Join us on this episode, as we sit down with Jerome de Guigne, a seasoned expert in international business and Amazon marketplace strategies. We take a trip across Jerome's impressive business career, which stretches from France to Luxembourg, and uncover the crucial steps he took to carve a niche in the world of Amazon. Listen in as Jerome lays out the intricate process of aiding brands in scaling their operations and mastering the art of value creation on this global platform.
This conversation also welcomes Jacob McQuoid from Avask and throws light on the hurdles U.S. companies face when stretching their commercial footprint to European shores, such as VAT intricacies, regulatory hoops, and the ever-present language barriers. But it's not a one-way street; European entities eyeing the U.S. market have their fair share of VAT tax complexity to navigate. We bring in perspectives from professionals at firms like Avask and explore tools like Pacvue and Helium 10, providing a lot of insights for Amazon brands planning to cross these transatlantic bridges.
Finally, we touch upon the wisdom of starting small and testing the waters when it comes to international expansion. This approach allows businesses to minimize risks and optimize for market receptivity, a strategy underscored by the shared knowledge from this episode. So whether you're an experienced Amazon seller or new to this realm, this episode is packed with invaluable advice and strategies for taking your Amazon business to new international heights.
In episode 543 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Jerome, and Jacob discuss:
- 00:01 - Expanding Amazon Sales With European Experts
- 02:49 - Value Creation Through Amazon Specialization
- 06:45 - International Expansion Strategies for Amazon Sellers
- 09:25 - IRS and European Tax Authority Comparison
- 16:51 - Navigating International Business and Online Presence
- 20:10 - Navigating VAT and E-Commerce Expansion
- 22:38 - Understanding VAT for American Sellers
- 29:39 - US Sellers' VAT Number in Europe
- 31:08 - Comparing Import Tariffs
- 35:24 - Starting Small for Market Testing
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Are you a North American seller interested to expand to Amazon Europe, or maybe vice versa? Are you interested in advanced Amazon advertising strategies? Well, today, I went to Germany to interview in person two experts on these topics. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
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Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm Bradley Sutton and this is the show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Another episode here coming from the opposite side of the world. I'm in Frankfurt, Germany and was able to interview a lot of different people. For the first time on the show, we've got Jerome here. Jerome, welcome.
Jerome:
Thank you very much. I'm super happy to be here and it's nice to see you on this part of the world.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent. So you know, like I do with first time guests, we need to find out about you. And this is important too, because, like I don't know much about your back stories. What country in Europe are you from? Germany, France, so I have.
Jerome:
I'm all about going international, so my background is international also. I was born and raised in France but my mom is British. My dad is French. I lived in France but I also lived in Turkey. I lived a bit in Germany, in the UK and now I'm office design Luxembourg. So a lot of different experiences all over the world.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, excellent, excellent. Now, what did you? Where did you go to university? In what country?
Jerome:
So I went to university mainly in France, so first in the nice city of Grenoble, which is not too far from Lyon. It's in the Alps Mountains, really nice to do like business and management. And then afterwards I did an MBA in a school in Basin Paris but had campuses in Germany and in the UK and also in the States. I did a week in Texas, for example. It was really interesting. So like multinational is really my thing.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, excellent. Now, upon graduation, did you enter right into the business world and what you had studied, or what did you do?
Jerome:
So I went to work two years into the chemical business at that time it was called Atofina Archema. Now, it's like I was helping the head of the subsidiary there. So doing a lot of things, helping on IT topics, on business topics for two years. And then I came back and I worked for 10 years for a Chinese group and that's where I started to work in Luxembourg. And then afterwards, I was looking for a job and couldn't find one. So I said I'll start my own company.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, and what was that company?
Jerome:
So at the beginning my idea was say, okay, I want to bring value, because when I did my MBA it was all about okay, how do you create value for your ecosystem? Because value has a price and you know, and then you can sell. So my first idea was to help people expand and grow in terms of sales. But I had been doing a lot of Amazon business in my previous company and like, step by step, I found out that a big pain point for people in Europe at that time so 10 years ago was not understanding Amazon and I said, oh people, it's simple, let me explain to you. So I went into step by step into the Amazon business and that's where we become specialized in Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon is not a typical segue from somebody just coming from the business world. How did you first, just you know, think about that as a good aspect, you know, like Google or friends?
Jerome:
So my background was really distribution, since I was head of Europe and EMEA for this Chinese brand and we were expanding into countries having subsidiaries, having distributors, and so it's about selling right and then I started to work with companies and helping them expand and actually even 10 years ago, the or even more 10 years ago, the fastest way to expand was Amazon and it actually really started when a German brand I knew from before told me okay, take care of the international distribution of our brand, which was binoculars, and I said, okay, well, you know, the best way is really Amazon and that's where we really started to go there. So we mostly started from vendor background because bigger brands were working on vendor and now we have probably 70% seller, 30% vendor in terms of people we help.
Bradley Sutton:
So what about you? During this time, were you selling on Amazon yourself as well?
Jerome:
So I never sold on Amazon myself. I was always selling in the name of a company and, like I said, I started as a vendor, so selling to Amazon rather than selling on Amazon, and I've been helping a lot of sellers but never sold myself. Help friends. But, yeah, never went into it. It's a bit of a dream at some point to do that.
Bradley Sutton:
For your agency for the last few years, are you focused on any particular aspect of Amazon or like PPC, for example, or it's A to Z? What is your focus on? What you help sellers with?
Jerome:
It's very much A to Z we focus. We've got three main topics we focus on. One is global expansion, so it's helping anyone to go from Europe to the US, from US to Europe to US to Japan, to anywhere in the world, and it's really whatever they need. That's the first thing we focus on. The second thing is retail media. It's one of the big topics we do is like how do we help them expand better thanks to retail media. So advertising, PPC, DSP, AMC, whatever there is. And the last thing is technology.
Jerome:
So we're not a SaaS company but we use a lot of tools. So Helium 10 is one, Pacvue is another one. We also partner with SalSify, for example, on the PIM side, and we have built our own dashboard. So those three topics Global Expansion, Retail Media, technology are three topics we're very focused on and we try to help people through those different things. So it's really, for me, it's A to Z especially in those aspects. So anybody, for example, we've started to sell on our own accounts for brands who can't sell. So for me, it's like an additional. We're not really a distributor, but if a brand can't sell themselves, it's okay. We'll set up a seller account and we have one in the US. We have a seller account in Europe and we have one in India also, for example. So anyone who wants to expand in any way, we are here to help them.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's talk about the first thing you mentioned about the international expansion. I mean, there's probably 35 different combinations you can have. You know, Japanese person selling on America, European person selling in Japan, a person from Dubai selling in Mexico, you know, etc. etc. Let's talk about some of the more common ones. Probably the most common for our listeners would be I'm a US-based company doing pretty well. Now I want to get started in Europe because that's the second and third biggest marketplaces, UK and Germany. The thing the elephant in the room for a lot of people is like oh my goodness, VAT and things like that. So what are some of the main obstacles and maybe difficult things to navigate for an American company who wants to get started in Europe?
Jerome:
Great question. For me, the three things. The first thing is regulations and taxes. Regulations. So the thing is like am I allowed to sell those products in Europe? We're talking with a supplements brand, for example, in the States, and it's like okay, the way you talk probiotics, for example, or can you have that keyword on your listing all of that? So that's a first hurdle. We today were speaking with AVASK and AVASK is a great partner. We partner with to deliver, like VAT services and also help on regulation.
Jerome:
The second thing is languages. Obviously, you need to have a great service and you need to have great content for the local people and that's something we are partnering also with a company, YLT Yanak Krekic, who's delivering great service, for example. So typically, we create a hub of people we work with. And the third part is logistics, supply chain. It's like, okay, how do we? Will you get your products to Europe? Like, will you have a warehouse in Holland? Will you go directly to FBA? Who will be your importer of record? That also we work with AVASK and some logistics company. So, even before going into advertising, content and everything, you've got those three things as regulation, translations, in a sense and supply chain.
Bradley Sutton:
What are some of the steps that somebody needs to take as far as the basics that everybody needs to do? Like you know, there are some things that are kind of like nice to have. There's some things that are need to have. For example, let's talk, you know, let's talk about the need to have for getting started in Europe. I don't need to form a company in Europe. I can use my US company, but I need to. What something that everybody has to do? Is it the VAT register for VAT?
Jerome:
Yeah. So one thing you can't. Well, same way as in the US you can't play around with IRS, right, and in Europe you can't play around with the tax authority. So VAT is a must and my recommendation is that, typically, Amazon tends to underplay and when they sell the service of expansion, they tend sometimes to be a bit optimistic about the simplicity of VAT. It's not that simple, it's not over complicated, but you need to speak with people who know this stuff. AVASK is a great example of people who really know this stuff. So that's the one thing you need to be set up in at least one country. I don't know, we want to go in all the details, but you need at least one country. Best is to be listed in or having VAT in every countries in Europe but you need at least one to be legal and compliant.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's do the opposite. I'm a European based company. I want to sell in the biggest marketplace in the world Amazon, USA. You know, I know like way in the old days and now on Walmart, you know, actually still for in some situations you do have to have like a US corporation, but nowadays I can. You know, I'm registered in Germany. I can go ahead and register as an individual or as a person. What are some things that I, absolutely, have to do that are in obstacle to some Europeans for selling in USA?
Jerome:
So our assumption as Europeans that everything is simple in the US and generally doing business in the US is much easier than in Europe. Like you have much less regulations, there's less hurdles. Now on the tax side, it's still quite complicated and as a European, I had to learn okay to navigate that. Because you can have a company in the States, in one state who's like, its addresses one state but if most of your sales is in another state, the other state where you're doing the sales might say no, no, I want you to pay your taxes where you're doing your turnover. Or if you have employees, it will start say no, then there's a fight between the different states.
Jerome:
For us in within one country, that doesn't happen. Like if I'm living France, you won't have the south of France trying to fight for you to pay your taxes and south of France doesn't make sense. Yes, so this you have to learn. So here again, you need to speak to the professionals, because taxes, you can't play around with and it's once you've understood, you've understood it or you have someone doing it for you it really goes smoothly. It's also that in some states in the US the tax accuration is automated between Amazon and the states, but in other states it's not. So it's like navigating that and understanding that is a bit complicated and if you're not an accountant, you'd rather work with someone who's a specialist and we work a lot with, like AVASK, for example, or specialists who will help you navigate that. So for me, it's focus on what you're good at and try to outsource what you're less good at to make sure you don't make mistakes.
Bradley Sutton:
What are you using Pacvue for? For your clients and maybe you know, some people out there might be wondering what kind of amazon seller or large corporate or large company might have use for Pacvue as opposed to Helium 10. So what are you using now Pacvue for?
Jerome:
So I think, we probably started to work with Pacvue and Helium 10 both the same time, a long time ago. So I think we started in 2019. I think, the first agency in Europe using Pacvue. Basically, we were looking for a tool and what I did is I asked the teams. I said I don't want to take the decision. I wanted the really the users to audit the different tools and decide which one they wanted to work with. And they decided to work with, at that time, to with Pacvue.
Jerome:
What we did is there's a lot of rules on a lot of features sorry on Pacvue, for example, rules to like improve your campaigns and as an agency, you've got you know 50, 70, 100 brands you work with. So you have a lot of campaigns and you have to have rules which help you optimize. You can't be checking every campaigns all the time. So you have rules really helping you optimize things. So we've been using Helium 10 from day one also to understand the market, make research, and we've used Pacvue really to optimize campaigns and do a better job in terms of advertising for our customers.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you using Pacvue for non-Amazon platforms at all?
Jerome:
Yeah, so we've started to go on Walmart, for example, in the US. So we are using Pacvue on Walmart on the platforms in Europe. Not all of them are linked on Pacvue because some of them are smaller. So it really depends. But on the major, we try to use Pacvue, as much as possible, because it's our sort of system of record today in the company.
Bradley Sutton:
And Helium 10, what is your team using Helium 10 like? What particular tools or what kind of strategies are you guys using?
Jerome:
So they are using it every day, I would say. So they are checking on the consulting side. Our consultants are checking, like the Market Tracker, for example, or the keyword researchers, like, example, when you were saying, okay, should we go into a new market? Okay, let's see what. You know how many researchers are done on the brand or on the type of product. Then the teams are also working when they're doing their SEO, like checking, you know, keywords and backing keywords and also campaign keywords. They checking all of the tools.
Jerome:
For me, Helium 10 is amazing because each time I go, it's like, wow, there's so many tools and I feel like there's a new one each time. So I have a hard time keeping track of all of them but I know they're using it daily to really on one or the other bit to improve things altogether. And because we have a content team, we have an advertising team, we have a consulting team, an analytics team, they check different things, each of them for different purposes and Helium 10 has always been amazing to me, like the amount of wealth and value they provide on so many things and that's as a day, as I said, a day to day tool we use.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, excellent. Now what kind of, you know, strategy help that can you give to our users? We usually ask our guests like, hey, give us a tip or a strategy. You know it could be about international expansion, could be about PPC, could be about health, could be about which French football team to follow. Anything that you want to talk about. What some strategies you can give our listeners?
Jerome:
So, yeah, I'm not a big soccer man so I won't go there because I might embarrass myself. No, the thing I typically say when you talk about global expansion is there's a lot of potential but there's a lot of hurdles. So probably you want to start small or start focused. So if you're in the US and you want to go into Europe, maybe you start in Germany and or in the UK because language is easier. Just make a proof of concept, go there, be successful and then start to expand. Because if you start to go in six, five, six, seven countries, then you have five, six, seven campaigns to build, translations to do. There's a lot of work.
Jerome:
So probably do one, show that you can be successful in one of the European countries and then expand. Same in the US, you probably don't want to maybe take all of your catalog and take a smaller part of the catalog, make sure you're successful and then expand. So for me it's like start small and grow from there. Learn, try to learn. Because international we're talking about earlier with other people today is like, you know, we say they're saying culture eats strategy at breakfast is like cultural things are very strange, like what happens how customer behaviors are different. So get used to it and to start with something and build on it.
Bradley Sutton:
Love it, alright. Now, one way I know people can find and reach out to your company is if you go to hub.helium10.com type in E-C-O-M-A-S. Is that right? What are other ways that people can find you, your company, on the interwebs out there?
Jerome:
So we're very vocal on LinkedIn and the team produces a lot of content on retail media on the street topics like retail media, technology and global expansion, so we do try to share as much as possible with everyone. I was honored to be named one of the Amazon Retail Media Advertising Ambassadors, so one of our job is really to share as much content as possible on advertising specifically and one of the advice I gave it was about globalization. If I talk about retail media is like AMC. Amazon marketing cloud is one thing which today is open. Really, if you're doing DSP and PPC, hopefully tomorrow it will open to PPC also only. I would really recommend people to look into it. This is giving you advice, like learnings, which will get you to the next level in terms of advertising.
Bradley Sutton:
What is the first thing that somebody just getting into DSP or AMC? What is the first thing they should maybe if they're just getting their feet wet?
Jerome:
So one feature, for example, which is already in Pacvue, which is day parting with AMC you will get even more granular information, a bit like with Facebook. You will know we've run some studies for some of our brands where you get information on the persona, like who is buying your products, like is it you know male, what age, what location, and then you can tailor your messaging, your content, everything you're doing, to really focus on that target customer you have. So that's one example and there's many others you can bring on AMC. We're just starting and people are just starting to get like insights from it. So for me, it's like get first, get into it, and it's not super easy so there's a bit of a barrier to entry. So, once again, either you can, you have got enough knowledge to go in yourself or ask for people for support, and there's a lot of great people. We can help. But there's a lot of great people on AMC which can really help you. Pacvue, for example, has got embedded some AMC features already. So I really look into it because that will be a game changer and for me, like they will probably be a change of like a crossroads people getting into it and who will win? And the others lagging behind.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. Well, thank you so much for coming on and hopefully, see you on my side of the pond next time.
Jerome:
Indeed, thank you very much.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So our next guest is one of the hosts for today from AVASK. We're in AVASK, Frankfurt office. This is not your main office. I believe the main office is in London.
Jacob:
Southampton, so it's about an hour south of London.
Bradley Sutton:
We're here in Frankfurt, Germany. And this is Jacob, who I met originally in Korea, spoke at an event that I did over there. And what is your title here?
Jacob:
So I'm the head of business development and commercial services, so responsible for client acquisition. You know have a team based here in Germany, in UK, in Spain and in Italy. So we're supporting, consulting clients, helping them expand.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, how did you get into the e-commerce world? Like, what's your backstory? What did you? Where did you go to university? What did you study? And then your entry into the job world.
Jacob:
Okay. So in terms of studying, I actually did Creative Media in college and then just directly went into working straight from there. So I started as an Account Manager for a finance company and then transitioned to AVASK. I've been here for five years. So that's the kind of a short background but yeah, been at the company for a good amount of time now.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, last time we had somebody from AVASK was Melanie, was on maybe, probably almost three years now ago. There's some people who might not know about you guys. So you know elevator pitch with an amazon seller and elevator. How do you tell them what you guys do?
Jacob:
Yeah, so we help people expand cross-border, so getting to different markets and try and make it as frictionless as possible. Kind of the biggest area for us and kind of the one we've been working in the longest is Europe. So supporting US sellers, you know, Chinese sellers, European sellers, sell all around Europe but that's not it. But like kind of in a nutshell, that's our main service, but essentially we help people get into different markets and make it as frictionless as possible.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so now you know, we just had Jerome on a couple minutes before you. He talked about some of the you know things that people need to be concerned about going from US to Europe, vice versa, maybe going to another marketplace. And he mentioned you guys too. So let's talk a little bit more in the weeds. About some of the you know, like this is what I call the unsexy side of e-commerce. You know the sexy side is PPC and Keyword Research and finding new products and developing your brand. The unsexy side is stuff that actually is arguably even more important, you know, getting your taxes in order and your business entity. So we touched a little bit with Jerome about the VAT and things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
But let's, let's dig into it because, like me, it just I've never sold. I've never done VAT here myself in Europe, and it's for a lot of, you know, US base sellers, like it's kind of like this monster of a thing that we have to worry about. Like, do I need to get it in every country? Do I have to report to every single country? Is it only if I am at a certain level of sale? So you are very familiar with what American sellers probably need to be educated on as far as this goes. So just take it away and let us know what we need to know about VAT in Europe to start, I would say, there's a bit of a, especially in the us.
Jacob:
I've been at the company for five years. Especially now over the last few years, has been a lot more regulation introduced in Europe. So when I first started at the company, there was a lot more US sellers who were interested in expanding because there was less regulation and people weren't as advised. But governments have caught up a little bit. There was a lot of that fraud so people weren't actually paying VAT. And that's not just you know American sellers, that, sellers from all over the world. But now marketplaces are Amazon a lot more regular, regulated, so they have to enforce it. So it stops people from wanting to expand. You know a lot of Americans they say, okay, VAT, how do I do of that? Okay, they don't worry about it, and I think that's quite a lot of the story in America.
Jacob:
For a lot of clients that I've spoken to, essentially VAT, like the system that we have in Europe, and in lots of other places as well, is completely different to the US system. Obviously, the US system, you have tax added on at checkout so you only have to worry about pricing your product and then in the majority of places, i.e. Amazon, and they're going to add the tax on, whereas here in Europe, you are responsible for adding the tax. So when you're listing your product, so you know, if you create a new listing and you need to make sure you include VAT. So I've had lots of customers who want to expand into Europe. They've gone for it. They didn't consider that the VAT would be part of the price that they actually put on the listing. And then you know, a month later, two months later, they've got the VAT bill and they have to pay that and they hadn't actually priced it into the product.
Bradley Sutton:
So like you're saying, like the buy box price should indicate it or it needs to be, it's separate?
Jacob:
No, it's just inclusive. So like, if you list your product for 24 pounds, for example in the UK, that 24 pounds is inclusive of the VAT. That's not going to add any VAT at the end.
Bradley Sutton:
What is the approximate VAT?
Jacob:
So for the UK, it’s 20%.
Bradley Sutton:
So that means if I've got a product that I'm selling for the equivalent of 25 dollars, let's just say, I need to make that at least like 30, 31, 32 dollars, to include that VAT, because that's what I'm going to end up paying the government.
Jacob:
Yeah, exactly. So you have to look at the net price. So 25 dollars add to the 20 percent, so add another five dollars to get it to 30. And then out of that 30 dollar sale, once it's converted, the portion which was the five dollars would be paid to the government and the rates are there or there about. So like we're here in Germany right now, the rate here in Germany is 19% so slightly different, but there are there abouts.
Bradley Sutton:
Now in America, you know, after three years ago or so, we have the Marketplace Facilitator Rax. You know, like that was a huge headache before, where people didn't know in America. Like, all right, I live in California, I know I got to pay California Sales Tax, but you know, do I have a Nexus or whatever we call it in all the different states. And then Amazon's like or actually all online marketplaces were like there's some law passed or something where it's like, all right, you guys are the ones who have to collect it. Now we as Amazon sellers, hopefully we don't have to. That's what I've been doing. We don't have to worry anything about it. We don't add it to our price or anything. The customer is paying for it but Amazon collects it. They remit it. Now in Europe, what it sounds like number one, we do have to add it to the price, as you just said. And also, Amazon is not remitting that. I've got to hold on to that money.
Jacob:
And then so previously that would have been correct. But as of a couple of years ago, Amazon and now and marketplaces are responsible for collecting and remitting VAT for non-European and non-EU sellers in the EU. You still need to price it so, like in that example we had, that was $30. That $5 would actually be deducted from you and be paid to the government on your behalf. However, you still need to report all of those sales via VAT returns in different countries where you've got different liability, like similar to Nexus. Nexus means you've got a liability, basically. You'll have to get a VAT number when you have a liability and you can create different liabilities and free different kinds of means, but the actual money will be deducted and paid by Amazon but you still have to report it.
Bradley Sutton:
So that's at least one burden off. And then now is Amazon withholding that from your disbursement? Then each two weeks?
Jacob:
Yeah. So that would get completely withheld. So Amazon should be withholding it and then paying it on your behalf.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Scenario A, I plan to open in all European marketplaces plus UK. So UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, et cetera, et cetera. How many VATs am I needing to register for?
Jacob:
Depends. So you've got options. So with Amazon, you've got options for how you can actually use the FBA system. So, like obviously, in US, you send to a single FBA center. You have no control over where they're good to go. Amazon can transfer them to different warehouses. It's one country. It's lots of different states, lots of different tax laws, but it is one country, whereas with Europe you've got many different countries. So UK, we separated from the European Union the free flow of moving goods essentially. So whenever good to travel from UK to EU, they need to go through official borders. So customs checks, there needs to be paperwork, there needs to be declarations, et cetera. A lot of sellers now treat the UK separately and they just have their own separate supply chain directly into the UK. You need a VAT number there as a US seller so you can store your products there and sell your products, whereas in Europe, for FBA purposes, you've got options.
Jacob:
Amazon have their main fulfillment centers in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and the Czech Republic. You can select which ones you want to have your goods in. Whichever country you decide, you allow Amazon to store. You've got an Enable Infantry Replacement on a Seller Central so you can disable and enable. If it's enabled, you have to have a VAT number because Amazon store your products there and that's creating a Nexus. Essentially, you create a liability. You've got to have a VAT number there.
Jacob:
So you could just start with one for the EU and you can list your products. So you could say right, I'm going to store my products in Germany, I'm going to list them in Italy, I'm going to list them in France, I'm going to list them in Spain, but they will all be fulfilled from Germany. Now the pitfall to doing that is Amazon charges you a significantly larger fee for fulfillment. So whenever I speak to sellers as long as they understand that because I've got people who you know they only want to get the one VAT number, because getting six or seven or however many you need to get is complicated and it means a lot of paperwork et cetera to get set up but at the same time, they don't quite realize the Amazon fees that you get charged. And I've come across cases where, yeah, it was an extra three or 4,000 pounds to get the VAT numbers but they ended up spending extra 40,000 pounds in fulfillment fees. So, like understanding, that's quite clear, but you can start off with not too many, which makes it easier for sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
A lot of American sellers are very familiar with rough costs of like tariffs and importing custom duties from China to the United States. Some have more. That's why you know maybe some people are moving their factory to India or other places. How does it compare, though, because most I would say 90% of Amazon sellers are probably manufacturing their products in China or India? How does the custom duties and tariffs compare on a percentage wise importing to the US as opposed to importing to Europe? Are there differences between like UK and EU?
Jacob:
Yeah. Depending on the products, the UK and EU used to have the same tariffs because of the UK separation. We've got the UK Global Trade Tariff and EU's got what's called the TARIC system. The rates for those two systems I would say probably 99% of the same and that will change over the course of time, but it wasn't going to all change immediately. There is some differences but you might find certain products have much higher rates in Europe. So you also get anti-dumping duty.
Jacob:
I'm not too sure if there is anti-dumping duty in the US, but this can be products that might be damaging to the environment or harmful to the environment so they put the rates up really high. But understanding it before you actually start shipping the products is easy to do. As long as you've got the right people to do it. You can understand the rates, understand if there's a difference between the rate. One thing you do need to be careful of, especially as a US-based business, not just US as a non-EU-based business, the particular country we're in right now, Germany the way that they look at imports for non-EU-based companies is sometimes different to an EU-based company. So I've had a lot of clients who they've imported stock directly from their supplier in China or in India into Germany, and the German customs office have revalued that stock. So instead of using the transactional value, so the cost of your products, the insurance and the freight, say €10,000, they've looked at it and they've taken the retail price and then minus Amazon fees, minus VAT, so to say 60% of retail, which then that 10,000 does end up getting to 50,000, and then they've been charged 5% on the 50,000 instead of 10,000, so suddenly you've got five extra costs. So that's something to look out for and be aware of, because I've seen it happen quite a few times.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, before we get into your last strategy of the day, just as a reminder, if this is all overwhelming to you, it's not something that you just can't ignore and pretend that it's not there. It's stuff that you have to take care of if you're doing cross-border or getting into new marketplaces. If you guys want to reach out to AVASK, the easiest way to remember to contact them just go to hub.helium10.com and then just type in AVASK, A-V-A-S-K right there inside there you can have the portal. There might be some specials depending on your level of Helium 10 membership that you might have available to you. Other ways that people can find you guys on the interwebs out there.
Jacob:
Yeah, so all the general means like LinkedIn, Instagram or just avaskgroup.com, so A-V-A-S-K group.com, and yeah, you can contact us directly for those means.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. Now what's your last, you know, something I like to ask some guests is like a 30 or 60 second tip or strategy, that it could be about any topic you've talked about today.
Jacob:
Yeah, okay. So I would say, first of all, do consider Europe, but maybe take it slow, because there's a lot of red tape and there's a lot of history with American sellers in Europe and people getting stung by governments because of certain situations that happened in the past. Things are different now, so there's a lot more regulation that makes it easier for sellers to make sure they're doing the right thing, but it also puts more barriers to entry. You can start small. Like I said, you don't have to go for all of the countries. Start small with one.
Start looking at the other countries, so like if you wanted to start in Germany, what are the biggest markets? Open your listings in the other markets and see if you start getting sales trickle in and then kind of make targeted decisions based on where you start to see growth. And that's what I think is good because we get a lot of people that are like right, I need to go for everything, I need to go for it straight away. Some cases really good, some cases they don't get the sales they expect and then they have to attract. So, depending on your position, obviously, would depend on what you decided to do, but if you're just considering it, you're not sure. Try that way because you're limiting your exposure in terms of compliance. You can start off small, your costs are lower and you can just see how the market goes.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright. Well, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and thank you for hosting us here for our first onsite podcast here in Germany and our AVASK and Helium 10 Elite event, and maybe we'll be seeing you at a future conference again.
Jacob:
Thanks, Bradley.
They say the best businesses are built on the foundations of friendship, and that's exactly what Samuel Loo and Singchuen Chiam, childhood pals, prove with their journey from elementary school to dominating the matcha scene on Amazon. Their tale is not just about the green goodness of matcha but a story of two friends who took divergent paths—law and business—only to converge into a powerhouse duo. With Sam's sharp legal acumen and Sing's Alibaba experience finesse, they've brewed up Naoki Matcha, a brand that resonates with quality and customer delight, nurturing it from a side hustle to a multi-million dollar success.
Our conversation steers through the meticulous craft of standing out in a saturated market, with Sam and Sing revealing their three-year grind to perfecting their matcha blend. They share the trials of juggling full-time jobs while planting the seeds for Naoki Matcha, a testament to their enduring patience and entrepreneurial spirit. Their business acumen shines as they discuss the potency of Amazon PPC in propelling their revenue growth, and the strategic decision to maintain a premium on their product—ensuring Naoki Matcha is not just another tea on the shelf, but a premium experience for the discerning consumer. As we wrap up, the future of Naoki Matcha gleams with potential, from its lean operational approach to its plans for product diversification and international expansion. Their story isn't just an inspiration for Amazon FBA sellers and matcha aficionados but to anyone with entrepreneurial dreams, demonstrating that with the right blend of passion and strategy, even the smallest idea can grow into a thriving E-commerce empire. Join us as we toast to the success of Sam and Sing, and keep an eye on your social media feeds—you might just catch the upcoming viral sensation of Bradley Sutton’s matcha flan!
In episode 542 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Samuel, and Singchuen discuss:
- 00:00 - Childhood Friends Start Successful Matcha Business
- 08:35 - Exploring Opportunities With Macha Tea
- 11:33 - Journey to Success
- 14:50 - Product Growth From Gradual to Significant
- 20:46 - Brand Growth Through Market Analysis
- 21:26 - Strategic Growth of Naoki Matcha Brand
- 24:37 - Matcha Market Segmentation and Competition
- 28:56 - Success in their Amazon Business
- 30:15 - Amazon PPC Advertising Strategy Effectiveness
- 33:37 - Matcha Success Story and Plans For Future Growth
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today, we've got two childhood best friends from elementary school who linked up as adults and started a matcha Amazon business that now does millions of dollars a year. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Black Box by Helium 10 houses the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world. Outside of Amazon itself, we have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces, from USA to Australia to Germany and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might want to get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me/blackbox. Don't forget you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we are going to the opposite side of the world today, to I believe they're in Singapore, and it's funny because the way they were introduced to me by Crystal and somebody else from Amazon she was like oh yeah, I want you to meet the Macha Bros, but I don't think that's their official name, so I'll let you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves to our audience. This is the first time we'll be on the show
Sam:
Sure. So my name is Sam and this is my business partner, Singchuen. We're not actually brothers, but we work together quite closely on a business that we started together. Our business is called Naoki matcha and, as the name suggests, we sell matcha green tea powder in the United States, in the United Kingdom and in Singapore.
Bradley Sutton:
You know what I've known you, of you or about you? I literally thought you guys were blood brothers entire time, not just because of that name, and so I've already learned something new. I literally thought, you guys were.
Sam:
No, no. We get that a lot. We get that a lot.
Bradley Sutton:
Brothers from other mothers.
Sam:
Yes, I think we can go with that, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right, hold on now. Let's you know like I already learned something new, so let's just take it. Take it way back, both of you born and raised in Singapore.
Sam and Singchuen:
Yep.
Bradley Sutton:
How did you guys meet? Did you meet like some story, like you met in university, or how did you guys meet each other?
Singchuen:
Sam and I met oh, this is Singchuen, by the way, so I'm the business partner. Sam and I met in primary school, so we have known each other for quite a long time.
Bradley Sutton:
So that is a good story, all right. And then you just went to that. You went to the same one, or? Or you just met in the neighborhood, or what?
Sam:
We went to the same one and we actually were in the same school so like 10 years, and then our paths kind of diverged for a little while. But we reconnected in university because we were both interested in like business and entrepreneurship and I think that's how it kind of like reconnected and we started exploring different things and that's how we started working together again.
Bradley Sutton:
What did both of you major in in university?
Singchuen:
I studied business and Sam, he was actually a lawyer.
Sam:
Yeah, I studied law at university.
Bradley Sutton:
Upon graduation, did both of you guys go into that field that you had studied law and business?
Singchuen:
I guess in a sense that because we started a business, business would be quite relevant. But in that in another, in another complete sense, it wasn't really that relevant because the things that you studied in school were geared to get you a role in a company, so it wasn't very practical. But the concepts, they were useful.
Sam:
Yeah, so after graduation I did practice law for like a couple of years and then, while doing this business, and then at the end of the two years, I realized that, like you know there was I had two opportunities and like this one kind of showed itself to be a bit more, have more potential, so I left the law and I went into e-commerce.
Bradley Sutton:
Who discovered e-commerce first? Was it you, Sam?
Sam:
Yeah. So I think I really found out about this opportunity on Amazon and FBA the ability to like sell in another country that is not yours. I think back in like 2015-2016 this is like early days, right but at that point in time I was still like a university student at Seoul 6th year, so we really didn't have like the kind of resources that we needed to really tackle this, this, this opportunity, right. So we spent some time like learning about how to approach it and we only really launched it like late 2016 and from then we went on our careers. We kind of like grew it slowly along the way and then after a few years, we realized that okay, the time is right, this is a good time to go all in.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So in 2016 you guys had reconnecting, like, hey, let's do something together while still having day jobs at that time.
Singchuen:
Yeah, exactly, Sam was a lawyer. I actually worked in e-commerce as well. I worked in Alibaba for quite a number of years, so it helped that I could bring a certain kind of context to how the Amazon platform worked, and so we decided to start this sort of like to see where this would be going, because it was exciting, it was an opportunity and we always wanted to have our own business. So that was sort of like the paradigm in which we started off on.
Bradley Sutton:
And so at the time in 2016, when you first just started dabbling in e-commerce, it sounds like you weren't all in. Was it matcha that you got into? Was that your first thing, or was it other things?
Sam:
Yeah, so when we first started, we started, as most people do, with like a search query on Alibaba.com. The first products we actually sold were like these glass teapots, so we realized that they were not too bad to sell. Actually, we reached like five figures in multi-revenue by like within a year, but we met the same problems that I think a lot of people encounter, which is that after a while, people see that you're somewhat successful and then they'll try to launch a complicated product and therefore, when we found that happened to us and we found it very difficult to grow, so we really were like scratching our heads to think about like what other types of products or categories that we could do, and that's why we landed on matcha.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so when you landed on matcha, were you still working your day jobs, or by that time you were all in on Amazon already?
Sam:
No, we were still working out day jobs because for matcha category and the grocery category we found that, like you know, it's not so much of like a quick win kind of situation. You need to invest the time and energy and you need to have quite a lot of patience before your results actually bear fruit, and for us that took actually a number of years because you need to kind of like build your credibility and gain experience in what you're selling as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Are we still talking 2016? Are we already now in 2017 in the timeline, or where are we at when you guys decided matcha?
Sam:
Right. So in 2016, we dabbled in matcha and then we spent the next two years essentially trying to improve the product and better understand the category and the product market fit as it is in the US, and we took like a couple of years to do that properly, and I think it was only about 2020, you know, right after COVID hit, when we realized that, okay, the product is good, we have a good product that can stand up against the other competitors in the space, and you're going to go all in and grow this thing.
Singchuen:
On the side of this, because our matcha green tea is from Japan and there was a requirement I want to say it's a hard requirement, but there is an understanding that in order to get the good product in Japan, especially from suppliers, you kind of need to cultivate the relationship a little bit and take some time for them to trust you. And so it's not as though, as we didn't want the best product right in 2016. Number one it's not. It's a learning process, right, especially when what the market is telling you of a certain kind of taste that they prefer. But it's also bringing back those requirements to the suppliers and the factories to let them know this is the taste that we want and, barring communication barriers, there's still that they need to feel, feel each other out to exactly ascertain what we're looking for. And that took quite a bit more time than what you would be doing on Alibaba.
Bradley Sutton:
That's what has been curious. This is not something you would just like find on Alibaba. So where did the like, how did you guys land on matcha? Was it something you guys just liked? Was it because you were doing tea cups and you just like it was a side thing? Like how in the world? Or did you find it in Helium 10? Or how in the world did you say you know what? I think there's opportunity in matcha. Let's go ahead and examine this further.
Singchuen:
In Singapore, generally we are exposed to Japanese culture quite a little bit already, but more closely, I guess it's also because I liked green tea. So at the point of time I didn't drink a lot of matcha, but I knew about it. So we explored that as a potential item to try to sell and in a sense it checked all the other boxes as well right. Whether it is for the economics, the logistics, the business, fit, branding, pricing. And that's how we started off on like taking the first step.
Sam:
I think also at that point in time this is like 2015, 2016, right, I think matcha was just beginning to get popular in the US. So, yeah, that's when I think the craze started, right. So I think we were also at like the right time in the right place and we realized that, you know, we could marry like our interests and the market opportunity in front of us, and that's how we really landed on matcha.
Bradley Sutton:
I don't have any matcha shirts or anything, but you mentioned like Japanese culture. So I got my Astro Boy jacket here. I got my old school Japanese Tokyo Giants hat here. You know, I used to live in Japan when I was younger and and that was why you know, like matcha is not exactly a natural thing for an American person to like, but I kind of liked it. Before it was cool and now, now, like you said, it's just like booming. Everybody's like, hey, matcha, you know you can go to Starbucks and get matcha, this and you can get matcha, and you know non Asian markets, which before it was different. So that was, you know, a little bit of foresight. Now, when you first started with the matcha, you know you had said, until then you were doing dabbling in other things, were you profitable on the Amazon side? Or, up to that point, you still hadn't made profit in the first year or so of your Amazon business.
Singchuen:
We tended to search for products that were more profitable on the first sale. So in that sense, the first products that we went to more like glass cups, g-ports, things like that they were already profitable. So it's not as though, as we were dabbling in things that were really difficult to do, low priced or otherwise.
Bradley Sutton:
Your first matcha product that you launched? Was that the one that was successful, or did it take a couple of tries before things really started taking off?
Sam:
Well, I think it is still the first product that we launched, but what we had to do was tweak the formulation over the years several times and each time we're trying to improve it and fine tune it to better suit, like the feedback that we were getting. So it is the same product, it looks the same, but they're always like tweaks over the years and this kind of like helps build that, I guess, average review score. That goes up because, like you know, you're getting closer to what people like with each iteration.
Bradley Sutton:
To find that like perfect blend and everything. You kind of mentioned it and I know this about your history. So can you talk a little bit about, like we just said, this wasn't something. Oh, let me find something in Alibaba, let me just put my sticker on it. How did you look for I don't even want to call it factories, but producers of matcha in Japan like we said, it's not on Alibaba and then talk about the long process of? Actually, I believe you would fly to Japan and meet different places and try things. Talk about that long process how long did it take and what were the steps involved in that.
Singchuen:
At the start, we asked for samples from willing factories and once we tasted them and we realized that this was something that could be in a ball pack of what's considered as good tasting to the market, we would ask the supplier whether they are willing to sell us a certain volume of matcha. So there are several factories in Japan that do just green tea, and their idea was sort of branch out to selling matcha as well, because there was where the growing market was, and these were the factories that were more suitable for us to go into, and once we spoke to them their experience with matcha may not be the best at the point of time, mind you, but they were willing to work with us and over a period of time, once we let them know exactly what we're looking for and they were willing to tweak to our preferences, that's when we got a good fit and from then, as our volume started going up, more and more, various factories started.
Bradley Sutton:
Until that part, though. How long was that? Were we talking a month? Were we talking multiple months?
Singchuen:
No, that actually took quite a long time. I think about three years at least so around 2016 to 2019,. On the marketing side, Sam was trying to define a market fit, but on the supply side, we were just trying to make sure that factories produce what we needed and the trust and formulation. That takes a while.
Bradley Sutton:
How can somebody have that kind of patience? That's very rare, not just in matcha industry, but just Amazon or business industry to have that kind of patience to you know to like, hey, I'm spending two or three years to get this right. Like, is that just in your nature or what's going on there?
Singchuen:
To be fair, I think we were not so much in a hurry, just to share a little bit. Personally, it's a little bit more of we always wanted to get a business eventually, but the timeline wasn't so important. We weren’t in a rush. Sam, as Sam has mentioned just now, both of us had decent careers, so we were optimizing on that front as well and we're happy to wait.
Bradley Sutton:
Like you said, you still had your day jobs, you know, for a time. So it wasn't like you know, like you were about to go out of business and I think that's important. You know, like people sometimes just like, all right, I'm going to quit my job before they even have like a viable business and that's what you know. That's not going to allow somebody to have the patience. That's interesting. Now, at what point in this three years did you finally have like a product just start taking off? And was it just random, like it was just one day that it started going viral and never looked back? Or was this something where it was like, all right, you know, over a few months you were selling 10 units a day, then 15 units, then 20, was it a gradual thing? Or when did what? Was that moment where it's like, oh shoot, we got this right and this is going to take off.
Sam:
Yeah, I think it was really like a gradual process. But that point for us, I think, when the old shoot moment, I think, was when we realized that, like the monthly sales for this Macha product alone was quite significant and this was enough to basically sustain ourselves, number one and number two provide a good base and recurring cash flow to kind of grow the business from there. Yeah, and this was really about, like you know, as I said, 2020, mid 2020, early to mid 2020, after COVID started, where we realized that, hey, this thing has snowballed into something quite significant. So it was really a gradual process.
Bradley Sutton:
If you can recall either of you, what was your sales the year before, in 2019, when you were still just dabbling in Macha and maybe still had some of the other products?
Sam:
I would say that it was like maybe like six figures a year, low six figures a year, and then, okay, yeah, we was at that point in time. We were, we were often optimistic about, about close to doubling each year. So that was, that was where we were at.
Bradley Sutton:
And then. So at that point, obviously still working full time jobs. And then it was at 2020, when it took off, and then you quit in 2020, your jobs or you still, even though it started taking off, you still were working your full time.
Sam:
I wouldn't say it took off right. It was just at that point in time with, like, the good momentum that like we know that there's some something to stand on. So that was when we decided, okay, time to go all in. And then we know that the product was ready. And then we started doubling down on marketing in order to kind of know that, you know, this optimized product is available to everyone. And then that's how we kind of grew from there.
Bradley Sutton:
What kind of marketing? I mean, obviously Amazon PPC is part of it. Was that it or other things as well?
Sam:
So we did try a bunch of things at first, but by the late by late 2020, we realized that Amazon advertising PPC mainly is that engine that's going to give us the growth for the next few years, because we realized that, like on a cost acquisition basis, like you just can't beat it.
Bradley Sutton:
You said 2019, low six figures. What about 2020, that your first really good year. What did you end approximately with?
Sam:
I think we were just under seven.
Bradley Sutton:
And then how about 2021?
Sam:
Yes, somewhere, seven.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So now it's like you guys knew you had something. It wasn't just a fluke, you know. You had some consistency. Do you mind if I show your product on screen right now? For those watching this on YouTube?
Sam:
Oh yeah, go ahead.
Bradley Sutton:
So let me pull it up here. Was this variation family here of the superior ceremonial blend it says here, was this like your first product that you got into?
Sam:
Yes, it was.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now I'm looking. Now it's like you know, according to Amazon, according to Helium 10, you are selling throughout this variation family here, thousands of units, multiple six figures per month, just with this, with this fam variation family. So this is the one that is your, your big seller. So I mean, if I'm looking at these numbers correctly, unless this is just a very nice month here, you're like what in the you know mid seven figures now, or higher?
Sam:
I think that's fantastic yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay and explain this product. You know there's a lot I like matcha. I understand it, but there's a lot of people who might like think like what? Like? Do you just like dump this in tea or do you actually use it to cook something? Like what? Like? How in the world are you selling almost 10,000 units of this a month? Like, what are the people buying this to use?
Sam:
Right, I think the way to look at this product is that it's a form of tea and in Japan it's enjoyed as a form of tea. Now in America it's usually enjoyed in a, in a form of a latte. So imagine you have a tea and then I think in some parts of the US, like milk tea is popular, right. So in the same way you can add milk to matcha and then you get a Matcha Latte. So because people find that coffee is not working for them for various reasons whether like they feel, like you know, nervous or anxiety after that they try to find something else, right. So matcha kind of ticks all the boxes because it's got a little bit of caffeine, so you don't feel that like that anxiety that you get with coffee sometimes, and also there are like amino acids inside that help you stay alert for a longer time. So that was kind of like the health food appeal of matcha. But that's, I think, why it got popular and that's why people drink it. So we also wanted to kind of share a bit of that Japanese heritage of matcha in our product, which is why it looks the way it does, because in Japan actually the traditional way of preparing it is to take like a teaspoon of the powder, add some water and then whisk it up with this bamboo whisk until it becomes like nice and froth.
Bradley Sutton:
I see that here in your A plus, your premium A plus content, so I can see a little bit of that here. You're telling that story. Really great branding here, I like that.
Sam:
So they whip it up into like this frothy little mixture and I guess if you could kind of relate it back to coffee culture, I would say like it's like a Matcha Americano. That's the way that they would drink it and that's the main way it's consumed in Japan.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now you've got just a beautiful listing here. You know, looks like premium A plus content. You're educating people here. You have a frequently asked questions, and then obviously you've got some great pictures here where you've got infographics. You've got, you know, like kind of like a history lesson of matcha. You have pictures of it. I mean what else? Like you even show the origin. I think I saw somewhere there's like different cities where this comes from. Where is that here, here? It is here Like you're like oh hey, this one is from Kyoto, this one's from Fukuoka. You have the city. So like I'm assuming that I mean, did you start this from like day one such in depth like information here, or is this just gradually how you were able to kind of hone your branding?
Sam:
I think we didn't know that it would take this form at the very start. We knew that, like you know, instinctively this is the branding angle that we want to work with. But as we grew with time we know we were reacting to what's happening in the market right and how we need to kind of distinguish our brand and our product from other people and to make sure that, even though, like, they like the product but they need to have like some visual reference to kind of like make that association, to know that like, oh okay, this is now Kimatcha and I like now Kimatcha.
Bradley Sutton:
You know what I'm going to check something. Hold on, let me see, I'm actually gonna run Cerebro on one of your products. I'm curious, you know you mentioned, hey, people are actually searching for Naoki Matcha. I'm just curious, like, what kind of brand recognition you have. So I'm just running Cerebro on here on our YouTube and podcast version. We'll speed this up. Let's see here, because I have a feeling, you know you've been selling for a while now and you're doing so well that there are literally people who just search for your brand name. So let's take a look at how many people are searching for your brand name here. Hold on, all right, here in Cerebro I'm gonna put phrases containing Naoki and let's apply that filter and wow, there's 45 different keywords that have Naoki in it and with thousands of search volume a month. So people like know your brand. You know just Naoki Matcha by itself has 1200 search volume and there's 45 other versions that people are actually searching for. So I mean that's kind of like what the goal is. When you're selling on Amazon, hey, sure you want people to buy you on the generic searches, like you know, Matcha Tea or Matcha Powder or something. But you know you've kind of made it when there's actually search volume for your brand.
Bradley Sutton:
You guys are getting, you know, using expensive you know matcha directly from the source in Japan. You know I'm sure there maybe are some competitors going like a cheaper route. Or maybe you know, like I'm just looking here in the search for Matcha Tea and I even see you know listings that are like $9, you know $9.95. And you guys are at like $40, $39. I see some that are, well, that's a different product, but like $7, you know $15. How can you guys stay at around the top? Like I'm looking at the BSR, you're like one of the top three in the whole Matcha category. Like some people think, oh, I have to. You know, like if cheaper sources come on, I'm just going to have to try and price match and then you know race to the bottom and I like to tell people no, no, no, there's ways to still succeed even at a higher price point. What's your guys secret where you can stay at this $40 price point and still make a lot of sales despite these cheaper alternatives coming into the market?
Sam:
Well, I think it's all about getting people to try it once. And once the person tries it once, right, and then they compare it to like the cheaper one that they bought before they realize, like you know, the difference is like night and day, right. So what we want to do is to make sure that they realize that they're getting like a good price for this level of quality, and once that kind of barrier is unlocked and then they realize that, hey, actually, if I pay $25 for one ounce, right, I'm getting a lot more value if I'm paying $40 for like 3.5 ounces, so the $40 one actually becomes like a good idea, even though, like it's like four times whatever is available on. You know the results when you search for matcha.
Singchuen:
Just to add on to that, the cheaper matcha products are by nature of how it's grown and how it's produced. It tastes incredibly different from how matcha products of a certain price level are like because of how much more expensive it is to produce. So matcha is actually in quite a bit of a supply crunch and so there is actually not that much matcha supply to go around at the higher quality price range. In that sense, because it's so expensive, it's not possible to match the quality level if you're to go below the price. So the market kind of like segmented itself in a way. So we, as Sam has just mentioned just now, as long as we are sort of value for the price that we are offering, it's good enough for us and that's how we managed to stay above the competition. If you notice that there are other competitors that are also doing well with high BSR and they are similarly high priced. But once you do the math you realize that in addition to our better tasting product our price per gram, if you want to put it that way it's still much better than our competitors.
Sam:
It's pretty competitive still.
Bradley Sutton:
What's the future hold? Now you actually have Naoki Matcha in the brand name. So if you just stay with this brand, you're kind of I don't want to say limited, but it's not like you can start selling something completely off the wall under this brand, like do you have are there still enough new kinds of variations and blends that you can come up with to keep this brand going? Or have you considered, like maybe we should start something completely different, like I start a new brand? Or what's your goal for growing the business?
Sam:
Right. I think for this brand there's still some room for growth, because actually so far we haven't touched the whole products that deal with, like matcha accessories. We're just starting that this year and also there are different grades of matcha right. So honestly, we are really at like that middle to high kind of grade, but we haven't really touched the other grade so far. So those are kind of like the growth opportunities that are available to us, yeah, but of course, once we hit there's a ceiling for category, once we hit that, yeah, I think you do have to choose another brand.
Bradley Sutton:
Obviously, Amazon USA is your main market. Are you selling on other Amazon marketplaces? If so, which? And then also other marketplaces at all, like Walmart, Shopify or other websites?
Singchuen:
We are in the UK. We're selling the exact same brand in the UK as well. It's sort of like an offshoot. We started it because some fans who have tasted it in America have gone back to the UK and so they are wondering why aren't you in the UK? So we decided to launch it over there as well, and so far the growth is okay, but not as high as in America, obviously, and in Singapore. We are on e-commerce platforms as well, and I'm not too sure we can confidently say this, but we are in the top few brands on those platforms selling decently well too.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, talk about some specific strategies that you guys think have helped you get to where you are, because it's not just like I mean somebody could spend 10 years and develop like the most perfect, pure form of matcha known to mankind in history and it's meaningless, you know, without the strategy that is going to get it in front of people. So what are some of the things that set you apart from maybe the 10 other matcha people who maybe have started and gone out of business, you know, because they didn't have your strategy? What do you think set you apart from others?
Sam:
Well, I think a handful of things. The first one is okay, so I think you can use. You can rely on Amazon PPC. You can look at your search term impression share reports. You can look at your keyword ranking and all that kind of stuff and that will help you in the short run. But honestly, the thing that really helped us the most was patience and making sure that your product is on a sensory level it's actually good and people like it. Once you have those two things covered, then you know you just need to get people to try to get them to tell their friends, and then, like people, their friends who are interested in matcha will buy, and then they are buying again and then this whole thing kind of grows by itself. Your PPC and all of these other tools that you have are really just like fuel that you add to this engine
Singchuen:
And on the other side of things is obviously you kind of need to make sure that you treat your supplier well as well. Make sure that they understand what you're going through and make sure that you try to understand what they're going through. If language is a barrier, hire an interpreter, right, it's not too difficult. Decency goes both ways. So you may be pressed, but you got to recognize that the factories themselves, they, are pressed as well. So working together for compromise, understanding each other and not drawing too much, just to be a little bit more understanding towards each other, goes a long way. I think what tends to happen is that if you're not patient, as Sam has mentioned, you may cut off communications with factories that may help you in the future, and you don't want to do that.
Bradley Sutton:
Now I'm looking, speaking of PPC, I'm looking at just what I see on Amazon and I see everything. I see sponsored product ASIN targeting campaigns right here on this one page I see you're targeting your own ASIN and sponsored display ad. I see sponsored brand ads in the search for Matcha tea. I saw sponsored brand video, regular sponsored products. So you guys are just like going all out with all the different kinds of PPC that Amazon provides. Any one of those, like you think, has performed better for you or gives you the best ROI, or is it kind of just kind of even across the board?
Sam:
Well, I think at the start sponsored products perform very well, but as you get more and more ad types and different you know SV, SD, SP you mix that in. You have some DSP thrown in. The attribution for which ad actually did the sale for you gets a bit more tricky.
Bradley Sutton:
That's true. That's true, yeah, because you know. But the good thing about that is you're just your top of mind because you're advertising everywhere you can. You know, like sure, maybe you don't know exactly what got the attribution, but the point is you have such a big share of voice you know, potentially, maybe compared to your competitors, that you're your top of mind for your, for your customers. Okay, so PPC is important for what's on Amazon. I'm sure you use Amazon data points as well. What about Helium 10? What's your favorite tool in Helium 10 and how has it helped you?
Sam:
I think, honestly, the keyword coverage and Cerebro is still like my favorite tool. I've been using it since like 2017, when it first launched.
Singchuen:
As you use, you search on Amazon and you search on other platforms take a look at how Helium 10’s are like compared to others. You always use that. There's a certain sense that Helium 10’s information is letting you after it. It's more of a sense. I can't really explain it, and then that really goes a long way, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Now for either of you. If there was something on your wish list for Helium 10, like, like something, maybe we don't do right now, you're like, wow, it would be so cool if Helium 10 could do this. Here's your chance to tell me what is on the matcha bros top wish list, for what Helium 10 can help now give matcha with?
Sam:
Right. So I think my number one wish list would be cohort analytics. So if, for example, I can see in January how many new customers are acquired and how much, and how much of that repeat over the next 12, 24, 36 months, that would be awesome. I don't think there's none of the big analytics platforms do this. There are some specialized ones that do it that we subscribe to, but they're expensive and I'm pretty sure that you guys can do a better job.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. Now my last question is just, you know, you guys have reached this level of success, selling millions of dollars. Obviously you two are working together. How many people total does it take to run the Naoki Matcha machine? You know like, are you guys doing 100% of the work? Do you have virtual assistants? Do you have, you know, in Singapore staff? How many people does it take to run your business?
Singchuen:
Right now we are actually quite an entity, Sam, as I'm sure you can tell from this conversation. Sam does most of the marketing and I do more of the supply side operations kind of activities. So in total we have about five people running the entire business.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, this has been very enlightening. I've you know, despite knowing about you guys, almost 95% of this I think was completely new information to me and obviously new to our audience. It's great to see this success story. I love matcha, so I'm going to have to purchase your, your product, and make some. I'll be your influencer. Make some matcha, some kind of matcha. Let's see I'm going to. I wanted to make a matcha flan flan like a. I don't know if you guys know what that is. That's like a Mexican dish. So that's, I'm going to make something and then it's going to go viral on TikTok and make you guys another few million dollars just for me.
Singchuen:
Thank you for your support.
Bradley Sutton:
You could take me out to dinner
Sam:
Yeah. Thank you and looking forward to that.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you so much for coming on, and let's have you guys back on the podcast in 2025 and let's see how you guys have grown at that time.
Get ready to navigate the buzzing twists and turns of e-commerce from some curious buzz around the COSMO document to the significant Amazon FBA fee hikes, we break down what sellers need to know to stay ahead.
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► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. COSMO: A large-scale e-commerce common sense knowledge generation and serving system at Amazon https://www.amazon.science/publications/cosmo-a-large-scale-e-commerce-common-sense-knowledge-generation-and-serving-system-at-amazon Target will launch unlimited rush shipping subscription to rival Amazon Prime https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/6/24092880/target-circle-360-free-delivery-shipping-annual-plan Walmart and Amazon Race to Provide Best Virtual Try-On Experiences https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2024/walmart-and-amazon-race-to-provide-best-virtual-try-on-experiences/ We tested Amazon’s new shopping chatbot. It’s not good. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/05/amazon-ai-chatbot-rufus-review/ Exclusive: Walmart opens new front in same-day delivery war https://www.axios.com/2024/03/07/walmart-hours-delivery-early-morning-online-orders Use persona builder to create and get insights on your personas https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/use-persona-builder-to-create-and-get-insights-on-personas/ Amazon will no longer underwrite loans for sellers in its $140 billion Marketplace business https://fortune.com/2024/03/07/amazon-lending-loans-sellers-marketplace-discontinuing/ My name is Alexa and I loved it until Amazon's smart assistant came along and ruined it https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ruined-name-alexa-2024-3 Cap the episode off with an inside look at how Amazon's FBA fee changes are reshaping the game for sellers. Discover how you could turn the tide on FBA fees with savvy shipping strategies. We also dive into Helium 10's latest feature alerts that promise to bestow an edge to Platinum Plan users and European sellers. Join the conversation, test out these new tools, and let's tackle these changes together.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley talks about:
- 01:27 - Amazon Cosmo - Sellers Panic?
- 07:39 - Target Prime+
- 08:36 - Amazon / Walmart Augmented Reality
- 09:35 - Amazon AI Chatbot
- 10:44 - Walmart 1 Hour Delivery
- 11:58 - Persona Builder
- 13:05 - No More MYCE
- 14:29 - Voice of Customer
- 15:34 - Amazon Lending
- 16:08 - Coupon Requirements
- 17:42 - Amazon Alexa
- 19:35 - FBA Inventory Fees...SAVE Money?
- 30:20 - New Feature Alerts
Ever feel like you're playing a game of chess with the Amazon algorithm, constantly striving for that checkmate which is a perfectly optimized Amazon listing? We're peeling back the curtain on the new secret weapon that the Listing Builder by Helium 10 has that could give you that winning edge on the Amazon battlefield. Prepare to be armed with knowledge as we take you through a live optimization of the Project X "coffin shelf" listing, dissecting the art of keyword research to uncover those high-traffic phrases that could propel your product to page one of the marketplace.
Marinate your brain in the sauce of Amazon seller strategies as we stir in the nuances of listing optimization and the significance of performance scores to outsmart your competition. The Helium 10 score may not be part of Amazon's official playbook, but it's a valuable benchmark we explain in detail, showing you how to leverage different types of keyword matches to boost that all-important performance score. And it doesn't stop there; we dive deeper, sharing actionable tips on how to strategically position those keywords for maximum impact, ensuring your listing is as tantalizing to Amazon's search algorithm as it is to potential buyers inside the online shopping platform.
In episode 541 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:
- 00:00 - Optimizing Amazon Listings With Helium 10
- 07:11 - Keyword Analysis for Listing Optimization
- 14:17 - Amazon Listing Optimization Ranking Score
- 22:43 - Optimizing Keywords and Phrases on Amazon
- 25:26 - Analyzing Title Density for Ranking
Join us as we explore the intricate art of keyword research with Jason Mclellan, the mastermind behind Vitacup's impressive $20 million e-commerce achievement. This episode is a great resource for anyone looking to enhance their Amazon selling skills, where we unravel sophisticated strategies to optimize your Amazon product’s online presence. With tools like Helium 10, Amazon’s Brand Analytics, and Product Opportunity Explorer at our disposal, we dissect the methodologies that lead to keyword research excellence, pinpoint niche markets, and boost your brand's visibility.
This is not just another chat about keywords—it's an immersive experience of how big sellers operate their Amazon business. We navigate through the ever-changing landscape of consumer trends, driven by the influence of social media platforms like TikTok, to keep your listings fresh and relevant. Together with Jason, we dissect the strategies that make products rank for the keyword "extra shot coffee" stand out in a crowded space. It's about refining, optimizing, and capturing the essence of what your customer is looking for, turning clicks into conversions, and conversions into Subscribe and Save loyal customers.
Wrapping up the conversation, we dive into actionable insights for harnessing the full potential of keyword strategies on Amazon and Walmart. It's about more than just being seen—it’s about resonating with your audience. We share how to weave the benefits of your products into descriptions that speak directly to your niche and discuss the significant impact of organic search success on platforms like Amazon. So pour yourself a cup of Rapid Fire Protein Coffee, pull up a chair, and let's unlock the secrets to catapulting your products to the top of the search results.
In episode 540 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jason discuss:
- 00:00 - Deep Dive Into Advanced Keyword Research
- 00:50 - Keyword Research Strategies for E-Commerce Sellers
- 04:44 - Learning From Successful Amazon Sellers
- 06:45 - Product Research and Optimization Methodology
- 07:20 - Product Refinement for Increased Sales
- 14:38 - Identifying Top Search Terms for Niche
- 20:37 - Understanding Product Placement Strategies
- 22:57 - Amazon Keyword Strategy for Coffee Products
- 24:26 - Amazon Seller Keyword Strategies Training
- 28:56 - Advanced Keyword Research Strategies for Amazon
- 34:52 - Top Keywords for Platinum Account Success
- 40:33 - Keyword Research Strategy Discussion
- 43:02 - Importance of High Search Volume Keywords
- 44:27 - Optimizing Amazon Listing for Spanish Keywords
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton: Today, we're going to have an advanced deep dive into some of the top keyword research strategies for 2024, including some strategies from a seller who does over $20 million on e-commerce per year. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10's Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton and this is the show. It’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We're going to be talking today about Keyword Research. And just like last time, I'm not going to have a bunch of slides that I'm going to be showing. Basically, what we want to do is show you real life examples of how we have done keyword research for some of our products, how we would do keyword research in 2024, and not just in Helium 10, but also we're going to be showing you some things for those who have brand registry and are able to access search query performance. Okay, we're going to be showing you some things that even if you don't have brand registry, a way you can find good keywords for your listing using something called product opportunity explore. Now, a couple of things just really quick. I want you guys to bookmark this one page. I want you guys to go to forum.helium10.com. And that is our new Seller Connect Forum where you're going to be able to interact with different helium 10 members in addition to our Facebook groups that we've already had, we're going to have one where it's right inside of Helium 10. Okay. And so we've got some information already there. I posted some blogs, but make sure to bookmark that guys. And I want you to regularly connect. So before we get started into, I want to go ahead and introduce a special guest that we had teased on today, a real live person who is going to show us his products and his keywords and his keyword research too. You know, how many of you Amazon sellers out there, if I ask you in the chat, what is your product? That's how it is. People usually don't want, the majority don't wanna sell their product. Show their product. Today, we don't have that. So Jason, go ahead and come on and let's introduce Jason. He has been on the podcast before, but for those who haven't met you Jason or haven't seen your podcast episode, go ahead and introduce yourself, please, and brief history on Amazon and what company you work for.
Jason:
Hi, my name is Jason McCallum. I've been with the last five years of the company called VitaCup. We are a vitamin and superfood -infused coffee and tea. We're probably the number one functional coffee on Amazon right now, a wide variety of modalities. So, there's just always keeping us busy between the K -Cup format, instant copy and ground. So I've been in this market space since the early 2000, starting off in eBay. So I've kind of seen the evolution of the place from eBay to Amazon and where we're kind of going in the future with some other things that are developing on other marketplaces. And just... love online marketplaces. Bradley Sutton: All right, so I take his products too. Here's his VitaCup Extra Shot. This is very important for the morning. So I am running a little bit on empty. So we are gonna test this now because I've stayed up most of last night and then this morning, like I said, did back to back webinars. So I am actually taking this product and we are going to go ahead and I'm going to be drinking it live right here. First of all, stir it. Hold on. This is one of my tests for if products are good or not, like how easy it is to open this. How am I supposed to open this there? Oh, look at that. Easy, easy, open, easy, open.
