HCOB: Let’s start at the beginning — you graduated from Harbert with a Bachelor of Business Administration, Lo- gistics, Materials and Supply Chain Management, and then went to work for Target, right? Mercer : That’s right — straight into the corporate world, where I spent the first four years of my career. I loved my job at Target. I was doing well at it and having a great time. And then my husband came home one day and said, “I want to try something different.” So, we talked about traveling the world, starting in Asia, and try to make a living while doing it. I looked at it as a great life experience, and worst- case scenario I could come back to Target. I was doing a good job, I could leave everything in really good hands and if I had to come back, I would be a better person and a better team member for it. We had no children, few obligations, so — why not? HCOB: Why Asia? Mercer : We started in the Philippines because the U.S. dollar goes so much further in the Philippines. We were pur- suing business opportunities online, so all we needed was a good WiFi connection.
HCOB: How did you come upon the idea for Jungle Scout?
Mercer : Jungle Scout was my husband's brainchild. He is an engineer — always a tinkerer, always looking at things from a lot of different angles. He heard about this thing called retail arbitrage, which is essentially the ability to buy something on sale, let's say, at Target, for 70% off and then offer it for sale on Amazon at full price. We thought there was a business there, but that it was a really labor intensive process — the buying and selling of existing physical goods, receiving and then shipping back out and all that. So, we looked into private labeling where you essentially work with a manufacturer to replicate a popular product and they put your logo on it instead of someone else's — but it's the exact same product. The challenge would be finding which prod- ucts to private label. HCOB: And that’s where the idea for Jungle Scout came in? Mercer : Yes. The problem we were trying to solve for our- selves was determining which products offered the best sales opportunities on Amazon — which products had the biggest gap between pent-up interest and availability. If we knew that, we could weave in the product margin factor and know where to focus our efforts. HCOB: How did you solve that problem? Mercer : So, my husband is a data nerd — he loves numbers and he doesn’t like to make a move without the data to back it up. And it turned out that Amazon has this metric called a best seller ranking that tells you how well a given item is selling on Amazon. So, we figured out that we could take that number and couple it with the amount of sales that a given product has in a day and simply plot those points over time to develop a sales demand curve. It started out as a little extension and it grew into a web app and just took off from there. This whole selling on Amazon was just beginning to become a thing — it was the early days. HCOB: So, it was, in fact, an algorithm that you turned into a viable product — how did you build that into the business it is today? Mercer : We found a software developer from an online website called O-desk, now known as Upwork — our entire business model was re- mote-based back then — and he added a few other
Liz Mercer and her husband, Greg, also an Auburn graduate, founded Jungle Scout in June of 2015 while traveling the world on a $25 per day budget.
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