Our Secret Recipe

Howdy manufacturers. Jon Hoch, founder of Power Equipment Direct, here to talk about secret recipes.

So everybody seems to have one. Kentucky Fried Chicken has their eleven herbs and spices, and Coca-Cola has their classic coke and their new coke, and they won't tell us what their recipe is.

And Google's got an algorithm, and they wont tell anybody what their recipe is. And like we talked about in our last video, the point of Google is to get higher rankings. And the better rankings, the more clicks you get. And the same works for our listing pages.

But we're going to do something. We're going to tell you our secret recipe today, because we feel if we tell you what it is, that you could manage your listings better, and you have a better chance at selling products on Power Equipment Direct sites.

So let's take a look at our pressure washer site. If you recall, we carry twelve products that we've put into the listings. There's 91 products. The first 12 are shown, everything else is on page two, and everything on page two is pretty much dead.

How do you get high listings, right? You'll notice that there's a couple tags that we have on our site.

The first one is the HOT listing. The HOT listing is for three different types of products. The first is for scratch and dent. If we put a scratch and dent on our site, it'll last about an hour and it's gone, so you don't see very many of those.

The second thing is for closeouts. So if you have inventory collecting dust in your warehouse, bring that inventory to us. We'll put it at the top of the page, we'll tag it with a closeout, we'll put it on sale, and we'll blow through this inventory.

And third, if you want to do vendor funded discounts and put products on sale, we can put them on there, and we'll put them on sale, and they'll be at the top of the page, and we'll go from there.

So if you don't want to give us closeouts, or vendor-funded discounts, how do you get better rankings on our site?

Well, it's actually pretty simple. The first thing we do is we give everybody a chance. For 45 days, a new product will be listed on this site, and in 45 days they have a chance to sell products.

And after that window has opened, it'll fall into our algorithm and our rankings, based on the number of sellers.

So 26 percent bought this, 11 percent bought this, so on and so forth.

The more the customers sort, the more likelihood that there's going to be a tie. Say for example, there's 3 products that we've only sold one of each, right? So you'll notice that here's an example that these two tied. So how do we determine whether this one or this one is shown?

It's actually pretty simple. In our mind, the tie goes to the reviews. And it's not the number of reviews, it's the number of stars that the reviews have put together. So for example, this review (one review) has five stars, so it gets five points.

This one has 41 reviews, and it's got a bunch more. So because it has more stars, it shows up higher.

So one thing you could do is write more reviews, get those star ratings higher, and then you'll get higher on the page.

The other thing is we have a second listing page, okay, which is our reviews listings page. And it's a little bit different. It not sorted based on best selling, it's based on those letter grade rankings that we always talk about.

Here's an example of where we have 76 gas pressure washer reviews. And we scroll down on the page, and we have A+s. We actually have four A+s.

And then if we keep going, it just goes to A's and A's and A's and A's and A's. Now I want to show you some data here, because on these pages, if you earn an A+, hats off to you. You deserve to be on the top of the page. We don't give out many A+s, and I'll prove it to you.

We actually only have given out 9 A+s on the pressure washer site. So those 9 products deserve to be at the top.

But we also have 178 A products, so when you look at these pages, it's going to be just a lot of A's. It's going to be twelve A's, twelve A's, and twelve A's.

So there are ways that you can make your A's higher on the page. Next we're going to talk about Preferred Placement, and that's really what it goes down to. If you've done your reviews, and you've done everything you can to get better rankings, and it's still not quite working out, there is an opportunity to get your way higher on the page.

And next, we're going to talk about how to get that done, but before we do that, I'm going to actually have some lunch, and have some finger-licking good chicken.

So thanks allot, and have a great day.

NEXT: Preferred Placement 101 - How to Get Better Rankings in Our Listings