E522: Amazon’s Hiding a LOT of Useful Data from Sellers. Here’s How You Can Unravel Them.

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In this episode, Mike's joined by Greg Mercer to talk about how Amazon will change in the face of AI, JungleScout's new AI features and how these apply to sellers on the daily.

Greg Mercer, the CEO of JungleScout, is back on the podcast to talk about AI and how sellers can use JS' new AI features to fix the leaks, so to speak. We also talk about how AI can level the playing field, and how Amazon hides a lot of useful data that AI can unravel.

If you're curious about the latest developments in the software space, or for practical advice for beating the competition, this episode is for you!

Video Timestamps:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 00:40 – AI in Ecommerce and Junglescout 
• 03:12 – Leveling the Playing Field on Copywriting and Data Analysis 
• 05:30 – Junglescout's New AI Features 
• 11:24 – Real-Life Applications for Junglescout's AI Features 
• 14:21 – Amazon's Hiding A Lot of Useful Data
• 17:33 – Tools are The New Way to Obtain The Competitive Advantage 
• 22:59 – “What should I be working on in my ecommerce business?”
• 27:23 – JungleScout's Roadmap for the Future 
• 32:06 – How will things change for customers on Amazon?

Audio Timestamps: 

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 01:09 – AI in Ecommerce and Junglescout 
• 03:27 – Leveling the Playing Field on Copywriting and Data Analysis 
• 05:32 – Junglescout's New AI Features 
• 11:00 – Real-Life Applications for Junglescout's AI Features 
• 14:11 – Amazon's Hiding A Lot of Useful Data
• 16:40 – Tools are The New Way to Obtain The Competitive Advantage 
• 21:58 – “What should I be working on in my ecommerce business?”
• 26:07 – JungleScout's Roadmap for the Future 
• 30:34 – How will things change for customers on Amazon?

Thank you again to Greg Mercer for coming on the show. It's always a blast to have him on.

If you're interested in signing up for JungleScout, I highly recommend you do so by checking them out here [affiliate link].

As always, if you have any questions or anything that you need help with, reach out to us at support@ecomcrew.com if you're interested. 

Don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes if you enjoy our content. If you have any questions, send us an email at support@ecomcrew.com. We'd love to help you in any way we can. 

Until next time, happy selling! 

Full Audio Transcript

Mike Jackness (00:12.107)
Greg Mercer, welcome back to the Econ Crew Podcast.

Greg Mercer (00:33.686)
Mike, I'm excited to be here. It's been a long time since I've been on and I'm looking forward to it. This'll be awesome.

Mike Jackness (00:36.544)
It has.

Definitely, I was joking that you had your media team reach out to me, you have some intermediary now. I don't even get direct contact with Greg Mercer anymore. I know, I know. I figured, as soon as I saw the email, I know, it's just like they're going through the list of all the podcasts trying to get Greg on. And they're like, that was the easiest sell ever. The guy just replied back like, yeah, no problem. And that was that.

Greg Mercer (00:47.846)
Oh, you have my phone number. You can text me whenever you want, Mike. Ha ha ha.

Greg Mercer (01:02.831)
Well, I appreciate it.

Mike Jackness (01:03.967)
Yeah, I'm super excited to have you here because AI is the buzz.

I don't know, like we've talked about this several times in a podcast already, like I think everyone started to be it to death, but you're a smart cookie. Like I mean, I've known you for a long time and you're one of the smartest dudes I know. And we were just talking before this and you're like, I've taken this upon myself to kind of get my hands dirty and add some additional functionality to Jungle Scout, which we'll talk about today. But there's some cool stuff like on the horizon. I'm just kind of curious, you know, what your feeling is on how things are going to change and you know, what the timeline is.

where we're kind of at right now. So maybe just we'll start with just your general feelings on how you think AI is going to change like the Amazon space over the next couple of years.

Greg Mercer (01:55.59)
Yeah, great question. I mean, all your listeners are, I'm sure aware of kind of like open AI and like the technological leaps with the large language models and generative AI this year, it's been pretty incredible. And I think why it's had so much kind of buzz around it is for the first time, some of these powerful large language models are really like just powerful AI related stuff has been very accessible to the general public.

So it's like, if you're really technical and an engineer, whatever, you've been using some of this pretty cool AI stuff for years, but the average person couldn't do it through code, now they can't through this chat interface. And OpenAI, ChatGPT, has been really cool for, it's really smart, just has great general knowledge about.

everything and anything, which is really cool. You can ask it to do all kinds of little things. And that's great, but I think the next thing that we're gonna see with generative AI is using it or refining it for more specific use cases to make it that much more powerful. So since OpenAI and the other companies doing this wanted it like.

relevant for a broad audience. That's kind of like what they made. And now we're starting to see a few companies start to use it for these very specific use cases, which is what I'm pretty excited about. And I think that is going to have like a pretty big influence on how people go about running their businesses, just doing all kinds of tasks.

