John is the Brand Evangelist at PickFu and Founder and CEO of Aspy, he helps businesses make data-driven decisions to optimize their product listings and marketing strategies on Amazon.

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

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews John Aspinall, brand evangelist at Pickfu and CEO of ASPY. They discuss the critical importance of optimizing main images for Amazon product listings to boost click-through rates (CTR). John emphasizes that a compelling hero image is crucial for attracting clicks, likening it to the exterior of a house. He shares insights into consumer behavior, stressing the need for data-driven decisions and continuous testing. The episode concludes with actionable takeaways for improving CTR and sales, highlighting the role of visual elements and the impact of tariffs on product costs.

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

 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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

I started Hadley Designs 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 go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

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, Michael Gerber, author of The E-myth, and Steven Pope from My Amazon Guy. Today I am speaking with John Aspinall. John is the brand evangelist at Pickfu and the founder and CEO of ASPY, and he helps businesses make data driven decisions to optimize their product listings and marketing strategies on Amazon. Think about how you can make that main image stand out. John is your guy that’s going to blow people away today, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about, is how to focus on main images that are going to blow the competition out of the water. If you’re an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a partner who can help take your business to the next level. My team and I bring hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is looking for a coach or a consultant or an investment partner, reach out to me directly at Ecomm Breakthrough.

Josh Hadley 00:00:47  Com. That’s e-comm with two M’s and let’s turn your dreams into reality. Today I’m excited to introduce you all to John Aspinall. He is an experienced Amazon CTR coach. He can help you navigate the complexities of selling on the Amazon platform and leverage Pig Food’s powerful tools to drive your brand success. Whether you’re looking to build an in-house Amazon team or partner with an agency, he can provide the guidance and expertise you need to thrive in this competitive marketplace through data. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, John.

John Aspinall 00:01:13  Thanks, Josh. I, I feel like I’m just a guy who plays with Canva on the internet, so it sounds a lot fancier. You saying all that stuff than what I really do, but I appreciate you for having me.

Josh Hadley 00:01:22  You’re a data driven nerd. AB test experiments all the time, right? But, you.

John Aspinall 00:01:28  Gotta you gotta you gotta let the data. The data makes the decisions, right? Like, a lot of people will have a lot of knowledge. Right? And they’ll have it.

John Aspinall 00:01:36  You could. You could be Kevin King, who you just pick through and you could have all those years. You could be Stephen Pope and have years and years of experience. But the littlest thing may change in the market. And if you’re not getting the data on it, those years of experience won’t matter for that moment. Because on Amazon, that search engine result page, that Serp changes at the drop of a hat. Right. So you could be in like, I call it a five by which is most categories on the Serp where it’s five across. You could be in a really difficult category, which is the one by which is like most electronics, which is very, very hard because if you’re searching for something before you scroll, you’re only really looking at three items, right? Versus a five by you’re probably looking at 10 or 12 and that kind of thing. So yeah, the data, the data does the the speaking and the and the decisions.

Josh Hadley 00:02:18  Yeah, I love that. John, what we’re going to be talking about today is, I think, one of the most important things that anybody selling on Amazon should be focused on.

Josh Hadley 00:02:27  Yet this is the stepchild of every Amazon brand owner that I know of. And and I admitted to this to you as well earlier. before we hit the record button was that oftentimes I have I have tried to outsource this for the cheapest possible cost. However, the realization has flipped in my mind as of the last month that like, I’m doing our brand a massive disservice by trying to hire the cheapest outsource person to manage the number one metric in my business. So what is this number one metric. Right. It’s that click through rate. so, John, why don’t you, why don’t you share with us? Why is this click through rate on Amazon? The number one core KPI that anybody selling on Amazon should be focused on.

John Aspinall 00:03:11  Yeah. So a lot of brands and a lot of agencies and consultants I speak to, whether at PickFU or ASPY, they really, really focus on the inside of the house is what I call it, right? So like that’s the PDP, that’s your A+ content, your brand story module, your all these premium A+ content, embedded video carousels, all that kind of stuff.

John Aspinall 00:03:29  It’s great. But what if no one goes through your front door and goes inside your house? Well, they’re never going to see all that kind of stuff. So you just redid your kitchen. That’s amazing. With Italian granite and marble. But the outside of the house looks like, you know, Freddy Krueger, A Nightmare on Elm Street. No one’s coming in, you know? So that’s the thing. You really want to make sure that your hero image is compelling. Is it a scroll stopper in a good way? A scroll stopper in a bad way. And we’ll pull up some examples of what that looks like, but also telling all the information that someone needs to know to make that buying decision. Because when people shop. Take take yourself out of the equation. Anyone hearing this and Josh. Even yourself. Right. We’re all in the space. Brand owners, you know, service providers. And we look at it like, oh well yeah. You go here, you’ll see this. This is all value.

John Aspinall 00:04:10  But how someone really shops. And I notice this when I watch my wife shop. She’s always shopping right. And she shop. She does have a computer. She has a phone. So everything 100% of her purchases are mobile. So I watch how she purchases. Right? Like a weirdo. I’m just creeping over her shoulder and she just scroll. She’ll scroll so fast and I’m like, how are you looking at anything? Should nothing grab my attention? And then when she clicks and grabs her attention, you’ll see what people do is they’ll they’ll see that hero image, they’ll land on the page. They’ll look at the hero image again. They’ll look at the price to see if they’re willing to pay that right. Then they’ll look at the title to confirm that the image they like and the price they’re willing to pay is indeed what they want. And then maybe they’ll look at the reviews. If it’s not, if it’s not ridiculously low. Right. Because otherwise people are leaving. And that’s really my wife does not look at A+ content.

