#65: Using Split Testing to Optimize Your Listings

Date: November 18, 2020

Episode: 65

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces John Li, a Serial Entrepreneur and Co-Founder at PickFu.

Subtitle: Split Testing and Listing Optimization

Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-65-using-split-testing-to-optimize-your-listings-w-john-li/

In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces John Li, a serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder at PickFu.

John is passionate about building technology that helps people solve problems they didn’t know they had. He discussed how to use split testing in optimizing your listings and some best practices for images.

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

In this episode, we discuss:

• 5:42 : What does PickFu do?
• 9:41 : Split Testing your main image
• 12:19 : The Brady Bunch Technique
• 19:20 : Target by demographics on PickFu
• 23:39 : Sample Testing/Poll
• 33:33 : Steps to improve your listings
• 36:05 : Split testing bullet points
• 38:07 : Users of PickFu biggest mistakes
• 43:08 : Preparing for Q4 and the next quarters

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Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• https://www.linkedin.com/company/pickfu/
• https://www.pickfu.com
• https://www.pickfu.com/blog/optimizing-your-listings-for-q4/
• https://www.facebook.com/pickfu
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-Mz7iSjPJiHF9PgsJTYxiA

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Norman  0:03  

Hey, everybody is Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch With Norm, the rise of the micro brands.

Norman  0:22  

Why can’t Microsoft or Apple keep things, good things the same? Running late today, there’s a whole bunch of new things on Big Sur, lots of notifications that I can’t turn off. If somebody knows how to turn off notifications or to put this simply, I’m an old guy, simply used to be you just slide it over to do not disturb and everything stopped. Now there’s a whole bunch of questions I have to answer which I don’t know about. Anybody knows, anybody that can turn off these, we’ll get you an I Know This Guy or Lunch With Norm mug. So just give me the information and that would be great, love to be able to send you some merch or something. Anyways, today, other than my bitching and complaining, I’m really excited to be joined today by John Li, co-founder of popular platform PickFu. So I’m sure most of you have heard of PickFu. It’s an incredible platform for split testing. So today, guess what we’re going to be talking about? Split testing and optimizing your listings and we’re gonna dive into it and talk about best practices, what to do, what not to do. So John will be joining me in a second. But before I get into that we are broadcasting to you live on Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. Kelsey is going to be joining me anytime now and I’m sure he’s gonna be telling you to smash some likes.

Kelsey 1:56  

That’s right. Smash that like button. Ring that bell. We are on social media everywhere.

Norman  2:03  

Hold it.

Kelsey 2:06  

Did you notice it?

Norman  2:07  

 What the hell are you doing?

Kelsey 2:12  

What do you mean?

Norman  2:13  

It’s, you’re almost growing a beard.

Kelsey 2:18  

Hey, okay. Okay, easy.

Norman  2:22  

Are you The Mustache Guy?

Kelsey 2:23  

Took you long enough to notice. 

Norman  2:25  

Well, it probably took you a few months to grow that. So over time, now I can notice it. But so you’re The Mustache Guy.

Kelsey 2:34  

Yeah. It’s for Movember. I thought I’d better grow it out a little bit. Yeah, if I can. I don’t know. We’ll see. But, yes, social media, back to social media. We are on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. All the full episode goes directly over to YouTube, along with clips and all the fun stuff. But we are also a podcast, so you can find us on YouTube, or Spotify and Apple and just search Lunch With Norm. We have a great new Facebook group, over 200 strong. We’ve got some great discussions going on there. So you can head on over there. I put the link in the Norman Farrar a.k.a The Beard Guy page. So you can go over and press this link to join and it looks like we got lots of people already joining us. This is great.

Norman  3:27  

Yeah, and you know what? I’ve noticed that Dr. Koz, Hey, I didn’t know you’re from LA. But you are lucky you’re in LA with a bit of overcast. You should see where I am right now. I got like six inches of snow that fell. It wasn’t even supposed to fall. I see. Who was it? Mark from Ohio. You probably got the same snowstorm that we’ve got. 

Kelsey 3:51  

Yeah, Melanie is saying time to call the IT department Norm. 

Norman  4:00  

You’re looking at the guy with the mustache? He’s my IT guy.

Kelsey 4:06  

We got Marina joining us. We got Simon. Hey chops, unplug, turn off, turn out, no more notifications. Ping. I love it and like we got some people digging the stash. We got Darwin. Thanks for joining. We got Simon 1970s YMCA, I love it and looks like Dwight awesome, but he’s joining us.

Norman  4:26  

There we go.

Kelsey 4:27  

But yeah, let’s jump right into this. 

Norman  4:31  

Okay, very good. So, if you do have comments or questions, please just throw them over to the comment box and we will get to them. If we don’t get to them for some reason, we will get to them later on and you will answer every question that’s out there. Okay, so let me see. Sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show. Hey, John. 

