Top 10 Viral Brands: Teardown Of Their Amazon Listings — Monte Desai | Why Amazon Listings Fail To Convert, What Drives Amazon Listing Success, Why Better Visuals Lower Ad Costs, How Testing Drives Higher Sales, How AI Boosts Small Teams (#475)

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00;00;00;00 - 00;00;12;05
Unknown
AI is leveling the playing field like never before. This is a time when if you're a solo founder, you can take on Coca-Cola and L'Oreal. Like this is the only time in history where that's possible.

00;00;12;07 - 00;00;30;05
Unknown
Hello! Welcome to another episode of the E-commerce Coffee Break podcast. Most brands are doing the work on the Amazon listings good images, good copy, good products, but still the pages are making those sales. So what's actually broken? Today we're looking at the top viral brands and what they do differently when it comes to building high converting Amazon listings.

00;00;30;11 - 00;00;48;09
Unknown
To help us unpack this, I'm joined by Monte Desai, founder of Pixii.ai an AI designer trained on over 100,000 top performing Amazon listings used by brands doing over 10 billion in revenue. Before pixie, he advised fortune 500 CEOs at Bain and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Monte, great to have you back on the show. Thank you.

00;00;48;12 - 00;01;09;21
Unknown
Great to be here. Let's dive into it. So most Amazon listings look okay. But why do so many listings get clicks and those sales. Yeah I mean so we at pixie now have looked at it's hard to put a number on it properly because it's changing by the day with several hundred thousand products at this point, and which are the ones that are getting people's attention on Amazon or even Shopify.

00;01;09;24 - 00;01;23;13
Unknown
And then when they're getting someone's attention, which ones are converting? Which ones are people buying? And it turns out that there's like, no, I can give you some rules of thumb and I can give you some guidance. But the truth is it actually just comes out the testing. And this is an answer that I think, you know, everyone already knows, but it's like so hard to do.

00;01;23;14 - 00;01;44;06
Unknown
But if you think about, like, the brands that have gone viral consistently, whether on Amazon or, you know, TikTok or Instagram, other places I think about like ag1 or Alala or Magix built on these brands are they're constantly testing, constantly testing. So new made images, new listing visuals, and then, of course, on that other, doing different meta ads.

00;01;44;09 - 00;02;02;13
Unknown
And so if you apply that framework through everything that you do, you'll see performance gains just by the testing and learning process. I think what people always get wrong and here is quite often everyone wants to go viral. That's that's the magic thing is like I want to go viral and no one really knows what it is. Now, you just mentioned a couple of brands are really good in that.

00;02;02;14 - 00;02;28;02
Unknown
What's the biggest mistake when brands just trying to copy viral listings? What's the problem with this approach. Yeah. So we have a that's interesting question. We had this feature in Pixi called clone. And it's like the steal the look, steal the look button. You can click and you can put up a listing and say it's like you know, Mary Ruth or you know, oh La La or any of these brands that you really love, and you can just kind of take their, their, their short list, their composition and that's helpful to get started.

00;02;28;08 - 00;02;44;20
Unknown
Right? Don't get me wrong. Like taking inspiration from a brand that you like, that you admire, that you think is relevant to your category, and saying, oh, will they show before and after I should show before and after? Or you know, they show you know how it works. I should I should do that. It's helpful. Like there is some value in that.

00;02;44;20 - 00;03;00;02
Unknown
Okay. Well said. There is some value in that. And the reason that there's value in that is because these have we have massive teams who are constantly testing and learning. And so if you take that assumption that, okay, they validated it, they've learned from it, why don't we learn from them. That could be true where it gets dangerous is the following.

00;03;00;03 - 00;03;19;11
Unknown
If you just copy paste the designs or the styles or. Oh yeah, just because Magic Spoon has a zoom in on the texture of the cereal, I should have the zoom in on the texture of my protein powder or whatever. Well, you get wrong, there is you're violating the number one rule of marketing, which is who is your customer, what is their problem and how are you the best solution for the problem?

