The Metrics That Separate 6-Figure Sellers from 8-Figure Giants with Ari Zecher

Ari Zecher is a former special operations commander turned entrepreneur and the co-founder of Deepsee Commerce, a boutique Amazon agency. Known for his disciplined leadership and strategic expertise, Ari blends creativity with data to help brands scale and thrive.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

Simplifying complex variables in e-commerce for growth and profitability.
Importance of understanding core metrics: revenue, profit, traffic, conversion rate, and average order value (AOV).
Analyzing traffic sources to enhance revenue generation.
Developing effective keyword strategies for targeted traffic and conversions.
Utilizing creative strategies to improve brand messaging and product visibility.
Focus on profitability through realistic expectations and key metrics like Total Advertising Cost of Sales (TACoS).
Importance of inventory management and its impact on organic rankings and sales.
The flywheel effect of maintaining optimal inventory levels for improved performance.
Systematic approaches to operations, including regular monitoring and proactive problem-solving.
Continuous testing and iteration of strategies to refine approaches and drive better outcomes.

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, hosted by Josh Hadley, Ari Zecher, co-founder of DeepSee Commerce, shares insights on simplifying complex variables in e-commerce to drive growth and profitability. Ari emphasizes focusing on key metrics like traffic, conversion rate, and average order value (AOV). He outlines a systematic approach for brands to boost topline revenue through traffic analysis, keyword strategy, and creative messaging. Additionally, Ari discusses the importance of inventory management, proactive problem-solving, and leveraging Amazon’s features to enhance customer experience and conversion rates. This episode offers actionable strategies for scaling e-commerce businesses effectively.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Action Item #1: Prioritize High-Impact Metrics for Growth – Focus on the key drivers of revenue and profitability: Traffic, Conversion Rate, and Average Order Value (AOV). Leverage tools like Google Analytics and Amazon Brand Analytics to track traffic sources, optimize listings for high-performing keywords, and ensure consistent branding across all product pages.

Action Item #2: Improve Profitability by Managing TACoS and Returns – Monitor Total Advertising Cost of Sales (TACoS) to optimize ad spend and ensure efficient use of marketing budgets. Reduce return rates by refining product descriptions, using accurate imagery, and addressing common customer misunderstandings to protect margins.

Action Item #3: Optimize Inventory to Maintain Organic Rankings – Avoid stockouts by keeping at least 45 days of inventory, as Amazon deprioritizes low-stock items in search rankings. Use data-driven forecasting, prioritize hero SKUs, and implement an inventory monitoring system to maintain visibility and sales momentum.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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Episode Sponsor

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Transcript Area

Josh Hadley 00:00:00 Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Aaron Cordova’s and Michael E Gerber, author of the E-myth. Today I am speaking with Ari Zecher, and he is going to be talking about how to simplify complex variables in business and e-commerce to be able to achieve your goals. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure ecommerce brands to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a partner who can help take your business to the next level, I bring hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for an investment partner, reach out to me directly at Ecomm Breakthrough. Com. That’s E-comm with two M’s. And let’s turn your dreams into reality. Today I am excited to introduce you all to Ari Zecher. Ari is a former special operations commander turned entrepreneur and the co-founder of Deep See Commerce, a boutique Amazon agency known for his disciplined leadership and strategic expertise.

Josh Hadley 00:00:54 Ari blends creativity with data to help brands scale and thrive. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Ari.

Ari Zecher 00:01:00 Thank you. Josh. Quite the intro. And I can’t believe that you actually read the whole thing. That it’s not prerecorded, man. Well, I.

Josh Hadley 00:01:06 Gotta do gotta do it live right here with you.

Ari Zecher 00:01:08 You know, super authentic. Yeah. Now, now I believe it.

Josh Hadley 00:01:11 Now. And now it’s the real deal. There it is. It is not recorded pre or post. It is.

Ari Zecher 00:01:15 Thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it.

Josh Hadley 00:01:17 Yeah. All right. Excited to have you on. Tell me a little bit more about your agency, deep see Commerce and what you’ve been working on there. What are the type of brands that you’re working on? What are the services that you provide? And I want people to just understand the context before we get into the real meat and potatoes to drive these businesses forward.

Ari Zecher 00:01:34 Totally. So deep see commerce, as you said in the intro, it’s a a a boutique Amazon, agency.

Ari Zecher 00:01:42 We’re striving to be the best operator that there is out there. And so we kind of break things down into operations, advertising and creative. and we fuel that with a foundation of analytics that is the most basic version of the standard. And that doesn’t mean like simple. It means trying to kind of turn over every rock and understand the basics across the, the, the, the board. We offer creative services. we’re not a kind of off the shelf cheap option. We really try to kind of break the system in the sense of, you know, Amazon is a landscape filled with so much clutter, so much noise. It’s super competitive. Standing out with creative, is so hard. And it’s kind of one of the things that is fun. It’s still fun to do. and so trying to lead with, with creative and then, you know, for a few select clients that kind of want further management. we align with growth and do a full operations to creative iteration, to advertising, DSP, the whole picture.

Ari Zecher 00:02:36 and we’re very small. We we like to work with few clients that really want growth. yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:02:41 Love that. So if a brand reaches out to you said one of the first things that you’re doing is like looking at the data. What are those data points that you’re looking at and why? Why is that so important?

Ari Zecher 00:02:49 It’s such a great leading question, Josh. yeah. So we talked about this this this earlier. you know, the when you’re thinking about kind of data and all of the noise out there in terms of like things to focus on and shiny objects. It’s really about disseminating the targets to two main variables, right? You have growth or revenue top line, and you have profit bottom line. And too often brands want both at the same time. And so for us, we like to understand from the words of the client, what’s your primary focus. Once we can understand what that primary focus is, we can basically work backwards and say, okay, it sounds like your primary objective is revenue or your primary objective is profit.