John 4:58

Hey, Norm. Good to be here. 

Norman 5:00

I haven’t seen you in a long time.

John 5:01  

It’s been a while. I think we last saw each other in Empowery.

Norman  5:05  

That’s right. It was at the Empowery women’s conference. 

John 5:10

That’s right. 

Norman 5:11

Yeah. So that’s been a long time and it seems like this thing is never going away. All these lockdowns and more lockdowns.

John 5:18  

Looking forward to in person conferences, at some point.

Norman  5:23  

Oh my gosh. Yeah, I just got to get out of this house. I think over the last few months, I’ve been out of the house, maybe three or four times. But yeah. So let’s dig into PickFu. Let’s dig into John Li, can you tell us a little bit about your company and about yourself? 

John 5:42  

Yeah sure. So, I’m John. I’m one of the co-founders of PickFu. My partner, my co-founder, Justin, we’ve been building internet businesses for over a dozen years. PickFu was a tool that we built for ourselves that turned into the main business, which oftentimes is kind of the case. So for people watching who don’t know what PickFu is, it’s basically a do it yourself consumer research platform. So you get to ask one question survey to our panel of over 10,000 US consumers. Now, what do you get from a one question survey? What you get is you can basically get real consumer feedback on things that you’re selling on your landing pages, on your images, so you can optimize off Amazon or off whatever marketplace you’re doing. Kind of what makes us different is that our responses are super fast. So you can get results in like 15 to 30 minutes for 50 people and we require all of our respondents to write down exactly why they chose the option that they chose if you’re trying to choose between different options and give sort of so you can think about it as a kind of like a digital focus group, but a super fast digital focus group and so now you don’t understand what wins, but you also understand why people choose what they chose. So that usually helps kind of unlock different insights to improving and iterating on your creatives.

Norman  7:11  

Okay, so there are other split testing platforms out there. But I think you’re probably the largest in the Amazon space, is that correct?

John 7:25  

I’m not sure how different platforms compare in terms of size. To get technical, we are not explicit, we are not a explicit split testing, because we’re not on Amazon, you’re testing with our platform, you’re testing with our panel off Amazon, so you don’t sort of incur that risk of changing your listings and changing your images and having that effect, potentially how Amazon views your listing.

Norman  7:50  

Let’s talk about that for a second. I never thought about that side of it. If you’re using a platform that goes in and changes your titles, every other person or your image or your price or anything like that, are there consequences to that? I never thought there would be an issue with that.

John 8:11  

Yeah. So I mean, Amazon, if you think about Amazon’s role, Amazon’s role is to provide the best possible product for somebody say searching for a tea kettle, right and so the Amazon’s algorithm uses all these different kinds of signals of click through rate images, how long people are spending on the search results? When they click through, do you convert or not? So if you’re changing these variables to Amazon, like, let’s say you’re testing two different main, potential main images, that means 50% of the time Amazon’s seeing an image that’s performing more poorly. So that definitely is a signal, it’s a potential risk to how things how your listing could be perceived by Amazon, and that could potentially affect your search rankings.

Norman  8:57  

That’s interesting. I’ve never thought of it that way. I always thought that if Amazon were to look at it, it was any type of manipulation or anything like that. It’s trying to better the customer experience. So I thought they’d be on two feet with that. But hearing the way that you just explained it, that makes sense. Alright. So I know that we’ve already got a few questions coming in. But I’d like to talk about the different types of test variations that someone can create for. This isn’t just about Amazon. So maybe we can stretch this out a bit. But let’s talk about Amazon and then let’s talk about off Amazon, maybe Shopify listings or any other platform.

John 9:41  

Okay. So, the simplicity and also sort of the complexity of PickFu is that all up all we require is a single question and then anywhere between one to eight options. So we’ve seen a lot of sellers do a lot of creative things with that. The thing that makes most Amazon sellers know us for a split testing your main image. If you have five options for a main image, you can come on PickFu, upload all five and ask if you’re shopping for, let’s say, a tea kettle, which image would make you, which image would you click on or which one would you buy? Right so that you can split test your main image, you can split test anything related to that. Your title, your descriptions, your bullet points even and so there’s a lot of comparison that you can do with PickFu, for basically any aspect of your listing. Now, beyond that, that’s all optimization on the listing side. So that’s after you’ve already launched, and you’re trying to improve the conversion rates of your listing and things that you’re already selling. But what we see more and more sellers doing now is there, they start with optimizing their listings, and then they move earlier in the process. So instead of, so for testing things that haven’t launched yet, if you’re working with a creative agency, and they’re giving you options to choose from, you can put that on PickFu and help get the panel to give you insight into which creative might perform better. You can go even further beat before before that, if you’re designing your packaging, you can put this up or you can put up your packaging options on PickFu and we’ve seen a really great success with packaging, with packaging design on PickFu, because basically tagging your packaging is your is your advertisement in the physical world and also on on Amazon as well. Right? So testing packaging, you can go earlier beyond that. If you’re trying to decide what to sell and you’re working with a couple of, if I’m selling tea kettles, and I’m working with a couple of suppliers, or potential suppliers, and they all have these different kinds of tea kettles, I could take images of those tea kettles, put them on PickFu and ask the audience which I can target. I can target Amazon Prime Shopper, female making over 100K and I know that that’s my target demographic, I can put these five options of tea kettles in front of that audience and say, out of these tea kettles, which one would you buy and why? So now I understand now I basically de-risk my product selection process, because I already have an idea of how potential shoppers might view my product, my listing, my packaging, and so on.

