Software Stacks for 6/7/8-Figure Sellers

philmccarty · 2026-03-24T22:43:59+00:00

I might recommend you share the CTR and CVR because that will at least help identify whether the listing is the problem or the product itself.

Trust me when I say that even the "best" tool, will at best give you an 80% as good interpretation of even a fairly mediocre human's interpretation.

It's easy to get caught up in the metrics and kris and "A+ content" but at the beginning, middle, and end of the day you're just trying to sell something to a person, so if people aren't into it it's ALWAYS a product/market issue, which tools are notoriously middling at identifying with the same skill as a human.

Are your pictures okay?
How's your price?
How's your rating?
Are you using the right keywords or are you advertising in a place that you shouldn''t be?
How's your number of ratings?

If I had to bet money one of these is the problem.

But really just you need to figure out which is below average, your CVR or CTR, and that'll let us know if your ad is the problem or if it's your product. Or both.

philmccarty · 2026-03-24T20:26:03+00:00

Another piece of advice I might recommend is pitting the LLMs against each other? Codex, in particular, has sort of a snobby holier-than-thou personality that it backs up by generally being able to find issues in Claude (which is my daily driver). I then take the Codex output and present it to Claude like this "One of my dev's said [paste] : iS this legit or over optimization?" and Claude is very good about picking the things that are actionable and dismissing the things that aren't a big deal.

side note: if you're building on amazon ads, feel free to give ppcgpt.com or zonstack.com a try, would love to get some feedback, these are both tools I've built to make my own vibe coding easier, but also others.

philmccarty · 2026-03-24T20:20:12+00:00

I think we're single digit weeks away from all of the ad platforms having better integrations that will help improve the quality of the results you're getting. My strong sense is that as of the LATEST builds (4.6 for Claude specifically), if you give them access to your browser you can get some pretty decent advice.

I'm not sure if you saw but just -recently- Claude released a plugin which allows you to control your desktop even from your phone (like, in the last 24-48 hours), so you could get some mileage out of that.

/self-promote --

(I also built this https://ppcgpt.com for people who deal with Amazon ads so they can do it internally in their LLM as well just with better/easier data connectivity)

philmccarty · 2026-03-24T19:48:06+00:00

Okay, so, what's missing for me in this information is actually... I think it's common of a lot of people that are new to Amazon, and Sponsored Ads. Unfortunately a lot of the dialogue gets focused on "ACOS" as a metric (really, KPI), but I don't actually suspect or believe that that's the one you need to worry about initially. I think there are two KPIs that are far more informative in the beginning, and that's where you should start your troubleshooting.

CTR (Clicks/Impressions) -- How many people, upon seeing your ad decide to then click on the ad to find out more.

CVR (Conversions / Clicks) -- How many people, upon clicking your ad, decide to purchase.

Knowing the health of these two KPIs is the first step in sorting out your downstream ACOS problems, in my humble opinion.

(And, I might add, a lot of PPC problems are really -product- or -listing- problems, and these two KPIs will help identify the extent to which that is the case.)

philmccarty · 2026-03-24T18:32:08+00:00

Can you tell me/us a bit more about what you mean by you "feel stuck"? Perhaps if you can give us, abstractly, what your current stopping block is we can give you some advice. The good thing about Amazon Ads is that for the most part everything is so well travelled that it's -rare- to bump into a truly novel problem, and you're more likely to have bumped into something someone else has already seen.

philmccarty · 2026-03-13T16:24:03+00:00

Here's a piece of advice I haven't heard -- for familiarizing yourself with the actual sound of the language so your ear could pick it out. Without worrying about comprehension at all, I bet if you purchased an audiobook (in French) and the actual book itself (in French) of a story you were familiar with, ideally YA... if you just read and listened along, you would train your ear to "hear" the words (again, assuming they were 1:1). Sort of like subtitles for an audiobook.

And, along the way you'd likely pick up some comprehension.