Ari Zecher 00:03:27 That that kind of teaches us and allows us to build to build the building blocks, which oftentimes is overwhelming for many brands, and it’s hard to focus. So we like to think about it in terms of a simple math problem, right? So in order to get to revenue, you have traffic times. Conversion rate equals orders. You have orders times average order value equals revenue. Right. Two is really simple tied and interconnected kind of equations. If you focus on any one of those variables, you will inevitably achieve some sort of incremental growth for revenue. Conversely, on the profit side of things. You have your contribution margin one, right. You can’t really change landed costs, especially not us. And then we start to think about, okay, the return percentage, the tacos. And then you get into all of these weeds of, you know, your subscriber base, your ads versus organic. And you can kind of funnel into these different elements, which oftentimes people are like, I need to focus on my cash, or I need to focus on my LTV, or I need to focus on my subscription growth or the churn rate or all of these details, which are really very, very, very valid.

Ari Zecher 00:04:22 But again, the starting point for us is understanding how do each of those variables tie into a major KPI, tie into a more major KPI that affects the primary versus secondary objective, which is revenue and profit?

Josh Hadley 00:04:34 I love that, and I think what you touched on, it’s very simplistic, right. But I think it is truly like a leading indicator. Right. And I think that’s what you’ve discovered. Revenue is actually a lagging metric. Right. And so is net profit. It is a lagging metric of it’s basically a result of everything that you’ve done over the past month or even six months before. Right. So the focus is as you mentioned, hey, how much traffic am I am I getting? What is the conversion rate? What is my average order value like? These are all things that you can influence. So I’m curious. All right. Like tell me. Let’s say I’m a I’ll do two different scenarios for you here. Right. First I’m going to be a brand owner that comes to you and says, hey, I want to grow topline revenue.

Josh Hadley 00:05:12 Here’s my brand. What do I do? Right. So let’s take that scenario. Tell me, like, what’s the playbook? If you’re working with a brand that comes in, it’s like, I want to grow revenue. How do you systematize and break things down for them to say, okay, here are the levers that we’re going to pull, and here’s how we’re going to do this.

Ari Zecher 00:05:26 Yeah. So I mean, like it really depends on. So that’s a great starting point. And it’s like a a perfect kind of leading a leading segue into kind of what the structure looks like. When we look at any brand and it could be a brand new brand or a brand that’s doing, you know, $10 million or $5 million a year. we try to understand what is the baseline of the variables that I laid out earlier, right? What are the actual building blocks? Now, if we take one example, right. If we look at traffic, say that a listing is getting 10,000 sessions a month.

Ari Zecher 00:05:52 Right. Understanding. Where does that come from? And I’m not going to I’m going to go to go back to your your your your your question. But a tangent that oftentimes people kind of go off on our TikTok shop is this brand new avenue of traffic. And let’s like mastermind and do all these amazing things, which is a true it is a goldmine, right? But understanding that TikTok shop eventually leads to branded searches or, you know, or buyer intent searches aka like keywords which funnel into sessions, right? So understanding how does everything relay back into these buckets. So for us again going going going back to the the the the baseline process. We we’ve built tools to basically understand all search terms that relate to a niche. And so we go into the, you know, thousands of competitors. We use scoop data really everything that we can kind of find to understand what is the entire niche look like. Once we’ve done that, we can kind of bucket things into to to relevancy brackets similar to what Data Dive does.

Ari Zecher 00:06:42 And a lot of tools out there we’re trying to understand are these search terms relevant based on lagging metrics? Right. The competitors that we’re analyzing, are they relevant to these the these these keywords. That little asterisk there sometimes is a is a cyclical bias. That’s like a side note. but once we kind of once we understand that, we group the relevant search terms branded or non-branded into anagrams. Once we’ve done that, we can basically say, okay, here’s my plan of attack. I’m going to focus on this group of 100 keywords that all relate to this one root or n gram. Right. And that’s just kind of one example of like, how do we focus on if you want to achieve growth? If you tell me, I want to get from X to Y by Z, I want to work backwards from that. And I’m going to say your conversion rate is amazing right now or it’s good right now. Let’s focus on traffic. And then conversely, again thinking about, you know, are you upselling? Do you have a large catalog? Does the customer understand what your brand is.

Ari Zecher 00:07:31 And this is like also is another tangent like potentially. But I think too often we think of creative on Amazon as a, as like tiles that we need to fill, right? We need to hit the box of like benefits us versus them, etc.. and sometimes that’s true. But oftentimes the cohesiveness, the cohesiveness of a brand and how the products relate to each other, how product A is used after product B, etc. that needs to be conveyed within creative. And so again, I’m like going off on a lot of different angles there. But the audit process of understanding what is the baseline, what’s currently happening, where are the sources of things, how can we bucket things into these building blocks and then understand what is the easiest and simplest lever to pull that will affect the goals that the brands want to achieve?

Josh Hadley 00:08:16 So does it really boil down to just kind of three different metrics that you’re looking at? It’s traffic, it’s your conversion rate and then it’s your average order value. Are those the main three things that you’re focused on.

Josh Hadley 00:08:26 And then what are you doing. Like are you seeing one of those is more powerful and driving, you know, better top line results than another right? Is it like, hey, the magic bullet is like everybody that comes in, we just raise their price by 10%, and most of the time nothing changes other than they get more money. Like, tell me, what’s your experience that way?

Ari Zecher 00:08:43 Yeah. I mean, so, like, it’s never like a one size fits. All right. Like you, you you can play with, with price. Most niches on Amazon are price are price elastic right. Like price does change things. And so if you increase price, you’re going to offset conversion rate. And then you’re not going to see growth right. Some sometimes there are those those you know, those exceptions to the rules where increasing price actually provides a premium and kind of helps with the buying decision. But that’s rare. in terms of kind of how we currently act, it’s it’s more of, you know, what is the opportunity look like? Is your conversion rate low? Do you have a sustainable product? Are you currently doing subscriptions? How do those things relay into conversion rate? How do those how does the how does the untapped potential of of search terms long tail or roots.