Norman  12:19  

One of the things, Darwin, you mentioned in a comment over here not enough and can you expand on that? I’m going to be talking about something right now that might answer this question. But I’d love to hear what your comment would be. So there’s a couple of things that I look at. So for Amazon sellers anyways, they call Amazon calls at retail ready and the slightest improvement that you can make to your listing could make a huge difference. So let’s say that you’re running traffic over to the search, like a search page. People see 16 different or how many units are on page one and they wonder why nobody clicks. We can always drive people over to the search page, or drive rankings, so they rank for these keywords. But we can’t force people to click and so one of the things that we’ve always talked about is, these images, I call it Brady Bunch, The Brady Bunch effect, take all of your competitors listings, in this case, eight, you can put them up, and you can show which one is best and if you’re not either tied or better than any of your competitors, and you got to go back to the drawing board and then you find another image and then and that’s the same thing with the title, the bullets, those are all those things. Another really useful tip that when you look at a slide deck, okay, on your Amazon listing, some people like the storyboards or the way that it’s laid out, aesthetically suck. You’ll look at it and it’ll be this doesn’t make any sense. Why did you go from here? Why are the colors all off here? You can test those, you’ve got eight different ways that you can align your storyboard and see what works there. That might be a 1% improvement, but it’s 1% extra in sales. So there’s all these other areas that you can look at crazy enough with split testing and I think I’m a pretty good guy when it comes to branding or aesthetics and I’ll be blown out of the water. Like just Oh, if I would have chose this, I mean, I would have lost 10% or 20% in sales.

John 14:44  

Yeah. You bring up a couple good points there Norm, because yeah, definitely the competitive testing aspect is one thing I forgot to mention and that’s something we see more and more on PickFu is people will literally do image tests of their main images against their top sellers in their category, or they’ll go on the Amazon search results, literally copy, take a screenshot, cut out the different search results of their competitors and their own and compare them on PickFu and you can normalize those, you can Photoshop out the price, the reviews, the ratings, so you’re normalizing, you’re comparing apples to apples and then you get quick feedback on, Why are people clicking on one thing over another? Like, why are they clicking on your competitors over your listing? Speaking of conversion rates, or click through rates, we do have a case study on our blog, where we had one company who sells at they’re called yes bar and they sell these healthy paleo bars and they were considering a rebrand and using a different main image, ran it on PickFu when with the winner, and I think their stats were that they increase their session rate by 12%, I believe. This is two week before and two week after tests that they ran and so they definitely kept that new image. Because, that’s how many, that’s 12% extra earnings, right, potentially. 

Norman  16:15  

Yeah, especially going in right now. Yeah, what you can do, we’re in fourth quarter, if you’re watching this live, we’re in fourth quarter. Yeah, a couple of weeks away from Black Friday, why not go out and test this out and see if you can bring up those sales, maximize your retail readiness? That’s what Amazon is looking for. If you’re converting 1% better than your competitors, then you’re gonna get that extra juice. Yeah, one other thing, I want to make sure that when we’re talking about this, one of the things I always talk about is, this is an unbiased, program or podcast, that we’re not pushing your service. We’re just talking about split testing. There are other places out there, we do talk about the platform. John knows about this, and we’re talking about it in general. So if the name PickFu does come up, I am not getting an affiliate. Okay. I don’t get any of that. So we’re talking about split testing. So John, I’m just saying that I always do some sort of disclaimer, just so people know that are listening, that this is, not leaning one way to get me an affiliate. Okay, so I do see a couple of other people that joined us. So hey, Victor, you’re back. Good to see you, Yarrow. Nice to see you and Darwin. Great to see you too and please get me that information so we can answer that not enough. I’d love to be able to, unless you’re talking about Kelsey’s mustache. Anyway, we have a couple of questions here, I think from Victor and Dr. Koz.

Kelsey 18:06  

That’s right and I forgot to mention that we do have a special giveaway at the end of today’s episode. So for you guys listening, just please stick around. You might have to answer a question from today’s episode. Who knows?

