Revolutionizing Amazon Selling With Game - Changing Tools From ZonGuru with Jon Tilley

Andy Splichal:

Welcome back to the Make Each Click Count podcast, where we dive deep into strategies and tools to help e-commerce businesses thrive in a competitive online landscape. Today we have a special guest, John Tilley, the CEO and co founder of Zonguru. Zonguru is a pioneering software company dedicated to empowering Amazon brands and agencies with the tools they need to grow and succeed. John brings a wealth of knowledge and unique perspective on Amazon ecosystem, and I'm excited to explore some of the insights and strategies that John has to share with us today. Whether you are an established Amazon seller or just starting out, this episode is packed with some valuable information you won't want to miss. So let's jump right into it. All right, John, tell us a bit about your grab background and how you got involved with Zonguru.

Jon Tilley:

What's up, Andy? Good to be on the show? Yeah. Where is Zonguru? I started the company back in 2017. Prior to that, I was selling on Amazon, so I created my own private label brands that did pretty well. And prior to that I was in kind of the agency world globally, working with some pretty big brands like Burger King, Gillette. So pretty experienced in the e commerce world in general. The accent is originally South Africa. I grew up there and moved to London and then found my way to Los Angeles in 2006 and I've been here since. So the accent is still around.

Jon Tilley:

But you being in Los Angeles for many, many years now, great.

Andy Splichal:

Well, we're excited to have you on the show now like I do before all shows. I was checking out your tools on Guru and it looks like you offer a lot of really cool tools for Amazon sellers. And I'm as fascinated as I went through it. And so I guess I just wanted to go through tool by tool to see what you developed and how it can help Amazon sellers out there. Let's start with your listing optimizer. Now, how does that tool work and what makes it stand out from other listing optimization tools on the market.

Jon Tilley:

Yeah, thank you. We have over 18 different tools and we'll run through a few of them there. But I think at a high level, what we have done well in the space is we have a very strong Amazon seller DNA that we built over the years. And we truly understand what sellers need to grow and make an impact in the marketplace. For Amazon, we specifically ensure that the tools that we build have a lens of not just data for the sake of data, but what is the actual critical data that is most impactful to moving the needle on an Amazon business. And how do we deliver that in the most efficient way possible? In every single tool we create, you will see most tools are focusing on the right data and delivering it in the fastest way possible for you to implement. In terms of the listing optimizer, that is one of our flagship products, I would say this one, and our keyword tool or our flagship products, what we know best for in the industry, and we've had a lot of firsts with the listing optimization tool. This is about how do you create the right content and now images that is best aligned for the Amazon algorithm so that you can get more traffic and more importantly, more conversions, which will help you to organically rank better.

Jon Tilley:

And some of the first that we've had in that space, one is a phrase that I coined a few years back called contextual SEO. So the idea there is, we don't want to just tell you, hey, what is the best content for your listing? But how does that compare to your major competitors? And more importantly, how do you make sure that you have the best content from an optimization score perspective that's better than your competitors? You can scratch the itch and say, I've got the best listing on page one out of any competitor. Then the second major first in the space there was, we were the first in the industry to integrate AI into our tool going back over two years now. And, you know, this is something that we've been first in the space on, and I think we do best. Specifically, it's around how do we give you the best baseline in the shortest amount of time that you can. Then with the insights that we give you around data, you can finesse, further align it with your brand, and then publish it directly to your Amazon listing. So, you know, what's the saying? The worst thing for a copywriter is having a blank page. And in this case, within about a minute, we give you a fully optimized listing that is typically about 20% better optimized than the best listing on page one.

Jon Tilley:

And that's the baseline that you can then work off to finesse, get better and then publish knowing that you have the best optimized score on page one. So that's where we stand out.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah. What I really found fascinating on, on Zonguru is I've worked with a lot, you know, I work with helping companies optimize their listings and really specifically bidding. But a lot of the companies out there, Amazon, concentrate on bid management and it seems like your software is a lot more proactive where there is reactive and trying to compete on bids and such. Is that fair to say?

Jon Tilley:

Well, I would say our tools specifically isn't focused at all on the paid side of ads on Amazon. It's focused on the organic side and how you rank organically. The idea here is your PDP. Your product page on Amazon is almost like the heartbeat of your whole Amazon storefront. It's like how well your page is displayed for the algorithm and for conversion is critical to the rest of everything that you do on the Amazon side of the business. If you can ensure that you have the best potential for your listing in terms of visibility and in terms of conversion, you're then well set up for every other strategy that you implement. And that includes obviously PPC, bid management, traffic, etcetera. So we focus with our tools specifically on how to make sure that whenever you put a listing together, it is absolutely optimized for Amazon and that every single piece of traffic that comes to your page, if there is a conversion that happens, it gives the maximum amount of juice to the algorithm to get you to organically rank better.

Andy Splichal:

How necessary. I mean, Amazon seems to be coming more and more pay to play. How required do you recommend people once they create their listings they use, especially if they're new, do you recommend people use paid advertising in Amazon?

