How AI Is Changing The Way Amazon Is Managed — Jerry Vida | How AI Is Automating Amazon Optimization, Why Focusing On Profit Is Better Than On Revenue, Why Manual Amazon Tasks Hurt Business Growth, Why Restructuring Accounts Saves 70% Ad Spend (#439)

In this episode, we dive into how AI is reshaping Amazon store management and the critical importance of focusing on profitability over just top-line revenue. 

Jerry Vida, Co-founder of Peak ROAS, shares how his agency helps seven- and eight-figure brands scale by leveraging AI to streamline time-consuming tasks like PPC and listing optimization. 

He explains why a clean ad account structure eliminates wasted ad spend and offers a 90-day profit guarantee for new clients.

Topics discussed in this episode:  

• How focusing on profitability beats chasing top-line revenue.
• Why PPC optimization and listing updates are the biggest time bandits.
• Why manual, repetitive tasks hurt business growth and efficiency.
• How internally built AI agents streamline listing copy and A/B testing.
• What an aggressive A-B testing schedule does for conversion rates.
• How restructuring a messy ad account leads to massive profit jumps.
• What is required for an ideal customer for high-impact changes.
• Why an ad account restructure redirects up to 70% of wasted spend.
• How new sellers can use ChatGPT to get up to speed fast.
• What a 90-day no-risk profit guarantee means for new clients.

Links & Resources 

Website:  https://peakroas.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-vida-255719126/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/peakroas/

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at https://tinyurl.com/mr2rpb9u

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Transcript

Claus Lauter (06:17.239)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the E-Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we're diving into a topic that's on every Amazon seller's mind, how AI is reshaping the way stores are managed. From automating teachers' tasks to helping brands make smarter data-driven decisions, AI is no longer the future. It's here and it's changing the game. To learn more about AI and Amazon, I'm joined by Jerry Wieder. He is the co-founder of Peak Rowers, where he helps seven and eight figure brands scale on Amazon.

With 15 years in e-commerce and experience on both ends, the brand and the agency side, he brings a proven track record in PPC listing optimization and growth strategy. So we have a lot to cover. Let's get started. Jerry, welcome to the show.

Jerry Vida (06:57.102)
Thanks, appreciate being here.

Claus Lauter (06:59.575)
Jerry, let's start simple. Many Amazon sellers struggle to keep up with daily tasks. What are the most time consuming parts of running an Amazon store?

Jerry Vida (07:07.768)
Right now for us, especially from brand owners ourselves and what we're seeing in the agency, a lot of stuff is just keeping up with optimization within PPC. can be a pretty time consuming task, combing through massive amounts of data just with all of the advancements they've made, with all of the different placements, ad types. It just becomes very cumbersome.

And then what we're also seeing a lot of time being spent in is listing optimization with all the different A and B experiments and how Amazon is getting very particular in the way that you write titles and what you're including in bullet points and descriptions. Going through and having a system to update that stuff efficiently is really where we're seeing a lot of bottlenecks right now.

Claus Lauter (07:58.766)
Before we dive a little bit into the technology part of it and into AI, something we just talked in the pre-chart about, many brands focus on revenue and ROAS instead of profits. You do it slightly different. Tell me why it's so important to focus on profit.

Jerry Vida (08:15.278)
why it's so important to focus on profit. So I own brands and the agency. So I do work on both sides of it. And as an example, a couple of years ago, we did on one of our skincare brands, we cleared the year at 6 million in revenue, right? With a pretty decent profit, just about a million dollars in profit. And I said to the team, guys, we are going to push hard this year.

like really hard and I want to get that to 10 million. I want to get eight figures on that particular brand. So man, I pushed the team. I pushed PPC. I pushed our factory, know, cashflow issues just because of inventory running all kinds of crazy deals with Amazon. And we were just shy of 10 million. But when we sat down and looked at everything, we did less in profit, right? Because of how hard we were pushing with everything. So...

You know, it was great to be able to say, Hey, you know, like I did eight figures on this brand and everything like that. But when it came down to it, you know, instead of making a million dollars in profit was, you know, 6 million in sales or 7 million in sales. I was actually, you know, a little bit shy of that. So that's really when we started to take a hard look at the amount of effort, the inputs that we're putting into the system and how those impact the outputs, right? Which at the end of the day is profit.

Right? Like, you you can say like, Hey, I did a hundred million in sales, but if I made a dollar, who cares? You know what I mean? So we sat down and just kind of fundamentally redefined the way that we looked at things and what the goals were that we were going to go for.

