How to Turn Your Product Listing Into a Selling Machine — Monte Desai | Why Bad Designs Lose Sales, How AI Speeds Up Design, What Drives Higher Conversion Rates, Why Constant Listing Updates Matter, How AI Automates Creative Strategy (#464)

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00;00;00;02 - 00;00;19;12
Unknown
People are changing every day, the algorithm changing every day. So you refresh your listings constantly. You're listing is the only way that you can communicate with the customer. You got to show the product and sell it. They're not in store or they can't touch it. They can't taste it. So you have to do everything you can. Hello. Welcome to another episode of the E-commerce Coffee Break podcast.

00;00;19;19 - 00;00;41;11
Unknown
Let me ask you something. How much money are you leaving on the table because of your product images? Most listings don't feel the because of the product. They fail because of the design, slow designers, expensive photoshoots, endless revisions and tools that spit out images you can't even edit. So what if you could create a high converting, fully edited listing images in minutes, not weeks, and actually increase your conversion rate?

00;00;41;13 - 00;01;00;07
Unknown
To find out how this works, I'm joined by Monte Desai is too fond of Pixii and I too trained on over 100,000 top Amazon listings and used by brands doing billions in revenue. So let's welcome to the show Monte. Great to have you here. Thank you for having me, Klaus. Let's dive right into it. What are most sellers doing wrong when they design their product listings?

00;01;00;08 - 00;01;16;07
Unknown
While huge question, there's a few things wrong. So one, they're probably not designing their listings at often, right? People are changing every day. The algorithm is changing every day. So you need to refresh your listings constantly. Your listing is the only way that you can communicate with the customer. I mean, that's you have to show the product and sell it.

00;01;16;11 - 00;01;38;13
Unknown
If they're not in store or they can't touch it, they can't taste it. So you have to do everything you can. One is there's not there's not design at all because it's so expensive. It takes nine weeks for a designer or at $5,000, depending on the, you know, the agency to get a freelancer. So fix, you know, $3,000 this time spent the money spent at this complexity and the fact that it's a black box.

00;01;38;15 - 00;01;58;03
Unknown
People just don't design that often. Right. And if you think about the best brands, ones that are scaling, they're touching their listing every month. They're updating, you know, because they're always optimizing for conversion rate, whether that's on Amazon or Shopify or TikTok shop anywhere. That's the first thing they're doing. So they're not designing it. I would say, you know, the second thing they're doing is that there's no sites, right?

00;01;58;03 - 00;02;18;06
Unknown
It's sort of just like I hire an agency hired designer. They talk a good game, they put it all together. But the truth is that, you know, we work with a lot of agencies as well. And the truth is that the person doing the selling is usually an expert, but the person doing the work is a designer, and they're asked to be a performance marketer and analytics person, the keyword person.

00;02;18;08 - 00;02;39;03
Unknown
And they're also asked to, you know, churn out designs in a day when these things take creativity, they say time. And so what you end up with is listings that are not back sites, they're not back to what's actually converting on Amazon or Shopify or Tuck Shop or Walmart.com. They're not really tailored to your customer and they often don't understand your product and why it's better than the competitors.

00;02;39;05 - 00;02;54;04
Unknown
So I would say those are the two things. One is just not doing enough. And then the second is the lack of sites. Now what you are working was huge brands. You have analyzed a lot of top listings on Amazon. What is a bad listing design and what does it really cost you in lost sales? Well, you'd be surprised.

00;02;54;08 - 00;03;10;17
Unknown
Some of the biggest brands, the most well known brands, have some of the worst listings, especially if they started out as a physical. You know, they started out, you know, kind of before the Internet or in early days of Internet, you know, you'll see like a porn pan company or a clothing company or a beverage company. And it's just one low res photo on their site.

00;03;10;17 - 00;03;31;08
Unknown
Actually, we have some companies that we're helping. They have, you know, 5000 products. They only have one photo, Right. It's like an oil filter for a car or auto parts. So, yeah, just having these, like really low quality, you know, single image, anonymous listings I think is a bad is a terrible starting point. Now, if you think about digital native brands, so if you have people who know the game, they spend time on the Internet, they've built the brand up to scratch.

00;03;31;09 - 00;03;51;01
Unknown
A lot of them are either founders or CMO's that are involved in listings because they understand the value that a good listing brings to the conversion rate and obviously the revenue. But they're busy, right? These founders, the CMO's or even the performance marketers are super busy so they can't dive deep into what makes product special. You know, if the customer doesn't buy this product, what will their life be like?