Jon Tilley:

100% yeah, it's pay to play, right? So it's fortunate and unfortunate and I hope we can look at what Google did over the years. Right. Amazon is a few years behind, so we can always see a similar trend on what's happening with Amazon and the paid side that happened with Google five, six years ago. There is obviously a critical piece to the paid side of it and certainly Amazon sees that as a big money generator for themselves. But there always has to be a balance between the pay to pay side of it and your organic ranking side for the customer. Amazon needs to always ensure there's a balance between how much paid side of it is and how much is the organic side. But certainly it's absolutely critical. Participating in the paid programs where your ads appear are important for you to get sales and traffic.

Jon Tilley:

But sales and traffic that come from your paid ads also help with your organic rank. So it is absolutely a critical piece. And if you find a business today that doesn't have ads switched on and using it, buy today because you can literally triple that business just by turning paid ads on.

Andy Splichal:

You know, and another thing that I really like is a lot of people that are looking to start their own business, you know, might think Amazon saturated and maybe there's no room for them, but you offer a couple tools in there. It looked like the niche finder as well as sourcing products, which I thought was really neat. Tell us about how those work and how maybe a new seller could use those to launch a product in Amazon.

Jon Tilley:

Yeah, look, I think the thing that's amazing about Amazon and why I'm also very passionate about the space is Amazon is a platform that is literally a financial game changer for people globally. You can come from any country, any background, any education level, and as long as you put in the effort, you can literally sell products. You can find products, source them in various countries, you can, you can ship them to Amazon globally, wherever you decide you want to sell. And you can sell products to customers without literally ever talking to your supplier face to face or meeting your customers in person. And you can live in any single country. And that's truly still an opportunity that's available today that can get you to a pretty high financial point in your life. So it's a fascinating platform that's developed in the last, you know, 20 years. And there are still opportunities today.

Jon Tilley:

Yes, some markets are more competitive, namely being the US versus other markets. But you literally have free opportunities to target and sell in any Amazon marketplace globally. If you want less competition, you can find that for sure. But even with competition, there are moats and there are ways to, uh, find opportunities. And it just means you have to rely more on data to get very, very deep on, uh, small niches, uh, within that markets that, that could, uh, result in a fruitful business for you. So, um, we still see today, you know, I've, I've got clients all the time that have launched six months ago and are now doing a million in sales or, you know, these are all opportunities that are still available. It's just about depending on how creative you get with understanding the data and how you use that data to create your final product. So the niche finder is very good in helping you there and it is aimed at answering very specific business questions that you have to answer to validate whether a product is good for a marketplace or not.

Jon Tilley:

And that's namely, how much traffic is there? Is a demand for the product, how much competition is there? Is there opportunity to get in there? What's the capital investment that I need to put together to invest in launching a product? And then how much profit am I going to make on the backend? So those are critical questions that we answer with the niche finder. How you differentiate your product isn't answered with data, but that is certainly a creative skill set that you have to learn as a seller. How do you actually make your product unique and commercially viably unique? Because it's got to be within a certain price point. And then the, the other piece is obviously finding products. And we partnered with Alibaba quite a few years ago. They put out a pitch. They wanted to get in front of brands that sold on Amazon, and we worked with them to essentially put their data through the same lens that we do, which is how do we give you the most impactful pieces of data that will make an important change to your business in the most efficient way. And if you go into Alibaba, you're going to find hundreds of thousands of suppliers.

Jon Tilley:

We have certain ways of filtering down that data to find the right suppliers for Amazon sellers in a specific market, and then you have a way of connecting with them. So we basically use the API data, but filter that down and that's available to you, so it'll shortcut you finding the right supply.

Andy Splichal:

So is your sourcing tool it's connected with exclusively Alibaba?

Jon Tilley:

Correct. And that's globally, so it's Vietnam, Mexico, et cetera.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, so I think we have a mutual connection, Sebastian, at signify, and he's the one that actually recommend that you be a great guest on the podcast and about your tool and how great it was, he about a year ago showed me if you're looking to source products, you could take all the reviews of the competitors and put it into chat GPT, and it would shoot out good things and bad things just based on customer reviews. Now it looks like you've done kind of the same thing with your customer feedback tool, the love hate tool. Is this what it does or how does that tool work and how can you use it when creating a new product?

Jon Tilley:

Yeah, that's right. I think that the idea of the love hate tool is the fundamental understanding that when you create a product and you communicate the benefits of your product, it's not just about the fundamental needs of the product, but it's also about the emotional connection and the emotional needs of what a client or customer is looking for. And so if you understand better what they love about products, but also what they hate, and then you can use that to differentiate your product or, and source your product accordingly, or package your product in a way that communicates the main needs. That's the point of low hate. And so what it does is it's kind of an AI word cloud assimilation of all of the common themes around reviews and what people love about a product or hate. And then you can use those insights to infer product differentiation aspects as well as benefit copy within your ads and your listing.

Andy Splichal:

So for people just starting to sell, I mean, you got to get the product optimizer, you got the love hate. I mean, you got a lot of things. What about an established seller? What tools do they typically use on Sanguru?