Mike Jackness (03:35.219)
Yeah, I agree with all that. I also think when I look at the landscape and how things are gonna shift,

Mike Jackness (03:46.403)
The people who are living in English as a second language country or, you know, they're living in, let's say, China, India, India is obviously English, but like maybe they learn Hindi first or like maybe they're in Pakistan and like they're just not native English speakers. Like the thing that we've had over them is we can write a better listing because like, you know, our copy doesn't sound awkward. You know, Americans are kind of prima donnas. Like, you know, when it comes to this, it's kind of funny. It's like, oh, it's like not perfect English. And it kind of it just doesn't have that pristine ring to it.

Greg Mercer (04:06.718)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (04:10.097)
Hehe.

Greg Mercer (04:15.959)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (04:16.337)
I think that these tools close this gap really quickly all of a sudden, over the next six to 12, maybe even 24 months at the outset. It closes the gap on that. I think it also closes the gap on a lot of the other knowledge. I think some of us are really good at mining data and figuring some things out that a lot of other people haven't. And AI all of a sudden, just with a click of a button or you ask a particular question, and it just gives you the answer. And you go make the changes to your listing.

the playing field in a kind of a scary way for people who have the edge, right? It's exciting for people who are kind of in the back of the pack in the race. They get to kind of shortcut the line. So I think it's A, for people who are kind of in the lead already to make sure that you're adopting these tools and staying on the cutting edge and not getting behind someone else that figures it out and also just be prepared for how that's going to change things and also just try to add more intellectual property.

Greg Mercer (04:48.938)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (05:16.297)
brand story, you know, really work on the things that continue to have a moat around them, but certainly commoditized products, selling it to the people on Amazon, that gap is closing quickly.

Greg Mercer (05:22.243)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (05:28.098)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, the one, you know, even if English is your first language and you're a great writer or a copywriter, it can, what I still like is it can make you way more productive, right? It's still, you know, you can use it to like write high quality listings much faster. So that's pretty sweet. But yeah, I agree that it definitely levels the playing field a little bit and it's going to be important for all of us to always be thinking about like how we can continue to stay on the cutting edge.

Mike Jackness (05:38.765)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (05:42.957)
Yup.

Mike Jackness (05:54.291)
Yeah. So, you're asking me if I was aware of some of the new jungle scout features. I actually haven't read about them or seen it firsthand yet. I mean, I assume it seems like everyone's kind of got a listing building tool. Is that something that you guys have done at this point?

Greg Mercer (06:10.162)
Yes, we actually released the listing builder tool probably like six or eight months ago, kind of when open AI first made its like big breakthroughs. And it's been sweet. And, um, it's pretty interesting how you were saying, like those who English is not their first language can benefit from them the most that's definitely what we've seen in our usage, like some Americans are using them, but our customers that are living in other countries or have definitely adopted them a lot higher. So yeah, that's, um,

We've had one out for quite a while now, other people have released them. One of the things that we're doing that's kind of cool with it is ours is aware of competitor keywords as well as how much search volume those different keywords get. So like when it's making recommendations for your title, your bullet points, your description or whatever else.

It has the awareness of like these data points associated with the different keywords, which is pretty cool. That's something that just kind of like copy and pasting into ChatGPT wouldn't have.

Mike Jackness (07:09.663)
Right. Yeah, I mean, and this is where I mean, I'm excited about the stuff. I mean, again, I don't know. It's a double edged sword because, again, it makes it accessible to everybody else. But

You know, recently I've been very hands on with our business again, because we sold a whole bunch of stuff. I was kind of telling you a little bit about that ahead of time here, but I'm down to one company now and I'm like in the weeds, like trying to prepare this one company for sale. And so like I've been doing the listing creation again and listing rework and all the PPC stuff. And what happens is like the amount of data just becomes overwhelming and like chat, GPT can like really chew through this stuff quickly. And so the example you just use is a perfect one where, okay, you're like trying to figure out what keywords to put in your title.

Greg Mercer (07:27.305)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (07:41.879)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (07:51.018)
And it becomes really difficult because there's only so many characters there, right? And so like we all know that the keywords that are in the title are the most important but

You know, it's, uh, there's only so many jelly beans. And so you start like taking out some jelly beans to put in other jelly beans, which are other keywords. Like how does that conversely affect your listing? You know, cause like now those keywords aren't going to rank as well. And it starts to become like a real mind F if you will, um, you know, and so I can see like AI being able to, to chew that much easier where it's like looking at all the competitors, looking at, you know, the subtleties of what you can

Greg Mercer (08:06.911)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (08:16.939)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (08:29.689)
Maybe you're trying to buy up more than you can chew and be able to figure out like what's gonna actually get you the most sales. That would be some pretty cool stuff to see like be spit out.

