Jungle Scout – My favourite tool for selling on Amazon

Vicki Weinberg: 00:00:04

Welcome to the Bring Your Product Idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell. I'm Vicky Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly, practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started. Hi, so this is another episode that is just me talking to you today. Um, and this is a bit of a special episode as I know it's outside of our usual schedule. Um, this is just a little extra episode. You can call it a bonus if you like, that I really wanted to record, um, because of a conversation that I. With, um, clients and potential clients almost every single week, and I thought, you know what? It's probably a good one to record a podcast episode abouts, and I've got somewhere to send people. So something I get asked a lot, um, as I say probably every week is what software I use to. Work with Amazon and which software would I recommend? So as you can imagine, over the years, I've tried loads of different tools. I'm not gonna name them all here. Um, if you've worked with me before for a long time, um, I might have actually recommended something different to what I'm recommending today. But I have to say my very favorite tool for. Selling on Amazon is Jungle Scout. I have been using it for years. Um, I've used it alongside a lot of other platforms because there were times when it couldn't do all of the things I needed it to do. How I've used it has certainly evolved. I think. As I say, I started using it ever since I started selling on Amazons when I was an Amazon seller myself. I still use it daily to help other Ramas and sellers. So yeah, I have used it very differently over the years. Um, some of the tools have changed and adapted a lot of new tools. Added. And so I just thought I would do this little episode to talk about it a bit. Um, and also to answer a question that everyone also asked me, which is, should I get Jungle Scout? Is it worth it for me? Obviously, I can't tell you, I dunno your exact situation, but I'm gonna talk to you about. What I use, how I use Jungle Scout, I'm then gonna talk to you about some of the features that I don't use and I don't mind telling you why I don't use them. Um, so I'm gonna explain how and why I use everything, and then you can decide whether you think it's something that would be useful for you. So the first way I use Jungle Scout is for finding product opportunities. So there's a tool in there called the Opportunity Finder, and you can use this to uncover high demand, low competition keywords. And this in turn helps you find products with a good profit potential on Amazon. So this basically means it'll help you find products that are in high demand, but not many others if anyone at all are currently selling. So this is useful if you are in a situation where you. I really fancy selling on Amazon. I'd like to maybe a little side hustle or something. Don't really know what I could sell. You could use this tool and you could work out if there's something that would be quite viable. So as I say, these are products that lots of people are looking for on Amazon, but they're not commonly sold at the moment. Um, I should actually say that this is a service I used to offer. So I would do this for people. I would go and research potential products for them. Um, and I don't actually offer that right now, partly because I feel that. Someone with this software and you can just sign up for a month's trial. I've got a special link, um, where you can, it's not something that's open for everyone, but I've got a link that can give you a month. Um, I'm gonna put that link in the show notes, but if you, you could basically sign up for a month, use this software and do it for yourself cheaper than what you would pay me to do it for you. So that's the reason I'm not offering the service has been really transparent. Um, I used to do it, but actually providing you've got the. Um, and obviously you have to spend a little bit of money on the month's trial, but I do think it's something you could, you can do. So you can basically use this tool to get ideas of products you could sell on Amazon right now as they've got high potential they're being searched for, but competition from other sellers is low. So if that's what you're looking to do, that might be useful for you. The second thing I use Jungle Scout for is researching product vi. So what I mean by this is if I'm doing some research into whether there's potential for particular product to do well on Amazon, so I offer something called a, should you say we're a product on Amazon mini strategy session, which is where I look at your. Product, you tell me all the details about your product, and I go and look into whether your product has the potential to do well on Amazon. And as part of that research, one of the things I do is I use the Jungle Scout Chrome extension to look into that product category by looking at other similar products on Amazon. And what I can see, um, Four products, really similar to yours is I can see what the product prices are, so what the average price are, what the high and low end are. I can look at daily and monthly revenue. For other products that you would be, I don't wanna say competing against, but you know, products similar to yours. I can see the bestseller ranking, I can see the number of reviews those listings have. I can even see how well optimized the other listings are. So what this means is you might find. Or I might find out if I was doing the research for you that there were lots of other people selling products similar to yours, but actually their listings aren't really good. So one way that you could get ahead right from the start is to make sure your listing was fantastic. Just as an example, you even get an opportunity score. So this is a number from one to 10 for that particular search term, whatever you've typed in the bar. And this is based on demand versus