Norman  18:21  

Oh, good and I see. Darwin just said some information. So that’s great.

Kelsey 18:25  

So I’ll start off with that. I’ve done basic testing showing friends and family, but then ultimately make the final decision. I often think my decision is the best, but I’m unaware or I’m aware I need to really be split testing more. So I put up a question saying how comfortable you feel split testing. So she’s responding that it’s Alright.

Norman  18:46  

Well, that’s an interesting question, because, and this is why this might not sound like it’s a big deal. But when you go to friends and family, a lot of the time, they’ll align with your decision unless it’s just a blind taste test, right? But if you say, Hey, I just did this, and you kind of give those little hints. They’ll probably align with you. But what I like about going in split testing to a massive audience, is that it’s a massive audience and what about the demographics? Can you choose demographics?

John 19:20  

Yes, yes, you can. So I mean, going back to your point, that’s actually why we built this in the first place is because we were working on another project and our friends and family were getting tired of us asking for their opinion all the time and we kind of knew that, they kind of liked us because they kind of have to because they’re our friends and family. So they bias towards what we were pushing. But we built this up to basically get out of our own bubble. Over time, we have added the ability to do targets, target by demographics. So you can target all the standard demographics, age, gender, income, ethnicity, all of that stuff, education, but then within that over time, we’ve built out segments, as we’ve worked with more and more Amazon sellers. So things like avid home cooks, are you an Amazon Prime member, you can target people who drink coffee or beer or wine, people who have pets, specifically dogs or cats, people who take nutritional supplements. So these are basically segments within our panel that you can target and you know that if you’re selling something that where you have a specific audience in mind, you can get the feedback.

Norman  20:31  

So you have your group, okay. If, let’s say that there’s an audience or a list that you’ve been able to get different emails. Can you add to that? So let’s say I have 5000 of my own email list that I want to take part in the survey to help better. Because I’m selling a dog product. So I sell a dog bed, maybe I want to see if people would like bully sticks with them or dog shampoo.

John 21:01  

Yeah. So yes, you can. The focus on PickFu has been to build out our own panel. So a little bit more about our panel. They’re fast, because they’re compensated. So we do pay a small stipend. Every time one of them comes and answers the survey, that makes things equitable, and that mixing superfast. On top of that, we work with a bunch of third party panel providers on the back end, we kind of unify them, and then add our layer of targeting and add a whole bunch of quality control on top of that. So we really filter hard for quality respondents like I think, I mean, we kick out about 75% of people who try to join the panel. So our focus has been on providing this panel and providing the panel for providing feedback. We do have an opportunity and an option for you to create surveys and send them to your audience. So basically, you could come on create a poll, and then we would give you a link, and you could send that to your mailing list of 5000 or so. We don’t push that very often, because what ends up happening is that if you’re not incentivizing respondents in the right way, it’s really hard to get really fast feedback in terms of response rates, and also for people to get responded quickly. So that’s definitely enough. It’s an option and we can go through more of that. But from what we’ve seen, we’ve had people who’ve created their own polls and sent them out to their own list of I think, maybe 7000 and out of 7000, within a week is a pretty low response rate, like it was in the hundreds or less.

Norman  22:39  

So can I put you on the spot?

John 22:42  

Sure.

Norman  22:43  

Can we do something? Can we do something live and just, maybe we can just share it? I’m not sure how, because a lot of people are going to be just seeing an audio, maybe we can upload the image of it. But can we do a survey right now on whatever, make it up? Try and let’s see how fast that works and then we can continue to talk while it’s being generated and share the results.

John 23:06  

Okay, that’s a good idea. So let’s see what we can do here. I’m gonna share my screen. 

Norman 23:09

Okay. 

John 23:17  

Technology, man.

Norman  23:20  

Tell me about it.

Norman  23:24  

Victor, actually, Victor is going to be able to help me out. I know he’s going to be able to help me out with the dilemma I had at the beginning of this with that do not disturb on big sir. I know he’s the tech guy.

John 23:35  

Can you guys, can you see my screen now?

Norman  23:37  

I can see your screen. Yep. 

John 23:39  

Alright. So we are on PickFu right now. Let’s see. So the easiest thing would be, one thing that works well for us is we were talking a lot about comparisons. Having the panel, compare one thing like two things or update things. But one thing that you can also do here is actually just use it as a digital focus group. So specifically, you can just solicit feedback on things. So for example, we can do something called a listing audit. So we can choose an open ended poll where we just ask a question about one thing and in this case, let’s say you’re running, let’s say you’re selling like a digital treadmill, like a treadmill or something so you can just ask the audience to review your listing so we can say after reviewing this listing, What other questions do you have about this product and my mind is on under desk treadmills because I use a standing desk and I thought, I’m trapped at home I need to get a little bit of exercise. So I found a random under desk treadmill. So I just ask the question, paste the list, paste the link of the listing right here. Why don’t we ask for a star rating as well like a one to five star rating and then that’s page one. Now all in terms of the audience who should respond, we offer between 50 to 500 people, let’s do 50 general audiences or let’s go targeted. So I want someone who’s an Amazon Prime member and let’s just stick with that. Now we can customize our results. So this is where you can actually see a breakdown of how the people responded and like their demographics. So I want to see the people who responded to what their exercise frequency was, so I can add that.

