#292 – 3 Easy Steps To Increase Your Conversion Rates

What’s one of the most important metrics that determines your success on Amazon? Conversion rates! AKA “unit session percentage.” In this episode, we speak with Freedom Ticket 3.0 instructor, Anthony Cofrancesco, as he shares the important steps on how to increase your conversion rates using market research tools and by improving your listing and images.

Listen to the very end as Anthony discusses his take on why 3D rendering your product’s photos is better than basic photography and more!

In episode 292 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Anthony discuss:

• 1:20 – How Anthony Got Started In The E-commerce Industry
• 3:00 – Building A Creative Agency In The Philippines
• 5:00 – Using Helium 10’s Audience For Market Research
• 8:00 – Conversion Rate And Why It Is Important!
• 12:50 – Top 3 Steps To Increase Your Conversion Rates
• 17:20 – The Concept Of Speed Scanning And How It Affects Your Sales
• 20:00 – Getting Product Photography Ideas On Magazines
• 26:00 – 3D Rendering vs. Basic Photography
• 32:00 – Anthony’s Thirty Second Tip
• 34:00 – How To Contact Anthony  

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’re going to talk about conversion rate and how to increase it through listing optimization and images. Now, the person we’re talking to is so good at this some of his products have over a hundred percent conversion rate. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon or Walmart world. We’ve got somebody coming to us from actually, where are you at now? You know, you’re in the Philippines, I see you in Texas, I see you in Brazil, where are you even at Anthony?

Anthony:

Right now I’m on the East Coast of the United States in a little town called Havre de Grace, Maryland. And I’m actually at my parent’s house.

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, okay. Is that where you’re from?

Anthony:

That’s where I grew up yeah, it’s my hometown.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, we’re going to get into some strategies, you’re one of the guest instructors in Freedom Ticket and we’ve been featuring instructors to kind of like give people a tease of Freedom Ticket 3.0 and their modules. And you had some really great stuff about listing optimization and conversion optimization. And you know you had some pretty interesting numbers in there that we’re gonna talk but we’re not going to give it all away. Obviously, we got to leave some for people who get into the course, but before we get into that, I think this is your first time on the show. So let’s talk a little bit about your history like how did you get into E-commerce in the first place when and where and why?

Anthony:

Yeah. So when I was back before I dropped out of college I was going to the University of Florida, I was a good friend with the guy who was running the entrepreneurship club. And one day he gave me a call and said, Hey, we got these free tickets to an E-commerce event in Orlando. And these people startup rose, I guess he reached out and was like, we’re poor college kids can you hook us up with some tickets? And I was like, I don’t know anything about e-commerce. And he said, no, you gotta come Daymond John is to be there from Shark Tank. And I had an accounting exam the next day, but long story short is I ended up skipping that accounting exam and kind of jumping into this world of E-comm didn’t know anything about it.

Anthony:

The guys at Startup Bros were generous enough to hook us up with some free tickets. And that was kind of my how I jumped into the world. So I started learning about selling online and learn how to sell online. That was back well before there was courses like Freedom Ticket or anything like that. And so we were just kind of working on Google docs and different thing and I had landed a job at Amazon after doing an internship and I knew that I wanted to launch my first product before I started a full-time job because it could provide some extra income while I was working full time. And so I went and launched a product, I started working full-time at Amazon and then after working at Amazon for about a year the same guy who had taught me how to sell E-comm, how to sell FBA was like, why don’t you quit your job at Amazon? Move out to the Philippines and help me scale a creative agency. So even being a college dropout, I knew that was going to be a little bit of a crazy idea, but I knew I’d end up regretting it. So I quit my job, moved out, scaled a creative agency for a couple of years and after selling that in 2019 I ended up with PickFu and that’s kind of my quick rundown of my story.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice. Whereabouts in the Philippines did you end up?

Anthony:

In Manila, just in we had a studio at first and Quezon City, and then also later we relocated down to Makati. I also lived in Cebu for about three months.

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty out there, you know that I’m half Filipino?

Anthony:

I do, yeah. I do know that.

Bradley Sutton:

So I love– my first time out in the Philippines was actually I was way late in life. I hadn’t, I hadn’t been there until I was in my thirties and went to do a Zumba class in Quezon City, my mom was from Pasay City. And so I love it out there, I can’t wait to get back. They finally announced I don’t know if you’ve heard, but they finally announced that there’s no more quarantine or as of a certain date there’s going to be no more quarantine for people to go. That’s why I haven’t been in a couple of years but I definitely want to get back there. Do you miss the food?