Jason:
Much better than the other one you try..
Bradley Sutton:
Last year, I didn't like how to open it. It was like impossible. And it's sprayed all over my face. We won't mention it.
Jason:
And we're changing it just for you. No one asked for. Just for you. Yeah, Just for you.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So now I'm making my instant coffee and stirring it up. So again, like I said, the reason why I'm just going overboard here in this product is like I said, hey, Jason is somebody who has opened up his product and listings to us before. And although most Amazon sellers don't want to do that, he is doing that. So we thank him. And now Jason, just as you know, you're kind of a humble guy. So people won't, you know it just by the way you talk. But what kind of gross revenue is your, is VitaCup doing on Amazon and Walmart, if you were to combine both of those marketplaces per year about?
Jason:
Around 20 million.
Bradley Sutton: About 20 million dollars, all right? So, you know, there might be a couple of people here on the call or on this call who do a little bit more, but I would say most of us, including myself, don't, aren't at that level. And that means we can probably learn a thing or two from Jason. Now, Jason does a lot of the same strategies, maybe that are common practice as far as finding new keywords for listings. But he also has got some unique things that he does as well on and off of Helium 10 on and off of Amazon. So I would like to I would like to go ahead and turn the stage a little bit over to you. What is the first keyword research strategy that you are going to help us? Give us the background first. Like, is this something that helps you find a product? Is it something that you already had the product and now you are like, all right, I got to find this, some keywords that are going to convert for me. Set up the stage here for this first one.
Jason:
So great question. The first thing I'm going to start off with is product opportunity, explore something that's been released for around the last four years. It's been evolving. I really call it at this point, the Swiss army knife of Seller Central. There's a wide variety of uses you can use for it. We look at it and research it for when we're developing new functional blends and flavors. I try and keep my process simple. A lot of people you know the more complex you get, the harder it is. Starting with product opportunity explore, we're researching and launching a new product. It's great to see what the market potential is, what customers like, what they don't like, sort of those keywords that are driving sales can start doing some research on what's the average CPC projected for those. Is it going to be something that we think we can do some conquesting on keywords and how much is it going to cost and is it even worth it? We started hitting over X amount of dollars for keywords. It really is not that viable. So, and then we also use for refinement, and the example I'm going to show right now is we start off in product opportunity explore and we're continually doing improvements and testing new things on our products and just how we go through and find those keywords and then the competing products on it we're going to be using. We'll use the extra shot coffee as example and then Bradley Sutton: What do you mean by refinement?
Jason:
Because we're continually refining your content and your images and we utilize the data to improve our images, which improves your conversion and increases your sales dramatically at this point, you got to consider 70, 80% of all Amazon shopping today is done via mobile experience. Your hero and your secondary images are actually more important than your product description, your bullet points and your A plus content at this point because of how everything's delivered. I mean, if everyone has their phone there, you can pull it out and at some point you can get ready by the cup, extra shot K Cups and we can take a look at that as we're going through and why. And so we're utilizing the keywords. We're pulling a product opportunity explorer and the keywords we're pulling in refinement. We're pulling out of Cerebro and we're directly addressing the data that we learned from that into our images, not just our bullet points, not just our titles, and because of that we're seeing a great conversion like extra shot. We just ran this through where we've seen it wasn't one of our stronger performing products, but we've seen in the last 30 days we've seen basically doubling the sales on that my lead, my number one product. In my rolling 30 day sales average over the last two weeks I'm up 16% on sales because we applied the same methodology. You continually have to be updating content. New words enter the ecosystem, Amazon new consumer trends are going on. TikTok drives a lot of different trends depending on the categories you're in, and that introduces a lot of search relevancy. People see things on TikTok or other social media forums. and they come to Amazon looking for it and necessarily you're not just trying to compete for your own space, but when these new trends come on board, sometimes that product isn't there and Amazon will see for those terms that your product is really relevant. And if you've been running for a while and you have some relevancy, you'll start getting delivery. And if you have sharp titles, bullet points and images, your conversion will be great and you'll continue to grow and accumulate on these new trends that are just kind of ancillary to what you're doing. So we see a lot of growth in that. So we're always just in a constant rotation of just testing out all content, all aspects, and then kind of refining and judging, through catalog performance, what your different points in the chain through click through to purchase, conversion, our improvements being made.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, a lot of your sales comes from subscribing, save and maybe certain things like sponsor display ads and a lot of other ways. Now, have you ever looked at search career performance for a week and looked at your brand's overall search career performance attributed sales, which is very limited? As far as hey, it has to be from a search, it can't be sponsored brand or sponsor display ad. They have to have clicked it, they have to have purchased it within 24 hours. Have you ever compared the amount of sales for a week that came through search career performance with your overall unit sales to see, like, hey, how much of your keywords or how much of your sales are coming from the normalized searches, which for some people it's 15%, some people it's 50%, some people more.
Jason:
You know I haven't broken it down that more when I generally start, because where I generally start to look at what branded searches and everything is what we're running off Amazon. Amazon, there's no like. Amazon actually is great, but if you use it for a while you understand that it's not capturing the full thing. Or if you're just doing, especially doing stuff on TikTok, it's not capturing hardly any of it. So I track by week, by month on branded searches to see if there's any spikes in overall, like wide a cup searched terms, and then we can start to correlate. And if there's a spike in sales we can start correlating. It is what we're running off traffic to educate the consumer about a particular blend or a particular product. Is that having a positive impact in customers coming back and searching for it? Because, as you're saying, like you know, we're running a lot of DSP, we're on search display and so we have all these lovers we're pulling. So we want consumers to touch our page, because we want to get them in the flow, because we want to acquire a new customer and move them to subscribe and save, and that's the way you kind of take the approach on it. So first one is is you're finding the niche in which your product exists, and so mine is looking at extra shot. I know it's already strong coffee. You can search by ASIN and the ASIN will generally allow you to select it. So you pin your product ASIN and sometimes there's enough affiliation. Where it can drive up.
So two niches under strong coffee is for the K-Cups and the high caffeine coffee. I've already been through both these. The keywords are kind of similar. We're selling in a K-Cup format so I wanted to focus on that one Initially. You kind of can see the total search volume over the last three, 60 days, kind of how the product niche has been growing, the estimated unit sales on an annualized basis. What we're starting to see more and more is really kind of interesting.
Is this return rate percentage. So for other, this is a consumable item and you're not technically supposed to be even be able to return it, so it's always going to be pretty low. But if you're looking at researching products that you're going to potentially get into, you can say, hey, does this statistically have a very high return rate, or does it have very low return rate? Because you're going to want to build that into your business model for the product. It gives the price range and then the kind of that sweet spot, the average price. So you know, from a pricing point of view, when you're thinking about pricing it, where do you fall in line? So we're going to select strong coffee K-Cups and then just there's such. They keep adding a wealth of information to this. What you're going to see on the first tab for products is all the ASINs that make up 90% of the volume that are associated with this strong coffee K-Cups. The second portion is the search term. These are going to be your top search terms for the niche. So this is where you can come up with a search term. So you can come up with a search term, your top search terms for the niche. So this is where you can kind of start getting an understanding of 90% of the volume that has been driven by the volume that's being driven by 90% of the search terms. So I tend to look at, what are the search terms that are non branded? so definitely, which I'd kind of ignore. But you know high caffeine, coffee, K-Cups. So everyone remember that term high caffeine, coffee, K-Cups, strong coffee K-Cups, extra caffeine coffee K-Cups, double caffeine coffee K-Cups, and then you start seeing some variations. So we've got strong coffee pods search less than strong coffee K-Cups, but still has relevancy. So you know that when people are coming to search they're not always necessarily searching for K-Cups, but they're also searching for coffee pods in some form or another High caffeine K-Cups, double caffeine K-Cups and etc. Also, it's really interesting as you can use this as a tool to monitor how you're performing within a product niche. So for this instance, if you're interested in going after high caffeine coffee K-Cups, this need. All the niches are updated once a week, so over time you can start seeing am I making headway into being one of the number one top click product on it, which is Deathwish, the number two, which is a variety pack of high caffeine coffee pods, or the number three clicked on is Wake the Hell Up, dark Roast. Keep that in mind. Like these are your top keywords. This is where I start with. I get my top keywords and then I'll eventually be going over Cerebro to find out what are those medium to low end keywords, and you're also gonna see these. The beauty of Cerebro is when we run the top three, our product with the top two products in it, we're gonna see a lot of the same keywords. It's gonna give a lot of validity. This real data that we're getting out of Amazon live, from the source, is being mirrored what's coming out of Cerebro, and so it's giving validity to Helium 10's authenticity, to those lower and mid keywords. You can then trust the data that, hey, for long tail keywords, I'm gonna grab these and build them into the text. For just some organic ranking. I wanna run some long tail keyword strategies on my Amazon PPC. I wanna build some of this content into my images. The next thing I go through and I look for keywords customer sentiment is on Customer Review Insights. This is amazing. So what it does, it takes all these products and starts aggregating that. We're on the product page. It starts aggregating the reviews together and looks for themes and looks for what consumers want. So the first one is aggregated haste. We can start seeing what customers are saying, and I love when I see things like just delicious, or the coffee is delicious. That tells me when we're communicating to the end consumer, we have to be communicating in the text, in the imagery, in the bullet points, in the A plus content that it's gonna be a delicious cup of coffee, so talks about flavor quality and we start smooth, so we start stripping this information out and that's what we're gonna use to help build. So in Cerebro what I do is I take my product extra shot plus two or three of the leading ASINs and I run it in Cerebro to get my top keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
And for those who aren't familiar with Cerebro, what this is doing is it's pulling up all the keywords where, in the last 30 days, any of these three products have shown up in the organic search results. They have shown up in sponsored search results or that, according to the Amazon algorithm, it suggests is relevant for the keywords, regardless if it's in organic or ranking. And so you know there's what? Oh my goodness, 24,000. 24,000.
Jason:
So we don't want yeah, that's pretty Two of the keywords. So, honestly, one of my favorite like filters is just the quick top keywords filter that's built into Cerebro, this, you know it at down to 83 filtered keywords. I do a little bit more refinement. I wanna exclude phrases like death, death wish, black rifle, pistachio and wake. For what I'm trying to do, regardless. This bumps it down to 59. So, and we'll search by search volume, things that are gonna be important we have a shot of espresso in our, so the espresso K cups, that's a great one. Blackout coffee I'm still trying to figure out how do you work out blackout within the text, cause blackout is a branded term, so utilizing it within blackout coffee Same as danger coffee. You're picking up a lot of these things, but then you start seeing like hey, strong coffee, k cups, high caffeine coffee, dark magic I know dark roast is really important to this, so that dark magic is a blend and so on. So you know, I'll go through and I'll delete out the ones that I don't like from this. I'll pull these out and I'll start using both these sets of data, to start building out what this should look like in as far as new content for both imagery and bullet points, and I-.
Bradley Sutton:
Now one cool thing. You know you might not have been looking at it, but just in this sense, guys, they're the column on. You guys see on the very right hand side, a match type. This also kind of shows you where if we have seen one of these products doing other placements. You know I said that Cerebro's showing keywords where you have shown up in organic results and sponsor results, but it's not just those two. If they're coming up in one of those widgets that says Amazon recommended, if you see something that says SBV, that means a Sponsored Brand video. So now you can know where your competitors are advertising in the video sections. Maybe the Sponsored Brand ad at the top, maybe if it comes up in highly recommended. So these are other ways where you can kind of look for holes in the market on the keyword side.
So right now Jason just showed us two ways. Hey, look at Product Opportunity Explorer. Look at which products are dominating the niche. Remember, like he said, Product Opportunity Explorer isn't the products that make up 90% of the clicks and also the keywords that make up 90% of the clicks of that market. Here he can round out his strategy, using Cerebro to find other keywords that maybe aren't part of that Product Opportunity Explorer niche, but the competitors are probably getting some sales here or there. Do you have anything else for us today, Jason?
Jason:
Yeah, I could run through how we're using manager experiments, where we popped it in that we're running experiment now on this board.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh yeah, why don't you show that to close things out, and then I'm gonna show some more strategies and then maybe we'll bring it back here for some Q&A.
Jason:
Right now we do take that details and we're running on through manager experiments and anyone who is brand registry has the ability to access and manage experiments and you can run A-B testing on titles, bullet points, A plus content and images. So right now we're running one for title and bullet points. As you can see, I totally just deconstructed my listing for this so you'll notice I've started to put in high caffeine coffee pods. Espresso shot. Through some other research I saw not just espresso but espresso shot was very important. Dark roast, strong coffee, espresso powder once again because powder it's a little bit different. People could have used espresso shot and espresso powder, but I saw, just because we had that included in it, there was actually some relevant high volume search relevancy on it. And then you start lacing some of these key words into your introduction double caffeine, strong, smooth and robust. We picked up on strong, smooth and robust dark roast all in like flavor profiles through product opportunity explorer. Customers were specifically using these keywords, so why not use them? They identify with them. It has meaning for them. Then we always have like a functional benefit to our. So we talk about our vitamin B12, there's a sub niche called healthy coffee that we dominate. So I always like layering in healthy coffee, and then we talk about our pods. All this is going to be baked in. It's going to start as we start driving advertising more and more focused on it, on these keywords. We're doubling down to try and gain organic relevancy. Amazon will pick on it, our AI will pick up on it, and this is kind of the process we use.
Bradley Sutton:
Love it. All right, Jason, thank you so much for sharing that. I want it. Instead of just being like, oh, this is going to be a Helium 10 training where just Helium 10 employees are showing stuff, I want to show, hey, Jason is a real live Amazon seller with a real live product, and these are the strategies that he's using to get ahead. You don't just randomly achieve the success of making 20 million a year on Amazon and Walmart without some solid keyword strategies, and those are some of the things that he has. Now I want to show you guys some common and some also maybe off the wall keyword research strategies in the next 10 minutes and then we'll open it up for Q&A. One of the things I want to show you and this I mentioned before some things you have to have a brand registry for the first thing that Jason was talking about Product Opportunity Explore. You don't need brand registry for the thing that he showed about how to use the experiments with his manager experiments and showing the alternate kinds of titles and bullet points that had different keywords in it. You need brand registry for that. This next one I'm going to show you also requires brand registry and it's because it's utilizing brand analytics. Now I could do this inside of Amazon, but it's much easier to do it inside of Helium 10, because I can search multiple weeks a lot faster. So let me go ahead and share my screen and while he was talking I just loaded up that search for one of the keywords yeah, strong coffee K cups. So I'm just going to take and look at VitaCup. Right here at the very top is advertising. Let's say I'm not VitaCup and I'm just going to copy him and copy his ASIN, and I want to go ahead and see where he is, has been ranking or one of the top three clicked. All right, now. What I want everybody to do is, right now, go into Black Box inside of Helium 10. And then, if you have a Diamond account, all right. I don't think it is available for Platinum just yet, hit this new tool called ABA top search terms. ABA stands for Amazon Brand Analytics and I'm going to be pasting in a few ASIN. So let's go ahead and put that ASIN in here. Did I copy it? I must not have copied it. Oh, there, it is. Okay, I pasted it and let's go ahead and take in the red alert coffee. This guy is selling about a thousand units a month and maybe a couple more ASIN’S here. Death wish, he was mentioning death wish, or there we got three ASIN’s from the top ones. All right, so now what I can do is I'm going to look, let's just say, going to February 4 to February 10. I'm going to hit apply filters and now what is going to come up is where any one of these products was one of the top three clicked products for that keyword. Now, not that many keywords came up, only 17, because I only put in three. But imagine I could have put here maybe 20 or 30 products and then for any week or any month I can say hey, show me where these are these products. At least one of them was one of the top three clicked and I could say I want to see the ones where at least maybe one ASIN had more than 1% of the conversions, meaning that there's got to be some conversions on there and theoretically, all keywords said have that, but there might be some like lower level keywords that have no conversion. Sure enough, there was one, because now there's only 16 keywords left here. But look at this I am now looking at any keyword where at least one of these products is one of the top three clicked, and I could start going in deep here and seeing all right, what is the history of how this product, who are the top three clicked? Like, for example, look at this one protein coffee K cups. All right, protein coffee k cups is not a branded term, and so I'm looking at the Search Volume All right, 735. This is not that much search volume. Is this something that's newer or is it trending? I personally have not seen this keyword before and I'm looking at the last year on Amazon and I could see that, hey, it's actually gone up from like in the 200s and 300s and slowly it's on the rise. So, right off the bat, you know this is not some crazy amazing keyword 735 searches but it's on the upper trending. You know I'm probably one of the ones who's trying to search for out because I'm looking for like hey, is it? Is there a chance to get some protein when I'm drinking coffee, you know? So I would keep looking at this keyword. Now I'm like all right, well, who has been some of the ones who are converting for this keyword? So I click the total click share chart in Helium 10 for the keyword. And now, if I'm looking on a month to month basis, I just put my mouse over and I could see who are the top three clicked products and are they similar to my product? Right, like, for example, look at here in the month of December, VitaCup Keto Coffee Pods was the top the sick, the third most clicked product. Now who is dominating, though? The rapid fire protein coffee. Right, they've got protein in their title of their product, so it's no doubt that somebody searching this is actually a great example. I completely just by chance, found this is a perfect example of keyword research and how it's important and how it actually kind of like will give you an idea about who's going to be one of the best products here. Think of somebody who is actually typing in protein coffee, k cups. All right, I look at the search results and I see all three of these products this Corelatte one, the VitaCup Keto one and the Rapid Fire Protein one. But just the fact that in their title and the name it just so happens to be the name of the product is protein coffee, it's going to get them a lot more clicks. And then, look at that. I don't have to guess if it did or not. Look, amazon is telling me this product got 28% of the clicks right and total makes total sense. The VitaCup one is just a keto. One might give some protein but it only got 6% of the click. It's still top three. But you can understand now all of a sudden why this product is dominating. So that means if I really wanted to dominate this product I might have to think I can just make up protein and say, oh yeah, my product is. You know, this extra shot. VitaCup is a protein coffee. If it's not a protein coffee, that's false advertising, right. But if I'm developing a product I really got to take that in consideration. Now this is how Keyword Research ties in even to your product development. Right, I've got to think about putting that keyword in my title if I want a chance at kind of like busting into this rapid fire proteins market share here. I can also see the history here on the right hand side about how organic and sponsored rank ties in to being one of the top three clicked. For example, this protein coffee in December, in January, in November, they, for this keyword, were not running any sponsored ads. Nowadays, you know, somebody might think you know you got to be running, you got to be having a high bid on this, on any keyword that you want to have a big sales, but for whatever reason, this protein coffee comes like nah, I'm good, I don't need to do sponsored after this keyword because I'm dominating without it right Now. What about VitaCup? VitaCup here in December. This is pretty cool, guys. All right, this is exactly why combining Helium 10 data with Amazon data is so cool. VitaCup was one of the top three clicked ASIN’s, right. The number one clicked ASIN was this protein coffee. Rapid Fire All these brands are really great, right,Rapid Fire. And then you're looking oh, no wonder they're the top click ASIN. They were Organic Rank one. Now, if you were just looking on Cerebro, right, and you saw our Keyword Tracker and you saw that VitaCup Genius Coffee was ranked 12th, you might think, oh, there's no way it's one of the top three clicked because it's kind of like towards the middle of page one. But this is one of the top three clicked and you don't have to wonder why or how. Look at the sponsored rank average. So in December of this month, this variation family was showing up on average right there on the top. So you see how, in some situations, organic rank is all is all that's needed, but if VitaCup was relying on their organic rank only to get clicks for this keyword, would they be one of the top three clicked? Absolutely not, because their organic rank is all the way down here, but they were able to be one of the top three clicked because of their high sponsored rank.
So this is, guys, this is like not your grandfather's keyword research strategy we're talking about today. This is like next, next, next level, where you're going into seeing who are the top click to try and like, understand, buy your intent, and then now you're reverse engineering the strategy with how these different companies were able to dominate this keyword. For this company, it's a matter of hey, they named this product after this keyword. It's in their title, right there at the beginning. They're able to dominate this. For VitaCup, it's completely opposite. Their path to being one of the top three clicked was through sponsored ads. So for every product there's always going to be different strategies, but this is the once you guys are experienced sellers, this is kind of the level of keyword research you need to do. It's not just hey, let me throw in an ASIN and a group of ASINs in a Cerebro. You obviously have to do that, exactly what Jason showed and find those 24,000 keywords and then whittle that down into what are the most important ones. But you also need to take a step farther and start using Product Opportunity Explorer and the Brand Analytics Data to kind of understand, well, what are companies doing after they find that keyword and how are they getting their sales. So that's Brand Analytics. For anybody that has the Diamond plan, I highly recommend it. Now let's say you're on the newer side and you just have a Platinum account, which is totally fine. What is the easiest way to get the top keywords? Let me just show that. Let's go back to that page that's Coffin shelves. Where are we at More Coffin shelves? Where's my coffee one? Here we go, all right. So I'm going to choose the top products on this page that I just want to go ahead and measure my success and my keywords versus them. Or maybe I'm just I don't have my own coffee product yet and I want to know what are the top products here. And, by the way, you can still see there's VitaCup still right there with their Genius Cup right there as one of the top three sponsored ranks, and this is kind of cool. I bet that Jason is actually spending slightly less than Deathwish Coffee and what is his wake the hell up Dark Roast, but he's probably getting a very similar click-through rate. You don't have to be position one or two on sponsored to be one of the top clicked or sponsored Dial back that spend, be the number three or number four and you'll still get almost the same kind of click-through rate and clicks. Let's go ahead and hit Red Alert. I got the Deathwish and I don't want to do Pete's. Let's do community coffee, right. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit run Cerebro. Now this is going to open up in Cerebro, kind of like just what he showed. Now I wasn't paying attention to. If these products are all pods and if they're definitely competitors I'm assuming they are. But you guys need to really take a closer look at who you are putting into Cerebro and make sure that you're doing very similar competitors or that, like Jason was talking about, you're pulling it from Product Opportunity Explorer and you know by definition they're in the same niche. But I just picked four random ones just from the search results, but within seconds here, or a minute or so, I'm going to be able to get where all of these keywords or all of these products, the keywords that they are ranking for and that they're doing sponsored ads. The very first thing that I'm going to do once this shows up is I'm going to hit the button top keyword right here, top keywords so everybody can do this anytime they run Cerebro, and basically what it's doing is it's like hey, where are most of these keywords are ranking for, or most of these products ranking for on these keywords very highly? And look at that. I came up with 24 keywords and a lot of these are branded. But, just like Jason showed, there's a lot of non-branded keywords here as well, like, for example, high caffeine coffee cake. I'm almost positive. He literally found that in Product Opportunity Explorer and I guess randomly guys, this is the first time I've ever searched these things in my life. It just shows how Helium 10 is validated by the Amazon data. That exact keyword that he found is showing up right here Strong coffee. There's the other keyword that he found that came up right here Protein coffee K cups. That's the keyword that I had found just on my own that I put up here. So these are the top keywords. Another thing, though I like to do, this obviously, is going to just show tons and tons of branded ones. I like hitting this button Opportunity Keywords, because, instead of looking at the products or the keywords that everybody is ranking highly for, this button allows me to see, in seconds, products where only one or two of these competitors are ranking high and, by definition, of course, the majority of those are going to be branded. But every now and then I'm going to be able to see unique keywords that other competitors might not be able to see, they might not be paying attention to. Like here, instead of k cups, here's a keyword that I didn't realize. Some people are typing in kpods. Now why did this kpods keyword come up here? Let's take a look at the Relative Rank here. All right, perfect, look at this. I don't know who is who, but look at this Of these top competitors. Let's say these guys are all kind of equal, competing with each other. Do you see where everybody is ranked here on this page? One of them is 78, one is 107, 241, 245. There is only one of these competitors getting sales from this keyword cake pods with no spaces, and they're ranked on page one, position 12. What does that mean? That means that if I were to kind of like, do a campaign on this keyword. It potentially could be easier for me to rank for this because I'm not having to go up against all of my main competitors. So that's why this button, guys, is a sleeping giant of a button right here.
Opportunity keywords let's see if we can find any of the hidden gems in here that aren't branded keywords. Let's take a look here: Coffee pod, bulk k cups. Maybe some of these products think, well, we're not really bulk so we don't think we should put that in our listing. But there are some people, for one of these products at least, where they are heavily ranked for bulk k cups, even though they're not really a bulk and they're actually getting sales from it. So this is just another way to get some keywords that can help you. I want to give you guys some deep dive strategy sessions on keyword research. To kind of round out your on Amazon and off Amazon, your on Helium 10 and off Helium 10 strategy. So let me go pull up those episodes right now. We did a three-part keyword research series on Helium 10 a few months ago. That really is going to help you, in about three hours of time, get all of the keyword research tips that you need. So you guys got a pen handy, write this down. And the way you can find this is everybody, go ahead and pull out your phone. If you have an iPhone, type in podcast and open up the podcast app. Or Spotify if you have a Spotify and type in Serious Sellers Podcast, all right, type in serious sellers podcast, and then go ahead and hit subscribe. And then the ones I want you guys to look at are these three episodes here keyword research masterclass 100% free, doesn't it? And you don't have to be a Helium 10 member to listen to these. All right. Episode 506, 507, and 508. All right, so again, go to the podcast, Serious Sellers Podcast. Type in episode 506, 507, and 508. If you guys are more visual, it's h10.me/506 , h10.me/507, and h10.me/508 . If you go to those links you'll go to a page where you can actually even see the video too of it. But either way, subscribe to the podcast and go to those episodes and maybe next time you're on your treadmill or you're taking a drive or a run, listen to those and then go back later to the video to kind of like have the overview. But what Jason gave and what I gave are maybe only like six or seven different research strategies. We have over 33 in those videos that will help round out your knowledge, and not everything is Helium 10. Half of them just have to do with Seller Central. Liz says I'm a newbie to Helium 10. I want to know where to start. All right, the podcast is a great way to start. If you don't have your first product yet, product research is what you want to get into. I would go and go into Blackbox and look at hit the Learn button, Liz, and watch all the videos there. And definitely, if you're brand new to Amazon altogether, don't even go there first. Go into the Freedom Ticket, go into the Learning Hub. At the very top of your Helium 10 dashboard you'll see a button called Learning Hub or Freedom Ticket. Hit that and start going through the training there. That'll give you a good way to start. So, Jason, are you looking at what's more important that, a high search volume or not a high search volume, a trending up search volume, kind of like that protein K Cup, or a keyword that already has like 3000 searches? Compared to that one only had 700 and thus has a lot more sales. Which one is more important for you?
Jason:
It depends. So let's if we take protein. We actually released a protein coffee slim protein coffee back in December. That's because of the AI and the way Amazon runs broad and other campaigns, it started picking up on that search term. So it started delivering on Genius. Genius gets delivered on every new search term that gets in. It's trying to find relevancy just beyond what other one product you're carrying. So we developed slim protein coffee because we saw a high search increase on protein coffee in general, which was a trend off Amazon as well. So but I also have baked into our slim protein coffee high search terms such as instant coffee and some other ones. So it's kind of a mixture of both. I always like high search term keywords built into titles and bullet points because it's going to bake in some organic relevancy that it's gonna be cheaper for me to try and build long-term. That it is versus advertising on.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, excellent. Does Amazon auto translate keywords from different languages? One of my organic ranked keywords is Spanish, but I never added to my listening Great question, and the answer is yes. So in America and different countries, it's different languages. In America, Spanish is the main second language that Amazon is on, and if you turn your Amazon browser into Spanish, it automatically translate your listening and then those keywords a lot of them you are already indexed for, and so sometimes, if it doesn't, I highly recommend looking for organic keywords that you're ranking for, and then what you might have to do is adjust your listing optimization, because the Amazon auto translator sometimes doesn't use the exact phrases, and so you might not be that relevant to the Amazon algorithm, even though you're indexed for it. So definitely look at what are the top Spanish keywords and then, if your translation is not good, talk to Amazon and see if you can get your translation updated with better keywords. Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the extra shot I had today, and thanks to everybody for joining us today. Hope you guys enjoyed this session. We'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye now. I'll see you guys next time.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. TikTok Shop listings are surfacing on Google Shopping https://www.modernretail.co/technology/tiktok-shop-listings-are-surfacing-on-google-shopping/ New Feature: Now advertisers can convert high-performing Posts into Sponsored Brand Ads. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7166461642057142272/ Chinese TikTok experts are teaching Americans how to sell https://restofworld.org/2024/china-livestream-studios-train-tiktok-influencers-in-us/ Top Amazon aggregator Thrasio files for bankruptcy https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/28/top-amazon-aggregator-thrasio-files-for-bankruptcy.html Monthly Fees May Be Coming to Etsy https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2024/02/25/monthly-fees-may-be-coming-to-etsy/ The episode continues to buzz with discussions around the benefits of the Helium 10 Elite program, including expert training and exclusive networking events. Plus, don't miss out on the insider scoop about Helium 10's new feature enabling price adjustments directly from the Insights Dashboard. We also encourage our community of Spanish and German speakers to connect through upcoming networking calls, ensuring a global touch to our Amazon selling conversation. Tune in for these fascinating updates and more, as we provide sellers with the tools and knowledge to thrive in the ever-evolving world of online commerce.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 01:10 - TikTok Shop On Google
- 02:47 - Amazon Posts > SB Ads
- 03:50 - TikTok Live Streaming
- 07:46 - Thrasio Bankrupt
- 09:23 - New Etsy Seller Fee?
- 10:10 - Join Helium 10 Elite
- 11:06 - Spanish Networking Calls
- 11:47 - German Networking Calls
- 12:00 - New Feature Alerts
- 15:04 - Pro Training Tip: Reverse-Engineer Your Competitor's PPC Strategy
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
TikTok shop listings showing up in Google results. Amazon posts can be now made into sponsor brand ads. The most famous Amazon aggregator has filed for bankruptcy. These stories and more on this week's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown on all the news stories and goings on in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world and we also let you know what new tools that Helium 10 has released. And we also give you a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing For two weeks in a row now. Not too many articles, couple of big ones out there, a couple of interesting ones for sure. We're gonna hop right into it, but make sure to stay to the end. We got a really cool training tip from Shivali and we also have a pretty cool new feature update from Helium 10.
Bradley Sutton:
So let's go ahead and go into the first article here, and this is from Modern Retail and it's entitled TikTok Shop Listings are surfacing on Google Shopping, right? Have you seen that in Google? This article talks about how listings from TikTok Shop have begun to pop up in Google Shopping, especially results for beauty and skincare products. So, through Google searches for trendy beauty products like Nail Art or Dior Lip Oil, dup results now feature links that go directly to smaller sellers on TikTok Shop, and the actual TikTok team did confirm that this is something that TikTok is dabbling in. Now this, to me, was a little bit interesting because you know, like traditional keyword research tools, you know, like Helium 10 for Amazon, don't necessarily like, don't have as much oomph. Right For TikTok Shop because it relies on so much virality, right, TikTok? You know kind of like influencers are the ones who have like these viral posts and that's what sends tons of traffic to videos. You know it's not like oh, let me get to page one for a certain hashtag on TikTok, right For TikTok Shop. But this could be interesting Depending on how Google is indexing some of these products and how TikTok Shop is integrating. Now, all of a sudden, it could open up a new thing for keyword research on TikTok Shop so you can get some maybe outside traffic that don't come from another TikTok videos directly to your TikTok Shop. So pretty interesting stuff. It'll be definitely worth taking a look at in the future.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is actually not an article, but it was a post from our buddy, Jeff Cohen, from Amazon, and this was from his LinkedIn last week. Just in case you guys missed, it was from a few days ago, but I missed it the first couple of days that it came out. But you can now have high-performing Amazon Post which are free, as you guys know. You can now convert them into sponsored brand ads. All right. So right in the ads console in Post Manager, you can just take an Amazon post that's doing really well and make it a sponsored brand ad. Now, this hasn't been rolled out to everybody yet, so go ahead and check. Go into the Post Manager in your Seller Central ad console, click on the boost button if you see it, and then you're gonna be directed to the sponsored brand campaign builder to review the creative setting. So in his LinkedIn post that we'll link to below, you'll be able to see kind of like some graphics of how it might look. But that is gonna be interesting If you can turn your Amazon post into sponsored brand ads.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is from restofworld.org I should say. Again about TikTok, and seems like I've been beating a dead horse for almost two years now about how US consumers haven't really adopted live shopping. Well, this article says Chinese TikTok experts are teaching Americans how to sell and it says, convinced, a live stream shopping boom in the West is inevitable. Entrepreneurs are sharing Chinese playbooks with aspiring US influencers. And there is just one kind of like tidbit here, guys, that blew me away. Listen to this quote right here In China, 25% of online sales in 2023 took place through live streams. Let that sink in, guys. 25% I mean, if you think about all of online sales in America, like the minor ones, you know, like Walmart and others is not even 25%, a lot, lot less. But out of every single thing that was sold online in China in 2023, again, let it sink in 25% were from live streams. Now, I don't think America will ever, ever get to that number absolutely not right. But I mean it would be kind of crazy if it even got up to like 5%. 10% might be asking for too much. If it gets up to 5%, that's gonna be, you know something, that's going to be pretty, I think, big, and that's what these people are making on.
Bradley Sutton:
So this article talks about how they've got these agencies that are training influencers on how to do like TikTok shop lives, perhaps some Amazon lives, et cetera. Here's one agency that has more than 10 streamers in the US. So these are kind of like streamer factories that they're pumping out and they're giving them the literal Chinese playbook. Like the documents they get is in Chinese and then it has English translation. Now one of these agencies said hey, on a regular day there's about 100 people watching simultaneous sales. This is even the agency. Just shows you how much it hasn't really taken off in America. The professionals can only get like 100 people watching a live stream live, but it says that some days the streams can attract over a thousand viewers at the same time.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, thinking about the cultural differences, of how different things work, you know one influencer said hey, I saw many Chinese live stream sellers screaming at the top of their lungs, counting down until a product is live to encourage rush buying. And this person said I don't think that's gonna work in the US. You know American customers don't like to be told what to do or just because somebody's yelling at them, right, but this influencer who has been doing lives here in America on TikTok shop. She says that she closed over 200 orders on her third day on the job, worth more than a hour with $11,000 worth of products in one afternoon. So again, it's not like completely, completely dead. It's just nothing compared to what's going on in China. But everybody keeps saying, hey, we expect this thing to take off in America sometime. So it's something that I think you know Amazon sellers, e-commerce sellers should be kind of paying attention to what's going on. You know, if we're selling on Amazon, amazon already has Amazon live. Walmart probably will come out with something if it kind of takes off, and then obviously it's a big part of TikTok shop. So do you have a plan ready to go for if live shopping starts taking off? I think it would be great because it's kind of something that's going to be net new. I think it's going to have a lot of impulse buying if it starts taking off and it's not like it's just going to take away from your sales that you already get during search. It's going to be like net new sales for Amazon sellers if this ever takes off.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of Amazon, you know some more sad news Going to. CNBC says top Amazon Aggregator Thrasio files for bankruptcy. Now, there wasn't too much information in this article. I don't understand the whole, you know bankruptcy thing. I know it's not good, but basically what it says here is that the company agreed with lenders to shave off about 495 million off of its debt loan. Doesn't take a bankruptcy specialist to understand. Half a billion dollars is a lot of money, and some creditors committed to provide it with up to 90 million dollars in fresh capital, which it said will go towards ongoing operations and enable to keep running brands as portfolio, so all the brands that it bought. You know it's not like, oh my goodness, they're all going to just run out of stock and go out of business. It still looks like it's going to keep going. But this is, like you know, for those of us who have been in the Amazon game for a few years. You know might be kind of. You know, for some of us maybe not a shock because we could see some things coming. But if somebody were to tell us three years ago or whenever Thrasio was at their peak, you know, hey, they're going to be bankrupt in a couple of years, like we, probably like no way. It seems like they've growing money on trees over there, right, but just the state of the world that we're in ice. There's still a lot of people who are buying and selling Amazon businesses. All right, the that model of buying and selling Amazon business is absolutely not dead. Make sure to check out a recent Kevin King podcast, amp and podcast, which talked about this this model still going strong.
Bradley Sutton:
Last article of the day is coming from e-commerce bites and for those of you, if you're like me and sell on Etsy Something real small it says monthly fees may be coming for Etsy sellers. I didn't realize there was no monthly fees, you know like. So I don't really think this is big. I mean, we're all used to it. You know we pay Walmart, right, we pay Amazon a monthly fee. I don't even know how much I pay Amazon right now. It's like what 30 bucks, 40 bucks, 50 bucks don't really care, because it Etsy sellers are kind of like scared that this is a fee might come. But if you're scared about $20 a month fee or $10 a month fee, you know you probably Shouldn't be selling on the platform, but still, hey, money is money. We got to count all our money. So this is something to watch out for. If you are an Etsy seller.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, a couple of things before we get into a really cool feature update I wanted to remind you of is. You know, a couple weeks ago, for the first time in over a year, helium 10 elite is open. So remember, with helium 10 elite, you can have one-on-one calls with me, one-on-one calls with Carrie and Shivali. Hop on private trains with Kevin King twice a month. You know one where he gives you the seven ninja hacks and brings on expert guests, and another would just him where you can literally Face-to-face, ask Kevin King anything. You want. A lot more perks, you know private networking, big events that we we do around the world. We just did one in Germany, we're gonna do one in Madrid, Spain, in a couple of months. So all of this for only $99 extra a month.
Bradley Sutton:
So if you're interested in more information about the helium 10 elite program, go to h10.me forward slash elite, h10.me forward slash elite, and Once you sign up for elite, make sure the first thing you do is go ahead and book a one-on-one call with me. I'd love to help you out with what you need. Now, if you speak other languages, we have some other networking calls coming up that are completely free, open to anybody. If you speak Spanish, we have our monthly networking zoom call coming up with Adriana, so make sure to sign up at h10.me/llamadaconadriana, and that's the link to go to that call, which is just gonna be in a couple of days. And if you speak in Deutsch, if you speak German, the one that you want to sign up for our monthly call happening this weekend is h10.me/elite-de.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, next up we have a new feature alert from Helium 10, pretty cool feature that a lot of people have been asking for. So you're in your Helium 10 account. You might see some insights from Insights Dashboard about your competitor has lowered their price, they've raised their price, competitors out of stock, competitors running a coupon. Your sales are going up, your inventory is going up, your inventory is going up. All these different things you can see inside of Helium 10's dashboard right, well, on some of these things, the action that you might want to take is you might wanna raise your price or lower your price that is appearing on Amazon, and sometimes you might want to go ahead and do that to a big group of products, like maybe you're selling leggings, like my buddy Yizhak in Israel. I mean, he's got hundreds and hundreds of SKUs. You know, some product lines have 100 SKUs with all the different colors and all the different sizes. When he wants to go change his price. It's like a very tedious task to do inside of Seller Central. Well, that's why I'm happy to introduce that on your Insights dashboard.
Bradley Sutton:
Now you can go ahead and change the price directly from your dashboard. So what you do is you go down to your product table, make sure that you're on the SKU view and then you can go to like listing and you will see this column that says price. So first of all, you click this button and you'll be able to see the history of the price. But right directly here in Helium 10, you can go ahead and, one by one, enter a price. So if you watch Carrie's training last week, maybe you saw how to do tags in your dashboard, where maybe you give all of your coffin shelves a tag. That's what I did here. So I can click on coffin shelf. All of my coffin shelves appear automatically here. I can select everything and then I can hit this button edit price and then go ahead and put the price that I want, to put all of them at once and it's going to go ahead and update in Seller Central.
Bradley Sutton:
There's a lot of use cases for this. I would think that the bulk one is especially appealing, because that really is not easy to do inside of Seller Central and especially for those of you who've got a lot of variations. You just wanna say, hey, all 60 of these variations. I want the new price to be $12.97 or whatever. Instead of going one by one, do it with just a couple clicks of the button. Let us know what you think of this product. Would you like to see some other feature? Me personally, when I saw it, I was like, hey, I wanna be able to see, or be able to maybe make a sale price. I don't wanna lower my price too much, but I would like to be able to make a sale price with a beginning and end date. Other people have asked for coupons. I'm not sure if that's even available for helium tend to do, but if that's something that you want us to try and investigate, make sure to reach out to customer support and let them know what you think of this new tool, but give it a try.
Bradley Sutton:
Next time you wanna change your price for one product or multi-products, go ahead and do it directly inside of helium tend without even having to go to Seller Central. So pretty cool update there, all right. Last up, we have got a really quick hitting tip from Shivali. So maybe you're examining some of your competitors and you wanna know what is their PPC strategy. How are they allocating their spend? Now, you might not be able to just hack into their account and see their seller central advertising console, right, but using Helium 10, there's a cool way that within seconds, you can pretty much see all of their strategy. Check it out in this video.
Shivali Patel:
Hi there, let's talk about how you can analyze your competitor's PPC strategy so you can figure out which keywords and phrases you want to go after. Theoretically, let's say, you found a good seller in your niche that's generating decent volume. What you could do is run a single search on Cerebro, as we've done here with this product, which is the Goer gift Woodcuff and Tray and then you could slide over to check out the keyword distribution. The keyword distribution tells us we have 646 paid terms for this ascent, of which, by hovering over the eye icon, we can see that 287 are for sponsored product placements, 41 are in highly rated spots and 318 are sponsored brand video. What's cool is we can filter for those match types. Let's say I wanted to check out which keywords or phrases is this ascent running sponsored brand videos on. I could go ahead and select that, tap out, click apply filters and you'll see that we have 318 filtered keywords right here. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Or let's say that instead of sponsored brand video, you are interested in just the regular PPC keywords and phrases. I could change out my match type to sponsored product, click apply and all of a sudden, the 287 placements for sponsored product are now visible. You could always further refine this search by inputting in something like a minimum of 200 for search volume and a sponsored filter of one to five. This is going to show us which keywords they seem to be concentrating their PPC spend on Applying just a couple more filters takes us from 287 filtered keywords down to a more feasible 22.
Shivali Patel:
Of course, as sellers, we wouldn't be bidding top of search unless those keywords are actually profitable. So now you can use this information to your own advantage. This contrasts to this other ascent we have here, where you can instantly see they're not running any paid ads. We have zero for all of these placements across the board. Now compare that to this last ascent, where we have 22 for paid search and, guys, anytime you see such few keywords underneath paid, then you're probably looking at an ascent that's not running any auto phrase or broad match campaigns and you can leverage this information. Especially if that ascent is in similar standing to your product, you can figure out whether that's something you want to duplicate or completely stay away from all this to say there is so much you can do with Cerebro. We have so many filters and I just showed you match type. Make sure that you go in and do this for your own products to figure out maybe how you want to change up your strategy or what are some new keywords and phrases you want to add. I'll see you next time.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, Thank you, Shivali, for that. That's actually pretty cool. Did you guys know that you can pretty much reverse engineer some of your Competitors Exact Strategy, especially those who aren't doing broad or phrase or auto campaigns? So make sure you guys are utilizing that. A lot of those features are available to any level of Helium 10. Well, that's it for this week's Weekly Buzz guys. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.
As the landscape of Japanese e-commerce undergoes a seismic shift, we're fortunate to have e-commerce experts Nick Katz and Gary Huang join us again to unpack the transformation. It's a world where Amazon goes toe-to-toe over local stalwart Rakuten, a surprising twist given the resilience of Japan's physical storefronts during a pandemic that skipped a full lockdown. Their insights shed light on Rakuten's gamble to step away from their cornerstone points program, a move that has sellers keenly watching the horizon for its ripple effects.
Steering through the complexities of international logistics, this episode covers the strategic use of freight forwarding when entering the Japanese market, a journey our expert guests navigated firsthand. We dive into the benefits of Japan's proximity to China, the advantages of trade agreements with other Asian nations, and reminisce about the global hiccup caused by the Suez Canal crisis. These discussions are not just theoretical musings; they're actionable insights for bolstering your bottom line and carving out a niche in one of the world's most dynamic Amazon marketplaces.
Finally, we celebrate the cultural tapestry that is Japanese business ethos, examining the surprising competitive edge that international sellers can unleash with astute analytics and Amazon product reviews. These narratives of success and support—from local sellers to global players—culminate in an invitation to an upcoming event in Okinawa, promising to be an epicenter for networking amongst the entrepreneurial elite. It's here where the theoretical becomes tangible, and where the future of selling in Amazon Japan takes shape before our very eyes.
In episode 539 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Gary, and Nick discuss:
- 00:00 - Sell on Amazon Japan Expert Tips
- 07:47 - E-Commerce Changes in Amazon Japan
- 12:04 - Import Taxes and Duties Abroad
- 14:25 - Freight Forwarding and Japan Business Opportunities
- 22:16 - Success Stories of Selling in Japan
- 29:37 - Selling in Niche Markets - Japan
- 33:49 - Leveraging Global Reviews for Success
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► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton: Today we've got two of the world's foremost experts on selling on the one Amazon marketplace that you probably aren't selling in, but you need to be Amazon Japan, where sellers are making more profit than all their other Amazon marketplaces. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. We know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/keywordtracker. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And it's the middle of the night almost middle of the night here, so I'm in my normal attire of what I wear every night here in my house, but the only people that I can go ahead and keep this on and not have to change back to work clothes when I do something at this hour of the day is the two guests here because they are actually in Japan right now. So we are, makes me feel right at home here with what I'm wearing. We have a back on the show, Nick and Gary. Welcome back, guys.
Nick: Thank you.
Gary: It's great to be back and for those of you guys that are listening, I can see Bradley. He has like a black and white sumo themed what they call you could tell or like a robe, but he wears it very well. I love the Japanese motif you got going on. It's great to see you.
Bradley Sutton: Yes, thank you for that. Likewise I haven't seen Nick in a year. But, Gary, you know we saw each other. We had some nice Tonkatsu right there in Ginza a while back a few months ago with my favorite place to eat over there. So it was nice to see you there. But you know, for those who want to get the full backstory, go back guys to episode 426 was the first time Gary was on. Nick's been on before then as well. But 426 was from last year and we had a lot of updates on what's going on in Amazon Japan and since then there's been new things. So I wanted to, you know, invite you guys back. But I'm not saying this is the reason. But we were talking earlier about how my LA Dodgers was able to sign Ohtani and Yamamoto, my two favorite baseball players, both Japanese, but I'm looking on the 7 Figure Seller Japan Mastermind website at last year's event. Let me just show everybody this. All right, I'm not saying that the Dodgers have me to thank, but last year at this event I wore my Helium 10 Dodgers themed jersey and you can see me here in this picture. I'm explaining something. I'm like think about it, man Ohtani is going to come to the Dodgers. He's like oh, I'm not exactly sure, but I was telling him that the Dodgers are coming. Well, we're going to talk about your new event this year for sure. I just wanted to call that out, though. You know, dodgers, you know. Let me give you my address. My check should be in the mail. You have me to think I set the ground, I set the standard there last year early. Anyways, let's start with Nick. How many years, now total, have you been Japan? I know Gary's newer, but how many years do you have under your belt?
Nick: I can't even count how many years now, but I came in 1995. So whatever it is from then?
Bradley Sutton: 1995. Yes, that's quite a while. Right after a few years, just after I moved out. Now You've been there so long. Just like you just said, the years kind of just bleed together. But if we were just to start off with one of the biggest changes in the e-commerce landscape in Japan in the last year, what would it be? This is maybe like the first kind of full year after COVID and dust is kind of settled. In America at least, there's a lot of the boom that was happening in e-commerce, I wouldn't say one crashing down. It's a steep decline to pre-COVID time. Something similar in Japan, or how do you view the landscape over there?
Nick: Yeah, well, I mean, e-commerce is very, very strong here. It still is very, very strong. Japan, unlike a lot of other countries, has always traditionally had very strong brick and mortar retail. People do like going to stores, but I mean, Japan never had a full-on lockdown, so most of the stores were open for most of the time. There were small periods where they weren't open, but because we also do retail, we actually do distribution to stores. We've seen that they are really starting to cut back. So there has been a real shift to online and I've noticed, certainly in the last year. I hope no one from Rakuten is hearing this, but I think they're starting to feel a little bit of pain. They've made a few adjustments and I think there is definitely more of a swing towards Amazon over Rakuten. They are pretty much half and half for the section of the market, no, of the section of the market, so they've both got about 20%.
Bradley Sutton: Yeah, no, I mean, I thought Rakuten was still way ahead.
Nick: No, I think Amazon has now overtaken Rakuten. It's kind of hard to compare apples to apples, but it does look like Amazon has overtaken Rakuten and Rakuten have started to do some strange things cut back on their points program, which has always been their main strategy. That it was their strongest point the fact that you can collect points. Japanese people get Rakuten points in their lives, doing everything, and even my company has a Rakuten bank account. People have Rakuten. They have Rakuten for everything for travel, for insurance, for everything and it's to get points. But Rakuten started to cut back on those points. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think that is going to encourage more people to move over. So that's kind of something that I'm seeing personally, all the Rakuten is still a very, very good marketplace here.
Bradley Sutton: All right, interesting. Now, going back to Gary, let's take a step back from e-commerce. This is only what is it? Second, third year in Japan for you?
Gary: Third year in Japan, one year in Tokyo. Bradley Sutton: Third year in Japan. Gary: Yeah, two and a half or two years in Okinawa.
Bradley Sutton: How has your family settled in now? Japanese speaking, culture, food. Is it home now or still feels a little bit foreign?
Gary: Well, I wish my Japanese was better. I mean, my son is 5, he's in pre-kindergarten. I'm pretty sure his Japanese is going to surpass mine very soon. But yeah, we're acclimating very well and we actually just got back from a trip from Hokkaido, which is in the north, really nice skiing. My wife had, they have this drift ice area in the northern part of Hokkaido like literally the ocean is like frozen, and my wife had that on her bucket list for many years and we were able to do that. So, yeah, very fortunate to be here and, yeah, very happy.
Bradley Sutton: That's awesome. Yeah, I used to live right south of there, in Aomori, for about a year and a half. Not quite as cold as Hokkaido, the oceans didn't get frozen over there but it was cold, I didn't mind that. I went back last year. Yeah, I went back to Aomori for the first time in like 20 years no, 25 years and so it was nice to go out there. My son actually went to Hokkaido. My son took his very first trip without his parents. He was friends and he actually went to Hokkaido before me. Now, what about e-commerce for you? Like, what have you noticed on your side that has changed? Maybe specifically more to Amazon Japan for your network of sellers there in the community?
Gary: Selling on Amazon. Amazon is still very strong. We can get deliveries very quickly. But, for example, when we went up to Hokkaido, rather than buying like a sled and like lugging it from Tokyo to Hokkaido, we just ordered off Amazon and shipped it to the hotel and you know my son was thrilled. He was ready to go, and so Amazon has that coverage. But one of the biggest changes for e-commerce sellers foreign sellers especially importing into Japan is there was a new import law change October of 2023. So previously you could use what they call a importer of record or IOR. I mean, you're not in Japan. If, let's say, you're a US seller with the LLC, previously you could use an IOR, a company that's importer of record to represent you to import the products. But now they changed the law because it seems the government is getting smarter when it comes to all of these e-commerce sellers. So now you have to go through ACP. I think that stands for Attorney of Customs Process. I might be getting the verbiage mixed up, but basically it's a different scheme and you may have to pay more in the taxes because you will be billed on the total selling cost. So that's the Amazon cost. So that's one of the big changes that we're seeing so far.
Bradley Sutton: So if somebody was already selling Japan, they don't need to convert to that. They can keep going with their importer of record. Or do they need now? They needed, you know, even if they already have tenure there, they got to switch to this new thing.
Nick: Yeah, so it's actually import base, so it's the time that you import. So if you're importing after October 1st, in theory you can't use IOR. I should probably stress the fact that this is all in theory. I can tell you that there are sellers who are still importing using Chinese freight forwarders, who are getting the goods into totally fine, but in theory there is no more IOR and so you have to use this. As Gary was mentioning ACP, which, although it's not so, the tax and duty is based on the selling price, which doesn't mean it's not exactly on the selling price. You're allowed to remove the cost, like Amazon fees and certain things, but the whole concept is that who is the purchaser of the goods. So if you're, if you're not a domestic company, if you're an international seller that don't have a registered business in Japan, then the goods being sent to Japan, going to Amazon, going to the customer the customer is the person purchasing the goods, so for tax and duty should be based on what they're paying, as opposed to, for example, for my company. We're based in Japan, so we actually do purchase the goods. We can show a paper trail back to the supplier. We are the purchaser, so we only pay tax and duty and what we buy it for and then we set it on Amazon. So it's just the way that the import office is just customs office is kind of interpreting. It's all a bit gray, to be honest, but that's kind of how they're interpreting it. The actual final buyer online is the kind of original purchaser of the goods. Therefore, tax and duty should be based off whatever they are paying.
Bradley Sutton: And then what? So is the customer paying for that then?
Nick: No, so the customer isn't paying it. So, but that is what they are using. So it's actually the ACP, or so you have to pay. So your company pays, so the customer isn't paying that, but that's what they're basing off and that's their reasoning for it. They are essentially, they're being almost regarded as the importer, which is obviously just ridiculous.
Bradley Sutton: Yeah, but it's not something like in Europe, where VAT is applied to what the customer's paying at the time of purchase and then the. I believe that I don't even sell in Europe, so I believe the seller has to remit that or Amazon keeps it, but it's like that price has to include that and so it's kind of like a surcharge. But how much are we talking about, like for somebody like me? I'm selling, let's say I sell in Japan and I'm importing. Like are my duties and all these taxes? Is it comparable to you know what I'm doing by importing from China to US and what I have to pay for customs? Or is it more? Is it less?
Nick: Well, it kind of depends on a few different things. Obviously depends on the categories and exactly what the products are, you have to remember. So in Japan the consumption tax is a lot lower than, for example, Europe. You mentioned Europe. So the tax is 10% in Japan, or it's 8% if it's, for example, food or drink. So, but because they base it on the price that you're selling as opposed to the price that you are actually purchasing the goods, for at that point it will be a bit higher. But there are. I say there are lots of ways actually around this and I don't know if Gary is going to mention it. There are a lot of countries that have agreements where you don't actually have to pay duty at all, for example. But it does kind of make things smoother and easier if it's a Japanese business doing the import as opposed to an international business. And one of the main ways around it is that you get a company in Japan to do the import for you and that kind of covers all of the problems. So all the large kind of import companies. That's what they're doing now. They're essentially importing themselves, paying the supplier, and then you only pay the tax and duty on basically the cost of goods, so it will become a lot cheaper. So you kind of have like a bit of a middleman in there.
Bradley Sutton: Yeah, makes sense. Now this question is for either of you. So at what point am I having to have my ducks in a row for this like am I? Do I need that already when I apply to sell in Japan? You know, I just go into my US, or if I'm a European seller, I go into my European seller central and apply to sell in Japan. Are they already asking me for this? You know ACP preview, the artist formerly known as IOR, or is that just something I need to take care of by the time?
Nick: It's something you need to take care of yourself. Amazon is not involved in this whatsoever. This is completely
Bradley Sutton: No. But are they asking me? for it, for like proof that I have that. Just to apply the account?
Nick: No. So basically, when you want to send goods to Japan, you just speak to your freight forwarder, whoever you use, and the freight forwarder will give you all the information and sort it out for you. It's not something that you really need to do yourself. The freight forwarder will do that. So the freight forwarder is traditionally done IOR. A lot of the Chinese freight forwarders, as I said, are still doing it and they seem to be getting the goods in quite fine. But there's something that you will do through your freight forwarder so whoever you use and to ship the goods, that. So it's not something you specifically need to kind of go out and do yourself in most circumstances.
Bradley Sutton: Yeah, all right, makes sense. That's good, like I thought it was something I had to, like, you know, find and or maybe you know, hire a company to handle it. But that's good to know that. You're like me. For example, when I import from from China to US, I actually don't worry about anything. Yes, there are obviously customs, yes, there's some kind of certification, but actually my sourcing agent, who's also my freight forwarder, she handles all that for me. I'm like, all right, you know apply, you know tell me what you need from me, but you take care of everything. That's nice to know that there's something like that, where you know I don't have to go searching in the Japanese yellow pages for people on my own, so that's good to know.
Nick: Yeah, I mean, if it's all set up, you don't? There isn't any extra work that needs to be done by you.
Bradley Sutton: Now, Gary, you know like speaking, you know we're talking about freight forwarding. You had mentioned something interesting. You know, in recent months, obviously many Sellers in Europe were affected and actually worldwide about. You know what was going on with the pirates of the Caribbean, there in the Suez Canal, like you know, the Red Sea, you know like that, that affected shipping prices worldwide because you know like ships couldn't go there. You know they didn't want to get shot down and things, and then obviously you know there are shipping delays and that increases prices. You know people felt it here in the States, people felt it in Europe, but you were saying kind of in Japan it was whatever, right, because it's so, so close.
Gary: Yeah, I mean the Suez Canal Crisis. It's really impacting ocean freight all over the world, like going from like 2000 something dollars or containers, who you know, over 5,000 and even more right, even if you're not, by passing through Suez canal, because it has a ripple effect, because it's taking longer for the ships to go around, like South of Africa, so it adds like two additional weeks and most people don't realize. You have to factor in for the containers as well, because the containers are used, so you have to have more empty containers to accommodate that. But if you look at the map, you know Japan is China's neighbor, right? So I mean a container from China to Japan can arrive in, you know, like a week, so it's really fast, I mean compared to China, USA, you know 30 to 45 days or even more right, so you can definitely save a lot of time shipping if you're selling in Amazon, Japan shipping from China. And also you can save a lot of money as well because distance wise is very close, I mean literally, I mean their neighbors, right, so you will save a lot of money as well. And then in terms of sellers, you know we were talking to with, you know, Brandon Young Last year and that was kind of like a light bulb moment for him, because if you can reduce the lead time you know from when the factory ships out the good until you land it, you know from you don't have to keep so much inventory, right? So rather than buying up like three, four months of the inventory just staying stock, you could cut that to, let's say, a month or two months inventory so that for the seller, that frees up your cash flow as well. If you were to sell in Japan, from China, Japan, given the shorter lead times. That's why we feel like there's, at least you know, this one big X factor for sellers. You know it would be an advantage to sell into Japan. If you're sourcing from China and actually not only China, because you know, as they could quickly touch upon just a few minutes ago. If you're sourcing from other countries in Asia, there's actually three trade agreements between India and Japan, Vietnam in Japan and Thailand in Japan. So it depends on your exact product, but your product could come in if it's made in India. If you're exporting Japan, if you land duty free right, I mean, it could be zero. So there's and obviously there's no trade war going on between you know, China, Japan. So there's no Trump tariffs and you could significantly reduce your landing cost and obviously that would help every seller, you know profit margins right if you're able to do that. So you know there's a lot of these type of logistical advantages that Japan has. Then not a lot of sellers are aware of, and you know that would it could. I mean you could land your product a lot cheaper, a lot faster. You know if your cash flow selling in Japan compared to other countries. So we feel like that's one big advantage.
Bradley Sutton: Yeah, I really need to get off my butt and do it. You know, like I've been saying I would, but I just been so busy at Helium 10 that I haven't been able to expand any of my Amazon business almost like this week. I'm finally launching like three products for the first time in probably a year and a half. But um, but yeah, I need to get. Gary: Can we do a Project X Japan? Bradley Sutton: We should do that, yeah Gary: We should do a project here first.
Bradley Sutton: Yeah, Project X will be doing. All right, I like it, we'll do it. Anime with Japanese animation. We'll get Wit studios to do it for us yeah. Speaking of Japan and Japan. So we'll get back to the Amazon strategy. But let's talk a little bit about the 7 Figure Seller Japan Mastermind. I attended last year. I'm probably going to attend this year. I'm not going like it in the official capacity. I think I like it so much I think I'm going to pay my own way, you know, because we have a certain budget for events at Helium 10 and then, you know, usually they rotate things, or one year we'll do, you know, like last year we did Prague European one, this year we're not doing that one, in the next year we might do it again or something, but this one wasn't on the list for our travel budget. But you know I'm a points hacker, so, like I'm sure I could, you know, probably pay for a flight myself or make it not so much. And it's going to be in a place that I have been in Japan 40 times, lived in Japan, have never, ever been, and that's Okinawa. So, Gary, was it your decision to do it in Okinawa, since you had lived there before, or how did you decide that you're going to do this event in Okinawa?
Gary: Yeah, well, Okinawa I mean, for those that don't know, it's known as the Hawaii of Japan. So there's beautiful beaches, it's, you know, subtropical climate, and we were able to secure a fantastic resort hotel, that Hilton in Okinawa. So literally it's on the beach. I wanted to do it in Okinawa, and I was talking with Nick as well, because it's Japan, but it's a nice change of pace as well. So it's kind of like the Hawaii of Japan and then logistically, there's, you know, the airport. You can arrive there pretty conveniently at Naha Airport and basically everyone's going to be there at the same place. You know we have 8 figure sellers, 7 figure Japan sellers. We have, like, all these different experts. You know, every step of the way, right from compliance to shipping, localization etc. But yeah, and I kind of wanted to to give back to Okinawa as well, because during COVID I mean, some of you guys know my family story. We weren't able to because we were living in Shanghai before. You know, I'm American and I couldn't go back to Shanghai, even though my wife is Chinese. I lived there 11 years, I paid all my taxes. I couldn't go back because they closed the border and my visa had expired. But Okinawa, you know they allowed us to stay on a temporary tourist visa for two and a half years. So Okinawa also is like the poorest prefecture in Japan and they really suffered a lot during COVID. So I'm just happy that you know people can come visit and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do in Okinawa, to kind of get back as well.
Bradley Sutton: Alright, yeah, I'm a history buff, I'm a travel buff, so, alright, guys, you heard it here first. Like I'm committing that I'm going to go, you know so, April 8th to 10th. If you guys want to join, like, I have a forwarding website here that make it easier. Remember, just go to h10.me/japan and that'll bring you to sign up and there will be, you know, a lot of great speakers talking about local. You know selling in Japan, strategies and, while I was there last year, you know there was a couple interesting success stories. I saw one I forgot his name, but one influencer who was doing 7 figures in Japan. I forgot his name, but, Nick, maybe you can give us some other success stories, maybe of either local Japanese sellers or maybe somebody from a foreign marketplace foreign to Japan. You know Europe or USA getting started in Japan and being successful? Any stories you can relate.
Nick: So one of our clients is an international brand, they're an American registered company and last year they cleared 7 figures and we're definitely looking to do a lot more this year and that's in two years. The sales currently are, so they're actually doing very, very well.
Bradley Sutton: Seven figures in US dollars, we're talking. Seven figures in Japanese Yen is not too much, but you're saying, you're saying US dollars, right.