Greg Mercer (08:38.986)
Yeah, no doubt, I agree with all that. Then I think a little bit of like, where we foresee this going is, like making the AI also aware of, like how changes to listings, or how performance of other listings have been influenced by like different types of changes. So like you think about it as kind of,

It's aware of what works well and what doesn't work well, and is aware of like benchmarks of what's typical or what to expect and how you're performing compared to that. That's kind of like the next level of this AI intelligence.

Mike Jackness (09:08.694)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (09:18.283)
When do you think that that's coming out? Like where do you see that on the general scout roadmap or just in AI roadmap in general?

Greg Mercer (09:24.83)
So, we have some of that available now, which is pretty sweet. So a little bit more about kind of like what we've done. We have cool stuff as far as the listing builder goes. We have cool stuff as far as like being able to analyze a whole bunch of reviews and make recommendations based off competitor factors or other stuff like that, which is pretty cool. But what I'm kind of most excited about and I've personally been working on the past few months is a chat interface.

with a really smart large language model that's been specialized just for our use case. And we've been training it on all different types of data. So like some of it is educational data. So like you can think about it as it's read all of our blog posts and all of our YouTube videos and all of our help center content and other content like Amazon's Terms of Service and all those different types of things. And it now like has that knowledge. So that was pretty cool. That was kind of like step one. So it's really good at like.

Mike Jackness (10:22.364)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (10:24.018)
specialized in Amazon. But then step two where we can get like the next level of intelligence from it is also give it access to all of your Amazon data as well as all of like the competitive intelligence that we have and all of kind of like the benchmarking data. And there's still tons of opportunities for us to make this a lot better, but it's like it's pretty dang good today and it's pretty cool to.

I mean, it's essentially like having a Amazon coach and a really smart BI analyst sitting next to you all day, and you can just like ask them any kinds of questions that you want, and they give you like pretty dang good responses.

Mike Jackness (11:04.147)
Yeah, I mean, this is kind of the obvious next step. I'm excited. I'm, it's cool that you guys have been working on this. I'm waiting for someone to kind of come along with this because chat GPT alone just can't do this yet. Right. I mean, like you can, you can load it. You can now it has code interpreter and you can load files and stuff in, but like you can't load in all the jungle scout keyword data, right. And so you have all that data. You can't load in all of your sales performance and

Greg Mercer (11:15.713)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (11:30.987)
conversion rates on an individual. I mean, it's too much to load into the chat GPT. It just doesn't have the interface for that. So like, it's obvious that the next step was like a third party builds a toll on top of this data, on top of either chat GPT or some open other open language model. And, you know, this sounds amazing. So what are some of the things that you can actually do with this?

Greg Mercer (11:47.937)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (11:55.262)
Yeah, so you can ask it anything from simple things like about the product, right? So like how do I add a user to my account, blah, blah. What's the best way to go about doing a keyword search, stuff like that. You can then ask it questions about like general selling on Amazon stuff. So it's like, hey, this is the scenario that I'm in. Like, should I create this as a variant to the listing or should I create a new listing? And it'll kind of ask you like maybe some followup questions and then make a good recommendation for you. So you can do stuff like that.

And then as far as asking it like about your business, for example, this morning, I logged in, I was like, what do I need to know about my business today? And, you know, like it looked at all my business performance and was like, these keywords have been performing much worse with an ACOS over a hundred percent the past couple of weeks than what they have. Like before that, we recommend that you turn them down. So it's like, okay, cool. Like what else do I need to know? And it's like conversion rate for this product has dropped quite a bit of the last week, like you should look into these few things to see if there's something wrong with it.

So it's like, it's pretty dang smart as far as recommendations like that. And then you can just ask it any general business questions like, what have my sales been this month? What is it? What are my top selling products? Um, like what, um, like one that I was pretty impressed with yesterday was, um, I just asked it like, why is my profit down this week? And it like, so it listed out all of the different expenses that I've had, like most of them Amazon related fees.

Mike Jackness (13:22.435)
Right.

Greg Mercer (13:22.506)
And then it called out that I got hit with a big storage fee in the past week. And then it could even tell me what products have been into Amazon for how long. So I don't get hit with that again. So it's a pretty powerful thing. And what's so cool about these large language models is I don't even exactly know everything that it can do, because sometimes it still impresses me.

Mike Jackness (13:45.395)
Right, yeah. I found the same thing. Like when I'm working with these tools, I'm like, wow, I cannot believe the responses that it's spitting out. But like, it's not true AI yet, right? It's like, it's really just, you know, trained on all the words have been written in basically in the English language or I guess every language at this point. And it's like pattern. So it's not really thinking, you know, it's not it's not quite to that level yet. It's not autonomous or anything like that. And so

Greg Mercer (14:07.845)
Mm-hmm

Mike Jackness (14:14.443)
But even still, it's just like the stuff that it spits out is like is so on point. It's really like damn impressive. And I can, like I said, I mean, I've been excited and kind of waiting on the sidelines for exactly what you're talking about being developed where it can take all these different data points. It has them like at its fingertips and you can ask like super intelligent questions and get like wild answers. You know, you would pay someone, like you said, you're having like a data analyst on your team. I'm like, I can't afford that. I don't have the size company to do that. I mean, I know Jungle Scout

Greg Mercer (14:19.658)
Mm-hmm

Greg Mercer (14:36.585)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (14:44.083)
Right.