John Aspinall 00:04:57  I showed her like all these things. She’s like, I don’t even know what it is because on mobile everything is pushed down. Yeah, so that’s the thing, right? It really, really, truly starts and sometimes ends with the hero image and CTR. So for a period of time in the supplement category, I think it was like for 3 or 4 months, Amazon was rolling out and testing buy now from the Serp, not add cart from the Serp, buy now from the Serp. And that was wild because that was your only shot. So if the guy next to you said everything in that hero image, that and the price was right and the reviews looked good, they were making the sale regardless of the actual PDP. So that’s the thing. So I’m going to pull up my screen. We’re taking a look at some some Serp. I’m going to ask you for a random look at so many products all day long. I’ve done. So I probably look at like 20,000 Asians over the past 15 years.

John Aspinall 00:05:40  So I always I always default like the easy one. So when I’m ready, I’m going to ask you and you’re gonna give me a good one. But looking at that and understanding what’s compelling, what’s the information that’s on there, but also risk versus reward. So we were talking about this before you hit record and people don’t understand that. A lot of the things that I talk about with the main hero image and merchandising, they think it’s breaking Amazon’s terms of service. It’s not because when you really look and I’ve done it, look at terms of service. There’s nothing in terms of service. There’s anything about images. That’s what image guidelines are for. And it’s not image rules. It’s not image regulations. It’s image guidelines. So if you open up any style guide for any category because they do have them, Amazon has different style guides. Furniture is like the wild furniture is like not. It’s unlike any other category that you can just like take a look at like mattresses or or sheets. Right? You have a whole picture of a bedroom in there, or you don’t even know what’s being sold.

John Aspinall 00:06:32  You know, it’s sheets, but there’s so many things you could never do that with supplements. You can’t have the whole picture of a kitchen and the counter and all that kind of stuff is never going to happen. So Amazon is very picky and choosy. And we talked about this before too, like the no fly zone. So a lot of these tactics can’t be applied for certain categories. For example apparel. Apparel is very very very very very very and one more very hard to do for the hero image because can’t really do anything right Technically, for kids clothes, you’re not allowed to show models of kids in the hero image. You’re supposed show flatley’s. Do people do it? Yeah, but it’s the risk reward. But you can’t do things like post edits. Tags, boxes, bags, call outs on apparel. Because Amazon’s not stupid. They understand that there’s no way that t shirt or dress is coming in a cardboard box. That’s all merchandise. But the coffee, you know, whisker may or may not.

John Aspinall 00:07:16  The bottle of supplements may or may not. So let me share my screen. We’ll take a look at some stuff.

Josh Hadley 00:07:20  So Jon and two like as you begin to share your screen here, I think the important thing to call out for the listeners is like how important this truly is for a brand owner. And we talked about this earlier, but like, what is Mr. Beast who is largely popular on YouTube and diary of a CEO? A lot of those guys get all of their views on YouTube. And guess what? Their number one focus is on their business. Is it coming out with the latest video that’s just slapstick funny. Like there’s a component of that. But guess what? Even before they launch an episode, guess where they spend all their time and energy? It’s on the thumbnail, right? Because they know it’s that thumbnail that drives the click to watch the video. It doesn’t matter how good the video is. Just like your analogy with the house. Doesn’t matter how nice the kitchen is on the inside.

Josh Hadley 00:08:06  If people look at the outside of the house, that is ugly. Like I’m not even stepping inside. So likewise, it’s the same principle. And so the bigger all the guys that have mastered YouTube, they’ve mastered thumbnail optimization. But yet for whatever reason in the Amazon space, like it’s like herding cats to try to get people on board to be like, when was the last time that you optimized your main image? It was like, what do you mean? I launched it five years ago and it’s doing great. And it’s the number one thing, and Mr. Beast is always testing new thumbnails on even the old videos. It’s not that you produced one video and it’s got millions of views and it’s good to go.

John Aspinall 00:08:42  I didn’t, I didn’t even know you could do that up until, like my old boss, Stephen Pope, when I was at Mag, I didn’t even know you could go back on older YouTube videos and still edit the thumbnail. I thought it was a wrap once it was already up, but you can always be optimizing more and more.

John Aspinall 00:08:54  And you know the example you gave about Mr. Beast, which is like how many millions or if not whatever, whatever amount of money he’s doing or giving away. My son is addicted to watching that show. But think about it like this, right? Think about like, video sales letters or marketing funnels, right? That’s like your hero image. So like with testing on you, we have hundreds of businesses that don’t even sell anything in ecom. It’s wild. Right? Because what they’re doing is they’re a B testing their landing page for their offer. They’re landing page for their course. Stephen Pope even a b tested when he did a refresh on my Amazon guy does this hero image on the. When I say hero image I mean hero image on the website look better than this one. And we have people on a B testing their Tinder profile photos, their LinkedIn profile photos, their LinkedIn banners. So the same way that a hero image is your first month, that’s very tactical. Your first kind of breakthrough into the product is the same way your Tinder profile photo, your LinkedIn profile photo, your website landing page.