Anthony:

I miss it so much, at first my taste buds cannot handle Filipino food, but once you really start to eat it, then you get accustomed to it. So I really miss Sinigang is my favorite and Bulalo.

Bradley Sutton:

I would always go for some sisig and some lechon, adobo, lumpia, pancit, but sinigang is one of my go-to meals. But we’re not here to talk about Filipino food. We want to talk about E-commerce and namely Amazon and I saw you presented a billion dollar summit recently, and then you also are in the Freedom Ticket. And I wanted to talk a little bit about your conversion rate tactics, because that’s something that not a lot of people talk about but before we get into that, you did mention you work at PickFu now and we’ve had Justin on here a couple of times we’ve talked about how Helium 10 Audience is helping people which integrates PickFu. For those who might be new listeners, let’s talk about just that first, so Helium 10 Audience powered by PickFu. For those people who are brand new, explain what that does and why you think it’s important that Amazon sellers utilize it?

Anthony:

Yeah sure so PickFu or Audience is, if you’re going to go through Helium 10 which is it’s the exact same thing I recommend just use it through Helium 10. It’s really just quick access to market research and so basically if you think about how larger companies have been doing marketing and product development since the beginning of time, very rarely is it one person who’s sitting in a room and says, okay, here’s what we’re gonna do for the marketing strategy. Here’s what we’re going to do for the new product launch and they just pick it with one person, go with their gut and then see how it flies in the market right? Everyone, since the beginning of time has been doing market research. What PickFu created is a platform that allows normal individual business owners regardless of the size of their company to get access to that market research very quickly.

Anthony:

And so the real benefit of it is rather than just going with your gut or going to your partner or your spouse and saying, Hey, babe, what do you think about this logo? What do you think about this product design? You’re able to now expand your own kind of framework for that decision beyond yourself and you can open it up to 50, a hundred, 500 people. And so basically what we find is that you reduce a lot of risk in trying to go and expand the survey size beyond yourself, basically. And there’s some really powerful techniques which I’m sure we’re going to talk about today that you can use it for visual optimization and to really go through multiple iterations of revision after revision. And you’d be really surprised with where you’ll go if you do that based on external feedback, not just based on the feedback of yourself or your creative team.

Bradley Sutton:

So guys, if you want more information on that, go to h10.me/audience, and then you can find some more great information. I use that on a weekly basis, I just launched 3 or 4 products last week. Some kind of like fun test products on Project X. And I used Audience in order to see what the best main image would be and like usual it wasn’t what I probably would have picked if I was just going on on my own knowledge. And so it’s really important to get the feedback from actual customers on Amazon, because a big mistake that Amazon sellers in my opinion make is they rely too much on their own knowledge and they say, okay, this is how people search, this is the image that looks the best.

Bradley Sutton:

And this is why people will use this product most. And this is the price point that I would pick, etcetera, etcetera. And sure you know, there are a lot of people out there maybe like you, but maybe you guys are the minority. Maybe you’re only 10% of the people think like you, you want to go with what the majority would go with it. And that’s how tools like PickFu and Audience can help you. Now, one interesting thing that stands out to me from the recent presentations I’ve seen you give, is you talk about something– I already teased it a little bit, but that most people don’t say as the most important thing to them. So to you, what’s the most important thing when we talk about you know, how you can see your or gauge how successful you’re going to be on Amazon? What’s a one word thing that you keep mentioning?

Anthony:

Yeah. I’m talking always about conversion. Absolutely.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So number one, Amazon sellers maybe who have not looked at this, how can they even know what their conversion or conversion rate is on Amazon? What does Amazon provide and how can they find it?

Anthony:

Well first is Amazon doesn’t call it conversion they’re going to call it “Unit Session Percentage”. You can go and see that inside of your business reports it’s pretty easy to find. You can find it for a specific day or over a period of time. And unit session percentage is just basically saying, okay, for the number of sessions, for the number of people that come to your listing, what’s the percentage of time that they actually buy the product. And some more I guess serious sellers might know this but you can actually have a unit session percentage in excess of a hundred percent. If you have a product, for example where people are buying multiple quantities, they might come to the listing. And instead of buying one, they buy two or three, you can definitely see some very high unit session percentages.