00;03;19;14 - 00;03;33;26
Unknown
And so starting with the customer, I think, is the thing that people often forget. When we have people all the time, they're like, oh yeah, like this is the top performer by category. I just want to copy them. And we always say, okay, well, that's good to get inspiration, but you're not going to see the performance that they can see because they have a different customer than you.

00;03;33;27 - 00;03;55;23
Unknown
Slightly different. Slightly different. Yeah, I think a lot of our listeners are have started at some point in their e-commerce journey as a side hustler or started some things that don't necessarily have this marketing background as AB testing background to SEO background. And you mentioned as these big brands to have big teams with experts, they haven't done anything else in their life then marketing optimization.

00;03;55;25 - 00;04;15;15
Unknown
Now AI is sort of leveling the field there that we want to dive into just a little bit more and to see is like, if you have a smaller team or your solo founder, we just started, how can I help you with optimizing listings, product detail pages and so on? Yeah, I mean, AI is leveling the playing field like never before.

00;04;15;15 - 00;04;32;21
Unknown
I mean, this is a time when if you're a solo founder, you can take on Coca-Cola and L'Oreal. Like, this is the only time in history where that's possible. And so let's just start with like, what are these big brands do? And then, you know, what can you learn from them? Right. So let's focus on Amazon. If you think about the brands that are in your kitchen right now.

00;04;32;23 - 00;04;51;27
Unknown
Right. You bought the tide laundry detergent or, you know, look what if for your post-workout or any anything that you know and love these household names, I don't know those companies specifically, but I can tell you that just based on, you know, that the companies we work with, they often have a one person, if not a whole team dedicated to conversion rate optimization.

00;04;51;27 - 00;05;07;06
Unknown
And on Amazon, it's actually even, you know, further than that, they actually have a person dedicated to just main image testing. So that one first image that you see, what you search detergent and all these detergents come up, there's one photo of your product and there's one title and that's all you get. And you have to get someone's attention, right?

00;05;07;06 - 00;05;23;21
Unknown
Everyone knows that. And the easiest way to make more money is actually to make a better main image with a little bit of a hint to get their attention right. So maybe like a splash of color or a badge saying, oh, 60 count, 60 loads of laundry or, you know, showing the ingredients. Maybe you have jasmine or flowers.

00;05;23;23 - 00;05;44;01
Unknown
Those are the things make a huge difference. When I say huge, I mean you can get 30% higher click through rate. Sometimes people are telling us are getting 300 and 400% higher click through rate, which usually translates closely to revenue. And so just a one better main image. And get that there's no secret there's no secret formula of like, oh, hey, you know, this main image is gonna work in your category.

00;05;44;01 - 00;06;01;23
Unknown
The only secret is testing because even once you find the winner, you test 100 variants. You find the letter that's only going to last a while because all the competitors are going to copy it. Right? If you find some secret like, oh, I'm going to show my protein powder and I'm show a splash of color on a protein powder that my last a few months, everyone else gets the idea they copy you.

00;06;01;26 - 00;06;16;21
Unknown
And then now you need to have another idea because you're in a sea of sameness. What do big brands do? Or big brands or even scaling brands that are you know, going from $10 million to $100 million? I mean, these people are crazy. They're they're talking to me very openly about, hey, we want to double our revenue this year.

00;06;16;21 - 00;06;36;20
Unknown
We're going from, you know, 20 million this year to 50 million this year. They're the way they're going to do is do testing a full team dedicated to testing main images, a full team to changing the gallery out every month based on seasonal friends. You know, we just had Easter past the next set of holidays around, Father's Day, Mother's Day, graduations over time, but making their sourcing listings very seasonal.

00;06;36;22 - 00;06;51;16
Unknown
And the conflict testing this and the same. Sure. Shopify, by the way, on Shopify is a little bit different because you have more control. So you can show different personas. So if you have what's an example of this? If you have like a unisex t shirt, simple example, you should show a man and woman at least, and you should show someone larger, someone slimmer.