John Aspinall 00:09:48  Because your website may be chock full of so many interesting things. But if I land on it and I’m like, what is this? I’m out of here, right? I’m never going to see that information. So you always want to make sure that you’re testing before you invest, whether it’s product on Amazon, thousands of dollars on a developer for an app or a site or anything like that. So I have Amazon Open. I’m going to give you carte blanche to give me a category, and I’m going to pull it up. I’m gonna take.

Josh Hadley 00:10:09  A look at it. All right. Let’s let’s do desk calendars.

John Aspinall 00:10:12  Oh, that’s I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a desk calendar. Let’s take a look at that. All right. Cool.

John Aspinall 00:10:17  Okay, so you’re gonna see my helium ten thing mock up everything. Helium sounds great. When I say mock up, it just mucks up the Serp. so what you’re going to see here, right right away, right off the bat, is post edits, right? So I know right from here this first one that’s sponsored, sold 400 units, $26.

John Aspinall 00:10:35  This one sold 600 units at $17. Yes, it’s almost $10 cheaper. That could be the reason it’s selling more units. Or the fact that it’s telling me without me having to really do anything more, that this is April 2022 to September 2026 and zoomed in on what the the lines look like. I like that if you’re aiding in the customer experience, that’s a good thing. Amazon’s never going to penalize you. Now if this call out here didn’t say April 2025 to September. If it said the number one best seller. Yeah. That’s not aiding in the customer experience one bit. So as we continue over here, I like this a little bit more now on the third one because guess what. Now it’s telling me the size. So this is all information I need to know to make a buying decision technically from this one right here. The third one in I know from now. Well, technically I don’t know what now is. So that’s a little bit of a flaw there, right? So March 2026 I know that it’s at least go to March 2026.

John Aspinall 00:11:24  And I know that it’s 22 by 17in. So if that’s exactly the size I want. I’m like cool. But then you see here down a little bit more. Well wait a minute. That’s 22 by 17 and this goes to June. But this is 32 bucks. I don’t know if I want to spend an extra, you know, $15 for those extra couple of months. But then you see this one here, the fourth one, this is not best practice. I’m actually shocked that this one is actually not image suppressed. And it’s actually a sponsored ad, which boggles my mind because people don’t understand there’s two barriers you have to get through when updating a main hero image. The first one is just regular. Amazon is just getting it up organically. You may find that you’ll get a suppression if you get a suppression, it’s not the end of the world. Change a couple pixels, change a couple pixels and resubmit it. Amazon has great and monstrous as it is, just like, you know, seller support.

John Aspinall 00:12:08  Just like customer support with Amazon. You ask one person, they say, no, you hang up, you call back again, they’re going to say yes. Or if they say no, you hang up and call back again. So brands, brands and agencies need to understand just because they say, no, that’s not it. They didn’t close the book on it and you’re done. You have to when you’re in the realm of playing these kind of tactics I don’t wanna say games, but tactics you need to be able to bob and weave, right. So with this, the reason this is not best practice is because it’s floating in the ether, right. So this is showing us three pack, which would be better if they were to apply it onto the actual calendar or putting it as packaging behind or showing me three. Right. We’re showing me one and then showing me two kind of folded out behind it. if I go down a little bit further, which I probably wouldn’t do as a shopper, I wouldn’t do that.

John Aspinall 00:12:53  Now, the only reason that I would know that where these sellers are from is because of helium ten. Right? So I see China, China, China, US, and I if you don’t have helium ten or any other plugin data dive, Jungle Scout, smart Scout, you know all the data tools that will show you this kind of stuff. You wouldn’t know that now if any of these was made in the US just be made in the US, that would be a huge value prop that you’d want to say very clearly on your main hero image, especially in 2025, especially with the state of the world right now, and especially the the search term made in USA or Made in America has a lot of traffic. So when people see that they’re and you’re a higher price, people are willing to pay more money for something that’s made in the US. So if we go down here to this one, this is the last one I’m gonna look at here, because then this is a little bit different.

John Aspinall 00:13:34  What they’re doing over here is they’re compensating for this, color swatches that certain categories have color swatches beneath the hero photo, but this category doesn’t. So what they’re doing is they’re putting the swatches down here to let you know there’s other color variations that are available, which is good. The problem with this is and this has this is actually organic number one, because these are all sponsored over here, which is interesting because it goes all the way through. Five for sponsored in this category. But over here this is organic number one. But it’s clear that well it’s due to possibly color but also it’s 7.99. It’s dirt cheap right. So when I click in here now I’m going to see wait a minute. I just got bamboozled a little bit because I don’t see different color variations over here. I, I thought there was different color variations but there’s not. So now I feel a little bit fooled. And I probably wouldn’t purchase this because I’m not really sure what they mean by this unless these are stickers or some sort of accessory, which again, it’s not really clear.

John Aspinall 00:14:30  So that’s how I would look at calendars, which is oh, here’s one more, I’ll take a look at this by the way. Anyone that’s watching this right now, even I get tricked sometimes with Amazon’s placement for sponsored ads. And when I’m talking to clients, I have to be very, very careful because I don’t want to click on an ad. I don’t want to call it that because that sucks. So you can see this right here. I automatically thought this was organic. Right. But frequently viewed sponsored. So understand this. The reason why I wanted to call this one out is because just to have a person in the hero photo, so is it adding value to the product? No. What they’re doing is trying to be a scroll stopper, trying to stand out, possibly trying to show the size because 22 by 17 you might think in your head, oh cool, what’s 22 by 17? Now I see a lady holding it, but I don’t know how tall that lady is, how short that lady is.

