Episode Summary
In this Prime Talk Podcast Video Sponsored by GETIDA, Onn Manelson, the founder and CEO of RevenueWize, shares his experience in optimizing Amazon ads and his eCommerce growth story.
One particular obstacle Amazon sellers encounter on this great journey of e-commerce is advertising. Amazon advertising can be very tricky and you need the right tools to be able to get the job done quickly and efficiently so that you can continue to scale and grow your business. Yoni Mazor of Prime Talk shares one particular solution for Amazon sellers that makes navigating the world of advertising a much less daunting prospect.
In today’s episode, Prime Talk has teamed up with Onn Manelson, the found and CEO of RevenueWize, an advertising optimization solution for Amazon sellers. RevenuWize helps Amazon sellers simplify their PPC with powerful reporting tools that allow them to take full control of their business and increase revenue. RevenueWize has been proven to increase sales by 25%, reduce ACOS by 22%, and save sellers 4.5 hours per week on PPC.
Onn Manelson talks about his incredible journey from the great world of giant enterprises to the Amazon world. So if you’re an Amazon seller that is stumped by advertising, or if you just want to increase your revenues and grow your business, then this episode is for you!
Learn more about RevenueWize!
Learn more about GETIDA’s Amazon reimbursement solution software
Find the full transcript below
Yoni Mazor 0:06
Hi, everybody, welcome to another episode of Prime Talk. Today I’m really excited to have a special guest. I’m having Onn Manelson. He’s the founder and CEO of RevenueWize, which is an advertising optimization platform for Amazon sellers. So Onn, welcome to the show.
Onn Manelson 0:23
Hey, thank you very much Yoni. Thanks for having me over. Really great to be here today.
Yoni Mazor 0:28
Our pleasure. Well, where are we finding you? Where are you located?
Onn Manelson 0:31
Well, I’m actually now in a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel, the sun is shining. It’s pretty warm these days. But unfortunately, COVID-19 has put us a bit back into a bit of a quarantine. So we’re trying to kind of figure out things right now. But overall, all is good. And I’m here in Israel, sending everybody warm regards.
Yoni Mazor 0:53
Very nice. Beautiful. What’s that name of that little suburb next to Tel Aviv? If you don’t mind me asking?
Onn Manelson 0:58
Oh, you’re probably referring to Ra’anana.
Yoni Mazor 1:01
Yeah. You heard everybody? Ra’anana. Full disclosure, that’s the city I was born and raised. So he’s talking to us straight from the source.
Onn Manelson 1:11
Yeah. Straight from the source.
Yoni Mazor 1:13
Shout out to my hometown. Much respect and love. Okay, beautiful. So thank you for joining us today. And I know today you’re going to share your story. It’s going to be the story of Onn Manelson. You know, you’re going to share with us your background, you know, where you from, where’d you grow up, where’d you go to school? How did you begin your professional career? How’d you become a business owner? So without further ado, let’s dive right into it.
Onn Manelson 1:36
I actually was born in Israel, my father went to study and we moved to Canada. So between the ages of three to 10, I lived in Montreal, so I speak a little bit of French as well. I’m Quebecois yeah? So that pretty much helped me as I grew up. Growing up and living in Israel, you know, great childhood, we came back to Israel when I was 10. And, you know, and since then I’ve been living…I have, you know, I lived in London a few years, I lived in the States for a few years. But overall, Israel is my base in that work. Today, I’m raising my kids. I don’t know if everybody knows this. But in Israel, you have three years of mandatory military service. So at the age of 18, you have to go for three years to military service. You know, some folks become combat soldiers, either go into intelligence corps, and there are different units in different measures. And what I found is that compared to folks in the US and around the world that do not have that stage, it’s a stage where, although we do kind of like waste three years, because, you know, we don’t get to go to college or university during that time. But it gives you a very, very good lesson in life, in terms of, you know, maturity, and, you know, suddenly at the age of 18, that’s it, you’re in the military. So that was, you know, part of that journey. And I think it’s also related to the fact that Israel is considered a startup nation. And it’s part of that as well. The people here that have to go to the military learn, you learn a lot in the military, and a lot of startups actually, especially in cybersecurity, in different tech areas. They’re usually very known, like Payoneer and others, which I’ve seen that a lot of our listeners are familiar with, they’re all Israeli companies that are from former officers in the intelligence corps.
Yoni Mazor 3:25
So hold on. So you’re 18 years old, you joined the army, the IDF, right, Israeli Defense Force, and which capacity? Which role?
Onn Manelson 3:31
So I started off actually as a combat soldier in the green beret unit for nearly two years.
Yoni Mazor 3:38
Well, what’s their name in Hebrew? Give a shout out so I understand a little bit more. I know. Yeah. Yeah. It’s called the (Hebrew), okay, good. Infantry. Yeah.