competition, and it's like an algorithm that works. So this is a really simple way to get a good overview of the niche you're looking at and figure out if there's potential for your product to do well. So for example, when I was um, writing this episode, I used a tool and I typed in bamboo baby towel cause that's something I used to sell. And um, you can see if you look at the blog paste for this episode, that Bamboo baby baby's house calls a one because. High demand for it, but there's also tons of competition, obviously. When I launched that product, I'm trying to think how many years ago that was, maybe six years ago, I did the same thing. I used this tool, this tools we'd around for, I dunno how long years I used the same tool then, and I think it got like a seven or eight, which is a really good score because back then there weren't actually that many people selling bamboo baby towels on Amazon. But obviously it's got super popular and there's also the Jungle Scout sales. this is a free tool. I've written about it before. I have a blog post about it. I have, I think I've probably mentioned in pop podcast episodes, and you can use that to get an estimate of the total number of sales made best on the best based on the best seller ranking in a certain category. So what you would do is you would go to Amazon, you would find a product you're interested in, you were taken over their bestseller ranking and what category it's in. Go to that tool and then you'll get an estimate of the number they sell per month. While this is a good free tool, so if you don't wanna pay for Jungle Scout, you can still use this tool, in my opinion. If you are gonna pay for Jungle Scout and all the other features, you won't need this as the extension is much more accurate and it tells you so much more. So if you. Deciding you're gonna invest in Jungle Scout, this tool isn't for you. Because as I say, if you get the Chrome extension, this does all of this for you. Literally, if you use Chrome, which obviously gets the Chrome extension, when you go to Amazon and you just type in the search bar for every listing that comes up in the results, you get all of this information anyway and it is accurate. So yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't bother with the free tool unless you know, you are looking for a all. You know, you don't want to invest in a paid for at all right now. So the third way I use Jungle Scout is for keyword research. So they have a tool called Keyword Scout, and I use this to research keywords to use when I'm writing product listings and when I am setting up or managing Amazon advertising campaign. So that's Amazon sponsor products. So you can reverse search existing ASINs. So ASINs are listings on Amazon and you can. Um, organic keywords and sponsor keywords. So basically you can type in the asin, which is the identifier, and you can get this on the Amazon product listing. Don't worry. But actually, if you're using Jungle Scout and you're in Chrome, it actually automatically opposite for you, and you can basically find out for that product which keywords they're ranking for. And it'll give you a whole list. Um, and you can also do this for any search term or phrase. So if I typed in bamboo baby towel, for example, into the keyword scout, I would get lots of information for that. But I would also get lots of information for related keywords too. And the sort of things you can find out is how many searches each keyword or phrase gets every month, how competitive it is, and what the cost per click is likely to be. If you run sponsor products, ads, I find all this really interesting. The cost per click isn't always a hundred percent accurate. It's pretty accurate. What I find really interesting is how many searches something gets and then how easy or hard it is to rank. Um, because. Keyword is getting thousands of searches, but it's actually quite easy to rank for because nobody else is targeting that. That's obviously a good one for you to include in your listing text and in your ads. And then you can also use the advanced search to find the top performing keyword for a group of products. So let's say a group of competitors and you can then save your searches as well if you want to run them again. That's really useful. So you could just set up a group, um, and just see how that changes over time. Oh, and there's also so. Speaking of changing over time called the rank tracker. And this means you can view the ranking history for any keywords you set up. And again, that will let you know how those keywords perform. Over time, this might be good if there's a keyword that's really prominent in your listings or your advertising. Um, you are using the rank tracker and you can see, oh, actually less people are searching for that now. For whatever reason, it's gone out of fashion or, I dunno what it is, but people aren't searching for that anymore, which doesn't mean, by the way, they're not searching for your product. They're just not searching for one particular term. If you can see, actually less people are looking for that now. You would then use the keyword scout tool and go, okay, they're not searching for bamboo baby towels. What are they searching for? Are they searching for hooded tales for babies? Are they searching? Swimming, you know, whatever it is. And then you could tweak your listings and your campaigns to reflect that, to make sure that you are always gonna show as high as possible in the search results. And then the final tool I wanted to talk about is the listing builder. I don't actually use this tool to write my product listings, I'll be really honest there. Um, I've been writing Amazon product listings for. You know, before this tool was available. So I'm just doing it the way I've always done it, but I do use it as a final sense check to check how well optimized the listings that I've written actually are. So there are two ways you can use this tool. So you