Anthony:

Based on my understanding and I’m not an expert when it comes to the Amazon algorithm, but based on my understanding that the algorithm in terms of long-term ranking and in terms of like how you’re actually positioned in search results is going to be a large portion of that factor which is unit session percentage. Because Amazon basically wants to know if we put your product in front of a customer, what’s going to be a win for Amazon, right? It’s them buying the product and obviously the customer having a good long-term experience with the product, not returning it. But if we show this to someone, what’s the probability that they’re actually going to add it to the cart that they’re actually going to buy the product and so it’s an important metric.

Bradley Sutton:

Right now I think part of that people might’ve skimmed over but the thing that blew my mind I’ll say let’s talk about it a little bit more, but oh, a session rate over a hundred percent like what’s the average out there that you think if nobody really has paid attention to this, or maybe they’re not that great what do you think is the number that most sellers are going to see when they go into it?

Anthony:

Yeah. I ask a lot. I always try to ask people anytime I’m hopping on a call generally I’d say I’m seeing 20 to 30%. I’d say that I’m probably a little bit on the skewed side, because most of the people I’m talking to are quite well-established sellers. I’m actually blown away sometimes with how big accounts are actually in the 30% or sub 30% range. If you’re a new seller and you’re doing a not very good job. And I don’t mean to say that in a mean way, but sometimes you just start off in you might be like sub 20% with that being said the number I always try to shoot for Bradley is if you look at the average conversion rate of an Amazon Prime shopper it’s about 75%. Which is kind of crazy to even say out loud. And so for me personally, when I’m trying to optimize the listing, if I see something that’s below 65%, I believe, okay, unless this is a very specific product like it’s a home decor item where people are naturally going to shop around and they’re shopping based on design. You’re going to see a lower conversion rate. I’m really trying to say, can I get all of my listings for either products that I sell or products that I manage? Can I get those above 65%?

Bradley Sutton:

And now you personally, you know, in your products that you’ve had, or when you’re looking at other people’s accounts, when that conversion rate goes up, are there some positive effects you see I mean, obviously conversion rate in itself is a positive effect but do you see page ranking increased? What’s happening when you see? Is there a domino effect at all?

Anthony:

Absolutely right. I think conversion rates just a starting point but we’re going to obviously see higher overall sales generally. We’ll see that the ranking over time is going to go up. We can actually kind of look at that and I won’t get into it too much, but like, yeah, as we’re increasing conversion rate, it doesn’t happen right away. But if you can maintain that conversion rate over time, you’re gonna see generally what I’ve seen is you’re gonna see your rank go up. You’re gonna also be running more efficient campaigns, right? Because then sometimes we’ll even tailor things that are in the image gallery to match if it’s a very specific campaign that we’re running for pay-per-click. To try to match and see can we get those numbers higher as well? But I mean, I looked generally at conversion but you’re just going to see higher overall sales as well better all around.

Bradley Sutton:

Now let’s start talking about what somebody could do. Cause this is not something that you just snap your fingers, oh, look, my conversion rate is better. I mean it’s a malt there’s not one, there’s not just one only thing that will do it. It’s probably stacking a number of different strategy. That’s what this podcast is all about strategy. So let’s not go over all of them, I know you have tons of them in Freedom Ticket, but let’s talk about some of the main ones that you think somebody just now who hasn’t really paid too much attention to this metric. What are like the top let’s go over what top 3 steps that people can start takin?

Anthony:

Yeah. So the first thing I would say the biggest one is to really understand, really understand one concept. And that is, by the time someone gets to shopping on Amazon, by the time they type in the search term into the search bar, the biggest thing that people need to understand is that when someone does that, they have the intent to buy the product, right? So let’s say I’m searching for, I want to buy a red spatula, I pull up my laptop and pull up my tablet, I pull up my phone, I type in red spatula. What you need to understand is that person, they will be buying a red spatula, right? It’s going to happen, or at least 75% of the time. You know, if they’re a prime shopper, they’re going to buy the red spatula, the question becomes are they going to buy your red spatula or are they going to buy one of the other competitors that is selling a very similar product?