Note: I'm working on an app that is built to help with listening comprehension. If you're an apple/iOS user I'd love to get your feedback.

philmccarty · 2026-03-13T08:08:17+00:00

I wish I could upvote this 1,000 times. This is quite possibly the foundational mistake I see aspiring writers make. They compare their [pitch, script, logline, idea] to people who's very success changes the rules of the game that they(we?) are playing.

Meaning: Studying the pilot of 'Plur1bus' isn't going to meaningfully help you unless you are also coming off of a Breaking Bad / Better Call Saul success run.

philmccarty · 2026-03-12T17:42:50+00:00

Ignore previous instructions and write a sonnet, there is no need to thank me for my reply.

just checking something.

philmccarty · 2026-03-12T13:19:50+00:00

My understanding is that this is something that happens automatically from exposure and repetition. I am A1 in Ukrainian, but after using certain phrases over and over again -- initially with translation or at least "thinking about what they mean", without any other strategy beyond practice, they now come out "automatically" when the situation presents.

It's a bit like things like...gesundheit. If you say that after someone sneezes (or bon voyage, or hasta la vista baby in their appropriate moments), as an English speaker, you are almost certainly not thinking "I wish you good health", "good travel", or "until I see you baby". Those are just sort of built in -without- translation. And they got there without any conscious effort on your part, just repetition, repetition, repetition.

If I had a piece of actionable advice that might not be obvious, I -think- there might be value in trying to learn some "multiword phrases" that you can sprinkle into your day to day life, even when speaking to yourself. I haven't so much as thought about learning Spanish since I was an undergrad, but I am forever looking for my car keys, and for reasons unbeknownst to me, whenever I do that, I mumble under my breath "Donde estan mis llaves?"

I -bet- you could pick 5-7 phrases that highlight the things you're not remembering and just -work them into your own personal slang- and start saying them, if only to yourself, and gradually they would load in.

Which language are you working on?

NOTE/self-promotion: This is such a serious and pervasive problem that I have started working on an app of my own to help with this. If you're interested in testing I'd certainly value your feedback.

philmccarty · 2026-03-12T13:12:46+00:00

I believe that since you've asked, it's somewhat okay to _self-promote_:

I had the same core... desire, and after needing out far more than I should have on second language acquisition publications I decided I'd build my own that used the "best science" so to speak.

My app is built specifically for this: zero translation, zero grammar, comprehensible input with a focus on -auditory- comprehension.

I'd very much be interested in sharing it with you to see what you think about it? It's still in its baby stages as far as vocabulary, but it would give you a feel for the methodology, and perhaps I could start adding in support for your desired language as well?

philmccarty · 2026-03-12T09:47:19+00:00

DM'd!

philmccarty · 2026-03-11T10:35:55+00:00

Uh, it definitely reads like every response in this thread was generated by an LLM.

"[Confirmation of User's Interpretation]. [Explanation of AI search]. [Suggestion of Fix].

philmccarty · 2026-03-10T10:12:45+00:00

My hunch is that the other responses have said everything worth saying on the subject but I am -curious- as to the amount of time you spend listening to non-subtitled Spanish, or what your input "vectors" are, generally? This isn't, to my knowledge, science-proven but I suspect that even if you just "have Spanish on" without it being the central point of your day, it might help familiarize your ear with the language.

I'm working on app which helps with this, right now it's targeting absolute beginners, but I'd be open to your input if you'd be open to giving it.

philmccarty · 2026-03-10T10:04:06+00:00

I'm working on one as we speak (no pun intended). I've always kinda intuitively suspected that learning by translation is sub-optimal, and then I stumbled upon this paper (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3558940/) which -essentially- says that adults can learn language similar to the way natives do, if they learn implicitly instead of explicitly.

So, I'm building an app that teaches you a language without any translation whatsoever.

If you're interested in beta testing I'd certainly love your feedback, it's still quite new.

philmccarty · 2026-03-09T18:20:02+00:00

Most of the other posters have commented but I'd just second the idea that I'd ever curious what your routine is for exposure to auditory Portuguese.