00;03;51;02 - 00;04;07;16
Unknown
Right. So we can we can talk some examples about that as well. But although I feel like it did invite this product in, why should I choose you over competitors? And so if you don't tell the story and if you don't answer this hidden question in the customer's mind, then there's a leak. Right. And so if you think about conversion rate, that's a 3% conversion rates pretty common.

00;04;07;20 - 00;04;24;18
Unknown
That means that 97% of people who come to you are listing leads. So every even a 1%, you go from 3% to 4%, right? You've had a 33% of your revenue just like that. And so if you could sell a little bit better and speak to them in a more emotional way, it really gets you what matters for a customer.

00;04;24;18 - 00;04;47;06
Unknown
Yeah, the rewards are just are just so limited. Right. And we've had people telling us that they're on Amazon, their tacos cut in half in two weeks. Right. Because they were just pouring ad dollars onto a listing that just wasn't converting and it didn't speak to the customer. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And you mentioned conversion rate optimization before and designers not understanding your brand, not understanding your product.

00;04;47;06 - 00;05;06;26
Unknown
And you might have a huge catalog. So then they're just overwhelmed with the sheer number of SKUs that you have. Now, this sounds for me and it's what you do a perfect solution for and I want to talk and dive really deep into this. Just tell me what brought you on, the idea that I might solve this bottleneck.

00;05;06;26 - 00;05;25;06
Unknown
So a few years ago I was I was a consultant before starting Pixi. I was it being a company helping Fortune 500 brands. And in all of these big marketing projects, these analytics projects, I would ask them like, Hey, what type? And all this data we're looking at Google Media and Amazon, millions of data points, and we were like, I would just settle the case.

00;05;25;06 - 00;05;40;15
Unknown
It's actually gonna help you, you know, do all this stuff or building these pipelines or building all these cool presentations and this is going to make you more money. And the universal response I get is that, no, it's creative. Creative is always a bottleneck. And so even though we know it's the most important thing that are created better visuals, we can't do anything about it.

00;05;40;18 - 00;05;57;22
Unknown
They feel hamstrung. And so right around that time, 2022, I was getting very, very good. And so I worked on a side project, actually a beauty company for Pixie and so pixie attraction. And then we spun out of any company with their support. And yet, I mean, the rest is history. And so you've been out of power for about three years now.

00;05;57;22 - 00;06;15;25
Unknown
Three years and eight terms is 100 years in real time. So I'm sure you had quite a bit of a learning curve there. And I think founders who tried to do image creation on their own was iTunes or did they end up in a prom tell or really not getting anywhere. You do this differently. You specialize on that.

00;06;15;28 - 00;06;42;24
Unknown
Give me a bit for our listeners an idea how Pixie works and what sort of the learning curve there. A zero learning curve. The way Pixie works is you drop in. You're lucky URL and you click generate and then Pixie will give you a set of set the visuals and the strategy that sells, right? So you'll have a creative strategy of breaking down the target persona of what the reviews are saying, what your competitors offer and how yours is better, and then creative concept, right?

00;06;42;24 - 00;07;07;07
Unknown
So we actually take after you if you ever watch Mad, then that could show a bit that kind of go deep into these New York City advertising agencies. I would charge you a million bucks, by the way. Just do that creative fantasy as we walk through that, like what is the functional benefit? Oh, this dog treat has eight calories to what is the identity payoff of, look, I'm a proud parent of my dog who takes care of that and make sure that nothing's ever happened to them and that they're going to age gracefully and have a long life.

00;07;07;11 - 00;07;32;24
Unknown
Right. And so you have to make sure you're speaking to these deeper needs. Do the thing that Pixie does is it creates a set of seven visuals optimized to sell on whatever platform are selling on Amazon, Shopify, Tick Tock shop that includes, you know, and the seven visual visuals optimized, right? So that what that means is you have the mean, which is for boosting on Amazon all of these click through rate and for Shopify tell your story and then you have a set of visuals that walks through exactly what is in the customer's mind.

00;07;32;29 - 00;07;46;15
Unknown
So will it fit as a common question? Right. So that's a question your reviews will make sure we dress out immediately for what are the ingredients. So that's something the supplement brand or a food and beverage brand that has to be the number two shop. And so and then, you know, eventually ending with lifestyle shots and trust badges.

00;07;46;15 - 00;08;02;26
Unknown
Let me back up, though, just to give you, because I kind of got around the way how this takes you work, job and listening URL. You click generate, you get an optimized listing seven visuals and the strategy that sells. Once you get them, you can pop in and open any of them in order. I could drop editor and you can make changes with point and click.