can use the builder, which is to help you write your product listings, and what you do there is you enter a list of the keyword you want to include. So maybe you've got them from Keyword Scout and you save it as a. and then the tool will check that you've included all the keywords you've chosen in your text, and it will also check you within the character limits reach field. So what you can do, and the way I like to use it, is to copy and paste the text I've written into the listing builder and just check that I haven't gone over the character limit limit for a bullet point and things like that. As I say, you can sense check that you've included all of your keywords that you've chosen as. And then there's also a listing grader and you can use the grader to look at your existing listings and find out how you can improve them. This is really useful if you feel your listing should be getting more views or you feel they should be converting better and you're not sure why this could actually be a really good place for you to start. I think it does give you some actual things that you can do to improve your listing. The best way to see this would be to go to the blog post for this episode, which I'm going to include in the show notes because I'll put a little screenshot in there that shows you exactly what you'd find out if you pasted your listing into the listing greater cause. I think that'd be really useful for you to see. But as I say, that could be, so some of this, as I say, you could do, you could do in a month, you could sign up for the month's trial, use some of these tools and see how you get on and decide if you. To keep going or not. There are also some tools of in Jungle Scout that I don't use. Um, and this is mainly because I'm not selling on Amazon myself at the moment, and obviously I'm not gonna be linking up my client's accounts with any of these tools. Um, so some of these tools are, there is a supplier database, and this is where obviously you can search for suppliers to be honest. I don't use this. Um, even if I was looking at searching supplies for myself, I wouldn't use this because I think you'd be better off using another sourcing portal. Um, because when I looked into it, I thought, actually you get more information on Alibaba as an example. You don't have to source In Alibaba, there were plenty of sourcing sites including Google. That's a great one. Um, when I looked into the Jungle Scout supply database, this was the one tool that I thought, unless it massively. Being honest with you, I can't see myself using, and I don't think there's any benefit to using, I think it's probably a database that suppliers can sign up to, you know, an additional place. I can't imagine any of the suppliers there don't have their own websites or aren't on another sourcing platform. Um, Yeah, for me it's not one of the most useful tools, but you know, you might find it helpful. There is also a review automation, which is where you can get it set up. So Jungle Scout will automatically send review requests for your orders if you're signed up to their professional plan. I used to use this feature when I was an Amazon seller, and I did find it to be useful. So sort of back in, back in the day as it were, you could actually set up something so that Amazon would send, well, jungle Scout would send via Amazon, like a customized email to your, to the customer. They're basically saying, you know, thanks, you'd get one that would say, thanks for buying from us. And then you would do another one saying it's been shipped. And then you would do another one saying, you know, if you like this leave of review and you could put your logo in these. You could add a bit of text. You might have noticed if you buy on Amazon, you're not getting any of these anymore. And that's because that's something that just doesn't happen. Um, I don't believe there are any software, less software options left for doing this. Maybe there are, maybe I'm wrong. Um, but Jungle Scout don't do this anymore. It's basically like a little, basically like a standard text reminder that says to the customer, please leave a review. I think if you. um, or I should say by the way, this is compliant with Amazon's rules. In case you were wondering, um, if you are going to use Jungle Scout anyway, I think get this set up because why not asking for someone for a view slightly increases the chance you're gonna get one. Um, but I wouldn't sign up to Jungle Scout just for this. I think it's just like an added, for me, it's not one of the main features anymore. It's just like an added extra. You can also. Jungle Scout to look at your sales analytics and your profit and loss for any marketplaces that you sell in. Again, I'm not currently selling on Amazon, so I don't use this. However, I did used to use it in the past and I found it really useful because, um, it's like most things, the more you put in, the more you get out. But I used to enter all my product fees, shipping fees, like all the information into it, and then I got a really good idea of what my margins actually were when selling on. because it also can sink to the advertising. It can see what the fees you're paying. It can give you a really good picture of how you are actually doing. Um, for me, I remember the first time I did this, I got bit of a nasty surprise, thought I was doing a little bit better, um, profit wise than I was, but at least I knew particularly this actually applied when I was selling in Europe. So this was like, Pre Brexit, I had all of my accounts synced, and it was actually really interesting when I looked at, for example, some of the FBA fees and I was like, oh, actually in this particular marketplace I'm not actually doing as well as I could. And it did help me because I was then able to say, do you know what? I'm only gonna sell these products in these marketplaces. I was able to be a bit more strategic cause I had a much better overview of the