Take-off Thursday — 6 September 2017
Welcome to Take-off Thursdays, your one-stop shop for the latest news and updates about all things ecommerce and Amazon.
Join me each Thursday in pondering the present and the future of commerce in 2017 and beyond!
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Hi everyone! Today I am writing to you from Vancouver after a whirlwind week of having the whole JS team together in Budapest. Fondly named “Jungle Camp”, our bi-yearly retreats are my favorite time of year. We spend a whole ten days in new locations each time, working, exploring and getting to know each other.
It really is amazing to see a remote team of people come together, and the friendships that form from this are unique and special. We are one big family.
I still pinch myself thinking about the early days of Jungle Scout when it was just 5 of us in Bali. The first unofficial Jungle Camp was actually an accident. I had sold everything I owned alongside Elizabeth and we moved to Bali. I wanted to live the 4 hour lifestyle, but within two weeks I was already chasing my next venture.
This is when the idea for the original Jungle Scout Chrome Extension came about and I decided to run with it…
I hired a bunch of strangers to help with development and after getting frustrated with the time difference I decided to ask if they wanted to come to Bali to work and get to know each other better. The rest, as they say, is history!
Pushing Prices? 💰
In light of Hurricane Irma, Amazon has been criticized of surging prices for certain items in areas such as Florida.
Amazon’s response was that neither them, nor third party sellers, engage in price surging, and that pricing actually fluctuates all the time depending on stock levels, demand and other factors.
As a seller who is always looking to increase sales velocity and profit, I can see that this explanation checks out. Third party sellers are now working smarter by relying on machine learning to automate their pricing optimization, or manually altering their prices in a bid to increase performance.
I think the key learning here is that business owners need to be mindful and respectful of world events such as this, especially when they are close to the areas in which we do business!
→ Read more — Money Watch
Taking Whole Foods Online
The Amazon-Whole Foods acquisition has officially gone through and as a result, over 1,000 Whole Foods items can now be bought on Amazon.com, AmazonFresh, Prime Pantry and Prime Now.
You need to pay an extra Prime fee of $14.99 per month to access this, but
Currently, to purchase many of the Whole Foods items you need to have an AmazonFresh membership. AmazonFresh is Amazon’s grocery delivery service and costs Prime members an additional $14.99 per month.
This is a very early step in the direction of putting popular Whole Foods groceries online, but an interesting development. If it takes off, this could further change consumer trends in the US.
→ Read more — Business Insider
Product Design Specifications
If you haven’t been following myself and Kym in the Million Dollar Case Study: Europe, now is the time to catch up.
I am mentoring Kym through the process of launching her first product and last week she covered how she dug into that all important product design specification.
I like to think of this stage as ‘extra’ product research. At this stage, Kym already chose her product idea and knew what she was going to sell, but she took the time to spend a few more hours studying the data for demand, trends and finding out how to manufacture a version of her product idea that stands out from the crowd.
→ Find out how she did it in the recap post
Jungle Scout Extension 2.0…
At the start of this post I was reminiscing about how Jungle Scout all started and when the Chrome Extension was born. Since then we have come a long way in making hundreds of improvements and iterations on the back end.
The time had come to give the tool a facelift…
I am super excited to be rolling this out. It’s not just cosmetics either, there are new features and data improvements. Check out the full list of updates on our blog 💥
→ Read more — Jungle Scout blog
Quote of the Week
The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.
― Phil Jackson
Book of the Week
I am currently reading, Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick ! Perfect for all the private label sellers reading this and you will have to read it to learn about the SMILE and SCRATCH Test 😉
See you all next week!
