Hey, thanks for tuning in to another Partner Interview at EcomBalance. At EcomBalance, we’re all about creating win-win partnerships where we are able to grow with other companies in the eCommerce space.
In this exclusive interview, we interview Marc Jepsen from Manage By Stats.
Marc has extensive experience with computer networking, business management, and over 7 years managing Marketing & Sales teams. He started selling on Amazon in 2014 in the supplement and workout categories, and has built up several Brands. In 2015 Marc was brought on to help run and expand operations of ManageByStats and has since helped create over 25 tools that are all geared to making Selling on Amazon a lot easier.
We hope that you enjoy the interview and that it brings value to you as an eCommerce business owner.
Connor: Hey Marc, thanks for taking the time to chat with us here. We love getting to know our partners better so that our community can benefit from what our partners are offering and doing in the industry. To get started, can you give us a high-level overview of ManageByStats and how it got started?
Marc: Absolutely, and thanks so much for taking the time to chat. ManageByStats was created in 2015 out of a need for clarity in Seller Central, and to be able to see how your profit is doing for each product, and it’s evolved into a complete suite of over 20 tools – all geared towards making time consuming tasks automated, allowing you to easily see what’s happening with your business in order to make decisions and take the right actions to make more profit on Amazon.
Connor: That’s awesome! Can you dive a bit more into the products and services that you offer in terms of managing and scaling the Amazon business incredibly easy and as automated as possible? I’m sure our audience would love to know exactly what problems you could solve for them.
Marc: For sure! Our core tools revolve around the concepts of being able to get clarity into how every aspect of your Amazon business is doing, all within seconds, and these tools then help guide you to being able to make decisions and take action on your business, so you know you’re handling the right area to get your sales and profits going back up.
This all starts with our customizable Decisions Dashboard, where we give you the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of your business, with accompanying metrics that relate to those KPIs. From here you can glance at the details and know what area of your business needs your attention, whether it’s related to your Products, your Advertising or your seller performance.
With this we have built in Smart Notifications relating to each of these KPIs, and several other key metrics as well, where you can set up email or SMS alerts when any of these key metrics drop by a percentage that would be important to know for your business.
And in addition to this, we provide Checklists for each of these KPIs, so if you’re ever wondering what you can do to improve one of these metrics, you can view the appropriate checklist and check all the areas that relate to them, then take the right actions to fix things.
Next is our Finances Tools, where you get an accurate picture of where your money is going, and get accurately reconciled financial breakdowns. See the real picture of your Amazon finances for any date range, and get a breakdown of each product’s profitability with a to-the-penny matchup of your Amazon payouts, yet broken down for every product so you can see details infinitely faster than using Seller Central. You can see this breakdown on an Account level, Brand level, product grouping levels, and all the way down to individual products details. Not only can you see the exact financial details on your payouts, but you can also see your TACOS (aka “Total ACOS”, aka “Advertising Cost of Total Sales”) for any groupings and products, as well as how profitable that product is for any date range.
The next tool that helps you dive a bit deeper is our Historical Trend Graphs, where you can see ALL metrics relating to your Sales or Advertising, ALL on one page, with date-coincident trackers so you can see how changes in one area are affecting other metrics. On top of this you have a built-in Change Log, where you can note key changes in your business, and see indicators on relevant graphs so you can see how each change affected your sales. And again, all these graphs can be viewed for your whole account, groups of products, and all the way down to individual products, with custom views so you can see these within a couple of clicks.
Next would be our Advertising HUB, where you get a fast overview of how your key Advertising metrics are doing, and how these are affecting your overall sales and profit metrics for your account. From here you can easily dive into your Campaigns and Keywords, and use our Quick View filters to see which keywords you’re losing the most money on, which you’re making the most money on, and which keywords are not getting you any traction at all. Additionally, you have several other management tools that help you get a higher level of clarity so you know which actions to take to improve your ACOS and profitability.
Next up is our Review Request Automation, where, with a single click, you can have the Amazon Review Request feature automated for your whole account, with fail-safes in place to make sure that for every order you get a Review Request is sent out by Amazon. You can also add filters to this, so you can prevent it going to people who’ve left you a bad review before, or have it only trigger for certain brands or products.
These are just some of our tools that relate specifically to managing your Amazon business, creating automation and making it easier to see what is happening in detail, and enable you to take the right actions to improve your sales and profits.
There are so many others, like our Retriever Chrome Extension, Customer & Transaction Details, Product Metrics, Keyword Tracking, Advanced Product Finder tool, Additional Expenses Tracking, Keyword Scout (Reverse ASIN tool), Keyword Distiller, Wordsmith Listing Optimizer, Launch Tracker, Promo Code Analysis, Geo Analytics Tracking, Repeat Purchase Rate metrics.
Additionally, you can connect up to 12 different countries, and multiple Seller Accounts, and add multiple Users to your ManageByStats account, so you can manage everything from one platform.
Connor: Jumping off of that…if there was one problem you’d say that ManageByStats solves best for your clients, what would it be? Why?
Marc: I’d have to say the best element about ManageByStats is, by using our tools you’re able to make profitable decisions in minutes.
Time is money, and having something wrong with your Amazon product or store can cost you tons of profit. So being able to quickly see what is happening with your business overall, and then being guided to what specific area or product is causing the problem, and having checklists in place to be able to know that you’re taking the right actions to get that thing fixed, is gold for any Amazon seller.