00;08;02;26 - 00;08;16;01
Unknown
It's like Canva, right? You just point to make changes or you could type in and prompted if you want to. And then once you have that set of seven, then you're like, okay, I'm pretty happy with this one. I love it, or my client loves it or my colleagues love it and it it's converting. Then is timescale, right?

00;08;16;01 - 00;08;39;07
Unknown
So you made the perfect listing. You need to make 100 more listings or 1000 more listings. Our factory feature allows you to recreate that except, you know, a thousand times write a scale, one listing to a thousand, keep the same visual identity, keep the same layout, keep the same styling by self-acceptance. Now, obviously, I needs a little bit of training to understand your brand and obviously a brand, but specifically, bigger brands have brand guidelines.

00;08;39;07 - 00;08;58;28
Unknown
They want to have things done a certain way, a certain font, a certain color. How does pixie deal with that? So in the first 2 minutes, when you get your first listing, she's actually already built your brand profile, right? So it's scraped your listing and a few other things to be able to understand exactly that. The visual identity, the brand font, the color of the logo, the brand voice.

00;08;58;28 - 00;09;14;29
Unknown
And from there it's just a really strong starting point, including for Fortune 500 brands that are using Pixie today. But if you want to modify it because the brands are always evolving, you can go in and change anything. And the great thing is you change your brand profile that affects all of your creative. You'll stay consistent across your brand.

00;09;15;02 - 00;09;43;00
Unknown
Now, we mentioned before a lot of sellers nowadays omnichannel. You mentioned Shopify, you mentioned Amazon. How does Pixi integrate with these platform? Yes, our focus is creative and so if you want to generate a listing for any platform, Etsy could do that, whether it's Walmart, Shopify, TikTok, Shop, Amazon, Upwork, How to Libra and anywhere else. To be honest with you, the way this works is any time, any book, if you have an Amazon listing, you can make it tick tock shop listing or vice versa.

00;09;43;03 - 00;09;57;02
Unknown
As you don't have a listing yet, you want to launch pieces can also help you with that. And these are all everything subscribing here is like 2 minutes. Like it's super quick. Yeah. So you know on the roadmap is a publishing as well that's not quite there yet. People have been just blown away by the creative. I mean I get emails every day.

00;09;57;02 - 00;10;24;13
Unknown
People are like, like this is, you know, we're saving $20,000 a day nowadays and people are like, Oh, well, usually we only redesign five listings. But now with the I was just going to redesign 80, you know, people are saying, I think God came into my life like this is I mean, the feedback has been so astronomically good and so it makes you feel great because, I mean, every one of our users has tried chats of beauty and that's been at a pro and every other tool and in there saying that ours is way better.

00;10;24;13 - 00;10;46;12
Unknown
And so yeah, that, that gives me a lot of, a lot of motivation to go on. Yeah. Let's dive a little bit deeper that do you have any kind of case studies or examples from brands that your work was so that our listeners understand what kind of results they see for sure. I mean, if you take so one founder oh, speaking to recently Kari Thomas, she runs skin perfection which is the high end brand for skin bots, right?

00;10;46;12 - 00;11;08;05
Unknown
And the anti-aging products and science backed products and their typical serums will sell for about 80 bucks and they sell in multiple places on Shopify, on Amazon and Walmart.com. And Keri's really experienced and she's sold so many, many products, many channels and hired many, many agencies over the years. And as she was just saying that on day one, within 2 minutes I saved $3,000.

00;11;08;07 - 00;11;24;10
Unknown
She was saying that, you know, we clicked a button and I got the visuals and they were Amazon ready immediately. So that that's a good one. And well, she had a doing actually is doing that. So she designed her home catalog. She was just she's like, well, this is so easy. And she's a founder, right? She's busy. She's got she got a team.

00;11;24;10 - 00;11;39;03
Unknown
She had to deal with supply chain issues. She has to deal with reviews, Hands is all these things. But she felt it was worth her time because she's getting such a high or a wide her time to just click generate and get the listing visuals say touch base with her to see what she's doing. I'll quit the conversion.

00;11;39;06 - 00;12;00;23
Unknown
Another founder recently, like I said, bought their tacos for 43% to 90% within two weeks. And this is just by improving the listing visuals. You know, agencies I think are a big factor for Pixie any I in general, of course, because they're the ones under the most pressure to create more with less. I mean there's we have one example.

