Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jungle Scout CEO Greg Mercer (Part 1)

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How do brands operate on Amazon? A fascinating window into a fast-growing world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Jungle Scout.

Greg Mercer: I’m the CEO and founder of Jungle Scout. It is a platform to empower entrepreneurs, small businesses, and brands around the world to do better on e-commerce. We do that in a number of different ways. We provide analytics and insights to help them manage and optimize their business. Right now, we are primarily focused on Amazon. We are also supporting sellers and merchants on Walmart and have a goal of doing it throughout e-commerce.

Sramana Mitra: What specifically do you offer to companies like Walmart and Amazon?

Greg Mercer: Our customers are the third party sellers selling through the Amazon marketplace as well as brands and manufacturers selling their goods on Amazon. 

Sramana Mitra: I see, you are taking the smaller merchants and helping them sell on the Amazon marketplace.

Greg Mercer: Yes, a majority of our customers are the smaller merchants, but we also serve and support the largest brands.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down. Tell me about the areas in which your customers need help where you provide them with service. 

Greg Mercer: The thing that we are best known for is our ability to understand consumer behavior on Amazon and e-commerce in general. Through that understanding, we provide insights to the seller. Let me give you some examples that would help. We can tell you, with a high degree of accuracy, how well every product on Amazon sells. We can tell you that a certain type of Colgate toothpaste sells 10,000 units per month.

We can also tell you which products are trending and which customers are purchasing. We can also tell them if customers are searching for this type of product and if they are not finding that item on Amazon. That would be a good opportunity for you to sell. There are other things like what the most popular color is or what new areas of opportunities there are on Amazon.

Sramana Mitra: You monitor Amazon data and look for gaps in what people are looking for. 

Greg Mercer: Yes, that is one use case. Another use case of understanding demand on Amazon would be forecasting demands. This is understanding that, for example, this product sold this well for the past year and this is what I am estimating the demand is going to be the following year based on the demand on Amazon.

A known use case would be to understand how much market share you have so that you know that your Colgate toothpaste has 10% of the market share. We can tell you what the leader with 20% share is doing differently. 

Sramana Mitra: Everything that you are describing requires access to data. What is your data source?

Greg Mercer: We have a whole bunch of data sources. Our secret is, it’s not necessarily any single data source. It’s our ability to collect tons of data in a number of different ways and then turn that into insights. We have a huge data scientist team that is constantly building models for things like estimating unit sales on Amazon or estimating search volume for different keywords on Amazon. 

Sramana Mitra: Does Amazon offer that as an open set of data?

Greg Mercer: They do not.

Sramana Mitra: How do you get it?

Greg Mercer: What Amazon does offer is a number of signals of what is doing well. For example, Amazon offers something called the best seller rank where they rank how well a product is doing. For example, for coffee, they show you the number one, two, and three sellers. They offer other demand signals of where they rank products on the page or how quickly they are receiving reviews.

There are a variety of different signals that we can pull together. Our data science team builds models to turn that into real numbers that are easy for customers to understand.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jungle Scout CEO Greg Mercer
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