Connor: As the company continues to grow over the next year, what are your plans for expansion? Any new products or offerings or enhancements to your current products?
Marc: Absolutely! First off, we’re constantly in touch with our clients, and constantly getting feedback on our tools. Practically every month or two we are adding new features, slight changes or completely new tools.
Beyond that, we have some great features planned for 2024, all geared towards helping the Amazon seller get even faster insight into their business and being able to take action on these directly from within the software.
And we do have a Special Deal for all your listeners. When signing up through eComBalance, your listeners get 25% off their first year of ManageByStats, and a 30 day free trial.
Connor: And how specifically would you say that ManageByStats and your team is different from other similar businesses in the industry?
Marc: There’s several elements to this:
- We’re an Amazon software company created by Amazon sellers. So we know what the Amazon seller needs and how to make the tools easy to use to get the data needed to make the right decisions.
- We’ve been around since the beginning and have kept on advancing with Amazon changes over the years.
- We have consistently prided ourselves on having the most accurate numbers in the industry. Time and time again we’ve done comparisons with the top softwares out there, and we see our data to be more accurate, more detailed, and more complete than any others. And it’s not just our own evaluations – we’ve heard this time and again over the years from people who come to us, having used another tool, letting us know that the other software numbers just didn’t match up with Amazon Seller Central. There’s a lot to the backend systems of Amazon, and we go to great lengths to make sure we get everything, cross reference it, quality check it, and back-check reports to make sure our details match up with Seller Central to-the-penny.
- And the last point is simple – we’ve been doing this for what, 7 years now… and all this time we’ve been specialists in Management tools. All the other tools have been specialists in one aspect of Amazon, and then added in other tools over time. None of them go to the lengths we do to make the details clear, accurate and actionable.
Connor: What made you decide to get involved in the Amazon software space? What’s your starting eCommerce story? From what we’ve found, a lot of business owners in the Amazon software space have fun stories of how they first started…
Marc: Absolutely, and thanks for having me! ManageByStats was created by Philip Jepsen back in 2015 out of a necessity to get clarity on which products were eating up too much profit. We were running our business with multiple tools and spreadsheets trying to keep everything together, and we knew there had to be a better way.
When our Amazon sales started taking off, there wasn’t. So we put together a team of talented software developers and built what we needed to run our business. Finally, we could breathe again.
For the first time, we saw the true profits from our Amazon sales. We saw exactly what was happening with the traffic and conversion rate for each of our products. And we didn’t have to hire anybody to manually do it.
Within months, we had friends – fellow Amazon sellers – asking if they could get access to our tools. We had never thought of that… we just built them to solve a need for ourselves. So we gave them access. And that’s when we saw the huge changes happening in businesses because of what we’d built.
Fast forward to today and ManageByStats is the most comprehensive single suite of tools to manage your Amazon business, helping you to make profitable decisions in minutes!
Over the past 4 years, we’ve built 25 powerful tools to help increase your sales, increase your profits, and save you time selling on Amazon.
Connor: Love it! Talking more about the eCommerce industry, where do you see it going in the next 1-2 years? Any unique predictions that you could share?
Marc: Well, something we’re seeing a lot these days is brands that do not constantly work on their brand message, connecting with their clients, and engaging with them in some way in the customer journey, are having a much harder time with their overall advertising conversion rates and customer retention. We’ve been seeing increments of this over the last couple of years, and in 2022 there has been more and more concentration from Amazon and Shopify to cater to brands who are on top of their marketing game, both with tools/features and marketing algorithm favorability.
From where I stand, I think there is going to be more and more honing of tools and algorithms that compliment smart marketing efforts, and push to the side those sellers who are not watching, tweaking and optimizing their marketing actions. Now more than ever, there’s a NEED for Amazon sellers to really understand MARKETING and BRANDING, or connect with people who do, so there’s a level playing field with the big companies/sellers.
Connor: Giving you an open mic for a minute, what is something you’d want the EcomBalance audience to hear?
Marc: For experienced sellers, I’d say don’t get comfy. There’s always someone else climbing that ladder and trying to burst into your level of sales. Instead of getting comfy, work on streamlining your business, so you can keep the intensity high, but have systems/personnel in place to be able to handle that amount of traffic easily.
For new sellers, something that really helped me is taking to heart the concept that, as an Amazon seller, you are the CEO of your business, and as such, you can’t just look at how many sales you get each day. There’s a plethora of elements that go into getting more and more sales, and you have to make sure they are all working together. Just looking at sales and not knowing if something down the line is broken, when that break catches up to your sales, you’re now scrambling to fix the issue, whereas you could have spotted the problem before it really hurt your sales.
Connor: Changing gears a little bit…When it comes to bookkeeping and accounting, what do you think the biggest pain points for business owners are? Feel free to speak from personal experience as well.
Marc: Accuracy and speed. Being able to get accurate details for your entire account, as well as being able to see accurate details listed out by individual products, can be very hard to get. And being able to get this data easily, for any selection of products, with any date range, make accounting a breeze.
I’ve met many sellers who had no clue what their actual profit was, yet were happy about their high revenue numbers, hearing months later that they were unable to pay for their next larger shipment of products due to not knowing how much of their profits were being eaten up.
Connor: As we close this out, I just have one more question. Where is the best place to find and follow you and the company online? Also, if you have one, is there any special offer that you’ll be offering to the community today?
Marc: For sure, you can connect with me on LinkedIn here, as well check out ManageByStats’s LinkedIn page here.