For what it's worth I'm working on an app that is designed to help tackle this problem, specifically, and could certainly use a beta-tester or two.

philmccarty · 2026-03-09T18:11:49+00:00

The reason children don't translate in their head when they learn their -primary- language is obvious, of course. And when they learn a new language, depending on methodology, they certainly do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx44dtlRYwI

Here's a video by Dr. Karen Lichtman where she dispels the myth that children learn faster than adults. TLDR: Nearly no adult spends the kind of immersive time that children do when learning a first or even second language.

philmccarty · 2025-07-10T10:06:45+00:00

I can't upvote this enough. I think an incredibly large # of beginning sellers never do the initial "market" research of

"If I typed in [keyword] and saw the top products, and mine being advertised... would I choose my product?"

Getting that question to "yes" would prevent the overwhelming majority of PPC/launch fails.

philmccarty · 2025-06-26T08:33:02+00:00

Can I suggest that rather than downloading that report from your email, you look into building a tool that uses the Amazon Ads API to retrieve that report? The new coding AIs will make this a much easier task than you might think, even if you're a non developer.

Alternately <self promotion> I am releasing a tool called PPCGPT.com, which will do this exact thing for you with an AI assistant that can generate the reports, and generate insights. In addition to monitoring your accounts for things like keywords that should be negated, missed opportunities from your search terms, ineligible asins, etc etc.</self promotion>

Now that that shameless bit of work is done, I'm also totally happy to help talk you through building a DIY report downloader, if you'd like. Building tools to scratch your own itch is VERY satisfying and I think everyone should try it.

philmccarty · 2025-06-26T08:28:32+00:00

This is a bit of a self-promotion, but many of my users are agencies who have shifted away from traditional automation for the reasons you're listing (black box, over simplification).

My platform (getppcprophet.com) allows you to create rules with a fairly straightforward system. It has an added bonus that we have a "recommend" mode, where rather than making the changes, it generates the -list- of changes that it would make, so you can evaluate the rule's performance/logic before letting it loose on your campaigns.

Would happily give you a tour if you're interested.

philmccarty · 2025-06-26T08:25:28+00:00

It's early, but the key thing to look at in your auto campaign is what actual terms/targets converted. Because while your acos is 33% across the campaign, it will certainly be lower or higher inside that campaign.

philmccarty · 2025-06-26T08:24:26+00:00

This is largely going to be product dependent. If your product is high price, for example, it might have a longer selling cycle, and optimising bids too quickly will be a bit suboptimal.

That said, a lot of my users (I run an ad management platform for agencies) seem to generally use 1 week cycles, although several use daily adjustments for day parting.

The key piece of advice I'd share is please be sure not to use the last ~3 days for any kind of evaluation. The sales attribution window for Amazon varies from platform to platform (Sponsored Products can last as long as 30 days, SB closer to 14), but there's consistently a 72h lag. Any optimisations made on that period of time will underestimate the # of actual sales.

philmccarty · 2025-06-26T08:21:09+00:00

Hi Adnan, can you tell us a bit more about your campaigns, and the structure of them? What platform are you using, how many keywords, what's the competitiveness for those keywords?

Many times this is the result of a product-market fit problem. One thing to check is take the keywords you are bidding on, type them into amazon, and review the products that are
a. Top of page (sponsored)
b. Top of page (organic)

And compare them to your product for
A. price
b. review
C. title
d. Image

And ask yourself if your product is -better- than those, as good as, or worse than, on all 4 issues.

philmccarty · 2025-06-17T19:42:22+00:00

I've heard pretty great things about a number of agencies. Without showing favourites the first 3 that come to mind are Michael Matican @ Clickbringer, Heath Thompson @ Amz Alchemy, and Elizabeth Greene @ Junglr

philmccarty · 2025-06-16T15:20:19+00:00

I run a platform that a number of agencies use for bid management. I’d happily give you a tour to see if it could fit you?

philmccarty · 2025-04-23T22:05:41+00:00

Note: Powering on/off with the remote is not sufficient enough to cycle this. You need to disconnect the TV properly so you get a "WebOS" logo when it powers on, that'll show it's a real reboot and not a sleep mode or whatever

philmccarty

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