00;12;00;23 - 00;12;21;29
Unknown
So Danielle Bozeman, she runs a creative boutique agency called Mindful Goods. Their focus is 7 to 9 figure brands. And she's, you know, a big voice on LinkedIn. So she's actually been using Pixie for AB testing. So her team, whenever they start a client project, they're like, Hey, can we just get ten, 20, 30 main image ideas to put in for the client on, you know, within a day of onboarding.

00;12;22;05 - 00;12;37;12
Unknown
And so these are types of things. I mean, to think about it like you would say in the old days, right, the pre in the old days last year you would pay often depending on the size of your company, 300 bucks to 5000 bucks just for one photo and you would wait three weeks and that would be your hero image.

00;12;37;12 - 00;12;53;29
Unknown
And Danielle and her team are now shipping you ten or 20 or 30 in a day. And then the creative strategy as to why you would pick one or the other. And so it's app testing use case now has made things possible that were never possible before. You would never do that. You would never just send ten free shots to clients.

00;12;54;05 - 00;13;15;28
Unknown
And so the clients now for brands, I mean, they're they're seeing a whole different level results like we're seeing color company saves 20000 hours a month on photoshoots because you don't need to you know, for a furniture company that we have called Westminster Teeth Care, one of our earliest customers and they sell luxury furniture, we're talking like $10,000 for a side table that sits outside of your porch.

00;13;15;28 - 00;13;41;05
Unknown
It's made of teakwood. It's beautiful, it lasts forever. So that's why they can come in that premium to do a photoshoot. They would have to rent a mansion, right, that's willing to be rented or a friend's a yacht that's a big of a permanent customer base and then ship all this really heavy teakwood furniture or these logs of furniture onto these boats and obviously deal with the yacht owner screaming at them because all you scuff the floor and they all have to have a photographer there.

00;13;41;05 - 00;14;03;01
Unknown
You're talking about $5,000 just for that day of photoshoots. And then you get you get, you know, eight usable photos with Pixie, they're saying that 20,001st of all, they're also like churning out like literally thousands and thousands of photos redesigning their entire catalog. The final piece I mentioned, right, is I think the you know, when talk about cost savings and on time savings, you know, there's the people are like, oh, well, what about designers or what about the photographers?

00;14;03;04 - 00;14;22;02
Unknown
And, you know, is taking their jobs? Are you taking their jobs? And from what we've seen, the answer is no. Like, the answer is actually that the brands, agencies that use Pixie are growing. They're actually hiring. And, you know, the Westminster teach example with furniture, they just wouldn't do it because they would ask for these freelancers, photographers and yacht owners.

00;14;22;03 - 00;14;36;19
Unknown
Economy was such a pain logistically, and the freelancers are busy and so they would never get anything anyway. So they would end up doing like two or three a year. They still do that, if not more, because now they know if I do one photoshoot, I'm not getting eight photos, I'm getting a thousand. These almost killed them. It's Pixie.

00;14;36;19 - 00;15;03;01
Unknown
I can totally remember the old days and the pain that comes was it was photo shoots because I'm in marketing for a very long time. So I have been in situations where I just scratching my head is like my time is sorted somewhere else. Much better than standing here and looking somebody making photos now. But what's the minimal at the minimum content or like a photo that you need to provide to pixies or it can do it's make it one shot, is it?

00;15;03;03 - 00;15;15;10
Unknown
Yeah. So 110 image of just a product. That's all you need. Obviously a better quality that images, the better results are get. I mean I think with a I right now, I mean all this information is going to be out of date in a couple of months. But I'll tell you what is good at what is not good.

00;15;15;10 - 00;15;37;09
Unknown
I it's amazing at CPG, food, beverage supplements, pets, medicines, anything that comes in a package is just is astronomically good billion dollar quality like we have brands that you have in your cabinet right now and it takes me the stuff that has actually gotten really really good in the last month or two is home stuff. So home decor tools, kitchen products, those have gotten really, really good.

00;15;37;16 - 00;15;58;10
Unknown
Where it's still struggling a little bit is truly one of a kind products like there's like literally only one of them and it gets better. It does a pretty good job. Like I had a customer that was they make a set of like ice cube trays in the shape of America. The guys in Canada, by the way, which is hilarious that he's making these America shaped ice trays and probably made in China for us anyway, these American shaped ice trays, one of a kind.