00;06;51;17 - 00;07;13;18
Unknown
You should show someone in the gym and someone in the city, like all the different, use cases that you have because it's very persona based and you can actually create separate tiered out, a separate landing pages for each one of those variants. Cons. We can see testing. So I basically said large teams and scaling brands have the ability to create and test constantly different photos on their main image, different photos and their listing different photos that are seasonal.

00;07;13;20 - 00;07;43;22
Unknown
What do you do if you're a side hustler? You have a job and you're trying to build a business on the side. All of a sudden you get the same thing. So instead of spending 20,000 on a photo shoot, you can just go use AI to create a lifestyle shot or create a bunch of main images. And instead of burning, you know, literally 6 to 8 weeks on these, these photo shoots, the agencies in Texas, you could do it in two minutes if you use like natto, banana or Google, you can do it in like ten, 20 minutes and the return on your time has never been higher.

00;07;43;26 - 00;08;04;00
Unknown
You spend an hour, you had a bunch of listings, you done those listings get 20, 30, 40% higher revenue, in the first week. I think that's a good point that you made there. It's about testing. Testing on a big scale, and smaller brands just do not have the resources, the knowledge to do so. Now we say, I was pixie, you can do this literally in minutes.

00;08;04;02 - 00;08;30;10
Unknown
Now obviously it might be a bit overwhelming for somebody coming to it and say, oh, now I need to create all these listings, all these pictures, and I can use them not only for your product detail, but you can use them for your ads and other things that you use in your marketing. So that's a good thing. Now walk me through how pixie works when you come with your product and maybe one product image that you have and that was your best performing, where do you take it from there?

00;08;30;11 - 00;08;45;28
Unknown
Yeah. So all you need is one photo of your product and a little bit of detail about your product. So it could just be your Amazon listing link, your Shopify listing link, or just some rough notes that you have about what makes your product special. And then so you put in the photo, you put in some information on your product, and you click generate.

00;08;46;00 - 00;09;14;16
Unknown
And then in two minutes you have seven visuals that are optimized for whatever channel yourself you're selling on, whether that's Amazon, whether that's Shopify, TikTok, shop sooner, actually launching Walmart.com support, Wayfair support, and then many other marketplaces as well. So you have those seven visuals. From there you can add more. You can say, oh, actually, you know, I think it's really important that I show a Father's Day visual for my, my supplements brand or my shirt or, you know, I want to show before and after of my skincare lotion of of how how much of a difference it makes.

00;09;14;22 - 00;09;32;20
Unknown
You can just say that, say before and after and piece will generate more for you. But the big thing that makes Pixi special compared to other AI tools, I mean one that is specialized for e-commerce, right? You jump in a photo, you get seven visuals. It's just a much better return on your time. But the other big thing is that PC designs are editable, so you're not just dealing with an image generator like, you know, Google or OpenAI has.

00;09;32;20 - 00;10;02;24
Unknown
I mean, these are designs, so you can take full control. It's an editor like Canva, so you can just click and drag and drop, and not be fighting AI and writing all these long prompts and stuff. We believe in a zero prompt experience. I like this approach. I'm creating a lot of images for my own marketing and as I said, was ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever I use is like you get something which is like 90% of what you want to have, and then you can't edit it, and then you're fiddling around and having like ten different versions with your prompt and it just takes a lot of time.

00;10;02;27 - 00;10;25;12
Unknown
Pixie, as I said, you can just edit what you get and then it's perfect. Now, you mentioned something briefly is that a pixie also distributes the pictures to different platforms. How does that work? So we designed for different platforms. So okay, the the game is always a little bit different on Shopify. On Shopify you're doing a meta ad and then they come to your landing page and you buy on Amazon.

00;10;25;17 - 00;10;41;12
Unknown
They search for you. You hopefully show up there, might pay for some, PPC ads. And then they come to your listing on Amazon, for example, on your listing, all your competitors are also there. Amazon is cutthroat, right? So you have to constantly say, oh, they came through your protein shake listing. Well, here's five of the protein shakes.