Mike Jackness (14:44.537)
army of them because that's what you guys do. But like, you know, for a mid seven figure Amazon business, I don't have that employee or even access to someone like that. And so asking those questions like, what should I actually do to move the needle in my business or where are the little leaky things in the bottom of my boat? Like the boat's holding water just fine, but like it's still leaking stuff out the bottom. The storage fee one's like a great example of this.

Greg Mercer (14:52.56)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (15:09.084)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (15:14.538)
kind of like by accident. You know, as again I was the one…

doing all this work these days and getting knee deep back into the business again. Man, Amazon really hides this crap. They're really good at it. I was just like, holy crap, you see the headline, we're going to start charging these long-term storage fees and they got this new interface that you have a utilization quotient and all this other crap and I don't know.

Greg Mercer (15:27.09)
Yeah.

Mike Jackness (15:45.423)
after six or seven years of selling on Amazon in the old way, you don't really think about like how this is going to affect you. You already have a bunch of inventory in there based on the old rules. And I didn't really realize what it was costing us. And like, I mean, it was like almost $10,000 a month on this like, again, mid seven figure business, just from, you know, having too much inventory in the wrong spot at the wrong time. And, and you're just like in this really crazy pickle because like,

Greg Mercer (15:52.074)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (16:03.056)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (16:12.355)
Do you recall the inventory and pay their now exorbitant fees to recall it? And in our case, we use Amazon basically as our three PL. We don't even have a three pillar warehouse. So like, where the hell do I send it? Do I like send all this inventory to my garage? And I've done big inventory recalls before in the past. And I know how that works. I mean, like it doesn't all just show up in one neat palette. It's going to show up like over the next three months. And, you know, my HOA is going to be like, why are you running a business out of your house kind of thing? Cause it's going to be obvious. So like, I mean, yeah, having AI like help keep you

Greg Mercer (16:23.02)
Right.

Greg Mercer (16:31.406)
Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe

Greg Mercer (16:38.187)
Hehehehe

Mike Jackness (16:42.569)
of this stuff I think is like super cool. Like just having a dashboard of like, here's all the crap in your business that you should be looking at today that you're probably just not aware of or this is where things are leaking. I mean, PPC spends another really good one. You were just talking about that as well, but like here were a bunch of keywords that are just wasting a bunch of money. And yeah, your account level A cost is at like 27% or something and it seems great, but the reality is there's always like a bunch of hidden stuff under, you know,

Greg Mercer (16:45.088)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (16:55.379)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (17:12.589)
under the rug that you don't really think about or You don't have a time to look at and if they can point out like here's the seven keywords You should go immediately lower the bids or even better yet. It does it automatically for you, which I think you know is coming as well I think that this stuff this stuff is awesome same thing with like developing new products You know it just I think it can make

Greg Mercer (17:24.279)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (17:33.539)
discovering new products a lot easier. It can help you write your new listing a lot easier, making sure that you're using the right keywords, that you're bidding on the right PPC, that you can kind of game the system to get to the top in a white hat way, like with all the proper data. It can definitely, again, the problem is everyone's gonna have access to these tools. That's the thing that's kind of scary about it.

Greg Mercer (17:49.15)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (17:56.947)
Yeah, I mean, I think as far as everyone having access to the tools, I think that I get where you're coming from there. I think it's also like, there's always going to be new potential tools and people's toolkits that they can use to get a competitive edge. And I think that like,

it's probably more so about constantly evolving your toolkit so that you have the stuff on the cutting edge to get that competitive advantage. You know, it's like, if I think all the way back to when I first invented Jungle Scout, no one even knew estimated sales for any product on Amazon, which is pretty, fast forward today, that's kind of crazy to think about, or even keyword search volume. And I remember a little bit of similar thinking that once everyone gets…

Mike Jackness (18:22.476)
Yep.

Mike Jackness (18:33.091)
Yep.

Greg Mercer (18:45.354)
a hold of these, it kind of like levels the playing field. And there's like a little bit of truth in that, but there's always like constant, it's always like constantly evolving to a certain extent of like the newest tool to kind of like get that competitive edge.