Claus Lauter (09:56.367)
I think it's a very important part that you mentioned there and also for our listeners, if you read all the news, the headlines like seven, eight, nine figure seller, most often than not, it's revenue and profit, as you said, is really what counts. Now running an Amazon is a busy business. How does relying on manual process actually hurt your business and your growth?

Jerry Vida (10:20.174)
Well, mean, people have a finite amount of bandwidth, right? So for example, if we have a client where we're working with them and say they have a portfolio of 500 SKUs, 500 ASINs, right? How long and complicated would it be if we had to go through and rewrite all the titles because Amazon says you can't use a specific word in the title more than twice now, right? So it's...

You know, people, you know, as important as they are, and, know, we absolutely do things within the agency manually, right? Like there are just things that have to be done by humans, but those repetitive tasks, we have really leveraged technology and AI to help us with streamlining that stuff.

Claus Lauter (11:05.806)
I'm trying to keep on the forefront with Amazon does what Amazon is really launching one AI tool after another. So it's really difficult to keep the overview. So AI is everywhere. How is it actually challenging for Amazon management or for store management today to really keep up with all of this?

Jerry Vida (11:25.902)
Well, what we have done is you're right, there is like a new tool coming out every five seconds across every different place within Amazon. You have video creation tools, you have image creation tools, you have different copy tools, you all these different things that, you know, that are quintessential facets of Amazon that people build tools for, right? What we have done is we have looked at what our specific needs are, right? And then we've built a lot of AI agents internally.

Right? Like ones that we use to do things. mean, other, are there video creation ones that are a little bit outside of the scope of our abilities? Sure. You know, like we, leverage, you know, third party tools for that. But for the everyday SOP type of tasks that we can have like VA's or someone do, we try to write our own agents to do that.

Claus Lauter (12:18.574)
How would you sort of order in the rank of the most important tasks that can be done by AI the tasks that you're doing to optimize a store?

Jerry Vida (12:28.346)
Right now, the stuff that we're leveraging heavy within AI is one of the things that we have been engaging with all of our customers and with our brands that we own is a very, very rigorous A-B testing schedule, right? Where we're always testing ASINs to improve conversion rates, click-through rates, like those type of things. The manual task of running a schedule like that, I mean, like I'd have to hire multiple people to do it, right? And...

using internally built AI agents. We have a pretty great system now for optimizing all of the copy within listings, for example, building out frameworks for enhanced brand content, those type of things, especially with incorporating in a lot of the Cosmo relevancies that Amazon is doing with the AI interfaces that they have within their system.

We do pretty in-depth research now on ideal customer profiles for the type of person who would be most likely to buy this type of product. We go through and build out buyer decision questions on all of those. So all of the right questions for that particular ideal customer are being answered to help, you know, make the conversions. To sit down and do this individually would just be, you know, nearly impossible to do with large catalogs.

where AI has made it where I can run through a listing in 15 minutes, as opposed to hours and hours and hours. So that's one of the things that we're doing is to kind of make overall management easier. We're also starting to incorporate it into some of the ad management, especially with the way that it's semantically grouping keywords. It's combing through search term data and finding

patterns within search terms that we can use for campaign expansion or negative keywords. So we're starting to streamline a lot of the processes with automation that way. So again, where it would take someone hours to comb through search term reports, I we can do it in minutes now.

Claus Lauter (14:39.054)
I think a lot is happening there and people are really confused what they actually can do. Now you have the big advantage that you are a seller for a very long time, you're in the game for 15 years plus and also on the agency. Now if somebody comes to you, what would you say they should leave on their plate and what should they give over to an agency?

Jerry Vida (14:56.75)
Well, the way that we look at it is any of the repetitive task type of things, Like catalog management, right? Like we're not sitting there and designing new products for people, right? Like they know the brand better than we do at that point. But a lot of the catalog management tasks, any of the promotional scheduling tasks, you know, because we focus heavily on the offer that people make to Amazon customers.

And then, you know, with the advertising, just because of the complexity of advertising and how long it takes to do, we have internally developed tools and a pretty decent system for managing all of that.

Claus Lauter (15:40.334)
Can you give an example and you don't need to name the brand of a brand that you worked with and while onboarding what kind of optimization processes you saw and what results at the end of the day came out of it?

Jerry Vida (15:52.376)
Yeah, for example, I started working with this smaller supplement brand. I enjoy working with supplement brands, reoccurring revenue model brands. their advertising wasn't terrible in regards to extremely high A costs or really high tacos numbers, comparatively speaking, between ad spend and overall revenue. Where their issue was,

the advertising was fundamentally structured in a way that did not allow them to scale their business. And it was lumping a lot of ASINs into the same campaigns. It was not having clearly defined goals for different campaigns, like those type of things. So just simply going through and restructuring their advertising account

We were able to actually, well, we lowered their A cost a little bit, but we kept their ad spend about the same. And we're actually able to generate an additional 15,000 a month in profit by just optimizing things and getting it in front of people the right way. And what we do is we typically use, well, we use a third party software for some of the reporting on it.