Onn Manelson 3:49
I started. And I became, I wasn’t an officer but I came to sergeant. So I was in charge of 60-60 soldiers at the time at the peak. And that’s when I had an injury, which really, really bothered me and then I moved more to different unit, more into the intelligence corps. Until I finished there my military service, three years. I actually went and met my wife in the military. It’s pretty common, you know, lots of people, you know, they meet their spouses in the military as well. So it’s kind of, you know, a bit of an incubator.
Yoni Mazor 4:22
You know what they say? There’s a big book, it’s called “Love and War”, right? Love it. Yeah. So or “Peace and War” or something like that. We call it “love and war”, we have our own version, you find love and you find war in the army, especially in Israel. So I’m happy you found your wife, that’s a good thing.
Onn Manelson 4:36
Yeah. So you know that the next thing that usually people do coming out of the military, they take a big trip around the world. You know, after being three years without the ability to travel or do stuff and kind of like come home every three weeks, four weeks, then people have this bug where they really really have to, you know, Israelis have to go out there and spend some time overseas. Usually it’s in the Far East, or it’s in the South or Central America, depending on what they like, so I traveled a bit. I’ve been to…
Yoni Mazor 5:05
What year? Let’s give some context with the years? What year did you spread your wings and start traveling the world?
Onn Manelson 5:09
96.
Yoni Mazor 5:13
96, you got released, probably save up some money. And where’d you go to the east to the west?
OM 5:17
Right. So I started …Yeah, so I started, you know, obviously, you know, working a little bit, you know, as a waiter bartender and these kinds of jobs until you make some money. And then I traveled actually to Central America.
Yoni Mazor 5:31
Which countries? Give it a shout out real quick.
Onn Manelson 5:32
Yeah. So Panama, Costa Rica, that whole area, and then back up to the US, to the States as well…
Yoni Mazor 5:44
And how long were you in South America? How many months?
Onn Manelson 05:43
So three months.
Yoni Mazor 05:44
Three months. Got it, then back to the US?
Onn Manelson 5:46
And then to the US for a couple more months, and then basically got back to Israel and started..went to university. Yeah, I went to Tel Aviv University. So it’s a pretty fairly known university, very strong, and IT technology and other aspects. I did my bachelor in engineering for four years. Industrial Engineering Management. until I hit my first, well let’s call it, you know, serious work. Serious role.
Yoni Mazor 6:15
The professional world. Yeah.
Onn Manelson 6:18
Right. So it was a very, very large firm, I think it’s less known today was called Mercury Interactive. It’s one of the major largest Israeli corporations. At the peak, it was a $15 billion corporation with, you know, 1000s of employees worldwide.
Yoni Mazor 6:35
What was the solution or technology they were offering?
Onn Manelson 6:37
So they did production monitoring for IT and major systems mainly for enterprise 1000s of employees, I actually relocated to London, to the, what we call the European headquarters…
Yoni Mazor 6:51
Which year was that?
Onn Manelson6:52
That was in 2002. Yep, in 2002.
Yoni Mazor 6:57
So you were already there for six years before because you mentioned you traveled to South America, Central America and North America around 96-97. And then four years right? Into university, you graduate around what 2000? 2001?
Onn Manelson 7:12
I graduated in 2000, I started to work at Mercury in 2000 that year. After two years, I basically relocated to the London…to the European headquarters. So I stayed there for two years, years till 2002. It was pretty interesting, considering the fact that I used to travel a lot. So I finished about four passports traveling, I used to travel business trips to countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Italy, used to hop on a plane, go to meeting, spend some time, mainly major enterprise, whether those was banking, industry, financial industries, insurance, things of that, where we used to check out and they used to look at the performance of their transactions, and see that there aren’t any failures. And there aren’t any IT related issues that are preventing from the transactions to go through, you know, like you transfer money, and do all sorts of things. So we used to monitor all these kinds of transactions, and make sure that there aren’t any bottlenecks related to IT, that are implicating and negatively affecting ….
Yoni Mazor 8:15
When you say bottlenecks related to IT, you mean bugs, basically, on a high level, or I guess, lower resolution level. It’s debugging, like bugs.
Onn Manelson 8:23
So it’s not really debugging. But let’s just imagine right now that you’re doing a wire transfer through your bank, and you’re online. So you have different processes that you have to go through right? Authentication, okay, when you log into, and you access the system, so we used to monitor the login and authentication to see how long it takes, and to see if there are failures. Because if there are failures, we would then start alerting. And then once you’ve logged in, if it took you a long time, we would identify the component in the login that was the one that’s taking the long time and alert and tell them okay, here’s an issue here, because instead of it taking regularly two seconds, it’s now taking six seconds. So that’s impacting performance, as well. And there are multiple…and then you would go and look in your account. And then you would open a certain page to do the wire transfer. And we would basically monitor all these internal processes and look at them from the IT and infrastructure standpoint, and come up and say, okay, identify where are the bottlenecks were, your database, application layer and multiple layers in the application? Right?