Ari Zecher 00:09:23 How do those feed into traffic.

Josh Hadley 00:09:26 yeah makes makes a lot of sense. All right. So that’s on the revenue front. Let’s say I’m a brand owner that comes to you, says, hey, I want I’m focused on profitability. Over the last year, Amazon is raised fees, increased competition. They’re they’re charging less for their product like I’ve I’ve had inflation on my cost of goods sold. However I’m having to reduce my prices overall tariffs same thing. So it’s just like margin compression after margin compression. That’s my issue. How do I bring more profit back into the business? How do you approach brands like that that are coming to you?

Ari Zecher 00:09:55 I mean, so number one is like setting like a, a a realistic expectation. I think the, you know, the profit margin of 2017, it was not the profit margin of 2019 was not the profit margin of, you know, of 2023 and 2025. Right. Like margins are coming down and you do need more capital to begin with to have real dollars cash flow.

Ari Zecher 00:10:14 so that’s like number one, right. If you want to achieve a 20% profit margin and you’re in the 7 to 8 figure, like it’s going to be hard with opex. That’s number one. Number two is like again, thinking about how do I break down the building blocks of profit. Right now, tacos is an obvious lever. return percentage is another lever. That’s a lever that people don’t often kind of pull and think closely enough about. So everyone talks about, you know, use helium tens review scraper and kind of understand what your, your, your, your competition is. But on the creative side and this also speaks to, you know, CVR or on the growth factor piece. But like are you looking at are you understanding why people are returning to the products. Are you understanding what is the consistent Reason why you’re getting negative reviews. I can go into some case studies there, but. Those two levers again, there are multiple like values and sub items within those two pieces that an agency or a brand can kind of control.

Ari Zecher 00:11:03 but I would say like those are the two focal points tacos and then return percentage and how that relates to your profit margin.

Josh Hadley 00:11:10 Interesting. Let’s dive into some of those case studies then.

Ari Zecher 00:11:13 Yeah, totally. So I mean, from the return percentage, we had this great brand, which we’re still managing. Amazing brand. It’s this this copper water bottle, and has all these health benefits. And copper, as some people know, turns green when it when when it when it oxidizes. and there were many the the I think at some point the return percentage was between 8 to 10%. And if you think about, you know, normally a normal healthy Amazon brand profit margin that like, I don’t know, between 15 to 20% contribution margin three after ads having a 10% like write off on the returns over a year is a huge, huge piece. And so that was a huge focus point for us. And so again, it’s. It’s about how do you how do you understand why people are returning the product? Why people are surprised.

Ari Zecher 00:11:56 Because again, it’s about how do you how do you convey everything that there is to convey about the product, the experience, the benefits, the inspiration behind the brand in like three seconds. Once they’re on the PDP, when they’re in the serpents, like I saw John Aspinall say, it was like 0.3 seconds, like you have no, no, no time. So how do you do that? and again, I can get into the tangent of like creative landscape, but specifically for the case study example. you know, we were like, okay, copper turns green. Iconic. What’s a, a a very known iconic green thing. Statue of Liberty. Let’s use that in messaging. Just like the Statue of Liberty. Your bottle will will will turn green. It means that it’s actually copper as opposed to another heavy metal, you know. So that was one very kind of clear example where over time and again, this is not kind of, you know, quick hacks over time return percentages went down to a much more a normal rate.

Ari Zecher 00:12:46 I think we got it down to 4% over two months. But again, the creative process of understanding, that of looking, of asking questions, of being humble about what do I not know? what is my competition doing right? What are some, you know, what is the actual customer? What are they speaking about? That took a lot of humility and asking questions, not giving all the answers, not saying, oh, you got to like, fit these boxes of slots of like, okay, you know, slot one is benefit, slot two is XYZ. yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:13:10 I love that. And I very just like pragmatic approach, to identifying, hey, here’s the issue. How do we resolve it with creative that allows people to understand before they actually purchase the product. So totally. Yeah. What other case studies do you have for us?

Ari Zecher 00:13:24 So before I started deep see commerce, I can go into a little bit of my backstory if that’s if that’s productive, let’s hear it. so yeah.

Ari Zecher 00:13:32 And, and feel free to kind of stop me if I’m going too, too, too deep into a, a rabbit hole. But, back in the day, I started selling at Amazon in 2017, I was doing private label. I was learning from, you know, Brandon Young. I was learning from Jungle Scout, like classic, you know, million dollar case study stuff. started a bunch of brands, got into wholesale scale really fast in wild ways usually. Like. Like horizontal ways where I got really. I got very spread thin. I got spread thin. and during the Covid nonessential item kind of saga where it went from Prime Day shipping, I think it was like March, March 2020, where all of a sudden conversion rates went to like 0%. And it was like, your product will be delivered in August, you know, four months down the line. my, my, my own brands just took a huge hit. And I realized at that point, that I needed to be really proud about the product that I was selling.

Ari Zecher 00:14:20 And there’s this kind of, untold message within the Amazon community. And it’s a fascinating community where you don’t like, you don’t talk about what you sell. which is amazing as a side topic to kind of dive into that. Like sociologically, it’s pretty amazing. but I was like, I don’t want to tell my grandmother what I sell, you know what I mean? And that and that fundamentally was like, okay, wake up moment. What do I actually want to do? and why am I doing this? And ultimately, it kind of goes back to military service and kind of helping people, being in a really extreme situations and being able to kind of give a hand to someone that needs help. Back to to the the, the case study. That was a a a wild tangent. Sorry, Josh. but I was I was kind of pushed into this consulting gig for a private equity firm that was investing in PPE. and again, it was it was around the same time that my products got decentralized, if that’s the right term.