Mike Jackness (18:59.607)
Yeah, no doubt. I mean, like, I always talk about the blow cube in my cheese that's sitting back on my shelf back here. And I mean, the reality is the only thing that's constant is change. And even though it concerns me that these tools are coming out and it's a little uneasy. Like the reality is, I'm gonna be the first ones using them because…

Greg Mercer (19:17.777)
Mm-hmm

Mike Jackness (19:19.767)
That's like where all the gains are made, right? Like it, it's been that way, you know, since day one, like I was using jungle scout early adopter. That's how we've known each other for so long. I mean, all the, you know, it was Facebook ads was early, like getting on Amazon was early. We haven't done TikTok just because we don't really have the business for that. But if I was still running color, I sure as heck would be, you know, doing TikTok ads. And just, I think it's important to just constantly be on the cutting edge because there, there's like these gaps that are constantly created.

Greg Mercer (19:29.218)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (19:50.261)
Jungle Scout is a great example of this already. I mean, before Jungle Scout, there was this heyday of, it was really easy, and things got a little bit harder, but you find other ways, because that data's all out there, everyone has access to it, to build a moat in a different way. And so I still think that the opportunities are out there for sure. And…

Greg Mercer (20:05.55)
Mm.

Mike Jackness (20:09.619)
being early to these tools and being comfortable with them and being like, I mean, if you're, it's like a kid, it's like learning a new language when they're very young. If you're doing it from day one, a couple of years from now, like it won't be as overwhelming if you're trying to learn it on, you know, all at once then. And so, yeah, I mean, I've been playing with it quite a bit. I mean, I was in there, I'm actually giving a talk on AI in India here in a few weeks. I did one at a…

Greg Mercer (20:26.188)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (20:33.931)
Nice.

Mike Jackness (20:35.619)
at Silver Summit, that's what Steve had me talk about this year. And so, yeah, I mean, I like, I think it's important. Um, and it is scary, like the repercussions of things is just in general in society are kind of like, you start thinking about it from that perspective, but it's also, you better be on the, on the bus.

Greg Mercer (20:38.739)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (20:51.182)
Mm-hmm, yeah, no doubt about it. A little bit earlier, you were kind of talking about how kind of like these new storage, or like storage fees and stuff, like still surprise you. And if we think about it, you know, like you're in like the top 1% of Amazon smarts, right? You're like, you're in this stuff every day. And that's one of the things that I think is really awesome is, so like I've been talking to a ton of customers, like,

Mike Jackness (21:02.069)
Yeah.

Greg Mercer (21:18.078)
I do probably like a half dozen customer interviews every week. And there's like this overwhelming theme from people that the hardest thing for them is to know like what questions to ask or what they should be working on or what they should be diving into. Like the way that like the landscape has evolved over time is now like

There's tons more like information and data and insights like that out there, but it can also be overwhelming even inside seller central, right? If we think about seller central five years ago, it had like 10% or 20% or something of like the functionality and reporting and things like that has today. And I think one of the reasons that I was like really excited about the AI stuff and digging into it is I think it can simplify a lot of that stuff and help people know what questions to ask and or be much better about proactively.

making recommendations or kind of like insights to them. Because I agree, like, you know, if, if you're overwhelmed by some of this stuff and you're in like the top 1% of smarts, just think about like the average Amazon seller and like how difficult it can be for them. And there's like, what is all this stuff and what is this search query performance data and what do I need to know about my competitors? And it's a very overwhelming thing.

Mike Jackness (22:20.882)
Yep.

Mike Jackness (22:27.087)
That's right, yeah.

Mike Jackness (22:32.875)
Yeah, I mean, no doubt about it. And the thing is like…

Mike Jackness (22:37.963)
You know about it, right? But it's like not the sexy thing to be thinking about today. I think a lot of us marketers are, it's hard to get away from looking at that top line number. Like even though, you know, the one I really care about is the net profit number. It's hard to like get away from, how many of these widgets that I sell today and what were my sales and what were my PPC, or my tacos or my ACOS or whatever, you know, those benchmarks are. And okay, yes, you're looking at your net profit, but like there really isn't a line item

Greg Mercer (22:46.998)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (23:07.397)
long-term storage fees, right? And so that's not like the thing that you're gonna typically spend your time digging into. And anything you spend your time on is like one other thing you're not spending your time on. And so, you know, it becomes, that's the part that's like overwhelming and is just like looking at all these different little data points. There's a lot of them. Like there's a lot of little things, you know, reimbursements is another one, you know, with Amazon, making sure that your product weights and measurements are correct. That's one that's been interesting for me.

Greg Mercer (23:09.765)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (23:37.123)
Totally.

Mike Jackness (23:37.317)
back and looked at products that are like 1.04 pounds, for instance, and like now we're like re-manufacturing them to like get them to like 0.98 pounds. It's like the customer will never know the difference, but it saves us 65 cents per item. You're just like a lot of these things where, again, that's not really a sexy thing. Like it's not that exciting to go back and like talk to the manufacturer and put like a little bit less liquid in. It's like the product is actually like a gel pack.