When you did a quarter to quarter comparison of the quarter prior to us taking over in the quarter that, you know, that the first quarter that we did, there was an average 15,000 a month increase in profitability just by restructuring campaigns, working on some of their, the way that the offer is presented to people, and then doing a little bit of listing optimization as far as honestly titles and bullet points.

Claus Lauter (17:46.048)
You mentioned listing optimization. that's a part. mean, everyone is using ChatGPD or any of the other large language models. Is that something that people can start working on their side and then come to you so that basically they take a little bit of the workload off before they come to you? Or is that something you start from scratch with them?

Jerry Vida (18:02.498)
It depends, right? We've taken over brands at all stages, right? Or started to work with brands at all stages where some of them have never run an A-B experiment or done any type of listing optimization at all, right? And where we've stepped into ones that are on an extensive schedule like we are, right? And what I would say is that as long as the ASIN is eligible, because you have to eligibility requirements within Amazon to do the A-B experiments, I would be running them all the time, right? Like typically,

You know, we run four week experiments and as long as you have enough click through and enough sales volume, you'll get data on that. And honestly, if you have the ability to run an AB experiment every four weeks, you know, throughout the year, I would continuously be doing that type of stuff. But again, right? Like that does lead back to, know, that profitability equation does the amount of input that you're putting into the system doing all of that makes sense as far as profitability goes.

you know, so, but we typically try to run on a pretty aggressive schedule with that. and I would suggest to anybody, you know, whether you do it every month or, you know, once a quarter, just test something, right? Like it's never going to get better unless you do.

Claus Lauter (19:18.137)
Very, very, very true. Now, Amazon is a beast. It's a universe in itself, and you need a lot of experience actually to be successful there. How do you think AI can help new sellers to get up to speed and really start selling very, very fast?

Jerry Vida (19:33.21)
One of the things that honestly that I like to do a lot with ChatYPG is have conversations to learn things, right? So sitting down and just asking questions, like for example, this like wonky thing that Washington state is doing with taxes. I'm not sure if you're familiar, but yeah, the state of Washington in the United States now is gonna be charging people 10 % on the advertising spend. So as a tax, yeah.

So, you know, they're not very clear on it. But what's nice about it is you can honestly have a conversation with ChatGPT and it'll put it into terms that are easily understandable. Right. So for like new sellers, you know, there is so much information out there and there's, you know, years and years and years of YouTube videos and like all this other stuff to comb through.

And honestly, sit down with ChatGPT and just ask it questions. And it's going to summarize a lot of that stuff for you. And it's like a wealth of knowledge. Take some of it with a grain of salt with anything. But at the same time, just having that research tool at your fingertips is unbelievable compared to the experience that I have with learning Amazon, because I didn't have that when I started.

Claus Lauter (20:53.967)
That's true. I'm in the game for a very long time and I wish I had all the access to information that we have nowadays. Like on the fingertips you get an answer to whatever the question is. It's so much better. Now you were touching on your customers and the brands you work with. Who's your perfect customer?

Jerry Vida (21:04.644)
Is it?

Jerry Vida (21:12.42)
You know what, like my perfect customer is someone that's probably doing upwards of three million a year in Amazon, who has a decent ad spend, where I can make some pretty impactful changes within their account. We do have a pretty rock solid guarantee for the agency after doing an account audit. If I am not able to

double the ROI on the investment of the management fee that we have in the first 90 days, I'll give the client their money back. So for example, if I'm charging someone $4,000 a month for management, and in those first 90 days, if I cannot cover that plus an additional $12,000 in profit, then I give them the money back.

So I'm really looking for brands who are decently established. I I work with brands that are not. I have a couple of startup brands that I just see value and opportunity in, and I'm more than happy to work with them. But my ideal is someone who's doing about $3 million in sales plus a decent ad budget where we can make some impact, especially if it is a reoccurring revenue model.

uh, based business, you know, supplements, consumables of some kind, something like that.

Claus Lauter (22:35.257)
Mm-hmm.

Claus Lauter (22:39.471)
I mean, this 90-day onboarding offer that you have is basically a no-brainer. It's a no-risk guarantee that somebody has starting working with you. Walk me through the typical onboarding process of a new client. What steps are involved and how long does it take to get up and running?

Jerry Vida (22:45.444)
Correct.