Nick: No, we're doing 7 figures in Yen a month now. So, no, yeah, they're doing very, very well in America. They sell in Europe and they sell in Canada, but the Japanese sales are now almost comparable to the US sales, but the profit margins are a lot higher. Bradley Sutton: That was about to be my second question.
Nick: Yeah, because you know things like the PPC is a hell of a lot cheaper. The ACoS for the account is about, I think it's about 8, 9 percent now. The TACoS is about 3 or 4 percent and it's the kind of figures you can't really get in the US. So, actually in theory you could sell a lot less in Japan and still end up with the same kind of profit as you could in the US. But obviously, if you, if you're getting sales close to the US, you're probably going to have much, much higher margins. Japan really is cheaper. It's a cheaper tax as well. If you are off the threshold to pay tax. But if you're under 10 million Yen, which is probably about 60-70,000 US, if you're under that in sales, you don't have to pay consumption tax. There is no tax. So anybody like me selling in Europe who gets absolutely lost by the tax authorities there you know paying 19, 20, 21, 23 percent in some of the some of the regions in Europe, you could be selling, you know, 50-60,000 US in Japan and not have to pay any consumption tax whatsoever. So there are definite advantages to selling in Japan.
Bradley Sutton: Another advantage that I've seen is the kind of Amazon seller culture is a little bit different. So, for example, the Chinese sellers and the foreign sellers there they're used to. You know they're using a lot of Chinese tools. They're using Helium 10, you know to be able to do their keyword research. But one thing I noticed, you know at least last year or the year before, was a lot of the Japanese-based sellers, even some of the bigger ones, it's like not in their business culture to really use like tools, like they're not using Helium 10. They're not using the Chinese tools and so sometimes you can go in there and like you might have these insights about keywords. You know running Cerebro, you know they wouldn't have any idea what reverse ASIN means and you've got keywords that you can put in your listing that they might not even know because they're just maybe relying on PPC to find their keywords. Is that still kind of like the case where you know tool usage is not widespread amongst the local Japanese selling community?
Nick: Yeah, definitely. I think it comes from the fact that most of the sellers, most of the largest sellers, were originally on Rakuten and Rakuten there aren't really as many kind of tools available, so they just haven't really kind of built up the systems and kind of the processes to handle that kind of data. So no, I don't think they are using it. Obviously the Chinese sellers are, but the local sellers don't think are anywhere near as much.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, that's definitely what I've noticed. Now, Gary, back to you. You know you've probably heard a lot of excuses. You know I just gave you an excuse of I don't have any time, you know, to do it, but what are some of the myths or excuses that you hear about what people think? Maybe it's just a conception of how selling in Japan is, or obstacles that really aren't there. What are some things that maybe you can debunk for those who might be timid to dip their feet into the Japanese waters over there?
Gary: Yeah, I think one of the biggest ones is language, because obviously Japanese language is very different and you know I don't really speak Japanese and you know I figured out how to sell in Japan because you really you don't need to actually know Japanese to sell in Japan. I mean, obviously it helps, but the fact that the number 1 Amazon Seller Central Japan is all in English, so literally, if you know how to sell in the US or Europe, you instantly can sell in Japan. And number 2, in terms of the keyword research obviously we have tools like Helium 10 so sellers can get smart. They're already familiar with how to do reverse ASIN searches and you know all that good stuff. You can do the same thing in Japan. And number three now we have tools like AI, ChatGPT and the translation feature. I mean, it's like miles ahead of Google translate, like you know what we're using just two years ago. So I'm able to use ChatGPT to really get smart and even dissect some of the Japanese competitors listings to extract keywords to better understand that. So I feel like you know that's one big myth about Japan and I feel at the same time, you know like all of these obstacles. You know, talking about culture, talking about language. You know, I kind of. You know I like that book, The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Like I don't know if you guys read that book, it's kind of like a stoicism book. But like these obstacles actually, if you look at it from the flip side, right, a lot of people are intimidated by Japan. But if the fact that you learn how to do this I mean, if you want to come to our conference, we'll literally guide you through it. You can leave no stone unturned; these obstacles actually become your moat, right, they're like a barrier against your competition, that they're intimidated by it. So I feel you know, for the certain seller that is motivated to do this especially, I mean this selling in Japan is really good, for sellers who are already selling in the US or already selling in EU. They have skews, let's say, with like 700 reviews, 1000 reviews. Why? Because you can actually carry over those reviews from Amazon US to Amazon Japan. So that way when you launch on day one, you don't launch with zero reviews, you launch with 700 reviews and like the review moat, I mean the review, like the average review is a lot lower, like review score is a lot lower in Japan as well. So I mean,Japan is the fourth biggest market, but it still seems like a lot of people are either too intimidated or, you know, they don't know about it. So I'm really trying to help sellers, and you know, Nick as well, right, we're trying to help sellers better, you know, take advantage of this opportunity, even though it's 2024, you know, like, what Nick said before, you know Japan is the niche, right? I mean, we're all talking about the riches are in the niches, I mean in Japan, like the best selling thick yoga mats, like I actually did. Like a comparison, in the US, the best selling thick yoga mat has 4.6 stars and has 75,000 reviews, so it's way too saturated, right? But in Japan, the best selling thick yoga mat only had 3.9 stars and only 370 reviews, right? So you think about it. I mean, which one would you rather compete against, right? The yoga mat with 4.6 stars, 75,000 reviews, or Japan, right? And if you're already selling the US, if you have a thousand reviews, you can actually carry them over to Japan and then you can be like, you know, the king right from day one. So there's all of these advantages that sellers can have if they know how to do this. Just sounds in Japan.
Bradley Sutton: What else that we haven't talked about yet are people going to be able to learn about at the conference in April?
Gary: I think something that's new that we talked about is Rakuten, because everyone knows Amazon, right, but Rakuten, like what Nick said, they're literally neck and neck with Amazon. So we're going to bring in a speaker to talk about how to sell on Rakuten and this way we can give the sellers, you know, a balanced perspective, right, Amazon and Rakuten. We didn't have this last year, so this way we want to give sellers more information, because certain products may sell better on Amazon or on Rakuten, so this way you can have more perspective there. And then we're also talking about how to get into offline retail in Japan as well, so we're going to have some content there as well. So I mean, if you're a seller, if you're going to make the investment to import your products into Japan, it kind of makes sense to maximize the different options that you have, right? So, beyond Amazon, Rakuten, getting into physical retail stores, and then we're also going to talk about external marketing strategies. There's social media, and you know Nick is really good at this, like using Japan social media platforms. eI think this is information You're not going to get anywhere else and you know we share, like real examples from real sellers. You know what they're doing, that you can take away, you can imitate. So, yeah, I think these are all great opportunities, and also AI as well. I mean AI is like super prevalent now you know Japan is trying to like push AI a lot as well because you know, with like the labor costs and you know Japan has kind of like fallen behind compared to the rest of the world. Right, but they're looking to amplify AI. So we're trying to help sellers use AI to scale your business in Japan, even if you don't speak the language.
Bradley Sutton: All right. So again, guys, if you didn't write down that address, how can you get more information on this conference, h10.me/japan. Nick, maybe any last words about selling Japan that you think foreign sellers need to know about the market, good or bad?
Nick: So I think one of the main things that people should really understand is that about half of the market in Amazon, Amazon Japan is made up of Chinese sellers. So, although you know we have these kind of podcasts and Gary is explaining to people about the fact that Amazon Japan is a very good marketplace, a lot of people who sell in Europe or the US, they might think about it, they might consider it. The Chinese they know. They know just how good it is because they know there is very little competition, there's very little branding, so they can ship products out to Japan and sell. They don't need to have very many reviews. If you are a brand that already has. Sorry. If you are a seller who already has a brand and you've already got reviews on your products, all you need to do is list them in Japan. Global review thinking has been a thing for probably about three years now. You can start in Japan with more reviews than all the other sellers combined. You don't even need to have very many, even if you've got 500, that might be more than all the people in the top 50. And so it's so much easier to launch in a marketplace where your main competition are Chinese, non-face brands. They aren't even brands, they aren't even brand registered, whereas you are a brand, you look good, you've got the assets, you've got the images, you've got the videos are more importantly, the most important thing you have the reviews. You are starting with more reviews than anybody else. I mean there isn't any other way, any other better way to sell. You'll have cheaper conversions, you'll have cheaper PPC than everybody else and I think that's probably the main thing.
Bradley Sutton: Awesome, all right guys. Well, if you're convinced already, well, hurry up and sign up for selling in Japan, and you could reach out to Nick and Gary for help from their network or attend in person the event and meet a lot of these people who can help you in person while enjoying the Hawaii of Japan. So I look forward to seeing you guys in Okinawa and month or so now, and it'll be great to see you there and hope to see some listeners there as well, so look forward to it.
Listen in as Alvaro Lopez from Solo Stove shares this brand’s incredible entrepreneurial journey that began with two brothers with a vision and has since flourished into a significant role in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce landscape. Our conversation paints a picture of how his academic pursuits in international studies set the stage for a career that expertly intersects with the Amazon-selling industry. We also unravel the story behind Solo Stove's creation by two brothers who dared to dream beyond the confines of their day jobs, skillfully navigating the supply chain from China to North America to deliver a product beloved by outdoor enthusiasts.
Join us as we dissect the intricate details of brand strategy and e-commerce optimization for Amazon and Walmart. From the leap of establishing a direct-to-consumer channel to strategic maneuvers post-IPO, our discussion with a global director of marketplaces offers many insights. We dive into the crucial role of consumer obsession and mastery over logistics, and we share invaluable tactics for brand defense on platforms like Amazon. The importance of rich content and keyword optimization to cut through the noise of a saturated marketplace is laid bare, providing a roadmap for e-commerce success. Wrapping up, our chat transitions from the tantalizing secrets of Peruvian chicken to strategic e-commerce maneuvers. We highlight the essential role of high-quality ingredients and cultural heritage in culinary success before shifting to the nuances of effective copywriting and the power of tools like Helium 10's Cerebro tool. Alvaro emphasizes the significance of localization in global branding and imparts wisdom on the 'action over perfection' philosophy that has fueled the growth of many successful brands. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to navigate the complex yet rewarding waters of e-commerce with agility and foresight.
In episode 538 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Franco discuss:
- 00:00 - Strategies for Solo Stove's E-commerce Success
- 07:58 - Solo Stove's Brand Defense Strategy In Amazon
- 09:50 - E-Commerce Brand Strategy and Optimization
- 12:05 - Strategies for Brand Protection
- 15:01 - Emotional Branding in Marketplace Selling
- 18:56 - Marketplace Performance Analysis and Expansion
- 20:21 - Expanding Sales Channels and Branding Strategies
- 25:57 - Peruvian Chicken's Secret & Other E-Commerce Strategies
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
You've probably heard of Solo Stove, a company that does almost half a billion dollars annually and does ads with people like Snoop Dogg and more. Now, today we're going to talk to one of the heads of their Amazon business to see what strategies that any Helium 10 user has access to that help them increase to this level. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Kevin King:
Hey, what's up everybody? Kevin King here. You know, one of the number one questions I get is how can you connect to me? How can I, Kevin, get some advice or speak with you or learn more from you? The best way is with Helium 10 Elite. If you go to h10.me/elite, you can get all the information and sign up for Helium 10 Elite. Every month, I lead advanced training where I do Seven Ninja Hacks. We also have live masterminds and every single week, one of those weeks I jump on for a couple hours and we talk shop, we talk business, do in-person events. Helium 10 Elite is where you want to be. It's only $99 extra on your Helium 10 membership. It's h10.me/elite. Go check it out and I hope to see you there.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And again I am here on the other side of the world, here in Frankfurt, Germany, and got to link up with somebody I've known virtually for a while but now got to meet in person Alvaro: from Solo Stove. Alvaro, how's it going?
Alvaro:
Good, Brad, thanks for having me. Good to be here.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, your accent is not a typical Swiss accent. I know you live in Switzerland. Where, so where were you born and raised? Let's talk about you, the person first of all.
Alvaro:
So I'm originally from Lima, Peru, my parents, but I grew up in Washington DC, which is why you hear the accent. So just outside of DC, you know, finished secondary school, started my undergrad in Utah and took a two-year break. During that undergrad, moved around Mexico, different parts of the states for an LDS mission at the time, and then, right after I got back and got into my undergrad, moved to Spain. That's where I met my wife, who's Swiss, German, and that's what really brought us to Southern Germany. This is why you're hearing American accent.
Bradley Sutton:
There you go. So how long have you been in Europe then?
Alvaro:
That was in 2014. So it's been. It's crazy to think it's been a decade. Yeah, but it's been a decade, a decade exactly this month.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow, where did you go to University?
Alvaro:
Utah State.
Bradley Sutton:
Utah State. Yeah, aggies, oh, I got it. Oh, yes, man I always try to like test myself.
Alvaro:
Right, it's like randomly in a very cold part of Utah the coldest part of Utah right on the border with Idaho but it's a pretty big undergrad campus, about 25,000 students, so don't keep me honest, but the international programs are amazing.
Bradley Sutton:
What do you study when you're there?
Alvaro:
I study International Studies. I'm really an honor trajectory to work for the State Department at the time, and I had already met my wife prior to finishing my undergrad, and so when I finished a foreign service exam right after my undergrad, she had got a gig in Basel. She works in the biotech pharmacy industry and Basel is mostly known for the pharma industry, and I took a job at the time in e-com through some friends in my network, and the rest is history, dude.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, what was? So when did you get into e-com?
Alvaro:
2016.
Bradley Sutton:
2016? So what? What part of e-com was that? Was that Amazon, or was that?
Alvaro:
Specifically, I was working through an agency at the time that was helping North American brands expand on Amazon generally, and I was a first European hire at the time to bring brands into Europe, and that's really we were able to successfully scale certain clients and from there moved around through other European companies, brought me into Luxembourg. I've worked back in between Germany and Switzerland for a few years and it's so now for almost four years. Great as a thing, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, so that's Alvaro's background. Let's talk about Solo stuff. A lot of this is that household name. I've had all kinds of cool companies like. I just interviewed somebody from Lego here now. We got Solo, so yeah for those who don't know about Solo. So what's the background of Solo? So the company?
Alvaro:
Yeah, so you know, Solo stuff is a business. Of course we're in the consumer product goods industry but, like our whole goal as a brand and as a business is to help our customers connect with their loved ones and connect with the outdoors. So I'll kind of get back to that later if we go in detail. But the organization itself, two brothers founded the brand in 2010, as you see my t-shirt here I'm like repping well the company and really what they were looking. They were both entrepreneurs. They're both Chinese, Canadian origin, so both very familiar with the supply chain aspects in China, but, of course, going up in Canada, so many opportunities in terms of producing things in China and bringing it over with healthy profits in the Western market. So these two brothers were just looking for ways to find freedom from their day-to-day jobs. We're both were working at the time some pretty strenuous jobs. So they found a space and so I'm giving a lot of context. I think it's important to understand.
Alvaro:
As they were iterating different product lines, they created this ingenious. What was this mini, now known as the light? But it was the original, just only Solo Stove and it was really a camp stove designed to be able to light a little camp stove within 90 seconds from twigs to a burning fire that you could cook with, with just the stainless steel concept, and so that same design and engineering is ultimately what ended up being optimized into grow I almost spoke German there close into bigger camp stoves from the light. And then, back in 2018, we ran a kick starter that introduced the bonfire range, and that's really what helped accelerate our growth and our momentum as a brand. But originally started from two brothers wanting to just have freedom in their lives, to create products that create good moments that leads to lasting memories. And now here we are as a publicly traded business.
Bradley Sutton:
Public company having Snoop Dogg. Maybe some of you guys saw the ad campaign like I'm going smokeless.
Alvaro:
You did go smokeless. Yes.
Bradley Sutton:
So that's, that's pretty cool. Now, you're a publicly traded company. I know like I think you guys had published like in 2022. You've done over like 400 million across all platforms. Were you up last year, down last year, 2023?
Alvaro:
Yeah, so from a marketplace perspective, we were up, which you felt really grateful. Obviously, last year, 2023 was really interesting year. We’re kind of pretty much all brands in our sector are reconciling like post pandemic trends. So as a business, overall we were pretty flat, healthy, cash wise and profit wise, very strong marketplace and international saw tremendous growth, which we can talk about this in detail. But I view our partnership with Helium 10 as a core variable to that consistent performance. I'm really helping us understand where the market at scale really is and how we can continue to take part of that market share that we have and grow it. So, from a marketplace perspective, amazon specifically USA was up in Amazon global was up significantly year-over-year.
Bradley Sutton:
What percentage? You know what once you get to a certain level. This is similar to what I talked about, Silas, who formerly from Lego is, is like what percentage is from brand search? And then what percentage would you say is just coming from people typing in you know, smokeless Barbecue pit or something? Random keywords.
Alvaro:
It's a great question and actually you know it ties directly into what we can do within Helium 10 and tech stack. You guys simplify, but from what we've seen, both within the search query performance on brand analytics and seller central, and from the believe it's Frank and center said, able to remind me where we can find a search volume that I don't yep, yep, we see that the Solo Stove branded searches is almost three times bigger than smokeless fire pit. Wow, which is wow, which is unique, because there's not a lot of brands that can pretty much be synonymous to an entire market. I mean, yeah, of course. Yeah, Lego is.
Bradley Sutton:
One of the only examples where it's like I don't know what you would skate toy bricks right.
Alvaro:
Kleenex, I guess. So we've been really grateful that we can drive that. Obviously, in the US, Germany, Canada, UK, Amazon is definitely if not the biggest, one of the biggest search engine platforms for consumers looking for a product or looking into a product. So, naturally, the way we have our omni channel sales channels, I should say set up, we leverage Amazon as both, of course, a place where we can drive tremendous growth and profit, but also a place where we need to defend the brand. So I think from a percentage perspective, all over half of our sales come from branded search, which is really a strong attribution to our entire brand and marketing team and, of course, product development team. We can go into detail in this podcast, however you wish, but for us, a marketplace that's really critical is how are we defending the brand, how are we displaying the brand, how's our content, what's that consumer experience like and how are we defending the traffic that's looking for us so we're not losing them in the funnel? It's a critical component of our strategy.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. I definitely want to get into some specific strategies, but one just general question I'm curious about is from what I understand, Solo Stove in the States has been kind of like a household name for a while. You're a little bit newer here in Europe. What was your expansion strategy? Like, did Amazon play a big role in trying to get your brand out here, or was it a lot of just traditional marketing?
Alvaro:
Yes, so we officially. So. I was actually the first European hire fun fact for Solo Stove back in very end of 2020, going into 2021. Originally brought on as a director of marketplaces globally. First for Solo, this was pre acquisition of other brands, pre IPO, so then took that role as we acquire new brands right shout out to Oro, Kayak, Iel, Chubby Shorts. So it was really really interesting experience. And then that fall 2021 is when we launched direct to consumer.
Alvaro:
Now, we had a little bit of a head start. We had some great distribution partners, some that we still work with very closely with today, that we had some organic search and so really, from the circumstance in the car that we were playing, that really helped us define, specifically in Europe, the way we're going to market is like where to put our focus in terms of marketing spend and our focus in terms of channels, like where we're actually going to sell. So we immediately noticed that in Europe specifically Northern Europe to be most specific, right between the UK, Nordics, Benelux, the Dach region, right Germany, Austria, Switzerland we knew that would be our focus. So that definitely helped us define where our headquarter would be, which is today in Rotterdam. That was extremely critical. Make sure we staff that effectively.
Alvaro:
For us, consumer obsession is our fundamental. We want to make sure customers have a great experience and that logistically which we own our distribution out of Rotterdam we own all of our logistics. That's an extremely critical component. So, in terms of, like, the actual launch right, the setup is critical. Understanding which market we're going to play in.
Alvaro:
I mean, these were things that were important to set up, but once actually going live to market, we're a digitally native brand. So when we went live to market, it was an omnichannel mix digitally, meaning that we focused, hyper focused on our website and across Amazon Pan Europe, and we did more our first full year being live direct to consumer than it took solo, so 10 years to do it domestically. So it was, I would say, obviously and this is with the same profit constraints that we have in the US obviously, as public and traded business, we have a responsibility to shareholders, not only to drive top line but also to drive bottom line. So we're really, really proud of that story and we've just seen year over year growth, sustaining those same top and bottom line figures that I'm alluding to.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. All right, let's get back into some specific strategies. You alluded to like kind of like brand defense and putting a moat around your brand. And yes, of course, when you're that size of a company, like you guys are, it's important. But even smaller sellers, once they're building up their brand, there's going to be brand search and it might not be at the scale of a Solo Stove or Lego, but they would have to follow the same principles as kind of like you have. So what has been your strategy? I know, like Helium 10, maybe Adtomic and some others tools talk about that a little bit, but what's your strategy at protecting your brand?
Alvaro:
One of the most profound conversations I remember the last three years working with Solo Stove and solo brands is a conversation I had with our Chief Digital Officer at the time, who's also one of the founders of Chubbies, Tom Montgomery, who, like what an incredible experience working under his wing for over a year. We were talking one day about like specific tactics for operating on Amazon, and one of those things actually was brand registry, and I was going into detail and he, for lack of better terms or articulating this, he just kind of stopped me and said hey, Alvaro, this is a fundamental, we don't need to go into detail here. So, when it comes to like your defense on Amazon, like make sure that the resources Amazon provides you to defend your brand, be it like the most fundamental basics being like hey, get brand registered. Make sure it's basically like an Amazon trademark right. Or maybe it's a transparency program right If you're dealing with counterfeits or unauthorized resellers.
Alvaro:
Maybe it's project zero, which is a more robust element of transparency I'd say, make those fundamentals in your business. I would say that's an extremely critical component. Like, make the resources that Amazon has to give to you now, what Walmart's providing right through their seller platform, make those brand resources to defend your brand of fundamental and exhaust them right. If you're a bigger business and you need to make that cross I'd say cross department focus initiative, like with your legal team or your finance team or your CTO, do so, but just make it a fundamental like don't postpone any resource you have through brand registry. Okay, hope that kind of answers your question.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, absolutely, so definitely important. And again, you don't need to be a humongous seller. I would say brand new seller. Why not start with brand registry? You know, if you're just an arbitrage seller or something, of course, yeah, you don't even have to worry about that, but everybody should be protecting their brand. What about on the kind of like listing optimization, keyword strategy, advertising strategy? As far as protecting your brand in that sense, though.
Alvaro:
Yeah, I mean indexing is critical. You know, as I alluded to earlier, we have a lot more search for Solo Stove than someone who's probably looking for a product that we sell right, similar to our core product, I'd say. But as far as like what we do to defend a brand through the listing, going again back to the principle, fundamentals, we have hundreds and thousands of assets. So this to any brand that's serious about selling on marketplace, where I mean, look, cost of acquisition is more expensive, there's more sellers, there's more listings, you need to make sure that your content is rich, right? So for us, where you know anyone can buy like a random fire pit from Walmart or from Target for 50 bucks, 100 bucks, you know why are you gonna spend three, four, five times more on a solo, so fire pit? And it's because we want to evoke that emotion of creating good moments. And so, for us, part of the defense strategy is hey, is the content, the copy, your A plus for Amazon specifically, is it evoking that emotion that you want to be associated to your brand? Right for us, it's, of course we're selling fire pits, but the end to all these means is can we evoke the emotion on that session that a customer or potential customers having with our Brand, showing that they can create good moments with the brand. I think it's a really critical component of our brand and that defense strategy from a listing perspective.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent. Yeah, I think that is something that smaller sellers sometimes think they don't have to worry about. But you know, people look at that stuff, you know, and in a cookie cutter world where maybe there's 15 people doing the same thing, similar prices, that's the kind of stuff that sets you apart and makes you memorable. What kind of advertising do you guys, you know, focus on? Do you just do pretty much everything that Amazon provides, whether it's sponsored, band, display, DSP, etc?
Alvaro:
It's a great question. You know, we actually just had some pretty high-level folks at Amazon in our offices last week in Great Vine. It's really grateful for that experience because we actually had some key members from the Amazon ads team coming to the office and really give us insights into some of the new products that Amazon ads is developing. And so for us, definitely it's part of a strategy broadly is to maximize the way we utilize resources that Amazon has to offer. But as far as like the going back to like the ad console and what we're executing highly and yeah, it's across the board right we obviously see best efficiency across sponsored product, right. And then the way we define that strategy top to bottom, the funnel is critical right, defensive to offensive, and we carry similar strategies across sponsored brand, sponsored display.
Alvaro:
And now we're getting to a point as a business where I mean you'll hear high-level team members from Solo, so speak about this over this coming year. But we're really trying to blur our performance digitally, right. Amazon is developing some products that is going to affect more positively performance outside of Amazon and we want to take part of that right through AMC or DSP. So that's gonna be a really critical component is leveraging the experience we have from the ad console right through the three core campaign types that we could have run into new products that they're developing and really blur both performance and our operations behind it with Amazing talent that we have in-house that historically been focused on, like paid social and Google, and trying to blur that operation, if that kind of makes sense.
Bradley Sutton:
On Amazon Advertising, how does your team leverage a Helium 10 Adtomic?
Alvaro:
You know the biggest, biggest benefit that we've seen with that Adtomic specifically is helping streamline extremely time-consuming things. I mean we're highly tactical, highly experienced and very, very detailed in terms of the, the campaigns and the way we're optimizing. I mean, you're probably looking at our account we have thousands of campaigns just in the US alone and then you can do the multiples of that because we put similar efforts across all of our channels on Amazon and we're in 15 Amazon stores a little bit under once you start to consider international. So what Adtomic has done really I can speak transparently with you here in person is helping a streamline, extremely time-consuming task like bulk changes, bulk edits, in a way that's not just to get it done to save time, but in a way that's it's insightful and data-driven. Yeah, to keep it simple.
Bradley Sutton:
Taking a step back, you just mentioned all the different marketplaces you sell in. If you were to say, you know, just gross revenue, top five, you know, I'm safe to say US number one, what would be? Germany, number two, UK.
Alvaro:
It's really interesting on Amazon. It's similar performance that we see between UK and Germany. It's funny because off Amazon our British business is more material. So it speaks a little bit to the power of, I think, of Amazon Germany, or maybe even the preference of consumer behavior. Maybe German is just again, we need to take a deeper dive in this but maybe our German customers just prefer to shop on Amazon Germany, for whatever their reason is I'll come back to your answer but an important fundamental as a brand is we want to meet our customer where they want to be met.
Alvaro:
That’s why omnichannel is so critical. But as far as Amazon, definitely the top four is Germany, UK after the US. Canada is up there and then in the rest of Europe between France, Italy, Spain and Holland. I think you have a pretty much flat performance competing for that fifth spot. We most definitely can scale our performance in Japan and Australia just from the data we can see in terms of search volume for our brand. But obviously Japan and Australia aren't necessarily right next to Europe, so it requires a bit more effort logistically. Yeah, that runs up the top five. I hope that helps.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, what about any non-Amazon marketplaces that you guys are doing well in, like you know, be it Walmart or TikTok shop?
Alvaro:
It’s a great question. You know, domestically, 100%, Walmart's been a really great partner of ours. Obviously, they as a business have been hyper focused on developing this marketplace that can, over time, become a pure competitor to Amazon. At the moment, from my understanding, at a macro level, it's still, you know, years away from really competing with Amazon, but they've been great partners in terms of giving us the human element and time and attention and placements that I think a brand like ours deserves, considering how much branded search goes into their marketplace. So that partnership with Walmart has been really important for us. Again, going back to the notion of meeting customers where they want to be met, we've found that there's a lot of customers that want to be met there, and so we're excited and eager to double down on the performance on Walmart marketplace.
Alvaro:
And yeah, man, look, I'm based in Basel, one of my favorite things about living in Basel is it's on the border with Germany, France and Switzerland, and so I have firsthand, daily I can see how fragmented consumer behavior is across those three countries and so in Europe, way more nuanced in terms of our marketplace approach. It's obviously Amazon Paniu is critical, but I mean we've got other really important sales channels to us, such as Bowl, right out of Netherlands and Belgium, Allegro, which we've heard a little bit about today in Poland, Manor in Switzerland, Galaxies something in our radar, so a few other marketplaces just because it's so much, so much more fragmented that are critical for us.
Bradley Sutton:
Do anything in Korea?
Alvaro:
At the moment? No, but we do have a great partner in Korea and we do have some pretty strong performance, not necessarily through marketplace.
Bradley Sutton:
It's got to be some Korean barbecue, a product you have. I mean, Korean barbecue is so popular worldwide. Yeah, you know, there's got to be something you can do there.
Alvaro:
Yeah, I know that for sure there. I mean, if you guys ever want to see like amazing engineering around a Solo, so I mean I hope I don't know of some of your audience if they're looking at Solo stuff. The aesthetics of the product is so simple. It's a beautiful product, but some of the things we see engineered around the Solo sale out of Japan and Korea and China not by our team is incredible. So owe them a lot of props in terms of like giving us definitely some inspiration.
Bradley Sutton:
If you make an in-house Korean barbecue table or device, I would be your first customer. You know, because, like you know, like what I do in my house, you know, none of us are Korean but like I've been eating Korean food my whole life and I just only watch Korean TV and everything. But you know, I just got like this burner with a little tank of whatever it is and it's not efficient. Smoke, like you know, everywhere. I got to open up all the windows and I got to, you know, replay. It's like there's got to be a better way and I think you guys would be the ones to do it. So let me, let me beta test.
Alvaro:
Don't challenge us. We're one of the key polar of ours is getting indoors, you know, with some of our core lines.
Bradley Sutton:
We mentioned earlier how you, you know, did something with Snoop Dogg. You know that now that's something that, no, not you know brand new sellers or even million dollar sellers, you know should be considering somebody of that stature. But at what point should an Amazon seller start reaching out to maybe micro influencers or just you know people, people to promote their product?
Alvaro:
Yeah, look, it's a much different answer today than it was even two years ago. Like, if you're coming on Amazon or you're like a newer brand on Amazon and you don't have a strategy to develop your brand off Amazon, you're going to lose. You're going to lose and it's going to make me. Maybe right now you're on a wave and trying to feel as good, but I promise you, the more you can flatten your reach as a brand holistically, the better you're going to be. In this case, like, the best example is we've been able to grow successfully on Amazon with further investments off Amazon by driving more organic search, because Amazon is a beast right, it's a massive search platform. So the more you can drive awareness off Amazon, you're still going to be technically driving awareness into Amazon. So I would say today, when you consider the basics of you, know, increased competition, increased cost, you know.
Alvaro:
Then you have some macroeconomic factors to implement in terms of how consumers feel about spending, you know, their own hard earned funds into brands that maybe they've never heard of. It's a lot more nuanced today and a lot more difficult, so you want to make sure you're definitely focused on developing a brand where consumers can not only connect but have awareness about what your brand is, so they can make a more. You know, feed the funnel earlier and get to that bottom much earlier than anticipated, because Amazon, of course, is the bottom of the funnel when it comes to sales channel. Like, people are ready to shop if they're on Amazon. So, yeah, I would just strongly recommend, like, make sure you invest as much time when it comes to branding off Amazon as you do on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, before we get into your final strategy of the day, just a couple somewhat off related topics. But first of all, if you guys want to find out more or find you know about their products, you know, just type in Solo Stove literally to any search engine or on Amazon or Walmart or anywhere. If people just want to find you on the interwebs out there is LinkedIn a good place to follow what you do.
Alvaro:
Yeah, LinkedIn is great. I'm pretty private on social media unless your part of our online community. My German wife has taught me well in terms of privacy, but LinkedIn is a great platform. If you just look up, there's only one Alvaro. Alvaro, it’s a very Spanish name, very difficult to Germanize or Anglicize. So if you just look up, Alvaro Lopez. All opus, you'll find me for Solo stuff. I think it's the best way.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay cool. Random question why in Peruvian restaurants is the chicken so good?
Alvaro:
Man, it's a great question. It's definitely a combination of the..
Bradley Sutton:
You got some secret spice that you all are using or what's going on?
Alvaro:
Well, actually it's funny because I was like in Utah recently and I know the owner of one of the biggest Peruvian chicken chain in Utah called a Red Fuego. If anyone's ever in Salt Lake City, I've got a couple of chains around Provo, Salt Lake City and he invested like his core investment was the kitchen and he imported it from Lima. So I think that's a core component. And then, of course, you get into the quality of the chicken.
Alvaro:
I'm pretty pro animal rights here, so make sure that chicken's well taken care of. It's gotta be a healthy chicken that you're going to be putting into your diet. And then just the seasoning. I mean Peru is like I'm very biased here, but it's definitely top five culinary countries, I think, in the planet because of our mix man. It's a great balance between the indigenous ingredients and culture from the yin and beyond that the Spanish, Italian immigrants, Japanese, Chinese immigrants that came through the 19th century and just made a perfect blend of spices and herbs and that's what goes into the marinade of the chicken man. So those three things man.
Bradley Sutton:
It's such good stuff, man. When I was living in LA I would always go. I forgot it was something, Inka was the name of the restaurant. Oh my goodness, so good. Yeah, um, favorite Helium 10 tool?
Alvaro:
That's very difficult. Yeah, I mean to be transparent, it's a very difficult answer. I want to say the one I'm just going to complete a correlate a tool to success, and I think the way we write our copy has been critical, right cause we do index very specific things that we know have high search volume on Amazon that don't necessarily appear on our website. I say Frankenstein has been very critical in terms of, not only providing a good copy for a customer, but also getting keywords that have attacked. You know, I've added new, uh, new customers that would have never found us anyway.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. And then if you were to have a wish list, like maybe something that Helium 10 doesn't do, or a feature or a filter or anything, what would you tell me? Because that's my goal this year is trying to get all the features we don't have yet.
Alvaro:
Yeah, that's a great question. I knew you were talking earlier. You're going to spend more time in Europe, I think I think for serious brands that have I mean, you've seen now like the proliferation of great brands that are focused on Amazon. Well, a lot of these brands are going to have global reach. So I think the more resources you can offer to better localize and translate within Helium 10, I think, there's a massive market for that the more you can automate maybe it's something with ChatGPT, but something to translate and effectively localized would be critical.
Bradley Sutton:
Got it, got it. All right. Something I asked the guest is like give a 30 or 60 second tip, strategy could be about anything in e-commerce or non e-commerce. Could be about anything.
Alvaro:
Go ahead, yeah, I mean let me put my consulting hat on, which have been a brand operator for the last few years. So just focus on action and I think one of the most again going back to lessons I've had from the executive leads at, one of the most important things I took away from, our former CEO, John Maris. He said he'd rather have me focus on doing twice the amount of things half as good than half the amount of things really good and that, really, to be transparent, that philosophy of just iterating different initiatives, obviously targeted initiatives that can drive business, drive top and bottom line, has been really critical. In terms of finding out what sticks, doubling down on those and then the ones that don't work, quickly offloading them, have been really good. So I think just purposefully actioning items that's going to grow your business is extremely critical. You need to be. If you're not waking up every Monday, if your business is good and you're not waking up the beginning of the week, if you're not obsessed about how to double down on that growth, you're on a track to lose. And if you're losing and you're not obsessed about how to offset those losses, then you're going to lose even more.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, well, Alvaro, thank you so much for coming on here. It's been great to meet you in person and thank you for taking the time out and wish you and the solo so best of success. Maybe we'll have you back on the show next year and see what you guys are doing.
Alvaro:
Yeah. Thanks Brad!
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Walmart grows online sales in Q4, agrees to acquire Vizio https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/walmart-online-sales/ Advertise Audible titles with Sponsored Brands https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/advertise-audible-titles-with-sponsored-brands/
Rev up your digital sales engine with the latest tools and techniques featured in this episode. We're talking about Helium 10's releasing a lot of new features in one week! Get the lowdown on enhancing your product visibility with Keyword Tracker's new packs, and learn how to optimize your listings with the newly improved Listing Builder. And for those with an eye for analytics, we'll guide you on customizing your product insights dashboard using tags for a laser-focused approach to product performance. Lastly, our training tip of the week features Carrie as she shows us how you can use groups inside the Helium 10 Insights Dashboard. It's a powerhouse episode packed with insider tips and actionable strategies, so tune in and transform the way you navigate selling on Amazon and Walmart!
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In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 01:02 - Amazon Virtual Bundle Update
- 04:34 - Walmart Sales Up
- 06:22 - Audible Sponsored Brand
- 07:23 - Follow Helium 10 On TikTok
- 08:24 - New Feature Alerts
- 08:44 - Keyword Tracker
- 10:35 - Listing Builder
- 12:03 - Custom Dashboard
- 12:57 - All Marketplaces Button
- 14:00 - Black Box for Amazon Brazil
- 15:37 - Pro Training Tip: Insights Dashboard Groups Feature
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon makes virtual bundles extremely more valuable. Walmart releases latest sales report, the most released features from Helium 10 in a week for the whole year. This and more on today's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. We give you a rundown on all the goings on in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We let you know what new features Helium 10 has released and we give you a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing.
Bradley Sutton:
We actually have a pretty light week as far as news Like this is one of the lightest weeks I've seen in a long time. Like crazy, crazy. I'm not complaining, though. Hey, sometimes no news is good news, right, and actually let's start off with some good news. There's no like doom and gloom reports this week, but the first article I wanna talk about is actually not an article at all and what it is kind of a beta test that one of our Helium 10 elite members noticed is running, so you guys know about virtual bundles, right? You know historically this is how virtual bundles look Like. Here's an algae cow product and then I'm just scrolling down a little bit and then right under the image you know, above where the sponsored ads go and even above where frequently brought together is, you'll see this virtual bundle section where it shows other products on this brand. You know I've been saying for, oh my goodness, almost two years now about how I think anybody that has two products or more in a brand should be using Virtual Bundles. It's completely free to use as far as there's no pay per click and it takes up, as you can see here, historically, pretty big real estate but, however, it's not something that a lot of people actually use to buy, like, you know, those who do virtual bundles. It's not like, oh my goodness, it's gonna increase your sales by 30% or anything like that, but it's great to push your sponsored ads down and also, you know, take up some nice real estate and cross promote your products now in our Helium 10 Elite and Serious Sellers Facebook group.
Bradley Sutton:
One of our users, Elizabeth, who has been on this podcast before she noted how hey woke up this morning and Amazon has an update for the Virtual Bundles widget, right above the bullet points, showing it as a variation even of the main product. All right, so this is interesting. Take a look at how it looks on her screen the same exact product that I just showed you. You can see right here that it kind of shows as a bundle right here, right under where the variations are, right to the left of the buy box, and then if you mouse over it it actually shows what products this bundle has. Now that image I was just showing you guys a minute ago on my screen for the first one for the product that's live on my computer. So obviously it's not across the board yet, like where it's universal, where Amazon is showing us, but I really hope that this is going to be something that's permanent. All right, you know, sometimes Amazon does tests and we're like yo, what in the world are you doing? You know I'll go back to how it was, but this is one of those ones I'm hoping they push through On my cell phone, my mobile app of Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Take a look at how it looks. It's actually kind of cool here. Let me go ahead and play this. I did a video here of how it looks on my cell phone, but you can see, here's the image and there's the variations, and then again, right under the variations and right before the Buy Box, you can totally see that there is the virtual bundles that are advertised right there Now on mobile, which is how most people buy these days. Right, this is even going to be more valuable. I mean, I don't know if you guys saw on that screenshot there though, the very top of the listing, it had one of her Sponsored Brand Ads for one of her other products and it showed the main image of her product. It showed the variations and then the virtual bundles and then the Buy Box, like there was not a competitor listing anywhere in sight. So, man, again, here is to hoping that this is going to be something that happens across the board with virtual bundles. I think that will be very that'll be pretty cool for sellers and, again, all the more reason that you guys need to be creating your Virtual Bundles.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is from Digital Commerce 360. It's entitled Walmart Grows Online Sales in Q4 Agrees to Acquire Visio. Walmart put out their report. They talk a lot about their regular sales, which only increased just a very slight bit, but Walmart US online sales grew 17% in Q4. And said global e-commerce sales actually grew 23%. Now another interesting part of this article they said, hey, e-commerce sales were led by continued strong growth and store fulfilled pickup and delivery. Over the last two years, store fulfilled delivery sales have nearly tripled and now we're doing over $1 billion a month. All right, so again, that's one of the kind of ways that Walmart is catching up with Amazon without having an extensive warehouse network like Amazon has and delivery drivers and things like that. They've got over 4,000 stores and a lot of these stores are the ones that are doing that final delivery. Now the article goes on to say that Walmart didn't share specific information about the Walmart+ program as far as how many members it has, but it says it finished Q4 with a record Walmart+ membership penetration. The article also talks about how there's over 400 million SKUs on Walmart's marketplace now and a significant portion of sellers are using WFS Walmart fulfillment services. So again, we've been talking about this for years. Now, guys, if you're not selling on Walmart yet, probably something to think about. It keeps increasing the marketplace there and as Walmart expands it's Walmart+ offerings I think you're gonna see more customers shopping on that platform.
Bradley Sutton:
Last article today is just something from Amazon and it's about something we've never talked about in the show, probably doesn't affect a lot of you, but just goes to show that you can pretty much advertise anything these days. So we've talked about having your own Kindle, direct, publishing books on Amazon, maybe merch by Amazon, things like that. Well, how many of you have Audible books? All right, so books that are for the Audible app that Amazon has, where you can listen to books, right? Well, guess what? If you make Amazon Audible books, you can now run sponsored brand ads to there in North America, Europe and Asia. So maybe it might be something I have to do and episode on in the future, or some training about how can you get on the Amazon Audible platform with a book, because now you can go ahead and advertise to it as well, whereas in the past only KDP and traditional books could have sponsored brand advertising. All right, that's it for the news this week.
Bradley Sutton:
So one quick thing I want. I'm gonna do a little quick contest here. All right, guys? All right. As you guys know, we've talked about on this show, Helium 10 has a new TikTok channel. I wanna give you guys an opportunity to win a one-on-one call with me. Here's your homework if you wanna qualify to at least be eligible to do it. All right, so go to our TikTok New page, right. It's called helium10_software. There's some fake accounts out there. Don't click on helium underscore or helium10_software, all right. And then scroll down all the way towards the bottom of our feed. Once you get there and find my video when it says best Amazon ranking hack. I talk about something inside of helium 10. I want you to go ahead and watch that video and comment on it and say you've heard about this from the Weekly Buzz and Make sure to follow helium 10 as well and those who follow the helium 10 channel on there and who go ahead and comment on that video, or we're gonna pick a random person to have a one-on-one call with me, all right, let's hop into our new feature alerts of the week.
Bradley Sutton:
And there was not that much news on the Amazon side this week, but oh my goodness, we have released tons of things this week. A lot of them you guys ask for the first thing want to talk about real simple. A lot of you Definitely use Keyword Tracker, but then those of you who have tons and tons of of skews, you always ask a hey, I don't have enough keywords to track. Well, if you don't have enough keywords to track, don't worry, you can now go ahead and go into your Keyword Tracker. At the very top of the page there's this button that says need more keywords and you can now buy like packs of keywords that so that you can have more than whatever your plan has for Keyword Tracker. So that's the first tool that we have. The next announcement that we have is actually I'm gonna go ahead and let Kevin King Do it himself. Kevin, take it away.
Kevin King:
Hey, what's up everybody? Kevin King here, you know one of the number one questions I get is how can you connect to me? How can I, Kevin, get some advice or speak with you or learn more from you? The best way is with Helium 10 Elite. If you go to h10.me/elite, you can get all the information. Sign up for Helium 10 Elite. Every month I lead train advanced training where I do 7 Ninja Hacks. We also have live masterminds and Every single week, one of those weeks, I jump on for a couple hours and we talk shop, we talk business, do in-person events. Helium 10 elite is where you want to be. It's only $99 extra on your helium 10 membership. It's h10.me/elite. Go check it out and I hope to see you there.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, guys. So don't forget, Helium 10 Elite has tons of perks, you know. Kevin just mentioned some of them, so I highly recommend checking out the program h10.me/elite as soon as you get into Elite, book a one-on-one call with me. If you don't win that TikTok contest, you can book a one-on-one call with me or with Carrie or Shivali If you're a Helium 10 Elite member. And that's just one of the many, many different Perks there are of being a Helium 10 Elite member. Last week, we announced a new tool and Listing Builder for being able to see the score of how your listing kind of like stacks up compared to your competitors, to the Amazon algorithm for SEO, right? Um, a quick update to the tool once you get into Listing Builder. This is something that people Requested right away once we launched. This is we. We brought back the root keywords when it was, like in the old scribbles, we would tell you what individual keywords were in the phrases that you put in. Well, now we have the One word roots. So you click on one word roots. It'll say what are all the individual keywords that make up the phrases down below and, in addition, how many times you have in your listing. But now for the first time, we also have two words or three plus phrases, like, for example, if I hit two word roots on this page, coffin shelf comes up, coffin makeup, gothic wall, and that's because those are all in multiple phrases below. So maybe there was coffin Shelf for men, coffin shelf for women. Well, that means coffin shelf is in those phrases twice, and so I can see how many times I've used that root for two or three word phrases. And then down here at the bottom We've got the competitor performance score right here on the right hand side and the search volume that's listed and which keywords I have used and not used. So a pretty cool update there for our Listing Builder. Next week there's even gonna be more updates to that tool that we'll be Announcing shortly now.
Bradley Sutton:
If you guys are on the Supercharge plan right, not Diamond, not Platinum, not Elite, but Supercharge there's one update I want to let you guys know about. You guys have the ability to now make custom dashboards. So you would go into your just regular dashboard here and hit new dashboard and Now you can create just tons of different things, like whether it's a chart or a graph about anything in your Amazon, in your account in Helium 10. For example, I can select your graph and then now I can graph, maybe, hey, what's my PPC click-through rate and graph that compared to my unit sold. Let me graph my RoAS and my ACoS. Let me check my ad spend, compare it to my refunds over time. I mean, you can pretty much chart anything here in your dashboard. So those of you who are supercharged members, make sure to go ahead and check that out and play around with your first graphs that you can now make.
Bradley Sutton:
One quick update in our Chrome extension and this is what I suggest doing any of you guys doing if you're selling in one marketplace is you might not know that there's potentially people in other marketplaces that are hijacking your listings, like maybe they're selling on it. So what you should do is go to your listing page any of your listing pages and the Helium 10 Chrome extension that comes up at the top. What you do that you're gonna see this All Marketplaces button. Hit that, see more data there. And now, instantly, I can see all of the different marketplaces that my product is being sold in. So, like, maybe I'm selling this garlic press only in the US and I'm like, wait a minute, I don't sell in Germany? How is somebody selling it for 35 bucks in Germany? How is somebody selling it in Great Britain? Right here, that's not me. So now you can go and click this and go check. All right, who's the seller that is selling my product in these other marketplaces? Sometimes you'll be shocked to know that other sellers are selling your products and you might wanna take action on that.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, the last update of the day comes from Black Box. I told you guys there was a lot of updates today and all of the black box tools now are available for Amazon Brazil. All right, so you would just select it right here in the drop down menu of all of the different marketplaces that we service and and just enter in a search, just like you would in your marketplace. So right here I'm in Black Box Keywords and I said hey, here in Brazil, show me a keyword with a search volume of a thousand. So, for example, right here I see hardy met BC, that category, I think that's garden and pool category. Right, I'm saying, hey, show me this keyword with a thousand search volume and it has at least three words and a title density of less than five and I have a whole bunch of Portuguese keywords from Brazil. Here's a Basel de planta, a racket electric, a mosquito electric mosquito racket. I guess a lot of interesting products here. I don't speak Portuguese so I don't even know what these mean. Here's one I think that means a garden hose 20 meter garden hose. But here's some just keywords that came up in the Amazon Brazil marketplace.
Bradley Sutton:
That's our latest marketplace, that we have tons of tools. Already Amazon Brazil was working for profits and Keyword Tracker, Magnets, or Cerebro, or more, and we're adding more tools as the time goes by. Don't forget that soon everybody who sells in Amazon United States is going to be able to sell an Amazon Brazil with this a click of a button. Some of you already are able to do that, but by March everybody's going to be able to do that. We'll have a podcast all about that program coming up soon. All right, next up we have our training tip of the week and it's actually a newish filter that a lot not a lot of people are doing, where you can group some of your products together on your Helium 10 Dashboard. Carrie, take it away.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone, today I'm going to show you a new feature that is available in Insights Dashboard. Now, if you're not using insights dashboard, you are missing out. It helps you to see so much that's going on with your products. Like you know, it'll basically it's a dashboard where it's kind of like a hub, where everything that's going on with your products is very visible. So, if you need to add keywords, if you need you know, if, if your listing got suppressed or if there's an alert, you know, maybe your dimensions changed, there's something that's going on with your products. It's all shown in the dashboard. And you can also monitor your competitors to see, you know, have they added a coupon, have they changed their price? They changed their listing? There's so much more than that, but it really saves you tons and tons of time monitoring your own products as well as your competitors products, and now we have the ability to tag an insights dashboard, so I'm going to go ahead and show you what that looks like. So this is insights dashboard. You're going to want to go over to where it says my products. Okay, so click on my products and this is going to be a list of all of your products here, and so, basically the way that this populates is if you connect your Helium 10 account to Seller Central so that it automatically pulls this information in.
Carrie Miller:
But sometimes you have tons and tons of products and a lot of different types of products, so maybe you're wanting to look at a specific type of product. You can actually group these with these different tags. So, for example, we have a bunch of different coffin shelves. We also have egg trays, so I made two different tags. One is coffin shelf, and so if I click on coffin shelf, I'm going to be able to see all of the coffin shelves that we sell that I tagged, and then, if you want to untag it, you want to see everything. You just click back on the tag. So to create your tag, it's super easy. All you have to do is, you know, go in here and click on the settings wheel that I just clicked on, and you're going to click on add tag.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, so on this, you can actually tag your competitors and your own products, okay, so, um, that is one really great thing about this is that you can. You can, you know, find and group them all together if you want to, so you can do competitors or you can do your own products. In this instance I, you know I actually just tagged my own products, so all of these are my own products but say I wanted to go in and I wanted to kind of edit this tag and I wanted to add some competitors. And take a look at the competitors, I can click on the competitors tab and I can search those competitors and add them on there to have them grouped kind of in a similar way. So there's a lot of different ways you can do this. You can also even go over to the competitors tab. So I'll close out of this and I'll go over to the competitors tab. And in the competitors tab you can also just create you know the same place here.
Carrie Miller:
So you can just add a tag here and you can say you know you can name it like increasing revenue or something like that, maybe you want to track those people, that you can do whatever you want in these tags and you can group your competitors in your own products in any way that you want to. Um, or maybe there's groups of products of your own that maybe you, you know, have started to see fall. You want to keep an eye on them. There's a lot of different ways you can do this, um. So all you have to do is unclick the tags so you can see all of your products. And one cool thing is you can actually even go through and say, oh, I want to add a tag here or here. Oh, I didn't add this one to my egg tray one, so I'm going to click and add it to my egg tray tabs tags so that I can see it there. So you can do this. You know in so many different ways.
Carrie Miller:
Um, you can you know, maybe also tag something that's on promotion, or if you're launching different products, you can say you know in launch phase. Or you know ranking. If you're working on ranking, you can tag those and say you know ranking. Um, because you're doing a lot of outside traffic, maybe an influencers, and you want to keep an eye on those and you want to sort them out. You can do literally anything with these tags. It's the sky is the limit. So what's great about this tool is that you can customize it to whatever you want to do and it helps you to just sort through the products very quickly based on what you're looking at or what you want to look at. So go ahead and check it out. If you haven't checked it out, I think this is a really great um feature to be able to categorize your own products and your competitors products and to be able to find them and sort through them very quickly and easy. So check it out and we'll see you later.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, thank you very much, Carrie, for that. So you know you might be wondering how do I use that. You know, like, for example, me, I've got four products right now that I'm launching all at the same time, and so maybe I just want a quick way to see those four products, about what's going on with my keywords, my sales and everything, instead of having to like filter through them. Well, now I can just give those products a launch tag and this with a click of a button. Now I can see everything that's going on for those four products on my Helium 10 Dashboard. So play around with that guys. Make your own custom tags. Let me know which ones you put in the comments below. That's it for the news and features and training of the week. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.
Have you heard the latest buzz about Walmart's marketplace? It's time to tune in as we chat with Michael Lebhar of SellCord, the brain behind the surge in sales for countless Walmart sellers. Our discussion is packed with strategies and insights, from exploring the alluring incentives for new sellers to the secrets of wielding the latest metrics to skyrocket your sales. Imagine mastering the art of ad automation or creating a brand shop that takes your visibility to new heights; that's exactly what we're unpacking in this episode. Michael and Carrie dissect Helium 10's Adtomic and its advanced features, designed to empower Walmart sellers with precision ad management. We're also sizing up the impact of Walmart Brand Shops on your sales figures. The conversation then shifts gears to the nitty-gritty of search engine marketing (SEM) and how Walmart's beta coupon program is shaking up the game – a potential goldmine for engaging customers.
But wait, there's more! Are your listings primed to pull in buyers, or could they use a tactical tweak? We're laying out a blueprint to boost your presence and sales on Walmart's marketplace, emphasizing the vital role of high-converting keywords and how Walmart's Fulfillment Services (WFS) and flash deals can be your ace in the hole. We wrap up by dishing out pro tips on navigating Walmart's evolving landscape, from optimizing product categories for approval to the influence of title density on your Walmart listing’s performance. Walmart sellers, buckle up – this episode is your roadmap to conquering Walmart's bustling bazaar.
In episode 537 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Michael discuss:
- 00:00 - Selling on Walmart With Helium 10
- 00:56 - Winning with Walmart Wednesday: Incentives for New Sellers
- 03:15 - New Features for Walmart Sellers
- 04:47 - Walmart Seller Center Updates and Strategies
- 07:05 - Walmart Brand Shops and Marketing Strategies
- 08:17 - Success of Search Engine Marketing Strategy
- 11:28 - Strategies for Boosting Walmart Sales
- 13:35 - Boosting Sales Strategies on Walmart
- 14:49 - Optimizing Walmart Marketplace Sales Strategies
- 19:30 - Effective Keyword Campaign Strategies
- 21:43 - Walmart Strategies and Tips for Sellers
- 23:48 - Amazon Seller Approval Guidelines Update
- 28:53 - Optimizing Walmart Listings for Success
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Transcript
Carrie Miller:
In today's episode, we are going to be talking with Michael Lebhar about strategies that sellers can utilize to help grow their sales on Walmart, and we're also going to be talking about some new metrics that Walmart has made available to sellers and how you can use them to your advantage. This and so much more on today's episode.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure to join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook or you can actually go to h10.me/walmartgroup and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join. You can tag me and Carrie with questions and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the serious sellers podcast brought to you by Helium 10. My name is Carrie and I'm going to be your host today, and this is our Walmart Wednesday, where we go over all of the things Walmart and we answer your questions live and we give you any updates that have to do with Walmart. So we'll go ahead and get into it. So today I do have a special guest that I'll announce in just a minute and he is going to be great for answering questions and I will answer some as well. But before I get into that, I wanted to talk about some incentives that Walmart is having for new sellers. So if you have been considering selling on the Walmart platform and you haven't pulled the trigger yet and you want to get into selling on Walmart, there is a really cool incentive right now. I'm going to put the link to this special deal because it's not for everyone. You have to apply through our Helium 10 link. Basically, what it is is, if you apply through this Helium 10 special link, then you can get up to 100% of the referral fees taken off, basically for 90 days. So you won't have to pay referral fees for literally up to 90 days, so actually up to 100% for 90 days. So the way that it works is basically everything that you do kind of unlocks something. So the first 50% off that you get off is you get 50% of the referral fees for just signing up and getting your products up and running, and then the 90 days start. Once you're up and running, then you get another 20% off your referral fees if you start utilizing Walmart Fulfillment Services. So that's WFS and you can enroll in that pretty easily. The next thing is you'll get another 20% off for using Walmart Connect, which is the ads platform, so you can start advertising on Walmart. And then, finally, if you want to start automating with the repricer, you can. You get another 10% if you start using the repress repricer. So that adds up to 100% off of your referral fees. Now, not everybody's going to use the repricer, so at least up to 90% off referral fees, which is absolutely incredible, such a good deal. So I will add that link in. So if you haven't started selling on Walmart and you really want to get started selling on Walmart, definitely click that link and take advantage of that. And this goes for US sellers and international sellers. So they're they're allowing anyone who clicks that link, that is a seller on, or wants to sell on Walmart and gets accepted, you can have that great deal. So that's great.
Carrie Miller:
And then the next thing helium 10. As you all know, we have Adtomic for Walmart, which is our ads program where we help you to manage your ads. It makes it a lot easier to manage your ads, and so we've added some rules and automations. You can now do day partying so you can advertise at certain parts of the day that are more profitable for you. You can add in bid rules. You can add a target, a cost max, impressions max, or you can create custom bid rules. So the new Add Tomic is absolutely incredible. If you want to book a demo, we'll also put that link below as well, because you can book a demo with one of our Helium 10 Adtomic experts that can help you. Not only you know, show you how it works, but then get you up and running on that. With ads. It's super easy. There's so many automations that will help you to manage your Walmart ads. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and get into our special guest, because I think a lot of you are very excited to have him on and his name is Michael Lebhar, so I'm going to go ahead and bring him on. Hello, Michael. Hey, so Michael Lebhar is from SellCord and many of you have seen him on Walmart Wednesday and a lot of other podcasts. He's been speaking, I pretty much all over the world, haven't you? He's been talking about selling on Walmart. He owns an agency called SellCord and he is doing really, really well on Walmart, has some products in stores, so we have a wealth of information available to us by just chatting with Michael. So thanks so much for joining us. What’s up Michael?
Michael:
Thanks for having me here. It's fun to be back.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, yeah, you were on here last. It's been, I think, a year since you've been on, so I'm very excited to have you back so I wanted to talk to you about a few things like new updates, and so we'll talk about some updates with Walmart, and then I'm gonna also ask you about some strategies that you can give to sellers. So the first thing I want to talk about, though, is sales rank, because this is something that's new. In the back of Walmart seller center, under search insights, you can actually see your sales rank for your product, and so I was wondering if you had any insights on how any Walmart sellers could utilize this information, or what you know, what you can do with that, or what you've been using it for for sure.
Michael:
Yeah, that's a pretty new data that Walmart started adding in and basically, if you go to your growth opportunities and you go into search insights, there's actually a lot of helpful data there conversion rates, click rates, and they rank it kind of high, medium and low select you could have a good idea of how you compare against competitors in your category. But what you're specific specifically regarding is Sales rank, and sales rank is a number that they basically rank how well you're doing Compared to the other. You know your competitors in the space, so it's pretty helpful number. I like seeing when we have also multiple items within certain categories, seeing how they rank against each other, how the search links against each other, and then you could see the difference in sales rank and obviously the difference in sales between those items. You could kind of gauge a little bit more on like the type of sales you should be expecting from other items. So I would definitely make sure to take a look at that. Look, go, look at the data and start getting more comfortable with it. As you know, time goes on, it'll start becoming, you know they'll start there again. It's gonna start being more and more data there. So I would definitely take a look at that data and try to utilize it another thing.
Carrie Miller:
I mentioned this on our last Walmart Wednesday and that is that brand stores are now available. So I was wondering if you have started utilizing those, because I know you manage a lot of brands. Have you started creating brand stores and how are you utilizing them? What kind of success have you been seeing so far?
Michael:
great question. Yeah, so brand stores been. You know We've been waiting for them for a while because there's been brand store functionality for years. But you used to have to pay seventy, five thousand dollars, if I'm not mistaken, to get a brand store. Now it's actually free. You just have to apply mom, not all brands get accepted to the most brands kind of that we've been applying. I've been getting accepted to the brand store. It's through Walmart connect. So it's through your Walmart connect account, you apply and you get access to there. There's a few great reasons. Number one like on Walmart, the brand shows pretty prominently on top of the title. A lot of people click on there. They look at your expanded assortment. So you're able to actually you know, you know, utilize it to bring all your items into that one link. A lot of times when you're it's just done by shelf and it's not by your brand store, like you'll see, random items that are you're not your brand show up when you click on your brand. So it's important to. That's one great way. Number two is for advertising. You're able to start sent. You're able to send ads to certain shelves. Now, sending it to a shelf that just has items on it because of a filter and doesn't. It's not like a. A set shelf Through brand shops is way less effective. Also, you can't have any banners and things like that, so we've been using a lot for advertising and that proves to be pretty effective. So, yeah, definitely exciting and there's definitely a lot of Opportunity there. A tap into creating ban shops We've been creating a lot of them for brands over the past. What would say mainly like month and a half, two months.
Carrie Miller:
Awesome. Yeah, I think a lot of people have started to work on those, so I think that's definitely a huge opportunity as well to not only get your sales for the one item but, you know, showcase all of your items and increase the court order court cart order value. The next thing I wanted to ask you about is the search engine marketing. It's called SEM on the growth opportunities tab. How has that been working for you? What? What kinds of things have you been seeing with with SEM, or I guess they might call it Sem on the back end there. And, yeah, just go ahead and get some insights on that this was an interesting one because you know it's.
Michael:
If you know in the Amazon space like people use different providers to help send Google traffic to their Amazon listing To build rank, that's essentially what this product is. It's you could run Google ads from within though your Walmart account. So number one, your attribution is gonna be, you know, much more legitimate, obviously because it's first-party data, so they know what converts. So like that's really helpful. You know, I'm trying. I was trying to kind of see if there's a difference in cost running gets through Walmart versus. So I'm trying to see a little bit about that. But yeah, so we long story short. In a lot of cases we haven't seen success that. There's been some cases where we've seen some good success with it. I wouldn't say like any crazy results, but if we're helping boost items that also have like lower ad relevancies and are having a little bit of hard time getting traction, like we've seen some decent success there. I would say, just because they're giving away a lot of promos with that, like check your email, you probably got either like spend a thousand, get a thousand, spend 500, get 500, or even now yesterday I think I saw some clients got like spend 500, get 250 or something along those lines. So there's a lot of you know I'm opportunities, or even you could see from there, like how you know how effective it is and then from there you could decide if you want further in it. I think it's definitely worth what. It depends on the category. So, like I would say, you know, search on Google for, let's say, you sell bikes, or turn Google for bikes and see, like what Google Shopping ads are coming up and if you feel like you're right, fit well there and convert well there, based on your pricing and Based on your product type, like then there's definitely opportunity there.
Carrie Miller:
What's kind of interesting is. I remember you pointed out to me like two years ago that Walmart was actually doing this for us for free, and so we actually got a lot of traffic to our listings through those kind of Google ads and I noticed my sales picked up with the Google ads that they were doing for me for free. So I do think it's definitely something that's worthwhile to do, because it says Walmart comm under the Google shopping little ad and so people trust Walmart comm and it's just a, I think, a higher conversion rate. For that reason I'm. Coupons can you tell me a little bit about coupons? I know they're in beta and I know you have had access to coupons. What kind of success have you seen with those? And can you tell us just a little bit about the coupons that Walmart is testing out right now?