Ari Zecher 00:15:09 and, you know, karma or whatever kind of fit. And, they were like, help us scale on Amazon. I said, you know, the the wave is now curling. If you if you’re not currently selling a three ply mask, it’s a bad time to start selling a three ply mass. And they’re like, we have, you know, $5 billion to spend, do what you want. and again, getting to the case study piece of it, we would have we, you know, I listened to them. I was like, okay, if you guys want to want to do this, let’s do this. Let’s compete with Lysol and Clorox and all these giant brands within the PPE space. and it relates back to inventory. So we would have days where Fauci would announce, you know, masks on or masks off. And the reaction, you know, the the the market would just swing. We’d have, you know, $10,000 days to $100,000 days. And it really kind of forced us to understand inventory.

Ari Zecher 00:15:54 And that’s obvious. That’s like a simplistic takeaway from the story here, but really kind of where it kind of gets into more and more, more, more detail. And it really has shaped how we operate within deep see commerce with inventory management is understanding velocity, understanding available stock and how those things as a as a foundation build kind of relate to profit and also relate to revenue. It’s pretty obvious, again, getting into the actual details without a certain amount of available days of stock, Amazon is not going to take a chance on you, which means that you’re tacos is going to go up because your organic ranks are going to drop. Without the inventory, you’re not going to have the exposure, which means that you’re not going to have the traffic. It all kind of, you know, within the, the, the, the flywheel, it all kind of speaks back to those two major goals. but yeah, that was definitely kind of a war story. and yeah, needing to kind of learn how do we how do we react fast? How do we understand the effects of staying in stock and and not just.

Ari Zecher 00:16:46 Yeah. Anyways, hopefully that’s a good answer for you.

Josh Hadley 00:16:48 I love that. So are you saying I think what I caught there at the end is that by staying in stock and having enough inventory, it allows you to like, stay organically ranked. Are you saying that in your opinion, part of Amazon’s algorithm is like once you start dipping below, I don’t know, maybe it’s 3015 days worth of inventory on hand at FBA centers that they almost like start prioritizing you in organic search results.

Ari Zecher 00:17:10 Yeah, so I can get into that. Yeah. So so what we found and this is a great case study. Well, what what we found is if we’re and this is so the one the one caveat here is that if you have a large catalog with hundreds of SKUs or you have have a parent child relationship with, you know, 50 SKUs, there’s usually going to be the hero Asin that does, you know, 80% of the, the, the, the sales that this is actually relevant for. But essentially there’s a certain amount of available days of stock.

Ari Zecher 00:17:35 And that’s not counting processing, free transfer inbound stock. It’s the actual available days of stock that Amazon is looking at. And it’s saying I’m going to allow for for my customers, Amazon’s customers to see this product. And the logic behind that, and it kind of gets into a wild topic of geo ranking, which I can talk a little bit. I can talk a little bit about the tools that we’ve built to kind of support that. Essentially, you know, there’s 300 plus FCS in the US, and the FCS all support a certain proximity of zip codes, right. If I’m in Philadelphia, you know, there’s an FC that’s supporting my zip code. My zip code, if I search for, you know, X product on Amazon, the zip code bar has to be inputted. Otherwise you get this generic nonsense. My my search is directly affected to the inventory that can support my my purchase. And so again, we don’t have control necessarily over where inventory goes to what FCS. Now they’re making it complicated with five or more.

Ari Zecher 00:18:29 And you know, all the all of the all of the nonsense that Amazon is doing with placement fees and non placement fees, you can play with, you know, the origin destination, putting that address in. That’s all hex. But essentially what we found is that if we stay above 45 days of stock, which takes a real which takes a huge amount of capital to maintain. And one warning. Right. Cash flow is is king here. You don’t want to overexpose your your. Yourself. But if you calculate your your available days of stock based on a velocity that is normalized. And I can go into that as well. What we found is that in the long run, Amazon will reward our organic rankings. And in return, tacos will slowly start to come down because we’re converting at a higher rate, which means that our CPCs decrease. And that’s just a flywheel effect. If we can maintain that, it’s golden. And we’ve had I mean, a case study is an example. We’ve had literally hundreds of occurrences where hero SKUs go out of stock.

Ari Zecher 00:19:20 Keyword ranks flop tacos goes up to 25%. It takes us a month to bring tacos back down to 10%. It just that’s just kind of how it works. And it’s based on this understanding of Amazon needs to distribute inventory. and yeah interesting.

Josh Hadley 00:19:34 All right. So dive deeper into how you’re actually getting those measurements. So like as you work with clients like how are you normalizing velocity then. Because I think like what you just shared, like you’re saying, hey, you should keep 45 days on hand in FBA and send a lot at all times, right? So how do you how do you do that? How are you managing that?

Ari Zecher 00:19:50 Yeah. So within the org, we’re a developer with Amazon right. So we’re we’re we’re drawing in Amazon API data every single day. And again this is part of kind of like the foundational aspect of kind of what what you need to kind of put into the system. We can talk about system later. but essentially it’s you know what, what are my historical sales by unit looking at different lookback windows.

Ari Zecher 00:20:13 We look at seven 1430 1690. We also have kind of further lookback windows for special cases with seasonality. But essentially like looking at those lookback windows then what what what we do is we look at days where there was no stock or there was a lower amount of stock in that lookback period, and then we normalize the weighted average. I’m getting into like some math here. But in essence, to simplify it, we’re trying to understand what is the true daily velocity of a product within a certain lookback window. And then we just divide that by the amount of available stock, not total stock. And if that number is anywhere from 30 to 45, we’re in the yellow. 45 to 60, we’re in the green, 60 and above. Oftentimes you’re way overexposed. And again, the asterisk here is that for catalogues with thousands of SKUs or, you know, parent child child relationships where you have, you know, 30 variations, you can’t reasonably do that. And it doesn’t work that way. You have a hero skew or 2 or 3 that make up the bulk of it.