John Aspinall 00:15:14  So it’s not really adding too much value to the actual shopping experience. And then you go down here and you’re going to get a whole bunch of other different things, the page turning, all that kind of good stuff. But let me pull this up over here because I want to show you some, some interesting stuff over here. So this is an image of beard oil. So I’m going to actually go back to Amazon for a second because I don’t have the original. But I know Valhalla. Someone likes mad Max I guess. Beard oil. Okay. So here perfect example. This was a hero image. This is not a client, not anyone I know. I was just looking for some beard oil and I stumbled upon this and I was like, This image sucks. And what happens is a lot of people, there’s a lot of reasons why this is not a good hero image. A lot of people try and be scroll stoppers by doing this water splash or oil splash and all these kind of things, but it’s not giving me the information I need to make a purchase, right? So when I click on this one over here, I’ve had to do a lot of clicks just to be able to see details about this product, and I don’t want to do that.

John Aspinall 00:16:12  I’m the kind of person when I go to like Target or Walmart, I don’t go to the self-checkout. Like I don’t work here, right? Like I’m here to pay money for stuff. I don’t want to also, you know, get a 1099 and start checking out myself right then be watched by other people when they could be doing it for me. I’m the same way on Amazon. I don’t want to work to be able to spend my money. I want it very easily done for me. So I took this and I said, well, wait a minute, look how much dead pixel space is all around this photo. Yes, this is maybe cool for like your mom or DC, but for an Amazon hero image that’s dead pixels. These are all dead pixels. That bottle should be way closer, right? So I took this and I applied a lot of the tactics I talked about. So I’ll break it down for you. So it’s not apples to apples right with this. So I had to recreate their label.

John Aspinall 00:16:53  So one of the first things I did was I ran their label through a, optimizer for images where it just crisps it up. So basically they had a non-high res photo and I ran this through Canva. Canva has it right. Here you go right into edit and it’s called image upscaler. Very very easy by the way. Canva doesn’t pay me. I pay Canva. I talk about Canva ad nauseam because Canva is probably the best. Let’s round it up to $20 a month you will ever spend in your entire life. Ever. The amount of value that I’ve never gotten so much value out of one single tool. Then I get with Canva. So right here I upscaled it. Beautiful. Then I went in. They didn’t have a box. Now you might be thinking, wait a minute, John. You can’t you can’t show a box if they don’t really have a box. Well, you can, you can for items that are not giftable. When I say giftable, I’m talking about utilitarian products, right? Items like this.

John Aspinall 00:17:48  Who’s ordering this? Guys like me that’s going to come in the mail. I’m going to rip it open. I’m going to use it. I’m not going to, oh, this beautiful packaging and give it to someone. Now, if you’re searching, talk about Stephen Pope. Stephen sells a mom box, which is a pink box that’s all decorated and has all nice stuff inside of it. Now, if I ordered that from my mom and it came in a brown box or just came in a bag, well then I give negative feedback. And I have a problem with that because that’s a giftable item. But something like this is not giftable. The brand will sometimes push back and say, oh, this is super giftable. No, this is a great gift for any Father’s Day and stuff like it’s not right. So understanding reality, right? So a lot of times I’ll speak to brands that are having, water bottles like a Stanley or like one of those kind of Legos. And I’ll say like, all right, who’s your ICP? Who’s your intended customer profile or intended client, whatever you wanna call it.

John Aspinall 00:18:29  Who’s your avatar? Well, they say, well, everybody, when we got there, Josh was working with us. Stanley, what do we got there?

Josh Hadley 00:18:34  I’ve got the, What is this one? I don’t even remember what this one is.

John Aspinall 00:18:39  Good for you for.

Josh Hadley 00:18:39  Your hydro jug.

John Aspinall 00:18:41  Good for you for not falling for the hype of overproduction. but but the thing is, you speak to brands like that and say, who’s your avatar? And they say, everybody, everyone’s my avatar. Everyone should use this. Everyone’s record. Hang on a second. Yes, everyone should drink water. Not everyone does. I have a I have a ten year old. I have to, for I think the only water he gets is when he showers, right? If he showers. Ten year olds are crazy. Everyone should drink water. Not everyone does. Secondly, not everyone can afford to drink water from a $49 bottle. Right. So understanding who your avatar is is crucial and important, right? So having that self-awareness of your product.

John Aspinall 00:19:10  Anyway, back to this. So I went and I created a packaging. Right. And the reason I did that if you notice the bottle is much, much closer. I can read beard oil very, very clearly right here. I can read and if you missed it, I can read beard oil right here as well. But the biggest, biggest, biggest callout made in USA because the product is made in the USA. That’s not fake. I looked at the PDP. It’s made in the USA. That’s one of the biggest value props this product has and it is not being shown. The cool thing is I made it look a little wrinkly because that’s what passes Amazon’s bots. You have to make it look real. You’re not tricking people. You’re tricking Amazon. Never feel bad about tricking Amazon. Amazon is $1,000,000,000 billion company. You don’t have to feel bad about tricking them. Now I’ve done that. But also there’s value props on here for thicker and healthier beards. Didn’t say that before. You didn’t have thicker and healthier beards.