Yoni Mazor 9:24
So you’re seeing bottlenecks on the other side of the coin says, you know, because if you fix it, the whole thing becomes more efficient for these enterprises. Right?
Onn Manelson 9:31
Right. So it’s a lot of efficiency. It’s a lot of making sure that clients and transactions coming through because that’s obviously what these institutions are making money from, just like you go today and you do your insurance online, you know, you can go ahead and you can file for insurance for your car insurance or home insurance. So we used to also monitor all of these. So any failures or time length or bottlenecks in those processes, cost money, and at the end of the day, they can cause losses, or they can, you know, cause frustration by clients. And those are the things that we used to monitor for these big organizations in order to highlight issues that they might have in their processes.
Yoni Mazor 10:05
Nice. So yeah, this definitely helps once they become more efficient as a large enterprises, it just makes the whole notion of skill scaling and scale up economy for these organizations, so they can scale up even more become more efficient and offer more solutions at a faster pace and increase sales, increase everything, and hopefully, increase the satisfaction of the user experience for all their users. Okay, beautiful, beautiful, brilliant. So two years you did there. 2004. What’s your next station after London?
Onn Manelson 10:32
So that’s where my spouse and I decided that London was a great experience, but the weather, it wasn’t really, you know, we really enjoyed it in London, there’s this thing that it rains most of the year. So, you know,
Yoni Mazor 10:43
It’s not rewarding. It’s…
Onn Manelson 10:45
Right it’s not, it’s, it’s a really, really great city to live in. Because there’s a lot of culture and there’s a lot to see. And, you know, you can travel, you get on a plane, and you’re like, an hour from Paris and from major European cities. So you really, you can really enjoy it. But overall, living in London itself, you know, either you like the weather, and you’re, you know, you’re okay with it. And there are people that can say, hey, it’s great. It’s nice, I enjoy it. Coming from Israel, we’re, you know, it’s mostly sunny here, we love the weather, we like going out in our shorts and flip flops. And suddenly living in London, you know…
Yoni Mazor 11:20
Which is more corporate also, more buttoned up. And also like a boiling pot of, you know, corporate world on the European level. But nevertheless, you know, once you want to kind of at least a little bit, it’s hard to just put, like flip flops go to the beach, because there aren’t any, and usually, you’re gonna find rain instead of sun.
Onn Manelson 11:37
Right. So it used to rain, used to rain a lot. So it’s like, it rains, it doesn’t rain, you know, like heavily. But it does rain pretty much all across, there aren’t too many seasons. Even in the summer, it rains, you can get the summers where it just rains and rains and rains, and you want to go and everything is outdoor, and you want to go have fun. And whenever… the funny thing is that, you know, I just realized that when I was living there, there are so many convertibles in London. Now I was scratching my head. And I said, how’s that possible? I mean, it’s just the thing is that people…
Yoni Mazor 12:07
Convertible cars you mean right?
Onn Manelson 12:08
Convertible cars is that people are just waiting for the sun, the moment that there is sun, even if it’s cold, they open the top, they want to open the top and they want to be and they want to be outside. Yeah, I used to go ahead and I say why are people driving? Why are there so many convertible cars here? And you know, I was told look, whenever there is a sun, we want to go ahead and we want to, you know, take advantage of it. So we go ahead and immediately we want to have the option to open the top. So you see people and sometimes it gets you know, it gets cold. And you see people driving convertible cars, and it’s pretty cold, but it’s not raining. So they open the top as long as it’s not raining so they can, you know?
Yoni Mazor 12:44
This is their way of going to the beach. They don’t have a beach over there and outside they catch the sun. Initially you don’t see too many convertibles. If you go to the beach, it’s packed with people, also in the winter. So I guess that’s kind of the comparison. We can do convertible cars or beaches. You know, that’s the tradeoff on the high level. Okay, very cool. So rain, you guys are out of there. What was the next station?
Onn Manelson 13:06
We got out of there. And that’s where, you know, my previous boss offered me to join a startup company..
Yoni Mazor 13:12
Previous boss from which company?
Onn Manelson 13:14
From Mercury. That was my previous to my relocation, basically. So I was two years in Israel in the major r&d center. And then two years in the London headquarters. So my former boss, which, you know, prior to my relocation, he was with a startup company that does search engines, artificial intelligence search engines for e-commerce.
Yoni Mazor 13:35
And this was around 2006?