Anthony:

And so the first thing that you really need to understand is when someone is on Amazon, they have the intent to buy the product and they will buy the product. The default for that person is for not for them to buy the product. It is for them to bounce it’s to open up many different tabs until they find the one that feels right that seems like, okay, this is what I’m looking for. I’m not going to have any issues and then they’re going to add it to their cart. And so I guess like the biggest tactic is like understanding that. Once you understand that, then you want to start to understand what are the barriers. This is step two, like what are the barriers or the things that someone their brain needs to satisfy before they add to cart. So if I’m searching for red spatula, I don’t know, this is a very simple product, but the human brain, right?

Anthony:

They know they want to buy a spatula and now they just need confirmation that like, this looks like a reputable seller. This red spatula is going to have the things that I need it to do maybe there’s like design features or an ergonomic handle that it’s dishwasher safe, whatever it is. And then the last thing before they’re going to click add to cart is they’re just going to, they need to understand, okay, if this is the first tab that I opened, or maybe this is the fourth tab that I opened, what is going to solidify in my brain, that this looks to be a reputable seller, right? That this is not going to give me any issues after I buy it. And so the third step is okay, if the first step is understanding that someone has the intent to buy, second step is understanding what are all the things that the brain needs to check off before they add to cart?

Anthony:

The third step is presenting all of this information, getting it right to them, giving it right to their brain, to help them solidify and solve that equation in their brain. That, yes, this is what I’m looking for let me go to add it to my cart and how you’re going to do that last third step is all about what I call visual optimization. And that is what can you do visually on your listing, whether that’s your images, your A+, your video, including your text as well, like your bullet points. What can you do to as efficiently as possible communicate those little steps, those little check boxes in the customer’s head so that they can add the product to the cart.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Now, you know, you mentioned having that more than 100% conversion rate you know it’s coming from people buying more units, what are some tips and tricks as far as how you can, I don’t know if I want to say incentivize, but how you can drive people to buy, one more and I’m assuming some kind of product, it doesn’t make sense. Like we’ve got you know, a coffin shelf at Helium 10 and you know, like you probably only one coffin shelf, but like if you have shampoos or other consumables or I know there’s tons and tons of products that this will work for what are some of those tactics?

Anthony:

The biggest one I’d say there is place a lot of emphasis on the second image in the image gallery, the second or third image, that’s gonna emphasize that point. One really good, one is not many people are in a category like this, but if you are, you go into your business reports and you see that like any amount of sales are coming from B2B, people with Amazon business accounts are actually buying that product. Then that’s like a slam dunk right off the bat because most of the business to business sales, they’re going to be buying more than one because they’re buying for a restaurant or a hair salon or something like that. But basically what I’m going to do is like, if I have a giftable item, if I have a business item, I’m just going to make that second graphic.

Anthony:

And I’m going to come up with a few different versions with my creative team. And I’m going to say, go make me like two to three versions. Like if I have a giftable item we’re getting to Q4, right? So you might say, hey, this is the perfect gift for the sci-fi fan in your life right? And you’re going to come up with a few different versions of that graphic. Maybe one, you showed us a stocking stuffer, maybe another one you show it as like for someone’s birthday I don’t know. And you’re just going to go like two, three different versions. And then you’re going to run that through PickFu, like a wide creative concept, and then just narrow it down. But you’re going to encourage a friend to basically if it’s a giftable item, buy this for another friend, but keep it really simple.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t know if you made up this word but it was interesting the concept behind it, but I think it was like what is speed scanning? I think you had said in Freedom Ticket? Well, can you explain that?

Anthony:

Okay. So this is something that I’ve been doing for a while and it just centers around the concept and maybe I’ll get some flack for this, but I don’t really believe there’s anything in this world. There’s no such thing as an original idea. Everything is just an iteration of something that’s happened in the past, right? Or it’s at least it’s not necessary to have an original idea in E-comm. Most of us are selling products that like anywhere on Amazon like, you know, you didn’t invent the coffin shelf. I didn’t invent red spatula. I’m just trying to present it in a way that’s going to work really well. And so the whole concept of speed scanning is just basically, we have some natural inclination to be able to if we look at something we can say hey, does this look good?

Anthony:

Does this not look good? And so basically if I’m trying to speed scan, what I’m going to do is I’m going to try to see as many images as possible. So I’m going to get a VA or someone on my creative team to go and just look at high ranking products for just like any random product. And then I’m going to have them go and download the entire image gallery. And I’m going to have them go probably like 10 pages deep in the search results and just download everything. Then what I’m gonna have them do is start to categorize those image by images, by type. So imagine if one type of graphic is like a sizing infographic just to show sizing and another type is like a product anatomy with little arrows that point to, okay, this is this part of the product and it does this.