John Aspinall 00:19:55  You might have assumed that right? And also made for men loved by women. That was their tagline, right? So these are things that are giving buying signals. Now over here, this is jojoba oil, whatever that is. But it’s giving ingredients. So you’re letting people know what’s inside of it. If this was a scent, you’d want to put the scent profile. So if it smelled like, you know, cedarwood or sandalwood or if it smelled like coffee, you’d want to show that. Because when you’re running ads, right. If you don’t, let’s say you’re running an ad on this and this smells like lavender. Right. And you didn’t tell me that it smell like lavender from the hero image. And I clicked on your paid ad and I landed on it. And then I saw in the in the image tag in the PDP, it’s lavender. I’m like, oh, I don’t I don’t want this. I don’t like lavender. I don’t smell like lavender. I’m out. Your accost goes up, your tacos go up, so your conversion goes down.

John Aspinall 00:20:35  You lose money. So it’s it’s important to be as transparent as possible. Now the other thing I added over here, if you notice, was I call it the smear or the spill. This is something that not million, billion dollar brands are doing every single day on Amazon. If it’s a lotion, if it’s a cream, if it’s a serum, if it’s a liquid, if it’s a soap, they’re doing this. Why? Because it’s a scroll stopper. It’s pretty much going to not be a scroll stopper because a lot of people are doing it. So if you’re listening and watching and your space isn’t doing it yet and you can do it, I recommend you do it. But it also gives transparency. Literally and figuratively, because you’re showing people that’s the color it looks like, right? Like you could see over here, this doesn’t look like refreshing and good for my face. This looks like motor oil.

Josh Hadley 00:21:15  Yeah, exactly. That’s what I was going to say.

John Aspinall 00:21:16  It looks like motor oil, right? So this looks like something I want to put on my face.

John Aspinall 00:21:20  The really interesting thing about this, you’ll notice, and I’ll clone this one so I can play with it for a second because I want to mess up this one. So if I redact all this stuff over here. This right here is a Canva element. These 123 bubbles. You’ll see these on Amazon that are people are using these. And what they’re doing is they’re going and they’re changing the tint right here to reflect their specific product. Right? The red tint. The darker tint. The lighter tint. This is 1,000% a Canva element. How do I know? You go into serum, you go into photos. There it is right here. There’s a gaggle that you can pick from inside of here. Right? So when I go to and I and I, I say, I stole this, but not really. la roche-posay is. Don’t ask me how I know this. My wife buys this, and I was sitting in the shower with this one right here. This has to be a $1.5 million a month listing, if not more.

John Aspinall 00:22:11  It’s 15 bucks. They sold 70 K a month in the last 30 days, but before it’s at 100 K. Yeah, $1.75 million a month right now. This one, they’re not doing it on. But when I landed on this and I was interested, I started to poke around. And then I said, look at this over here. This is a cream. This is a serum. This is a serum. So and you could see they’re doing this in almost all of their listings. Now, the really, really interesting thing, if you then go and say vitamin C serum, let’s just take that one for example. This is why it’s super important to stay on top of your hero images, because when a trend starts to hit and you’re one of the first ones to be on it, you capitalize on it. But if you wait, then everyone’s doing it. So take a look over here at vitamin C serum bliss is doing the smear over here, right. Scroll down. Parador is doing the oil splash.

John Aspinall 00:22:58  Right. Laroche is over here doing this bliss again. Now we get into. Goodall is doing this over here. So you’re seeing the people in the skincare and wellness space are pulling away from throwing the orange slices in your face and throwing flowers in your face. You have some people doing it over here, but what they’re leaning into is this rock is doing this right here, 40,000 units a month at a $26 price point. Look at this. This is I’ve never seen. I’m taking a screenshot of this right now. I’ve never seen I’ve never seen the serum actually spell out a percentage of numbers. That’s interesting. That’s a first for me, Josh. So you could see people are getting very, very, very innovative. Now, I will say this while we’re looking at these because I’m very into this space. The box is here. Remember how I’m showing you the box with that beard oil. That’s not real box. I’m willing to bet 75% of these products that show boxes don’t come at the box.

John Aspinall 00:23:40  They’re not. Some of them will, but most of them won’t. And the reason that you can. The way that you can kind of tell that is if you go to one. Right. Let’s say this one here 8.99. I don’t even know. That almost looks like ChatGPT mixed up over there. Maybe I’m wrong. I go to the reviews and I take a look over here. You notice one thing. Okay, this does have a box. So this is. This is fine. But you’ll notice a lot of the times, any kind of post edits, any kind of packaging, anything that you might think you’ll get suppressed or banned or whatever kind of crazy thing you’re thinking of. You’ll see when people receive the product, it’s not on there and they’re giving it five stars. They’re like, I love this stuff. It’s amazing. They don’t care about the box. The biggest, biggest, biggest proponent or culprit is Procter and Gamble brands. If you look at, let’s say head and shoulders, I don’t know if it’s Procter and Gamble, but check this out.

John Aspinall 00:24:26  I call that mega label where you’re taking something as a two pack and you’re putting a label right across. This is a monster company. This is 1,000% of vendor central one offering. That does not come with that. It doesn’t. Right. When you go down to other things over here. Look at this. Head and shoulders over here. The billion dollar brands are taking these risks that a $50,000 a month brand is not willing to take, which is, to me, crazy. If you take a look at look at guys like native deodorant. Look at these call outs. Old spice. Right. These. It’s not there. It’s physically impossible. But they’re doing 30,000 units. 30,000 units a month at $32. They’re not afraid to do these, and they’re mixing it up in different tactics. So I really, really this is like my one millionth call to compel anyone. Please look at this one. It’s it’s insane that this is. People think this will get you suppressed. It’s not going to.