Norman  25:44  

None, zero from my end.

John 25:48  

Hopefully a little more on my end, and that’s it. So we can do a quick preview. This is what the respondents will see: they see a question, after reviewing this listing, What other questions do you have about this product and there’s a link to the product and that’s it. Let’s start the poll.

Norman  26:08  

This is what’s so amazing is you can get these polls done so quickly.

John 26:13  

Yes.

Norman  26:14  

It’s with almost any information. So yeah, just let us know the results when that comes.

John 26:19  

Yeah, I will actually throw it in the comments right now.

Norman  26:23  

Okay. Sure.

John 26:25  

I’m gonna leave it in our chat and I hope that people see that.

Norman  26:31  

That’s in our private chat. So Kelsey, just put the survey.

John 26:34  

See if you post that over there.

Kelsey 26:35  

Yeah. Yep. We do have some more questions.

Norman  26:39  

Do that right now.

Kelsey 26:41  

Cool. Alright. Some of them, I think were touched on a little bit.

Norman  26:45  

Victor, is that T-shirt you’re talking about? Did you get that on Amazon merch?

Kelsey 26:53  

So I think we, yeah, I think we touched this one already at the beginning. Victor, what do you mean by a one question survey? What if you have multiple questions for the same audience?

John 27:05  

Ah, yes. So like, like we just showed there, you can ask, there’s only one question field, I know, there’s a lot of opportunities. There’s a lot of services where you can run market research surveys. So you can think of this as a really fast, really focused market research survey. The problem with market research surveys is that a lot of people don’t want to answer a huge battery of let’s say, on a scale of one to five, how do you feel about this and then your next question is on a scale of one to five, how do you feel about this, and so on and so we’re just trying, our goal is to distill everything down as simple as possible, both for the people who have questions and the people who answer them. So that’s why we’re really focused on the simple one question surveys. 

Norman 27:49

Okay.

Norman  27:51  

Okay and Dr. Koz, who are your 10,000 respondents? How are they engaged and incentivized?

John 27:56  

Yeah, so it’s probably much more than 10,000 at this point. So like I said, we work with a bunch of third party panel providers. So there’s panel providers in every country, usually for market research. We’ve built it back into tie a bunch of those together, they’re engaged because we pay them a small stipend for every single poll that they answer.

Norman  28:19  

That’s similar to many of the other platforms.

John 28:22  

Yeah, yeah.

Kelsey 28:25  

Okay, from Yarrow, what is the best scenario you can recommend of how to test my first image versus three to five competitors?

John 28:33  

My first image versus three to five competitors. Let me try to find an actual poll that does something like that. So you could do something like this, I’m gonna toss it in, and then you can see if you can share this. So I just tossed in a poll for someone selling bamboo, bamboo utensils. So this was five. Yeah, five main images, five potential main images. I cannot tell here, let’s see, I think these are from five different sellers. So this looks like a competitive test. Just asking which image is more appealing and so this is probably the simplest way of going to you can go to you to the category that you’re trying to sell in, look at the top sellers, grab their main images and then you can put in one or two of your potential main images, put up a PickFu poll, and just go through and take a look at, see how they perform and the key thing here when looking at the results is it’s not just about the number. It’s not just about the number of votes, but it’s really like where you’re really going to learn a lot is reading the responses like why people choose one thing versus another. Because oftentimes, you’ll pick up on themes where either things look more colorful. You’ll basically you’ll pick up on themes where responsively like, this image was brighter or this image showed that the product was it showed the product and use, or it connected with them in some way and that’ll give you ideas on how to iterate on your image so that you’re able to continue to kind of connect with those consumers in that same way. 

Norman 30:23

Okay.

Kelsey 30:24  

All right and another one from Victor, can you discuss the advantages and disadvantages of running surveys on PickFu compared to using SurveyMonkey for the question and MTurk for the audience?

John 30:36  

Yeah. So you can definitely go on SurveyMonkey and create your own surveys and that ultimately gives you the greatest flexibility for your surveys, in terms of asking whatever you want, how many questions and so on. The downside on that is, if you go directly to a panel company, like either survey or SurveyMonkey audience, or to MTurk itself, like then you don’t have a level of quality control and from what we’ve seen with our experiments, it is hard to validate and optimize for quality when you go directly to panel service company.