00;10;41;12 - 00;11;00;26
Unknown
Why are you better than those. And so the listing visuals have to tell a story about the, the benefits, the comparison, us versus them. How many grams of protein are there? The nutrition facts. Why are we sorry if this whole all this information to try to convince somebody to not buy your competitors product on Shopify, you have more flexibility because you know, it's your site, you own it, there are no competitors there.

00;11;00;26 - 00;11;15;18
Unknown
And so on. Shopify to really get higher conversion, you want to tell a story about your brand. A lot of these people may already know your brand. They might be repeat customers, they might have seen you an ad or on social media. And so you have more flexibility to tell stories to be more aspirational. So you might have more lifestyle shots.

00;11;15;18 - 00;11;36;28
Unknown
You might have, you know, for a protein shirt, you might have someone really fit at the gym. You might show the different static that you try to create, whether it's like a more modern or more gritty esthetic or a more bodybuilder esthetic, you can just convey that and say, oh yeah, this is for you. Like you came to my, Shopify site, you know, hey, bodybuilder or, you know, hey, female athlete or hey kid was just getting started.

00;11;37;05 - 00;12;02;13
Unknown
You can kind of tell that story without seeing it directly by showing it to the pictures. Somebody comes to your site, they feel like they belong there. They click buy. That's a perfect example that they just it's not only the product, not only the product, so they should tell a story. I like this approach. Now, you mentioned already companies working with you and the goals they have, but can you share some success stories or case studies of business you have worked with, and what kind of difference they saw in their business?

00;12;02;13 - 00;12;29;04
Unknown
Yeah, for sure. Let me pull up a couple examples. So we have a couple examples on our website. I think, the one one that comes to mind is this, a skincare brand called Skin Perfection. The founder, Kari Thomas, has about 80 products, super scientific products. I mean, this is like a, well researched, kind of hard to explain a technical product like peptides, tallow, all these things that I don't really understand that.

00;12;29;04 - 00;12;46;06
Unknown
Well, serums and she came to Pixi, she started using it and she was just blown away that she understood her product. And, you know, she had this one quote where she's like, well, I would never trust a freelancer you to do my designs or use any of my tools because they don't understand my product. But I trust them with Pixi because Pixi understands the product.

00;12;46;06 - 00;13;03;01
Unknown
It does the thinking and analysis for you. So she created a bunch of Amazon listings in week one, and she was like, oh man, it's actually pretty easy. So she didn't. Then she did 80. She did 80 listings the next week using Pixi. So all of her products on Amazon were done. And then she was like, okay, I'll do Shopify, I'll do social media and, you know, tell a different story.

00;13;03;01 - 00;13;19;20
Unknown
You know, she takes her brand very seriously. And so the brand consistency, very important retelling is very important. You know, the right fonts, the right colors, the right kind of visuals, a very scientific theme. You know, she's saying that on, the first day she saved $3,000 just compared to what an agency would charge you for a first listing.

00;13;19;26 - 00;13;37;18
Unknown
And then in the first couple weeks, she saved, like $240,000 by creating so many listings for so many platforms, so many products. I can show you one more example where we had a customer that was doing is like a like a home product, right? Like decor around the house, like picture frames and, you know, shelves and things like that.

00;13;37;20 - 00;13;58;03
Unknown
And within two weeks, using Pixi visuals, they cut their ad costs in half. And the reason for that is, is, you know, tacos, tacos, total object sales. Really. They cut their they doubled their ROI. That's a better way of saying it because now there were obviously spending money to send people to their listing. They would come to the listing they didn't completely understand, like, oh, like this is a shelf.

00;13;58;03 - 00;14;16;13
Unknown
How does this shelf mount? Like how much weight can hold, you know, how many items can I sit there and she used pixie pixie's create visuals. And all of a sudden, I mean all the revenue off the same ad spent. And that's a one. That's one thing that we're very proud of, right? Like if you think about these platforms, whether it's meta, whether it's Amazon, you know, our TikTok, they're trying to grow their ad revenue.