Jerry Vida (22:53.626)
Well, what we typically do is we sit down and do an account audit where the first round of account audit is we request several different reports out of the client account and we go through and take a look at those. And then from there, if we see that there is opportunity and we can help, because there are times where I look at people's stuff and I'm like, hey, whatever you guys are doing is working, you know, just keep doing what you're doing, right? Like you do run into that, right? Nine times out of 10, that's not the case, but it does happen.

But basically we go through and look at all of those reports and if we see that we can sit down and help, then we will ask for access to the account to do a complete audit. Once all that is done and everybody agrees to us working with the brand, we typically start by pulling all of the different backup reports that we would need, like account resets, like those type of things.

And then the very first thing that we sit down and work on is tuning their offers, right? Where we see that that is one of the most impactful things where we build out promotional offerings, coupons, brand Taylor promotions, those types of things. And it's something that happens very, very quickly and shows like immediate impact. At the same time, we start identifying what the top drivers of the account are. The 80-20.

And we start systematically setting up A-B experiments for all of those to optimize indexing, optimize placement within the SERP, and optimize click-through rates. And in conjunction with that, we sit down and do an entire restructure of their ad account. Because 95 % of the time, people's ad accounts can be quite messy.

So going through and restructuring those into the format that we use that allows us to scale things and to cut down on a lot of the wasted ad spend. So typically, those major things happen within the first couple of weeks. And then there's optimizations that are ongoing. So usually, we're into a

Jerry Vida (25:13.466)
pretty decent place where we meet our obligations as far as profitability within those 90 days.

Claus Lauter (25:21.68)
That's very quick and obviously we're getting into Q4 now. So if you want to jump on board with Jerry and peak ROAS, you need to come quickly over to get optimized. And I was just smiling when you said ad accounts are messy. Basically, I need to look at my own one. I think it's a mess as well.

Jerry Vida (25:26.872)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, we don't got a lot of time.

Jerry Vida (25:42.01)
Well, hey, if you just want me to take a look at it, no, it's like we see some crazy stuff in ad accounts. Like I just recently took over a client account. They're on track for 10 million this year. So they're very healthy, right? Very healthy brand. Their ACOS is unbelievably, it's great, right? But when you go past the surface, when you peel back some of those layers,

Claus Lauter (25:57.552)
Okay.

Jerry Vida (26:09.666)
you see that 70 % of their ad spend is wasted. Exactly, like those type of things. And it literally just comes down to really bad structural issues with the way that they are grouping ASINs and keywords together. And once that stuff is cleaned up, we'll be able to redirect all of that wasted spend into the healthy stuff. But again, it is just

If you have a bad foundation, it just makes it tough to be able to do things efficiently and scale. And that's the biggest thing that we see with the vast majority of the accounts that we take over is a lot of the issues are solved by correct structure of the ad groups and how the targets in them are associated with the products.

Claus Lauter (27:04.624)
I think it's a problem most every business that scales and grows fast has. Standard operating procedures are somewhere at the sideline, best practice somewhere at the sideline. It's about growing, it's about day-to-day business. all of this basically has, there's no time to optimize. And then it's good to get someone like you on board who comes with a fresh set of eyes and really rips it out in bits and pieces and then restart building it in a perfect way.

Jerry Vida (27:33.324)
Yeah, I'll go, I'll just say, yeah, what, are the thing is too, is, is it's about consistency with that, right? Where we have very, very strictly written standard operating procedures and campaign structures that we always adhere to on every client account and our own account for that matter, our own accounts, because we have three brands. and we have just found that when you do things with consistency, the results are much better.

So.

Claus Lauter (28:05.04)
couldn't agree more. Jerry, before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?

Jerry Vida (28:13.186)
yeah, again, Klaus, you're right. We are coming up on Q4 here, right? So there is still time. we do have, a couple of spots available. we're going to innovate, next month in, New York. So if, if any of your, listeners, you don't want to stop by the booth, come, you know, have a conversation. but just, yeah, hop onto peakroas.ai.

and sign up for an account audit and we'll get in there and get it done for you.

Claus Lauter (28:46.256)
Perfect. I will put the link in the show notes and you just one click away and I hope a lot of people will jump on board. think right now is the right time to do so. And I'm sure Q4, even with all the warnings economy will be still a good Q4. Jerry, thanks so much for giving us an insight what's happening within AI and Amazon. I think we are on an exciting journey there and AI will definitely help tell us to get more successful. Thanks so much for your time today.

Jerry Vida (28:59.084)
Of course.

Jerry Vida (29:11.108)
Klaus and I really appreciate the time and thanks for everything.