Kelsey 31:16  

Okay and one more thing from Simon, like your friends and family, the panel will get tired as the audience continually refresh to keep the split test fresh?

John 31:25  

Yeah, constantly. So all those panel companies, they’re constantly refreshing their sources, and we see influxes of people all the time.

Kelsey 31:33  

Okay, and last one, it looks like, can you choose the panel by country language and culture?

John 31:39  

Great question. Right now, it’s US only, and we are working on being able to provide audiences in other countries. So other countries will get their languages, more secondary culture. I’m not seeing that yet.

Kelsey 31:59  

Okay, it looks like Darwin, for new products, what would be a good way to use your panel if I were in the creating portion of it? I mean, hand drawings, pictures for references, this thing added with this thing needed x material.

John 32:14  

Good question and I think it’s all of the above. So we do see, let’s say, for eCommerce, we see a lot of potential product descriptions, or there’s photography and so on. One of the other big verticals who uses PickFu are mobile game creators, so completely different from eCommerce, but people who make mobile games that the ones you play on your iPhone or your Android device and the reason they use PickFu is for similar reasons. They want to validate with an unbiased audience really quickly, and understand how they feel. So with that segment, we see a lot of hand drawings, a lot of concepts, a lot of would you play a game that does this? Would you put, what kind of storyline would catch your attention when you’re trying to when you’re in this medieval castle game or something? So definitely testing conceptual things with an audience. Totally works.

Kelsey 33:11  

Okay, good and that looks like it’s it for now. 

John 33:13

Cool.

Norman  33:14  

Alright. So if we wanted to take action steps about launching a product, we’ve got a product, we’re launching it or maybe, as Black Friday is coming up, and we want to improve our listings, what are 123 steps that we can do right away to make this thing work?

John 33:33  

Yeah, so, the biggest mover of clicks, obsessions and conversions is going to be your main image for your listing. So number one is definitely to try to make sure that your main image is fully optimized. I would recommend doing a quick test of your current main image with your competitor. So assuming that you’re not actively changing your main image, and you have all these options to choose from already, then I would go with the competitive route and say, take your main image, grab your top two or three bestsellers in your category, and just put them up on a split test anywhere get feedback on them and at least try to understand why people are clicking on yours or someone else’s. Right? So that’s step one and then see where you can iterate in that fashion. The next thing is on your supporting images, on your secondary images. I mean, part of the goal of your secondary images is to sort of address questions, right? So like address questions that a potential buyer might have about your product. So definitely, I would look at how the best selling products in your category use their secondary images and what objections those secondary images are trying to address and make sure that your secondary images are at least addressing the same thing, right? If someone’s buying a walking treadmill, they’re going to have similar questions whether they’re looking at your listing or someone else’s list. So definitely cover your bases there and then I would also consider testing your bullet points. So that’s kind of one thing that we’ve seen a lot with. Assuming that your main image is optimized, and your secondary images are optimized, people are going to be looking at your title, which you can test and they’re going to be looking at the bullet points, the key selling points of your product and what you can do on PickFu is that you can actually put up eight bullet points or eight potential bullet points and run it and our respondents will not just pick their favorite, but they’ll rank every single one in order of preference and so the results that you get are actually, we just had our elections over here. So people talk about voting and stuff, it’s a rank choice vote of all the different options that you put up. So what you can do with bullet points, is you can put up eight bullet points, see how they fall in terms of preference and actually just like the top five or six, because you know that those are the most compelling points out of that out of that set of eight that you’ve put up for potential buyers.

Norman  36:05  

So I got a couple of different other options that we might be able to use. You talked about bullet points, yeah. What about changing the order and showing images of eight different like five bullet points, in different orders and just say, Okay, now that I’ve got the five are from the survey that you just did, now you take them and put them in different orders to see what the first second third would be?

John 36:34  

Yeah.

John 36:36  

Yeah, you can totally do that. So you can do basically, with PickFu, your options can be text, images, video, audio. So yeah, you can do those screenshots of different orderings of the bullet points that you’ve decided and see whichever makes sense for most people.

Norman  36:51  

The other thing that I really, like I talked to a lot of people, there are Amazon sellers. Who I don’t know why, but they like to write a book on their images, they just like, isn’t that supposed to be where the bullets are? There’s just too much information. I’d love to see. Yeah. Again, this is just, I’m just thinking about this now, but taking those images and saying, okay, here’s with the book. Here’s with five points on it, here’s with one point on it, or one feature instead of all five features. Yeah, that might be one way and another way that I think would be really helpful, would be a short title. Mid, long.

John 37:38  

Long title. Yeah.

Norman  37:41  

Yeah, I think that can be very helpful, too. Those are just a few things that if there’s so many things, when you get down to it, what you can check out? Let’s switch this around. Where do you find that a lot of people either aren’t using your product properly, or they’re making mistakes? Put you on the spot?