John Aspinall 00:25:15  Now, native is a large brand, so they’re not caring about competing with smaller guys. But if I was a smaller guy in the space you want to focus on, show me the coconut. Show me the vanilla. These are the spaces when it’s sent. You want to showcase that because if you’re running an ad on this and I didn’t know native and I was like, oh, that looks interesting. I’m like, I don’t like coconut after I clicked on it, that’s wasted ad spend, right? So here’s another one. Oh, Dawn. Dawn. Dawn. soap because I think I mentioned soap. Big culprit. Ajax two. Please. You’re not. This is not this. I’m willing to bet my next paycheck that you. If you order this today, you will not get a box that’s cardboard all around with just this stripe over here. It is not going to happen. And this is $81 moving 5000 units. I’m. And it’s one P it’s vendor central. So if this is really a problem do you think Amazon would let it happen and let it get monster complaints.

John Aspinall 00:26:00  And this is a 4.7 star. No it doesn’t happen. So time and time again Clorox look at this call out over here. Now the Clorox is an interesting one. Going to cost Clorox some money because this is a monster listing. This is 600,000 units at $11 price point I think this is like what two almost $2.5 million a month at a 4.8 star. So they’re interesting because they it does have a rap, but it’s enhancing what’s already there. And I’ve looked at this one before because you take a look at the listing of the reviews and you’ll see look at that box. That’s not the box that’s shown. But what’s happening is you will get and they’re not showing it over here. But if you were to buy this in the store, it does have a minor rap on it, but again, nowhere near this. It’s impossible. Right? So that’s why I tell people, look at these kind of things. Look at the Serp. If you’re not, if you’re selling on Amazon and you’re not actively searching main keywords to see what your competition is doing, I mean, this is crazy.

John Aspinall 00:26:49  They’re doing a splash over here to it. It’s all over the place, right? This looks like to be a third party, kind of arbitrage bundle. yeah, that’s probably what that is. But, hey, that’s as crazy as that looks that got approved for an ad, right? One other one I want to focus on or kind of showcase is, one of my favorite brands in the space. I actually got to meet them at, prosper. they came up to me and they were like, hey, we love your stuff. I’m like, hey, I love your stuff is algae, cow, algae, cow. Josh, I’m telling you, they boggles my mind. They do two things that I’ve I’ve coined phrases on something I haven’t made myself that I kind of procured it. Right. So they do this thing I call a teacup handle where it’s not packaging. It’s just a little half circle where they’re putting us a GMO free GMP, whatever that is. Now, are they doing best practice as far as John Aspinall is concerned? No, but I’m not going to knock them because there’s 9000 units on something called for 60 bucks, right? So this listing is doing, what, over a quarter million dollars a month just on that one item.

John Aspinall 00:27:47  So but the concept of that is really, really interesting. Now look at this one right here. This is doing both. This is doing mega label where this is where it started from. They took two bottles. It’s just a two count. And instead of having two small labels they stretched one large label across the two of them. You’re not getting the product like that. And it doesn’t matter because they have a 4.5 star 7000 unit at a $130 price point. They’re crushing it. But the interesting thing is this circle back here, this gradient circle, it’s not packaging, it’s not packaging. It’s not adding anything of value to the to the actual purchase. It is 1,000% a scroll stopper and Amazon lets it rock. while we’re here, look at this logical packaging. Just this right here. That’s nothing. But they’re able to push the envelope because they understand the risk versus reward. Now here, perfect example of bad practice. But it’s it’s ancient nutrition and they don’t care. right? Because they’re crushing it.

John Aspinall 00:28:35  But if you were just coming out with your own collagen protein powder, you might not want to do this because this is a very non-organic looking post edit, meaning it doesn’t look like it’s actually stuck to the packaging, that it’s part of the label, that it’s part of the wrap. This may likely get you an image suppression if you’re just getting started. You don’t have historicals with Amazon. Is it fair? No, but Amazon historically isn’t fair. Right. So these are things that I like to like here. This is another example of not best practice is they’re putting two-pack right and I can’t Josh can you read that that whatever’s on that label right there.

John Aspinall 00:29:05  No.

John Aspinall 00:29:06  So they’re showing it’s a two pack, but they’re showing me the back of the bottle. I don’t care about the back. The bottle is not reading the supplements from the Serp. Right. And they’re not making it clear enough about what they’re getting or what they’re giving. One thing I really, really liked, I talked to folks about a lot is called Dead Pixel Real Estate Space.

John Aspinall 00:29:19  So I’ll click on this one, verified by the Vegan Society. Right? That’s clearly a post edit. It’s not really a good one because you can tell, but that’s area that you’re able to put. Something of. Value is verified by the Vegan Society, a big value prop in my opinion. No, because I think there’s other things you could be putting there that are much more valuable. So let’s take a look and I’ll tell you exactly why there’s more value inside here. So I go down here to see where it’s manufactured. So it’s not telling me it’s in the US. So then I like to scroll a little bit more to see if it’s made in the US. And it’s, it’s not really screaming to me. So it’s either 1 or 2 things. The product comes from China, which is concerning for anything that you’re ingesting in your body. I mean, everything we’re talking on right now came from China. My computer, my screen, my my microphone. But I draw the line with consumables because that’s just me.