Michael:
Yeah, so traditionally there's really been no coupons on Walmart.com. Besides, for some in-store items was through a third-party provider. There was a couponing program that was very expensive for in-store brands and you should spend tens and tens of thousands of dollars to be part of it. That was the only couponing available on Walmart. Walmart recently rolled out couponing through Marketplace beta and it's been in beta I think it's already been a couple months and we've been having a lot of testing with it. I've started to become a really big fan of it. We've started seeing some really strong success there. Now, in some ways, obviously when you have a price cross-off it works better, but obviously with coupons, not everybody redeems, so you save a little bit there. But more importantly, the reason why we've been leveraging coupons is Walmart has these deal shelves that do a lot of volume, and very significant volume, In order to be able to be eligible for those deal shops deal pages that a lot of times want really good pricing, sometimes even better than Amazon. So if you're going to provide pricing that's better than Amazon, or even if it's going to be good pricing but you just don't want to bring down your Amazon, you're okay, get bringing down your Walmart. You just don't want to bring down your Amazon because your Amazon is doing a lot of volume. Whatever the case might be, you don't want to lose your buy box on Amazon. One of the good ways to do that is through couponing, because it depends on who your account manager is and how well your relationship is with Walmart, but they do sometimes accept your items for that. So that's been a one really cool way to leverage coupons and we've been seeing some success there.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, another one that's in beta is subscribe, not subscribe and save. You said subscribe. So have you had some clients utilizing subscribe on Walmart? Has it been getting good traction? What do you think about subscribe?
Michael:
I think it's got ways to go. I think it's really cool that there's that functionality there now. I think in the beginning that we're testing out subscribe and save and now it's just unsubscribe. But there's really, if you're selling obviously consumables, anything consumables, but anything people repurchase often, it definitely makes a lot of sense. I think just the Walmart, it's pretty prominent now and a lot of times it's auto selected, so it's like pretty prominent and I'll talk to buy a lot of items. So we have been seeing some traction there. The issue is, I think the Walmart customer isn't used to subscribing yet. So on Amazon they're very used to subscribing. So I think it's going to take some time till the Walmart customer really picks up on that. It doesn't hurt to have it on there, obviously, but I think it's going to take some time till the Walmart customer really picks up on the habit of subscribing and the convenience of it. So I think we got a little bit of time to go there, but it's cool that it's already built out.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, sounds like coupons is giving better traction. Okay, so I have had a lot of questions from people recently about, you know, they're starting up on Walmart and they're kind of, you know, getting everything set up but they want to really, you know, be successful on the Walmart marketplace and they want to get sales going. So what are some strategies and what are some things that you would give advice to somebody who's you know maybe just starting out on Walmart, or maybe they're on Walmart and they haven't had enough traction yet? Like, what are some sales strategies that you would recommend to them to boost their visibility and sales on Walmart?
Michael:
Yeah, so I think there's a few things and obviously it depends a lot on the type of items you sell and a whole bunch of other things, but some things that generally keep in mind is Walmart recently started releasing some data, which is extremely helpful. If you have Pacvue, you could actually see it on search insights on Pacvue. But there's basically Walmart started releasing data through API on the Kinect side where it basically shows you every keyword on Walmart, from 1,000 to 300,000, what the keyword is, how high it ranks, right. So they're not giving you search volume data, they're giving you, if it's one, it's the most searched keyword, right, for example. And then what are the three top items converting getting the click share and the conversion share for those keywords and the way we you know, I think, when you're coming to the platform and you're in a new or seller coming to the platform, I think it's really important to understand the shelves that have volume and the key word is the shelf. But like the shelves that have volume, and then what's converting for those shelves and make sure like your product fits the characteristics of what's currently converting there, because if not, like you're right, you might be successful, but it's hard to know. But if your product has the right features, as at the similar price points and maybe even more competitive, then you know there's good opportunities there and I think you really have to tailor your approach a lot more to understand the shelves and their standards going on. That's number one. Number two is, like, lean into the Walmart programs as fast, as quickly as possible, whether it's WFS, whether it's Walmart Connect, whether it's work incentives working with Walmart, whether it's, you know, flash deals, promotions. Like, really lean into those programs. They drive so much significant volume and it's something that you know is. It's one of the advantages of being a marketplace seller versus selling DSV on you know one P to Walmart. So, like you have a lot of those advantages, you might as well use them to your leverage.
Michael:
And people always complain about and I hear this all the time the one P seller is in the store items. They're on the top, ranked on the top and they get preference. The reality is that marketplace sellers have a lot of advantages that the one P sellers don't. So if the marketplace sellers really tap into the advantages and I've seen the ones that do it but if they tap into Flash Deals, promotions, a lot more of those placements are marketplace right now. They're not. Flash Deals is basically all marketplace, I think if not I'm not mistaken, it's all marketplace. Mosaic's are, especially during key times and events. It's very heavily marketplace driven. A lot of the data and things you get is a lot more on the marketplace side than on the one-piece side. So there's really a lot of programs that you could really lean into, especially with WFS. There's so many things that if you do them, you put yourself at a better advantage. So yeah, I would just kind of strongly emphasize that.
Carrie Miller:
So you're saying Walmart Connect is advertising and the Flash Deals not everybody has access to those. Can you maybe give some strategies to get those or what is needed in order to get access to Flash Deals?
Michael:
So if you're doing volume any decent significant volume it's usually going to be added to your account. If it's not and you're doing a lot of volume, you can reach out to me and I can get it added to your account. But yeah, most cases if your account's doing volume it'll get added to your account. If not, you can open up a case and request that. I'm not sure if that works, but you can email me and I can try to get it added to your account.
Carrie Miller:
Is there a number of certain amount of volume, a year or a month, or what are they looking for?
Michael:
So I'm not sure they don't say it. I know there's a number for that specific item to be eligible for Flash Picks. To actually do that it's in the thousands. It's not that much that it has to be doing in sales. It's in the low thousands for it to be eligible for Flash Deals. But for the account itself, I'm not sure Because I have very small accounts that have it and I have sometimes bigger ones that don't have it, that just have to request it. So yeah, I'm not sure exactly what the criteria is.
Carrie Miller:
All right, yeah, those are some good suggestions. Anything maybe on the optimization side, or like do you think? That the pro seller badge is really needed, like what are some other things people can do and focus on that they can control to get more sales.
Michael:
Yeah. So I think items if you're already an existing seller or if you're coming on, like I think it's important to pay attention to item spec 5.0. There's been new updates in the Walmart guidelines for how items are listed. I was actually in the Walmart offices in Hoboken a few weeks ago and we were actually looking through listings that we managed and seeing how, like, once item spec 5.0 got implemented for listings that didn't implement the changes, how, like slow performance kind of dropped off in some areas. So definitely learn those, pay attention to some of those, adjust your listings. You know, in Venezuela there's no reason to wait until, like, you're not just starting to not rank to make those changes. So I would definitely suggest that is one thing that you could control. I really pay attention to.
Carrie Miller:
All right. So what about keywords? So you said you know they're basically ranked on there, but I know you know with Helium 10, we have kind of a search volume. You know, what kind of keywords do you recommend going after, like if something has you know 30,000 search volume or it's like a high ranked volume, do you think people should go after those? Or should they go over after low hanging fruit keywords in their advertising, in their listing? Like, what's your keyword strategy for marketplace sellers?
Michael:
It's a great question. So start off with getting as really figuring out your really high converting keywords and building campaigns around those. Because even though the volumes of those are so low, you really need to build ad relevancy on Walmart and you could try bidding on the main keywords. But it's just so. Even if your item in a situation where your item would convert really well for a high volume keyword, you eventually want to target those because that's where you'll make sales. It's too hard to make sales by the smaller keywords. If it's a situation where the really large keyword, your item, doesn't fit in well there, like then you know that shouldn't be an item you're focusing on. But in order to be able to bid effectively on those keywords, you need to start building some ad relevancy. So what you'd seen work best is like building some campaigns around a lot more targeted keywords and build some relevancy there and then from there, like when you start bidding on the main keywords, you'll start being able to win them much easier and much better.
Carrie Miller:
Do you mean like long tail keywords, like, for example, like bookshelf, like you would say large green bookshelf and you would target that instead of just bookshelf?
Michael:
Exactly, yeah, and with Walmart, like you don't have to go even that long tail, like sometimes it's even two words, right. So like a white bookshelf, a bookcase, a green bookcase, but things like that, and you'll already have, you know, some volume there. That already allowed you to start converting.
Carrie Miller:
Another question for you about ads. Then I noticed whenever I'm shopping on Walmart I haven't seen many people utilizing video ads. Do you know why that would be? You know? Do you think they're really good converting tool for you know? Because I think they're only a dollar and I think that's pretty cheap for a lot of people who are moving over from Amazon, or like just a dollar or something. They're not that expensive comparatively to Amazon. So I'm just curious why you think maybe there's not as many video ads and what you think? You know how well you think they're doing?
Michael:
Yeah, so we've been having good success with video ads. It's really great if you have good content about your product and there is good video, so to say, do about your product. You're getting so much brand visibility and just for low costs. Like you said, the reason why it's not in a lot of categories is, for the most part, it's usually people not bidding on it. Like you have to accept the video ads and most people are just not doing it. So a lot of times, like we'll see really good success there, then some competitors start the video ads because we're doing it and then it starts becoming not as economical. But in the beginning you could get some good boost out of it.
Carrie Miller:
Any other strategies or anything that maybe I haven't covered, that you wanted to talk about in this?
Michael:
I think that's good. I think just pay really close attention to the updates and things that are coming out from Walmart, like if you're pretty quick to jump on those, you know some of those programs could help move the needle. So and just plan a lot around promotions. Like there's a lot of leverage with promotions. Like try to plan properly around how to position your promotions. It's a longer conversation but there's a lot to unpack there. So definitely try to have a better eye for the promotional angle.
Carrie Miller:
I did see like Black Friday it came up pretty quickly. Is that kind of how Walmart works? Is like the deals come out pretty quickly, you have to move fast and say you want to do them, or is there a planning process for them?
Michael:
There's a planning process. If you have an account manager, like holiday deals get planned way in advance, but there's also like the prime equivalent event that they do around prime things. So like definitely want to plan ahead with your account manager and ask them if there's any opportunities for your items to fit into any of their promotions and see if there's any opportunities there.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, all right. So we've got a question from Lady and the Storm. How long is the process to get approved?
Michael:
To sell on Walmart. It could either happen right away, it could either take a few days, it could either be a denial. So you know it really depends on. But if you really, if you fill out your information properly and you double check it all and you fill out your information properly and all the paperwork and everything matches up and you're, you know it looks like you have a decent Amazon store, like you know, you shouldn't have a problem getting accepted unless you have, like another application before. And most people, by the way, that come to us with like a non accept, like denied accounts, it's usually like they have another, they have another, they have another account they tried opening. It's linked on the email, there's that to like all these bunch of things. But just, I think it's very important to make sure you really think through your application, make sure that you know you have everything filled out and if you already tried applying in the past, like reach out about it rather than opening up another application, it'll just get both your applications, yeah you can reach out to sell cord.
Carrie Miller:
Michael does has helped some people that have gotten rejected. That I've sent over to him. So reach out to them if you do have some issues with that. And also have they kind of loosened the guidelines on? You know, do you have to be an established seller still? Or I've seen some people who, like maybe started a new brand and then they applied and they got accepted. Is that the kind of the norm or is that just kind of like? They got kind of passed through and they got lucky.
Michael:
No, so they're starting to accept like newer, smaller sellers. It depends a lot on the products you sell and you know it goes there. It goes under different teams based on the main category that you're under. So you know there's definitely there is there. There changes a little bit but for the most part we started seeing new small applications get approved.
Carrie Miller:
So it is dependent on the category. So that's a good thing to note. Okay, next one from Lynn how to manage Amazon PPC. Okay, so we're not doing Amazon. See, for example, how to add negative keywords in Walmart. So okay, so I'm going to try to sit rephrase this, maybe in Walmart terms, because this we're not talking about Amazon in this one, but how to manage Amazon or Walmart PPC. The platform is different from Amazon. For example, how to add negative keyword in Walmart Seller Center.
Michael:
Yeah, so Walmart Seller Center doesn't have negative targeting yet they're adding it so that they're adding that there's new things that came like conquesting ads and stuff like that, so there is newer things for targeting. But, yeah, negative is gonna come soon.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah they said it was on the road map. So yeah. Alright. Next lady in a storm asks how long do you have to ship your items?
Michael:
So it depends on how you fill out your shipping template. So you just have to whatever you fill out in your shipping templates, like that's what you have to when you have to meet. So if you fill out two days, you're gonna have to make sure it's two days. It's a fill out one day. So it depends how you manage your shipping templates. I think there's a minimum. There's like a maximum, though I'm not exactly sure what that is.
Carrie Miller:
But I think it's seven days. This is the max. Can you analyze wholesale for sales data in competition with helium 10? You can with x-ray. So you can, you know, find the products that you want to sell and you can actually Utilize x-ray to look at sales. So that's a great way to do it, mostly. And then also, you know, you can also look at the sales rank as well in the back end of seller center. You can utilize that information and then any information that you get, like if you have Pacvue or using kind of a software To help you to run your ads. You can see some more data in there that way, but I would say mostly x-ray for helium 10, go ahead and go to the, the main page for the price that you're selling, and then pull, pull our Chrome extension and it'll show you the sales data there. Um, okay, is tied? Janak Ranchod said is title density as relevant to Walmart listings compared to Amazon listings?
Michael:
Yeah, so I'm not sure exactly what it's meant by that, but Title Density on Helium 10 is basically Keyword phrases on Amazon.
Carrie Miller:
So if you, for example, green bookshelf and you wanted to target green bookshelf but if, like 50 competitors on page one have green bookshelf in their title, it's gonna be really competitive. However, if that phrase you see that maybe only one or two have just that same exact phrase, then you can actually rank for it a lot easier on Amazon. So it's basically like the exact phrase form and how many competitors have that exact phrase in their title.
Michael:
Yeah. So I have a different approach when it comes to ranking on Walmart and you know everybody's got their own opinions. But my approach for ranking on Walmart is more about you have to find the keywords that have the most volume and then, based on the most volume, you have to then analyze who's taking the conversion share of those keywords and then understand their product, their price points and, if you're on the features around their product, if your product Matches up well enough to their product, meaning you're just as you have just as much features, your item is just as good, if not better, and your price points competitive enough. That's what you want to target because you know if you get there you'll convert and you're gonna have to check their PDP and make sure like your PDP is better and all that kind of stuff. But the problem is, if you're focusing on, if you do all that research, but you're focusing on key on items, on keywords, that the items that converting in the shelf, you're not gonna, you're not gonna match on, you're not gonna match one next to it, doesn't matter if you rank, you're just gonna start de-ranking because Walmart's so heavily based on conversion rates. So I that's kind of our approach to it, and also because the Significant keywords are the only ones that drive legitimate volume, like there is some volume done from other keywords but it's usually not significant enough loose is asking Do you recommend to start Walmart even when just started on Amazon? I would say it depends on their products, your storemen and a little bit of more about your company. But as a whole, usually not usually, I would say like build your brand, build a little bit of your capabilities off of Amazon. It's gonna be hard to tackle both at the same time and then start with that.
Carrie Miller:
So you think starting on Amazon first is a good idea, and then yeah. Okay, the next one. Jenak asked. I hope I'm saying your name right, Jenak. Jenak, can you simply copy your Amazon listings to create your Walmart listings?
Michael:
You shouldn't. That's a big no-no. You should Rewrite your listings like you can use the same core of information. You should rewrite your titles, descriptions, key features, to be optimized based on Walmart style guide. So number one, the keywords that you care about, are going to be different. Walmart wants shorter titles, they want different style, descriptions, key features. So for the most part, all that's different. So you really that's kind of the biggest Task is to just make sure you're optimized specifically for Walmart.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I think it actually kind of hinders you on your listing quality score when you do that. So yeah, Lynn asks are you going to host a Walmart PPC management session? We really need it. I think we can arrange that in the in the near future. So we'll definitely work on that and if you haven't joined our one winning with Walmart group, that's probably where we'll do it. So make sure you're in our helium 10 winning with Walmart group if you want to do that. Alright, it looks like we've come to an end of the questions. I think that we had a lot of great information. Oh, we got another question. I will put this one up here. Let's see here. Mr. Kamal says how much revenue Should you have on Amazon to consider yourself to move to Walmart?
Michael:
So I mean, the revenue number is a hard thing because it depends on your Category and the type of items you sell and how competitive is on Walmart versus how well you're doing on Amazon. A lot of times, if you really started tapping on your Amazon and then definitely make sense to spend one by once, you already have some traction and you have a good hold. You have good products, like you know, I would I mean, we're a big fan of Walmart's a lot of times will tell people to start pretty early on. So it's just, I think, less about revenue numbers because it's so dependable based on different brands. I think what what's important to understand is like do you have good enough products that are? You know? You feel like you know you could move properly on Walmart. Is enough volume for them on Walmart? And what is that? What is what type of a volume are you looking for it to be worthwhile for you to kind of take on the endeavor? And then you know, yeah, and, and based on that you could really analyze, okay, are you ready to move, and what that would look like and just expand not move, but expand.
Carrie Miller:
All right, it looks like we've come to an end of the questions. Thank you everyone for joining and for just, you know, interacting and asking all these great questions throughout. And thanks again, Michael, for joining us. I know it's been a while since you've been on and I'm really happy that you were able to answer a lot of these questions for us. So thanks again and we will see you all again next month. We'll have another guest for Winning with Walmart Wednesday, and we'll see you then. Bye, everyone.
Cara Sayer's entrepreneurial spirit shines brighter than ever as she recounts her nail-biting journey from the brink of closure to soaring profits. Her candid discussion with us offers a lot of wisdom on the critical importance of keeping a keen eye on business metrics. As an e-commerce maven, she underpins the conversation with her own blunders and breakthroughs, ensuring that our listeners can sidestep the pitfalls and replicate her success. And for those with a penchant for cultural quirks, our banter in British slang adds a hearty dash of charm to the mix.
Our talk takes an exciting turn when we unlock the secrets to mastering keyword research and making data-led decisions that skyrocket sales. Cara and Bradley dissect how tools like Helium 10 can revolutionize product listings and why a stale strategy could be your downfall. We also unravel the complex web of inventory management and the savvy approach to just-in-time shipping, a must-know for Amazon sellers looking to conquer international markets. Plus, don't miss our exploration of the monumental impact that solid branding has on weathering the competitive storm and securing consumer trust. Wrapping things up, we navigate the art of standing out in Amazon's vast marketplace. Cara shares her playbook on crafting a unique narrative and engaging brand backstory that can mean the difference between blending in and breaking through. We spotlight the strategic edge of maintaining your website for direct consumer rapport and a sneak peek at new products. With a nod to the upcoming changes in EU regulations and the significance of a diversified sales approach, this episode is jam-packed with actionable insights. And as we close, Cara and Bradley reflected on the delicate dance of work-life balance, ensuring our listeners remember the heartbeat behind the hustle.
In episode 536 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Cara discuss:
- 00:00 - Reviving and Growing a Struggling Amazon Business
- 02:53 - Origins of Common UK English Phrases
- 07:59 - Amazon SKU Economics and Tracking Sales
- 11:05 - Keyword Optimization for Sales Growth
- 14:45 - The Importance of Branding in Business
- 16:29 - Brand Marketing on Amazon
- 20:17 - The Benefit of Having a Website
- 28:29 - Favorite Helium 10 Tool
- 28:43 - Selling Tips for Amazon
- 30:42 - Importance of Websites Beyond Amazon
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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got listener favorite guest car back to tell us how she came close to having to shut down her business since she wasn't looking at the right metrics, but she's going to show us how she was not only able to save her company but grow it. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you a 6, 7, or 8 figure seller and want to network in a private mastermind group with other experienced sellers? Or maybe you want to take advantage of monthly advanced training sessions with Kevin King, an expert guest? Do you want to come to our quarterly in-person, all-day trainings at Helium 10 headquarters? Or do you want the widest access to the Helium 10 set of tools? For all of these things, the Elite program might be for you. For more information on Helium 10 Elite, go to h10.me/elite.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And to continue in my series of me being on the other side of the world here in Germany, the next guest that we recorded here in Frankfurt is none other than the amazing Cara. Welcome back to the show.
Cara:
Thank you, gorgeous one, thank you for having me.
Bradley Sutton:
This is actually the fourth time, believe it or not on the podcast.
Cara:
Am I approaching a world record for the most interviewed person?
Bradley Sutton:
You're in the select top 5% of people who have made it to four episodes.
Cara:
There you go I love it.
Bradley Sutton:
So we're not going to go too much into her backstory. Mhel here prepared some of the numbers where she's on, so if you want to find out her origin story, that's episode 117. She came back on episode 246 and we were talking pandemic stuff and then most recently back in 2022, she was on episode 378. And that was interesting, talking about some of her struggles that she started seeing with her business, and we're going to talk a little bit about that today. Hey, we keep it real on the podcast, but before we get into the stuff we. Every time Cara is on the episode, she teaches me a little bit more of British English, all right, and I'm sure it's going to come out like, like she, the way she talks. She always says stuff that I'm like what, what did you say? So we're all going to learn some more British slang here? My first question is wait, what is this one phrase? That was something.
Cara:
Yeah, so we were talking about something. I said oh, that's just piffling, and piffling is when something's really inconsequential, so it's just like so little, it's like a piffling thing, okay. And then the other one was put some Wellie into it.
Bradley Sutton:
Put some Wellie into it.
Cara:
So, which is, I suppose, a translation, would be put some oomph into it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, put some oomph in it. All right, so I'm wearing my office the office t-shirt Dunder Mifflin here, because you know that's one of our exports that we got from, from Britain, is the office. You know, one of our most popular shows. I know how it's used, but when people say Bob's your uncle, like, like, where does that come from? Though that's the most ridiculous phrase I've ever heard Bob's your uncle, how does that?
Cara:
I actually have no clue. This is half the problem. So when I talk, a lot of the time I'll use these phrases and I have no clue. I haven't got a Scoobies where it came from. That was one, and I thought maybe that had something to do with Scooby-Doo, but apparently it doesn't, because I Googled it last night and it's got something to do with the Scottish word that's got to do with Scooby or something. So that's the thing is a lot of these things I have, and in fact, what's the other one? There's one oh, I'll have it, it'll come back to me. But there's one that I use quite a lot and I actually had to Google it because and it turned out was something to do an Australian runner or something. Oh, Gordon Bennett, that's right, Gordon Bennett, have you ever heard of that one?
Bradley Sutton:
I have not.
0:03:49 - Cara:
Okay. So you know, instead of being really rude and throwing out an F word, you go oh, Gordon Bennett. And I was like who is Gordon Bennett? Why do we say him? And I'm quite interested in these things and I think he's. Either he was either an Australian pilot or an Australian runner or something like that. I have no clue why we use it, but we do and I say it quite a lot.
Bradley Sutton:
Now the first. You know like you know how I roll here. I usually don't like trying to get our topics before I don't really think about it. But you know, we went out to dinner last night and you were talking a little bit about some of your struggles and how you were taking one aspect of your total business and we're kind of like not giving it the attention it needed. And then when you actually did, you were just like, wow, this is I'm in such bad shape, why have to close? You know, shut the business. So talk about what you were neglecting, how you put a stop to that neglect and then the steps that you took to rectify this situation.
Cara:
So I think a lot of it comes from the fact that when I started my business I had no clue what I was doing, and I suppose a lot of Amazon sellers are like that, in that you just sort of go yeah, this sounds like a good idea. So I'm going to start running a business and I used to work in a corporate environment and had budgets and all various other things, but in my own business I didn't. I just kind of ran a lot like the seat of my pants and I think maybe that's just because, also, my I'm more of an intuitive person versus a data driven person, because I know a lot of Amazon sellers are very data driven and maybe less, you know, intuitive. You know, as in like everyone has different skill sets. And I think what happened was the business grew and grew and grew and I basically broke my own golden rule, which is that at the end of the day, the whole thing about turnover is vanity and profit is sanity. So what I was doing is I was just looking at the big numbers and not really focusing on small numbers, and I sort of came to a point in July where I realized that basically what happened was I used to use the software Sage for my accounts and I knew Sage inside and out. And then I changed accountants and they started to use zero and I didn't know it as well. So, if I'm honest, I should have been more involved, but I just kind of let them like run it. And so when I went to look at my accounts I was like, oh God, I don't seem to have made very much money. I've got really quite a good turnover, but I haven't actually made much profit. I'm thinking like, what am I gonna do? So I started looking into it in much more depth.
Cara:
So, first of all, what I did and I would suggest every Amazon seller does this. But, to be honest, as you know, I don't really talk about Amazon sellers, I talk about businesses and brands. But every company that is selling products, you 100% need to really make sure that your profit and loss, your PnL, reflects what you're doing. So mine was literally sales, pretty much as a big picture. Well, I sell in four countries. I've got four websites, four marketplaces. I've also got retailers and distributors and various other things. So to have all of my sales information in one place was a bit stupid, frankly, because how am I gonna get any clarity on what's doing well, what's not doing so well, and pretty much all my costs, like all my Amazon costs, were all bunched in one place. And yes, I could have separated them out if I'd done it by area. But actually I then had an issue with my bookkeeping and so actually it turned out that hadn't been done properly, so I wouldn't have been able to do that, so I then separated my costs out. So again I had like eight different cost centers for well, not eight different cost centers, sorry, I did four different cost centers, but by country, so I could at least see what I was making in terms of turnover and then see what the costs were for those countries, looking at a lot of detail. And then I started looking like then I went into and this is a really really super useful and I don't think I certainly haven't used it before the SKU economics level of reporting, where I mean, obviously it's easy for me because I've got only 13 SKUs and I know I've spone people today and they'd like two and a half thousand. But you can actually see although it would be really good if Amazon could do or actually I don't think Helium 10 does it do they Like, an ability to export SKU economics reports?
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, I don't know what SKU economics means. I mean, we have-.
Cara:
Oh my God, right. Well, in which case, I'm giving you a whole new thing that Helium 10, a thousand-.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean, I probably do it but I just don't call it that. You know like it's called.
Cara:
SKU economics.
0:07:58 - Bradley Sutton:
There's no other right.
Cara:
So basically I saw it for the first time on the app because I'm quite a regular app checker. So I go in and I have a look and it's in the manage inventory. You go to the SKU and then on the top it's got like pricing and this and that and then it says SKU economics and you can actually You're talking about seller central.
Bradley Sutton:
This is Seller Central
Cara:
Yes, sorry, do translate. So I go to SKU economics and basically you can do it like the last seven days, last 30 days, last six months, last 12 months, and it's the only place I've ever seen where you can literally see what your total sales are, what your net sales are, what your Amazon costs are, and they break it down to a level of detail where it's literally like you spent this amount on a deal coupon code, this amount on a sponsored profit by SKU.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, yes, helium 10 has that. We don't call it SKU economics, but it's just in profits. You go to your product performance and then you could look at it at the ASIN level or you could look at the SKU level. Okay, well, you need to show me how to do that then, okay, we'll do-.
Cara:
But I did this myself, just went in Sure, and then I started transporting all the information over and then I broke it down by country and I started looking and I realized that actually, like in Canada, when you actually put in the cost of my product, excluding shipping in or any other costs, I had running a business in Canada I was pretty much not even breaking even. And then I started looking at the US and I was like, oh same thing, not good UK, really healthy Australia, healthy so. But at the time I was before I did all the analysis and there was a lot of work to do on it I was literally like, oh my God, I think I'm gonna just have to shut up shop because I've got an issue with the Chinese sellers who I think were impacting before, but they're really kicking off now because obviously my product was launched over 10 years ago, so they know there's no patent on that product. Therefore, they can go for it. So at the moment they're selling the product that looks like mine it is not the same but it looks as similar enough to the consumer for $5. Well, it cost me $25 to manufacture the thing. They're selling them for $25 on Amazon and I can't compete. Now I don't want to compete, but the issue is what it's done.
Cara:
And again, this is where I wasn't paying attention and should have, like, pulled myself up sooner. I didn't see the huge drop in the sales and therefore my storage costs at 3PL level have gone up hugely and therefore I've got huge, big overheads on the fact that I've got all this stock and it's not selling. And if I sell it at too low a price then I'm almost not even, I'm not gonna break even at all. So anyway, I started doing a whole lot of analysis and I literally I've probably had my head in spreadsheets for close to four months, something like that. But I tell you what, once you've done that sort of work, the clarity you have and the decisions you can make. So, for example, I actually decided, normally I'm all about trying to give my customers the most range possible, the widest, and I'm like excuse, my French, fuck that.
Cara:
Literally I'm just gonna give them this product, this product, this product, this product. You don't need the variations, because the variations are costumey, extra. They often get returned because they may be by the wrong one thinking they didn't realize it at a pink trim and they bought that one. So I'm like actually that one I know they'll like they either have that one or nothing, and so that's now my more my approach. And then the other thing I was doing as well is looking more into the keywords and looking more into making sure that the listing was actually really reflecting the keywords that are out there. So I was doing a lot of helium 10 research into that and actually updating the listings. So they'd probably been around like one of them particularly had been around for about two or three years and I probably hadn't really ever done that much work on it and already I only updated it like middle of December. It's not my peak season and I can see the sales coming up. And that's from literally looking at what are the terms that we should be using. Because, it changes over time.
Bradley Sutton:
It can change the same product, but the how people find it are searching for it to change over time.
Cara:
Exactly, and also, I mean, I do have a tendency to kind of invent keywords as well.
Bradley Sutton:
So words, that I use in my speech and also in my listings.
Cara:
So I find that things like there are certain keywords that I use in my listings, that because people are copying my listings, they're copying my wording and therefore then that wording is then getting picked up in like brand analytics, et cetera. So it's quite fascinating, but the thing is is at the end of the day, I think it does. You know, I'm all about the marketing, I'm all about the intuition, but also you have to be about the data as well and the numbers, and you know there's a difference between taking some risk and investing in something that your business needs in order to grow, versus just sort of sitting there and maybe not paying attention to what you shouldn't really be spending, and that's what I was doing. So bad me, bad me.
Bradley Sutton:
So, you know, instead of having to shut down the whole business, you were able to, you know, maybe shut down some unprofitable skews. Well, I shut down Canada, shut down, you know, marketplaces, and that might be a scary thing. You know, some people, they go to extremes. They're like I got to, just I'm just going to quit everything, and that's not good. Or they're like no, like I have to succeed in Canada, like I know it can work despite all the numbers. Screw the numbers. You know I'm going to make this work. You know you got to be able to not easily give up by the same time, understand that you'd have battles, or if you want to win the war, you might need to like. So it doesn't always have to be permanent. That's the other thing, right?
Cara:
So just because I've shut Canada down for now doesn't mean I can't come back to Canada. But right now the numbers don't work in terms of getting the product over there, the various other things that are there, the pricing structures, etc. The percentage of the particular products that will sell and the ones that won't it. I literally just was like no, okay, that doesn't make sense. And, like you say, there is a bit of ego in there in terms of like oh well, I sell on, you know, for marketplaces. Well, who cares? If you're not making money, don't sell on any, you know. So I did. And then I actually had a chat, the reason I was gonna shut the US down. So I had another a chat with another friend of mine who she'd exited a business, an eight-figure business, and she was saying the US is really tough and particularly because, like Amazon, are doing all this now Penalizing you for not having enough in as well as penalizing you for having too much, and it's like God, Gordon Bennett, like give us a break, right, seriously, give us a break.
Cara:
And I was like you know what the thing is that in my home country it's a lot easier to manage that sort of thing, which obviously, you know it, the US is not my home country, so I'm gonna have to pay more for storage and 3PLs and all the rest of it, managing that constant fluctuation. So I did the numbers and it is actually cheaper for me to fly it in on a sort of just in time basis, at least for the short term, because that's the other thing. Sometimes it's not about always doing things, for I'm never gonna. I'm gonna do that forever. It's more, let's just have a breather and Monitor the costs and then see whether you've got something going on that works.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, now, I didn't get to see your presentation right now because I was recording some podcast in here, but I know like one of the things you talk about a lot is is branding, and I imagine Actually that's one of the reasons why you don't have to shut your business down and why, you know, some people might have been listening right now and thoughts themselves wait a minute, if she has very close knockoffs who are selling for $25 and her price is $90, you know it's not a matter of oh, maybe us is just a little bit more profitable in Canada. You know, like that that's a huge gap, you know right there. But you're obviously not fighting on price and I would imagine one of the main reasons why you're able to Succeed is because of your strong brand 100% because we grew in the UK.
Cara:
30% Grew, even at that price..
Bradley Sutton:
You know it's not like the Chinese sellers are not selling in the UK.
Cara:
I've got loads of Chinese sellers chasing me in the UK, but the difference is that the brand is better known and is better trusted and therefore you know they, they and also I think there is an element, you know, there is an element of the fact that you know whichever country you're based in, you know People like to support a more local business, so there is an element of that. So, if you're a US seller in the US, I do think sometimes you know you need to make more of that because actually you know US citizens are gonna want to support a US business.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, so talk, talk a little bit more about that. It's about you know the all of this can be considered part of your branding. You know where's it manufactured. You know, like, are you really targeting your, your target avatar? You know, what did you talk about in your presentation today that you can maybe share with the audience About some things that will help them to one of the one of the one of the biggest things was the fact that I do think a lot Of Amazon sellers don't really have a brand.
Cara:
They just have a name for a business or a name for something that they use and they don't really have a what I'd call a true brand, and they don't always. I think sometimes also, existing only on Amazon makes you lose perspective on you know how normal businesses work, like businesses that aren't based on Amazon, and so you know a lot of businesses. I mean, I think throughout life, people buy from people and I think that's so important to remember that, even on Amazon, one of the reasons why Amazon focus is so heavily on a plus listings and now they're bringing in the premium, a plus and all the rest of it, because Amazon knows right. I, you know, you've known me quite a few years now and I've always banged on about brand. I've always banged on about having a story.
Cara:
Tell your story. It doesn't have to be your story necessarily. It could be the product story, but you need to have something that differentiates you and and even then I was chatting to someone the conference earlier on and I was saying the thing is that sometimes it's not even the fact that you're you're selling different products. It's the way that you curate them, right. So it's the collection of products that you've chosen to sell it under your brand name Says something because, like, if you check, if I said right, bradley, like we're both gonna do kitchenware, I guarantee you that both of us would choose different products. If you said right, you've got to choose 10 products and you know, off you go, I would choose 10 different or we might have some crossover, but you know, we might both have a garlic crusher, for example. I used a garlic crusher as an example in my talk about how even a garlic crusher can have a story.
Bradley Sutton:
We call that garlic press.
Cara:
Thank you for enlightening, but you know. But the whole point is that you know, even the fact that individual people are actually running these businesses means that there will be something individual about that business. So it's finding that story effectively and finding the why. I'm always really quite fascinated by the whys of business. So, for example, you look at things like Airbnb and Uber and things like that, and the why was because people didn't want to pay the stupidly high taxi rates. The why was the two guys who did Airbnb was because, of fact, they didn't want to. They didn't have enough money to rent a hotel room and they needed somewhere to stay and they couldn't afford all the other options. So they came up with a concept of Airbnb.
Cara:
Even things like Ring, you know, like the doorbell company, you know that originally came that that wasn't the story there is. It's a reinvention of something traditional, but they've used technology that's available to revolutionize an existing product. It could also just be the way in which something is communicated with or handled like with the customers, so making the customers more engaged with the product. So, for example, one of the things I'm doing this year is I'm going to be doing an app which helps baby sleep through the provision of white noise, and you know that's an add-on product, but I won't be selling on Amazon, obviously. But the thing is, is it's kind of something where, again, it can become a marketing tool. It can become like something that you can, you know, give to people. You know there's other. I'm all about added value, like where can you give added value? And hopefully try and give added value where it doesn't cost you very much.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. One thing I think that helps you expand also to different market places. Be it, you know, like when you, you know you started in UK, then went to US I know we were talking about the potential of UAE and you were saying, oh yeah, I've got. You know, I've got some customers down there and stuff, so talk to you about that. Like how can you say something like that Is that because you know people from social media who have bought your product? Or you look at the addresses of where people buy your products. But how can you say, oh yeah, I've got customers there. When I'm ready to launch there, I can hit them up and they'll promote it. Like how can you do that?
Cara:
Okay, so yes, yes and almost yes. So, fundamentally, one of the other things I always bang on about and I banged on about it in my presentation is I do believe that any real brand or product business should have a website. There's two reasons for that, so I'm going to just go off on one tangent slightly, but the main reason for it is that, for example, I've been out of stock for two of my best selling products for the last couple of months because we've had issues getting stuff in from China, blah, blah, blah, and we had delays on the line, etc. Etc. So what I'm able to do with my websites, take pre-orders. You can't do that on Amazon, because if you don't have the stock, you can't sell. Literally, that's it, you're done. So I've generated, I've lost. My sales are down for the month in comparison to last year on Amazon and they're up not as much as they would be, but they're still significant enough money coming in on people who are prepared to hand over their money on the basis that the product will come. We tell them the dates and then we ship it.
Cara:
And so, therefore, the benefit of having a website, for example, is I know exactly how much traffic my website gets from the UAE. I can literally see it down to the almost like city level because, like the analytics now on things like Shopify is absolutely fascinating. So I did a breakdown of breakdown of, like, all the visitors that come from outside of the UK and you know there's some significant numbers Also. Yes, the other thing with the UAE is that you have a lot of expats. Now, the one thing that expats lack is family, because they're living outside of their home country. So when they have a baby, they're much more reliant on external sources. So they're much more reliant on things like baby sleep experts. They're much more reliant on gadgets and things that can help the baby sleep. And, yeah, we've got influencers. There's actually a few baby sleep experts starting up in the UAE and at the moment I can't, I can't. It's really frustrating.
Cara:
The most frustrating thing for me is when someone says they can't buy my product at a reasonable price, because I don't want to be like charging 25, 30 quid for a courier, which I do, and people will pay it, but I don't really want to be. I want them to get it at a price that works for them and in a time span that works for them. So the reason the UAE I've been sort of thinking about it for many, many, many years and in fact, I had way back in the day like 2010. I had a distributor in the UAE and I've had retailers in the UAE before, and I think the main issue is that they don't do any marketing, whereas I'm happy to do the marketing. So we're happy to make contact with the influencers, we're happy to, you know, and the good thing is we get people contacting us because it works both ways, and then we can say, oh, actually, yes, and we're selling on Amazon, so it gives us the opportunity to say, yeah, we can help you, sure.
Bradley Sutton:
Really interesting. And another thing that I found or I probably knew this, but you know my memory is so bad but that you are an unexpected expert in things that have to do with, like trademarks and stuff like that. So what is something that you think the average listener might not know or might wow them like well, I didn't know that.
Cara:
Well, one of the issues I think that people in fact I was chatting to someone at dinner last night about it is that quite often people worry about the fact that a particular brand name may have been registered already. Now, that's not necessarily a problem because, for example, McDonald’s farms now this is a slightly like random, not realistic example, but the principles are the same. So you've got McDonald's restaurants and then you've got McDonald's farm. Now we know, obviously McDonald's restaurants probably have got their own farm. But if they didn't, then there's absolutely no reason why you can't trademark McDonald's as a farm, because it's a different category and those categories are actually quite important. So, for example, if you've got a rubber duck company and you wanted to call it, you can't call it rubber ducks, it's too generic. But say, you wanted to call it sort of yellow ducky or something like that, right, and then somebody else was doing you know you're making toys and they're called yellow ducky, and then someone wanted to do a swimwear brand called yellow ducky. Well, actually you could have the two existing, like you wouldn't necessarily want to. This is the other thing. Sometimes it's not advantageous to actually have a similar brand name to somebody who's already established. But if they're in a completely different like industry. So if you had a yellow ducky, that was a truck company, right, and you're doing yellow ducky toys, no one's going to confuse the two, like you know. It's really not going to be like a case of someone's going to go to the yellow ducky truck company and think, oh, my goodness, where are my ducks, you know, or toys, or whatever. So there is that and there's also.
Cara:
The other thing is, I think, is that you know, people don't really know how to search for that sort of thing and it's not that hard. The USPTO, the US Patent Trademark Office, has actually got some really good search functionality. There's also the WEPO, which is World Internet, because I'm always suggesting the other thing you need to do is you need to make sure that your trademark isn't taken in another country. So we have it quite a lot. I tend to talk about it in reverse, which is you might have a brand in the UK and then actually someone may have already filed for that trademark in the US. So there's no point really building up a brand in the US, in the UK sorry if you're then hoping to go to the US, because it's going to be too difficult, especially if they're in a similar sort of environment.
Cara:
So it is really, and that works both ways. So I would say, even in the US, if you're thinking of expanding to Europe or to the UK or Australia or whatever, do a bit of due diligence, search online, because you will be able to find it, and make sure you use a VPN to go looking through on Google in local countries, because the other thing also you don't necessarily know is there was one brand that I know of in the baby industry and if you Google it, it actually means it's in Dutch, it actually means the bits of that hang off the back of a sheep's bottom.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Cara:
Okay, so I'm not being funny, but I don't want that as a brand name they have and I don't seem to impact on them at all. But the thing is, you do want to see whether there's any weird colloquialisms or weird slang and things like that. Plus, the other thing is people get very like oh my goodness, what am I going to do? What am I going to do about like, trademarking internationally? And there is something called the Madrid Protocol and the Madrid Protocol. Once you've actually trademarked in a country that follows the Madrid Protocol which, by the way, includes America and China, EU, Australia, all the big players, all the most of the places you would want to trademark and once your trademark has been accepted and obviously this is why the due diligence is really important, to make sure that you haven't got like McDonald's restaurants anywhere else is you can use the Madrid Protocol to register in those other countries within a six month period of your trademark being approved in your home country. And it's a lot less and you don't need to use lawyers because otherwise you'd have to literally go out to each country and then trademark it. So I always say to people sort of think big in terms of and think safe. So, for example, it's super important to have a trademark in China, because trade in China. It is a first. I think it's a first to file. It is it's first to file, whereas in other countries it's first to use. I think the US is first to use.
Cara:
So the problem is that you could have been using a trademark in, for example, I think in the UK we're first to file, I think in the US it's first to use. So somebody would not be able to probably register my trademark unless you know, because I would probably know about it and therefore it would come up and I'd say well, hang on a minute, I've been trading in the US for this amount of time and I also think I had to also do the same in Canada. I had to actually show how long I've been trading for. But in the UK you don't have to have been trading at all. So if I wanted to, I could literally take Helium 10, and I could trademark that in the UK. If you haven't done, you know, because no one else is using it. There's no reason why it wouldn't be, and you know so by thinking with using the Madrid protocol, especially in the early days of like, when you're just doing your trademark. It's expensive, but the thing is, if you think you're going to go. Well, if you're producing in China, you should definitely do it, and if you think you're going to go into the US or into the UK or EU, it's actually quite a cost effective way of getting a trademark.
Bradley Sutton:
So Edumacated me about a lot of stuff there. Now, before we get into your last strategy, a couple of questions. I've been asking guests, so you've obviously been using Helium 10 for a while and I remember from the very first time I met you. There's just a lot of stuff that you don't know how to do. But about from the stuff that you do know how to do and that you do use, what is your favorite tool in Helium 10 that you feel gives you the most value, and why does it give you value?
Cara:
It's the one. It's a Cerebro where you go in and look at the keywords put the ace in it and get the keywords yes, yes. So I love that one.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you know what language Cerebro is?
Cara:
Oh, is it Greek.
Bradley Sutton:
No, it might be, I have some Greek in it, but it's. Oh, that's so the literal translation or the literal spelling is brain yeah, for Spanish yeah okay, cool, so yeah, so that's definitely one of my favorites.
Cara:
and then I also use I get the marketplace alerts and things like that, and I particularly like every time I
change my own or if a price changes. I love that coming in, because Amazon quite often starts selling my products in other places and it's useful to know what they're charging when they're doing it. And also it's a sanity check for me, like when I, for example, I messed up the other day big time. I'm launching a new product and I'm making a variation of another product and I accidentally put on the old product the new title. So I was accidentally selling the new product before it had launched because the old product was still live. So it was only when I got an email from Helium 10 saying my title had changed and I was like. So I ran into the back of, like Seller Central oh my god, I think it was only about 20 orders and then I'm like, trying to change the title, trying to change the title, trying to change the title, got it changed finally and that was yeah, that was a bit of a lifesaver as well.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So alerts is and Cerebro Wishlist for something that maybe we do it and you just don't realize it, or something that you think that we don't have. That would really make your life easier.
Cara:
Well, the SKU economics. I'm gonna be looking for that, okay, so I don't know. We have to have a chat afterwards and we'll have a look, because the problem is with the Amazon seller central version is that it's not exportable. So I literally had to sit there and I was doing screenshots and then moving and copying, like a picture, into an Excel spreadsheet.
Bradley Sutton:
For you with 13 SKUs. Maybe not so bad, but imagine somebody else.
Cara:
I'm thinking, feeling the pain, but also if I wanted to do regular updates like where am I now? I don't want to have to go through that every single time. So I will be very interested to see. Because SKU economics honestly, I'm a bit obsessed with it at the moment because it's so useful in being really granular, Like literally, like that SKU has spent X amount of money on sponsored ads, that bit has generated that amount of profit and it tells you all the returns, like everything, and so it really gave me some, like I was saying, some really good knowledge into what the business was actually doing versus what I thought it was doing.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, your last 30, 60, I know for you might be hard. So maybe 90 second tip of the day. It could be about trademarks, it could be about branding, it could be about the best pubs to go to in Britain. I mean any possible subject that you are an expert on.
Cara:
Okay, I'm not going to go down the pubs route.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, okay.
Cara:
But no, I think my top tip is have a website outside of Amazon. Have some way where you can sell, because we are all at the mercy of Amazon and all that needs to happen is we've got some new regulations going into the EU that's going to impact on all the US sellers, which is new labeling laws, and if your product is not compliant, amazon will shut your listing down on December the 13th 2024. Literally, so it's absolutely vital that you have another way to sell. That's obviously in the EU, but like this, that could happen in any market. We just don't know what's going to happen. And the thing is, you know, if you have all your eggs in Amazon's basket, then you're not really giving yourself an opportunity to do anything other than be at the mercy of Amazon. And you know, whilst I do love Amazon, obviously, at the same time I don't think it's healthy to be that involved with any one person at all. So it is really good to be able to sort of spread the risk a little bit and, as I say, then that gives you the opportunity to do more things off Amazon, which then actually tend to drive more traffic. So my website increased by 30% last year. Amazon increased by 30% because I do encourage my customers to go to Amazon if that's what they want to do.
Cara:
But and then there's also a customer who doesn't want to buy on Amazon because they don't like the concept, they don't believe in it. And there is, there is a there's a definite movement. A lot of people. Unfortunately, they don't understand how Amazon works and they think everything that's being sold on Amazon is being sold by Amazon. And I often have to explain to them like hang on a minute, I'm selling on Amazon. So by you not shopping on Amazon, you're actually not helping me.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah.
Cara:
You know, and they don't get it. So, anyway, have a website and make sure you've got a really good, strong, like about us like page which sort of tells people why you're doing this.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome, Well, Cara, thank you so much. I have no doubt that you're gonna be make it to five episodes next year. You'll have some good stories and teach us some new vocabulary words as well. You know, one of the things I like about you is that you're not here to sell something and then not the people who Nothing bad about it, yeah nothing bad. You know, I have influencers and people who have service providers and they push their website Great. You know, that's why part of the reason why we're all here, but you know, you're just like helping people.
Cara:
I love it.
Bradley Sutton:
You speak and you have no agenda, so we're not gonna say, hey, go to carasayer.com but I have nothing on there. But I'm sure people like to hear from you. So like do you know where the next speaking? Are you speaking at a Billion Dollar Seller? Somebody are going there or anything.
Cara:
No, I'm not allowed to, because my daughter's doing her big exams this year.
Bradley Sutton:
So I've had it. This is the one year so no international travel until after July.
Cara:
But I'm going to the European Seller Conference in Prague Because I'm allowed to stay with it.
Bradley Sutton:
That's in March, I believe.
Cara:
Yeah, march 13th to the 16th, I think it is, and I'm not speaking, but I'm just gonna go along as a participant and I'm really looking forward to it, actually, because I've never been before.
Bradley Sutton:
So I love that conference. I spoke at it last year. Shivali is going this year. I won't be going this year, but make sure to go there If you guys want to go to Prague.
Cara:
It's in March, it's a beautiful city as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, oh, and there's really great, amazing pizza place called Johnny's Pizza. I'll let you know where it works at.
Cara:
I'll make sure I go out and make sure you're Really great, me and Shivali can go out and eat some pizza.
0:33:57 - Bradley Sutton:
All right. Well, Cara. Thank you so much for joining us and coming out here from across the pond.
Cara:
Indeed, a bit of a bumpy landing. It was yesterday, but yes.
Bradley Sutton:
That was a little rough here in Frankfurt. I kept me a little awake there, but anyways, thank you so much for coming and I can't wait next year to see what you've been up to All right, take care.
Cara:
All right, take care. I'll see you next time. Bye, bye, bye.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. California man receives dozens of Amazon packages he never ordered https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2024/02/15/mysterious-Amazon-packages-Woodside-California/6441708019084/ The Amazing Ways Walmart Is Using Generative AI https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/02/15/the-amazing-ways-walmart-is-using-generative-ai/ Sponsored Brands video introduces vertical video creatives on the advertising console and Amazon Ads API https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-brands-video-introduces-vertical-video-creatives/ The final leg of our journey takes us to the launch pad of Helium 10's latest tool, akin to Surfer SEO, but built for conquering the Amazon listing optimization battlefield. Bradley shares his journey from four months in the trenches, crafting over 150 listings to decode the Amazon algorithm for ranking. And for those hungry for knowledge, we spotlight an array of events and webinars, including a keyword research masterclass with Jason from Vitacup. Tune in for these insights and more, as we provide serious strategies for serious sellers looking to make their mark.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 01:21 - Amazon Brushing
- 03:26 - New Brand Metrics
- 04:30 - Walmart AI
- 06:40 - Amazon Vertical Video
- 07:40 - FBM Returns
- 08:30 - FBA Inbound Placement Service
- 17:39 - 3D Models
- 18:55 - Upcoming Online and In-Person Events
- 23:00 - Helium 10 Seller Connect Forum
- 23:23 - New Feature Alerts
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon's new FBA inbound placement service fees are going live in a couple of weeks. Walmart's integrating generative AI Vertical video PPC ads are now live. Helium 10 releases its most requested tool of 2023 for sellers. These and many more stories on today's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our Helium 10 weekly buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the goings on and news articles in the e-commerce world and we let you know what new Helium 10 features there are and we give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. Got a few articles today, but a little later on I'm going to give you guys a complete breakdown of that new FBA inbound inventory fee service that is coming out soon. Some sellers are saying they might have to pay double what they used to. Is that really true? I'm going to break down some things inside of Project X to show you what the fees are going to be, and make sure to stay to the end, because we also have exciting, exciting new tool announcement that's in beta for Helium 10 members.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let's go ahead and hop into the news. The first article today is from upi.com and it's entitled California man Receives Dozens of Amazon Packages he Never Ordered. Does that sound familiar to you? This sounds like things that were happening years ago that maybe some of us thought you know went away. But basically, this guy in California yesterday he says he received dozens of mysterious Amazon packages at his home over the course of six months. Now, first he just started with a couple of envelopes, he said, but then a lot more products were coming. All right, the name on the label wasn't his name, it was somebody else's name, and he at first thought that, you know, just maybe there was a mistake that happened. But more and more packages sooner arriving, everything from, says, solar panel cables, video game consoles, digital picture frames, portable spas. And then he said he eventually just stopped opening them and just simply sent them back. All right, somehow his card actually started getting charged.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, that's separate than what I'm talking about or what this guy I think is talking about here, but basically this is the Black Hat method of brushing. Even this article talks about brushing. Like I said, this is like circa 2020, when this thing happened. And then this article says hey, brushing involves Amazon sellers sending packages to random addresses so they can artificially inflate their number of positive reviews. So the way that brushing works is kind of like these sellers they get somebody's real address and then they just use all these different Amazon accounts and send products to that address and then that allows them to do like a verified review. For me I wouldn't be sending it back. You know me as an Amazon seller. I'm gonna think like an Amazon seller. If one of those companies is gets my address and they're gonna use me for brushing, give me all those products, I'm gonna put it right back on Amazon and make some money off of it. But that's interesting. I wonder if this is just an isolated case or is brushing making a comeback. Hopefully Amazon cracks down on that, because you know shouldn't be doing any of these shady shady behaviors, in my opinion.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is from Amazon Seller Central, and it was a news article that came out and says increase sales with new metrics available on the build your brand page, all right. So this is something that a lot of us might not even know is in Seller Central. All right, you have to like if you're using a sub account, you actually can't see it off the bat. You have to go and to the admin account and give yourself the rights to this. But basically, this what Amazon announces hey, there's gonna be four new key metrics that allow you to measure your brand's performance branded search ratio, star rating, brand conversion rate and repeat customer ratio. All right, so there's gonna be actionable things that you can do. Go to the build your brand section of Seller Central, scroll down and then if, for the brands that you have brand registry, you are going to be able to see, for the different countries, these new metrics. Again, branded search ratio here's one about the star rating. It's gonna give you a whole bunch of insights on things that it wants you to do how to increase your conversion rate, et cetera.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is going to Forbes now and this one is entitled the amazing ways Walmart is using generative AI. Now, a lot of this didn't have to do with Walmart sellers, but if you scroll down in this article, there's an interesting tidbit here where it says here under the section, where it says under the section improving the shopping experience, it says there's also a new text to shop feature that lets customers ask for what they want by texting Walmart. All right, so there's a simple text chat powered by AI technology. Customers can search for items, add or remove products from their cart, reorder products and schedule delivery or pickup. Like, Walmart seems to be beating Amazon on this one at least, but if this is only in beta, well, you can't really say that it's beating Amazon if it's not widespread. But that's interesting, like, will that increase sales for third party sellers using the Walmart app If people can just start texting and ask questions? Will Amazon roll out their version of this, which has also been rumored?
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing that Walmart says they're launching is they're introducing a new online AI shopping assistant designed to help shoppers find the best product for their needs. So this AI is going to recommend relevant and related products based on, like, you're throwing a certain party or you have a certain age kid who has a need and you just, instead of like searching for keywords, you kind of like explain the situation and they'll give suggestions. Now, you know, part of me the skeptic is like I can't imagine how this is going to work because, like you know, like what I'm going to say hey, I've got a 19 year old kid who got his first new car, what products would he like, you know? Like, is it really going to know exactly what? But then again, guys think about it. How many times is this happening? You, where I don't know, you type in a search, or sometimes even you just are having a conversation with somebody. You go back to your phone and you're getting hit with ads, like about that very thing that you were just asking. You know it's got to be AI doing that. I don't know. But so, who knows, maybe AI is a lot more advanced than I give it credit for.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is from Amazon Advertising and it's entitled Sponsored Brand Video introduces vertical video creatives on the advertising console and Amazon API. So now when you're creating sponsored brand video ads, you are going to have an option to choose from creative assets. It says upload video, horizontal or vertical, alright. So a lot of people have had access to this for a few months now, I guess in beta, but now this is the official announcement. It looks like it's rolling out to everybody else. I've heard a lot of good feedback on how the vertical video looks, especially obviously in mobile browsers, which is what, or the mobile app, which is what it's designed for. So take a look at your advertising console. Do you have that available? It says it should be available united across North America, south America, Europe, middle East and Asia Pacific for sellers for that Next article, going back to Seller Central again, and it's entitled instant replacements are available for seller fulfilled returns.
Bradley Sutton:
Starting on this week, buyers will be able to request instant replacement for items sent using the prepaid return label program. You see me shaking my head. Those of you watching on YouTube. They were on this Seller Central article, 468 down votes and only 55 up votes. Up votes. So this is something that if you're doing fbm, you know, like myself, it's like might be a little scared. What now? Just a customer can just instantly get a replacement and I have to ship it to them and they have like 30 days to return it. They might not return. I got to start keeping track of if they return it, if they return the right product. But we know, you know that Amazon is very customer centric and so I guess you know this really shouldn't surprise us all. Right now.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's do a deep dive, guys, into the 2024 FBA inbound placement service fee. That's. This is just one of the couple things that amazon, or a lot of amazon sellers are very scared about this new in inbound placement service fee, and then the low inventory fee. That's going to come a little bit later, guys. This is coming now, march first. All right, so you look up, if you, if you want to get some detail on this, just go into your Seller Central and type in FBA inbound placement service and you you'll get this article. But let's do a deep dive into some of these things that that it says. Now, basically, what's going to happen is that you are going to start getting charged if you are only sending to one location, for example. All right, you're going to get a per unit charge based on the size of your product and based on where it's going uh, west coast, middle or, or uh, Midwest, I don't know, central area or east coast. Now, this is going to be interesting because, according to this article, this service fee is going to hit you 45 days after your shipment is received. So you've got a little leeway in there. So the first charges are not actually going to happen until mid-April, but it's going to be in effect starting in March.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the only way to completely skip this fee is if you accept Amazon's suggestion to ship to four different locations. I mean, that's only if Amazon tells you to ship to four different locations. You know, for me in the past a lot of times it's sometimes two locations, sometimes three, sometimes it tells me to only ship to one. So like I'm wondering how that's going to be. Is Amazon going to like force me to send it to one and I still have to pay, no matter what? But if you send to four or more locations, amazon is going to waive this fee. If you ship to two or three locations only, you are going to get a surcharge per unit that you were sending to Amazon and if you only send to one location, it is going to actually be the highest fee.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, how does this affect sellers? Well, everybody has different preferences. I'm here in Southern California. What do I want to do? I want to send to one location and I want it to be in Southern California. It's going to get there super fast, right, and the shipping is very like sometimes half what it is if I ship it, like all the way to an FBA DC in New York or Florida or something like that. But now I've got to start thinking what do I choose? Do I choose to send it to multiple locations? Is it going to be expensive? Am I going to get a surcharge? Or should I just send it to one location and I save on the shipping fee because it's so close, but I just pay this extra fee?
Bradley Sutton:
Let's start breaking down what some of these fees are. I'm not going to go into detail on this table here. You guys looking at YouTube, you can take a look at the screen here or just go into your Seller Central. But, for example, like if you have a small size box size 15 by 12, by 0.75, less than one pound you're trying to send everything to one location, you are going to get a 21 cent to 30 cent charge per unit. If you're sending to two or more that same package, you're going to get 12 cents to 21 cents per unit and, like I said, if you send to four locations or more, it is no fee. All right, so let's go ahead.
Bradley Sutton:
What I did was I actually went to my. This is what I suggest you guys do to go into your Seller Central and go into your shipments and look at your old shipments to see what's going on. For example, here is one of my shipments that I did late last year. This was for, I believe, the large coffin shelf, so this is an oversized box, and they had me send I only sent 20 units, for whatever reason I think it was right before I ran out and it had me sent to two locations. All right, so two locations, and one of these was in Washington. Okay, so, as you can see right here, for these 10 units, because this is a huge oversized box, I got charged $25. All right, so about $2.50 per unit, all right, the other 10, it had me send all the way to Delaware, all the way across the country, and it actually cost me $35 for those same amount, 10 units. All right, so you can see how much more it was by sending it to the opposite coast, and the one in Washington wasn't even that's not even close to me. Like I said, I'm in Southern California, so if I were to send it to California, it would have been cheaper, right, it might have been like what less than $20, right Now, what you do to calculate this out?
Bradley Sutton:
You go type into your search in Seller Central revenue calculator. All right, type in revenue calculator. We're going to have this in Helium 10 eventually too, but for now, go ahead and use a Seller Central. It's a little bit more difficult to use but it has the details you need for this new fees. Go into Seller Central, find your product this one that I just did and put how many units you're going to you're going to send. So I'm going to say, hey, I'm going to go ahead and inbound 20 units of this product.
Bradley Sutton:
And now if I were to ship it to one location only let's say it has me ship everything to Spokane, Washington I'm going to pay $2.70 per unit to ship this to Amazon. That's do you remember what it was? In Washington, it was $2.50. That's more than double just for shipping to one location. Now, in this shipment I shipped it to two locations, you remember. So if I ship it to two locations, I just hit this partial shipment splits and it brings down the price to $1.57. But still, that's now $31 more I'm paying for shipping. Do you remember total? On those two shipments I only paid $55. Well, now that $55 shipment just became $80 a shipment, all right, and that's only 20 units, that means I'm paying $4 just to get it from my warehouse to Amazon. So you can see that there's a decision you have to make. Like what if I could send everything to San Bernardino? Right, if I send everything to San Bernardino and I pay $2.70, but I save a whole bunch of money on my shipping, the shipping price would have to be $2.70 cheaper than what it would cost to send to multiple locations into the East Coast in order for it to be worth it. But again, it's not just the price. Now you got to think well, if I send it to Delaware, it might take like six days to get there, another few days to check in. If I send it to California, it'll get there the next day, maybe just a couple days to check in. So there's all these things you are going to have to start kind of like calculating out.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me show you another example. Another shipment I did this was actually from this year was the smaller coffin shelves and I sent like 80 units total. All right. Now take a look. I sent one shipment to California. 30 units cost $25. All right. So like what? 80 cents per unit? At the same time, it had me send some more to a different warehouse in California. It was only 10 units for $8.57. So 85 cents. And then, lastly, it still was in the West, but it had me send another 40 units to Henderson, Nevada, and it cost me 37 bucks, so a little over 90 cents. All right, so the average for this 80 units I was paying. What about? I paid about 80 cents per unit to ship and I didn't pay any fees. Right, if I do the same exact shipment after March 1st? Conversely, here is one more shipment I did separately and I sent 100 units all together and it went to Southern California and it only cost me $70. All right, so that's 70 cents, about 15 cents cheaper per unit than those other ones I sent all over the place. All right, so again, these were two separate shipments, very similar in scope. One had me send to three, one had me send to one.
Bradley Sutton:
What's going to happen if I have this same scenario in a couple of weeks, starting in March? Let's go back to that revenue calculator. I go ahead and put the coffin shelf in here and I say, hey, 100 units, the same exact shipment to California, to the West, 68 cents per unit. Do you remember what it cost me Originally? 70 cents. This is doubling the cost of what I have to send, or how much it cost me to send it in the old days, literally doubling my cost. Now, what about that other one where it had me send to three different locations? All right, it's still not four. It didn't have me send it to four, so I have to hit the partial shipment splits. I select three locations and now I see that it's going to cost 33 cents extra. It's not double, but now my price goes from 80 cents to $1.20, which is almost the same as the 70 cents plus 70 cents that I pay if I send it to one.