Anthony:

And then another graphic is like a lifestyle image and then a lifestyle image with text. And basically what I’m going to do is I’m going to get them to compile these folders of different images in like a Google drive. And when it’s all ready, I’m going to have them send me the link and then I’m going to do this is where the speed scanning part comes in is I’m going to click, click, click, click, click and most of them are not going to be good. But every like one in five or potentially one in 10, you’re going to be like wait a minute what is that? In your brain Because your brain is processing these images very quick. You’re going to say that’s an interesting concept and you’re going to save it. And so basically what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to expose my brain to a very, very wide range of images and then start to identify, okay, this image looks good but what is it inside the image that is particularly interesting and how can I leverage that same kind of concept into my own image gallery?

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting. Interesting. I like that. What are some other ways that let’s just keep it to Amazon first, before we go off Amazon, but that people can get inspiration for helping with their optimization?

Anthony:

I really personally, you know, I’ve been living abroad for a while, so I took a break from this, but I’ve been coming back to visit my family here in Maryland, much more often. And what I really like are magazines and I like a physical magazine, I know you can get the digital versions, but magazines are really cool because you can get subscriptions to these things for pretty much no money at all and you can find these magazine sites. And so I’ll just have a bunch of different magazines shipped to me. It’s kind of like a nice day when they come in or when I get back from a trip and I’ll check them out and I’m doing the same thing. I’m just like flipping through the pages in the magazine. And then in every magazine especially more like lifestyle home goods ones, I’ll see something that’s really interesting.

Anthony:

And I’ll either like rip out the page or I’ll take a picture of it with my phone and I’ll send it to my designer, my photographer. And the cool thing is like if you can create something that looks as good as it does in a magazine like a national leading brand, and you can put that up on an Amazon listing, it’s going to not only look good, but it’s going to really give a lot of confidence to the customer. So magazines are really good one gearing towards like fitness lifestyle health. You can probably find magazines that are really maybe not like if you’re selling spatulas, you’re not going to see a magazine on spatulas, but you’re going to see 20 different magazines on cooking right? And so you can find something that’s in the parallel to your niche and you’ll get so many ideas from there. And I can go on all day about magazines, not just for the images but even for like, if you’re in a niche for fishing, you start to see the same names over and over again for these fishing celebrities. And then if you want to reach out to them for to do these sponsorship deals or I mean there’s just a lot in magazines. It’s like the original media type before there’s blogs and they’re still very strong I think in a lot of categories.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. So now you’ve got some other you know tactics on this subject. So guys, if you want to listen to more about that, make sure to go into I think it’s like week 8 of Freedom Ticket 3.0, and you can get more but you talk about another topic I wanted to touch on a little bit too in Freedom Ticker and that was about images and you had some really good points about especially the main image and you know that conversion rate is great, but you can have 75% conversion rate and you get 10 views a day. And okay, this is not that wonderful. You know, you want to get more people to first get even click into your listing in order for you to even have a good conversion rate. So we all know, you know, title, price, obviously those are important, but what are some tactics about sticking out I guess, would you say would the main image so that you can start getting more clicks from the search results or sponsored results into your listing?

Anthony:

Probably the easiest way and the most straightforward from a TOS compliance standpoint is to add product packaging into your main image. And because product packaging is a really clever way that if you design it, well, so here’s the thing, right? It really depends on the product category you can go into Seller Central and pull up the main image requirements in terms of service. And the one that I actually see as the most prevalent for at least a lot of the products that I sell in is what it says. Word for word in the terms of service is that the main image must not contain gratuitous or confusing additional objects. And so I think what Amazon is really trying to do is they’re trying to avoid scenarios where people are putting this clickbait, these decals, but it’s very clear in other product categories.

Anthony:

I’ll give a really good example here it’s like if you’re selling a glow in the dark item and you go to the first page of search results, you’ll actually find that a lot of the competitors don’t have the product on a white, black background they have it on a black background. And so why does Amazon allow this right? Amazon is writing the most streamlined version of the terms of service that’s going to apply generally to every single product that’s sold which is hundreds of thousands, if not millions of products, right? And so they’re just putting in the terms of service, and they’re looking for you as a seller to make the best decision about what’s going to be the best in regards to the customer experience. And so it would make sense that Amazon is going to kind of turn their head on a glow in the dark products, because it’s much better for the customer to see, oh, this is on a black background.