00;15;58;13 - 00;16;17;05
Unknown
And this is actually actually did a pretty good job. I was pretty surprised. Yeah, it's getting better and better. Better even at one of the kind products that it's never seen before. It's very amazing that it can do this and we can see how quickly really is involving basically on a daily basis. Walk me through the typical onboarding process of a new client of yours on an agency.

00;16;17;05 - 00;16;36;26
Unknown
What steps are involved? How long does it take to get up and run? That's about 2 minutes. Yeah. You go to the website, pity that guy. You drop in, you are listening, you are all. And then 2 minutes later you'll have a set of beautiful visuals that you can use immediately or you can edit or you can scale to the rest of your catalog if you want to do more involved process, we can certainly do that with our enterprise.

00;16;36;26 - 00;16;59;10
Unknown
Customers will find portable catalog and will do listing analysis across the entire catalog to figure out where the best conversion rate improvement opportunities are. But for anybody just starting out, whether you're a big brand or you're watching your very first product score a PC day and and drop in, you're listening and you'll get something beautiful. Okay. With that, obviously the question comes how does your pricing structure work for sure?

00;16;59;10 - 00;17;16;02
Unknown
Well, so the free trial is actually very generous. So you can do probably about three listings there at least, which that alone would be, you know, $9,000 depending on where you are. And so that's a that's a free trial is very generous. Then from there, we have a brand plan and then an agency plan. These prices are all going to go up.

00;17;16;02 - 00;17;39;09
Unknown
But I'll just mention what they are now. So the brand plan is about hundred bucks a month and this includes really like a large number of listings. And then the agency plan 20 bucks a month. This allows you to have multiple brands. It allows you to accommodate team members. You get slight support with offers, you get custom playbooks in case you wanted to do really interesting things like translate this image to, you know, the 15 languages in Europe or Yeah, so there's all kinds of fonts.

00;17;39;09 - 00;17;58;29
Unknown
Other people are doing their show. This intended for linear rooms, one in one in all the capitals of Western Europe. It's a fun it's a fun thing you could do. So for the agencies that they have a lot more power features like that. Okay. For that price, it's absolutely a no brainer. I mean, was one product listing you would be already making money, not spending money on two before a coffee break comes soon?

00;17;58;29 - 00;18;19;11
Unknown
And is there anything you want to share with all listeners that we haven't covered yet? I think that with a I it's gotten so good now that you really have to rethink how you thought about everything. Like, okay, if you're a founder and it was never worth your time to use Canva and play with photos like now you just shop in a photo on A and you'll get an entire listing.

00;18;19;16 - 00;18;35;26
Unknown
If you have a large catalog and you're like, Well, I'm not going to redesign a thousand products. Like, that's a waste time. That would be millions of dollars. I mean, doing Pixie, it'll, it'll take we could do it tonight and you'll have it by the morning or if you're like, no, I can't optimize my main image or my listing every month of these days.

00;18;35;26 - 00;18;54;03
Unknown
So much time now you can and it's even though you're if you're a CEO or you don't have much time, you don't have that expertise and you don't diety design skills, you now have a superpower with Pixie, you are now Iron Man. You can drastically grow your revenue. And the good thing is that most people who hear this won't actually do anything right.

00;18;54;05 - 00;19;19;22
Unknown
And so the people who do, you're still in the minority. You still have the edge. You're still much further ahead than all of your competitors. Very true words. And I want to bring this back to the beginning of when we started. You said it conversion rates, that is like 3%. If you increase that by one or 2%, your business basically goes through the roof and now you have the chance to optimize and have to perfect images to perfect visuals, a perfect listing, and really stand out and be better than your competitors.

00;19;19;22 - 00;19;39;13
Unknown
And as you said, you don't need to have a huge budget or a huge team. You can do this as a founder, as a small team and was Pixie is very easy go people go and find out more about you. Definitely just go to Pixie Daddy I Pixie I talked You can start and get a listing in 2 minutes or you can book a call with me or my team members.

00;19;39;18 - 00;19;55;05
Unknown
And then yeah, just to play on conversion rate, I mean, a lot of our users are getting three or four x conversion rate. You know, sometimes I just mention the 1% because it's conservative and that's 30% higher and you can definitely do the three or four acts. I mean, it's a no brainer. Like go improve your listing. Yeah, I think that's, that's the right words.

00;19;55;05 - 00;20;13;07
Unknown
To finish today's episode. Try pixie I had a look at your website and all the examples set out there and they're very impressive. So for our listeners, I will put the link in the show notes as always, and then reach out to Pixie or to Monty directly and get started. Thanks so much, Monty, for your time today. Thank you, class, and a great one.