Bradley Sutton:
Is your mind kind of like spinning in circles with all these things you guys have to calculate? Now? I'm sure there's gonna be hopefully easier ways that Helium 10 can help you decide which one is going to be better to use. But again, you can't just blindly do your shipments anymore. You have got to really think about what's going on. All right, let me know in the comments below what are you seeing. Go ahead and put in some of your old shipments in there and let me know what you're seeing in your account. All right, last article of the day. It's actually just a post from LinkedIn.
Bradley Sutton:
I wanted to give a shout out to Jason from Vitacup and he talked about the release of Amazon's 3D photos. This was something that we talked about like about four or five months ago, when they announced that Amazon Accelerate, and now he is reporting that he's seeing it out there in the wild. Now we actually saw this a couple of days ago because when I was setting up that brand rights that I talked about earlier how I had to give rights to do that to my sub-accounts this was one of those new ones that you have to give rights to.
Bradley Sutton:
So if you guys are giving rights to see the brand, go ahead and click this 3D models thing. You have to have the seller app and then it's gonna allow you to take pictures from all sides using your mobile phone and then it's going to allow you to be enrolled in this 3D beta that Amazon has going right now. So take a look to see if you guys have access to that. Now, the reason why I wanted to give Jason a shout out here was he's actually gonna be a special guest next week in a keyword research webinar. He's an eight-figure seller and he's gonna give us his best keyword research strategy. So that's just one of the many online and offline events coming up for myself and the evangelist here at Helium 10 over the next few weeks. Shivali now is going to let you guys know of all the other events that's going on.
Shivali Patel:
Hi there. We have tons of online and in-person events over the next couple of months, so let's just quickly run through them so you're in the know and can potentially even plan ahead. First up, we have the virtual Billion Dollar Seller Summit from February 20th to the 22nd. Bradley is a speaker and if you plan to attend his session, you can take $150 off the price by using the coupon code BDSS2024. Again, that's just BDSS2024. At h10.me/bdss, you can also sit down with Bradley at the Sellers Edge training this upcoming week where he's gonna start a conversation with a guest eight figure seller and they're going to talk shop on keyword research strategies for Helium 10, amazon Product Opportunity Explorer, Search Query Performance and so much more. Get registered at h10.me/edge2. The two is just the number and it's not spelled out. On March 1st to 2nd, if you're interested in remotely anything Walmart and you're located on the other side of the world from me, perhaps you'll be able to make it out to Ecom Seller Summit and say hello to Carrie, who will be speaking. Visit h10.me/australia to grab a ticket. You can use the name, Carrie, as a code to save $50 and catch her session in person.
Shivali Patel:
The week right after Australia, we have the Prosper show in Las Vegas, where Bradley and Carrie are speaking, but all three of us will be there. Go to h10.me/prosper to reserve a spot and come swing by the Pack View and Helium 10 booth so we can get acquainted. Don't be shy, even if you see us just walking around. Now. If Vegas is too far for you, as is Australia, then I have the perfect in between event for you, and that is going to be held from March 13th to 16th in Prague, Czech Republic. I'm opening up the conversation for strategic innovation that leads to increased profits and so much more. The link for this event is h10.me/prague. You can use my code Shivali50 for a 50 euro discount. If you don't know how to spell my name, that's S-H-I-V-A-L-I 50 for a 50 euro discount.
Shivali Patel:
There will be an Amazon sponsored seller meetup in Manila, Philippines, so save or mark the date for March 21st. Bradley will be attending, but we don't have a sign up page yet. We'll keep you posted, though, and I will also be speaking at amazing day summit and attending the Amazing Days Summit in Sofia, Bulgaria. That's going to take place on April 3rd, 4th and 5th. These two events are just days apart, so perhaps it's the perfect excuse. You need to come out and spend a week in Bulgaria. If you'd like a ticket, go to h10.me/bulgaria and use the code Helium10 for a 10% discount.
Shivali Patel:
The last couple of events you can anticipate some more in-person Bradley time are going to be the seven figure seller Japan mastermind in Okinawa. I might make it out to Japan, but it's still up in the air, so I guess you'll just have to come out to find out. The link to learn more about the Japan event is h10.me/japan. However, Bradley will definitely be speaking at Seller Velocity, as you can see here. So naturally I've got a code for you and that's going to be BRADLEYFIRST in all caps. You can put that into motion at h10.me/velocity. Look, guys, at the end of the day, each of these events are packed with incredible sessions, knowledgeable, expert speakers and the invaluable opportunity to network and honestly, I couldn't tell you just how many connections I've made by attending these events and the strategies I've learned to implement into my own business so I can take it to the level I'm hoping towards. So, really, if you can come, come, we'd love to meet you in real life and we'll see you there.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, thank you, Shivali, for those events. I hope to see you guys at some of them. One quick thing, guys if you didn't get our notice we have a new message board or forum. That is on our website. So sign into your Helium 10 account and then go to forum.helium10.com and you'll be able to post messages there, interact with other Helium 10 users and see some announcements and strategies that myself and Carrie and Shivali are doing. So, again, forum.helium10.com. All right, let's get into our Helium 10 new feature alerts.
Bradley Sutton:
The new tool that Helium 10 is coming out with right now is probably the most asked for tool last year 2023, of what, when I was on the road, people asking about this and something even beforehand I had in mind. Now, before I get into how to use a tool, it's kind of important to understand the background of how we even came up with this. This wasn't like my idea or something, but it's something that's been on my mind for a while Now. As you guys may or may not know, I used to run the content team here at Helium 10. And now I still write blogs to help out the content team, and something we've always used is this software. The one that we're using right now is called Surfer SEO and it's really cool Like we have blogs for SEO, right, and it gives me all of my kind of like titles that I need to have and then all of the main keywords that I need to put in blogs and it tells me how many times I need to use it, where I have to put it and, as I'm writing my blog, it gives me the score of how I'm going to be ranking for Google SEO and it tells me also how I'm doing compared to other blogs about the same subject. And so I've always thought, well, you know, like that would be kind of cool thing to have for Amazon sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
And Amazon sellers thought the same way. One of the you know, as I was touring everyone said, hey, we like a tool that allows us to kind of like take, hey, the best keywords from Helium 10, but then helps us to understand where we need to put it in the listing and how it kind of stacks up for the Amazon algorithm and then how my competitors are doing it. All right. So I'm going to show you guys how to use this new tool. It's in listing builder, but let me just tell you right off the bat like. I actually spent, you know, like four months on a case study, making like more than 150 listings in different accounts and trying all these different things that kind of like the best they can decode the Amazon algorithm to see, hey, what forms of words work best for the Amazon algorithm, what helps the ranking, what kind of frequency, what does it matter where the keywords are, et cetera. So I did a lot of work on this, but let me just say there is no buddy out there myself included who can tell you exactly how the Amazon algorithm works. It doesn't work that way. All right, it's not like I can just give you an exact formula, but what we, what I've been able to do here is get it to a formula here that will give you the best chance at having good SEO for your Amazon listing. All right, so where you find this tool is now in listing builder, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
Now you're gonna see a little bit of different things here. There's some things that, based on when you're seeing this video, it might be different Later on, like these colors might be gone. You're gonna have the number here of how many times the keywords came up. We'll update this video later, once this tool is fully finished. Like I said, it's in beta. But the first thing you do is just like you normally do with your keyword research. You're first gonna get all your best keywords from Cerebro, whatever other tools you have, stick them all now into listing builder. Before I didn't have you do that, remember, I said, hey, only get your 20 best keywords, right, and then the rest of the keywords just find the individual words. That's no longer.
Bradley Sutton:
With this new tool. You can go ahead and throw all of your keywords into listing builder at once. You don't have to separate the best and the worst. One of the reasons why is because now we have the Cerebro competitor performance score. Again, this is from Cerebro and it tells you what are the most important keywords for this niche, based on what the listings are all ranking for. Very highly, all right. So I put all 116 phrases right here. I also see the search volume and it breaks it down here on the top to all the one and two and three word parts of these phrases, so that I can see hey, what are all of the individual keywords that are showing up here, what are the two and three word phrases that show up in multiple phrases? Now, after you get your keywords in here. You scroll down, you're going to see your original listing quality score if I already made my listing here on the right-hand side, and that's just based on Amazon best practices, like you know how many characters in your title, things like that. But the new part here click on Keyword Performance Rank and what you're going to want to do is add your competitors. Okay, so this is something new. So this here is a bat-shaped bath mat that I was doing. So I went to Amazon and I wanted to put in all of the top bat mats here and I just pasted all of the ASINs or I could have just selected it right here in this Add Competitors section and now, instantly, based on these keywords that I already got from Cerebro, it is going to give me a score for every single one of these competitor listings that we see right up here, and actually the number one listing just happens to be the product that is selling the most, all right, so it kind of shows that, hey, this formula is a pretty decent indication on how you might be doing in the niche, potentially, all right. So that's what you're going to see right here when you click on Keyword Performance Rank, and then once I make my listing now it's going to give me a score. So right now I'm not first, all right, I might need to tweak my listing a little bit. This is only version one of my listing. It says I'm second out of 10 competitors. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, if you want more detail on what is going into this Keyword Performance Score, well, it is based on a lot of these kind of like match types. There's five of them that I kind of pinpointed with all of my tests that I was doing, and it also has to do with where in the listing it is. You know title is the absolute most important. Search volume is something that is factored into the score as well. The points is the next, and then description right, and then you get different points based on the search volume and then based the highest points for a keyword is exact match, like if the word is coffin shelf, you put coffin shelf and then that's an exact match. The next one that you also get points is plural or singular match, so like it's coffin shelf or coffin shelves, right. Next is a phrase match, but a partial phrase match, all right. So it gets really down and dirty. Guys Like I did a lot of work trying to come up with this formula. So when you get into this tool, put your mouse over the little eye, the little information, and you will see, kind of like, what all of these different match types mean. And then, as you are making your listing, you will literally see this score change based on these factors, right here.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, remember, keyword stuffing is not suggested. You, I did see that some kind of like duplication of keywords is good in some circumstances, but you're not going to get points, extra points, by putting the same keyword five times in a listing. The first time you put it, and if it's in phrase form, that can get you the most points. If you have it again, that actually can kind of like let Amazon know you're especially relevant for it. So you are going to get some credit. But as you play around the score you'll see that it's not the full credit as if you like the same one that you put in the title.
Bradley Sutton:
Now again, I'm not going to sit here and say hey for a fact. If you get the top keyword performance rank out of your competitors, that's going to guarantee that you're going to get the most sales. Obviously, a lot more things have to be considered when you're talking about getting sales on Amazon. But this is what I came up with and our data scientists. I'm not smart enough to make like full formulas here. I had to get the data scientists help, but this is what we found will give you the best chance to really make sure that Amazon knows that you're relevant. I'm going to have a few workshops coming up on just general listing optimization techniques, but once you have all that down, this is what is going to help you really bring your keyword research and your listing optimization to get the best bang for your buck.
Bradley Sutton:
So I want you guys to try out this tool. Like I said, it's in beta right now. New things are being added to it every day. If you have a diamond counter hire. Elite members have been playing with this for weeks, but now it's to a point where, like, hey, if your diamond are higher, for now, we want to get your feedback too. So please give this a spin and then, if you have any questions or comments on it, reach out to customer support and let them know about it, and we'd love to hear from you to see what you think about this tool that everybody was asking so much for the last year or two. All right, guys, thank you very much for joining us on this edition of the weekly buzz. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.
Ever felt like you're just one PPC secret away from skyrocketing your Amazon or Walmart sales? Madalina from eComcy joins us on this month’s TACoS Tuesday program to lift the veil on advanced advertising tactics that could very well be your game-changer. From initiating precise exact-match campaigns to harnessing the untapped potential of broad match types, we cover the A-Z of creating a strategy that not only speaks to your product’s strengths but also steals the spotlight from your competitors. Using Helium 10 tools like Cerebro and Magnet, Madalina walks us through the art of strategic competitive analysis, ensuring your keyword lists are as refined as they are effective.
Bid management can often feel like walking a tightrope, but with insights from our guest expert and the aid of Adtomic, we transform this balancing act into a calculated dance of numbers and intuition. Discover how the blend of automated suggestions and manual adjustments can refine your campaigns to an unparalleled level of precision. Madalina doesn't stop there—she dissects the significance of match types, niche-specific benchmarks, and the pivotal role they play in the fluctuating realm of click-through and conversion rates.
Wrapping up, we look into the crystal ball of keyword volumes and campaign management, offering a blueprint for structuring your campaigns so that they work smarter, not harder. Whether you're dealing with keywords that command their own stage or those that perform better in an ensemble, Madalina's methodical approach to campaign structure ensures you'll stay in control while maximizing efficiency. As an added bonus, we touch on the experiences of Walmart sellers, inviting a broader discussion on the adaptability of these strategies across platforms. Tune in for a wealth of knowledge that's sure to give your Amazon PPC efforts that extra edge.
Episode 535 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Madalina discuss:
- 00:00 - PPC Strategies and Campaign Optimization
- 02:21 - eComcy's Approach to PPC Campaigns
- 08:21 - Strategies for Launching PPC Campaigns
- 12:29 - Relative Rank Filters and Adjusting Strategy
- 13:32 - Improve Amazon Rank and PPC Campaigns
- 20:38 - Advertising Strategies for Amazon Sellers
- 23:11 - Advertise With General Category Terms
- 26:31 - Considering State-Specific Strategies for Sales
- 31:29 - Using Free Retail Space and Placements
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Transcript
Shivali Patel:
Today, on TACoS Tuesday, we sit down with Madalina from Ecomcy to talk about a variety of different things related to PPC, for example, how to do keyword research, how to set up your campaigns, recommendations for launching and what kind of key metrics to look out for.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. I want to check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon. Or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result have the actual searched keyword in the title. You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome extension tool X -Ray. More than one million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray.
Shivali Patel:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday episode, where we talk anything and everything PPC. Today, our guest is from Ecomcy, which is an Amazon and Walmart ads agency, and our guest is Madalina. Welcome in. How are you? I'm great, thank you, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm glad to have you on. I know that we're talking all things PPC. We're going to have some questions kind of filing in and it's going to be AMA style. But in the meantime, how about we talk a little bit about you, so what you do at Ecomcy, how you got started in this field and what have you?
Madalina:
First of all, thanks for having me. I'm super excited and I'm really nice to see everyone just joining from different parts of the world. So I'm Madelina. I've been in the industry for the past six years yeah, doing everything Amazon and then specializing in PPC, because I'm more like a data lover, you know.
Shivali Patel:
So I've started doing PPC at Ecomcy and now I'm the PPC lead and do you offer such an important service to F that PPC is so monumental for any business? So I'm excited to talk a little bit about how you guys kind of approach your PPC campaigns, how you audit, how you optimize, and so let's kind of just dig right, deep right. How does Ecomcy navigate its PPC campaigns? Like, when somebody comes to you with their campaigns, what is sort of the first way that you really look at it and audit?
Madalina:
First of all, we would be looking not only at the advertising campaigns but we would be looking at the products overall and kind of reverse engineer performance, this against to the client's target. So if we have issues with sales or if we have issues with profitability, we would be basically reverse engineer from there and kind of see like do we have a PPC order percentage that's too high? Is our organics doing okay? Obviously, we would be using Cerebro and all the 10 tools to kind of like reverse engineer performance, see how we're being compared to the markets and things like this when it comes to PPC. So of course, ppc plays like a very, very important role but like my point is that it's not only PPC that goes in here, because we kind of like look at performance overall. So at an advertising level, we would be basically assessing main metrics like collect rate. Is everything that we put in our ads kind of relevant to our audience? We would be looking at conversion rates, see, like if there's anything we can do at a very detailed level when it comes to like placements or things like this Are we doing migrations? Are we doing like all the different kind of placements? Are we doing all the match types? So kind of like going through a very detailed audit to see is if, basically, the client objectives are being reached or not. And if not, what else are we doing in order to reach the objectives?
Shivali Patel:
Yeah, I know, I kind of threw you into the deep end there, because there are so many different things that are part of the PPC campaigns. Right, you have your ad structure. Maybe it's something that's an underlying factor. I do see we have questions starting to roll in, so let's go ahead and start with how to start PPC. So I guess, for this question, if somebody is just starting I know we just talked very briefly about auditing what about if you're just getting started? Is there a specific campaign structure or, like match type, specific kind of ads that you recommend?
Madalina:
Yes, so we usually start with the bare minimum and that would be exact campaigns for your very relevant keywords, right? So we would be using the cerebral tool in order to find what are your competitors are ranking for and then, with kind of like, find your most relevant keyword and start exact campaigns from there. So I think that would be a good start. What I usually like from there to the from there as well is not to limit only on exact. Also do like a broad plus to, so a broad modifier to ensure, like you kind of find the long pills from your highly relevant keywords as well. So that would kind of like ensure you're using the, the budget, in the most efficient way. So that would be the like the match types I would use. Then, at the structure level, like there's a whole debate like how to organize your campaigns and things like this. It's up to you and the tools you'll be using to optimize campaigns. We would prefer to kind of like put all the highly searched keywords in one campaign because we can monitor them more closely and we can better understand performance. We can change the placements, do they partying, change budgets more easily, and things like this. And then for the maybe lower volume keywords, maybe like add maximum if they're super low volume. I would say maybe like 15 keywords max per campaign and then try to put them, to group them based on intent. So then when you look at the very high level in your advertising console, you understand exactly what performs well, what kind of targets you might want to dial down on and things like this. There's a lot, yeah, there's a lot to start with, but don't get overwhelmed. I bet that's also an advice. Don't get overwhelmed because, yeah, it's, even if you start with the exact and doing like a broad modifier, you should see some performance. If you don't see performance, then getting that through us, we can trouble you.
Shivali Patel:
Right, right, I think the most important thing is definitely what you said is just getting started and then modifying from there. Something that you did mention is budget. I've heard sort of a debate even on that aspect, right, because some people say you should start with a really large budget per day and then just bid a little bit lower. Some people say, just go based off of what you can really work with. So what is your take on that specifically?
Madalina:
So it really depends on your product price and your estimated conversion. Because let's say you have a product price that's $20 and your target A cost, let's say, might be 100% to start with, your budget could for that particular company let's say might be $20, right, so you can work it out this way If you have a higher price product, then of course you can work on your budget as well. But I would reverse engineer it from the price of your product and based on your estimated conversion rate.
Patel:
Good advice, good advice. I feel like my broad match campaign is always burn money, so it's always a tricky game getting the right sweet spot. I see we have some more questions, so let's go ahead and pop those onto the page. We have Yizak. He says I'm about to launch two new listings Congratulations. Any new strategies? Do you have any PPC recommendations for launching? Which keywords do long tail, low search or high search volume?
Madalina:
For the long tails. I would definitely add your long tails. It's all based on relevancy. So if your long tails are relevant, definitely add them in your campaign. If they are high in search volume, just make sure you start with low bids in order to make sure you can't control the spend. You can always go back and increase bids, but if you wake up with a very high spend that's you can't go back on that. So make sure you set up low bids initially. I would say start with the classic approach Go and research your competitors, see what they're ranking on, see if there's any sales you can sell from them With the highly relevant keywords you'll be targeting and, of course, add those keywords in exact campaigns. Then start with the broad modifier to do the long tails. You have a limited budget.
Shivali Patel:
All right, we have. What are the key metrics?
Madalina:
you are following we love conversion rate, we love orders, so that is a key metric we are looking at. Other than that, to define relevancy, we look at click through rate as well and down the profitability road we would look at clicks, impressions, spend a-cost, total advertising cost of sales tax cost and things like this. So basically a lot of metrics, but the key ones would be basically conversion. So it's like how your campaign is going and then how much traffic you're putting into or you're receiving from us on impressions and clicks, Amazing.
Shivali Patel:
We also have Ismall who said how to research keywords. Now, of course, as somebody from Helium 10 can also say, you can check out the Sears Sellers podcast. We have a few episodes that Bradley has done for keyword research, like master classes that you can go in and check out how to do keyword research using Serebro Magnet, some other ways. But, Maddalena, I also want to hear from you sort of how you guys approach keyword research.
Madalina:
Yeah, so we are actually in line with the Hewley Newton approach. So we would be, with this, very important to look at your market, study your competitors. So find your competitors first and you can do that by looking at your product features. So the price would be very important, the number of ratings, how many, how established they are in the market and things like this. So first find your competitors, then find your keyword based on the competitors and this is where the Cerebro will come in and you'd reverse engineer based on the keyword competitors would be ranking on and you'd try to go for those particular keywords. Now the Cerebro also have that relevancy column which you can look at. So basically, try to go for. You basically assess relevancy based on how many competitors would be ranking for your product. So try to look at the keywords that are the most relevant ones in order to prioritize those in your advertising campaigns and then be higher on them and try to base your launch strategy on them.
Shivali Patel:
Basically, I think what Madalina said is really important. You guys can go in check out relative rank filters inside of Cerebro or Magnet. But in doing so, in running a multi-ASIN search, you can then go in check out where you're positioned in accordance with your competitors and then adjust your strategy. So let's say you have a really great competitor who is killing it and you see that they're ranking higher than you want a specific keyword. You can use that keyword, adjust your strategy and incorporate into your listing or into your PPC campaigns and then vice versa, if you have some of these other filters, you have Amazon recommended rank, you have your sponsored type. You can go in reverse engineer somebody's PPC strategy If you're doing a single-ASIN search. There's so many cool things to do. So, again, make sure you guys go and check out the Ceresellers podcast I'm talking about with the masterclasses. If you type in masterclass, you should be able to find it. We also have Tassine from Germany Any Amazon report to check day parting performance and your rank on Amazon.
Madalina:
Yes, so there would be. So we have that in Adtomic and I love the Adtomic performance graph on it. But if you're using Amazon, there is a sponsored product report. You can download it. If you go in the sponsored product, then it's the campaign one and then you have the hourly. You just have to choose it hourly and then we'll go for the last 14 days. I don't like the fact that it's for 14 days Only. Helium 10 has for 60 days, so I do love that.
Shivali Patel:
All right. We also have Abe, who's responding to something I said about the Broad Match campaign. He said Nake Shivali negate frequently in broad. I do negate frequently and I use Adtomic. So Adtomic lets you set up rules and suggestions. I suppose I probably need to go in there even more frequently. However, speaking of Adtomic, I hear that Ecomcy uses Adtomic, so I would love to know a little bit about how you guys use the tool itself for all of your clients.
Madalina:
It depends on the client, on the brand, on the product, so we don't do an overall approach. So we would be basically going with some benchmarks and we would be setting up some rules in atomic based on them. So we would be looking at the main metrics we talked about, in fact, like the conversion rate, the clicks, the impressions, overall spend for that particular target, and we would go with those kind of metrics and set up rules and kind of like if performance is not good, based on the category or the product, decrease speed. If performance is good, increase speed and things like this. We do want a very, because we put a lot of time into knowing the product and understanding the category and things like this. And we would be manually going and approving the bid suggestions, Because if the audience doesn't know, basically what the atomic would do is to give you some suggestions, bid suggestions or budget suggestions or negative keyword suggestions and things like this. So then we would be manually applying those to make sure our knowledge is combined with the knowledge we put in atomic and make sure that we understand what kind of actions we took and then how the results were affected by those particular actions. So kind of like track and measure this way. Yes, and again, it would be like it would depend on the product market category and things like this, and then on your goals as well, If you want to be more profitable, even to increase sales, and things like this.
Shivali Patel:
We also have another question on the thresholds, since we were talking about the key metrics before. So what are the general thresholds for click-through rate and conversion?
Madalina:
Yeah, I love that question, but it's a yeah, it will really depend on your category and on your product. Because, yeah, if you can see very big variations from one product to another, I would really throw you off if I were to give you some benchmarks. I don't know, at some point it used to be like 0.3, let's say, in click-through rate. Now, let's say, we are seeing a little bit of an improvement when it comes to click-through rate and conversion rate. Again, it really depends on your product. So, yeah, now you can actually see that in the product. You can see some ideas of your category conversion rate in the product that Opportunity Explorer, as well. If you search for the niche, you can basically see the conversion rate for that particular niche.
Shivali Patel:
What is the best metric to use, in Surabro or Magnet, to find the most relevant keywords for the product that you are selling?
Madalina:
So what we usually do internally I know there's now the column that shows you how many computers are waiting for that product we are doing the report to make sure there's nothing we're seeing in the filter things down and things like this, and we would basically just apply a relevancy for a new lot to better understand, based on the keyword relevancy as well. So Sorry, let me take that from the beginning. Basically we would be taking like the, what sounds relevant. We would be clustering that and then apply a relevancy column from formula from there in with the data we downloaded from Cerebro.
Shivali Patel:
I think that answers that. We have explained what is the best match type for PPC broad phrase and exact.
Madalina:
I wouldn't say there's something like the best match type because, again, like, it will depend on your product and your target. Exact is the most controlled one. So from a profitability point of view that's your best, let's say, because you can really like the search terms you would have would be essentially like the search terms you wanted to put in that campaign. Then phrase is good, like for a mean between discovery and then broad is best for discovery. Broad now is super broad on some accounts actually and on some products. But yes, I would say if you're launching, exact is your best friend. If you're, like in a discovery phase and trying to find new keywords, then broad and phrase would also be good friends.
Shivali Patel:
Okay, now we have. Ysak has asked. I found around 80 keywords or phrases relevant to my product. How many exact campaigns would you do or should do, and do you use auto campaign for launch?
Madalina:
Yes, auto campaigns could be good for launch. Again, like, depends on your budget, depends on your product and how much you want to invest in discovery. You, it would be good to set up auto as well, but usually, like, if your budget is limited, go with a lower budget and lower bid on auto, just to ensure your budget is distributed nicely in those exact you put a lot of work discovering already. So about the 80 keyword phrases relevant to your product. So depends on your search volume, depends, like how popular those keywords would be on Amazon. You can I that does sound like a lot of keywords. I would say that will be like. If you imagine if you, if all your keywords would have one click you already have and you have like a dollar cost per click, you'd already have 80 in spend only from those particular keywords only with one click. Depending on your conversion rate, that will obviously be higher. So I would maybe try to filter down a little bit more. But again, depends on your, on your budget and your launch strategy, your product. I would do for the very, very low volume keywords I would do 10 keywords per campaign and then for the high volume keywords I or medium volume keywords, I would do five keywords per campaign. Then for the very high volume keywords and the ones that you're really trying to to go with for the launch, I would do only one keyword per campaign. You can control the placement that you can do. Sorry, you can play with the day parting and things like this, because, yeah, you might have if they are very high in volume, you might be surprised with how much they could be spending.
Shivali Patel:
So, if I sum that up, just for those of you that are listening, maybe four or five that are very high search volume, very highly relevant, that you do want to rank for just one each and exact match campaigns, and then the medium style ones, maybe five keywords per and then the low would be 10 to 15. I believe is what you said at the beginning, right? Yes, exactly Okay. On the note of exact, this person's asked the number of keywords in campaign structure. I can see that you avoid making too many single word campaigns. Is there a specific reason for that, like difficulty to manage it or something else?
Madalina:
Yes, so when you start especially, it is quite hard to manage it. If you don't have like a tool like atomic, I would say, yeah, it would be. It would be quite difficult to look manually in each campaign, you know, and kind of apply your bit. So that that is the main reason why you wouldn't do too many single word, too many single search term campaigns. Yeah, just to clarify. Actually, you don't mean single words, right, you mean single search terms.
Shivali Patel:
I think it's yeah, single search term inside of campaigns. But for any of you guys who don't use atomic at the moment and you want a free demo, you can go to h10.me forward slash atomic. So that's h10.me forward slash atomic. If you want to get a free demo of atomic to learn how to use it. Hey guys, been working with brand related terms, tried branching out to general category terms. Currently running campaigns with limited sales. What should be the strategy here?
Madalina:
So I guess that's where you're taking most of your traffic from. But you're also doing a general category search term, like a product I would imagine, a sponsor product category target. So I would do, I would ensure, like, apart from the branded search terms, you also have those kind of product descriptors in your exact and broad plus or phrase. So back to the, the garlic press example, like if it was Nike garlic press, let's say, yeah, you, you are everything on all the the branded search terms, but also make sure you're advertising on garlic press. So your product descriptor and then go, go from there again like, check your competitors, see where they're getting their sales from, do some some keywords, research and ensure, like you, you also like, do all the the exacts that are not related necessarily to your, your brand. And then, apart from, like the, if you're already running only sponsor products, I would also ensure you're doing like sponsor brands, sponsor brand videos for your branded search terms. Sponsor display you're targeting your own asians and then you're doing sponsor display targeting, free targeting, the kind of thing. So ensure, like all the different advertising types are also being ticked for your branded search terms, if that's where your, your, you have seen performance.
Shivali Patel:
We do also have whether or not you should run campaigns for competition brand names when you are just getting started, when you're just launching.
Madalina:
Yes, I would. Well, those would be relevant targets, I guess, again, it depends on your budget. It depends how closely related your competitors would be as well from a price perspective and from a reviews perspective. If they are very popular in Amazon as well, like how much visibility would they get out of it? What's your plan with the launch? Are you planning to seal sales from there, from them, or are you planning to rank on other keywords? So if you're planning to rank on other keywords organically and those are more like extras you might want to steal some sales from them, but that's not what your strategy is focused on. I would just run them with very low bid see how they're working, see how they could convert. If that's your strategy, if you're stealing sales from them, definitely run campaigns on them. But yes, again, it depends on the different factors regarding search volume and the metrics I've mentioned.
Shivali Patel:
We have a question here that says we all sell better in some states and worse than others. So is this something that you consider in your strategy and, if yes, how?
Madalina:
To prioritize the market. Sorry, I'm not sure I'm understanding the.
Shivali Patel:
Really, this is just more widespread. Let's say you're selling in the US marketplace and you know that your consumers are purchasing more in a given state, then is that something that you consider?
Madalina:
I guess, yes, you can definitely tailor your strategy based on the different states as well. You won't be able to advertise differently in different states, unfortunately. We hope that will be a feature that will be released soon. But, yes, you can definitely target keywords that are for the different states and you can potentially use day parting as well if there is quite different. I guess the states are super differently from a geographical point of view. It's super different from a geographical point of view and then you might see some performance differences. You could potentially use day parting to tailor that strategy.
Shivali Patel:
So time zones if you know that certain time zones are selling better than others, then definitely day parting. But outside of that, I think your best bet, if you were going to go that route, is really just external traffic. Right, it's going to be Facebook, I think, is where you can actually segment stuff like that out when you're going geographically speaking if you want to do certain states. But that's completely off Amazon. We have a defensive PPC question. What tactics do you recommend to cover more real estate from your own page? What is your advice to sellers when they have competitors that push very hard PPC on your listing or your product detail page?
Madalina:
We would make sure we are targeting ourselves. So basically target your own AC limit when it comes to a sponsor product, because you'd be basically following the customer throughout the journey, and then it's not only on your product page but also target those customers that were interested in your product and also target your product in your whole catalog. So make sure you have a defensive campaign for all the products in your catalog, and that covers sponsor products, sponsor brands, sponsor brand videos and sponsor display. It depends how popular your brand is as well, because sometimes you might want to, as you say, have a defensive strategy. Other times you might just want to ensure you're getting sales from it, because the page could be already super cluttered by other search results and also depends on your product performance. So, let's say you have some product that you're launching right now and you might not have a great visibility on them. There is a chance you might not even index on those products for your brand names. So definitely, I would definitely target the new products to ensure they are at the top of the search results. You also want to make sure the customers are not too distracted when they go on your page, so make sure that you keep them there and show them what other options they can have from you. Also, make use of the free retail space when it comes to stores sorry, the costs and publish a lot of costs, so those will appear on your product page. Yeah, basically, use all the different types of placements on your own ASIN.
Shivali Patel:
So I know we're kind of coming up on time here, but I just wanted to leave a little bit of room to give you some space to talk a little bit about how people can contact you if they want to reach out to you or talk to Ecomcy.
Madalina:
business@ecomcy.com and we also offer a free audit. We're happy to look at clients' performance, see how we can help increase their sales with PPC and also with product optimization. We also do Walmart, so in case I didn't mention it. So we are happy to help on that side as well. And actually for the audience here, we are happy to offer a 25% discount for the first three months as well. So just let us know if you need any help and you can get the freebie as well on your first three months Amazing.
Shivali Patel:
So I know you mentioned Walmart really briefly. I know we said we were closing out, but just really quickly, do we have any Walmart sellers here that are watching and do any of you actually sell on the platform? I'd love to know because I know a lot of our questions were kind of geared in general or like mostly Amazon based. Thank you so much, Madalina, by the way, for being here, and it seems like people got a lot of value out of it and I'm excited for this episode to go out. All right, take care.
Stepping away from the comfort of a well-established brand like Lego, Silas has steered his career ship through the tumultuous waters of entrepreneurship and surfaced with a lot of insights. From launching a private label brand on Amazon to the helm of his own agency, his narrative is rich with the lessons of building businesses from scratch, the significance of co-founder synergy, and the hard truths of partnership pitfalls. Silas' story is a testament to the resilience and adaptability required in today's e-commerce oceans, and he doesn't shy away from sharing the gritty details.
Tuning into the finer points of Amazon PPC, we navigate the complexities of keyword strategies with the precision of a Lego master builder. The conversation traverses from Lego's expansive strategies to the necessity of adaptability in the private label and agency landscapes, where budget constraints demand a more tactical approach. Silas introduces us to his innovative keyword categorization, a strategy that has revolutionized advertising efficiency for businesses big and small. He even lets us peek into his toolbox, showcasing how tools like Helium 10 are not just for the giants but are instrumental for anyone looking to make a mark on Amazon and Walmart.
But it's not all about keywords and conversion rates; there's a heartbeat to Silas’ story that underscores the importance of mental health and personal fulfillment. He shares a candid account of his own struggles and triumphs, reminding us that well-being is inextricably linked to professional success. The birth of Copenhagen Commerce and the value of connections made through podcasting and networking events narrate a journey of rediscovery. It's a compelling reminder of the power that lies in human connections and prioritizing what truly matters – a lesson that resonates with all of us, whether we're building block by block or keyword by keyword.
In episode 534 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Silas discuss:
- 00:00 - Silas On Lessons From Lego to Amazon Private Label
- 02:17 - Advertising and Retail Management Career
- 08:31 - Optimizing Keyword Strategies for Success
- 11:57 - Lego's ASIN Grabber and Enterprise
- 18:48 - Negative View on Mental Health
- 19:48 - Starting a New Agency, Finding Fulfillment
- 27:20 - Amazon Keyword Research Strategies and Tools
- 28:39 - Building a Consistent Ranking System
- 30:55 - Favorite Helium 10 Tool
- 32:25 - The Power of Networking at Events
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space and provide a training tip for the week. Target considering paid membership program to compete with Amazon, Walmart: report https://nypost.com/2024/02/07/business/target-considering-paid-membership-program-to-compete-with-amazon-walmart-report/ Sponsored Display | Geotargeting https://www.linkedin.com/posts/destaney-wishon_sponsored-display-geotargeting-activity-7160694127251062785-gtD3/ Amazon announces Rufus, a new generative AI-powered conversational shopping experience https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-rufus The latest actions against fake review brokers: Amazon continues to see success in global efforts to stop fake reviews https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazons-latest-actions-against-fake-review-brokers
For sellers seeking to harness data with precision, Helium 10's latest features provide sellers with immediate sales data and a two-year historical view right from search results and product pages. And for sellers eyeing the Brazilian market, our Listing Builder AI now crafts listings in Portuguese, simplifying your international expansion efforts. Tune in for these insightful updates and more, tailor-made for serious sellers eager to stay ahead in the ever-evolving Amazon FBA landscape.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 00:43 - Big Amazon Coupon Update
- 01:40 - Save on FBA Fees
- 05:21 - Target Prime Coming?
- 06:00 - Sponsored Display Locations
- 07:05 - Clickable Tabs in A+
- 07:52 - Amazon's Rufus
- 09:20 - Fake Review Broker Industry
- 10:44 - Follow Helium 10 On TikTok
- 11:01 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Shivali Patel:
An interesting Amazon coupon update lower fulfillment FBA fees with the Ship in Product Packaging program and geographically targeted sponsored display ads. This and more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Shivali Patel:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you all the latest news in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce space, and we also provide you with a training tip of the week that will give you insight into serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. First up, we have a big Amazon coupon update this week. Bradley was setting up a new launch for a test coffin shelf and he saw this when setting up coupons. Basically, now you can create coupons for specific audiences, similar to what you see in brand tailored promotions, for example, having them show up only for customers who might have abandoned your product in their cart. Other alternatives, as you can see here, include things like people who have not purchased recently nor frequently, with varied spend, who are considered at risk, Brand followers who have clicked to follow the brand on Amazon, and so much more. If you just keep scrolling, note that you do need to be brand registered for this, and since they're in the process of rolling it out, you may or may not see it, but it's cool to play around with, especially since this lets you set it up at the ace in level compared to what you can do inside of brand tailored promotions, where promotions are for all the products in your brand.
Shivali Patel:
Next up, let's talk about the lower FBA fulfillment fees with Ships in Product Packaging. Amazon recently launched the Ships in Product Packaging program, otherwise known as SIPP, and this used to be known as SIPP in Own Container. The gist of it is it allows FBA sellers on Amazon to ship their products using their custom brand packaging without any additional materials added by Amazon. This initiative presents several advantages for FBA sellers, such as lower FBA fulfillment fees for products, an increased ability to connect with customers and the honorable contribution of environmental sustainability by reducing packaging, the latter being something that decreases the space needed on trucks and ultimately leads to a reduction in the number of trucks required, as well as carbon emissions. It's worth noting that products that are certified under SIPP prior to February 5th 2024, will automatically qualify for discounted FBA fulfillment fees starting from that date, and the program is currently available in seven stores the Canadian, American, Italian, Spanish, German, French and UK markets. There are no fees to enroll, but there may be costs associated with updating your packaging to be compliant with Ships in Product Packaging requirements, or if the product that you wish to enroll is fragile or contains sharp items, contains liquids, etc. Then it might have to be tested at a lab. The only time a product may be shipped with Amazon-added packaging is if a customer is shipping multiple items in the same order or if they've selected to have the Amazon-added packaging. Shipping requirements will remain the same and some products may have already actually began shipping without the Amazon-added packaging, because they're actually using machine learning to identify, test and then certify SIPP compliant products without needing you to take any action. Frustration fee packaging indicates that the package is compliant with SIPP guidelines and it has a series of other parameters, for example, 100% curbside, recyclable materials per applicable laws in the region of sale. It's easy to open and all content removable by the customer within 120 seconds with minimal use of scissors or box cutters, plus some other things.
Shivali Patel:
While there is no separate certification and it won't grant additional discounts, you can enroll those into the SIPP program. You can also enroll variations without having to enroll all of the variations. As for your first arrival date, that's going to be the date where all your units being shipped to the Amazon facilities are SIPP compliant. Meaning if your enrollment date is complete on March 1st but the SIPP compliant packaging is April 1st, then you should input April 1st. If after that date your packaging is not compliant, then you're going to risk decertification. However, your shipments don't need to be compliant when they're waiting for the enrollment approval. There are dimension regulations and discount rate depends on the size and weight of your product and you can always request to decertify later. If something changes. Customers are going to be notified. I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but they're going to have the option to add Amazon packaging at no additional cost. Now, I wouldn't want to do this for my own products. Putting a shipping label would take away from them as a gift item and just not protect the product that well. But let me know in the comments would you do this for your products and for more info? If you're interested in this, then you can visit the SIPP enrollment portal from your news page inside of Seller Central.
Shivali Patel:
In other news, have you guys heard about Project Trident? And no, I don't mean the gum brand. Target is actually coming out with a brand new paid membership program as soon as this year. Speaking at a personal level, there are barely any third party sellers that I know who sell on Target, as it's quite hard to sign up. But hey, maybe if this goes through that might change. Target might open up its platform and pave the way for more sellers. So what about you? Will you be keeping an eye out? I'm curious what do you think about the opportunity potential here, and will you get on it right away, or are you going to wait until it's a little bit more established? Switching gears? Sponsored display locations. We know that sponsored display ads give sellers the most customized ability for targeting and audiences in sponsored ads that regular sellers have access to outside of DSP. Amazon now has something new in beta that again brings DSP level functionality to any brand registered seller using sponsored display ads. Destiny from BTR Media started a conversation on this post of how some sellers who have access to the functionality in beta have the ability to target locations with their sponsored display ads. This should be cool because, say, you have a product specifically for the Alaskan market, you obviously wouldn't want that to show up in sunny Florida. You will now be able to geographically target those display ads Again. For now this is only sponsored display ads, so it's not something that's going to allow you to target certain keywords or regular sponsored product campaigns just yet, but it's still a pretty cool addition by Amazon. So do any of you guys see this inside of your account? Let me know when we have Amazon reporting.
Shivali Patel:
They've redesigned navigation carousel module so brands can access it within the A plus content manager and help you enhance your listings. Modules have been updated to include clickable tabs that are highlighted in a translucent overlay on the image. This is going to help you navigate elements in the carousel. Now, I'm not sure if this is it, but check out this listing from Uncar. There are actually a couple links in their content and, if I can just scroll down here and show it to you guys, this right here, check this out. When I click these three dots, it automatically changes over the tabs, so I go from business trips into Commute and back into outdoor cafe.
Shivali Patel:
Alright, just a couple more things. Here we have Amazon Rufus. Has anyone already heard about this? If you didn't know, rufus great name, by the way is a new expert shopping assistant powered by generative AI that is trained on Amazon's vast product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As and web information to assist customers which shopping needs, product comparisons and recommendations. Rufus is presently launched in beta to a limited number of US customers via Amazon's mobile app, with a gradual rollout planned in the coming weeks. It aims to enhance the shopping experience by providing tailored assistance, from general product research to more specific inquiries about products or comparisons between categories. The assistant will enable customers to shop by occasion, by purpose, by specific needs, offering personalized suggestions and insights seamlessly integrated into the Amazon shopping experience, customers can interact with it by typing or speaking queries into the Amazon search bar, and then feedback mechanisms are already in place to continuously improve that performance. As Amazon continues to invest in generative AI technology, rufus represents a significant step towards enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction within that Amazon ecosystem.
Shivali Patel:
I want to know do you guys already have access to this as well? I don't yet. Then, finally, we have Amazon emphasizing the significance of the Amazon shopping experience in its shopping experience, but acknowledging the rise of a fraudulent fake review broker industry that exploits the value of reviews. I think we all know fake reviews are against TOS and Amazon has been quite proactive about stopping them globally, investing resources in combating those fake reviews, utilizing really sophisticated tools and legal action as well In 2023, legal actions targeted bad actors in US, in China, in Europe for instance, this case against Tao Hau-Vai in the US. Despite progress, amazon recognizes the ongoing threat and vows to continue its efforts to maintain the integrity of customer reviews and hold fraudsters accountable in 2024.
Shivali Patel:
If you want to dig deeper, Chris of e-commerce. Chris touched on this more recently, I believe it was in the AM/PM Podcast episode 379. All to say, look, we know there's a lot more bad players out there, but it's good to see Amazon taking steps to police this kind of thing. Remember, it's never worth it to try to take those illegal shortcuts, as much as you want to do them. So with that, that is it for this week's Weekly Buzz. Let me take this opportunity to encourage you to follow our new TikTok page for some cool, fun, educational content regularly. It's helium10_software. So just go to TikTok, open up the app, go to helium10_software in that search bar and click follow. Now for our new feature alerts. Carrie is going to be sharing with us what new tools Helium 10 has launched this week.
Carrie Miller:
Today I'm going to be talking with you about some new Helium 10 features updates. So I'll go ahead and get into it and share my screen. The first thing that we have here is when you actually go to a search. So, for example, in this search we searched coffin shelf and we have all of these great results. What we can do now is we can actually look here and where it says load a 30 day sales data on all of these, we can just click on those buttons and we can see the 30 day revenue and the 30 day unit sales for all of our competitors. So this means we don't have to open up the extension and look for all this information. It's actually just a pull down right there. So if you wanted to just quickly look at the revenue while you're browsing a page, you can see quickly what it is. And I think this is kind of cool because then you know, for certain searches where there's a lot of different types of products that are kind of different designs, it's really helpful to just be able to look at which one is selling the best, how much they're selling. So that is one feature update. I think it's really great. And then the next thing is on the detail pages themselves. We have this new data up at the top of the page. Now you can expand this and you can show more details. And we've got not only we have the revenue for this listing, but we have the ratings and reviews. We also can go down here. We can see, you know, the fulfillment dimensions, the, the stamp you know sized here, and all this information, that BA fee on the side. Here you can also go back and look at sales on different days of the year and you can change the timeframe to all the way back to two years so you can see kind of, the growth of each product. You can see, you know, the price and the best seller rank. You can see ratings and reviews right here. So this is some golden information that you can just see right there, especially if you find you know a big competitor and you want to just see what's going on with their product and how long they've been in the game. This is a great tool to be able to see all of that.
Carrie Miller:
The next thing now I know Bradley mentioned that we have some great tools for the Brazil market. We've got, you know, Cerebro, Magnet, lots of great stuff that he talked about last week in regards to starting to sell on Brazil, the Brazil marketplace on Amazon, and so now we also have our listing builder AI that can help you to create listings in Portuguese, especially if you do not know how to speak Portuguese. So the first thing you need to do is you're going to go under tools and then you're going to click on listing builder AI, and then what you're going to do is you're going to go up to the top right and click on add listing. Now I'm going to just go ahead and say get started from scratch, and then the most important thing is you need to choose the market of Brazil, which is at the very bottom. So I'm clicking on Brazil here and then I'll click on start building, and then I've actually already created some keywords from Cerebro in Portuguese for our Brazil garlic press, and I chose. I found those by just going to Amazon Brazil and doing a reverse asin search, and so I'm just going to add those to my bank, so they're going to show up here in the bank, and then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to click next, and on this part, this is really cool because you can input information in English and it's going to create the listing in Portuguese.
Carrie Miller:
For the, for example, we're going to put garlic product characteristics garlic press stainless steel, durable, high quality, perfect for home cooks, okay. So then the next thing is the brand name, which is optional. Okay, so I'm actually going to just put create my own brand name here and make it up Manny's garlic press, and then I'm going to have that at the end of the title. The product name is garlic press and you can choose the tone, whatever tone you want. I'm just going to put casual here. Target audience home cooks, chefs, the home cook chefs, anyone who wants to easily mince garlic, okay. So I'm just going to kind of put it like that. The more input that you put in here, the better. You want to put all your sales, your sales points, in the in the product characteristics, but you can put them all in English, which is really cool. If there's anything that you want to avoid in the listing, you can put that there, so you can have it avoid certain things. And all you have to do here for the title is click, write it for me, and it's going to use the keywords that I have in here plus the input that I gave it here to create an optimized title, which is really cool because you don't even have to know Portuguese. Now, obviously, you can check this and go to Google translate, translate it, make sure it works right. Or, if you know, you want to pay somebody to just kind of review your listings after you've created them to make sure that they're they make sense. That's probably a good idea, but I think this is pretty amazing to get your listings started. So I'm going to click on use suggestion and so, because that looks pretty good, and, again, just go to Google translate and have them translated. You can check it that way.
Carrie Miller:
The next thing is bullet points. You can click write it for me. It's going to write all those bullet points in Portuguese and you'll have an optimized listing with those keywords that you put, as well as the input. So we'll let that pop up here. And then at the bottom here you can also do this for a description and click on write it for me. So this all can be written in Portuguese at the click of a button by just putting in these simple inputs in English and it's going to spit out a an optimized listing in Portuguese. All right, so we have these little suggestions. You can click on use suggestions. You can discard it and have it rewrite it, but I'll just go ahead and hit use suggestions and you can see that it's crossing out the keywords that they've used in the bullet points here, and that is pretty amazing that we've been able to use all these keywords with just the click of a button. It's still writing the description here, and once the description is done, I'm sure all of these keywords will be all crossed out. So most of them are, and so we've got an optimized description there.
Carrie Miller:
You can again click use suggestion or you can discard it, and so that is the simple and easy way that you can optimize your listings on the Brazil marketplace. I know a lot of people are excited about the opportunity to sell it in Brazil, so go ahead and try this out. I think it's a great tool to help you to get started on other marketplaces in other languages. Really really helpful to use AI to get these all written with a click of a button. It's absolutely incredible. So if you haven't checked this out, go ahead and check it out and we'll see you again next week. Bye.
Shivali Patel:
Thank you for sharing, Carrie. That's a wrap. Hope you enjoy this week's episode. We will see you next week to see what's buzzing.
Ever wonder how an Amazon seller jumps from zero to hero with a product that defies the odds? In our first-ever Seller’s Edge Series episode, let’s explore success stories, product journeys, and every tactic that will help you find your first or next E-commerce product. Special guest Shivali Patel, brand evangelist at Helium 10, joins us bringing the heat with a story of how a $45,000 revenue bomb was dropped in just two weeks after launching in Q4, proving that with the right strategies, such as leveraging BlackBox for product research and adding unique value, anyone can stand out in the crowded Amazon marketplace.
Finally, for those ready to expand their horizons, our brand, Manny’s Mysterious Oddities, is branching out into the bat niche, where opportunities lurk in the shadows. Using Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer and Helium 10’s BlackBox, we dissect how to scout and validate new product extensions for your Amazon brand. This episode isn’t just about telling you what worked; it's about showing you how to pivot and roll with the punches, finding those hidden gems in the market, such as bat-shaped bath mats, that could become your next big win. And for the cherry on top, resources and podcast episodes are flagged to help you turn these insights into action. Join us to learn about these actionable strategies, and let's raise the stakes in your Amazon selling game.
In episode 533 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Shivali discuss:
- 00:00 - Sellers Edge Monthly
- 00:31 - Strategies for Finding Profitable Amazon Products
- 04:50 - Discover New Business Opportunities at Trade Shows
- 15:55 - Profit Margin and Sales Success
- 19:16 - Discovering Product Opportunities on Amazon
- 24:16 - Bat Niche Product Opportunities Exploration
- 30:47 - Launch New Product At A Higher Price
- 31:29 - Advanced Keyword Research and Product Opportunities
- 37:27 - Combining Amazon Brand Analytics and Helium 10 BlackBox Data
- 42:36 - Brand Analytics and Launch Strategies
- 43:38 - Accessing and Listening to Podcast Episodes
Bradley Sutton:
Today is our first ever Sellers Edge Monthly Training. In this episode we're going to go over how I found a brand new product that I can come in at a price point twice as much as the competition, and how Shivali was able to sell $45,000 on her brand new product in only two weeks. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. One, two, three, four. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And, as mentioned, this is the first in a new series that we're going to do monthly where we go over a different topic in our sellers edge training webinar. I actually recorded this in front of a live audience, so this episode might have a little bit different sound than normally and there's definitely some interactions there, but we have here cut up the highlights from that training and basically I'm going to show you how Shivali took some steps to have a product that nobody can compete with her in and it was over $100 and she was able to get 40% profit and sell $45,000, even though she launched right after Black Friday Kind of crazy. And then how I am launching a product like in the next couple of weeks and I'm going through all the steps on exactly how I found it and how I can have a higher price point as well, and we go over some other product research strategies that I think will definitely be able to help you guys. So this is a new series. Hope you enjoy it.
Bradley Sutton:
This is 100% based on value that can help you find your first or next product to sell on Amazon. Here we go, welcome to our new monthly workshop. We call it Sellers Edge Monthly Series, and this one is entitled how to Find your First or Next Product to Sell in 2024. So we are going to start off with a real life experience. I'm going to interview somebody right now who launched a product and had a lot of success on Amazon, especially in Q4, which is kind of like when people say, oh, you should never launch a product during that time. So we're going to ask Shivali to come on the show right now. Shivali, you there?
Shivali Patel:
Yes, I am Awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
I want to talk to you about your product launch. We had you on the podcast a few months ago and you were talking about this long journey of getting it ready, but then you actually launched in December. But for those who maybe didn't hear that podcast, let's start on this. You were selling on Amazon years ago and then you've always been selling for years, like books, but you really wanted to have a physical product to sell. A lot of people here they're looking for their first product, so they might have been kind of like in a it wasn't your first product but you were restarting it, so there might be a similar situation to you. So how do you tackle it? First, like, were you like hey, I want to try to find a product that just there's a lot of demand for it. Or you like hey, I want to find a lot of demand, but it's got to be something that maybe I'm passionate about. What was your thought process when you first started?
Shivali Patel:
I was quite open to whatever opportunity I was finding. I was using Blackbox, which I love because I come my first brand I launched years ago. I did manually. I was inside of Amazon, going through best sellers list, looking at BSRs, trying to understand the reviews, figure out what I could do better, and that's great, it works. But it takes a long time, and so that's where software like Blackbox is really, really helpful, because the process is over 2 billion data points daily right, Something that you can't actually do. So going in I was pretty open. I did many, many searches inside of Blackbox and then from there, started narrowing things down based off of different parameters. So whether that was profitability I mean all these things are important but profitability, what I can add? Value creation, the price point, checking out the market, the competition, what sort of reviews there are yeah, and I also did go to trade shows as well, so I went. I actually flew out. At the time I was considering a cocktail smoker kit.
Bradley Sutton:
What is a cocktail smoker kit.
Shivali Patel:
It's those for anybody who drinks. I mean you don't have to necessarily have it be a cocktail but a mocktail or even smoking. Your food comes with a little blow torch and then a different oak piece.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I see that.
Shivali Patel:
Yeah, it's really nice. But I was considering that and a supplier ended up saying, hey, I'm actually in the US, and so I flew out to meet that supplier in person, which is a really, really cool experience. There was many vendors there, people that have flown in from Indonesia, from China. I got to see actual products, field them, try to negotiate a price point, get a basic understanding. Cool Enough is I ended up meeting somebody who helped me design a brand new product which I'm hoping to launch eventually as well.
Bradley Sutton:
This was at the trade show that you went to.
Shivali Patel:
At the trade show. Yeah, so they designed in a completely new style of a product for me.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so that's the first thing that's probably interesting to. Maybe some of you guys haven't thought about that, but you know, maybe you think that, oh, the only place you can go to trade shows which is 100% accurate, like it's a great place to go, is like in China. But what she's always talking about, I believe, was in Chicago or somewhere in the United States. So sometimes you know a lot of Chinese factories, indian factories and other factories. They'll come to US based trade shows and it's also a place where you can go and meet a supplier. Maybe you've been talking to online, like she was doing, but also you might meet somebody else. That is completely not even why you went there. So in her situation, she met somebody who's helping her design another product. So then that original product, the Smoker Kit you went to that trade show. You kind of like I'm probably not going to do this. How did you land on this makeup bag that you ended up going with?
Shivali Patel:
I found it inside a black box and I saw many different keywords. Actually, I was using the keywords tab. I went through and I did a few other things. I did the regular products tab, I did the keywords tab, I went into product opportunity explorer inside of Amazon. I was looking at Etsy and Pinterest trends as well. Anytime I was scrolling on social media. I mean the list was massive. And then eventually I found, I think, five to six different keywords inside of the keywords tab that were all related to the bag, so obviously there was a growing demand for it. And then from there went into the product validation and I felt like I could actually contribute something to that space, because I grew up in fashion and in the beauty personal care sector. I guess is something that I've taken time to educate myself on and spent many hours with, and so when I started having conversations after that with you, I think we also had a very unique pitching point that I felt I could go onto the market with a premium price point, because anytime I'm selling something, the value of creation is important, but you also want to make it worth the person's while. So if I'm going in with a premium price, I want to over, deliver on it, and I think this bag really hit all those spots.
Bradley Sutton:
And this was a high. The current the market was kind of high, aren't most products there like 80, 100 bucks or so?
Shivali Patel:
Now. So when I was looking at this product, everything was 30 bucks and I wanted to sell it for 120. And I knew I wanted to sell it for somewhere between 120 and like 140. But by the time that I actually launched, there was a couple bags on the market that were selling for 160 with a lot less value. In my opinion, they're nice, but also, if you think about anything else in the world you have your cars, you have your coach bags there's always a market for something. So I suppose at that point it's just what you're planning to or who you're really getting.
Bradley Sutton:
So then you know a lot of people here in this room. You know they might not be able to afford a product that requires an investment, you know pretty high, because you know if you're having a 100, $120 product, you know your costs might be like 30 bucks or 40 bucks a unit. And then, if you're, what was your MOQ, by the way?
Shivali Patel:
My MOQ was 500.
Bradley Sutton:
500, all right. So, like, you guys can do the math, if you're buying a product that costs $30 and you have to order 500 or 1000, you know you're already talking about 15, $20, $30,000 before you even consider shipping. However, on the flip side is if you can afford that. This is just by itself a way that you can differentiate yourself from from these saturated niches, because not that many people can afford to go into a niche like that. So you're immediately kind of like disqualifying a lot of the potential people that you might that you might, you know, be going up again. So let's fast forward. You know, you took a few months. You started designing the product. You're looking at different, different needs and you actually built in like your own program. Since you're kind of like your own influencer, you're like, hey, I'm going to sell this product with also like this course, and so just, you know, briefly, like in a minute or so, can you talk about how that idea came? And then what's the deliverable? Like, like, are people getting this, this card inside the thing that says, hey, sign up for my beauty course, or how did that work?
Shivali Patel:
I have always sold physical and digital products separately, and I thought it would be interesting to combine the two, especially because a lot of the competitors inside of the makeup bag market were selling, essentially as the add-on, a 10x magnifier. It was like a bonus piece that people throw in for bundling options. And I know for me, while a magnifying mirror is helpful, I don't actually use one on a day-to-day basis, so it has no real value for me as a consumer, not to say that it doesn't for somebody else, but for me. Outside of that, they also had these little travel jewelry compartments, which is great, but again, what's something that would be more of an experience, right, that would justify $120 price point. And so I started looking at the intersection of a digital course or a live coaching element, which one increases your touch points with the customer you get to hopefully get with, of course, in like, I'm not saying anything, black hat, I'm just saying that you can get to know, maybe, your customer a little bit better and then you'll know their order number so you can ask them to request a review a little bit later on. But yeah, the delivery aspect of it for the actual course is the product insert, which I created a QR code using Helium 10s portals and then just put that in so they get access to exclusive course that pretty much no other competitors can replicate, right? Because it takes a significant amount of time to go through and film a bunch of videos and then also end up taking time to do live coaching as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, hold on. I want to pause you right there because this is important. I want to make sure people understood the main point here. We hear so much and maybe you who haven't started on Amazon yet you've probably heard oh my goodness, it's too late to sell on Amazon, or there's just too much competition, or no matter what I sell, everybody's going to copy me. And then everybody's going to do it and have a low price. And, guys, let me tell you that's, first of all, that's not true. Like in some, you know, like categories, maybe, okay, maybe that's true. Like, if you just have a generic product, could everybody copy you? There's not much room for differentiation? Sure, but there are so many opportunities out there where you as, like you know, if you're selling in Europe, you're Europe based. You're selling in America, you're US based. There's things that you can do, there's skills that you have, or maybe, utilizing the network you have, that you can kind of like competition proof what you're trying to make. So, Shivali, she was like what can I do that? You know, probably the bakeries that are trying to sell direct on Amazon can't do All right. And one of them was like, hey, she's like let me make an actual course that nobody you know no Chinese factory or Indian factory or any other country that makes this are going to take the time to find an American based influencer and film this whole course and have that be a threat.
Bradley Sutton:
Like literally nobody is going to do that. So this is something that she has like a 100% exclusivity on that she never has to worry about competing with other people and it's going to allow her to keep a higher price point as well, because there's this added bonus. So don't let people tell you, oh it's, it's impossible to compete on Amazon because of the competition. No, you, absolutely, you know, can do that. Now let's just fast forward. Now you launched on what doesn't have to be the exact date, but when did you actually launch your product? November 30th or right, wait, November 30th. Was that during Black Friday weekend or?
Shivali Patel:
Okay, I was trying to get ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but the issue was it's an electronics item and I had some sort of request that they asked for like an MSDS safety sheet, and then it got classified as a dangerous good. So all my inventory was at the facilities but it was in reserve. I couldn't access it, I couldn't sell it. And then eventually, when it finally happened, I pretty much didn't know when it like went live. I was checking but I couldn't tell because it was like some of the products looked okay and then I made the stupid blunder of trying to check if it was available by buying, but then it wouldn't let me buy because I'm a seller. I didn't process that. But finally, November 30th, I had my first sale. It went live and I had my first sale and then I actually discounted that product for I think it was like 20 bucks or not 20 bucks, 20%, and then I had like that nice strike through price so I dropped from 120 to $90 and then went back up because my end of the November.
Bradley Sutton:
You're doing all this which, by the way, guys, she's talking about like what we call the Maldives honeymoon strategy. I'll give you, guys, links to how to launch your product. You know, based on the Maldives honeymoon strategy. It has to do with PPC and putting a heavy discount on your product. Now some people in the chat are asking about if they can see the product. I can throw it up here. Is it out of stock right now? Like, did you sell out or is it actually live still?
Shivali Patel:
No, it's still live.
radley Sutton:
Fast forward guys. She kind of like was doing stuff that some people say, oh, you should never do, like never launch a product in Q4., don't launch a product during Black Friday weekend. But she did that and then, right away, what did you get your kind of like daily sales up to? 70 units a day 70 units a day at $100 price point. But, guys, this is the product that we're talking about. It's a live, real live product that was just launched on Amazon a couple months ago. Here we go, brand new. She doesn't even have the video on here yet, like she even didn't even do the brand registry at first, I remember, because she just like got this, got this up, but where does it? Man, these are some nice images. So here's the image that talked about her makeup lessons. Okay, there she is. She's her own influencer. Totally fine, you're not going to see me put my picture on a coffin shelf, which is the product.
Shivali Patel:
I sell. I don't know. I think a lot of people right now that are watching would buy things if you were the influencer.
Bradley Sutton:
I don't know, I don't know. That's not the way I roll, but you can see, like if you go back in her BSR like when she launched the product and look at these crazy BSRs that she was having. Now obviously the sales have gone down after Christmas. This was a heavy, heavy item in Christmas. But long story short, like how much money did you sell in December of this product? What was your gross sales at?
Shivali Patel:
$46,000.
Bradley Sutton:
$46,000.
Shivali Patel:
And what kind of profit margins?
Bradley Sutton:
did you have?