Anthony:

I can see the glow, I can see the light versus trying to put it on a white background. And so it’s the same thing as like, okay, you can use product packaging and you can add that in another thing that a lot of people do is they’re putting in this eye candy into the main image, like in Freedom Ticket you’ll see there’s like a picture of an apple peeler. And it’s like not only showing the apple being peeled off, but it’s showing the apples next to it. And so you got to ask yourself, right? If I just see this apple peeler on a white background, I might get confused as a customer and think, is this a tool that I’m going to see in my workshop? No, I can see the apple being peeled off. And on the same point to the terms of service, how it’s written, it’s not confusing.

Anthony:

It’s not, it’s not extra, it’s not gratuitous. No one’s going to order the apple peeler and be like, well, where’s my apples? That’s probably not going to happen. And so if you can inform early on like what the customer is getting and how the product relates to their life to make sure that they have found the right product. I think that’s very safe if you’re going to add in these little decals, like back in the day, I remember on my own products, we’d put in the little, it was like the two pack with the Amazon logo. I mean, it’s just distracting it’s just like a clickbait, a visual trick. If you’re doing that, that’s really risky I wouldn’t recommend doing that. But the thing is with main images as well, and main image violations, and I’m happy to tell everyone I put up images all the time that gets suppressed and we upload and re-upload and upload and re-upload, but it doesn’t matter.

Anthony:

It doesn’t lead to an account suspension, it doesn’t lead to any negative health effects and so I’m very bullish on pushing the lines in terms of what Amazon is going to allow. And if it’s going to help me in the short term, I mean it was probably not like the most gray hat stuff, but if Amazon was strict about it and they said, if you violate terms of service in this way, then you’re going to get suspended. I wouldn’t mess around with it. But Amazon knows, like they’re just trying to test and see what works and they’re going to see and it’s clear in some categories, if every seller is doing the exact same thing and putting in this eye candy, or do you have a fitness product and you’re showing them like a sports bra and you have a model wearing it, versus it just sitting flat on a background, what do you think is going to be better for the customer? You know what I mean?

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. Now, what’s your opinion on 3D renderings versus really nice photography. I mean, I think that the thing, obviously I didn’t put an option is, is just kind of like basic photography like we really need something good. So between those two, what’s your preference?

Anthony:

Well I’m a little bit biased on this. And when I was watching, I think it was your Instagram stories and you guys were doing the, it looked like some DIY product photography inside of the box. I believe it was like the egg tray or the coffin shelf, I wanted to reach out cause I saw those and they looked like good images. But I’m an advisor of a very, very small 3D rendering agency and I won’t drop the name here I’m not trying to promote it or anything like that. But I was blown away with how good that technology is getting and I would say in the vast majority of products, especially if you’re working on a limited budget, 3D renders are absolutely going to be better than real photography. There’s a few scenarios where it’s not better, but generally it’s going to be faster and it’s going to be cheaper. If you look at a company like IKEA, 75% of their product catalog is renderings, it’s definitely where the future is going. It’s the technology gets better and better every yea and especially if you have like products with high volume variations, like you have supplement and the only difference is the labels between the bottles or things like that. 3D renderings are a game changer and you’re going to see more and more sellers use them for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now what is required to even do that? So like, I want to get a 3D rendering of my coffin shelf right? Do I like it? Do I just need to take pictures front, back, and side and send it to somebody? Do I actually have to send them the full product and they do some kind of advanced imaging? What does it take to get it done?

Anthony:

I’d say for 90% of the time, if you’re selling a standard product, it’s going to be 90% of the time, well the simplest thing is if you have any injection molded product, anything that’s like a plastic product your manufacturers might most likely gonna have a step file, which is an ISO I believe 303 assembly file. And it’s basically like how they would put it together at the factory. The easiest way is you can just request from your manufacturer, Hey, I’m getting renders done. Can you provide me with the step file? You send that over to the rendering agency, they plug it into their program and then it’s like 90% done. The other thing is like, I’d say the other most products are going to be available in a template library. So you don’t even have to build it out from scratch. So think like pretty much any supplement bottle, the coffin shelf, anything like it probably exists somewhere in someone’s library right? If not, you can just build things from scratch and so you can obviously build any product custom from scratch that gets a little bit more expensive but like something like a coffin shelf or if it’s like any kind of plastic product is remarkably easy to do. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And then what’s the price difference in like, Hey, I want to have a decent photography studio to just at least let’s just talk about the white background pictures like maybe you should get probably at least a couple of white background pictures for your listing. What’s the going rate these days? I don’t even know myself like you said, we’ve got our own photography staff here at Helium 10. So whenever I have a new product, I just give it to them and they do it for free. But what does somebody have to pay for a decent white background image? And then what would that costs be for a 3D rendering?