Greg Mercer (23:46.986)
Hehehe

Greg Mercer (23:51.795)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (24:07.217)
percent less gel in the gel pack that indistinguishable the customer. I don't know how this got through in the first place that it was 1.04 pounds, but like these little things like having AI or something alert you of this or having like a master file of what the stuff wastes. The other thing is like Amazon will eventually miss way or miscategorize your products or hey like this product has been switched to food and drug or adult toys or something you don't even really realize that it's you know and your sales are going down but like it's hard to know like all the little things that go look at.

Greg Mercer (24:11.062)
Right.

Mike Jackness (24:37.397)
every single day. And this is where I think like an AI smart dashboard can be like just incredible. Like you log in, it's like these are the things that you should go work on today. Go spend your time on. It's gonna give you the most bang for your buck. And you don't waste time turning over a bunch of rocks that don't need to be looked under.

Greg Mercer (24:39.18)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (24:50.958)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (24:55.818)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's ultimately what we're trying to get to is log in, you look at a dashboard, all the insights or recommendations that it makes for you are like highly relevant and actionable. And I think that's an important thing. It's like, if you log in there and it's like 90% of this stuff isn't like, no, that it didn't have it quite right or.

yeah, so what, there's nothing I can do about that thing, that type of stuff, it's not very good and people will get kind of bored of it quickly, but if you're logging into something every day, it's like dang, this is the most important stuff I should be working on in my business, it'll be a game changer.

Mike Jackness (25:33.323)
Yeah, absolutely. So when you think four to like the next six months, let's do like a six month, 12 month, 24 month roadmap for Jungle Scout and the things you're working on, what do you think are coming out? Let's start at the six month mark, like by the end of March of next year, what are the things that you think are gonna be coming out from Jungle Scout and others in the AI space that's gonna kinda shake up the industry?

Greg Mercer (25:43.436)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (25:59.322)
Mm-hmm. I'd say six months from now, you'll be able to have like really impactful, high-quality conversations with our chat interface, and it gives you like…

really excellent responses for anything that you ask it. So right now we wanted to get like a first version out there in the wild. I would say, like if I'm being really honest, I'd probably say 50% of the time it gives me a response where I'm like, damn, that was really good. 25% of the time it's like, that's okay. Like I know a way I could have made that better. And probably 25% of the time it's like, ah, that wasn't a very good response. So like every, actually like every day we're making improvements to this to like raise that. You know, we want

every response to be a really, really great one. And I would say six months from now, we'll probably be like really close to that, or like 95% of the responses will be like, damn, that was a really good one. And that's kind of like phase one of where I see like the future vision in this, because we're learning so much about how to make these like large language models really specialized for the use cases that we care about.

And yeah, just like learning so much along the process. And then the other thing that's pretty cool about it is we're getting a much better understanding of what's most important to people or like what they care about most or what they want to chat about it with. And it's pretty interesting. Like I've like just like seen some of the chat conversations that some people are having and it's pretty interesting that, you know, like it's not necessarily the same things that come up in user interviews and it's unclear to me whether or not that's because people like if.

they're not having a conversation with another human, they just like talk differently and wanna know about different stuff, or they don't know what's possible with it. But anyway, like that's pretty interesting. So then, so like the way that I look at it is like, what we've released right now is like really sweet. And I think if, you know, people are listening to this, logged in and used it and checked it out, they'd be pretty impressed. But like, it's the foundation for what's gonna be most powerful. So six month roadmap, I think that's kind of what it is. 12 month is probably gonna move much more.

Mike Jackness (27:43.809)
Right.

Greg Mercer (28:09.806)
towards that dashboard that gives you really great insights and recommendations that you can just log in and look at. Because at the end of the day, people don't really want to click around on a dozen different tabs inside of Jungle Scout or Cellular Central or whatever else. In a perfect world, if we had a magic genie, we could just look at one dashboard and it'd be all of the stuff that we care most about. So I think over 12…

Mike Jackness (28:22.273)
Yep.

Greg Mercer (28:38.262)
the next 12 months that's very possible and very plausible that will be happening. And 24 months, honestly, it's pretty hard to, it's like everything's moving so fast and even what I never, or like I wouldn't think would be possible six months ago is like now is happening. Man, 24 months is really hard for me to like get a good, have a great vision of what would be possible then. Because even like…

Mike Jackness (28:48.333)
Yeah. I know.

Greg Mercer (29:05.622)
the foundational technologies that we're using to make this a reality are also evolving so quickly that it's like, you know, I don't, it's hard for me to know what's gonna like, where those are gonna go.

Mike Jackness (29:17.535)
I think it's, you know, it just ends up doing everything for you and you just lay in bed and it's making your PPC changes. It's updating your keywords for you. It's updating your product dimensions if it needs to be like in sending automatically sending emails to the Amazon for reimbursements and whatever. I think a lot of it, there's like a lot of automation type stuff that comes down the pipe like relatively quickly. Yeah, yeah.