Shivali Patel:
So after all the time, I originally thought I had like a 57% profit margin, but after all the calculations I think it was closer to 45% profit margin 45.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, guys, we're not going to be here and say that, oh, everybody who sells on Amazon using her strategies and using Helium 10, it's going to be able to sell $45,000 in three weeks and 40% profit margins. She obviously worked really hard to do this, but it shows that what is possible. Because she didn't use any special hack because she's a Helium 10 employee or some backdoor into Amazon. She just used the same exact strategies that you could have it. And somebody asked hey, after ad spend, what was the margin? No, that is after everything, after her cost, after PPC, after everything, 40%. Yeah, Ron says she doesn't even have A plus content. Yeah, she didn't have brand registry. She got this out so fast. She didn't even have brand registry yet and she just sold out almost completely. All right, well, that's a cool story. I'm going to give one of mine. So let me give you guys one more story about something that hasn't even launched yet. But let me walk you through the process, and this has a. She talked about how she found her opportunity in helium 10.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me show you something where I found an opportunity, and originally it came not from black box, but another tool that's not even designed for product research? All right. So does anybody in here use the regular market tracker? All right, this is not market tracker. You know 360 regular market tracker. Let me show you guys, let me retrace, what I did a few months ago. This is the regular market tracker and, as you guys may or may not know, so if you're new to, if you're new to helium 10, you probably haven't seen Project X, but we launched this product called a, a coffin shelf. All right, and so I've been. I've sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of these coffin related items, and so I have this coffin shelf market and basically what it does is I'm tracking my market share, I'm tracking like where my market compared to the others, and actually I did so well in Q4. I sold out, until just like a week ago, of of coffin shelves.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now let me show you here what I was looking at, what the purpose of this tool is. It allows me to track what is going on with my direct coffin shelf competitors, right, but then it also suggests to me like, hey, there's a new coffin shelf or a new potential player that might be like coming into your niche, right, and so you can see here those of you watching this and if you're listening to this later, you might not see this visual here, but there's a button that says track or ignore. So it's saying like hey, here's a new player in this niche. Do you want to start tracking him to, to, to track how, how your market share is going, all right. And so I was scrolling on here and then look, do you guys see what this is? Let me know in the chat, do you guys? If you can see it, it's kind of hard. These two things that are not coffin shelves, what does it look like to you guys? Bats yes, exactly, these are bat shelves.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so now, all of a sudden, let me just explain how my thought process went. I'm like, wait a minute, this is kind of interesting. All right, like these people are not my direct competitors, but they must be ranking for similar keywords, and I'm like that makes sense. Like in in, coffin decor is like a bat shelf might be kind of like a kind of spooky thing, right? So I went into a, an Amazon tool. All right, that is the product opportunity explorer. Okay, this is another thing that anybody on this call should have access to. Whether or not you, whether or not you guys, have brand registry you should have product opportunity explorer. So I typed in the keyword coffin shelf because, again, that's what I was selling and I'm like all right, let's take a look at what are the top clicked products after coffin shelf. So after people search coffin shelf and the related search terms, what are people clicking on? Okay, now, this is. This is not helium 10. This is directly from Amazon. All right, I like to kind of validate to see a little bit deeper what's going on.
Bradley Sutton:
Once I saw that, initially inside of helium 10, and then, sure enough, look here in the top 10 products after my products. A lot of these are my products that I'm selling. I saw I start seeing these bat related products and so I'm like, okay, that's interesting, but I want to. I want to take it a step further, like I could launch a bat shelf and I still might do a bat shelf, but are there any other bat related items? Maybe I could start a line of bat related items.
Bradley Sutton:
So here's what I did, all right. So Shivali situation was kind of like hey, she was looking for her first product on a new brand. A lot of you guys haven't found your first product yet. You follow that technique, right? I'm talking about what, if you're ready, are selling a brand, how can you expand it out? And this is the kind of process for you guys.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so I went back into helium 10 black box. Okay, let's go ahead and go into that tool. So now this is what I want you guys to do. We're literally retracing my steps. I'm going to try and remember what I did. I'm selling, you know, there's probably a lot of bat related products that maybe you might be in the pet niche, like people making bat houses and stuff like that. There's probably a lot of Batman stuff in the memorabilia, right. But I wanted to do stuff in my niche. So hit the category and subcategory, drop down in black box and select home and kitchen All right.
Bradley Sutton:
So I wanted to find products in the home and kitchen niche, all right, okay. The next thing I wanted to do was I wanted to make sure that you know we weren't going to have some like $5 products or, at the same time, products that cost, like you know, $60 or more. So I put in the sales price field minimum 10, maximum 60. I wanted to find products that we're selling already, like is there a product in this bat niche that is selling pretty decently already. So under monthly sales okay, under monthly sales I put minimum 100 per month. All right, that means, hey, here's a bat related product that is in the home and kitchen that's priced between 10 and $60. And it is 100, selling at least 100 units per month. I didn't want to have a bunch of variations, like a product that had a whole bunch of sizes. So what I put, I think again, I'm trying to retrace this, I'm doing this live here, guys, I think I put a maximum one under variation count.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now what else do I do? Okay, you might be wondering well, how in the world am I looking for bat related products? All right, well, what I did was, like, I figured if it's a bat related product, it's probably got bat in the title. Okay, and Nicole says variation yes, max should be in the max right here under one. This is the minimum. I don't put anything, max, I put one. Okay, that's why, that's why the, the, the min is blank, all right. So under title keywords I put bat. So like, that means that I'm trying to find a product that had the word bat in it. Because I like again, couple steps back, I saw in market tracker, there's bat related products showing up in my market. I looked and validated that in Amazon opportunity explore. There's bat related products and I'm just wondering is the only bat related products shelves, or are there other bat related products? Okay, I'm not sure if I, if I entered more things, I'll know by the number. Go ahead and hit search now, guys, and let's see how many, how many things come up. Let's see 14 items. Okay, this is probably it.
Bradley Sutton:
And then I started seeing some super interesting things. Now, of course, some things were completely unrelated, because obviously a baseball bat, you know, might, might show up. But take a look at this, guys, a bat, I don't know what. This is like a remote control holder or a decor box. Look at this one a bat shaped wine and beer opener. Now, all of a sudden, my like creative juices were flowing. Here is a bat shelf. And then, as I was scrolling down, boom, I was like, wow, look at this, a bat Bath mat or bath rug. I was like that is such a novel idea. And so I started looking at this. I'm like, hey, there is some opportunity here to make a bat bath mat. But here's the problem. When I looked on Amazon, I was like the price is a little bit low, all right, compared to my cost. So I was like, is there any way I can differentiate this? So let me just show you what I was looking at. Um, let's just go here to Amazon and let's type in bat bath mat.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, at the time the prices were actually higher. But let me just walk you through, kind of like my thought process here. Okay, so take a look here. I started seeing this and, by the way, when I was looking at this, I think it was kind of like around the Halloween time and there were like hundreds and hundreds of these being sold, like now there's only a couple, that there's like a hundred or so being sold, but I'm like this is a super cool product. What I like to see is like the number one product, like the one who, who is selling the most.
Bradley Sutton:
What can somebody in the chat tell me about? What is wrong with this? Like, what are they doing wrong that could get them literally suspended they're listening, suspended at any time. Yes, alexander says no white background. Everybody, a lot of you professional stuff. I was like I love to see this. We're the number one seller in the niche Probably doesn't even know how to sell on Amazon because they've got this ugly image of a tile floor and it. This literally could get suspended by Amazon at any time because it's not white background.
Bradley Sutton:
And then, as I scroll down here, this is what I love to see. I'm already like, not even halfway down the page. All right, these, these are organic results. What do you guys notice here about these organic results? Is this one a bath, a bat bath mat? No, it's unrelated results. Who said that? Jonathan says that unreal. I'm not even halfway down page one and I have completely different results, like, like, here is somebody who's advertising here with a stone bath mat has nothing to do with this. Here's some spider web bath mats. This is what I love to see. Now, guys, this is now four months later.
Bradley Sutton:
It was even more drastic when I was looking at this, where I like nobody had bath bath mats but at that time that all of these were like around 20 bucks and I'm like, ah, man, this is like this is. You know, I want to have some higher Profit margins. I'm like, look at, some of these guys are just blowing stuff out because, because you know, they probably had overstock. But I'm like, how am I gonna have a product that's gonna go for like 20 to 30 dollars when people have, at the time, like 16 17 dollars? So this is what I what I looked at. I was like, let me just look at regular bath mats. All right, bath mat. Okay, this is has nothing to do with bat shaped or coffin shaped or anything. And then this is what I saw, like a lot of people had it for cheap prices. I'm like, okay, fine, but you know, since I have a bat one, I I don't have that much competition.
Bradley Sutton:
But look at this, I didn't know much of Beth Matz at the time, but look at this. Do you guys anybody see the difference between these and those ones that were the bat, the bat ones? Anybody know about bath mats and like could see instantly I know I'm zooming in here the difference. So what the difference is is the material. Do you guys see how thick this is? This is what's called and I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right this is what's called chenille, if I, if I'm mispronouncing that, I apologize. I literally know nothing about this. This niche Chenille. This is a lot more expensive material than I thought it would be. This, this niche Chenille. This is a lot more expensive material and it is like it's kind of cool, like your foot sinks into it and your foot almost disappears into this material and it's much more absorbent and I'm like, okay, all right. So here's the thing I want to make some bat bath mats and that could launch some other products, like maybe some coffin bath mats and everything, but everybody's selling for this cheap price. So what I want to do is sell a bat shaped bath mat, and I'm going to be the only one that's going to make it Chenille. So let me show you.
Bradley Sutton:
I went to, I got the product made and then I went to AMZ One Step and paid them to go ahead and have a photo shoot done at their factory, and my product is not yet launched. Guys. I just got this. I'm gonna open up a Google Drive, guys. This is like real stuff. This is just a Google Drive that was sent to me two days ago. I got the images ready and take a look at the products that I was able to develop based on all of these steps that I went. Here's a same thing Chenille bat shaped Bath mat. Let me show some more images here. I did some research and I'm like all right, some of these are not machine washable. I'm going to make sure to have an image where people can clearly see that this is machine washable. That's another way that I can differentiate my myself with the other competitors.
Bradley Sutton:
What else did I put here? I made some detail about how the non-slip you know backing right. What else did I have in the images? I did like a really expensive photo shoot, guys. I really wanted to go out. Look at this, this is not 3D, this is like a real. This is a real Airbnb, not Airbnb. I don't know if it was Airbnb, but it might have been Airbnb. But they literally rented a house to have this that had like these kind of like minimalistic, gothic vibes and we did a photo shoot to really kind of like differentiate. Now take a look at some of these images and compare it to the images that we saw on the bath you know, bath mat over there. All right, completely different. Right, very high quality. So basically, guys, this is a product that I am going to launch either maybe this week or next week, and I'm going to launch at over $20, when everybody else was selling it for um for a lot cheaper. All right, so there's two different cases. Shivali will open up a brand new brand.
Bradley Sutton:
Here's me. I was selling coffin shelves and I wanted to open up a kind of new line of products that aren't coffin related but are from the same kind of like um customer profile. I guess you could say you know somebody who's weird enough to buy a coffin shaped thing, probably weird enough to buy a bat shaped thing. So those are a couple of techniques. Let me give you guys a couple more techniques that those are real life examples. Let's go back into black box, guys. All right, let's go back into black I can't even say that right back into black box. And then everybody, let me know in the chat if you're with me. We're going to do something together. We're going to pick a imaginary product research situation right now and somebody said will the US consumer buy this all year long? Absolutely, believe it or not, people buy coffin shelves all year round. They would absolutely buy this. The people who are into Gothic decor, they just love this kind of stuff. All right, everybody's ready.
Bradley Sutton:
Now I want you guys to click into keywords. This is the keywords tab. All right, now, everybody, give me some sample ideas of categories to choose. I'm going to give you kind of like an advanced technique and I'm going to do one more advanced technique and then we're going to open up to Q&A for about five minutes here. Somebody says kitchen, somebody says pet, a bunch of people saying pets. Okay, let's go with those. So everybody. Go ahead in your black box keywords select kitchen, kitchen and dining, home and kitchen just for kicks and giggles. And then what was the other thing that people started? Yeah, pet supplies. All right, select pet supplies. Now I'm on a tool that looks at keywords. So who can tell me in the chat what signifies demand for a keyword? Is it sales? What is the metric that signifies demand for keywords? All right, it is search volume, exactly. So I'm going to say, hey, let me see a keyword that has at least 2000 search volume, maybe a maximum of 10,000. And I might have to like, lessen these because I might be doing something a little bit too narrow here. All right, and let's go into a price range where the average product on the search results, on average of the top products, are between, let's say, 20 and 50 dollars. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Now here's what I like to do. I'd like to go to the very bottom of black box keywords and, under competitor revenue, I'm going to do something that's opposite from logic. All right, this is opposite from the way that you might have learned how to do this tool. I'm going to say competitor revenue more than $5,000, a maximum of four and a minimum of one. Traditionally you might. And, by the way, guys, there's not a right way and a wrong way here. I'm just trying to show you that you can have an opposite technique and you could still get a good result. The traditional teaching here is you want to find a keyword where most of the products are selling at least $5,000. I'm trying to do something different, where maybe only a couple products are really doing well and the rest are just kind of like throwaways. Why do you think, guys, why do you think this could give me something that might be opportunity? Let me know what you think in the chat. Why would I want to see when a keyword where not that many products in the top 10 are making good sales?
Bradley Sutton:
Ritu says improvement opportunity. Max says bad listings yes. Kl says try to be in the top yes, very good. Louis says low PPC. Guess what, guys? Everybody's correct. These are all reasons on why I'm doing this. Now, it doesn't mean that the opposite way is not going to get me good results too, but this is what I'm doing for this one. Now, competitor reviews out of the top 10, what I'm going to say is hey, I want to see a minimum of, let's just say, six products have less than 150 reviews. So that's what I'm doing in black box keywords Again competitor reviews at less than 150, minimum six. Now there might be either a whole bunch or not enough.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm not sure what's going to come up here. Yeah, I have too much hair. Oh, my goodness gracious, I found a pretty cool product right away, guys. I've never looked at, I've never seen this keyword in my life Goat blankets for winter Search for 3,000 times a month. Like there are 3,000 people out there trying to find blankets for their goats. Or is it blankets made from goat fur? I don't know. We can take a look at that. What else do we see here? Oyster shells, cat collar, camera, wedding table numbers, tree wall art guys, these are all Good opportunity stuff. Pottery apron like I guess a pottery apron would be different than a regular apron. Like it maybe needs to be more thick. Alright, to Taylor Swift Betty, I'm not gonna do that one, because that's probably Branded there, trademarked, I should say. Bulldog storage decoration what the heck like storage that? Is that a brand name or is that, like people want storage with pictures of bulldogs on it? Table numbers for wedding reception here's a Vietnamese keyword that I don't know. A Heart-shaped charcuterie board.
Bradley Sutton:
Guys, I literally just came up with one search. I came up with about 15 product opportunity ideas that all of these are pretty good. Jonathan says these are blankets for goats. I used to have goats myself, believe it or not, like here in San Diego County. I have one acre here property. I used to raise goats. I I never bought them blankets. You know, I'm sorry, sorry to say, but I guess I was, you know. But but I'm in Southern California so it doesn't get too cold so I think my goats were doing fine. But anyways, guys, that was just one search I just did with you guys right here and we found 10 Opportunities that could be worth looking at.
Bradley Sutton:
One last quick one I wanted to do before we get five minutes of of Q&A. Another new tool here in black box. Now, those of you who have the diamond plan, you'll be able to see this. It's a BA top search terms. All right, this is combining Helium 10 data with what's we're called Amazon brand analytics. Okay, amazon brand analytics is something directly from Amazon and we could see in here what are the top three clicked items by any keyword. This is directly from Amazon. This is not a helium 10 metric. I mean you're looking at it in helium, but that's what this is. So, right here, guys.
Bradley Sutton:
Um, this is Gold because, like, for example, I could say, hey, show me something, let's say a keyword that has the word bat in it. Going back to my original example, but where? If I take a look at the top three clicked ASINs, okay, I want to see their total click share, maybe at least 50%, meaning that let's just let's just see if anything comes up. That might be nothing, might come up here, let's just take a look. But what that means is, if I take the three products that have the most clicks after this keyword, it makes up more than 50% of the clicks overall. Okay, so that's what I would want to do phrases containing bats and look at that. I might do the top three conversion share. That's another thing that I could look at as as well, but these are unique data points that somebody could use, where you combine Amazon data with helium 10 data to find something completely new and different.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, I've got five minutes now, maybe less, for question and answer. Let me take a look in the Documents here in the chat, what you guys have sent in. Alright, here we go. This is from Frank what is better to use a coupon or discounted price? Great question, frank. So he's talking about when you launch a product, like she volley did, either. Or yeah, I personally use discounted price. I try and get a strike through and have a big discount and then sometimes it's like it'll put a little red symbol that says, like you know, 50% off. But then other times, if that doesn't happen, using a coupon might be better because it gives you that green bar in the search results.
Bradley Sutton:
Alexandra says what was the product photography company? Oh, the one that did the batch of that was AMZ One Step. So you can see them at. Go to hub.helium10.com, Alexandra. hub.helium10.com and you can contact them right inside helium 10. Just type in AMZ and then one step. And then Make sure that. Make sure that you say that helium. You know you learned or heard from a helium 10 or from Bradley on this workshop. Shivali, who can you let us know? Who made your images? Alright, so I think you. One step, Shivali. So James is wondering who? Who did you use? I?
Shivali Patel:
Used myself.
Bradley Sutton:
You actually took yourself for like your phone.
Shivali Patel:
I did my own images. I also made my own infographics. Wow, I did the only. I did the course on my own.
Bradley Sutton:
I you had to have outsourced something, though, like anything. I've outsourced nothing wait, you know how to do Photoshop and stuff like that. Yeah.
Shivali Patel:
I didn't even Know. I make all my own videos for TikTok, for Instagram. Anything I post, I do. I did my own product photography with a camera I have at home. Although I For social, I typically just I phone it and then use Canva for Infographics. So that's free, which contributes to the very high profit margins.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah Well, yeah, that definitely helps. Like me, me, I have no Photoshop skills. Maybe a lot of you don't have Photoshop skills, so you've got an outsource.
Shivali Patel:
I Didn't use that much Photoshop, all I did like. If you wanted to do this yourself, they actually the same thing that you pay $1,000 for you can do on your own. All I did is take a white sheet, put it up on Like a wall at home, got a phone I ordered like a 20 or $30 circular thing, but that was for video, it wasn't even for just photography and then I put it on to like a white table and then threw it into a free app free iPhone app for background remover and then put everything into Canva. Okay, so canva Able to do a pretty, pretty impressive if you guys want to do this on your own, you can also. I believe we have a module in Freedom Ticket For making your own product images, so you guys can watch that too. I filmed that one.
Bradley Sutton:
If you are at all artistically inclined, it doesn't even take Photoshop to do this. But you could be like me and be completely Illiterate from artistic sense, and that's why I outsource my stuff to different companies who are the Professional. So there's not a right or a wrong way to go about it. Hosam asked how does brand analytics help you? Could you please explain with an example? So, brand analytics that the number one benefit of brand analytics is that Amazon is telling you, after the search of a keyword, which three products are click the most and of those three products, what kind of sales share do they have of the people who end up buying a product after that, after searching that keyword. Super, super valuable information that you can see inside of helium 10. That comes directly from brand analytics. Um Frank says I would like to some launch help, for example, vying coupons, giveaways what would you recommend these days? So if you're talking about, like the old school Giveaways, you know that that's against terms of service. Now, on Amazon, what Shivali did, what I'm gonna do is Fully within terms of service is mainly just using PPC, all right. So if you guys want to know the three episodes, you guys have some homework. You guys want to know how to launch a product in the same exact way that Shivali and I launch our product. This is what I'm gonna leave you guys with.
Bradley Sutton:
Right this time, everybody have a pen and paper ready. All right, right down these three episodes h10.me/466, all right. Or it's Serious Sellers Podcast, episode 466. You can look it up on your. I want everybody actually typing it in right now go into your Apple iPhone and go to Apple podcast and go into Serious sellers podcast and hit subscribe the three episodes you want to look at for how to launch your product, to get ready for it is 466 and 467, so you can go on your podcast. Or you can just type in h10.me forward, slash 466 or 467. The one to actually launch, it is 500, all right. So there's three episodes that you want you guys to listen to 466, 467 and 500. Thank you guys for joining and we'll see you later. Bye, now you.
Join us in this episode as we unfold the remarkable e-commerce tale of Josh and Jenna Coleman, a powerhouse couple who turned their online sales venture into a resounding success. They take us on a journey from their beginnings in marketing and finance to dominating Amazon and TikTok Shop, sharing the strategic decisions and personal pivots that propelled them into the limelight. Their story is a masterclass in leveraging life's twists – from raising kids to career transitions – to build a thriving business that resonates with the potential of passive income.
Listen in as the conversation turns to the nitty-gritty of starting with side gigs and progressing to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). Josh and Jenna provide valuable insights into using platforms like Helium 10 for market research and how they used their design acumen to create products that captivate both digital and physical markets. Discover how they utilized KDP as a testing ground for market interest, leading to a booming workbook series that soared in popularity, thanks to smart social media strategies.
Finally, our chat takes a deeper look at the couple's viral breakthroughs and how they utilized TikTok Shop and Shopify to amplify their business. They share the behind-the-scenes of managing a small business through the highs of viral sales spikes and the challenges of inventory and listing protection. The duo also reflects on the profound impact that Amazon and TikTok Shop have had on their lives and the lives of influencers who have joined them on this journey. Tune in for a dose of inspiration and practical advice that could set you on your own path to e-commerce success.
In episode 532 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Josh, and Jenna discuss:
- 00:00 - Married Couple's E-Commerce Success Story
- 05:05 - Transitioning to E-Commerce
- 09:17 - Side Jobs to KDP and Amazon FBA
- 08:24 - Hooking With Software and Numbers
- 12:48 - Comparing Opportunities in FBA and KDP
- 17:40 - Transitioning to Full-Time E-commerce
- 20:53 - Viral Success on TikTok and Amazon
- 27:31 - Start Small Business With TikTok
- 31:50 - Learning in the Space
- 34:39 - Promoting Business With TikTok and Shopify
- 37:30 - Strategies for Promoting Products on TikTok
- 44:21 - The Importance of Branding in Strategy
- 45:19 - Amazon and TikTok's Impact on Lives
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► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got a married couple with an incredible story. In not even their first full year on Amazon, they've grossed over half a million dollars. And in not even their first full month on TikTok Shop, they've grossed over a quarter of a million dollars. And they're going to share how it's possible to set up a TikTok Shop account in only 10 minutes. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Esty, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on? Well, while you're on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. It's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We've got a husband and wife dynamic, serious seller duo here for the first time on the show the double J crew, josh and Jenna. How's it going, guys?
Josh:
Good.
Jenna:
Pretty well Thanks for having us.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, Awesome. Now where are you guys located?
Jenna:
We are right outside Philly.
0:01:45 - Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so you're on the East Coast, all right. So you guys were born and raised, or are you transplants from somewhere else?
Jenna:
So well, I'm a transplant. He is born and raised out here. I'm originally from the Midwest, the suburbs of Chicago.
Bradley Sutton:
In West Philadelphia born and raised. Oh sorry, probably back.
Josh:
Yes, yeah, oh she could sing it with you the whole thing.
Jenna:
Oh, yes, I could, yeah. We met in college out here and I kind of fell in love with the East Coast so we knew we wanted to raise our kids out here. So yeah, then we ended up out here.
Bradley Sutton:
You're supposed to say you fell in love with him and then you fell in love with the East Coast.
Jenna:
Right, yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, in that order there. Exactly what college did you guys meet?
Jenna:
We went to Nova Villanova.
Bradley Sutton:
Villanova Okay, yes, I knew one of my favorite Clippers was Kerry Kittles way back in the 90s.
Jenna:
Yeah, 85 here they won yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, so the reason I know him is funny. Here's just a really crazy story. You guys may or may not know. I used to be a Zumba fitness influencer and in my channel that I created on Zumba that had 30 million views. It was called CrazySockTV and I created that. It's kind of like a branding kind of thing. I wanted to be memorable so that people in memory is my brand, and just not to be some random person dancing Zumba, which was a million people. So what I would do is I would have a crazy like one sock on one leg and then one sock on an arm, and that was what I came up with. It was always a crazy sock, but where I originally got that idea was Kerry Kittles. He would just have one sock when he played with the Clippers, which is which is my team, and I'm like that is the most weirdest thing I've ever seen. I'm going to roll with that idea. And that went to tens of millions of Zumba video views and so, yeah, that's my Villanova tie right there. Anyways, all right. So you guys, what did each of you major in there?
Jenna:
My bachelor's was in marketing and he was finance. Math and finance yeah, I mean he took everything for fun math, he loves math. So like that, my fine classes were like astronomy and his were, I don't know, derivatives and anything he could with math.
Bradley Sutton:
What did you guys do after graduation then? Did you, either of you, enter into that world that you guys were studying?
Jenna:
We did. We did a little bit. So I did marketing for my dad's financial planning firm and then I decided I wanted to be a teacher. I got my master's of education, went down that route and then we were actually living in Chicago for the beginning of our first quarters. And then we had our twins and moved back out to the East coast and I definitely took a good break there for like the better part of a decade and didn't really jump back into anything until like until this. I mean not really fully into anything, until this.
Bradley Sutton:
And then, Josh, what were you doing all this, all this time? I'm assuming you were the income, then if she was taking a break, so what were you doing?
Josh:
Yep. All sorts of things in finance Consulting.
Jenna:
Yeah, so working too many hours a week
Josh:
Flying a hundred thousand miles a year, like domestically only, which you. You probably fly that in four trips, but around the world domestically, that's a harder target to hit.
Bradley Sutton:
So, yeah, this doesn't sound like an exciting job. So what? What was the thought process on, like how you guys ended up with e-commerce? Was it just like all right, I don't want to do this always? Or were you looking for a side hustle? Or how do you go from the finance and marketing world to and the stay at home you know world, to switch to e-commerce?
Jenna:
So I mean that was definitely part of it. The time constraints and I think the idea that there could be some passive component to e-commerce was interesting. But I really was. I mean, josh knows I would. I was admiring e-commerce for like the better part of a decade. I was that person that everything I looked at I was like, oh, I could create this, I can make it better, even with educational stuff and tools and resources. I was making my own and kind of like just admiring it from afar and saying, you know, when it's the right time, then then I'll go into it, cause we are not like the dip your toe in type of people. We are like the 50 foot cannonball jump ball in. It's not like we're just going to try, you know, like a product and see how it goes. When we I knew when we were going to go in it was going to be all in. So I was waiting for life to slow down and it was really like actually the craziest, the easiest time of our life and I kind of just had this like epiphany that life doesn't really slow down, no matter how old your kids get. So if I don't do it now, it's probably now or never.
Jenna:
I can remember I think it was like a month after we got out of the hospital with my son. So our oldest son has epilepsy and he had about a year of failed anti seizure meds and treatments and it was just in and out of the hospital and they eventually came up. So they have this all over the country but it's the medical ketogenic diet for epilepsy. So they put him on that and we had to go to the hospital and we had to learn all about it and I kind of had this moment of I was like this is more intense and exhausting than twins. This has been my dream forever. I'm like if I don't jump in now, I'm never going to do it.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, was there something that made you that's still not a natural thing to just like jump into, like, like? Did you get hit with an ad somewhere, or where you're searching how to make money at home? Or how did you land on Ecom?
Jenna:
So I definitely found a couple ads there, because there were. I did take a couple courses that were teaching you how you can sell on Amazon and I had already had ideas and I kind of thought selling an Amazon? I didn't understand the process of it. So I was like, all right, so I think I can figure this out. There's courses to do it. So I took the courses, I downloaded like a ton of podcasts and he knew I kind of like dug into this whole of like just learning and education and I didn't want to bring it to him until I was like I can do great. Yeah, you're like you're doing great, you're doing your own thing. Like I said, we're not like a dip your toe in type of person. I didn't want to bring it to him until I thought this is something he would like to. So I really just kind of like dug in on the courses and I already knew the things I wanted to create, but I didn't understand like the science, the research behind it and it's funny we were talking about this. I was like, okay, so I listened to your Serious Sellers Podcast before I could understand 10% of what you said and I remember like listening to one of your podcasts and a few others like it and I was like this is amazing, this part I don't understand creating design innovation. I understand the numbers.
Bradley Sutton:
We're here talking, by the way, about more or less 2019, 2020, 2021. Last year, fall of 2022.
Jenna:
Yeah, yeah. So I listened to one of your episodes and a couple others and I was like, oh, my goodness, josh would love this. There's software, there's research, there's numbers that can go into this. So basically I hooked him by showing him that kind of stuff. I was like, look, if you can do the product research and you can tell me the numbers and you can do this, I will design and create their products. And look, they have software like Helium 10, he was like lit up. He's like this is fantastic, I can play. I mean, he was playing around in it before we even had our first product like that. Yeah, like before we even really knew if we were going to do a product yet.
Josh:
And now I'm like now we're here. What happened yeah?
Jenna:
So I hooked him with that kind of stuff. We're very different, very different in terms of like, our interest and what we like, and I think it actually helps in this industry. So yeah, that's it. I knew I wanted to for a long time. I don't think he knew we wanted to until he saw that aspect of the business that I could kind of hook him in.
Bradley Sutton:
So at this time you still weren't working yourself. Only Josh was.
Jenna:
I've done a lot of things on the side, like I would just say side jobs and stuff. Like you know, I've done network marketing and coaching and stuff like that.
Josh:
Coaching sports yes.
Jenna:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
What sport did you coach?
Jenna:
I coached volleyball. I played volleyball in college, so I just here whenever. I could camps and helped at schools and stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
But you had, you had the kind of bandwidth, but. But, but, josh, you know, you know traveling everything. If it was up to him it probably might not have gotten done because he was pretty busy then. So that's an important thing to know. Like, hey, maybe it's the husband, maybe it's a wife, but but you know you got to have somebody who's able to dedicate some time to this, or else you might never get started. So then you guys, you know, started dipping yourselves into Two courses and now the very first product that you launched, uh, are you still selling that product now?
Jenna:
Yeah, but well, I mean it's of our FBA product we have, yeah, we have. We launched our first ones for KDP books and then our first product we launched last summer.
Bradley Sutton:
Talk about that for a second. What made you go that route?
Jenna:
So KDP, I mean, well, it's inexpensive. And I already was creating designs and things like that and I knew that was something that we could do while we're learning, because we wanted to. When we wanted to launch products, we knew that we wanted to launch more than one at a time and we wanted to make sure we had the research into it and we knew they were going to take a while, especially, coming up to you know, the timing of the year that we were looking at sourcing products was a little tricky.
Josh:
It was January, right, yeah, it was a year ago, yeah a year ago was when we launched our first KDP book in February of last year and it was Really based on. She knew the audience that she wanted to serve, but we had to test the content and we felt like KDP was a good place to test the content of like a meal planner and fitness type Trackers and budget planner, and then on the education side, cursive workbooks and you know things of that nature. Because when you look at the you know audience that she wanted to serve, my Research coming out of it was trying to find you know products that interested or that, um, that Audience wanted at the time. And so that's why we used KDP is we got to kind of test content and then we also got to test PPC, play with it and learn it and in a in a real experimental way, instead of With an FBA product that was going to require a you know a large Upfront investment and inventory and all that kind of stuff and we had started that process. But it takes a while.
Bradley Sutton:
So, but basically you use a lot of the similar strategies, like using Helium 10 to see demand and, and that's how you like landed on what KDP thing you were going to uh, launch and how to optimize your listing things like that. at what point then Were you like hey, not a lot, I want to do physical products.
Jenna:
So some of our designs that went into the KDP books are actually used in our physical products. Um, we edited them, made them a little bit better. We were able to use some reviews. So, for example, we have a meal planner, fitness tracker, or I think we call that the advanced meal planner and fitness tracker in KDP, um, and then we were able to make some improvements on that to make it into one of our vegan leather planners, um, but yeah, so, like we, those designs took me A lot of time to focus on and creating those. So we just had to make some adjustments to make those doable and we were able to get samples and stuff as we put out that KDP book. We were getting samples because we knew we wanted to eventually make it in FBA. We knew that there was more money obviously in FBA than KDP.
Bradley Sutton:
Were you able to do things by going, you know, directly to somebody who actually physically produced this? That was not an option with KDP, like a certain kind of Cover or something like that that you just literally could not even do KDP Uh, what are some of those things?
Jenna:
the KDP books. You can only do paperback or hardcover. You can have limited size Um and, as you know, with FBA you can do anything you want, really. I mean, you can create any material, cover, um things in our meal planner, fitness tracker. One of the things that I wanted was that they could tear off their grocery list and take it with them. You can't have perforated pages in a KDP book, um, and that's also, I think, where you can get seen on KDP versus you're. You're shown everywhere on amazon right and isn't KDP, I believe it's just the books that you're shown in yeah, you, you're shown in.
Josh:
You're shown in search To an extent, but it's an ISPN Then identified a product, not an ASIN, not a traditional like ASIN Uh product. So, yeah, you're definitely Limited as to where you show up.
0:13:50 - Bradley Sutton:
Do you use it kind of like as a like an incubator almost for some of your FBA, like if it really takes off with KDP, then that's what you maybe double down on and make a physical uh copy.
Josh:
I will. I will say yes, and our most successful product, which we launched in December, that that most recently, um, fortunately exploded on like TikTok and such, is really a culmination of like a case study in that it's a handwriting set of handwriting workbooks that have disappearing ink and such and Most of that content you know. She built over time and we released in A variety of different like KDP workbooks while she was. You know, we kind of in always in mind had man, it would be great to do this one thing. The keyword always looked great, there were so many things about it that we felt like we could improve and we were so excited about it. But we knew it would take a lot of time and KDP's content kind of feeling and seeing how things worked was really a huge part of the design over like a nine month period before we released those in December.
Jenna:
And we're still using our KDP designs into new things. We have our newest product coming out, the bible verse mapping that. We're working on getting those out by spring and they were in KDP and now we're able to get those and a linen cover. A different thing for spring, for FBA products.
Bradley Sutton:
What's your, what's your average Retail price on the KDP side? And then, of those, how much do you take home?
Josh:
well, our average, every one of our products on KDP is 999, except for the homeschool planner, which is 1499, and on the, the Products that are nine, that call it ten dollars. On the products that are ten dollars, we take home about $2 and 60 cents A sale, and then on the homeschool planner, we take home about $3 and 80 cents, 90 cents give or take.
Bradley Sutton:
And then are you doing PBC for this at all, or it's just all organic?
Josh:
Yeah, we do. I think our total PBC spend on KDP is about $15 a day maybe. So it's small. Obviously it's all relative, but um, but that 1500 a month is net of you know PBC charges specifically. So it's a pretty low a cost Process. As long as you don't get sucked into chasing physical products, you stay in your lane, recognize that you're a KDP product and not try to go after FBA products not that I ever tried that then you can. You can do fine.
Bradley Sutton:
It's separate log on for KDP and you're a seller central, because that that's kind of like a different. It's not seller central, I know, but how different is the interface for advertising? I know Shavali you know probably knows this but I've never done Advertising for KDP Is it very similar, like you know, you can do, you know, phrase match and Sponsored and campaigns.
Josh:
Almost an hour,
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Okay, cool. Were you selling the entirety of 2023, or did you start later, not January?
Josh:
KDP. Our first one was February, and then our second one was like April, and then our first FBA product was July 1.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so not a full year of KDP, not a full year, obviously, of FBA. What would you say if you were to combine the gross sales of both on Amazon, only For your planners and things? What? What would you say? It was total at the end of the end of the year in the past year, Since well we haven't been out of here, but yeah okay, yeah, so total 2023?
Josh:
About 400,000.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you still doing your day job or did you at some point last year that go all in on the Ecom?
Josh:
It took about like eight days to realize that there's no chance I was gonna not be able to To like go all in into this.
Jenna:
it was too much fun. Yeah, you and, and the hours you worked, and the time you worked, I mean, I mean not to say that you don't right now, where it has, we're starting everything up, but uh, yeah, I mean we're trying to launch a good amount of stuff.
Josh:
It's a lot different being on a plane a hundred thousand Miles a year than it is being, you know, up late at night talking with manufacturers or something, but still in your own house. It's a little different.
Bradley Sutton:
Was this your first year? In a few years that you're, you didn't make your high status on your travel?
Josh:
I absolutely it was a second year, but it was the first year I haven't been on an airplane in like my entire life.
Jenna:
Really amazing yeah, when was. I mean I guess, so yeah, no, we've really.
Josh:
Because after COVID we actually started driving Everyone like if we went somewhere, love it to the kids, like it and and frankly it's fun for the two of us.
Jenna:
And the things we like to do. I mean we love to go to the mountains and snowboard. They're all close enough here the ocean, the beach, all that stuff is driving distance from here, which, growing up in the Midwest, that's not possible. So I love that we can just get to anything within a couple hours by the way, it was great, great story.
Josh:
We're in the Midwest and after school and she's like, oh, we, you can snowboard here. And I was like, awesome, where? And we she's like I'll take you this place. And we're driving and the nav you know those old Tom Tom. Things right is like this is when we live in Chicago over after we got married two miles you're at your destination and I'm like Jen, I can see about 15 miles in any direction right now there is nowhere to. Actually I don't believe. I like kind of I want to believe you. Yeah, I was like this is like a sled.
Jenna:
We found a hill somewhere that we turn into is yeah, so yeah, we like the mountains out here.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, well, don't got much of that here exactly in my town when I live, few miles from the beach here in California. But all right now, at what point did you guys discover TikTok shop?
Josh:
one of your serious seller podcasts in the. In the fall you had on a create some, a creator who did a video, a viral video that went viral for, I think, one of Lizzie's products, but I forget exactly which one it was might have been the body suit One of them, but you had someone on that was explaining, kind of somehow some of the worked and it was super intriguing. And then we went to the meeting in New York where Lizzie spoke and Jenna drove home and you set it up in New York City and I set up the. I set up our TikTok shop in the car on the hot spot.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, what they're talking about, guys, by the way, is we have their helium-10 elite members and we have a quarterly in-person workshop for Helium 10 members and we did one in New York and we brought somebody Elizabeth, who's been on the podcast before talking about TikTok shop, and she kind of broke down exactly what she did, and I remember you guys at that it was like light bulbs were going off in your head as you guys were watching. We're like wait, wait a minute, we've got a perfect Kind of product that would do well on TikTok shop. So then you got home or he said on the way home, not even you weren't even home yet, you're already setting it up on the way home in the car, yeah, I feel like in the car, because the kids are with my great, with their, my parents.
Jenna:
They're great kids for a couple days, but you draw like literally on the drive. I mean, what is it? That's less than three hours from New York, oh yeah it's a couple hours. He was done by the time we got back. He's like we're set up, let's go. I was like are you kidding me?
Bradley Sutton:
Now, at what point there were you like oh man, we're on to something like what was your first kind of like viral day, or?
Josh:
Frankly, Christmas was our first viral day. On Christmas Day, you know, I had Alerts on, like sale alerts on TikTok, because we didn't get too many before that. So we had sales, but not compared to Amazon. And so our phone. I'm like it's Christmas, leave me alone, who is bothering me? And I was like not that many family and friends are trying to say Merry Christmas. And so it was sales. And we had no idea what was going on. And it was a you know video that was about 10 seconds long, that someone had posted, that had picked up and had, you know, half a million views that day and a million by the next, and the following day, sold us out of our meal planners. I was about 500 on TikTok and about 800 on Amazon so at that point.
Bradley Sutton:
Sold out in like two days.
Josh:
Yeah, it generated more Amazon Sales than TikTok shop, even though it was from TikTok shop for that first product.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, as well as our website, so you didn't have like a link. It was just like it got sold out and then people were just trying to search for it on Amazon, you know, to try and get it, and they found your product through there.
Josh:
Yep and our website, yeah, and we found where they found it was be banner ads, like sponsored display ads, because they recognized the Products or if they would search for something meal planner or fitness or whatever. Our banner ads had like a you know 6% a cost. I remember we're looking at them and I was like, oh, that's what. Like they didn't necessarily know what to search because I didn't really think about it at the time. We just had the title as Grace will buy design meal planner or fitness tracker or something, whereas all the conversions, PPC were happening from there. And that's when we kind of realized you know, there's something to this, to your point about your question about when did we realize like this was a thing, when we realized how well these markets could play off each other and help each other. That was when that day, Christmas in the day after, is when I was like oh yeah, oh wow, like this is, this is a thing.
Jenna:
I think you were pretty excited about it pretty early though, yeah.
Josh:
I was excited.
Jenna:
I'm the pessimist, I was the one that was like I don't know. I mean, we're still. We just had our second product go viral, even more so, and I'm still like I don't know if we should we get the inventory. Is it gonna repeat?
Josh:
Yeah, it probably won't work. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
So now the planners on Amazon. This is not, this wasn't your KDP, this is a physical one. So what's the retail price on these? On Amazon?
Josh:
$19.99
Bradley Sutton:
$It was 19.99, and then so what? What kind of profit margin on Amazon?
Josh:
Actually before PPC about 50%. So they're 240 landed plus small stand. We we made sure that packaged their point seven, four inches thick so that we can fit in Small standard. So basically about a 50% or shade above 50% margin and then with PPC, with. PPC, like if you take launch and everything in the consideration. The first, you know Three, four months which was the end of last year, where you know we 20% net margins on, including launch.
Bradley Sutton:
So about 20%, probably more. You know if we're not considering launch in there now. I yeah. Now if, what kind of retail price did you have it on TikTok shop? Did you still keep it at 1999 or did you take advantage of how you can just add shipping and TikTok pays for it? Or at least they were before?
Josh:
So we did not do that where we lower the price, because so TikTok shop for Sellers who use seller shipping which is what we were doing, because we are fulfilling some of it from our Amazon inventory, for example, all of it from our Amazon inventory that if you spent $20 as a customer, they would pay for shipping, TikTok shop meaning so the the customer would get it for free for shipping and then TikTok shop would reimburse us and Basically, the $7.99 it's like for one item Quantity of one is what they would do. So we would make the product $20 and shipping $7.99 and as long as we do that, the customer doesn't pay shipping and we get the $20 and reimbursed for shipping at $7.99. So 27.
Bradley Sutton:
So on Amazon, let's say that you were taking home, you know, after PPC and stuff you know like, let's say, six bucks or something like that. You know maybe five, six dollars or so, which is which is pretty decent on Amazon. Not many people can say that. But then, for that same order, on TikTok shop, how much money were you taking due to TikTok, like subsidizing your, your fees and all this other stuff?
Josh:
Yep. So basically, to break it down, so we would get the $20 Minus the 20% commission that went to that creator, right, so we would get $16 for the product Plus the $7.99 for the shipping reimbursement, so $23.99 that we would receive, and TikTok pays the influencer directly. We don't have to do all that accounting, thank goodness. So 2399 that we would receive, it's 240 landed and our MCF fee to like ship and deliver an item to a customer is $8 and change but eight, call it $8. So $23.99 in and Around $11 and 50 cents out, so double plus.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, double or more the profit margin for the exact same product on TikTok shop. Now what's this, Jenna? Are you doing some kind of Like? Are you the influencer for your own product to like? Are you doing like lives or videos or some? Or am I getting you guys Confused with somebody?
Jenna:
I mean I do it, I do it, um, it's you know, I really More so. I mean they had different promotions that they were running that you could get ad credits for doing lives. That's why I don't think I get a lot of traffic and that's really not, in my opinion, where we get a large amount of sales, the sales I mean especially with our group books. That's well, that was all because of videos and influencers. So it gave us ad credits, which was great, um, but personally I'm not. I do it for the business, but I'm not a fan of being in front of the camera any more than I need to. But I was all for, you know, starting up a small business. When they were like I think it was like $1500 in ad credits, I was like I'll do it, let's do it, you know that's what it was.
Josh:
No, you're right. During December, if you went live, you know a certain amount of time and Spent 1500, they would give you 1500 an ad credit. And so we basically did that, and the day the promotion ended, they deposited 15 like they were exactly as they Said it would be, and she was tortured every minute that she was live.
Jenna:
So I would never classify myself as an influencer. I that's what I love about take talk shop that you can use the professionals that that do that as your influencers.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So now you guys I mean technically, if you know Christmas was, was around. You know was around where you really started taking off. You know, by the time that we're recording this podcast, you know, maybe you, like you, can talk about your first full month of TikTok shop. What were the gross sales on that platform?
Josh:
Since, if you include Christmas in that time, there 250,000 dollars.
Bradley Sutton:
In one week in one, in one month, in one month in one month in one thirty 70-72 hour period.
Josh:
They were 180,000 dollars.
Jenna:
That was that group books viral video, which was crazy yeah and it's amazing to me still, because we had a few large influencers that were, like you know, half a million followers. That I'm like I was the optimist for those. I'm like this is gonna be the one, and they did great videos and the video that took off. That's what I like 9 million views, knowing I don't know, I mean she had, I think, just under 40,000 and which is still big, but it's not like the half million or, you know, near a million followers, that we had other people. So you just don't know and I mean the video was good.
Bradley Sutton:
So the fact that you guys did a 250 or quarter of a million, does that mean that your influencers took home like 50 grand themselves for doing videos, so that that influencers specifically.
Josh:
Generated, yeah, single mom she's like the nicest person and we were so happy because she sent a message. You know that the commission was like life-changing, she was ready to get to be done with this and it was 30,000 and change in commission income that she generated based on her post and that, just like that's again when further, it has furthered this point of like you don't have to be the influencer because you know Jenna can be Jenna and Talk to the influencers, which again we try to do like on it, like we write Cards to them when they make content, like all of those types of things, and then it's so much more natural and the creators love doing posts on Jenna's products because she can relate to them and she cares, like she genuinely cares, and it was so cool to see that from a couple of the moms that I've had really successful posts on our products, that you just sit there and you're like this is a great, great business model, that even though they're increasing TikTok shop, increasing their referral fees, no problem, worth every penny.
Bradley Sutton:
You know you guys have some hijackers on some. You must have be out of stock or something. You guys know about that. I'm just looking at your day, your story now.
Josh:
Yep all right, you guys need to take care of that.
Bradley Sutton:
do some tests we already those guys offers that, do you mind if I show people your product page here.?
Josh:
Yeah, all right, let me um they're the worst because the shipping is like weeks and weeks and weeks that we ordered it right. Yeah, it's killing.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean the fact you know that that's when you that, by the way, that that's when it's like you know, until you get it fixed, you know where you might want to like suppress your listing, where you take out the images and then nobody can sell on it. You know, so that you know your Every day that somebody has it active. You're like losing your, your keyword ranking, your conversion rate and stuff like that. So if you don't think you're gonna fix that right away, you know, try and get your listing suppressed somehow, you know taking out the image is doing something.
Josh:
I said that this is where you're always learning in this space because, yeah, these are problems that you didn't know would be problems. Inventory management didn't know that was a problem till all of a sudden it was a Problem. So it's been great to have resources and help from people like you know, Helium 10 folks and other folks in the space, which is Such a help because you're going through for the first time.
Bradley Sutton:
So then, going back to your main product, which is in stock here, this is the main one that you sell on TikTok as well, right, and the ones that that went viral before.
Josh:
It was the first one that went viral. It's not the largest selling of our products anymore, but it's the second, and it was the one that was here first. This product released in August yeah, august.
Bradley Sutton:
Did this originally start as KDP or this was a from scratch?
Josh:
Oh yeah, you may yep, no, we did a version of this via KDP, which, if yeah, Jenna’s author page is like amazon.com/author/jennacoleman, and that's where KDP stuff is and there's a there's a 11. It's called like the advanced meal, the advanced weekly meal planner Yep, but yeah, we reached a PSR of like two and then it all went out of stock.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So then this you know, and then this is, this is what you also have on your TikTok page, and so doing some cool numbers, all right. So so you, you showed me the other day like there is a for anybody who has a, an Amazon account and a Shopify account. They can literally start TikTok shop. I Within like what? 20 minutes, would you say, or less, or?
Josh:
Yeah, I mean we've had some people that have taken Time to like if they have a sole prop, like where they don't have a business in some ways, like where they don't have an EIN or some things. There's been some people. That has taken some time. But TikTok's due diligence on you as a company, the Shopify system, seems to Serve as enough validation for TikTok shop that they're good to go and you get set up pretty quick with a shop and Then an ad account on the business side. Then it pulls from their Amazon inventory.
Bradley Sutton:
Then it pulls from their Amazon inventory. So I, you know, I, you guys, don't have a way to share your screen, but maybe you can just verbally Walk through those steps. So somebody has their Amazon account and then do they need to have the Shopify account already tied to their Amazon through, like by with Prime?
Josh:
Yeah, so okay. So good question, but not by with Prime. For fulfilling on TikTok shop by with Prime can be used on your actual Shopify website, like if you have your website on Shopify but you don't actually need a website to do the TikTok Shopify Amazon integration as long as you have the program Shopify. There's two sides to it. There's the TikTok side and there is a native app. In other words, TikTok shop has built an app that sits on Shopify's Interface so you can download on Shopify the TikTok app that allows you to create your shop and Create your business center and ads manager. Right. So all from Shopify to TikTok shop so it can push To TikTok and then, if you have like a personal TikTok account, it Can link that to your store and convert it to a business account basically.
Bradley Sutton:
In Shopify. What? Where do they go and Shopify if they have their Shopify account? They got their Amazon account. What's the? If they're not tied together, how do you do? They need to get it from the Amazon app store, the Shopify app from the Amazon app store, to tie it to the Shopify account?
Josh:
In the Shopify app store, there is a TikTok app and an Amazon MCF app. They need both.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so you do it through Shopify instead of Amazon. We do it in the middle.
Josh:
Yeah, and then the Amazon MCF app is what pulls from Amazon and all they do really there is they have to sync up to skew right to make sure that the skew and Shopify matches the one in Amazon, which the app will say you're good, and then that your shipping map. So if you say standard shipping defaults to MCF standard, if you've ever done an MCF, the person has done an MCF order. Then it will say okay, when an order comes in and you fulfill it, it's gonna fulfill via Whichever MCF option, standard option. So that way TikTok shop syncs immediately to Shopify. Shopify pulls the inventory and ships it and then Shopify gives the tracking number back to TikTok shop
Bradley Sutton:
And then when you, when you, you know, set up your TikTok shop From your Shopify and if your Shopify is already pulling in your Amazon, you know Images and things like that, the Shopify Site, it publishes all your images and description and stuff to TikTok shop, right?
Josh:
Yep.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow. So, guys, this is not rocket science where you have to know coding and a bunch of crazy things in order to get up and running, but, at the same time, it's not something that, hey, you just turn it on and you make a quarter of a million dollars, you know, in a month. It requires you know it's heavily on influencers. So what's your guys' best suggestions of somebody's just setting up? They do everything you just said until now. They've got their Amazon store. Now they've got their Shopify set up. Now they set up their TikTok shop. It's pulling. It's all tied to Shopify and tied to Amazon. How do I get eyeballs in front of my product?
Josh:
The two biggest recommendations we would say is that. So I'll let her say on our account what we should have, because there are some things that you should have on your account when an influencer looks you up, it's kind of like having a website if they go to your shop and you don't have any posts or anything. So I'll let her cover that. But on the flip side, on the affiliate side, you know, you can go into the affiliate dashboard right inside TikTok shop and you have immediate, direct access to creators and that is really where you can do 50 at a time where you can reach out to. You can create a message, select a product that you want to offer them a commission to promote, and they'll receive your DM right in their affiliate dashboard that invites them to promote that product. And so being able to get in there and send 50 of those a day to reach out to folks that are relevant to at least your audience and be careful not just going after huge creators. You're able to see how each creator does. You're able to see their sales, their engagement, all that kind of stuff, and you can go and directly reach out and just use the hard work method instead of the blast or spend money just throwing money to be there, money to build your awareness. You can do manual reach outs, but then on our page.
Jenna:
So I would say I think in the beginning, no matter what, it's hard to get influencers to talk to you because you haven't had any product sales right. They can see how much they can see, so I think it's really important to focus on connecting with them and I think a lot of influencers, when they're sharing a product, they don't just want to know what it is and how much it is, they want to know the story behind it. So a lot of the ones that we connected with especially some of the bigger influencers where they have plenty of options of what to share they kind of want to know the story behind your product and a lot of people love to know when there is a small business owner behind it. Why did you create it? Who are you? What went into this? And that helps in connecting in the story. So a lot of them use that I've connected with the fact that I'm a homeschool parent and a lot of them are homeschool parents in terms of some of the educational stuff or other ones I've connected with. I'm a former public school teacher too and they connected the fact that we you know that we were both educators. Some of it is mom life and connecting with you know busy meal planning and just connecting in different ways. So if you're just honest about your story, sometimes it's the things that surprised me that we had connections on that. They were like, wow, that's really cool, I also have a kid, you know one with allergies on a specific diet that you know. I saw you, you know you created a meal planner or something and so different ways to connect the making of your products and sharing in those Like.
Jenna:
I try to do reels a little bit on that and sometimes that will help because I think when they're considering they go through and see some of your reels that you've created not just your products they don't just go to your storefront. I will notice they'll sometimes like my reels and my reels don't have many views. A lot of them have, like you know, like a hundred, a couple hundred, but the influencers were go and check to see, you know like, and sometimes I'll talk about why I made the product the way I did or the features of it. So I really tried to push on that in the beginning because I think that helped connect with influencers. But then once you do have a product that goes viral and they see that you, you know you have a business that could help them as well then they come to you but it doesn't start that way, then they come to you, right. So now it's different, which is nice, but I would say in the beginning, the pessimist in me, I was like, oh my goodness, how are we ever going to like get them to come to us? Or like we're a small business that haven't proven that we can, but it really does, yeah. It does change.
Bradley Sutton:
When you go into that portal you know there's probably a hundred thousand influencers, a million influencers, whatever, in there. How are you picking and choosing those 50 that you want to reach out to first?
Jenna:
Really the same way that I think they're choosing us Like. I try to find people that connect with our brand. So when they're talking about educational stuff or their kids or I see that they have an interest in in recipes and cooking and things like that we try to find ways that are natural connections. So that's part of it.
Josh:
Because you can search by interest. Yes, so in the affiliate dashboard you can search by interest.
Jenna:
Right and then and then you know that's the really cool part about it To have that background view into people that that are going to be sharing your products. You can like go see what they're all about on their page. So it doesn't take long. But you know we usually spend time checking out their page before we even message someone.
Bradley Sutton:
All right Now, before we get into you know some, some just quick hitting strategies from you guys. If people want to reach out to you, I mean, they can obviously see your, your brand, and I just showed it. You know, graceful by design. But if people want to reach out to you guys for more questions or help with either TikTok or KDP or any of your specialties, how can they find you guys on the interwebs out there?
Josh:
The interwebs. I would say the best place is, you know, jenna. jenna@gracefulbydesigncom.
Jenna:
I do check on graceful by design for TikTok or Instagram. It's at graceful by design LLC, but either one of those. I do check the messaging in there, but yeah, it is.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's go ahead and get into your, SST 60 second tip or 60 second strategy. You know, maybe, maybe one each gives us any strategy that you think will be beneficial to our listeners.
0:42:51 - Josh:
I'm going to do a quick strategy on folks who are newer or who are getting into, maybe wanting to get into the space, in case someone like that is watching. Um, cause, this has been, you know, a real thing for us over the past year from, you know, building this together, and I would say that the biggest thing in the e-com is that you have to remember is that cash flow timing and the business right, the real business aspects of any business, hold true in the Ecom right. So, cash flow timing, when you're thinking about getting into a business and you see, you know again some of the courses out there that just say you know, things are easy and things are this and you can make money quickly, and all those types of things, I just would say that, uh, from a cautionary perspective, that you know, remember, this is a business that costs money and when you sell more on something like Amazon or TikTok shop, you need more reserves that they hold and you have to spend more on inventory and so and so those. That's just like a fundamental business practice. That I wanted to make sure you know we said is that it's not a, you know, fairytale industry. It's a hard work. You know business, real business, and I feel like that gets blushed over a little bit with a lot of the things that are out there. So that that's just in general, a principle and uh, and then my less way, less than 60 second tip is that you know your. Your biggest strength still is your brand, and to build a strategy today without a brand, I think is just challenging, because then you can just be you. So when you're reaching out to influencers or you're designing product, you can really actually relate to it, in addition to it being good research and all that kind of stuff, because people know whether you care about what it is that you're selling or making.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, it's been really great to see your journey, you know, from just learning about TikTok shop at that conference. And then you know selling out and then, and then guys, they can hire me just out there. So I don't have any website or anything, but they're now my customers for my family running 3PLs Cause I have a warehouse here and I found out that they were, they were struggling with shipping. So I'm like, hey, let me take your planners here and let me have my family help you guys ship. So they're shipping. You know 20-30 of these planners all the time. So, like it's really cool to first hand see, see your growth and uh, and now you know you're putting a food on the table of that one influencer. Well, not, not now you're. You're employing my family as well. So, but yeah, you're changing lives here left and right. I'm sure you're changing lives with people who have listened to this episode learning about the potential uh on KDP um with uh TikTok shop as well. So we'll definitely want to, you know, reach back out to you guys next, uh, next year, and see how. You know, we just got with you on your first full month of TikTok shop. Let let's see what happens after a full year of Amazon and TikTok shop. You guys will be probably have some cool stories to share. So thank you so much for joining us.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week.
TikTok Shop links could soon become a lot more common across the social media app. https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/30/24055388/tiktok-shoppable-videos-automatic-product-discovery
Amazon continues to increase the speed with which it can get deliveries to customers. https://www.geekwire.com/2024/amazon-delivery-gets-faster-with-65-jump-in-number-of-same-day-and-overnight-items-in-u-s/
Walmart plans to build or convert more than 150 large-format stores over the next five years. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/31/walmart-plans-to-add-150-more-stores-across-us.html
Etsy’s new Gift Mode is an interactive hub, powered by AI and human curation https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/features/news-briefs/etsy-debuts-personalized-ai-powered-gift-mode
China’s Temu in US online ads blitz in challenge to Amazon https://www.ft.com/content/7717fa78-a102-405f-83d5-b8750dc5b6c0
Consult-a-Friend is the latest feature to make shopping on Amazon more social and collaborative. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-introduces-consult-a-friend-mobile-shopping-experience
Walmart suppliers and Marketplace sellers can launch, manage and review performance across their Brand Shop and Shelf pages through the Walmart Ad Center using Shop Builder. https://advertisinghelp.walmart.com/s/guides?channel=ShopBuilder&article=000011167
TikTok is reportedly planning to open studios https://www.tubefilter.com/2024/01/30/tiktok-livestream-shopping-studios/
Beware of misleading discounts on Amazon products promoted in news articles with affiliate links https://people.com/fykee-cordless-stick-vacuum-deal-january-2024-8553406
Lastly, Bradley shares how you can start with Amazon Brazil with just the click of a button and not having to send any inventory there. Also, Bradley shows you how can you use some of the Helium 10 tools in the said marketplace.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 01:00 - Easier to Hijack Listings?
- 03:47 - TikTok Expanding Shopping
- 06:04 - Faster Amazon Shipping
- 07:24 - New Walmart Stores
- 10:26 - Etsy Gift Mode
- 11:22 - Temu Ad Blitz
- 12:33 - Amazon Phone A Friend
- 13:59 - Walmart Shop & Shelf
- 14:27 - TikTok Studios
- 15:29 - Fake Deals
- 17:13 - Follow us on TikTok
- 17:52 - New Feature Alerts
Listen in as Bradley shares the latest on Project X and how we're shaking up the game with our coffin shelf product. He tackles the challenge of fierce competition and relentless price wars not by slashing our prices, but by creatively enhancing our product's value. With the inclusion of quirky accessories like mini skulls and pumpkins, we've managed to not only raise our price by $10 but also to give our product a unique edge that customers love. Bradley also opens up about our strategy for listing optimization using Helium 10's tools, which could revolutionize the way you manage your Amazon listings.
This episode also takes you behind the scenes of our coffin shelf launch, revealing the thought process behind our unique packaging solution that has both charmed and intrigued our customers. Drawing inspiration from the concept of heart-shaped gift boxes, we introduced coffin-shaped gift boxes that serve a dual purpose, adding an innovative flair to the traditional storage functionality. As we unpack the hurdles of custom packaging and marketing tactics, you'll gain insights into how these elements contribute to our premium pricing model. Plus, don't miss out on the invaluable product validation and research techniques that could be the difference between success and failure in your Amazon ventures. Join us for a blend of practical advice, personal experiences, and strategic approaches to Amazon product differentiation and market success.
In episode 531 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:
- 00:00 - Revitalizing Project X With Product Differentiation
- 03:16 - Selling Out and Replacing Products
- 09:51 - Coffin Shelf Launch With Unique Packaging
- 10:54 - Two-in-One Coffin Product and Packaging Idea
- 17:47 - Watch Out For Future Episodes
- 20:43 - Recommendations for Beginners on Helium 10
- 21:42 - Product Validation and Research Techniques
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got an update to our Project X series where we show you step by step how, with our coffin shelf product, I'm trying to tackle the problem of having price wars and increased competition, and I found a way where, instead of lowering the price, I could actually raise my price by over $10. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Do you want to see how your listing or maybe competitors listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you want to compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other? Maybe you want to see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings? You can do that and more with the Helium 10 tool listing analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly ask me anything training. This is something that we do every week for our series sellers club and elite members, and then, once a month, we open it up to everybody out there. Go ahead and have an opportunity to come on and ask questions, and I'm also going to give some cool training tips that will help you this time, especially with your product research, and I'm actually going to be going deep into Project X. That's why I'm wearing my Project X hat here. I'm going to show you some updates on what is going on with Project X and, like my thought process, on how I am revitalizing the original product. How many people don't know what Project X is Basically? Project X is a series that we did on YouTube a few years ago, where we found some products and then we basically took it from zero to here. As a matter of fact, it's here in my background.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me go pull this product. So this was one of the products that we had. It's a shelf shape like a coffin. So this was a product that we found using helium 10 techniques. We launched it and now we've sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of this product. And now I was like, hey, I need to let me explain what happened. My sales had gone way down on this coffin shelf and there's a couple of things I noticed. Has that ever happened to you guys, where maybe your keyword rank starts going down on your main keyword and now you're unable to make the sales that you used to be making before. Well, that was what was happening with our product. One of the reasons was that everybody started lowering their price. We used to sell this coffin shelf for over $30. Over $30, and people started coming at $26, $25, $23, even, like now, $20. They were selling a similar coffin shelf and so we were like all right, this something has got to go. Now, if we maintained our keyword rank, we still would have been doing okay, but our keyword rank just wouldn't go up above like 10 or 15 anymore.
Bradley Sutton:
So what I've been doing is I've been trying to sell out. We actually had run out of stock, but then Amazon miraculously found 25 units of our coffin shelf somewhere, and so the listing went live again. But I've been trying to sell out of this product over the last couple of weeks, and then a few months ago, I started development on something that would kind of replace this product. But let me explain my thought process here, and this is something that maybe one of you guys could do to one of your products. All right, so let me show you my thought process. All right, so you guys should be able to see our coffin shelf. This is our real product. It was out of stock for like a month and again, like I said, amazon just found it again, and so that's why you see a little bit of sales here.