Ari Zecher 00:21:05 If you focus on that, the flywheel effect is very significant.

Josh Hadley 00:21:09 So I think like to sum it all up, you’re saying, hey, focus on your your SKUs that are doing 80% of your revenue, focus on always having 45 to 60 days worth of inventory at Amazon. That’s what you’re kind of like always targeting.

Ari Zecher 00:21:21 Exactly. And for us, we send out a sheet every single day so everyone can see what the what the actual value is. And that speaks to advertising, right? If we’re not within that, that, that, that realm, it means that CPCs are inherently going to be higher, which means that we’re just not going to hit the targets. and oftentimes, right, it’s like a chicken and the egg. Right? People want growth without inventory. And you can’t help them if they don’t have the inventory. At the same time, inventory equals cash flow issues and capital exposure.

Josh Hadley 00:21:47 Yeah, I love that. All right. That I think is a great fundamental shift that I think brand owners need to understand.

Josh Hadley 00:21:52 Are there any other key metric or key processes just like inventory that you’ve identified that really can become like a big lever in the business, right, for a positive or a negative effect?

Ari Zecher 00:22:02 Yeah. I mean, I think AOV is an under and under looked feature and it’s one of the easiest. It’s one of the easiest ones to to play with, right. Like essentially you’re not looking at, you know, a parent child relationship and seeing like what’s my average price here. You’re looking at you did $1 million and you sold a million units, right? Your AOV is one, right? If you did $1 million, you sold half a million. Your AOV is two. And so understanding how how that actually works and understanding, you know, why does a customer purchase more than one product or product A and product B that are not similar? and basically structuring initiatives and structuring actions that are simple, for example, you know, buy one, get a certain percentage off, or play with creative. Make sure that you know if you have a more profitable product with a higher price point.

Ari Zecher 00:22:46 Make sure that that is in your brand. Store your A plus your listing images. people do not. Again, this is also a a cliche statement, but people do not play with conversion rate. They do not play with creative enough. and I know a little bit about your brand. I know how, how how complex the creative aspect is. And people really need to understand that creative is not a I’m going to change my main image, you know, twice a year, which is like a checkbox. It’s it’s not that at all. Right? It’s about like, what am I trying to achieve again? Going, going, going back to the basics. Am I trying to achieve revenue or am I, am I trying to to achieve profit and understanding? How can I change things and how can I play with things and constantly test things so that I’m trying to show that I’m getting the results? And I don’t just mean main image optimizations, which is great, right? I’m talking about how can I upsell and how can I quantify changes to the listing images, changes to adding this profitable skew? As I mentioned earlier in your A+, thinking about your store as a true, you know, DTC site, Right? We all saw, Mary Ruth Organics, you know, with the, I forget what they called it, but it was like some specialized, you know, branded, landing page that was like, not Amazon within Amazon.

Ari Zecher 00:23:49 you know, Amazon is going into that area of just like, trying to trying to trying to confuse, slash mesh everything together so that buying online is buying online. You’re not thinking about, is it Amazon or not. And they’re embedding themselves in so many different places. And we can talk about that. But understanding how can you how can you play with how can you build a landing page within your store and do it for a week? Do it for a month. See if you can actually see the AOV increase. Track that on a weekly basis. it’s really it’s really simple. It’s it’s definitely harder said than done. but again tracking things regularly, understanding what is what are the inputs, what are the leading behaviors or the leading actions. that kind of will feed into that is fundamental, in the space for sure.

Josh Hadley 00:24:31 So you’ve got you’ve got me interested here on the different ways that you’re using creative, whether it be secondary images, a plus content brand story. How are you? Like give me some specific examples like how are you using that? Or what are the creative ways that you’re using that creative to increase AOV? And maybe are there specific brands that you would say, like these guys crush it, like go check out their stores, go look at their, secondary images, go look at their A+ content.

Josh Hadley 00:24:55 Because like, these guys are constantly upselling. Like, what are your thoughts?

Ari Zecher 00:24:58 Yeah. I mean, so yeah. So, the the first part of your question in terms of like specific, specific examples, it’s as simple as, you know, if I am if I’m searching for a water bottle, I’m going to experience the PDP. If I decided to to to click into this brand, I’m going to experience it. I’m going to experience it from top down. I’m gonna look at the main image and look at the social proof of the price. we use a or we are using a specialized software that is eye tracking. So like it’s understanding kind of where do customers focus in on. And that’s kind of how we build creative in a certain sense. Obviously it’s not that scientific, but understanding, okay, they go immediately to price or they go immediately to the bot to do the videos. There’s lots of case studies on that stuff. but understanding that, you know, the experience is you get to the landing phase.

Ari Zecher 00:25:41 You get to the, the PDP. You scroll down, you look at the swatches. If there are swatches, you look at the brand story, you look at the A, the A plus. At that point, when a customer is needing the validation to purchase your product versus others, and they’re not being kind of candied away by Amazon’s placements on product pages. they’re already engaged with the brand. And so putting in another product, it’s not necessarily confusing. And it could backfire. It could confuse the customer. Right. Why am I seeing a product that I did not see at the main image. But that’s a really easy example of like test that, right? If I were to try to sell what I’m actually trying to sell on a detail page, what happens to my AOV? assuming that the price is higher. another great example. And it’s not necessarily related to AOV, but more kind of case studies about variables or case studies about certain metrics and trying to kind of increase them with creative.