John Aspinall 00:30:04  And that’s also a lot of folks too. So when I go over here, if they were made in the US, right. Oh, perfect. Look how hard we had to dig Josh to find out that it was made in the US. I’m not going to do that. So if I’m not able to see that. So now now that we know it’s made in the US, what they should do is put a red, white and blue flag over here, probably made in USA. That’s going to cause you to have more clicks because you’re getting more transparency about where it’s being sourced or where it’s being manufactured, and people care more about that than they do the Vegan Society. That’s not a knock at vegans, right? But I’m willing to put my money in my mouth is and run this as a PickFu. Right. And just take it as is. Remove this over here, put made in the US and let consumers tell us what they’d rather pick. So I urge brands like Navy to go out there and try PickFu, because if you don’t believe me for 15 years doing this, then take the advice of people that would actually purchase the product and pick through.

John Aspinall 00:30:53  You’re able to drill down very clearly on a Prime subscriber. I take supplements daily. If it’s a high income, low income household, if it’s male or female, if they’re parents, how old are your kids? All you could really drill down very, very granularly, with that. So let me show you some pig fu polls. By the way, I did some really cool ones. So this was interesting, right? Because I showed this brand. Right? And this was a mock up. This was me just playing around in Canva. This is not a final version, but you can see the final version would have crushed it just being in Canva. Because what am I doing here? Right. There’s a lot of things that I changed. I added the actual product, which is a tablet, right. So I didn’t know there was a tablet over here. It says tablets very, very small. But I want to see what it is. I’m also seeing how it’s coming in the packaging.

John Aspinall 00:31:33  Right. And you could say, hey, John, you already showed us that down here. I want to show you more. I want to show you what it looks like, that you understand that. And that’s also becoming a scroll stopper. Now, you said cats and dogs over here. Can you show me a little stylized icon? But now you know it’s for cats and small dogs. Like, I’m not putting a picture of a Great Dane. You know, it’s for a Chihuahua and that kind of thing. But even more importantly, I put me in the US, and that’s a Canva icon that I use nonstop because I like how it’s vertical or horizontal. And you can see here in pick for the reasons why I like it because it has made in the USA on it. It’s more eye catching. It makes it clear, shows the pills, the graphic. you can see down here. It’s more compelling. I like seeing the package. I like seeing the real cat and dog. The picture of the cat made in USA label.

John Aspinall 00:32:15  So if I could just hit control F, right. And just type in USA on this, right, you could see at least four folks said because of USA. So that’s why people don’t understand. Brands don’t understand the value. If you have something sourced in the US, make it clear, right? You already hold the cards in 2025, right? With being made in the US, you’re already winning because yeah, maybe the packaging comes from China and you have to maybe. Okay, 200. What is it, just 240%. How did it go up since I last looked or.

Josh Hadley 00:32:41  Yeah, I mean it continues to change by the day. It’s like the stock market, right? Yeah. Know what the tariff rate.

John Aspinall 00:32:45  Even if your packaging cost is like $0.60 okay, 245% $0.60. It’s really affecting folks that their landed cost is $18, $29. That’s very, very painful. That’s a larger number to take a percent on. Right. So let me pull up these perfect example.

Josh Hadley 00:32:59  As we as we wrap this up because I know we’re on we’re on a time crunch.

John Aspinall 00:33:03  Here. Oh yeah. Yeah. Sorry.

Josh Hadley 00:33:04  Share these. And then what I would love for you to share to wrap things up is like what are the brands you would recommend people take a look at, like some of the ones you as like, these guys are like always ahead of the curve. Pay attention to what these brands are doing.

John Aspinall 00:33:15  I could talk about this all day. That’s why I lose track of time. pure LG. I’ll go real quick, smear and showing that it’s lavender 22 to 8 crushed it. Right. just because you’re showing that it’s lavender. let me go over here to this one. This is one I did with I, I did with three AI tools. So I did with ChatGPT. I did this with, I think, Google Whisk and then Google Effects. Right? I liked this one. I thought it was more organic pick. Few people liked this one, not realizing he has no thumb. So just goes to show you that I, even as wacky as it is, can take you places.

John Aspinall 00:33:43  Lastly, I want to show you this one too. This is. You know what Rock plate is?

John Aspinall 00:33:46  no.

John Aspinall 00:33:47  I didn’t either. It’s like you carry it. Exercise, I don’t know. So this brand, they said, Hey, it was an agency, and they said the brand owner does not want to put red, white and blue for me in the USA, but they want to put me in the USA. There’s a lot of power in the color red, white and blue, and it’s shown right here. Five people picked this one, nine people picked this one, and only one person pick this one. So just changing the color over there is going to make you more money. Because at the end of the day, if your CBR and your conversion rate stays the same and your CTR increases, you don’t have to worry about increasing CVR. If it stays the same and you get your CTR increases, you make more money. It’s basic math. Now the brands I would say to focus on and watch are guys like Carl who already mentioned them before.

John Aspinall 00:34:21  Over here. You want to they’re constantly they have some new stuff coming out. They told me a proper and I’m keep on eyeing it and trying to see what they have new coming out I would look at algae. I would look at monsters in your space. I would look at dawn. I would look at any Procter and Gamble company, any company that’s on brick and mortar in the store. If they’re doing these tactics. Keep your eyes on that. The other one I would say is Mary Ruth’s Mary Ruth’s is. Everyone knows Mary Ruth, right? They’re doing these right. This packaging here, it speaks volumes. And a lot of these things like two month supply, sugar free. People need to know that that’s value, props and value you’re adding to the shopping experience. So that’s kind of my $0.02 on that.