00;14;16;18 - 00;14;30;22
Unknown
At the end of the day, they want you to spend more money on ads. Pixie wants you to spend less on ads. Right? We want you to make more money off your existing listings with your existing. You know everything you have today so that you can grow faster and get more bang for your buck. For every $1 that you spend on advertising.

00;14;30;26 - 00;14;57;02
Unknown
I think it was very good examples there. And we as humans are visual creatures. We react on images. You can have the best copy. The one is reading, people are scanning. Yes, it's important to a certain degree, but if your pictures are not good, the best copy, the best text will not save you. So that's I think why is so important again, was I one of a sudden you can do things on scale that you couldn't do before or for a very high cost.

00;14;57;06 - 00;15;22;05
Unknown
Now tell me about how does the day to day work look like and who is using pixie? Is it the marketing department was working on it. We have a wide range. We definitely have kind of. Yeah, marketing departments at fortune 500 brands. We have agencies, you know, a lot of the scaling brands. It turns out the the performance marketer was like one person that has a mandate to turn a $20 million revenue a year into an $80 million revenue year into year.

00;15;22;08 - 00;15;38;01
Unknown
It's often just one person, right? And they're very still skilled, very talented, the heartbreaking. But, they're in pixie and they have a design team they can use, but they don't want to wait. Right. Because time is money. And it's most important thing, even if they're not the best designer, they can use pixie to get really, really high quality results, put them on the listing and test them very, very quickly.

00;15;38;01 - 00;15;53;25
Unknown
So speed to testing is what they obsess about. And it makes sense, right? Because they they get more data. They grow revenue faster. We have plenty of soul founders as well. So people who, you know, started a business a few years ago and now they're successful and they do this full time. And so they have everything, right. They have to deal with supply chain.

00;15;53;25 - 00;16;10;06
Unknown
They have to deal with returns. They have to deal with the the partnerships are doing good product development and they have to do listing design. And so pixie helps them with that. And of course we have people who are really just starting out like the side hustlers. I mean, this is the time, right? Like your arm in the insurgents, the Shopify team, we totally believe in that.

00;16;10;09 - 00;16;29;23
Unknown
Like, you now have this, like, ultimate slingshot to take on a Goliath, which is I yeah, we're in a golden time a lot of people do scaremongering about. I know I'm sure there's some areas where things are a bit difficult, but overall for entrepreneurship or selling online or doing marketing, I it's the golden age. Let's talk about a little bit of pricing.

00;16;29;23 - 00;16;49;03
Unknown
How does your pricing structure. So we have a free trial. And from there the plans are 249 a month and then 749 a month. And then we can go higher depending on your needs. I should mention, by the way, that we have a coupon code now for anybody who comes, any listener of this podcast, just Coffee Break, you get 25% off your first month at, pigsty.

00;16;49;03 - 00;17;06;27
Unknown
And. Yeah, I mean, it's it's built for scale. Like, if you think about ROI on a PC subscription, I mean, 250 for the first month, you make that back in the first day just on cost savings alone and then hopefully many, many, many times that with revenue growth, whoever has worked with a photographer or with an agency knows that there is a massive cost saving in there.

00;17;07;00 - 00;17;23;22
Unknown
Very good. I think that was a really good overview on how you can optimize your business with more. A B testing was more, artwork out there. And before we come to an end of our coffee break today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? This is the moment for David to take on Goliath.

00;17;23;25 - 00;17;40;11
Unknown
You know your secret weapon as I, So get on there and to start testing and play around with it, you'll see results much quicker than you're expecting. Just take the first step. Where can people go and find out more about you and pixie? So I, you can sign up and get a free trial going. You can also follow me on LinkedIn.

00;17;40;11 - 00;17;54;17
Unknown
Monte deci I'll post content about how brands are scaling, how they're using AI, and then teardowns of brands as well. Cool. I will put the links in the show notes, as always, and you're just one click away. And I hope a lot of people will reach out to you and test pixie wanted. Thanks so much for your time today.

00;17;54;23 - 00;18;17;26
Unknown
Thank you. Gloves.