Ari Zecher 00:26:29 So subscribe and save. Subscribe and save is like it’s a monster on Amazon and supplements, you know people just it’s a wild, wild space and people are always trying to, you know, outbid out game the next guy and the subscribe and save coupons. You know we’re getting into like big B2C world of like what’s my cost of acquisition and how much money can I lose in a certain amount of time? And how can I offset that with a subscribe and say purchase two, three, four? And what’s my churn rate? It gets very, very, very, very complicated. Like assuming that it’s simple, right? Because again, how do you make decisions in a really complicated environment. You make the binary simple. If I’m trying to increase subscribers, obviously I can make the offer appealing. I can offer a coupon, a one time subscriber and save off coupon. I can also write. I can also create top of search banner ads. I can I can modify my my my creative advertising on the search, on the search, on the Serp and funnel towards a landing page within the store where I’m showcasing this product is a subscribe and save product.

Ari Zecher 00:27:25 I can use that words, right? There are certain limitations where you have to be careful and Amazon will just say no, no, fix that word. But again, if I’m trying to increase subscribe and savers, oftentimes people just use a coupon, right? Why not create a funnel from the search to the product page, or from the search to the store and hone in on. I am trying to make you subscribe and here is the creative. Here is the story as to why that is.

Josh Hadley 00:27:47 I love that that unlocks a lot of little golden nuggets in there. So. All right. Thanks. Thanks for sharing that. Are there any brands that you would say hey go check out these guys. They do a really good job at it.

Ari Zecher 00:27:56 Yeah I mean honestly, you know, this is going to be cliched, but operators the the Operators podcast, Sean Frank Mary Ruth Organics, those are easy examples because the guys who are running those brands are just so smart. and they are they are testing everything and anything.

Ari Zecher 00:28:11 And I think, like, again, if you wanted like a really quick, what are they doing? Versus what should I do within different categories. Check out Ridge Wallet, check out Mary Ruth Organics. you know, I don’t want to name our brands just because of privacy issues, and I wouldn’t want the brand owners to get pissed. but yeah, like I would say start there, you know, start at the best. understand why are the best? And you’ll find some anomalies, right? You’ll find some, some brands that are not doing, you know, the, the SOP for selling on Amazon. and it’s good to ask questions. It’s good to scratch to to. To scratch your head and be like, I don’t understand what I’m doing. Everything that they’re there, they’re doing. Why am I not succeeding? And oftentimes I think that people, if they’re open. To being wrong and not kind of winning, they’ll find some really good basic findings. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:28:52 Those are. Those are some great brands to take a look at.

Josh Hadley 00:28:55 So, Ridge Wallet, simple, modern. And then Mary Ruth’s Organics. So there’s there’s some good inspiration nine figure brands to. Totally.

Ari Zecher 00:29:02 Yeah. Exactly.

Josh Hadley 00:29:03 All right. This has been fantastic thus far. What else have we not communicated to these seven figure business owners that are looking to scale? To eight figures and beyond. That you feel like they need to hear?

Ari Zecher 00:29:14 we’re really big on system. and any. You know, seven figure, eight figure brand or really any brand that you know, has had issues in the past will obviously say system is key. I could offer, you know, some of the things that we have built, which I think are very kind of fundamentally simple but structured properly. we’ve broken down the operating system to reactive versus proactive activities. And we’ve defined those activities with certain cadences. And what I mean by that is as we go through the process of, you know, things breaking on Amazon, Amazon taking things down and shutting us down and copy changing and all of these AI suggestions, it’s just it’s a landscape that is ever changing and ever evolving, and the amount of things that we need to check is overwhelming.

Ari Zecher 00:29:55 Systematizing that by putting it into buckets. What are the things that I need to check regularly, and how often do I need to check those things? So it’s really it’s like what’s prone to breaking, what’s prone to like what is really important. So a great example. We do monthly, weekly and daily on a weekly basis. For an example, we check that the FDA fees that we think were being charged are actually being being being being charged. And you’re you are allotted 20 bin checks per month to basically verify that the product is being is being is being sized appropriately. And more often than not, we’re able to shave off a couple of cents. And at scale, that’s tremendous. So again, going back into the system. That’s a weekly check where we’ve found that we’ve made the mistake. You know, we have the battle scars of we’re running at, you know, we’re contribution margin to it’s considering FDA fees and FDA fees are for 65 or whatever. And then we’re at a quarterly review and all of a sudden it’s at five.

Ari Zecher 00:30:45 Right. How did we not how did we not think that Amazon would screw us over and increase the FDA fee from 465 to 5 something? So having that is a really important thing. And that’s just one example. Another thing is browse nodes, right? How often does Amazon shuffle categories? It’s shocking, but they’re constantly trying to make the buyer experience more predictable, more effective, more clear, which means that the categories and the subcategories and the subsub categories are always shuffling and changing. Keywords are relevant, have relevancy to the subcategory. More often than not, a brand will come to us and be like, we were doing fine things where we’re growing, things were doing wonderfully, and all of a sudden we fell off a cliff. Why is that? And it could be a lot of reasons, but more often than not, there’s a browse node where we’re the the the we’re we’re not relevant for the subcategory that Amazon has now reshuffled us to. So checking that checking that is a great a great tip.

Ari Zecher 00:31:34 But again, back into the system, thinking about what are all the things that can go wrong, what are all the things that we want to kind of have a grip on? How important are they? How frequently should we check them? Daily, weekly and monthly, and then create a very clear space for what are all of the what are all of the reactive things, the things that go wrong that we did not anticipate? And how can we create a rigid structure that’s dynamically scalable so that as we as we run into the quicksand and as we get hit by this and hit by this fee, low inventory fee, how do we systematize that so that there’s a place and a time and a team member whose job it is to make sure that they are looking at that. And for brand owners, your target audience who are scaling and and want to achieve that growth, peace of mind and the ability to focus is just key. You need to be able to think and strategize and not be consumed with the whirlwind with clutter.