Jon Tilley:

Yeah, for established sellers, you can also connect your data through seller central, Amazon, and we have a pretty deep analytics dashboard that simply will help you to focus on, again, the right parts, the right data set that is really impactful to understanding what's working well in your business, what isn't, and how to improve it. There's thousands and thousands of data points inside of seller central. So having a system that can uniquely visualize that data in the right way to answer key business questions is important. We have dashboards, you know, we certainly have review automation, which will help you to get more reviews and ways of looking at your profits. And all of those tools are available, everything through SEO and research tools, looking at brand expansion reports, how do you expand your brand? These are all tools that are available with things like.

Andy Splichal:

So, looking ahead, is there anything you guys are working on or anything coming to market soon that you should be on the lookout for?

Jon Tilley:

Yeah, AI is obviously a huge talking points and we do have a flagship focus around the SEO side of it. And that is always evolving, understanding right now not only what content you need to put into your listings, but what does Rufus as an AI tool recognize in your images? And is it reading your images in the right way from an image perspective, but also the content that you put in your images? Because it feeds off of that and will use that in the suggestions that Rufus will give you when you're asking questions. That is being analyzed and built into our listing tool. That whole imagery side of it will be part of our product roadmap. We're also looking a lot more at dashboards and additional data points in there because anything that can help alert you or fundamentally give you more insights around areas of your business that you have to improve to better rank with the algorithm and get more profits are important. We also have some services that are available to larger brands that will help them with organic growth launch campaigns, ranking and growth audits and understanding where all your sales are coming from. And how do you focus on getting your most profitable sales, which are organic rank sales? We help with that. So these are all services and products that we're offering and ever evolving.

Andy Splichal:

So you had mentioned, you know, the one client that you had that started doing a million dollars in six months and, and I love to hear success stories, but do you have a one or two success stories of a client and what they've been able to do with your software?

Jon Tilley:

Oh, yeah, we have many. You know, I think without being specific about clients, I think what is interesting is we have success stories. We obviously have brands that don't do well as well. And what's interesting is Amazon is an organically ever evolving industry and marketplace, and some niches perform a lot better than other ones. So it is interesting to see the performance themes within specific niches and importantly, seeing the type of success stories around where that business is in their journey. You have businesses that, for example, launch and rank well and get to a million dollars very quickly. You get a lot of businesses that peter out at two, 3 million and just fundamentally can't figure out how to unlock the next area of growth. And then certainly you have much bigger brands that, that are looking to unlock growth as well.

Jon Tilley:

So we see a lot of interesting success with brands that are doing three to five to 8 million in annual revenue on Amazon and for a couple of years have just stuck at that level. And how do you actually get them to fundamentally break through into that eight figure mark and beyond and the success behind that? Certainly how do you focus on using all of the levers that are available to you on Amazon to drive your organic growth? And that is a combination specifically of PPC paid advertising with the lens of organic growth, promotions price, and then fundamentally a good source of outside traffic which can come in the world of affiliates, TikTok, Traffic, et cetera. Those larger brands, if they want to unlock their growth, they have to figure out outside traffic and how they can bring that to the Amazon brands.

Andy Splichal:

So how does the pricing work with Zonkuru?

Jon Tilley:

Pretty straightforward. We have two plans. One is called a researcher plan. That's just access to our research tools. If you're looking to launch and you want to get insights that will help you to choose the right products and strategy. And then we have a seller plan which you would connect your data to and get access to all of our tools. The researcher plan starts around $49 a month and the seller plan starts at around dollar 79 a month. If you pay annually, you get a discount on that.

Jon Tilley:

And on the seller plan it's based on your SKU count. So if you have a small SKU counts you'll pay around $79. If you have a large SKU count, it goes to up to about $150 a month. Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

And how can an interested listener learn more and get started?

Jon Tilley:

Sure. Yeah. You can contact us directly through the websites. You can also hit me up on LinkedIn. We'll give you some contact details that you can connect with us. If you're more of a large scale seller, you can connect us through free growth audits that we can run for you and give you a fundamental understanding of the potential of your index traffic in the buy zone. What's that worth and what should you be earning on Amazon? It's a pretty interesting report to look at. And how should you price your product to maximize your sales and revenue and profit? And I will give you links to both of those and they can connect with us at any time.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Jon Tilley:

I think the other thing is not only do we serve brands that sell on Amazon, but one of our fastest growing segments are actually agencies that use our technology to help their clients grow. And we do have an agency product as well. And certainly if there's agencies listening that are interested in understanding what our product looks like for them, connect with me as well and we can go from there.

Andy Splichal:

Great. Well, thanks for joining us today, John.

Jon Tilley:

Appreciate it. Thank you so much for listeners.

Andy Splichal:

Remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you are looking for more information on Zonguru or connecting with John, you will find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our Podcast Resource center, available at podcast dot. Make eachclickcount.com, where we have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information in case you would like more information on any of the services I've discussed in previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.