John 38:07  

No, no. Let me think. The biggest mistake that we see with using this platform is that people move away from keeping things simple. So what that means is they will try to ask lots of questions in the question box, because you think that, oh, if I can ask multiple questions, I can get a lot more feedback. What ends up happening when you ask multiple questions, that’s called a double barreled question and what that means is you’re not actually getting clear results, you’re not getting clear signal from your respondents. If you’re asking multiple questions, some respondents might answer your first question. Some might answer your second, some might answer your third. We are posting a lot of links there. I think that was a sample poll about comparing different screenshots of different search results. In terms of eCommerce, what people should probably be using and more for is on the ideation and product and listing creation side of things. I think a lot of people just think, see PickFu as Oh, you split test images out on your listing after you’ve already launched, but the earlier you can use it in your process, the bigger benefit it can be, in terms of the outcome from equally on the packaging and sort of product creation side of things.

Norman  39:34  

Oh, yeah, I can see. Yeah, isn’t that big time? Yeah. Victor looks like he’s got a question there Kels.

Kelsey 39:41  

Yep. Since most click through decisions are made on the basis of a very quick look at the grid. Search Results a few seconds at most, is there a way to force a quick decision and PickFu?

John 39:52  

There is not a way to force a quick decision. I would say that most of our respondents do answer pretty quickly. So our focus on single questions and single polls is we tell our respondents that they should take no more than a minute to complete and that means reviewing the options, and also writing down your explanation for your choice. So while we cannot force them and I don’t think, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t think that we should be forcing them to answer really quickly, I would say that in the vast majority of cases, they are pretty quick decisions of choosing which one they like, and then explaining why.

Norman  40:30  

That’s a really cool option, Victor. I mean, if you could just, put something up for a second or two seconds. That might be a feature to look at.

John 40:43  

It may be an interesting thing. Yes. Different. Yeah.

Norman  40:47  

Alright, it looks like Simon’s got something too.

Kelsey 40:50  

Simon, do you share general findings of the most commonly asked questions to educate?

John 40:56  

We do have a poll gallery so when you run a poll on PickFu. By default, everything is private. So if you get a link, you can share that link to the poll results with anyone you want. So like some of the links that I shared, those are also polls that are, if no one has the link, and no one can see your poll, some of our users can opt for a discount to be listed in our poll gallery. So we do have a poll gallery on PickFu. If you go there, you can find the gallery and that’ll be sort of the last hundred polls or so. So you can definitely use that for education. We also do a regular weekly blog series, where we take a poll and deeply analyze the results, like all the different, go through sort of the motivations and analyze the responses, and so on and try to draw some conclusions from that.

Kelsey 41:45  

Okay, and looks like Darwin. When do I know when to leave my main image alone? For example, let’s say it’s in the top five positions of the main keywords?

John 41:54  

It’s a really good question. Sounds like you’re doing really well already. So I think if you already have a high performing product, and you’re already on the top of the results, I would suggest at most just using split testing for validation. So see, just confirm, right and validate that Yeah, your image is doing well, it performs well against your competition, there aren’t any things about your competitors’ images that are drawing them like that are something unique, right? Like, if you’re selling a multipack of something, and your image is beautiful, fills the frame, like shows it in use this all the checks all those boxes, and then your competitors has now includes six pieces or so maybe there’s something obvious that otherwise, yeah, I would just use split testing more for validation in that case.

Norman  42:51  

Okay, let me see. So we’re getting close to the time, are there any other things that you’d like to discuss? Or if you have, comment on anything?

John 43:08  

I would say that, like right now, it is a really busy time for sellers with q4. There is a lot of hesitation to change things that are working and I completely get that, especially like, if you’re driving most of your sales in this q4 season. I recommend thinking ahead towards the next year, like, early January, like when things are slower and really, I find that with a lot of our sellers, that’s a great time to optimize for the year ahead. Particularly as suppliers and stuff are winding down and taking vacations and stuff.

Norman  43:44 

Okay, it looks like Victor had a question here, too. This is actually quite interesting, because this comes up a lot of times when I’m working with suppliers, but I guess he had run some sort of split testing, and it popped up in your newsletter. Okay and he was wondering if the policy has changed?

John 44:06  

Yeah, so I’m not sure how that would have popped up if it wasn’t in the public gallery. When we put things in our newsletters, we always just pull from the ones that are already publicly listed. So what may have changed is that in the past, polls by default went to the public gallery, and then you needed to choose a different option to make them private. That has since changed probably for over a year now, where every single poll by default is private, and you can opt for a discount to put it in the public gallery. So if that happened to you, Victor, I’m sorry about that and you can reach out to me afterwards, we can try to figure something out. 

Norman 44:49

Okay, very good.

Kelsey 44:50  

Last one, Simon, I guess the answer is yes. But can you split test a website homepage?