Ari Zecher 00:32:22 hopefully that’s helpful.

Josh Hadley 00:32:23 Yeah, I think that is that is so important to you listed things out that are so basic but so vital, right. Monitoring your FBA fees. Monitoring your product GL codes. Right. And that browse node. Those are simple things that can really like steer you off course real quick if you’re not actively monitoring those.

Ari Zecher 00:32:39 Totally review sharing for an example. Right. Child parent like that happens all the time right? Your your your your social proof affects your conversion rate. Amazon can just disconnect child variations without you knowing which will affect conversion rate tremendously. Why not check that? That’s really crucial. That’s a daily check.

Josh Hadley 00:32:55 You know I love that. What other things have you seen that you’ve implemented with a lot of your brands that has been like it’s basic but it’s super valuable, just like FBA fees, just like the GL codes, etc..

Ari Zecher 00:33:06 Yeah, another really easy one is to store, store, store, store byline. So right above the, the, the the ratings, there’s a hyperlink that says visit the brand store.

Ari Zecher 00:33:14 Sometimes Amazon will screw things around. And that could be because of catalog work in the back end, etc. they won’t link your store byline to the actual store. The link it to the brand search, which again is a really easy fix. There’s even like an automated fix within seller support, but checking that as an example. Another one is, you know, like we had this happen to us about a year ago where a client, the credit card and the ads console just would stop working and PPC would stop again. It’s a tiny like, like bureaucratic administrative fault that leads to, again, revenue, profit sessions, tacos. Like you’re just they’re fundamental. How do you let the specialist do what they do with peace of mind. So we added that to a daily check. All of the AI suggestions, for example, that Amazon is just constantly trying to push. and you can say, no, I don’t want this, which I recommend not doing that. It’s just a bad idea right now.

Ari Zecher 00:34:03 making sure that it’s actually selected to know, those would be a daily checks everything on the account health and, you know, the keeping the lights on. I like to call it the, the feedback manager, the buyer messages, return authorizations, any sort of like, you know, MFA orders or if you guys have if people have fvwm or, you know, yeah, there’s a lot of details. I’m, I’m happy to kind of go through each and every item. But you know, to put it into the like, perspective on a daily basis. We’re checking 35 items on a weekly basis. We’re checking 13 items, and on a monthly basis we’re checking five items. And that’s across all accounts that we manage. And that’s not to mention, you know, the, the the intelligent automations that we have on a product basis that pushes the team, that pushes the team notifications. If you know, things change that we’re not checking. And we use softwares like celery to help with that. yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:34:43 All right. You know what? What is something that I bet you every brand owner that’s listening right now wants access to? Is that checklist. Right. So there’s there’s words about food for thought for you if like you had like a printable file or something that’s like these are the things we check monthly, weekly and daily.

Ari Zecher 00:34:58 Totally. Hey, I mean, it’s a great hook. I love to learn about people. I love to learn about challenges, and I love I love to learn about the brands that people sell back to the like strange Amazon niche of like people not sharing what they do. I love to learn about, you know, the product and why is your product the best? Reach out to me, you know, give you my, my email number. So it’s all good.

Josh Hadley 00:35:15 So that Ari’s Ari’s opening up that for permission, he wants you to set up a call with him. He will share with you what he checks on the monthly, weekly, daily basis.

Ari Zecher 00:35:23 So absolutely.

Josh Hadley 00:35:25 Love it. All right. Anything else that we haven’t covered yet today that you think we need to share?

Ari Zecher 00:35:30 one. So this is another hook, and I’m going to, on on unapologetically. Kind of put it in there. When you think about conversion rate and creative, you think about utilization versus optimization. Are you utilizing the entire Amazon landscape for creative input? 3D features is one of those utilization fields that is underutilized and definitely under optimized. A really brief paragraph about this. There is three features that are kind of coming out and becoming much more prevalent. There’s view and 3D view in your room and virtual try on. Now again, reach out to me or Google them if you want more context. I’m not going to kind of give a whole kind of breakdown of each of them. But some, like Amazon, is pushing for augmented reality shopping, and they’re trying to make it so that the digital buying experience is tangible and is realer, right? Amazon is also rolling out a, a, a, a program where they are, they are they are creating 3D models and pushing those updates without sellers knowing about them.

Ari Zecher 00:36:29 And so you’ll search for it for, for for a brand. And there will be 3D models on the detailed page. Oftentimes people think, oh, that’s great, just how Amazon will add the subscribe and save by box without you asking. It’s a very similar phenomenon, right? The issue with that is you don’t have the control over the quality. Amazon is basically reading your detail pages, reading your listing images. And if your creative is not amazing, if the specs are not amazing, Amazon will do a poor job at digitally conveying to the augmented reality what your product is. So it’s important to get in front of that. How do you get in front of that? You work with people like us who we have a direct, a a direct pipeline to the Amazon QA team. So we, we build 3D models that are compliant with Amazon, and we can push and override the 3D models that Amazon will have inputted into those slots and 3D models. As an anecdote. They’re amazing for creative content.

Ari Zecher 00:37:15 The designers will love you because they can play with them. They can shift them. It’s not a 1 to 1 replacement for photography and for video and stills and UGC, obviously. But if you want to to tell the story about the product and have basically unlimited kind of artistic freedom to change and manipulate and understand the product. 3D models is the way to go. So reach out to us again if you want to learn more about 3D models. If you want to see. Does your brand is it eligible for the features that Amazon is offering that will do that for you for free? and just again, I’d love to chat and learn about, you know, brands and stuff.

Josh Hadley 00:37:46 Awesome. All right. This has been a fantastic episode. I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted, but you let me know if you feel like I’m missing something here. All right, so number one, what I have is going back to one of the first case studies that you shared, which was centered around inventory.