Greg Mercer (29:30.879)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (29:38.414)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, in 24 months, that's probably right. Because we're actually even just on the six month time horizon, we envision it, like making recommendations and then probably not taking actions on your behalf, but making recommendations and then saying like, would you like me to make those changes for you? And you'd be like, yes, and then like, it'll do those. Yeah, so like one layer of human involvement still, but 24 months.

Mike Jackness (29:55.179)
Mm-hmm.

Right, just hit accept or whatever. Yep, yep.

Greg Mercer (30:06.322)
I can see a lot of it's just automated.

Mike Jackness (30:08.407)
Yeah, yeah. All right, to close things off, we're already hitting 30 minutes right now, but I wanted to ask you one last question, kind of shifting gears a little bit. How do you think things are gonna change for the customer on Amazon? Obviously this will affect us sellers as well, but like, how's the interface with Amazon going to change?

And how is that going to like kind of affect how you position your products? You know, cause that's the kind of like the snowball effect. But I, I have to imagine that the interface that we've all come to know over the last 20 years, whatever the hell it's been since Amazon's been out, it seems like it's been 20 years now, um, you know, same thing with Google, like there's a, there's a box you type something into what you hit enter, there's results, right? Google does the same thing. Amazon does the same thing. How do you think that's going to change?

Greg Mercer (30:39.62)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (30:50.185)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (30:56.346)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (31:02.158)
That's a great question. I've been thinking a lot about this. It's really hard to know. One of the things that I foresee happening is the ability to make much more refined searches using natural language. So I've even found that over time I use more and more of Amazon's filters over on the left hand side, but I wish they had a lot more depending on what I was searching for. I also tend to…

tend to find myself like searching by average customer review, because I'm probably not as like price sensitive as some people. I just kind of like want like the highest quality or the best one. And I find that like, it's kind of difficult for me sometimes. Like we just moved into a new office and I was just looking, I was trying to find just like a little love seat sofa thing to put in my office, just to have somewhere besides my office chair to sit.

Mike Jackness (31:40.077)
Right.

Greg Mercer (31:56.762)
And it probably took me like 20 or 30 minutes to like keep searching through the results or like editing my search a little bit or whatever else to find that. But I probably, I could have described in natural language exactly what I was looking for. And like if it then gave me the results, I actually met all that. So like I, it needed to be between this width and that width. And I was looking for a certain color and I was looking for a certain fabric. And that wouldn't be that hard to do. And I can foresee a world where you can make like a…

more refined searches using natural language on Amazon. So that's one prediction that I have. Beyond that, I guess where my mind goes to is what's not an optimal user experience right now? So it's probably things like what takes you too long to do on Amazon.

Mike Jackness (32:47.064)
Mmm.

Greg Mercer (32:49.254)
reading through the reviews to try to find an answer to something that you're looking for, or even just get a better sense. You know, I know Amazon's kind of already working on showing like a summary of the reviews, which I think is pretty cool. So I think there'll be some items like that where like in the next six months, we'll see some more things like that on Amazon because those at this point aren't really probably like technological barriers, more so just like an

Mike Jackness (33:01.015)
Yep.

Greg Mercer (33:19.203)
thing for them. What do you think?

Mike Jackness (33:20.144)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's interesting, because like…

Amazon makes so much money off of the current way that results are displayed because of ads, right? I mean, it's become this huge part of their P&L. You look at Amazon's quarterly reports and they actually had declining revenue, top line. The sales on Amazon actually had dropped. The only category that had a huge increase was the ad revenue part, right? And so it's just, you think about the results being displayed and how they make all that money because there's the…

Greg Mercer (33:30.875)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (33:48.337)
Mm-hmm

Mike Jackness (33:55.249)
headline search ad and then there's like four sponsored ads. Like, I mean, you have to scroll down before you can even see an organic search result right now. And so like if the large language model like gives you the best result without having to like scroll or click a whole bunch more, is that a sponsored result or is it like the organic result, you know, and it's like.

Greg Mercer (34:04.979)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (34:15.534)
Hehehehe

Mike Jackness (34:19.559)
that they give up the ad revenue in lieu of making the shopping experience less friction and try to increase the revenue from that perspective. I mean, that part's going to be interesting because if you were to type in that search you're talking about, because I do think that that's coming. It's like I'm looking for a love seat chair. By the way, the other office chair you have better be Elizabeth's chair, otherwise you're in trouble. Okay, good. I'll make sure you're not going to get in trouble there.

Greg Mercer (34:27.564)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (34:43.084)
I have one of those, don't worry.

Mike Jackness (34:48.753)
But if you were to just type that in and the result, the first result was like the Nirvana result and you didn't have to waste any of your time, that probably can't be a sponsor result at that point because it doesn't make as much sense. Okay, so yes, now the process is less friction, maybe the chances of you jumping from Amazon to go buy it somewhere else if that's even a thing is lower, but they're making less money because you haven't clicked the sponsor result or three sponsor results to find the

Greg Mercer (34:58.626)
Mm.