Bradley Sutton:
But the first thing I thought about, like, regardless, if I relaunch this product or start a new one, I wanted to like do something to differentiate my product. Okay, and one of the things was I was like, can I add some accessories into this product? Like, is there something that won't add too much cost for me? But if I add it, it's going to differentiate my product. Okay, let's take a look here. Let me show you what I did. I went and I clicked on our reviews and I was like what are people using in this coffin shelf? Okay, so I hit the reviews and then I went to the reviews with images, all right. And then I hit see all photos. And then I started looking at what are people who are taking pictures of this product putting into the images that they're leaving with the reviews, right, and look how many a lot of people are using these pumpkins and looks like there's some light up pumpkins. And then I saw a bunch of people putting crystals and then I see tons of people putting these like miniature skulls. I don't know if you guys can see that here in the images more pumpkins, more skulls and so I'm like, okay, this is, this is something that, like, people are buying extra and then they're putting it in into this coffin shelf Right, what? If so that I thought you know, here's another one that's pumpkins and other things. I was like, what, what could I possibly do in order to maybe take advantage of this knowledge? I was like, okay, that's my product. What about some of my competitor products? All right, so here is a competitor product. All right, let's take a look at their images. All right, this is one of the guys who's just been been selling a lot of, you know, trying to sell super cheap, and I looked at what. What are his customers doing? And again, people with coffin shelves. I see, look at this, tons of miniature skulls everywhere. There's a miniature candle that shaped like a pumpkin. All right, so I'm like, okay, this is definitely what people are doing with these coffin shelves.
Bradley Sutton:
So the first thing that I started thinking about was I was like is there something I can buy that I could put in here that cost me maybe pennies, like less than 25 cents, and I could include it in my package without adding any size. So let me just show you guys. I'm going to open up a new window here and let's go to Alibaba, and I forgot what I typed in. I might have said mini, let's see mini LED pumpkin candle. I'm not sure if this is what I searched, but it's just going to give you guys a vibe of what I search for. And this is not it, because I don't see mini pumpkin. Did I type in mini pumpkin? All right, let me try mini LED pumpkin, let's see what happens there. Here we go. Okay, perfect, this is what I started seeing. All right, I was like, nah, $1 for a lot of these, no, that's too expensive $2. But basically I kept looking and then I found this kind of thing here. I was like, look at this, here are some little mini miniature pumpkins I can get for like 10 cents. So basically what I did was like all right, let me see if I can find a miniature pumpkin for about 10, 15 cents. And that's exactly what I did.
Bradley Sutton:
The other thing was I wanted to get like a mini skull, mini decorative skull, all right, and I was like can I get another skull for like 10 cents, or something like that. And sure enough there was a bunch of these that were super expensive, like $4. I'm like I'm not going to pay $4 for this miniature skull. So what I ended up doing was I actually found a miniature skull that was a candle, it had a wick right and it was only like 20 cents. But then I was like wait a minute, I am not going to have this candle like a real candle with a wick, and people put that in their coffin shelf and they're dumb enough to light it and then it burns their house down with the coffin shelf. Like that's not the kind of publicity I need. So I went to that factory and I was like all right, I want to buy this miniature skull that you have for like 15 cents, but I want to make it not a candle. So can you produce this to me, for me, for like 20 cents and have it? Not have a wick, candle, wick right. And they're like sure, no problem. So I'm like there's two things. But like, is this enough to really set me apart from the competition? And I was like no, it's not.
Bradley Sutton:
So then, all of a sudden, I just started doing some just general product research, and now this was around the time of you know, October, November, so giftable things started getting popular. So I'm like, all right, how can I take advantage of this maybe giftable theme and what I saw, some of the top selling products? They had these really kind of expensive looking gift boxes. Okay, let me see if I can actually find one that I was. That I'm talking about. That really inspired me. Hold on, let me show you. It was a heart shaped one, perfect, all right, this is. This is similar to what I found, all right. So I searched and I found these heart shaped gift boxes. I'm like these gift boxes don't even have anything in it, all right, they're just shaped like a heart, whatever. These are literally empty gift boxes and people are paying $20, $15, $25 for these things. And then I started looking at some of them and I noticed that they were advertising this as something that people could not only use as a gift box but then also kind of like for some, like trinket storage, like take a look at some of these images, like look at this, people were putting like roses in these gift boxes. So it's kind of like an evergreen product. This wasn't this gift box, wasn't just a product that you know is meant to put the real gift inside. But the gift box is almost the gift product in itself, because the person you're giving it to can use it for storage, for things like chocolates. They could use it for macaroons, like we see.
Bradley Sutton:
So then, now, all of a sudden, that got my creative juices working and I'm like all right, what if I launch this same exact coffin shelf? And not only did I now have this LED light, pumpkin light and a miniature skull figurine, but I also made a gift box with it. But then I thought what of what good use is like a shoebox shaped gift, you know, like that really doesn't go with the vibe. So then I started looking at packaging factories. I'm like, hey, who can make me a gift box that is kind of like with the vibe of those heart shaped gift boxes that I saw back in October. But check this, I want to make it in the shape of a. What do you guys think I did? In the shape of a coffin. So that means the coffin itself, which is again this product that you see right behind me here, is going to be inside of a coffin gift box that people could then use later for storing their socks or storing their chocolates or whatever. So it's kind of like people are buying two in one.
Bradley Sutton:
Now my cost it's expensive to make a custom box, guys. Let me just tell you, all right, this is not for the, the, the, the weary here. All right, this is not something that is easy to do. This box ended up costing me like two bucks, like almost as much as the coffin shelf itself, which costs like about three, four dollars or so. But I'm like, hey, this is worth it. So I've got my coffin shelf. That's normally like four bucks. I'm going to go ahead and pay $2 for this coffin bookshelf. I'm going to pay 40, 50 cents for these two miniature figurines and instead of having to sell my coffin shelf at $23, I'm going to go back in the market at like 33 or more dollars. So I'm adding $10 to my retail price. But I'm only adding like $2 and 50 cents. And in zero I'm adding to shipping because, remember, if anything, this box is smaller than the box I was having it in, okay, and since there's a hollow area of my coffin shelf that allows me to go ahead and put those little trinkets in there, so I'm adding zero to my shipping, zero to my transportation costs, very, very little to my taxes, you know, because it's these. This stuff only costs like $2, right. And now, all of a sudden, instead of playing this price war, I am going to go ahead and sell this product at a premium because nobody else who's selling coffin shelves is going to have this, and I'm not ready to launch it yet. I have it all here in my warehouse. It already delivered to me a couple of weeks ago.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me show you the images that AMZ one step did for me. Take a look at this. This is just from Google Drive. Right here, here is going to be the new listing product. All right, there's a. This is the exact little mini miniature skull that I put a LED pumpkin like light little candle here. All right, that's one of my infographics. Let's see what else we got here. Here's some new images I got that show the products that are coming with it. There's another one that shows the size of the product. Here's one example of a main image I could use, but hold on, you guys haven't seen the cool part. And then look at this box. This box is epic, guys. It's shaped exactly like my coffin shelf. And look, people are going to see this and be like oh wow, I can use this box as like another coffin shaped storage. It's literally like having two products in one Now where they can put like dead roses and things they can put a ribbon on it. Let me show you some other images I have here. There's my infographic of the size here. This is super cool, guys. Here is my new coffin shaped box, and then the coffin fits right in there. These are the images I'm going to be using for my new listing.
Bradley Sutton:
And again, now, all of a sudden, somebody types in coffin shelf into Amazon and sure, they're going to see a bunch of $23, $22 coffin shelves, but don't you think mine is going to stick out with a main image? You know, maybe that looks like this, where it shows I've got a coffin shelf, I've got a coffin storage box, I've got a miniature skull, I've got a miniature pumpkin LED light. It's going to be no competition. I'm going to be priced $10 or more than the other coffin shelves, but my click through rate is going to be pretty darn good, I think. All right. So this is something that I think is beneficial for anybody out there who are selling products in niches that get a little bit saturated. Okay, they get a little bit saturated and you're like I don't want to play the price war. And, guys, let me tell you I don't think you should play the price war. So this is again.
Bradley Sutton:
This is Project X, this is our product that you guys know and love from Project X, and it's been selling for like almost four years now. And on Amazon, you can't just keep things status quo. Sure, we were successful with this product a couple of years ago and it's still been successful, but it's fallen off because of the competition. That's what happens on Amazon. Does it mean I need to give up right away? No, if this doesn't work, should I close this product? If I'm not profitable, yeah, I probably should close it, but don't just give up just because there's a lot of competition or there's price wars. There's different steps you guys can take in order to try and get your market share back and where you don't have to play these price games. All right, do not do a race to the bottom, because that's where all your profit is going to go. So this will be. You know, this is going to be live on Amazon, like probably in a couple of weeks or so.
Bradley Sutton:
The other test I'm going to do on here, guys, is I'm going to test this as a separate product with a honeymoon period, or launching as a new variation on this existing listing, taking advantage of those 1800 reviews I have, and doing a test on what works better getting that new honeymoon period and launching on a brand new ASIN or launch or taking advantage of all the reviews. But there could be something weird going on on the Amazon algorithm. That kind of like shadow blocks me from getting past position 10. So that's. I just wanted to give you guys a little mini tutorial on a real life experience that I'm doing here for Project X and what I'm doing to relaunch this coffin shelf product. Another thing I'm going to be doing I'm going to talk about in a future episode is the egg trace. That was the other product that I was selling for Project X. It's so funny. We got a brand new shipment in and the factory confused my product with another customer, so they gave me egg trays. That's the wrong shape and the wrong finish. It's like a shiny finish and I'm going to get some money back from the factory, but I'm like I don't want to throw these products away. I don't want to go without selling coffin or without selling egg trays for months, while I have to get the right product in. When I launched this product as like a new variation, a new product for me, I'm going to show you guys how I'm going to do that. You know, next month, in next month's episode. And that was the other Project X product.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, now, guys, this is now your show, 100% of the rest of the time I want you guys to put in your questions. Violet says how do you find the supplier for the coffin box? So for me, I actually have a sourcing agent. Okay, so I think this is super important. My sourcing agent is boots on the ground in China. I just give her the parameters of what I'm looking for and she goes out and finds it herself for me. Rhonda says does the manufacturer design the new coffin shape box for you? No, I designed it. So I, I guess I just told my my sourcing agent. I was like hey, I want something that fits the exact shape of my coffin so that it doesn't add to my shipping dimensions, and make it happen. So she did. Oh, great question by Jonathan.
Bradley Sutton:
Once you find items to create differentiation, do you ship these to the main supplier who boxes it all together. Yes, so this is another way to kind of like foolproof yourself against. You know, like manufacturers doing shady things. So you can have, you can just send the products directly there, or you could send it to a third party. Like maybe you have a separate place that packages everything for you. Like maybe I can send everything to the where I get the package. Actually, I think that's what I did. Instead of having the coffin shelves packaged at the coffin shelf factory, I think I send it to the packaging company that has the coffin shaped box and that's where they put in the coffin shelf and they put in those little trinkets that come from. Now, three different factories, making it that much less likely that you know, somebody's just going to copy exactly what I'm doing, because I'm making it too difficult for them to copy me.
Bradley Sutton:
And David says do you have any reference for an agency that does a plus content? I've used a few myself. So the two I've used are both in hubhelium10.com. All right, go to hubhelium10.com. One of them is AMZ one step is has done it. And then the other one I've used is, uh, marketing by Emma. All right, marketing by Emma. So go into hubhealym10.com, look for both of those companies and you'll see how to contact them. Brenda says what videos do you recommend for beginners on HealyM10? If you're brand new on HealyM10, I recommend going through our Freedom Ticket Program. It's in the Learning Hub right there on your HealyM10 dashboard. That would be probably the best thing to do and then you know you could find the Project X videos in there as well, and the Project X videos are also on YouTube. Sergio says just launch what would you say is a good amount of sales per day to aim for. All depends on your keyword. All right, basically, if you want to get to page one of a keyword, you got to be selling probably through PPC for that keyword X number of products over 8 to 10 days in order to be able to get a good chance to get to page one. And if you're wondering how to find that number, that's inside of HealyM10. Just look at the CPR. So add your product to keyword tracker, your exact ASIN, and then look at the CPR number for your main keywords and that's kind of like how many units you need to sell over 8 days to give you the best chance to get to page one.
Bradley Sutton:
Ollie says let's go, bradley, these two sessions really lifted my spirits up in the process of launching my product was in doubts. How do you deal with the thought of whether the product will work or not? Well, I validate, validate, validate, all right, super important. We've been talking in the last. You know, you might have been in our Sellers Edge webinar where we're talking about how to find the product opportunity. But that's only half the journey. The next step is how to validate it. All right, you see something that looks good, but you just you don't just blindly say, all right, let's go with this, all right and let's make a million dollars. No, you've got to validate it All right. Now there's different steps that you have to do. So I take a look at you know, how strong are they on keywords? How strong are their listings? Is there enough demand for this product? Is there a must sales? Is there enough search for this? What's the seasonality? There are so many things that I look at to validate it. And then in Project X we talk about before, you might want to do a test listing. If there's not enough data, maybe you came up with some new idea that there's that doesn't have enough validation points on Amazon for you to make a rational decision. You might need to make a test listing to try and get those data points All right. So who knows, maybe that'll be the next Sellers Edge workshop that we do next month to talk about that.
Bradley Sutton:
Jacob says I've been using Opportunity Explorer on Sellers Central. Is there a good minimum for number of top clicks products? Excellent question. So for me this is how it can go either way. So for those who don't know in Product Opportunity Explorer the number of clicked products, it's the number of products that it takes in a niche to equal 90% of the clicks. So if there's only 10 products, that means that those 10 products have 90% of the clicks of that whole niche. If it's 1000 products, that means it takes 1000 products just to get to 90% of the clicks. Whether one is good and one is bad, you can go both ways on that, but that's how you look at that information. There's different circumstances where you might want to see different things. You might want to go into a niche where it's wide open, where there's no 10 products that are dominating, or on the flip side, you're like no, the 10 products that are dominating, they kind of suck. So I don't want to compete with 1000 products, I want to compete with only 10 products who suck. So that's another way you can look at it too.
Bradley Sutton:
Constance says what role does the first ASIN that I select play? When I select ASINs on X-ray to run them on Cerebro, you always say the first ASIN should be a random ASIN, not the top seller. Yes, so that sets the baseline product, the way that Cerebro is set up it's supposed to be. You have your product as the first one and then five or 10 other products that you're comparing it against. So then when you look at the competitor rank average, it's excluding that first one because that's the one that you're comparing to. But if you're just doing general product research, like on X-ray, you maybe don't have your product on there. So you don't want to select all the just top 10 good ones because, remember, it's going to exclude that first product. So you need to click on the first one something from the bottom of the page that's maybe irrelevant to your product, and that's the one that it isolates. And then the competitor rank average and the sponsored rank average of the competitors. It's going to be all of those subsequent nine 10 products you choose.
Bradley Sutton:
Good question, Constance Jonathan says when validating, do you order a smaller quantity than build up, or do you validate mostly with online data points? I validate mostly with online data points, but if I don't have enough, that's when I do a Tesla scene and I'll have like five or 10 units only for that. All right, guys, that's about it for all the time that we have today. So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode where we went over some Project X updates that you guys will actually see live on the website on Amazon, probably in two weeks, if you guys are watching this on YouTube or another place. This is what we do once a month, but every week anybody who is in our Serious Sellers Club or Helium 10 Elite actually gets this call. All right, every single week I'm on here answering every single question, but once a month we open it up to everybody. So make sure you sign up next month to take advantage of this episode, or sign up for Helium 10 Elite. Get on the waitlist h 10.me/elite and you can take advantage of getting asking me questions every single week. Thank you guys for joining us. We'll see you guys later. Have a great day, bye, bye now.
Ever wondered what it takes to get your product to the top of Walmart's search results? We've cracked the code and our host, Carrie Miller, is here to share every inside tip and strategy you need to make your Walmart listings shine. In this episode, we discuss everything from the importance of choosing the right product type to mastering the listing quality score without resorting to the pitfalls of title stuffing. Compliance with Walmart's guidelines is key, and we talk about the balance between PPC campaigns and organic search enhancements that could transform your rankings. Plus, we can't forget the tactical use of Walmart's SEM tool to harness the power of Google ads—a game-changer for driving traffic to your listings.
As we dive deeper into the ecosystem of Walmart's online presence, one thing is clear: the influence of digital word-of-mouth is not to be underestimated. We explore the emerging role of the Walmart Creator program and how influencers can catapult your products into the social media spotlight. Agencies like SellCord, Blue Ryse, and Ecom Creative Crew get a nod for their expertise in navigating listing challenges, and we remind sellers of the resources available through our Walmart.com tools inside Helium 10. Wrapping up, we send out an invitation to join the Winning with Walmart group—your go-to hub for community support and answers to all your Walmart-related queries. Remember, success at Walmart may be a podcast away, so tune in, get inspired, and let's make those sales numbers soar!
In episode 530 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie talks about:
- 00:00 - Ranking Strategies For Walmart Listings
- 04:22 - Walmart's SEM Offers Growth Opportunities
- 12:37 - Walmart Listing Optimization Guide
- 13:40 - Walmart Traffic, Influencers, Branding, and Agencies
- 16:54 - Walmart Application and Brand Registry
- 22:43 - Ranking Strategies For Walmart Products
- 24:16 - Join The Winning With Walmart Group
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Transcript
Carrie Miller:
In today's episode we're going to be talking about how to rank on Walmart, some new tools that Walmart is offering to help you with your sales and ranking, and also just how Helium 10 tools can help you with your PPC and also your listing optimization.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of this Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Keri and I'm going to be your host. This is our winning with Walmart episode, where we go live and give you some Walmart information and answer all of your Walmart questions live, alright. Somebody asked this is a great question how do you rank organically in Walmart? Is it the same algorithm as Amazon? There's actually a few different components to ranking on Walmart. The first one is product type. Your product type is really important because the product type is connected to the keywords for your actual product. If you're in the wrong product type, it's going to make it hard for you to actually rank. The first thing you want to do is go to your growth opportunities tab and check your product type. You can click on the details for each product listing and it'll tell you a product type up at the top. If the product type is definitely wrong, then you're going to want to make sure to fix that. Sometimes, what you can do is you can A B test the product types, because some product types include a lot more keywords. That means you're going to be able to rank and show up and basically index for any of those keywords. If you aren't in the right product type though with the most keywords, then it's going to be hard to rank for this. For example, I know someone did for supplements. It was nutritional supplements and herbal supplements or something like that. They changed their product type to nutritional supplements and that encompassed a lot more keywords than herbal supplements. You want to really take a look at those product types. Make sure that you have the right product type. That's first for ranking. The second thing is you want to make sure that you have a high listing score. You want to make sure you're in the 90s at least for your listing quality score. Look on that dashboard and make sure you're doing that.
Carrie Miller:
Things like stuffing your title. If you use the same titles that you do on Amazon a lot of times they'll suppress you a bit, because Walmart does not like stuffing titles. You want to make sure to follow the guidelines for the titles and just the entire listing. Make sure that you write the keywords that you want to rank for into your listing. If there's a specific phrase, if there's some targeted phrases, you're going to want to write those phrases in the exact form. Maybe there's 15 to 20. You want to write those throughout. Obviously, your most important phrase should be in the title. Those are the first things that you're going to want to do. The next thing is you're going to want to get sales. It is important to get some clicks ads to carts and conversions. I know some people do some search find by. There's some people who do different coupons. Sometimes people send traffic from TikTok and people will search on Walmart. They'll just search for the actual product through the keyword. There's a few different ways to do it, but really you're going to want to click add to cart and conversion.
Carrie Miller:
That's how you're going to help to rank. PPC is really, really helpful. If you're doing PPC along with that, that is a great way to rank. You really get some good ranking juice with PPC. Definitely try all of those things. Those are all the best combination of things to rank because it all goes together. Make sure that you're also putting in as many attributes in the backend as possible so you can rank for those as well. Those are the basics for ranking, but it's not really the same as Amazon, because Amazon's really giving you a lot of ranking juice for outside traffic. Walmart does have some outside traffic things that they have going on, but it's not necessarily helping with rank. There is something that I wanted to talk about. It's called SEM and it's on your growth opportunities tab. It's the very last one and it's basically Google ads. They used to do this for free and now it's. Unfortunately, you have to pay for it. What they're doing is they're giving you the ability to drive Google ads directly to your Walmart listings. That is a great way to get some outside traffic. That could potentially also help your rank because of the conversions and things like that. Check out the SEM at the very end. Very easy to set up those Google shopping ads and you can start showing it for Google shopping and get more conversions that way.
Carrie Miller:
I think we have another question Does Walmart take care of the shipping to the client? Can I ship products from China directly to the Walmart warehouse? I've actually never shipped directly from the China warehouse. The thing about it is I don't believe they're going to be receiving large shipments for you as your first starting out. So the best thing would probably be to ship your products to a 3PL and then ship them into the Walmart warehouses. That's what I would recommend in general, and then, if you don't sell out on Walmart, you can use it for Amazon, you can use it for TikTok shop, so that way you have better control over your inventory. So I think someone else said, no, you can't. So yeah, I know you can with Amazon and or used to be able to. You know we were shipping containers directly to Amazon and it's this little harder now. But you know, it sounds like somebody else said you can't ship directly from China, so ship to a 3PL, then ship into WFS, and that is the best way to go.
Carrie Miller:
I think something else that I wanted to kind of point out to everyone is that we actually do have some tools with Helium 10. And I did have some. I've had some meetings recently with some sellers and they are. You know, I think we're all kind of forgetting some of these tools that Helium 10 has and I wanted to kind of bring it back to your attention. So I'm going to just show you some keyword research tools and like, for example, garlic press. Okay, so we always use the garlic press kind of example. But what we want to do is what we can do here is we can actually pull our x-ray extension. We have x-ray for Walmart here and what we can do is we can copy the product IDs and do a reverse search on Cerebro for keywords. Now I like to look for kind of the main. You know things. Actually, I was looking at decorative pillow. I want to look at decorative pillows, decorative pillows. So I'm going to search for that and we'll see if we can find some. A lot of times these are kind of interesting and diverse. So let's go ahead and pull the Helium 10 extension. So, for anyone who's listening, I'm just pulling our Chrome extension for Helium 10. This is going to show revenue for each product. It's going to show the product IDs, it's going to show reviews. It's going to show a lot of great information to help you kind of better make good decisions, for not only you know what products to start selling on here, but also how to kind of position your own products.
Carrie Miller:
So what I usually like to do is kind of look for things that are selling pretty well. So it looks like this snow leopard pillow is selling pretty well. So what we can do is we can just paste that into Walmart for Cerebro. Now you have to choose. You have to scroll all the way down to Walmart Marketplace in Cerebro to choose the Walmart Marketplace to do this, and it's basically this product ID. Now, if you don't have, you know, the X-ray pulled up, you can actually find it on the listing page itself in the URL. It's the last digits on the URL, so you can do that as well. So I'll go ahead and actually just do this one search. Let's look at the keywords for this decorative pillow. So we're going to hit, get keywords, and what it's doing is it's basically showing all of the keywords that that particular product is ranking for, sponsored in Organic. So if we take a look, we can see a lot of different, you know, keyword phrases. We've got snow leopard decorative pillows, their organic rank number five, if you wanted. So if there's a competitor that's doing some advertising, what you can also do is you can do this single search product ID and you can sort by sponsored rank. It doesn't look like this one is doing any advertising, but if they were, then you would be able to see all of the keywords that they're advertising for. And with Walmart, a lot of times there's, you know, kind of like a 15 to 20 keyword phrase focus, and so you might be able to see the exact keyword strategy that your competitors have. So that's something that's really cool about doing a single search ascent, but you can see all of the different kind of keywords in here. You can see the search volume and it's going to be compared to the search volume on Amazon. It's a little bit different on Amazon.
Carrie Miller:
Now, on Walmart, there are a lot of filters that customers do use, so they kind of filter down to find the products that they want. But this is an incredible tool for your, for your listing optimization. So you want to make sure to write all of your most important keywords into your listing. Then you also want to, you know, use this for your pay per click advertising, because I have noticed that there's a little bit different keywords and keyword phrases Then on Amazon. So I always do keyword research separately for Walmart so that I can make sure that my pay per click advertising and my actual listing is optimized for Walmart. So that is one way to do this. We can also search magnet. You can search phrases. So if I put decorative pillow in here, it'll search on Walmart. Actually, you know what? I think? I didn't change the marketplace. Let's go all the way down to the Walmart marketplace here. This is the Walmart marketplace. We're going to hit, get keywords under the Walmart marketplace on magnet and what this will do is it's going to show you similar keywords to you know decorative pillow that you could use and give you. It'll give you more ideas of you know what kinds of keywords to target so you can sort by.
Carrie Miller:
You know search volume amounts. You can search by search search volume there. You can see it compared to Amazon there, and there's a lot of great keywords that you can focus on. Now, even the lower search volume keywords I've still made sales on those, especially if they're very relevant. So I don't ignore those really low search volume keywords either. So if you are ignoring some of those, I would highly recommend, you know, creating some campaigns for those lower search volume keywords as well. All right, so we've got Cerebro when we've got magnet. We also have a profits tool and I know there are a lot of people who are using profits to maintain just their whole profits view of Walmart and it's been been very, very helpful for a lot of people. So if you haven't started using profits, you want to connect your Walmart token to helium 10, so it'll automatically pull in that data. You can add in your costs of goods, you can add in any other expenses that you have in there and you can get a pretty good overview of your profits on Walmart. So that is something else to think about. Now.
Carrie Miller:
I did notice that there was kind of an announcement recently about video ads. They're doing some different testing, maybe just on the look of video ads and sponsored brand ads on Walmart. So if you are doing those, you might see that a little bit. But something I did notice is that a lot of brands are not even doing video ads or any kind of sponsored brand ads. So if you, you know, are in a kind of competitive category, you should check on those keywords and see if you can start doing some advertising on those. You know you have to be a registered brand in order to do that, but video ads and sponsored sponsored brand ads are going to be a great way for you to, you know, really get going with some sales, especially because you'll be right at the top and it's not as expensive as it is on on Amazon at this point. So it's really good thing to do. Coupons are still in beta, so I have talked to some people who are using the beta program for coupons and they've had a really good conversion rates for coupons. So I'm really, really hoping to see those come out soon for everyone. Maybe some of you have them, so you might want to check your dashboards, your growth opportunities wherever, to see if something appears about coupons, but I have heard very good things about them. Also, subscribe and save has been in some beta programs, so that those are some things to kind of look forward to. Brand stores are available, so if you are a brand registered seller, go ahead and check it, check that out, get your brand store all registered and ready to go.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, it looks like we have another question in here. Are there any guides for SEO, titles, description. Is it good to have keyword stuffing in the title? No, so I did mention this at the beginning. There are guides for very, very good guides, actually on Walmart. So if you go to the help center, you can find and search different for different things, and optimization is one of them. You can look for how you should set up your title, how you should set up your description and your bullets, and it's all in there. Now keyword stuffing is going to get your listing suppressed a bit. You want to follow the guidelines that Walmart sets and then, when you actually create your title and your whole listing on your growth opportunities tab. It's going to give you a listing quality score and if your title isn't the way they want it, it'll show you what you need to do to fix it. So that's very, very helpful. So any mistakes that you make on your actual listing, you can go back and fix them on the growth opportunities tab, which is a really, really great thing to utilize. So that's a great question. So thank you for that question.
Carrie Miller:
Another thing is I just wanted to talk a little bit about traffic to Walmart. So where is the traffic coming from? There are some things again I wanted to reiterate. If you haven't started using the SEM tab on the very end of your growth opportunities tab where you can do those Google ads, that's going to be a great place for traffic. I think a lot of traffic can come from Google. So if you can just get that that advertising going, that would really help help you there. Another thing is I have seen a very large uptick in influencers. Now I follow a lot of kind of female, kind of clothing influencers and I know there's a lot of home decor influencers. There are a lot of influencers that are now promoting Walmart products because there's a Walmart Creator program. They get commissions. Some of them are Walmart partners, so they're finding products on Walmart and promoting them through their Instagram, through their TikToks. So what you can do is, if you wanted to kind of reach out to some of these, you can search you know, walmart partner, walmart sponsored ad, or just search hashtags to see what creators within your space are, you know, basically promoting your types of products, and a lot of times you'll find those. Or if you're just following, you know people in your space and a lot of times they are already promoting Walmart stuff. So I think that's a really good opportunity to help them to not to be successful by, you know, giving them your product and then seeing if they'll promote it on Instagram, tiktok, you know, everywhere on social media. So I highly recommend looking into that. I think it's a great way of getting more traffic there. I also have noticed that you know Walmart is still really pushing for Walmart plus memberships. A lot of credit cards you get it for free, like American Express, platinum, for sure you get. You get it for free for the year. So there's a lot of great credit card perks that you can get Walmart plus memberships for free, which you know will incentivize people to you know shop at Walmart, especially if they see something that's the same thing on Walmart, they're like, oh, I might as well just go to Walmart because I get free shipping anyway. So those are some things about Walmart traffic, all right. So another question Do you know any I think, maybe trustworthy agencies to fix my listing problem for me? Yes, I do know some agencies. There is Michael LaBar at SellCord.co. They do a great job at fixing listing issues. I think they're probably the best for kind of like solving issues. There's also Ryan King from Blue Rise and there's also McCall Chapnick from Ecom Creative Crew. So Ecom Crew so sorry, Ecom Creative Crew team and so you can reach out to all of them. I know McCall has a great Walmart group, so if you haven't joined her group, it's a Walmart Marketplace Sellers group. She's pretty active in there too, so you can you can, you know connect with her there. So there's a lot of great agencies that you could reach out to. Somebody has a very long one here, let's see here, let's see. It's a very long question here. Thank you, my G, michael Thomas, says sorry, I had to step off for a minute so I may have missed this.
Carrie Miller:
Concerning the application process. What is your experience or anyone that you know who has submitted an application? I've actually been talking to a new seller of business development and Matt Turner said the fiscal year starts at the end of this month, so I think Walmart will start approving applications at that time. Also, how do you get a brand page on Walmart? Okay, so you should be able to apply to Walmart anytime. So if you're, you know, ready to sell on Walmart, I would recommend that you just go ahead and apply. Make sure that you have, you know, make sure that there's a list of countries that are approved. Now, if you don't live in the US and maybe your country is not approved, usually an LLC works and I know Michael from Cell Court can help get around those kinds of issues. But you do just need to have kind of an established business. Make sure that you have all your ducks in a row, you know of all the qualifications that they have listed out for your application and you should be good to go for the application. It takes usually 48 hours. Sometimes it can take a little bit longer, but you should be able to get that application going. The next thing is going to be brand registry. So there is a brand registry portal, so it's brand portal, portalonemarkcom, and you just click on register. You need to have a you know a red, a trademark. It says it right here on this screen here you need to have registered trademark and so make sure that you have that. You know all that in a, all those ducks in a row, basically, before you apply for that, so that you have access, that'll give you access to video ads, sponsor brand ads, the brand stores. A lot of the perks that are coming are going to be basically related to to the brand portal. So hopefully that answers your question. Let's see.
Carrie Miller:
Another question is it seems like Walmart is looking more for brands. Do you agree? I actually don't agree. What they are looking for and I've actually talked to a lot of these kind of the managers on Walmart they're looking for products that really complement what's already on Walmartcom, so things like accessories to products that are already on Walmart, so things that are complimentary that maybe aren't already on Walmart. They're looking for a well-rounded catalog. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a big brand, they just want complimentary products. There is an assortment growth tab on the back end of your Walmart seller center and sometimes you get some good suggestions on how to kind of grow things that might not be available on Walmart, that they want you to sell. But that is a great way to just look for things that are not necessarily available on Walmart but would be good complimentary accessory products to things that they have, and that might be a great way to go. But, yeah, they are accepting third-party sellers. They're really investing a lot of money to get third-party sellers to start selling on Walmart, so they are definitely wanting third-party sellers to come.
Carrie Miller:
Another thing that I wanted to bring up is that there is some rich media that's available for free and that's kind of like A-plus content If you go to the help and then go to get support when you're logged in to seller center. So go help get support, then click on items and inventory, click on rich media and then you'll see instructions on how you can upload a video or a 365 image and that'll be basically for free. Otherwise you have to pay for each thing to get hosted through an agency. But those are some free modules. If you don't have a video up, that's a great thing to put up there and I highly recommend you do that if you haven't done that yet. So another thing somebody asked is where can we create a brand store? This is going to be when you are registered, a brand registered, you go to your brand portal and that should. That is the place where you're going to be able to see all of that to create your brand store. Another thing I wanted to bring up is the review accelerator program is still going on. You can go do up to 10 reviews and basically how this works is it's not like Vine on Amazon, it's basically your actual customers. So whatever sales you get within a certain amount of time, they will actually send a request to that customer for a review and they'll pay them $3. You pay $10 for the whole review, but it's a great way to get some verified reviews of customers who are actually looking for your product already, not just somebody who's reviewing products. So review accelerator program if you don't have any reviews, you can go up to 10. So once you pass 10, you're no longer eligible for the review accelerator program, but that is a great way to get some reviews going if you don't have them going as well.
Carrie Miller:
And let's see. Here we have another question. Bradley's asking me what was my December sales? I actually don't know the actual number. I think it was around the 12,000 to 15,000 for my one main product. And I have to go look, I have a few different brands on there, so the one that I've been really focusing on I did about 15,000 for that one product. So not bad, especially since it's only one product. You kind of multiply that by 10, you've got a million dollars a year on Walmart. So that's something to consider. That's the one that I use mostly to kind of test things out and I try to see what's going on with Walmart with that particular product. And I've had the Proseller badge. I've had that for quite a while now and they've actually been giving me refunds on my referral fees and so that's pretty cool. So a lot of great things coming with Walmart. I think the coupons are going to be a really big deal, that we're going to be able to sell a lot more on with those coupons, because people do like deals, and I think that's going to be great. So let's see here Bradley is asking how have you been getting to page one for your Walmart launches?
Carrie Miller:
Now, I did talk about this a little bit earlier, right at the beginning, because somebody was asking how to rank, and that is basically the first thing obviously is your product type. You have to be in the right product type. First of all, you have to make sure you're listing it has about a 90% or above, and sometimes you'll rank to the top just with that listing quality score. A lot of times we'll just help optimize listings and it goes straight to the top with just the listing quality score. Don't stuff your title, but it's really clicks, adds to carts, conversions. Those are going to help to really get your ranking up, and that includes PPC. So if you're combining doing a search, find by type strategy along with pay-per-click advertising, you're going to get some really good results from that. So I know we talked with Kostin from AZ Rank last I think it was last month that we did and they actually have a whole way to help you rank. So if you do want to use their services, they're doing a good job of helping people to rank to the top. So check them out as well, because they've got some great strategies for ranking on Walmart too.
Carrie Miller:
All right, another thing that I wanted to point out is WFS. Make sure you have your products in WFS. That's another thing that's going to help you with your listing quality score and your rank. So Walmart fulfillment services are even if you want to just send in like 20 to 30 products at a time just to see how much it's going to how much is going to go, and I would suggest at least trying out WFS, and it's going to help you quite a bit. So if you haven't enrolled in WFS, you should do that. But other than that, I think that is all that I have for today, unless there's any more questions. But thank you all for these questions and if you haven't joined our winning with Walmart group, make sure that you go and join our winning with Walmart group. We have a lot of great sellers in there and people answering questions, and so you can also tag me in any questions that you have. On Facebook. Some people have sent me messages and so I would love to help you with any Walmart issues. So I will see you all on the next episode Next month, we'll have a special guest, so I'm excited for that one, and so stay tuned. Every month, usually on Wednesday. We had to reschedule this week, but usually on Wednesdays we do Winning with Walmart Wednesday and I hope to see you all there again and have a great rest of the day. Bye everyone.
Listen in as we explore the latest buzzing news shifting the landscape of e-commerce, where we talk about TikTok’s slowing usage, Amazon’s AI integrations, and more!
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Senior Brand Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. TikTok Shop buyers will have to pay higher order minimums to get free shipping as the company cuts back https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-shop-cutting-back-free-shipping-trims-costs-2024-1 Amazon aids seller listings with new generative AI partnership https://chainstoreage.com/amazon-aids-seller-listings-new-generative-ai-partnership Etsy targets gift shoppers with AI-based tool https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/19/tiktok-usage-is-starting-to-slow-is-tiktok-shop-to-blame/ TikTok usage is starting to slow — is TikTok Shop to blame? https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/19/tiktok-usage-is-starting-to-slow-is-tiktok-shop-to-blame/
Learn how to stay ahead of the curve as Carrie shows you the power of Helium 10’s BlackBox tool together with Amazon’s Brand Analytics data. Your perspective is the missing piece so make sure to share them in the comments below or in the Helium 10 Users Facebook group as we dissect Amazon, Etsy, and TikTok shop’s evolving marketplaces and the power dynamics at play for sellers.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Carrie covers:
- 00:43 - TikTok Shipping
- 01:25 - Amazon Listing AI
- 03:32 - Etsy Gift Finder
- 04:23 - TikTok Usage Slowing
- 05:32 - Amazon Search Terms
- 07:14 - New BlackBox Tool
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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Ever wondered how the savviest of e-commerce entrepreneurs keep their profit margins healthy amidst rising industry costs? Buckle up as Benjamin Webber, a true maverick in the Amazon FBA realm, rides through the podcast to share his unique tactics. He's not just playing the game; he's changing it by using his own truck as an Amazon carrier, slashing his shipping expenses, and keeping his company's financials robust. With a 10% hike in gross sales and an ever-expanding team, Ben breaks down the logistics of becoming an Amazon carrier, the operational efficiencies that keep his business ahead, and why sometimes the best move is to quite literally take the wheel of your product distribution.
The chessboard of global e-commerce is complex, but Ben is a grandmaster at maneuvering his pieces. He unveils his strategies for managing inventory across continents, discusses the art of optimizing check-in speeds, and serves wisdom on tackling geographic conversion issues. His narrative takes us through the meticulous dance of manufacturing diversification—from Asia to the Americas—and the savvy logistics of East Coast shipping. As Ben's company eyes a leap into Amazon's global marketplaces, he lays out his blueprint for facing the squeeze of shrinking margins, fortifying supplier relationships, and negotiating like a pro.
In a world increasingly driven by AI, Ben has mastered fusing technology with human creativity. This episode isn't just about listing optimization and tweaking ad strategies—it's a glimpse into an advertising revolution dictated by sponsored rank and AI's role in it. And when it comes to product development, Ben and his team are tapping into AI to conjure up innovative solutions to everyday problems. It's a thrilling ride through the intersection of data, technology, and human insight, where Ben exemplifies the adventurous spirit of online selling. Join us, and let your e-commerce curiosity be captured by his exceptional vision and trailblazing tactics.
In episode 529 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Ben discuss:
- 00:00 - Amazon Carrier Strategies and Profit Margins
- 06:45 - Optimizing Amazon Stock Check-in and Distribution
- 09:08 - Inventory, Manufacturing, and Global Expansion
- 10:52 - Product Warehouse Benefits
- 15:43 - Amazon Advertising and Listing Optimization
- 16:52 - Analyzing Conversion Rates and Product Quality
- 24:31 - Factors for Retiring Products
- 25:33 - Warehouse Efficiency and Competitor Analysis
- 31:50 - Using AI for Product Development
- 33:52 - 2024 Tips and Unique Strategies
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got a popular guest back on the show, Ben, who's got very unique strategies, such as he made himself an Amazon carrier so that he can deliver with his own truck his FBA replenishment orders 15 minutes away from him for free. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image, or Amazon changed their shipping dimensions so they had to pay extra money every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me/alerts. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. You've got a serious seller back for, I believe, the second time here on the show, Ben. How's it going, man?
Ben:
Good, how about yourself?
Bradley Sutton:
I'm doing just delightful. So I take your North Carolina, which is why I switched hats here at the last second rock in this Charlotte hat. Here Is Charlotte where you're at, or what part North Carolina are you on?
Ben:
Yeah, I'm in Charlotte.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, been out there long yeah.
Ben:
I came here in 2002 and never left.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. So if you guys want to get more of his backstory, guys write this down episode 379. We went a little bit more into his background there, so we're not going to go too much. You know more into. You know how his superhero origin story, want to catch up and see what cool stuff he's been he's been working on. That was a great episode, by the way. In there he talked about how he had a three million dollars in retail arbitrage sales and he has his cult following now in the Amazon world on the speaker circuit. A lot of cool stuff we talked about in that episode, including you know how to hire for your Amazon businesses and whatnot. But let's just catch up. You know now we're in 2024. You know I think the last time you're on the show was like end of 2022 around there, so it's been, you know, full year. How was your 2023?
Ben:
It was good. Our big priority was expanding obviously expanding product lines, and then just figuring out the best ways to manage what we have so that we can grow and scale as efficiently as possible.
Bradley Sutton:
How many employees are you guys up to now?
Ben:
So we have the warehouse and then we have an international team. So collectively we're between 60 and 70.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent. Now what was you know, just from a gross sales overall, all channels, if you were to compare 2023 with 2022, how did you guys do?
Ben:
We're up maybe 10%, so it didn't really push too hard this year.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, something that I think a lot of sellers might have said compared in 2023 to 2022, is profit margins were down due to increased cost, whether that be inflation or cost of goods, Amazon fees, PPC how was your profit margin?
Ben:
Yeah, it definitely went down a little bit, not as bad as I guess a lot of people have. That I've talked to have run into. But one of the big things that helps us and I think we talked about this before is just that because we are in Charlotte and there's a CL2, the CL22 warehouse is in Charlotte we're able to deliver a lot of our own inventory. So we're a last mile delivery driver or delivery provider for Amazon. So we don't have to pay to ship in to Amazon. We pay somebody $15 an hour to drive a truck with 12 pallets and they're 20 minutes from our warehouse. So as far as the inbound shipping costs and those expenses, those don't really hurt us too badly.
Bradley Sutton:
So that whole, so you ship everything then from your manufacturing to your warehouse and then so that that quote unquote landed cost that ends up being your cost to Amazon as well. Essentially, yeah, how did you even know that that was possible to do?
Ben:
Several years ago we were about to stock out of. As you know, we sell a lot of fourth quarter products and kind of joke toy products, and we're about to stock out of one that we sold between 800 to 1000 units a day, which is a fairly substantial issue. So we actually loaded up a cargo van and drove the cargo van to Amazon, talked to us our way through the front gates to deliver it and they took it and so we did that once. Then we did it again and we got through again the third time. They're like no, you can't do this and so like, okay, but somehow we have to be able to do this. So we looked into Carrier Central and figure out how we could become a last mile carotter, which is incredibly easy. It takes about 15 minutes to fill out a form and then you have to show that you can back in and out of a parking spot Incredibly easy. So in that January we bought a truck and the rest is history from there. But it was. It came about because we were about to stock out and panic and we're like well, what's the worst that can happen?
Bradley Sutton:
So then theoretically you can also do this service for other people, that you would be the carrier and then other people can just store their product here at warehouse and then you would deliver. But for now you just pretty much do it for yourself. Is there like was there any kind of minimums? Like, hey, you have to have a dock high truck, you have to, it has to be this size, it has to be order, you know, like it has to be at least X number of pallets, or what kind of requirements was it.
Ben:
So basically it had to be palletized and it required a dock high truck, and I forget there was. There's a code you have to send them that you get for just having a truck, so it doesn't really matter, you're going to have it anyway. But dock high and palletized products. And what we did was we looked up what the largest truck that we could buy without having to have a CDL was, which in North Carolina, is a 26 foot box truck, and so that holds 12 pallets.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you have to have, like a company that's a registered trucking company or something?
Ben:
Nope, I actually had a friend who was trying to do this for some of their products because they were just the same issue where they're about to stock out and Amazon wasn't checking them in fast enough. And one of the benefits of what we do is and this is I don't know how long this will stay that way, so I'm probably going to jinx myself by saying it, but our stuff gets checked in faster than anybody else's. So, like this year, we had stuff that we delivered in December that was checked in three days late.
Bradley Sutton:
We were able to pick that exact DC to get the stuff into when you're creating your transfer shipments.
Ben:
There are a number of softwares that you can use that let you pick and direct where you want it to go to.
Bradley Sutton:
But what is that? So that's not something that you can do on your own, just in seller central.
Ben:
It. Well, yes and no, it's not something that you can directly do, but typically if you're sending case packs in, they're going to try to send that to the largest distributor center nearest you or distribution center nearest to you. At least that's what we've seen Even before, like when we weren't using a software for it. We're sending about 65 to 70% of our case packs all went to Charlotte, so they're still trying to keep stuff. As far as the case packs that, they're just sending them to the nearest large distribution center. At least that's how it worked out for us.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, have you looked into, or do you know yet, how this change to their shipping program is going to affect you, if any at all, with this whole thing where people now have to pay if they're only sending it to one location? I mean, even if that's the case, it's still got to be better. I'm assuming that you'd still choose that.
Ben:
Yeah, it'll cost us more now, but it's still better to deliver to ourselves. The bigger issue, honestly, was the minimum stock levels. Because we're able to deliver so quickly and because we know that Amazon is checking in so quickly, we've been able to run very, very, very lean, and that's going to get.
Bradley Sutton:
They're going to punish you now, right?
Ben:
So now we're going to have to put. Over the last month we've been having to send way more inventory than we ever had before in because we have to meet the minimum stock requirements to not get charged, though I had the fees there, so that's honestly the bigger issue for us.
Bradley Sutton:
Have you ever taken a look at in Helium 10, at our inventory heat maps to see what they do with your inventory day by day and then how long it takes them to distribute? Because sure, you can get it checked in, but if everything just sits there in Charlotte for a week and then all of a sudden somebody's in Portland and their buy box says yeah, two weeks delivery date, then that might be conversion issue for certain geographic areas. Are they getting your inventory out to the country pretty fast?
Ben:
Usually within two weeks, but it is something where there's definitely some gaps, where we have been not fulfilling the West Coast, for example, is efficiently, as we probably could be.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, what about the fact that you're I mean I'm assuming you manufacture your stuff in China, India or where you?
Ben:
manufacture it. So we have manufacturing in China, Mexico, India, Canada, the US and I want to say Vietnam as well.
Bradley Sutton:
So what about the stuff coming from Asia, the fact that you're not, that you're sending it to you in the middle, not completely in the middle, but is it coming to the East Coast port first, or is it coming to California?
Ben:
We send a lot of it through Savannah Georgia.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, okay, and so, even if it wasn't going to your warehouse, is that where you're routing it? In the old days, if you were going directly to Amazon, it would still go to the East Coast first.
Ben:
We always sent directly to our warehouse just for having the flexibility. For a lot of our products there are varying pack sizes and we'll repackage as needed in the warehouse to make sure that we're filling the ones that we need to. So we've always sent it to ourselves first For that reason. Then also just from a flexibility standpoint as far as inventory management, where if you send it from China you're basically going to have to send in 90 to 120 days to make sure that you're covered or just have constant orders going. If we send it to our warehouse first, we can keep the Amazon fees lower for storage by storing it. For what amounts to about? I think last time we calculated it we're paying like $6.50 a pallet or $7 a pallet, something like that, to store it at our warehouse. So the amount of money that we're saving off of the Amazon fees by storing it to ourselves and then sending in smaller shipments versus sending in the bulk ones that a lot of people do.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, makes sense. Yeah, I was worried a little bit at least. Like, wait a minute, you know like some of your savings might be gone if you're still having a bring things into the port and like California. And then you got to ship it all the way Right, stick it on trains or trucks to go all the way to North Carolina. But the fact that it's coming into already on the East Coast, that doesn't make it too bad. Okay, so that's pretty cool.
Ben:
Honestly, that's one of the things that we're looking into for 2024 is seeing if we want to find a 3PL out on the West Coast so we can send some inventory there for the heat map issues that you were bringing up, where we can send stuff to the West Coast DCs from there and then keep doing everything else from Charlotte so that we can make sure that we're covering the country. And also, if there's a way to bring stuff in and have it on the West Coast already, then it just makes things easier.
Bradley Sutton:
Now what other you know? We've been talking about Amazon USA. What other Amazon marketplaces are you selling on worldwide? And what about other domestic here in the USA marketplaces like Walmart, tik Tok, etc.
Ben:
Honestly, we haven't pushed that hard on the non-domestic Amazon sites just because our logic has kind of been well, the US is the largest market. If we're able to successfully sell something here, we're going to be more successful than selling something in another market. So we would rather come up with a new product to sell in the US versus taking the time and energy to push externally. But that is something that started to change over the last year. We are in Canada, we're in the UK and we're going to expand through Europe over the next year as far as Amazon, and then we have our own Shopify sites for all of our brands, and then we do a good bit through Walmart as well.
Bradley Sutton:
What's your strategy, like you know, going into 2024, now that margins are decreasing, I mean, are you raising? Are you planning to raise prices? Have you raised prices? Trying to cut costs in unique ways? Pull back on advertising? How does somebody you know, because it's not like you know, this is just something that you're facing, like we talked about earlier. A lot of people are facing it, and some worse. Why do you think, other than the shipping thing, you haven't been hit as hard as others. And what's the plan to you know? It's not like costs are going to go down anytime soon. So how are you going to? You know, stay above water.
Ben:
Yeah Well, I mean, one of the things is, before we started the podcast, you and I were discussing how you were just in China and like going and meeting with your manufacturers and actually having those conversations, you can get better rates, you can get better terms, you can get a lot of benefits. You can also see what they can and can't do and find a lot of products that you can make with the same manufacturer. And the more things you buy from one manufacturer, the better rates you're going to get on each of those orders. So going directly to your manufacturers and talking to them is a way that you can massively improve your, your costs and also the terms you have. Like, with some of our, some of our manufacturers, we don't pay until 90 days after the products has come to our warehouse.
Bradley Sutton:
How long have you been with those manufacturers?
Ben:
I like to ask for some Wow yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
And have you visited them there in where they're at and got out to meet and stuff like it?
Ben:
And met their family, took their kids presents like or we're very close with them. But it's something that you can like you, that's something that you can build. And again, even if it's somebody that you aren't close with, the more that you can, more you buy from them, the more likely they are to give you better rates, better terms etc. So that's one thing. As far as the advertising goes, one of the things we started really pushing over the last probably six months is just kind of figuring out what are where our product deserves to be ranked based off of price, quality, everything else compared to our competition on specific keywords, and adjusting our advertising based off of that. So if we look and we say like, okay, we're really the fourth best product on this keyword, we're not going to push heavily for our with our advertising to try and get to the number one spot, because eventually we're just going to drop back down to the number four or we're going to have to keep spending a ton of money. So we've adjusted our ad spend to match where we feel like we should be on that keyword and if we drop below that then we'll raise it. But if we're there we'll leave it basically where it is, and that's actually significantly improved our profitability, because we're not spending as much to rank up on something that we won't stick. Because you're not going to stick at the top, then why are you trying to get there? It's not going to, you're just wasting money.
Bradley Sutton:
So are you like you know? Obviously, like you said, you know, price is an easy, easy one to know. If you quote unquote deserve to be there. You're looking at, like conversion rates by keyword and search, career performance or things like that, or what are some other factors other than just strictly price?
Ben:
Yeah. So we'll buy every single product and bring it to our warehouse and do comparison tests so we'll look and see like okay, this one, like, let's say, we're selling a paper plate we can see like, okay, if we put sauce on this for an hour, it leaks through Ours doesn't. So for the sauce we rank better than them, or the size that it takes or the amount of weight they can hold. It can hold as far as food, things like that, where you're just testing to see the quality of your product versus theirs. So it's not just the quality of the listing and conversion, it's also the quality of what you're actually offering to the customer.
Bradley Sutton:
That's interesting. I've never heard of somebody doing that. Where it's like at the keyword level, how do we stack up so that we deserve you know to. You know like, like a product could do really well, like in that situation, for like a keyword like heavy duty plates, or you know big meals or some, or for you know watery foods or something like that, whereas maybe another one would be, you know, floral looking plates, where it's more aesthetic and you could rank or you could rate, I should say, differently for each keyword.
Ben:
Exactly and it also helps you figure out which way you want to direct your, the copy and photos and everything that you're putting out for the listing, as you see like, because I mean, everybody is doing competitor research before to figure out, okay, how can I say that I'm better than this one? But if you don't keep doing that throughout it, you're going to get passed off. But also, if you look at it on a keyword level, like we're doing, you're able to save a lot of money on advertising by not bidding on things you shouldn't.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, speaking of listing optimization, you know that was one thing that we focused on the last episode I remember. You know you talked about. You've got some listings that are 100% puns and a different, you know, and that helps with your conversion and stickiness of customers. What are you like? Are you guys using AI? That's something that's just kind of blown up, probably since the last time we talked. What other listing optimization strategies you're doing in the last year?
Ben:
Yeah, and, like you said, ai is massive. I mean the ability to identify a customer avatar immediately, to put the reviews in and pull whatever, extract whatever data you need to from it with like quickly, efficiently, and to have essentially a professional copywriter write your listings for you. One of the things that I enjoy doing, which has led to some good results and some terrible results is to pick like a few famous copywriters or famous advertisers that I find interesting and then have them have a conversation about the product. So if you say, like these four people discuss paper plates and why someone would buy them, and then they go through and the AI talks like those people and has a conversation, and you can see people who are way smarter than me discussing how they would sell it, why they would sell or what they think people would be directly interested in and how they would position it, and so I like doing that. Also for coming up with brand names If you have like the top branders in the world, you can just say have these people discuss what my brand should be if I'm selling X product. So kind of expanding outside of just saying write me a bullet point with the including these keywords with 250 characters or less and yada, yada, yada. Trying to like, think outside the box a bit more, to be more unique, because at this point anybody can use AI. It's trying to figure out ways to use it in ways that other people aren't yet and especially trying to get add to what the AI is doing, add emotional language to it, because AI is okay at emotional, but not great. So if you can put something in that appeals directly to the customer while still using the the pitches from the AI, we've had really good success with that.
Bradley Sutton:
Now what, if anything is, would you say, is the biggest difference when you're taking one product from Amazon and making a listing on Walmart, Like, have you seen something that definitely works and something that you always have to change because it's completely different on Walmart, or is the general structure always pretty much the same and you're just doing the little things that you know, the little requirements that Walmart has, in order to differentiate it?
0:21:40 -
Yeah, I mean we are trying to obviously match what Walmart says, but it just seems like on Walmart you want to be way more direct. Like, keyword stuffing doesn't work as well there. It seems like there, at least for us. It hasn't May for other people. But just being more readable and fluent with the way that we create the listings has led to better results versus just trying to stuff too many keywords into it as we possibly can.
Bradley Sutton:
What else are you doing differently Something we haven't talked about in this episode or the last one, I mean, you know to manufacturing in USA and keeping respectable profit margins. Having 70 employees, this is not something that, you know, like any Amazon seller can achieve. There's got to be some more other unique things that have helped you reach this level. What do you think those are?
Ben:
Now you're putting me on the spot. I think the you know that I have three main partners that I've worked with from the start and I think one of the things that we've done really well is division of labor and creating the SOPs and the backbone for everything that we need in order to run the business, so that we don't have to be involved in the day to day as much as we used to and had to at the start. So we are able to look into things like Amazon fee changes. Look into things like okay, how can we get to China and improve our costs and fees there. Like having the flexibility by building a powerful team to and like our team is. I mean, I would say our VA's are probably smarter than me, so they're better at the job that I am at this point. So like being able to get to that point where you're able to have the flexibility to scale mentally going forward has been massive and we actually like, from the start, the way that we kind of divided it was, we had one of my partners was focused on incoming products. The other was focused on running the warehouse. My role was mostly building the products on the marketing side, and then we had one person whose role was essentially figuring out how we're going forward. His job has always been to push things forward, to figure out what we need to do and then having him he is very, very good at systems so he'll be able to come in and look at what we've done and see the systems we built and say, no, you all are idiots, change these three things. That's going to be much better.
Ben:
So, like, being willing to constantly, always, constantly be improving on what you're doing Is one aspect of it, but also always looking forward. So figuring out, like, how do we dodge whatever the next big thing is and I mean, if you look at the and I know you know Steve Simonson, but like whenever he's talking, he's always talking about, okay, what's happening in China now and how is that going to impact things? A year for now, it's two years, or now five years or now.
Bradley Sutton:
So even just looking ahead at stuff like that, where You're able to make decisions that mean that you're not going to be Sure changing yourself in the long run for a bigger game, now, I think something that successful sellers also have to know how to do is when to pull the plug on on products and everybody and this is one of those things that there's not one size fits all, everybody has their own criteria. How do you guys decide what to what to retire as far as the product goes? Is it strictly just you know a profit margin? Is there a certain sales velocity that you need to to maintain? Is it you know? If the reviews dip below a certain you know point, what's your decision-making factors on it?
Ben:
Honestly, one of the the biggest things we care about is how annoying it is to deal with. So just just being perfectly honest, because we do have, we do have a very wide catalog at this point Counting our kind of variations. We have over a thousand skews. So when we're looking at things and figuring out what we want to do, if the way, if we're sending it to the warehouse and the warehouse has to touch it four times, even if it's making more money, we may want to cut that faster than something the warehouse doesn't have to touch. So we look into not just the profitability of the product but also the profitability of the product compared to the labor, how labor intensive it is. And Also, if the warehouse people don't like dealing with it, then and we're not making much money on it and why keep dealing? Why keep doing it? So that that is one of the big things. But beyond that it is Almost exclusively profit, profitability. Like I don't really care if I'm selling something a hundred, a hundred units a day, if I'm making $12 a day on it. I would rather sell one thing for $12 and a hundred things on the flip side, what is?
Bradley Sutton:
are the triggers where it's like, hey, we need to Launch this product, or we need to launch this you know new thing for this brand, or hey, we need to launch a new variation? Are you guys just? Do you have a department that's just constantly looking at new opportunities per brand, or or you're looking for certain signals in a market? How's that work?
Ben:
Yeah. So I mean we do look at every single review that we get and and. So if we see a lot of reviews come against saying I wish this were larger, I wish this were a different color, like the obvious things like that Are things that we that play into it, or we're getting negative feedback saying there are all these issues, then solving the issues is a very easy way to improve on that. But the the other aspects of it are Just. If we look and we see a competitor come in and they're doing something different and it looks better, it's doing better, it's taking sales away from us, then we figure out, okay, how do we beat that? What can we do differently? So a lot of it is competitor and customer driven, as opposed to Keyword or sales velocity driven you know you talked about.
Bradley Sutton:
You know you've Use helium 10 for years and your team has what. What is the number one thing you're using helium 10 now for? And if you were to Join our product team for a few days let's say you were to you were to be in charge of our product team what would be on your wish list on, like, how you would add something to helium-10 that we don't have right now. That would make your lives as on the Amazon side, yeah, easier the conversion rate trends for that keyword For each individual product.
Ben:
So if you're looking at it, you can see like, okay, this one is selling this number this month a day, but being able to go in and figure out if their conversion rate is moving up and down month over month, as opposed to just sales moving up and down month over month, because I think that the Conversion rate is just getting more and more important and at the keyword level, not just the overall conversion rate, but even at the keyword level.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah, I'm dead. That's definitely the top of my list as well. You know, once Amazon, you know, make search query performance available in the API, then then that's like yeah, to me that's like a must-have for sure. All right, so now I knew you. You know you were like a nationally ranked tennis player back in a. You still get on the courts every now and then. What were your main hobbies last year of? You know like, hey, you need to get away from the Amazon world and just, you know, enjoy yourself. Yeah, what were you doing?
Ben:
So the US National Whitewater Training Center is in Charlotte so I learned how to whitewater kayak so I got a membership there. It's a closed course that they controlled the the flow of the water, so it could be anywhere from a class 1 to a class 5, depending on the day that you're out there with the rappers they're going to be. So that was my kind of fun. It was a 10-minute drive from our warehouse. So go Do some kayaking and then they have Like. On Thursdays they had concerts and stuff so you can go Hang out and be around people.
Bradley Sutton:
Now Is that just a local hobby for you, but or or? Now that you know I knew you travel sometimes too, or have you know when you travel? Have you ever gone real like a whitewater kayaking?
Ben:
I have once and it's way more terrifying. That's what I was about to say.
Bradley Sutton:
That would be a little bit scary if you're just doing a controlled environment one thing, but then to Be out there Okay.
Ben:
Yeah, when it's big stuff of a controlled water flow, if you flip over it's like, okay, I can handle this. If it's not controlled, we're the rocks. I don't know what's happening. I'm about to die, so that's not quite as good. But one of the things I've tried to do Well traveling is trying to try and go fishing Everywhere I go.
Bradley Sutton:
What were some of your cool places you've been to in 2023?
Ben:
Yeah, so I went to Fiji for the first time, Wow did you stay in over water like a over? Sadly, no, that was. I was not on an island that was conducive to that, so I'll have to. They'll have to be added to my next trip.
Bradley Sutton:
That's on my bucket list, fiji I've never been there.
Ben:
Yeah, it's, it's a beautiful place. I went to Estonia To the ambition event there, which I'd never, never been to Really Eastern Europe before, so that was a lot of fun to get to go and meet a lot of the sellers there and get to explore An area in a culture that I'd never gotten to experience. So I always enjoy getting to do stuff like that. Try to think of one more. I started in Greece in college and I got to go back there this year, so I'm going to go back and see what I saw in college and appreciated a bit more as an adult, from a historical perspective. Yeah, as opposed to the 21 year old kid who's just like if alcohol here, I need all of it.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, your priorities are a little bit different at that age, I think it's like getting to go on an adult trip there was.
Ben:
It was a nice change.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, before we get into your final strategy of the day, if people wanted to reach you or find you on the interwebs, how can they find you out there?
Ben:
Facebook is probably the easiest. It's just Benjamin Weber and I think I don't have a picture of myself there. I think it's a picture of the Frank Lloyd Wright falling waters house. So if you, if you see a Benjamin Weber with a house, that's probably me.
Bradley Sutton:
Now we're at the stage where we asked for your 30 or 60 second tip. You already gave us a doozy, you know, with that, looking at the how you rank at the keyword level as far as how you deserve to rank. So do you have another one for us?
Ben:
I mean, obviously everybody's talking about AI now, but using that within your product development to expand on what you're doing. So one of the things that we used to do with our Entire staff was, every day, as a kind of learning, mental strength, mental training exercise Say what are 10 things that you would pay $50 to never have to deal with again. Then we look to see if we can make products out of those, and so we had this massive list of Thousands of these. Now we do that with AI. So we're going into AI and saying what are problems like, let's say you're in the kitchen category. You would say what are 1020, however many things you want to say things that people would pay 30 dollar, 10, what are 10 problems that people would pay $30 to solve In the kitchen, so they don't have to deal with that every time they're doing it and then see what results come back from that and look at the products that come from it. So it's a way to get essentially consumer research via questions with AI, versus having to go in and look things up. So just using the, the AI as a creativity exercise can be Incredibly huge for coming up with new product ideas, and that's where the last, like seven products that we've made have come from us Just typing questions like that into AI, and there are things that no one is selling on the market right now.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Well, ben, thank you so much for joining us Again. You've definitely given us some insightful tips and you've got some very unique things that nobody else is doing, you know, like being your own Amazon last mile carrier, and everything is less, less great, and so I'll love to see what you do in 2024, and then we'll bring you back in 2025 and see how things are going.