Josh Hadley 00:34:54  Love it. John, this has been a super valuable episode. I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are the three that I noted here, John.

Josh Hadley 00:35:02  Number one is, if you are not testing your main image on an ongoing basis, you’re behind the times. And I think over the next five years, as Amazon continues to get more and more competitive, it’s going to be the brand owners that are willing to double down on these small things that have massive outputs. I love looking for leverage opportunities, and the main image is the biggest leverage opportunity that you have on Amazon, which goes into, you know, action. Item number two. Do you want the solution for higher conversion rate and lower ad spend? Right and better improve tacos. Guess what the fix is? And the silver bullet is main image for all the reasons that you mentioned early on. You don’t get wasted ad spend. People didn’t. They thought they were getting this. You know your example with the desk calendar. They thought they were getting this. They weren’t getting that. The the flavors or the scents. All of the above. Right. So your main image actually directly impacts your PPC spend and its efficiency.

Josh Hadley 00:35:56  And that was the unlock that I had today. And then my third and final action item is you should always be leveraging different AI tools to just like exponentially be able to scale out your test. Right. And sometimes it’s just like good is good enough, right? Just get the test out there and experiment with it. So, John, maybe we can twist your arm and have you come back for a part two where we can actually diagnose, like how do you run these tests? How do you identify like what is actually significant or not. And how do you come up. Like how are you using AI to scale up? And, you know, like Mr. Beast test hundreds of thumbnails before you even release the video.

John Aspinall 00:36:28  Totally.

Josh Hadley 00:36:29  so with that being said, John, final thing for you here is we’re going to skip all the other questions. Well, let’s let’s do this real quick. Give me your favorite book.

John Aspinall 00:36:39  My favorite book is right behind me. It’s a $100 million leads. No, it’s a $100 dollar offer.

John Aspinall 00:36:44  That’s the.

Josh Hadley 00:36:44  One. Alex Ramsey.

John Aspinall 00:36:45  Alex Ramsey.

Josh Hadley 00:36:46  One of my favorite. All right. Okay. Question number two. Your favorite AI tool.

John Aspinall 00:36:50  I can’t answer that. I pay for every tool I use cloud for writing. I use perplexity with deep seq for search. I use ChatGPT for everyday stuff. I use Google Gemini now for deep search. And I pay for Google Workspace anyway. Google has no book LM, which I use, which is free. Canva has Canva I built inside of it. I use AI with everything, so it’s I use there’s no silver bullet to quote you on AI tools. So if you just pay for ChatGPT. Yeah, you can make yourself look like an action figure in a box that everyone was doing for the last couple of weeks or so. but Claude writes better and perplexity with deep sea because it’s hosted in the US on their servers. So you have to worry about privacy concerns with, you know, China and deep sea. Perplexity is leaps and bounds better than almost everybody for search and deep, deep research.

John Aspinall 00:37:32  But then Gemini is better if you’re in the Google Workspace because you can actually drive natively to it, and it takes notes and everything like that. So have everything. Play with everything.

Josh Hadley 00:37:39  Love it, love it. Great recommendations. All right. Finally, who is somebody that you’ve been impressed with in the e-commerce space? Somebody that’s blowing your mind doing some cool things in the e-commerce space.

John Aspinall 00:37:48  So we talked about her before and it’s RE2 Java man. That lady is I say that with the utmost respect. Is genius like that. The things that she’s I’ve seen her talk about at conferences and shows and events and, you know, with Google App Scripts, I had no idea that Google Apps scripts was a thing until I heard Reto speak. And the amount of powerful things you can do with an app script without even having to go to, like, Zapier or make. And the fact that she said, if my team does something more than three times repeated, we automate. It totally blew my mind and makes me want to automate my entire life.

Josh Hadley 00:38:18  Oh, I love it. She is. She is a great speaker, always on the cutting edge of AI tools in the e-commerce space. I’d would recommend other people follow her as well. Now, Johnson, people want to follow you. They want to learn more about you, your services you offer. Where can people reach out to you and follow you out?

John Aspinall 00:38:31  Yeah. I’m on LinkedIn. I just had 20,000 followers, so that’s. I kind of slowed down a little bit once I had 20,000, but I post daily on there all tips, tricks, all that kind of stuff. pick for Aspen Olympic com or ASP. Go asp asp. Com john@asp.com. Should you need any help with merchandising, creative consulting, all that kind of stuff. I’m not a graphic designer, but my Canva mockups can compete with, most graphic designers. I will say that.

Josh Hadley 00:38:56  So I love it. John, you’ve been wealth of knowledge. Thanks for taking your time to come on the show today.

John Aspinall 00:39:00  Thanks so much for having me.

John Aspinall 00:39:01  I will have to give a shout out to Stephen Pope for connecting us, because Stephen is a is a very large, mentor for me and, sparked me being an influencer in the space. So I always got to give props where props are due.

Josh Hadley 00:39:14  Awesome. Yes, indeed. Stephen, we had a great podcast episode talking about image optimization, which then he spun me on to you, which I’m grateful for.

John Aspinall 00:39:21  So he’s awesome.

Josh Hadley 00:39:22  Awesome. Well, John, thanks again for your time.

John Aspinall 00:39:23  Thanks, Josh.