John 44:55  

Absolutely. Yeah. So we do have a couple of examples of that where you can put up. Yeah, since it’s just images, you can put up two different mock ups or renderings. We do that ourselves at PickFu, we’re going through a redesign right now and so we have options. We literally did this last week where we have options for our new homepage and we had the both mocked up, uploaded both images, and then collected feedback on that.

Norman  45:19  

Okay, so I think that’s pretty much it, sir.

John 45:23  

Yeah.

Norman  45:23  

We are working on a giveaway. 

John 45:25

Cool.

Norman 45:26

Why don’t you announce what the giveaway is?

John 45:29  

Yeah. So we have two things. So the first giveaway is $100 point credit for one person in the audience. I don’t know if you guys pick that and then the second giveaway is a coupon for everyone in the audience. The coupon is LUNCHWITHNORM, no spaces, all caps, and that will get you 50% off your first poll, and that’s good for one week.

Norman  45:57  

Oh, that’s great. So Alright. I know what the question is and it’s gonna be a question. So you have to pay attention. Hopefully everybody did. Anyways, the question is, what’s the best way to maximize your profits on your listing? 

Kelsey 46:24

No, it’s for the group. It’s about the topic today. All you have to do, it starts with an S. A second word is a T. Anybody? Yo, yo, you got it? There we go. Yeah. So Yarrow gets the hundred dollar gift certificate. Yeah. I mean, I’m gonna get bombarded with Yeah, this this. I should have said that. Yeah, it was two words. I like charades. Right. Starts with, Alright. So great, Yarrow, very good. We’ll make sure that you get that information. Kelsey is going to or actually, Kelsey, you have to post your email, right?

Kelsey 47:11  

Yep. I think Yarrow already has it. But yeah, k@lunchwithnorm.com.

Norman  47:24  

So John, I really appreciate you coming on today and in talking about this, and the importance of it and best practices. Love to have you back. I hope everything, I hope you have a great Black Friday.

John 47:44  

You too. Great holiday season and can’t wait to see you in person at a conference.

Norman  47:48  

It’ll be great and hopefully a whole bunch of the people that are watching live too. I know a few of the names that are here like we’ve met live and it’s always much better to be able to meet somebody in person and see them eye to eye and break bread and have some fun. But Alright, so I think that’s it for today’s episode. Thank you for joining and thank you for the nice giveaway as well.

John 48:12  

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on Norm.

Norman  48:14  

Alright. See you later, John.

John 48:17

Bye. 

Norman 48:18

See ya. Okay, everybody. Thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Kelsey, where are you?

Kelsey 48:24  

Right here.

Norman  48:25  

Alright, do your thing.

Kelsey 48:27  

Okay. Yes. If you haven’t already, please hit that like button. Share the video. If  someone who’s maybe new to Amazon, and doesn’t know where to go. Maybe share the video with them, tag them in the comments and yeah, the full episode will be available on YouTube. So you can go there if you maybe miss something. Along with highlights. They get updated every day. A new video goes up and oh, yep. Mark says, Thanks guys. Yarrow, thanks. We had lots of guys who just missed it. Darwin, Brian.

Norman  49:07  

It was close but wait till the next episode.

Kelsey 49:09  

Yeah, so the podcast, it’s Lunch With Norm and you can find us on Spotify, Apple anywhere you get your podcast and we do have our Facebook group. It’s right at the very beginning. Where is it? Right here. You can go to the Facebook group, you can join our Facebook group. You just need to answer three questions. You need to answer those three questions to get in. But other than that, it’s Lunch With Norm Amazon FBA & eCommerce Collective and you can find it on Facebook, and we’d be happy to have you, get some good conversations, all of the discounts to that end up from the show, go directly over to the group and there’s a big document that says like, Lunch With Norm discounts and prizes where all the winners and the discounts are there. 

Norman  50:05  

Two other points. Remember, if you’re looking to build your online knowledge, we have a newsletter and it’s great content, it absolutely doesn’t suck. It’s about improving your skills as an online seller, not necessarily just Amazon, but it could work with Shopify or digital marketing. You name it, we cover the topics. The other thing is, our Friday episode is going to be great. If you’ve never heard of this seller, you’ll be amazed at what he’s done. His name is Paul Miller. He’s the man behind Cozy Phones and it’s an incredible brand. He’s going to be talking about licensing and his licensing agreements, what he’s been able to do over the last three years to go from zero to $4 million. Man, some people are so lucky. I shouldn’t say lucky, skilled. Paul is absolutely skilled. So this is something that a lot of people aren’t talking about licensing and how to get your product licensed. So I can’t wait to talk to Paul. I’ve known Paul for a long time and he’s a great guy. So Alright. So tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, noon, Eastern Standard Time and thanks again everybody. Our community is growing. We love seeing that and enjoy the rest of your day.