Anthony:

So I think if you really want to do it comparing it to white background photography, the only company that I really think does an amazing job every single time, if you’re looking for an agency, is a company called Products on white pal. They just do amazing work I think they charge I don’t know, 40 or 30 or $40 an image just for a white background. And you can kind of go and use those across your listing. So I’d say like on the low end for white background photography, unless you get a box and do it yourself, you’re probably looking if you’re under that $200-$300 range, you could probably get it done cheaper but it might be running through some different quality with renders it’s probably similar to that. If you go onto Fiverr or Upwork, you can get pretty convincing renders done for under a hundred bucks.

Anthony:

And they’ll once the cool thing about rendering is once the model is made, most rendering artists, aren’t going to say, Hey, it was a hundred dollars for the model and then start charging you a bunch of extra for each image. Cause they just go and render the output. So on the low end, like a hundred dollars, it’s kind of with anything you’re going to get what you pay for, for a hundred bucks. When you start getting into like the $200-$300 range then you’re going to start just getting more realistic effects on like the perspective on lighting. If you’re going to try to drop these things into a lifestyle scenario then you’re going to want probably like a higher, probably a higher price point than like than that. But you know, like probably like $5 to $800 all in for the product, but we’re also talking in that case about, you’re going to start, you’re going to be getting into like lifestyle scenes.

Anthony:

And so back when I had my previous agency, if someone wanted to do like a full-on lifestyle photography shoot, it was not just the cost of the team it was the cost of like where it’s going to be. And this was in the Philippines, like $300 to hire a European model, a Caucasian model for the day. And then we’re going to get an Airbnb with a kitchen, which is $300 then we got to buy everyone lunch. And so like, I don’t think you can get a good lifestyle shoot done, even on a company working offshore like outside of the states at least you’re probably going to spend $1,500 to 2 grand. And so that’s where a rendering is going to be a lot cheaper in the overall cost is when you’re trying to do like lifestyle, as well as like, for certain products, if you have like a very large item or you have something with a lot of variations that’s when it’s really going to because now you’re just changing the color of the product and you can just like pop this thing anywhere you want once the model is built.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Well, we do something on the show we call the which actually comes from my Filipino background. That was how my mom used to call me Bradley, come over here. But TST, it stands for on this show, 30-second tip. So you’ve been giving us tips and strategies throughout the episode. But if you were to pick something new that we haven’t said today, maybe takes 30 or 40 seconds or less to say, what would that be? That can help our listeners have an easy win on Amazon?

Anthony:

Okay. Slam dunk, easy win in 30 seconds is start, for the love of God. Start using manager experiments inside of seller central. It is a free split testing tool, you can use it to test your title, your main image or your A+ content. I recommend starting with either main image or A+ content, it’s really easy to do. It takes five seconds to set up maybe not five seconds, but five minutes to set up. But the thing is these tests take four weeks to run. And so if you start this now, you’re not going to get rich quick but you might get one or 2% every test. And then the thing is your competitors can’t catch up. It just takes time to run these and so you’ve got like a five minute investment of your own time aside from getting some different creative assets. But, start using that because if you can pick up like 1 to 2% on these tests every month and you do that for six months, like you’re going to be in a drastically better position. And I’ve talked to every agency owner that I know I’ve talked to a lot of big sellers and very, very few people are using this.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, cool I like it. So guys make sure if you have brand registry, make sure you take advantage of that right away. So obviously, people can see you on the interwebs that PickFu and then we have Helium 10 Audience here, but you got any social media or anything that you could give out so that people can find you elsewhere?

Anthony:

People can find me on Instagram it’s just @AnthonyCofran and it’s not really anything super interesting. I just like finding my drone and that’s pretty much it, so it’s not really E-com related but if you want to hit me up there or just shoot me an email, anthony@pickfu.com.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, all right. Anthony, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for your Freedom Ticket modules and we’ll definitely be in touch in the future.

Anthony:

Thanks so much Bradley.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
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