Onn Manelson 13:38
That was around 2006. And that’s where I was offered, I was offered a role. I went from a corporation of several 1000s of people to a startup company of eight people sitting in a house, basically, you know, kind of…it wasn’t a garage, they rented out a house where everybody…Yeah, in Israel. And I remember it was such a cultural shock, going from this big corporation, where everything is laid in front of you, you know, we had kitchenettes filled with food, anything you needed. IT, everything was just, you know, so arranged and so organized to the startup where you know, you barely have a desk, you know, you don’t have you have to kind of like make your own. And that’s where I pretty much kind of got the bug, the startup bug and entrepreneur bug and people come in to say, once you have that bug, it’s hard to go back. And I completely that’s when I understood that.
Yoni Mazor 14:36
Were you a partner there or did you start off as kind of…?
Onn Manelson14:39
No, no, I wasn’t a partner. I was brought in to manage the company’s professional services and build it together.
Yoni Mazor 14:46
So you were involved in coding at all? Or just sales, growth?
Onn Manelson 14:50
I was more involved in sales growth and customers. And that was my role. I remember my third day was already at a flight and we were flying out to San Francisco to do an implementation with a client in the diamond industry. So that was pretty much my third day. Very quick the company grew up, we were about 120 people, we obviously moved out of the nice house that we were at to, you know, more of a corporate location.
Yoni Mazor 15:20
How many years did it take for the company to grow from 8 to 120-ish?
Onn Manelson 15:24
It took two years.
Yoni Mazor 15:27
So in 2008, you’re already 2009, you’re semi way to become a big corporation, right? Middle of the way. I wanna actually touch on the purpose or the mission of the company, you said e-commerce, SEO?
Onn Manelson 15:41
No. So it was a search engine for e-commerce, internal search engine. So imagine that you go now into a website, and you start searching for a product. So what we built is we built artificial intelligence based on natural language processing. I don’t know how many people are familiar with that. But basically, we understood the shopper’s queries, and we were able to identify what they’re looking for. So at the in the past, if you recall, you’d search for things in search, and it would be textual search for you said you search ‘men’s pants blue’, and you’d get results that are blue results that are men’s results that are pants, what we basically developed at the time, we developed a logical engine that’s like human-like that used to very, very analyze, analyze the query, the shopper query, just like you have today, you know, obviously on Amazon and on sophisticated engines that come in, and are able to understand what you’re looking for and serve the results that used to be served are very, very contextually in that query. So we had linguistic professors that used to understand and break down languages, whether it’s in German and Spanish and French, in English. And that way, our algorithm used to be able to learn and understand the query, analyze it, and put together the most potential results that would basically that the shoppers would be looking for. And it was pretty, it was pretty new at the time. I mean, today….
Yoni Mazor 17:00
Yeah, today we would take it for granted. Yeah, definitely do take it for granted. But I guess only 14 or 12 years ago, this was a state of the art innovation, that actually was probably the founding and foundation blocks of what we live on now. You know, ecommerce is just you want it, it’s there, boom, you get it. A big component of that is what do you want, or this is what you want it that whole optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization. So it’s actually it’s pretty cool, you’re able to have an input into the early days of that. Okay, so 2008, you grew to 120, what’s, what was the next thing for you?
Onn Manelson 17:35
The company grew. I was head of operations. And I’m a person that, an individual that focuses on build, I like to build stuff, I like to be there during the initial stages, the establishment, that’s where my strength comes into place. And that’s when I decided after several years that, four years, that it’s time to now move on. If I was, let’s say 2009, if I’m not mistaken. Yeah. And that’s when I said, Okay, it’s time now to, to move to the next venture. And I joined a company called Wind Buyer. Pretty, pretty groundbreaking at the time. It did advertising in e-commerce, advertising in websites, based on price comparison. So it sounds a little, you know, the idea was that today conversion rates on e-commerce sites are anywhere between two to 3%. So out of 100 clients that come visitors that come to your site between 97 to 98 basically leave your site, they don’t buy, they don’t act in a purchase. And what we did is we monetized that traffic. So we took and we displayed ads of competitors in product pages. So you’d go to Home Depot, and you’d see you know, a forklift, and you’d be able to come in there and you would see okay, this is the price at Lowe’s. And this is a price at Amazon and this is the price. So what we would try to do is we would try to give a certain level of confidence to the shopper because everybody did at the time, price comparison, right? Everybody goes ahead, they go ahead and buy something they like. So we wanted to save the shoppers price comparison. And we told our clients, you know, like a Home Depot. Look, people are comparing prices anyway. So why don’t you give them that mirror image of your price comparison. And if they do click on Lowe’s, you’re going to get the price of that click right. So you’re gonna get…
Yoni Mazor 19:28
That’s brilliant, pretty genius. You’re saying listen, if eventually they’re going to bounce out, you help them to bounce out, you monetize that. But if they stay in and they make the purchase, obviously, it’s a win for you also. So you create some sort of a win win situation. Obviously, the bigger win for them is to get them to generate the revenue, the