numbers. Some of you are possibly doing this yourself. Anyway, um, that's never been my strong point. So actually having this software was really helpful for me. Other things you can do is you can manage your inventory and your selling price. Um, although in my opinion, there's not much of an advantage of doing this. Versus doing this within Amazon Seller Central. Maybe you hate Amazon Seller Central. Lots of people do. So maybe you just want to do it in Jungle Scout for that reason, but to me it doesn't look massively different. And then finally, you can sync your Amazon advertising campaigns so you can better understand how your advertising activities impacting your sales and your bottom line and your profits. So that might be quite. And so that in a nutshell is everything that Jungle Scout does as of now. So I'm recording this early February, 2023, but they're always adding new tools, tweaking existing tools. I can only imagine it's going to get better, but um, if something changes, I'll let you know. So, I guess to sum up, would I recommend Jungle Scout to you? Well, I think I said at the beginning, it honestly depends what you're looking for. I think if you plan on using all, or at least most of the tools and your goal is to grow your business on Amazon, um, you know you're gonna be adding new products over time. Or maybe you've got a fairly big product line now. I think it might be a good investment. I. When I was an Amazon Sellr, I used it every day and I continue to use it every day to manage my client's accounts. I literally always have the Jungle Scout tab open, cause I'm always using it for something. As I said before, I use it for all kinds of things. But I guess the things I use most often are the keyword research tools and the Chrome extension. you can, if you're not sure, you can sign up for the basic package, which is cheaper than the full suite if you just wanted to test out how much you'd use it. This does things like it caps, number of keyboard searches you can do in a day. Um, you get access to most of the features, but it's limited how much you can use them. If you're just getting started, it might be a good place to start. At least you can get a feel for it and think, okay, is this something I would use? Um, however, if you think you're just gonna be adding one product, so let's say right now you're thinking you're just going to research one product, write one product listing and you won't use any additional features, maybe you could sign up for a month and see how you get on. Um, I think that would be the way to start. I wouldn't commit to 12 months. If you are in that position where you're thinking, actually I've only got one product and I dunno how much I'm gonna grow, um, you. You may not want the full suite of tools. Um, but yeah, as I say, I think a month's trial is a good way to start. I do have a link. I'm gonna put it in the show notes, but I will also tell you what it is here as well. It's get dot jungle scout.com/bki with an I. So that's Get Jungle Scout slash Vicky with an I that's gonna be in the show notes and that will give you the option to sign up. And as I say, you can get that. Trial there as well, which you can't get everywhere else. Um, I should also tell you that that is an affiliate link. You know, I've just been talking for God, I dunno how long, I've been talking for a little while, about how much I like Jungle Scout, how much I use it. So I do know that this is the only thing I have an affiliate link for. And it is because I genuinely love it and I think it's a useful tool. Um, but just, you know, I just wanna be honest by that. Um, and in terms of, Costs. It really varies by plans and as I say, if you go to that link, there are lots of special offers and the offers change all the time. So I can't tell you what the offer will be at the time you go and look, but it is worth having a look. Final thing I'll say is, cause this is a question I get asked a lot as well, is in case you're thinking, well, why Jungle Scout? Why not Helium 10? Which if you haven't heard of heating and 10 is another Amazon. Um, I've linked in, I'll link in the show notes and I've also linked in the blog post to a really interesting article I read that was comparing the two. So I'll let you read that for yourself. I'm not gonna talk you through it cause I'm not here to like say you have to be using this tool. Um, as I explained right at the beginning, the whole purpose of this episode is I get asked this question so much and I just thought if you get asked something a lot, it's probably a good idea to do something about it. So, Yeah, next time you ask me, I just might say, oh, go listen to this podcast. Well, I'm not gonna say that, but if you ask me, I'll tell you a condensed version of this. But, um, if people want to know more, they can always come listen to this podcast. So I hope you found this useful. If you do have any questions, I'm. You know, I've tried to be as honest and open about all of this as I can in this episode. Um, but if you have any more questions about, about it, whether you want my opinion or whether it be useful for you or you want some more information about certain features, you know, I'm always happy to, um, to talk about it. Or maybe if you want to see some more screenshots to get an idea of. What the interface is like. No problem at all. So as always, you can always reach out@vickyvickyweinberg.com and that link is always in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening to this special episode. Whenever you are listening, hopefully this one will be timeless and um, have a lovely rest of your day, your week. and, um, the normal schedule will resume on Friday. Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode. Do you remember that You can get the full back catalog and lots of free resources on my website, biki weinberg.com. Please do remember to rate Emma of view this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you.