Josh Hadley 00:38:03 And I think this is such a key component, especially as I know that Amazon. Amazon’s goal is to be able to become the site where you can purchase a product and in their opinion, and their ideal world in less than an hour or two. That product is sitting on your doorstep. That’s where Amazon wants to be. Now, in order to do that, you have to have inventory distributed throughout their entire network, and they’re always updating it. And from what I’ve understood, like Amazon in Q4 of 2024, the reason why there was so much of a disaster with FC transfers and people’s inventory not being in FBA available, is Amazon just recently changed to a more regional network? That’s what they’re saying from what I’ve gathered. And with that, like they’re trying to focus more on same-day deliveries, which means you’ve got to have that inventory to support it. And this is now just in the last week. You are the second person that I talked to that has said by having enough like follow Amazon’s recommendations with whatever they want you to send in.

Josh Hadley 00:38:56 Because if you do that, they’re basically trying to program it to say, hey, in order to have one day available inventory across our network. This is the amount of inventory we need from you. So my recommendation action item is keep that 45 to 60 days worth of inventory in there. But also, if you have an evergreen product that’s not highly seasonal, follow Amazon’s recommendations of what they want you to send in. And I would argue if you start to follow those, you’ll probably see a greater uptick in your conversion rates because they’re going to be one day available. if it’s seasonal, completely disregard that because we have a have a lot of seasonal products, and Amazon’s recommendations for seasonal products absolutely make no sense. So don’t follow that for seasonal products. Yeah. All right. Action action item number two here is focus on the AOV. Right. And it’s not just it’s not just one thing of hey just increase your price by a dollar right. It is actually more than that, as you mentioned, Ari, which is hey what can you say in your, in your secondary images or in your A+ content or your brand story to feature your hero product or feature one of your higher priced products in your portfolio to hopefully get an upsell right.

Josh Hadley 00:39:57 And it just comes back to like focus on the brand and focus on what can you do to showcase your other products that cohesively work together, and that thereby you can increase your average order value from those customers. My third and final action item here is going through like creating a checklist, just like you talked about here, Ari, which should be just a very systematized checklist that you can assign to one of your team members to say on a monthly basis, we look at this on a weekly, we look at that and on a daily basis we look at these things. That’s 101. And if those are the if. If anything, if you don’t have processes in a checklist like that today. That’s got to be your first action item in all reality because there’s a lot of low hanging fruit. And you might just be tripping over yourself thinking that you’ve got bigger problems on hand, when in all reality it’s just a simple product type or category. Browse node change that you need to make to your brand.

Josh Hadley 00:40:44 So all right, those are my three actionable takeaways. Anything I missed?

Ari Zecher 00:40:48 No spot on man. It’s great. Thank you for summarizing those. Awesome.

Josh Hadley 00:40:52 All right. As we wrap things up here, I’d love to ask each guest the following three questions. So we’ll start from the top. Number one. What’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Ari Zecher 00:40:59 0 to 1 by Peter Thiel. just fundamental working backwards from goals and understanding kind of how how how ideas, how ideas start and how how they become realities. Great book. Quick read, very, very functional.

Josh Hadley 00:41:14 Great recommendation. Question number two what is your favorite AI tool? Or maybe ChatGPT prompt that you think’s been a game changer that other people need to be using?

Ari Zecher 00:41:23 Yeah, so that’s a great one. we we we record all of our calls, with fathom no taker, which is a great AI tool. we have a call log. We use a CRM system called Monday.com, and we log all of the calls. When my my, my business partner, his name is Matt Brown.

Ari Zecher 00:41:38 I mentioned at all. but he’s the super genius behind deep see commerce. when we have disagreements for other team members or clashing heads, or we want to do X and they want to do Y, putting the transcript through AI and basically trying to ask questions such as, why is this person feeling this way? Or what is his key points? Where is the actual clash? Is a really helpful way to kind of disseminate a lot of the noise, a lot of the emotional stuff and really boil it down to a binary of like, this is where it’s at.

Josh Hadley 00:42:04 I love that use case. And I myself, I have a bot that follows me to all of my meetings as well, and you’d be surprised how many times it’s helpful to go back and reference.

Ari Zecher 00:42:12 So totally. It’s amazing.

Josh Hadley 00:42:13 Great use case. All right. Third and final question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Ari Zecher 00:42:20 So I’m a, I’m an OG from the inner Circle.

Ari Zecher 00:42:23 So Brandon Young, I have a lot of respect for for kind of showing, showing the way to a lot of sellers. And he’s just a genuinely sweet, awesome guy who, who, who wants to help. I also, you know, I’ve been following Ezra Firestone for a long time. I think it’s really important for brands to understand, you know, Amazon is a sales channel. It is an amazing sales channel, but it is a sales sales channel. And Ezra is very vocal about that. Also, his personal life story is very inspiring. And I think it’s, you know, coupling success with personal triumph is is really, is really meaningful.

Josh Hadley 00:42:51 Definitely. Those are two great recommendations as well. If you’re not following those individuals. Go follow them now. All right. This has been fantastic. If people want to learn more about you, they want to reach out to you. How can they do that?

Ari Zecher 00:43:01 Easy. Yeah. So deep see commerce. That’s deep see. Sea as in deep see commerce.

Ari Zecher 00:43:07 Dot com. there’s a contact feature at the bottom of the, the website. It’s a fun website, so enjoy. Or just email me at deep see e-commerce. Deep see commerce comm.

Josh Hadley 00:43:18 Awesome. Well, Ari, thanks for joining the show today. It was a pleasure having you on.

Ari Zecher 00:43:21 Thanks, Josh. Have a great day.

The Metrics That Separate 6-Figure Sellers from 8-Figure Giants with Ari Zecher

The Metrics That Separate 6-Figure Sellers from 8-Figure Giants with Ari Zecher

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