Mike Jackness (35:19.033)
the best product. So that's the thing that's like kind of a conundrum to me, because it's just like, how do they, how do they rectify that part? You know, cause I think, you know, and then the other thing, you know, what's kind of being tossed around is like, do keywords and stuff like this become less relevant? Like does these large language models just kind of understand what the product is, you know, way better than you even do as the seller. And again, display the proper results to people based on, on what the product is.

Greg Mercer (35:25.952)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (35:46.935)
You know, so I think that what's going to be interesting, the thing that I also see happening is like, there's going to be less and less real estate at the top. You know, like the, right now it's already like 74%, I think of a clicks go to the top three results. I think that gets even tighter, right? Like the number one result could get like 90% or something because it's just so good. Like that's the actual thing that you really want to buy.

Greg Mercer (36:01.341)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (36:10.879)
So I don't know, I think that that's going to be interesting. I don't know exactly how that plays into…

Greg Mercer (36:12.086)
Yeah.

Mike Jackness (36:17.363)
you know, a selling. I do think the other thing I think that's gonna be happening over the next couple of years is we're gonna wake up to some bad mornings. You know, like we've been in business for 20 years coming up here in January. I left my job 20 years ago. You know, and over 20 years, like there's bad days, right? You wake up and like something bad's happened. Like I've had government regulation get passed. I've had accounts get suspended, you know, whatever. Like there is someone suing you. There's like, on any one day, like the chance of something like that happening is…

Greg Mercer (36:36.418)
Hehehehe

Mike Jackness (36:45.507)
insignificant doesn't really happen like over time you wake up to a bad day So I think you know the chance of us waking up to a bad day over the next couple of years are increasing We like wake up in you know this product that you had Amazon choice for that was ranked number one for all these keywords like suddenly Doesn't matter anymore. You know like somehow like that the results have been upended because of AI and a new interface of some sort and

You know, it could be you got a pivot and like you got too much inventory now and, uh, you know, you get, maybe one of your other products takes off or, you know, who knows how that, how that happens. But I definitely see that type of thing on the horizon as well. Um, and again, that creates opportunity as well. But I do, I do think that, uh, you know, if you were to think of the doomsday clock that's out there, whatever, that gets closer and closer to midnight. I feel like one of those types of things is, uh, probably more likely on Amazon than it's been in a long time.

Greg Mercer (37:24.75)
Mm-hmm.

Greg Mercer (37:31.894)
Hehehehehehe

Greg Mercer (37:40.19)
Yeah, we'll see. That's a little bit of your personality too though, Mike. Ha ha ha.

Mike Jackness (37:43.091)
It is, it's true, it is true, it is very true. No doubt about it.

I think the reason for that is because I used to, when I was younger, I just like flew blindly into this stuff and like thought nothing could ever go wrong. And then like when it starts to happen, again, it's like you wake up one morning and it's like Congress has passed the UIGEA and your business is now no longer relevant or you wake up one morning and Google has de-indexed you because you were buying links from link farms and should have been de-indexed. But you know, it makes you like just a little bit more cautious. And I think, you know, in general, I'm pretty optimist.

Greg Mercer (37:52.848)
Uh-huh.

Greg Mercer (38:02.444)
Uh-huh.

Greg Mercer (38:10.879)
Mm.

Hmm

Mike Jackness (38:17.585)
And, but there's always that voice in the back of my head that's like, be careful, like things are going too good right now. And that's probably good a little bit, right? To, you know, plan for the worst and expect the best. You know.

Greg Mercer (38:24.866)
Totally. I think so.

Yeah, no doubt. It's funny, probably like the newer you are as an entrepreneur, the more like unrealistically optimist you are and that like goes down over time.

Mike Jackness (38:38.083)
That's right. Yeah. Well, you know, you got to knock on the door. That's the sheriff with like being served like some lawsuit. You know, it's like, it's like, okay, you know, the stuff happens. You know, you go blindly into it until then. And so like live in ignorance until it happens and.

Greg Mercer (38:49.619)
Uh huh.

Greg Mercer (38:55.633)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jackness (38:56.359)
You know hope for the best so anyway. I've kept it. I've already kept you too long. I apologize Thank you so much for coming doing this. It's been a fun conversation Ecom crew has a Unlisted special deal with jungle scaffy go to ecom crew comm slash jungle scale I can't talk about on the podcast if you go over there There's a special site is an affiliate link so we do get a commission off of that But you also get a special deal ecom crew comm slash jungle scale if you don't already have it and definitely check out some of these tools

Greg Mercer (39:01.518)
That's been awesome.

Mike Jackness (39:25.873)
I said knowing you for a very long time, smart dude, I see a lot of cool things coming down the pipeline. I'm sure that Jungle Scale will be leading the pack in this.

Greg Mercer (39:34.986)
Awesome, thanks so much, Mike, I've really enjoyed it. Talk later.

Mike Jackness (39:38.852)
Have your marketing team reach out to me when you're ready to talk again.