Ben:
It sounds good. Thanks for having me.
Navigating the unpredictable rapids of Amazon and Walmart marketplace selling, we had the pleasure of being joined by Lesley, a maestro with a flair for reviving online seller accounts from the depths of suspension. In our conversation, we uncover the labyrinth of issues that can snag unsuspecting sellers, from the snares set by underhanded competitors to the resurgence of 'inauthentic' item flags. Lesley, drawing on her rich tapestry of experience that spans from journalism to digital marketplaces, guides us through the complexities of maintaining a pristine account on platforms like Amazon and Walmart, while also sharing her own transition from traditional business consulting to the fast-paced e-commerce arena.
The episode takes a turn into the shadowy alleys of the online marketplace, exposing the black hat tactics of less scrupulous sellers who resort to fraudulent reviews and other deceptive maneuvers to gain an edge. Stories of sabotage and extortion unfold, revealing the lengths to which some will go to undermine their competition and the sophisticated strategies Amazon employs to counter these threats. Lesley's insights prove invaluable for those looking to safeguard their ventures in this cutthroat environment, ensuring your business not only survives but thrives among the giants of the digital retail world.
In episode 528 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Lesley discuss:
- 00:00 - Strategies for Amazon Account Reinstatement & Protection
- 05:00 - Common Suspensions and Appeals on Walmart
- 07:59 - Amazon KDP Issues and IP Theft
- 11:10 - Amazon Account Suspensions and Prevention Tips
- 17:18 - More On Account Suspensions on Amazon
- 23:25 - Amazon TOS Compliance, Fraud, Extortion, and Black Hat Tactics
- 23:45 - Fake Orders and Amazon Locker Strategy
- 34:20 - Lesley's New Book And The Importance of SOPs in Business
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Amazon launches generative AI tool to answer shoppers’ questions https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/amazon-launches-generative-ai-tool-to-answer-shoppers-questions.html FedEx announces its own commerce platform for merchants https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/15/fedex-announces-its-own-commerce-platform-for-merchants/ Amazon May Start Charging Users for Certain Alexa Services https://www.mensjournal.com/news/amazon-alexa-plus-subscription-service Helium 10 Elite / AVASK Plus Workshop: A Day of E-Commerce Mastery in Frankfurt, Germany h10.me/avaskgermany The discussion concludes with a dive into using Amazon’s brand analytics data together with Helium 10’s Black Box to unearth niche keywords and product opportunities, offering you three different sets of strategies for identifying market gaps and leveraging data to enhance your Amazon-selling game. Join us for an episode that's not just about the news, but about giving you the insights and strategies to level up your Amazon journey.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 00:48 - Amazon App AI Tool
- 03:21 - FedEx Marketplace?
- 05:02 - Alexa Plus
- 06:17 - Walmart Video Ads
- 07:08 - FBA Shipment Window
- 08:42 - Reduce Returns
- 10:32 - Europe Conference
- 11:33 - Pro Training Tip: Amazon Product Research Tools
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon has started rolling out its consumer side generative AI shopping assistant. FedEx making an e-commerce marketplace. Walmart, sponsored brand ads and video ads, have a beta launch. A first-ever Helium 10 workshop in Germany next week. This and more on today's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz.
Bradley Sutton:
We give you a rundown of all the news stories and articles that's going on in the e-commerce world and we give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies For serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. We've got a lot of articles today, so let's go ahead and hop right into it now. The first one here is actually from CNBC and it was an article Entitled Amazon launches generative AI tool to answer shoppers questions. Now, this is pretty interesting because you know we've been talking about this for over a year, about how amazon has been testing Different tools and they're going to be coming out with things that allow the consumers you know, like shoppers of amazon to perhaps have generative AI like Conversations when they are shopping. Now it hasn't gotten to that point yet. However, something new that has been spotted in the wild I haven't seen it in my app yet is that there's a prompt that asks customers questions about a specific item and then it returns an answer within a few seconds by summarizing information collected from product reviews and the listing itself. Now something to note again. Like I said, this is not some conversation like you can. You can do with ChatGPT. It says, unlike open-art ai's ChatGPT, amazon's new feature isn't equipped to carry out a conversation, but it can respond to creative prompts. It says on a listing for a woman's vest, it could write a haiku about the product.
Bradley Sutton:
How that Is going to help us sell products, I'm not sure. So take a look here. It says it was also able to describe the item in the style of Yoda from star wars. All right, and it actually had a screenshot of this. So I guess somebody who has this app they typed in Can you describe the product as if you are Yoda from star wars? And then the answer that this amazon app says Yoda why is jedi master would describe this product thusly. And it says crop puffer vest. Women wear zipper closure. Yes, okay, I'm sorry that was a bad Yoda impression, but literally I wasn't making that up. This is a screenshot from this article and it it answered about this product in this style of Yoda. Again, I am not sure how that is going to help us sell products. There's probably a lot of other things. I wish amazon might Maybe put a little effort into more than Allowing its ai app to respond in the or not in the voice, thank goodness, but in the tense of or the form of Yoda. But hey, it is what it is. Um, technology is getting kind of scary. Could this, you know, a future iteration of this actually help sales for us? Maybe it's too early to see so generative ai it. It's not coming anymore. It has come All right, so look out for this in your amazon app.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is actually from tech crunch and it's entitled FedEx announces its own commerce platform for merchants. Now, right off the bat, let me just go ahead and say you know, I did a little clickbait. I said, oh, this might be a marketplace, no, FedEx says it's not a marketplace. it's this new commerce platform they're calling fdx, all right, and it's in private preview, with a wider launch schedule for fall of 2024. Now it's not really known what in the world it's going to be. You know, like they said, it's not going to be a marketplace. However, they did purchase this service called shop Uh runner a couple years ago, or a few years ago now, and it allows people to see estimated delivery time on websites, handle shopping carts, track packages, record carbon emissions for those who are interested in that managed returns, etc. You know, but they specifically says we are not in the business of the marketplace, we're trying to help businesses build the best possible experience From demand to post purchase.
Bradley Sutton:
So, like I'm just confused, like I have no idea what the heck this is. You know, since, since FedEx is not, you know, really being open with it, but you know, shots were fired Earlier this year or last year. Now when, when Amazon's like, hey, we're gonna be a shipping company. Now you know, like you don't have to be selling products on FBA, you can use Amazon as a shipping company, like that's like direct competition for FedEx and UPS. So FedEx is like I'm gonna clap back at you right and say, alright, well, let's get into the commerce game. How they're gonna do that? I'm not sure are they gonna be successful, who knows? But be interesting to watch out if there's a new player on the block.
Bradley Sutton:
Going back to the articles, men's journal comm had something Says Amazon may start charging users for certain Alexa services. They're gonna launch this thing called Alexa plus later this year and they're gonna be able to have exclusive Features and it's gonna be the revitalized, subscription based version of its voice assistant June 30th. Now this is another one I'm very skeptical about. I mean, alexa has not really improved in years, you know, and it's been struggling. I, if I were Amazon, I would not be trying to put a price tag on it Until it was proven to really really be better, because I'm just not sure that Alexa is worth any kind of money. Well, I know Alexa is not worth any money. You know nobody's gonna pay extra money for it now. Now Could they make something super cool again using generative AI? That would make it worth couple bucks a month potentially. But let's see. You know, the thing that affects Amazon sellers is Are more people gonna be shopping on Alexa because of some new features it might have? That's to be determined. Now that's gonna affect us, like not many people I know ever buy anything on Alexa, but if that changes, that would be very helpful to Amazon sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article was actually an email I got from Walmart, so guys, check this out. If you got the email, you might be on this beta program where they say, hey, Walmart connect is it excited to inform me that we are testing sponsored brands and sponsored video inventory on browse and topic pages on Walmart site, starting last week actually, and it's gonna run a minimum of four weeks. All right, we have generated next Recommended next step, so check if you got this email and you can click on it. It says, hey, all self-serve sponsored search advertisers With scheduled live or net, new sponsored brand and sponsored video campaigns will automatically be updated and part of the test and they gave a couple of screenshots of how sponsored brand ads might look looks very similar to what we all know and love in Amazon Advertising. So check your email, whatever your Walmart email is, if you have that Next article is actually not article, but it's from the seller central dashboard and this is an update of something previously announced and it's Entitled automatic closure policy for shipments will be updated on February 1st.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so this was announced before, but they clarified it a little bit. So let's say this is again Effective February 1st. Let's say you create a shipment, all right, using the send to Amazon workflow. So so you're trying to send inventory into Amazon from your let's just say, your own 3pl here in the United States or in Europe. Domestic shipment, in other words, from US addresses, if it has not arrived within 45 days After the shipment creation date, the Shipment will automatically be closed, all right. Or I mean, if it doesn't arrive within this, this time of the policy now for International shipments, that means you create a shipment that's going to be coming from your Chinese or Indian or Pakistani Factory. Well, you're gonna have 75 days from the shipment creation date. For most of you this doesn't have. You know this might not affect you, but but what if they're shipping delays? Or maybe you accidentally, you know, create your shipment too early and then you know Chinese New Year's came, you know, like what's happening right now, and then it delayed your shipment a month. You know, could you be pushing this time limit? It's, it's a possible. So just take a look at this in your dashboard if you have any questions. They clarified a couple of things, but you can't just create open-ended shipments anymore and, you know, expect five years later, or five years or five months later for Amazon to accept your package.
Bradley Sutton:
One last news article from the seller central dashboard this was from last week and it's something new on Amazon where it says reduce customer returns recommendation. This is in the growth opportunities tool and it's supposed to gonna tell you, like the financial impact of Money you could have gained over 90 days if you've done the recommended actions. This I can pretty much take with the tiniest grain of salt I have ever eaten, because I have never found value in these Estimations that that Amazon gives and I'm not trying to throw Amazon to the bus, I'm just keeping it real, guys but I haven't seen anything that gives me faith that this algorithm is gonna work. That being said, the reason why I'm bringing this up is because there's gonna be some recommendations that's gonna have. Now, this could be potentially, you know, beneficial. You know, forget the what's the potential impact. Just being able to see what the Amazon algorithm Thinks you should do will be interesting because it's supposedly, as this article says, it's gonna be based on Customers, customer issue trends and reviews and it's gonna compare your listing to other top-selling brands. Now that is something I could see that could be helpful where, hey, here's a brand that has a similar product and it's a really selling well and they've got, like this field filled out that you don't have filled out now. That could be Beneficial. The other thing that seemed interesting, but again I'm skeptical on, is it said hey, find out whether placing content in the title bullets or product description of your detail pages, we'll have the greatest impression on customers if they're just making this up, you know, like I'm pretty sure that us experience Amazon sellers probably no better than Amazon as far as how the algorithm works, as far as things like this. But again, if they've got some advanced new information that that is coming out, this could be a potential way to have insight into the Amazon algorithm. All right, so so look out for that on your, your dashboard as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Last thing, again, next week, a chevalier myself will be in Germany, Frankfurt, Germany. We are gonna be at our very first ever all-day event that Helium 10 is doing together with the VASC. So if you'd like to attend, go to h10.me/avaskgermany. It's only 75 euros to attend all day. We've got tons of speakers coming from multiple countries All over Europe. I'll be there myself. We're gonna have a networking social. We're providing food. It's gonna be in the Frankfurt airport, all right. So, like I don't care where you are in Europe, you're, you're like a Ryan air 30 dollar Ryan air flight away from Frankfurt. You don't even need to get an Uber. You just walk out of the terminal and you're right there. All right, guys. So again, h10.me forward slash a VASC Germany. Please come out. It would be great to see you all and meet you guys in person next week, on the 25th of January. All right, that's it for the news this week.
Bradley Sutton:
Next up, let's get into our training tip of the week, and actually it's multiple ones. I want to spend just a couple of times just showing you the power of the new Helium 10 tool that came out a few weeks ago in black box, called ABA, top search terms, which is for Amazon brand analytics. The possibilities are endless with the kind of research you can do, so I just picked a couple of scenarios here to show you. Let's pretend that you have a product or a factory that makes products made of bamboo. I actually have a brand that makes bamboo products and you're like hey, what are some trending bamboo Keywords, right, so. So then you go in and you go into black box, you go into the new tool, aba, top search terms, and then what you can do is you enter bamboo, just like you would in Amazon brand analytics inside of seller central. But then now I can enter in other things, like, for example, I'm gonna enter in the helium minimum, Helium 10 search volume of 500. I'm going to say, hey, I want to see where the top three clicked ASINs, okay, per brand analytics have a total of less than 200 reviews. Meaning, hey, these the top products in this keyword, they're not even, they don't even have that many reviews Overall. There might be some. You know room for me.
Bradley Sutton:
And take a look at the keywords that came up here. You know we've got like bamboo cool underwear here, bamboo boxer briefs. I'm already seeing like a you know some, some trends here. And then, as I scroll down here, this one jumped out to me bamboo lampshade. And right here in this brand analytics tool I can see, wow, okay, this has a thousand search volume. It's increased 35% this search volume over the previous week. And then I'm looking at these top three clicked and, yeah, these are products are fairly new. Look at this, the number one clicked item for this keyword only has five reviews. All right, so let's just go ahead and take a look at this on Amazon and I can see this Amazon page, like you know, the number one, page one, position one, only has 14 reviews. Position two, six reviews. Position three has a hundred reviews and it's sold a hundred units. So this is pretty interesting. You know, like I found a new niche, potentially for myself, if I'm selling bamboo products, just by using the brand analytics data together with Amazon or Helium 10 data allowed me to find this new niche. So guys, play around with that.
Bradley Sutton:
Option number two let's just say, hey, I'm doing some, some new research and I'm like, hey, I want to see a keyword that, per brand analytics, the total click share of the top three items are 70%, meaning that the top three click products. If you add up how much percent of the clicks they get, it's over 70%. But if you add up their conversion share, meaning what share of the sales of this keyword do these top three click products have, it's less than 35%. What does that mean? Think about that for a second. Theoretically speaking, if, if all products and listings were created equal, if there is a listing that or some listings that get 70% of the clicks, well, it should have 70% of the sales, right. But most, most keywords, most products are not created equal.
Bradley Sutton:
Sometimes people click into a product and they're like, wow, this is amazing, so it's conversion rates going to be super high. Other times, everybody's clicking into products and it's like, nah, we don't like this, this listing sucks, this product sucks, whatever right, and the conversion rates going to be lower. So that's what I'm looking for. Show me where there's a lot of buyer intent for three products. That means whatever they see in the search results, it looks good. So if they click it, it like 70, 70% of all the clicks for a keyword. That's a lot right, but everybody's clicking out of it and buying another product that wasn't even one of the top three click. So that's literally what I'm looking for here, using brand analytics. You know you can't do this in seller central unless you download stuff and make some pivot tables.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm also using some other Helium 10 data points like hey, I want these keywords to have 2000 search volume at least and at least three word count. I want these keywords. It not only has to match everything I just said, but I wanted to have a search volume trend that's going up. I want to see this going up 50% week over week. Search forms, like it's a trending keyword. And then take a look there's a hundred and 78 keywords that that had this like look at this one human dogbed that that's a crazy keyword. Human dog bed has a 500% increase in search volume. recently. All right, that that's kind of insane. there's other you know products here mini chainsaw, cordless. You know there's some, just random, one wagons cart, foldable. The heck is that cigar ass trays for men has a 1000% increase in search volume. And then take a look here the top three clicked products for this cigar ass trays. Look at this the number one click product for this keyword has 94% of the clicks but 0% of the conversion. So there's something fishy going on there. Everybody seems to love it in the search results but nobody likes it on the page. However, another product there had 0.6% of the clicks yet 11% of the purchases. So again, there's just so much valuable information in brand analytics that you guys can do for your product research. But now you have a completely new way to search for it using helium tens brand analytics tool.
Bradley Sutton:
One last scenario here. Let's say you're doing keyword research. Hey, you look up all the coffin shelves, let's just say, and you put all of the ASINs of the top selling coffin shelves into this tool and basically what you want to see is hey, where did any of these products show up as one of the top three clicked for any keyword? Well, boom goes the dynamite. You just put in the ASINs and within seconds you are going to get every single keyword where it was one of the top three clicked and you'll be able to see if it was one of the top three purchase. You can see it's click share Like here's a keyword I didn't even, you know, think about, for I might not even be focused on in for our project X coffin shelf, alternative decor. All right, that's a new keyword for me. I discovered it right here in brand analytics.
Bradley Sutton:
So, guys, if you haven't used this tool, make sure to use it. I believe for now it's open to diamond and up members. You know we always try and you know, give our tools first to elite, then to diamond and then it'll get down on platinum. But you know there's tons of you diamond users out there. So make sure you guys are getting the value out of this tool. Open up, play around with it. Let me know what you think. What other kind of filters would you like to see? All right, guys. That's it for our Weekly Buzz this week. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.
Listen in as Gefen from Vendocommerce joins us in this month’s TACoS Tuesday episode to share expert insights on the evolving landscape of Amazon PPC advertising. We're unwrapping the tactics that have driven success in 2023 and looking ahead to what 2024 holds, with a keen eye on the emerging trend of vertical video ads. Discover how an integrated approach to advertising, factoring in the halo effect on overall sales and product rankings, can amplify your brand's presence during crucial retail events. We also delve into how to use Helium 10 to easily optimize and track these strategies for superior performance in the year to come.
In our conversation, we compare the accessibility of Sponsored TV with the robust control offered by Amazon DSP, especially for smaller brands looking to maximize their advertising efforts. Learn why testing and patience are critical when navigating these platforms, and understand the strategic organization of sponsored product campaigns to optimize ad groupings. Plus, Gefen imparts valuable advice on marketing products with different attributes and the potential pitfalls of violating terms of service when it comes to product hang tags on Amazon and Walmart. Tune in for an enlightening discussion that could reshape your approach to Amazon advertising.
In episode 527 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Gefen discuss:
- 00:00 - Amazon Advertising in 2023 and 2024
- 03:10 - Vertical Video Ads Trend
- 09:29 - E-Commerce Behavior on TikTok Shop and Amazon
- 13:13 - Amazon's Sponsored TV and Publisher Ads
- 14:25 - Comparing Sponsored TV and Self-Serve DSP
- 16:51 - TikTok and Amazon Trust and Fulfillment
- 19:19 - Amazon Advertising and Product Attributes
- 20:46 - Optimizing Advertising Creatives on Amazon
- 30:10 - Helium 10 Tool Cerebro
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Carrie Miller:
Sponsored TV ads. What worked for ads in 2023 on Amazon and what to look forward to in 2024 with Amazon ads. This and so much more on today's episode of the Serious Sellers podcast.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me/adtomic
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Carrie Miller and I will be your host, and this is our TACoS Tuesday, where we talk about all things Amazon advertising, and we have an expert guest today. So this is Geffen from Vendo. So welcome, Geffen.
Gefen:
Hey, Carrie, it's a pleasure to be here.
Carrie Miller:
Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm very excited to have you on. I know you've been on here before and a lot of people really liked your episode, so we have some more good content for everyone today. And so for those of you, for those of the people in the audience that don't know you or know about Vendo, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience, and then also about Vendo?
Gefen:
Yeah, 100%. So I'm the VP of advertising here at Vendo. So just a background on what Vendo, who and what Vendo is. So we are a full service e-commerce agency specializing in Amazon and Walmart, full service management From an advertising perspective. We have kind of brought in those services across Amazon and Walmart also to bring in things like programmatic, various retail media networks, as well as other marketplaces too, and so those have been incredibly, incredibly growth focused. I mean, 2023 was a very crazy year. The team did an incredible job from a strategic standpoint, from a number standpoint, to grow across the board and when it comes to PPC, as most of the people I hope know, on this call, a lot of those different strategies rhyme. So we've been able to replicate the immense success that we've had on Amazon. We brought it over to Walmart and then we brought that over towards the various retail media networks, as well as things like Page Search and Social with Google, facebook, tiktok, etc. Amazing.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, so you guys are into everything. That's awesome. So I guess, since you were talking about 2023, what are some things that you think worked really really well Specifically in 2023 that you might carry into 2024? And then maybe some new things on the horizon because of just the changing landscape and things that Amazon is introducing right now.
Gefen:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll start with the second half of that question, because I think that vertical video is going to be a really big push for Amazon this year. I know that everybody's talking about that in the space. I'm very curious to see how it's going to be rolled out. I mean, if you think about it from a practical standpoint, it's going to take up more page real estate than the, than the former video format. Now they might have both horizontal and vertical in play. We also don't know where on the search engine results page it's going to show up. Is it going to show up on row four, which would be row four, five, six on mobile, potentially even row seven, depending on how, you know, zoomed in your screen is, or is it going to be at the bottom of the page? And I think those are big questions because that's going to place a big emphasis on where you're ranking. And so I think that that leads into the first part of your question, which is something that worked really well for us, because we don't look at ads in a vacuum, right?
Gefen:
So you know, ACoS is great, but obviously this is TACoS Tuesday and taco of your sales, yes, and so when we're looking at total sales, something that we brought in and I know it's a little vague, but we really looked at the halo impact of ad strategies and how they impacted ranking, ranking and total sales, right. And so when we focused our ad strategy maybe on a cost per customer acquisition model, maybe on a taco's model, and we look to really prioritize, hey, where are we showing up, right? So if, if we're driving all this traffic and we have a 20% conversion rate, let's say, on this keyword, are we tracking, using a Helium 10? Of course, are we tracking that ranking properly? To say, hey, we started running these ads aggressively on August 1st and if we've been tracking ranking on that keyword for the last two months since going aggressive on that term, where are we ranking now and how has it changed?
Gefen:
And are there broader KPIs that we're measuring outside of just direct ad revenue? And that worked really well for us because we centered that around 10 poll events and this is a really big strategy of ours. That is incredibly complex, it takes a whole village to actually execute. But when we, when we focus our customer acquisition and ranking models around major times in the year so think Prime Day, think fall Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Holiday, and then, of course, if you're a one off brand, if you I don't know are ski related, then obviously your season is January to March. You know like there are differences, but really peak seasons. If you're able to focus your growth model around the times that are going to give you the most reward, then that worked really well for us last year and we expect to see a lot more of that this year, especially as we all expect people are going to be more deal oriented, the constant battle for margins. So the better ranks you are, the more organic sales you drive, the better your TACoS is.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, so are you. Are you also maybe sending a lot of outside traffic for that ranking as well, or just utilizing? Can you tell us a little bit about that and what your strategy is there? That kind of goes in with what you were just talking about?
Gefen:
Yeah, absolutely so. One of the verticals that I oversee is paid search and social, and so that's going to be met in Google primarily. There's Pinterest, there's Reddit, there's now TikTok. That can drive back to Amazon as well. I think there's two buckets. I think you have the always on external strategy right, which is the constant drip of, say, a Facebook campaign that's driving, whatever the budget is $200 a day, $150 a day, whatever it is back to Amazon. We all know that Amazon is going to reward external conversion a little bit more. Also, the Amazon attribution program gives you a bit of a boost with getting up to 10% back usually around 5% to 7%, but up to 10% back on each sale, which is nice. And then you also get a boost in your actual ranking. The influencer programs that we've run specifically for 10 poll events again, to go back to that first point, those are the ones that have really kind of set themselves apart or set those brands apart, the ones that are willing to have very strategic and targeted strategies towards high return on investment periods. And so you have the always on, which is great, that is a constant, and we run that for many brands. And then we have a few brands, usually on the larger side, that are willing to invest some serious cash into some of the of Amazon programs that are just going to drive as much traffic as possible. Those are the ones that see big gains, and it's not necessarily that you have to hit a home run with one TikTok influencer. You can have 10, you can have 20, you can have 30 micro. That actually get you the same result potentially for cheaper. But you have less risk with putting all of your eggs into one basket, and so that external traffic has been really helpful.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I actually know some people in our elite group said that their ranking just organically just shot up just from their TikTok stuff that they were doing. They were focusing on certain keywords in their title and they just all the traffic from TikTok was really bad, yeah, and now there's actually a TikTok shop, so that's actually going to compete with Amazon.
Gefen:
We've actually launched multiple brands on TikTok shop. We're seeing phenomenal success with those. It doesn't necessarily directly translate to Amazon sales, but what we always say at Vendo and it's the approach we've taken that has been very successful for all of our brands is you can't separate your customers anymore, right, you can say that an Amazon customer is in its own bucket and they're never going to be a DTC customer, and vice versa. Yeah, every customer everywhere you're exposed is a form of advertising and you can't force a customer to buy in a certain place. So if you're available on TikTok shop and that's where they find you, maybe next time they're going to buy an Amazon, right? Or maybe they're going to buy your DTC. As long as you're looking at the business holistically and Amazon is a piece of that pie, or TikTok is a piece of that pie, then, and your business is growing, then you know that your efforts are pushing the whole business up.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I was saying that I think that a lot of people aren't necessarily comfortable yet purchasing on TikTok, so I think that's why a lot of people are just going to Amazon. They might be like, oh, I saw this on TikTok, but maybe it'll change eventually, because I think we're still seeing quite a bit of traffic on Amazon, even though TikTok is like not wanting anyone to do that. Have you seen that same thing?
Gefen:
Yeah, I can't remember what the exact term was. It was like I saw this on TikTok, or I found this on TikTok, or seen on TikTok, or something like that.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, TikTok.
Gefen:
whatever the thing is, TikTok is game here, yeah it was one of the largest search terms a few months ago. And so, to your point, 100% right, yeah. And that is actually, I think, more proof to my previous point, which is, wherever they're seeing things, they're coming to other places, to their comfortable place to buy. And so if they're coming there and from an advertising perspective, we're showing up where we need to show up, then we're in a good place, right yeah, because then we're going to get that conversion and that you just you spent elsewhere. Maybe your customer acquisition was slightly higher, but you drove that conversion.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah.
Gefen:
And, at the end of the day, if you have a good product and your customers are loyal, then it's going to pay off in not even the long term.
Carrie Miller:
Do you see that a lot, because I know you do a lot of DSP too. Do you see that a lot with DSP, where you're kind of putting a lot into Amazon and maybe you don't necessarily see the exact conversion on Amazon, but then all of a sudden their website goes way up or kind of other platforms.
Gefen:
So a couple of points to that. So, when it comes to programmatic, there is there is native programmatic on Amazon, right so. And then there's also non-native programmatic, right, so we can use something like the trade desk that can kind of target any programmatic targeting across the entire internet. Basically, the latter, yes, right, so the latter we do see that kind of um, that kind of halo impact across either website, and you can, you can also measure that right. You can put in a pixel and you can actually, so you can also put in a pixel on the, on the um, on the Amazon DSP as well. So you can put a pixel on your website for Amazon DSP and even though traffic isn't necessarily driving to your website, it will still pick up if there are sales on your website or, at the very least, visits from that same campaign. And so the interconnectedness of this world is growing, where the advertising synergies are becoming a lot more um, a lot more intentional, and so you have to have the pixels on your DTC site, right. You have to be launching on TikTok, you have to be on Amazon, on Walmart, because if you're not measuring that, then you won't know if, if your sales are lifting across the board. And if they are lifting, then you don't know where you can take spend. Maybe you're bloated in one area and two lean in another and you can put those and so, uh, to your question, 100%. Um, we do see the halo impact from DSP with Amazon DSP specifically. I will say the biggest halo impact is actually in the performance of the PPC ads. Um, we usually tend to see, especially on our mid, mid to large size brands, um, when we launched DSP for them, their PPC ads tend to pick up in specifically in performance. So their, their ACOS tends to go down. Um, and that's probably because Amazon, as we all know, is a, uh, is a pay to pay platform, so they're just rewarding you with being further entrenched in their ecosystem.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I did have actually another question, um, kind of about just some newer things that are going on with Amazon. Have you started the using the, the TV ads and then also just the sponsored um ads that go to uh like things like Buzzfeed and um, I forgot what the it's called, I think it's uh Sponsored Product Ads but they go to publishers. Have you started using those?
Gefen:
So yeah, Sponsored TV.
Carrie Miller:
And then also they're sponsored ads that go to like Buzzfeed or yeah, yeah.
Gefen:
So two points. So, first off, Bradley’s point. We actually don't use Paki for Amazon. We uh use them for Walmart. Uh, we actually use software for Amazon, besides Helium 10, of course. But as far as management software goes, uh, it's, it's all manual, um, um, but, and we can talk, we can have a whole 10 podcasts just on that. Yes, there's a ton there, but as it pertains to sponsor TV, so that's something that Amazon launched at uh, unboxed this past year, um, and the goal is to create similar to how sponsored display is like DSP light, sponsored TV is like STV or CTV light, right, so they want to bring the, the, the TV portion of programmatic, into a self-serve area. There's pros and cons. The pro is that there's no minimum, there's no barrier to entry. You can throw up a video and it gets blasted out towards a bunch of different publishers at a um at a uh, fairly, fairly decent rate. It's a little bit more expensive, obviously, because you're not able to put your max CPMs or anything like that. At the same time, you have no control. So, similar to sponsor display, um, you know, if you work with and uh with an um, with an agency like Vendo, uh, we don't have any minimums on our uh, on our uh, on our DSP self-serve seat, so we're able to uh to say, hey, you know, if you want to spend a thousand or 2000 or 3000, you can, you don't have to spend 20.
Gefen:
Um, and so my recommendation is, if you're a very small brand, you're starting out, definitely test out sponsored TV. Don't expect because they're usually non-engageable, or or, if they are engageable, um, the really the primary KPI and what they're optimized for internally is views. Um then, don't expect a strong row as treat that as a top of funnel approach. Yeah, at the same time, if you do have a little bit more budget and you want some more control, go into self-serve DSP. You're just going to get more. You can choose what your destinations are, what your publishers are, you can choose your audiences, you can choose your retargeting. You can't in sponsored TV too, but there's just a lot more control and so, similar to sponsored display, it's a great launching pad. But I wouldn't say, hey, if you're going to take 10 grand and throw it into there, take 10 grand and throw it in the DSP, you're going to see better results.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, that's very good advice for everyone, as far as the DSP, Very good advice for everyone, especially for smaller brands, Cause usually it's all you know, it's harder because a lot of people are focused on big brands with kind of strategies and smaller brands is like I don't know if it's time to do even DSP or the sponsored TV. So that's good advice about the TV and there is no real, like right time.
Gefen:
I would just say hey, if you have some budget, if your ads are performing well, test it out.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, we test as much as we can, I mean if it works, amazing.
Gefen:
You know. If it doesn't, then we know it doesn't and maybe we'll test it out later on. But we can put that budget immediately into other areas.
Carrie Miller:
How long do you usually test it for DSP? Two or three months or?
Gefen:
Technically, DSP is a 14 day window before it's actually giving you proper data and usually DSP you'll know within a month.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, that's good to know too. Okay, so then we have Chris Shipperling said to your point about trust people also want to see the product ASAP and Amazon owns product operations. I bought a product from TikTok which is from Shipbob. I'll say no more as a customer.
Gefen:
Yes, you can technically fulfill with Amazon for TikTok shop. I don't have too many details on that, but I know it's possible. I don't know how much of that is being conveyed to the customer, and so that's a great point about trust from the. From the customer standpoint as a seller, it doesn't really take much more. I don't know the fees, I don't know what it kind of entails, but I know that I've heard that is possible.
Carrie Miller:
I it is possible and that's definitely a better. You basically connected to your Shopify site and then use the fulfillment by Amazon. But I I did purchase something on TikTok and it was literally shipped all the way from China. So I didn't know that was happening when I bought it. So that is kind of the that's going to kind of ruin some trust, I think, with people. So something to think about moving forward.
Gefen:
If you even talk about Temu here either, because that's a different ballgame.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, that's another one. All right, and let's see, Chris Shipperling has something else. He says, which, which is why you always KPI individual platform metrics, but blended CAC is so important when you do have several activities running to drive traffic and conversion. Completely agree with what you were saying, so yeah, 100%.
Gefen:
We use a cat model for a ton of our brands. We track new to brand customers on Amazon very closely new and repeat as well, and we have we have a lifetime value graphs that we track over multiple years to see what the actual return is for our clients.
Carrie Miller:
Amazing, that's awesome. Okay, so, Michael, would love to hear your thoughts on how to organize Hold on sponsored product campaigns. Thank you, you lost your audio there multiple skews in a category, independent skews, not variant ASINs that share many keywords. When is it better to combine ASINs into an ad group and let Amazon pick the best for separating each SKU into its own ad group or campaign?
Gefen:
Thanks, it's a phenomenal question and this is where you're going to hear the variation in answers. You're going to hear shows that advertising still, to an extent, is a good amount of art versus science, because there are different opinions and I manage my own brands for Vendo as well, and I've actually done both in terms of separating out and then keeping them together. So a couple of different things. Number one there are always differing what's the word differing attributes to a product, right, whether it's a count, whether it's a size, whether it's a color, at the very least you can separate out by that. So, for instance, if you have TVs, right, you might have a smart TV. Right, so let's. But you could have a 45 inch, a 55 inch and a 65 inch smart TV. So, right off the bat, you can look at the search volume. For what is a 65 inch TV bring in in terms of search volume? Okay, that's, that's a separate campaign, right, 55 inch, separate campaign.
Gefen:
And then to your question, my recommendation and best practice is you can never rank and and equally grow all of your products, right, you have to have a hero item or a hero couple of items. So, for instance, let's say you go back to these TVs. You've got, I don't know, 10 sizes, 354555, whatever it is. Some of those are going to be best sellers, right? More people search for 55 inch and 65 inch versus 24 inch, so you know that those are the ones that have the highest potential and those are the ones that you're going to want to rank. So you might as well take those, and maybe take three of them, and put them into their own hero term campaign, so smart TV, tv, etc. And then that way you're focusing the majority of your ranking spend on the highest search volume terms towards the few that are actually going to generate that sales and performance.
Gefen:
And even within that, I mean usually think about it. I mean, how many brands do you see that have three products ranked on the top row? Right, it's usually one. And so at the end of the day, we are going to try and diversify our sales as much as possible, but at the same time, one product is going to win out. And so to the last part of your question, when it's better to combine a since into an ad group on Amazon, pick the best when it comes to your hero items. Let's say you've got three and that whole product line the three best selling colors, three best selling sizes, whatever it is, put those into their own ad group and then Amazon can choose. If you're again going back to smart TV, it's like, okay, someone's typing in smart TV, Amazon's going to eventually know whether or not someone typing in smart TV is more likely to buy 55 inch or 65 inch. And you'll be able to see the conversion rate, you'll be able to see the performance and you can say that's good, that's not good, etc.
Carrie Miller:
We'll go into kind of ad creatives like videos and stuff. How do you optimize those? Are you doing a lot of tests and split testing? What is your process for creatives And so when it comes to the best.
?
Gefen:
So, again, we have five ad verticals. Every vertical requires different size creatives. So we have a phenomenal team working on our creatives that can really customize to whatever it is that we want or need. A Facebook creative is going to be different from a DSP creative. It's going to be different from a, from a credo creative. But to backtrack for a sec, specifically on Amazon, specifically for something like sponsored brands because you're sponsored brand lifestyle imagery and sponsored brand video, right, those the two main creatives that you're going to be generating. And I will say, first and foremost well, first of all, by January 31, all of your product collection ads have to have a lifestyle image on them, if not, they're going to be paused. So that's a note to everybody that's selling you need to have a lifestyle image on your product and ads, if not, they're just not going to show up. That's by the end of this month, but I've found, from a video perspective, having a video versus not having a video gets you 80% of the way there. Of course, it needs to look like decent, right, but if you have any form of a decent video made by, made by a graphic designer or software, that's good enough to pass for you to be like okay, I'm fine with that. You're 70 to 80% of the way there. Obviously, that 20% for much larger brands matters.
Gefen:
So that's where you bring in different testing, right, and usually that's at the discretion of the brand's creatives, right? We're not a full creative agency. We have creative support, and so what we like to do is we like to take their direction and actually make the asset. So usually they have a marketing team that's going to bring us either static imagery or video imagery, and then we're going to scale that into, let's say, three different videos from that static imagery of just like slideshows or whatever, and then maybe we'll test out those three. Now Amazon's sponsor brand video has different ad groups that you can test out, which is awesome. So you can do like three different ad groups there and whatever ends up working. Basically, from a CVR standpoint conversion rates going to be your primary KPI there Then that's the one that you go with.
Carrie Miller:
All right, very good, we actually have something else from the audience. I sell yoga pants. Can I print my website on the product hang tag? Does it follow Amazon and Walmart terms of service?
Gefen:
I don't think it does. I don't think that you're allowed to drive any form of traffic to off Amazon. Don't fully quote me. I am not an expert in all of Amazon terms of service. I know the ad portion. But if you were to ask me my two cents, I would say if you're referencing your website anywhere on your product and Amazon catches you, it's probably against TOS.
Carrie Miller:
I do actually on mine, have on our packaging our website, because we use the same packaging for all different platforms and I know big brands also have their websites in there and they even have you know things where maybe it's not enforced. Yeah, I don't know if it's enforced as much, but I think it's if you kind of drive traffic to your website or you're kind of contacting people with their info. But it is kind of a gray area there. So yeah, that is a hard one.
Gefen:
Yeah, it's tough. I know that on any assets you have on Amazon you can't do that. We've even made videos where, like at the end, like we've just taken a video from their website and put it onto sponsor brand video and it was like at the end, like the last slide was like buyonx.com.
Bradley Sutton:
And it got taken down. Yeah, exactly.
Gefen:
It just depends. I mean there's a lot of gray area. My guess is that's against TOS. Also to your point, Carrie if a lot of people are doing it, maybe it's not really a police stuff that much.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I think. I think the kind of differentiator is are you trying to drive traffic away from Amazon, or you know? I think it's also when you think about big brands. I don't think they're all going to change their packaging just for Amazon?
Gefen:
I guess that's going to not yeah, yeah, so that's also a good point.
Carrie Miller:
It's not really. You know it's when you're like you've got an insert and you're like buy this on my side or you know something like that. That's kind of a difference, whereas if it's just on your packaging, I think it's, it should be fine.
Gefen:
Yeah, um, that's actually a good question. So, do do branded campaigns help in the organic rank of your product? It's yes and no. So when you're launching, 100% yes If you're launching a new product line inside your existing product catalog, um to leverage your branded campaigns is huge. Or, excuse me, your branded traffic with branded campaigns is huge because that's how you build your sales velocity quickly. Same time, if you are seeing that you know a majority of your spend is going towards branded um, then I would look at the CPCs and I would say you're probably not um helping out with ranking as much as you could be for non-branded terms. Remember, amazon will rank you based on how you perform on non-branded terms. If you don't drive traffic to non-branded terms, you can't convert against them. If you can't convert, then you can't rank. Yeah, good point.
Carrie Miller:
All right. Another question from Douda to Silva how do you harvest search term reports from a main keyword running as phase type, phrase type? That uh generate tons of variations of the main keywords. Those keywords are all different, with one clicks costing me a dollar.
Gefen:
Yep, that's some. That's probably arguably the largest source of waste it's been. Um is phrase terminology, phrase terms, phrase keywords that generate one click, $1, no conversion. You have a thousand of them, you spend $1,000 and you didn't get anything as a result. Um, switch it to exact, pause it out and then test out them in like groups of 15 or 20. It's more manual work. It kind of sucks. But if you take the thousand dollars you spent, let's say over a month, and then you um, you take 500 of that, so you save yourself 500 and you put it towards 30 keywords and you test and let's say you generate sales after driving 10 clicks on each, on five of them, and then you use those as ranking campaigns. That's how you're able to scale the business. You're going to spend that money anyway. You might as well go deep rather than shallow, all right. Sounds like he was. He was testing me. He said correct.
Carrie Miller:
Hmm, that's. That's an interesting test, all right.
Gefen:
I'm glad I passed.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, yeah, you're definitely passing all these little tests here from people. Um, uh, just on a kind of an ending note um, are there any other kind of things you want to leave for people in 2024? Kind of final thoughts of you know what to look forward to, what, what people should be focused on, and uh, and yeah, just any final words of advice search volume trends.
Gefen:
We use Helium 10, I mean hourly, but daily, obviously uh to to look at where the search volume trends are in the space. And when I talk about 10 poll planning, when I talk about uh, uh, high, high traffic times, um, it's just the nature of the beast that you are going to perform better at certain times of the year. Um, you need to have a strategy that is able to address low demand and high demand to what you need your business to do, and so the more demand you're tracking, um, the better, uh, you're going to be able to prepare for that. And just a very simple equation or a simple example, excuse me, is um, if you know that last year you did phenomenal in December, um, then take the steps in October and November to make sure you're ready for that. And if that might mean taking or spending less in August and September, if you do have an annualized budget, then make sure you're looking at December in February, so you know that by the time August and September comes, you know what you need to do to prepare for that time of year. And so you, you know, we have, for almost every term, we have four, five, six years of data. At this point. You know what the best times of the year are. Obviously, things change every year, but we do know that, hey, if you're a holiday or a gift brand, prepare for that Right. And if you, if you are a brand some brands don't, but if you are a brand that has a hard dollar budget, make sure you don't get to December and you're out of money.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, that's a good point. Something to point out too about the Helium 10 tools Cerebro. We have um. It has shows trending if of keywords trending up or if it's trending down. So you can constantly check the trends and how much, what percentage, they're trending up and down. But then you can also do historical keyword searches for 24 months in the past. So that'll really really help. You know, you can kind of see year over year in the last two years what happened. But then you can kind of project also moving forward based on kind of the difference there and track it that way. So definitely, you know that's a really good point. Is, you know, kind of projecting out and making sure you plan properly your budget in the right places, very good? Well, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of tACoS Tuesday. If somebody wants to reach out to you, how can they find you?
Gefen:
They can find me by my email, geffen at vendor commercecom. Yeah, would be happy to talk anything. Advertising, um, we, like I said before, we run ads. If you can run ads on it, we do. But we take a different approach and that we make sure that we are looking at your business holistically and we're not just spending to spend, we spend to grow and so, um and so, because we spend to grow, we might recommend different strategies and say, hey, you know, even if it hurts us, right, because we take a cut from that, even if it hurts us. Say, hey, you know, you shouldn't spend 100 can meta. Maybe let's look at these different avenues or save that money for later on. We want to make sure that we are going to provide the best service for you guys.
Carrie Miller:
That's amazing. Yeah, thanks so much. I love you guys. Want to reach out to Geffen or Vendo? You need somebody to help you with TikTok ads or Facebook or Amazon or Walmart Walmart especially. I get asked all the time about Walmart, and Vendo is definitely one of the uh the top uh players in the game for Walmart.
Gefen:
So one of the largest advertisers on Walmart. Um, I think we have one of, if not the most, brands on Walmart advertising and um, we've just seen so much growth there.
Carrie Miller:
And so, yeah, thanks again for joining and thank you everyone for your questions and for joining us live, and we will see you again on the next TACoS Tuesday, which will be next month, and we'll have a different guest. But thanks again, Gefen, for joining us.
Gefen:
Of course, see you later.
Have you ever wondered how the savviest Amazon sellers pinpoint products that skyrocket to success? Join us as we navigate the complex landscape of Amazon's seller tools with insights from our expert guest, Yi Zhen from Amazon Singapore, who unpacks the secrets of the Product Opportunity Explorer, Brand Analytics, and more. We tackle the nuts and bolts of metrics that matter—from sponsored ad percentages to the telling average age of selling partners—all to equip you with a map for mastering sales trends and strategic inventory decisions.
Unboxing the art of personalized promotions, this episode reveals how a deep dive into customer loyalty analytics can revolutionize your sales approach. We share real-life tales and tactics for waking up those hibernating buyers and how vital understanding customer lifetime value can be to your growth. From decoding top search terms to smart segmentation targeting, this is an arsenal of strategies you won't want to miss.
Lastly, we journey with Helium 10 to find niche markets where the quirky, like coffin-shaped cat trees, become a good product opportunity. Discover how leveraging data from Amazon and Helium 10 can lead to unexpected product triumphs, and why sometimes, the more peculiar the product, the more passionate the customer base. Our candid conversation wraps with a heartfelt thanks to our guest and a teaser of what's on the horizon for Amazon sellers. Tune in to get ahead of the game and keep your finger on the pulse of Amazon market opportunities.
In episode 526 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Yi discuss:
- 00:00 - Analyzing Product Opportunities and Customer Trends
- 03:51 - Understanding the Product Opportunity Explorer
- 12:16 - Product Returns and Display Color Analysis
- 15:43 - Tailored Promotions and Customer Loyalty Analytics
- 17:19 - Understanding Customer Loyalty Analytics
- 21:43 - Discover Niche Markets With Helium 10
- 21:55 - Analyze Product Opportunity With ASINs
- 29:21 - Analyzing Consumer Behavior for Product Development
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► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
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► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
And today we have invited you back onto the show the second half of the episode. I couldn't cut it off because there's just too much amazing stuff that we're going over. So let's go ahead and get you the second part of this interview and let's learn all there is to know about product opportunity Explorer, brand analytics, customer loyalty dashboard. We're going to talk about a whole bunch of cool stuff. Here we go. Did you know that Amazon sometimes loses or damages some of your inventory? Usually they reimburse you for this, but sometimes they might miss things. That's where refund Genie comes in. What Helium 10 refund Genie does is we go check out your reports and see if Amazon owes you any money, and then we give you the reports that you need to submit to Amazon so that you can get your money back. If you haven't run this, you can have hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars that Amazon might owe you, especially if you've never used this before and you sell a lot on Amazon. So to find out more information, go to h10.me forward slash refund Genie. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series tellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. What else, so what else we have?
Yi:
here. Okay, I will just move on to the other tabs, because each tab will have different interesting insights for us to know.
Bradley Sutton:
So this one speaking of insights, I just clicked on insights.
Yi:
That's right. So over here you'll be able to know wow, I mean you'll be able to see the different matrix for instance, how many percent of the products are using sponsored product top five products. How many click share are they taking out?
Bradley Sutton:
At one glance, you're a good saleswoman, by the way, really Kind of like me. She's like she does this every day, but she's like, wow, like this never ceases to amaze me, Like this is so amazing. That's like you're like me and Helium 10, like look at this Helium 10 thing, guys. Wow. Like oh, my goodness, like I'm speechless. I'm just like, yeah, I love it. I love the genuine. This is a wow thing because this is I'm seeing here the 90% of click, like how many percent of people are using sponsored products? How many percent is prime, you know, and it's like 100% right. But then imagine if you guys found a niche where it's like 50% only are using prime. Wow, that would be a real wow. Right there, exactly.
Yi:
Exactly. Yeah, I think the reason why I said wow is because I saw that the percentage of products using sponsored products is above 90%, which is pretty high compared to many other niche I've done research over. Usually, I think the average I've seen so far is between 80 to 90%. This is like 90 to 98%, so it's pretty high. I would say it's really competitive, which is why I guess, when you see in the search term, tap earlier on, the search conversion rate is so low, because I think way too many people are running advertising on this. It might be a bit expensive. Yeah, correct, correct, this might. It's a consideration point.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm not sure if you can give this information, but what does it mean here when it says number of successful launches, like what determines successful launch?
Yi:
I think actually, if you hover your mouse over the, over the matrix, you actually tell you. It means the number of new launch. It's been in launches in the past 180 years. Wow, it's in there, right there. We've annualized it. Didn't say that before.
Bradley Sutton:
Like I was like in the dark. This was like six months ago.
Yi:
Since I've looked at this, I didn't even notice that.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, Number of new launches with an annualized revenue amount of over $50,000 in the past 30 days. All right, yes.
Yi:
I think we are just being more transparent, especially because many sellers are telling us they don't really understand this matrix. Can you explain this better, this product opportunity explorer? I think throughout the entire year I've seen so much changes and in fact it's for the better, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, cool. So I see this. By the way, for the people not watching this, I see there's columns for today, columns for 90 days ago, 360 days ago. Oh, my goodness, the one thing that tells me to stay far, far away. Not stay far away from this niche, but average selling partner age almost 10 years. So, like these are like experienced sellers in this niche and if you're a brand new seller, you might not want to go against people with 10 years of selling under their belt. So there's another piece of interesting information here. Pretty cool, all right. Next one here is or is there anything else on this page? No, I think we can move on to trends.
Yi:
Okay, yeah, I think what helps over in the trends page firstly is to identify the seasonality of the product and also when you should enter to sell. So firstly for this product, as you know, shower curtains typically is something usually people will buy across the year. Right, there shouldn't be much pigs, but from what I see over here I think there's a pig in July. Probably is because of Prime Day. Prime Day yeah probably is because of Prime Day, otherwise it's quite flat throughout. So I think, regardless of where you, when you launch, I think it's fine. But just take note, maybe when you do your inventory planning or when you try to you know purchase your product from manufacturer, maybe before Prime Day you might want to manufacture more, right? So it helps you to do your inventory planning for that.
Bradley Sutton:
Also. I'm just looking at this and the number of products goes down. So that could mean one of two things. It could mean that more products are going out of stock, like maybe this people in this niche are not keeping their product in stock come Christmas time and they're running out, or like the stronger listings are getting more powerful because now it takes less products to make up the 90 percent. But either way, there's a clear trend here where, from September where it was about you know 90 products that make up this niche, and then now in November and December it's down to 65. So that's a pretty significant drop there, pretty cool stuff.
Yi:
Yeah yeah. There are also many other matrix that you can just toggle into to just quickly see, like how this niche doing. For instance, you can also look at the search conversion rate, but I just quickly see and it's pretty stagnant throughout. In fact, I think it seems like it's increasing towards like slightly.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, I didn't even know that I could hit this button and it shows me the graph history. Man, there's so much new stuff in here. I mean I swear. I looked at this like a few months ago I didn't know I could do all this stuff. Pretty cool, yes.
Yi:
Yes, so you can actually see, the search conversion rate seems to be increasing slightly, but yet the product count is decreasing. Maybe it's because, like, more products are stopping to sell or it's going out of stock, like you mentioned. So the remaining products are actually doing much better in terms of like search conversion.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah, correct, correct Okay.
Yi:
Cool, okay. The next one would be purchase drivers. This is actually something new, and I noticed that not many sellers have access to this beta page, so for you that you are able to see this, oh.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm special.
Yi:
Yeah, you're special, yeah, so over here it's something new that I think it got released in October, so it's really really very recent. It will tell you what are the different features. They are leading to a successful sale or like a purchase by customer Right. So what are the important features I would say in this case? Then you could see the color white or it has to have curtain hook or the team is boho. Typically are the top three positive feature for this shower curtain. So maybe it's something you need to take note of when you come out with different variations for your shower curtain when you want to start selling it.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm going to read the little tool tip here where it explains what does positive drivers mean. It says here, because I didn't know, I was like what the heck am I looking at here? It says feature specific to this niche that positively impact the number of units sold by products within it. The impact is calculated by comparing the estimated sales of the products with that feature against the average units sold by all products in the niche. Okay, and then I'm assuming negative just means the opposite.
Yi:
It means the opposite here.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right, interesting. So this means people do not like the stripe pattern Exactly and they don't like that fabric one because it's not waterproof, I guess Correct, correct.
Yi:
So let's say if you can come out with something water resistant. Maybe you have a chance and maybe your advertising may not have to be that expensive. If they are not much similar selections, they are water resistant.
Bradley Sutton:
Anything else on this page, or can I go to the next one?
Yi:
The next one.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, customer review insights. So this is you know. We looked at the review insights based on like an ASIN. This is kind of just like based on the all the products in the niche right.
Yi:
Correct. Correct, and I also briefly talk about it for, like the particular ASIN just now, just that what you see over here is on the niche level. So you know, at the aggregated level for shower curtains, what are typical things that are wanted or not wanted by customers, and this is something I would say for you to work on, especially on the negative reviews for you to innovate your product in order to differentiate from existing products that are currently selling. Right, for instance, you see, there might be a seller selling the shower curtain a cloth shower curtain since 2014. But, let's say, if you're able to come out with a water resistant curtain which people like you can even like, win over some of the click share.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, so water resistant is one. I'm looking here and I clicked on the negative and I see a lot of people have issue with the magnet. The magnet is not strong. I know exactly what they're talking about. I bought one of these shower curtain. I don't know if it's this one, but but it doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't work very, very good. Maybe I'm part of this percentage in this niche of these negative mentions here.
Yi:
Okay, yeah, yeah, I think people also talk about the thickness of the product. So, yeah, there's something very immediate. In fact, the mentions of thickness is 18%, which is significantly higher compared to the other topics, like magnetic strength, because magnetic strength, even though it's second, it's only 5%. So, in fact, something that you immediately need to work on will be the thickness of the shower curtain.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I see that right here.
Yi:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, and then here at the bottom it says topic impact on the star rating. So yeah, the thickness is the number one, like everything else. Is that like two? Or point zero, point zero, two, but the thickness at 0.2, so like 10 times as much. So that's a easy way to see what people are complaining about.
Yi:
Correct, correct. So I mean looking at the product itself, even though we see like the product might be quite competitive in state in terms of like the sponsored products percentage, in terms of search conversion. But actually there might still be opportunities because people are quite strong about the negative review they are talking about. That means there are products on Amazon.com. They are not able to satisfy people that are complaining about existing product within this niche. So in this case, if you are able to come out with something different, position yourself differently, there might still be opportunities for you to go in. Yeah, even though there are multiple Asians available already.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, Alright, we're ready to go to the next tab.
Yi:
Yeah, the returns.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's see, oh return. There's another one of the new ones, because there's beta here.
Yi:
Correct, correct. This is something new. I think it was announced in Amazon Accelerate this year, which I think you are quite lucky.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you see my shirt on Word today? Look.
Yi:
I bet you don't even have this sweater here. I don't have it.
Bradley Sutton:
I was a speaker at Amazon Accelerate so I feel special. I got to have an Amazon Accelerate sweater. That's my word.
Yi:
Yeah, it's nice, it's nice.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright. So I'm looking at this literally my first time looking at this because I haven't looked at this and I see a lot of the same data points here as far as search volume and things like that, at the very top. But if I scroll down here under product returns insights, it gives me the percentage of mentions of certain things like. The number one thing was the display colors. There's that thickness right there, 8%. The material, the value for money. So yeah, that's interesting how people were giving bad reviews for the thickness the most, but as far as why they returned it, it looks like they didn't like the colors.
Yi:
They feel like it wasn't accurate, right? I think they mentioned the green didn't look like what it was as advertised. So the product listing images also plays a very important part in this, as well as part of the returns, which is why we always emphasize on coming out with a good listing, as accurate as possible. Give sellers or customers, in fact, even more information to help them make decisions on whether they want this product and help them understand this product, so that you'll reduce possibility of returns. So yeah, in this case, display colors really like a huge issue.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so tons of new stuff here in Product Opportunity Explorer. Now, one thing I kind of referenced was there are some familiar data points with the top clicked and stuff that we might have been used to from years ago in brand analytics, but it is a little bit different brand analytics. So then, how would a seller use Product Opportunity Explorer with Amazon brand analytics?
Yi:
Yeah, I would say it's more of how do you use brand analytics together like some initial insights of what you should sell. Then Opportunity Explorer is always a tool for you to look more in-depth into and see how can you further validate the product selection. So I think that I would probably share a few useful cases of how people can use brand analytics in order to shortlist a couple of ideas from there. But just something to note brand analytics is only available for sellers and wrote into brand registry, so, beyond just professional selling account, they need to have an eligible trademark that is enrolled into brand registry to access brand analytics.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool, yeah. So Product Opportunity Explorer guys, remember it's available for everybody, but brand analytics is only available to brand registered sellers. So hopefully most of you guys are brand registered and if so, go ahead and click over to brand analytics and there's a whole bunch of new stuff here. Are we going to talk about the CLA? This is the CLA. As soon as I get in brand analytics, it goes directly to the CLA Customer Loyalty Analytics. Oh my goodness, look at all of this new stuff here.
Yi:
Yes, yes, this is something that I wanted to introduce, actually, because it's something that's pretty new, also, I think, introduced around in October. So over here, you'll be able to understand what are, like, the demographics of the people that are buying your products. Right Then, from here, actually, what we'll recommend for sellers to do is to tie it up with brand tailored promotions in order to run specific discounts or promotions that will be able to help you to retarget a particular segment that you want to grow further. Yeah, have you tried using brand tailored promotions?
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, I have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, like I've done in some of my accounts the abandoned cart and some other different markets here where I was able to get some sales that I probably wouldn't have gotten without that correct. Now this here is looking at one of my. I'm seeing my coffin shelf brand here. I see I have an option of weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. And wow the hibernating customers what's a hibernating customer?
Yi:
Basically people who haven't, I guess, purchased in a long while. So, which is why it's very important for you to look into these analytics before you actually do your brand tailored promotions. Because when brand tailored promotions first launch, sellers always ask us which segment should I target? They don't really know right. But over here, after looking at our analytics, you'll be able to know which segment you have the most customers in, so that you'll be able to re-target them or re-activate that particular segment. For instance, your hibernating customers is 600 plus. Maybe you might want to run a promotion that target sellers or customers that haven't been purchasing your product for a while. Maybe you want to do something special about that.
Bradley Sutton:
And there's a button right here that I can do that on the right side. I'm assuming this kind of ties directly to the brand tailored promotions. Right, this create promotion button. Okay, correct.
Yi:
In fact, over here, if you go to the top left corner, there is a button where you can click into the segment view. So the thing about customer loyalty analytics ideally it's for sellers that have been selling on Amazon for at least a year, I would say so that there will be sufficient data for you to make decisions on Of course, you need to have enough customers for you to re-target right. In this case, over here under the segment view, you'll be able to see a few metrics, including predictive customer lifetime value, right. So usually, if there's sufficient data, it will roughly tell you what is customer spending this year and what they are predicted to sell, to buy next year as well, for, like your top tier customer. So this is what's very important for you to know, so that maybe you'll be able to Kind of like retarget them, either through promotions or actively through the post that you have, in order to engage with them.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah, see my repeat customers average repeat purchase interval.
Yi:
Very interesting stuff if multiple people are like Purchasing from you, if you're selling like commodities, if maybe you can consider doing subscribe and save, for instance. So it really depends on what segment you have so that you'll be able to leverage on, like the different programs or different promotions that you have, in order to retarget this group of customers.
Bradley Sutton:
This wasn't even. Was this even in your presentation in Singapore?
Yi:
No, it isn't, yeah, because this wasn't even out a couple months ago. Okay, yeah, that's what I thought.
Bradley Sutton:
I know my memory is bad, but I didn't know was that bad? Okay, good, I'm glad. I'm glad it's not that I forgot about it. All right, cool, anything more in the CLA.
Yi:
Nothing much to highlight additionally here? Yeah, because after all, is still a very new tool. I guess, at a very start for sellers, when you review this dashboard is to see is to understand more about the Demographics of like customers that are purchasing, how valuable they are. If not, is there are some immediate actions that you can take, for instance, using brand tailored promotions in order to actively engage with them first.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah, I haven't done that. In a few weeks I might be. I might need to look at my numbers here and run, run some more.
Yi:
Yeah, let me know how it works for you.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, what's the next hour? Gonna switch to Marketplace.
Yi:
Amazon brand analytics, but I just I'll be talking about maybe three use cases on the different reports that you'll be able to use in order to shortlist the kind of products that you want to Investigate further or explore further using OX.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so that's it for the customer loyalty analytics. What's next? What should I? What should I click on? Yes, you're, you're, I'm the driver and you're the navigator. You got to tell me where to go next.
Yi:
Okay, okay, right now We'll still stay in Amazon brand analytics, but the next thing that you need to click on is the top search terms report. I think it's under the Correct.
Bradley Sutton:
I see it's under search analytics and go to top search terms correct. All right excellent.
Yi:
So over here.
Bradley Sutton:
This is the one that I.
Yi:
Often use.
Bradley Sutton:
I love like three years ago when this came out. This is the greatest thing in the history of mankind, I think yeah, but this is cool, and now it's like kind of crazy because it's like the oldest thing now. Now Everybody's talking about the OX and SQP, but still I think this has some Definitely has some value, yes, yes.
Yi:
So over here, what I think is actually useful is let's say, if you don't really know, you know what kind of products that you want to sell, but then, or maybe you already have like an idea of like the keywords of like that item that you want to sell. Maybe, to put it better, in a better way, let's say if you have a rough idea, yeah, if you have a rough idea of what you want to sell by I'm not sure how to Validate the selection or what niche is it in actually right, so you'll be able to use the top search term report I would say keen the keywords in the search bar over there. I'm gonna put coffin because that's my, that's my main.
Bradley Sutton:
My main thing here.
Yi:
Correct.
Bradley Sutton:
And here we go.
Yi:
Okay, so over here, immediately, you'll be able to see what I like, for instance, the top click brand and top a, since over here, so immediately, you'll be able to know what are the similar a, since you can benchmark yourself against right. But how do you work backwards in order to find out what are the niche for this product, in order to do more research? Because, after all, within this analytics report, the Data available is still limited to a certain extent. So what I would advise sellers to do over here Is to copy the ASIN. For instance, we can take the top ASIN. Take this coffin show and copy that we can put it back into opportunity, explorer and search for this product Correct. So over here You'll be able to see your target ASIN. So likewise, like what we have did Previously, you'll be able to see, like customer review insights while like the click counts etc for this ASIN. But I think what's more interesting would be if you can go to the previous page, you can click into niche view, which is beside ASIN view, can you see at the left side You'll be able to see which niche this product is Situated in and in fact, for some ASINs. Sometimes it might be present in multiple niche. So over there you'll be able to work. Go backwards then after that to do your research, for on the niche level, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
I see it right here. All right, so for those just listening, you haven't seen what I was in. I took the ace in, put it back to product opportunity explorer and then looked into the ace in view and also the niche view. Now You've been showing me stuff this whole time. Let me show you something you've never seen but that we just launched in Helium 10. This. This you might think is pretty cool. So we took brand analytics now, because this is available in the API, and now we have this kind of like database here Inside of black box and again, just like with brand analytics, you can only get this. You know, Helium 10 is checking your account if you have brand registry, and if you don't have brand registry, we can't show you this information because we always play by Amazon's rules, and which is a Reasonable rule. So let me show you something I literally found today. This was my first time. I think I actually did a video on this and it was a product that I couldn't believe existed. But what I did, let me see if I can remember. I think I did the same thing where I typed in coffin here and, and then I was like, alright, show me a keyword that has, and now it's easy. The cool thing about this is taking like Helium 10 data At the same time as as Amazon data. So I'm like hey, show me something that has at least I think I said 500 search volume where at least two items had greater than 30% Click.
Yi:
Share you see like right, this is something you can't.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean, you could download this, of course, in In brand analytics and I'm not doing anything new other than the search form. This is all stuff that anybody can just download, but I'm just doing it right here in this dashboard. And then let me I'm not sure if this is the exact thing I typed. Let's just take a look, I'll know when it comes up and I hit apply, there, it is right here. Look at this Cat tree. And I'm like you've got to be kidding me. What the heck is this 3,200 search volume? I, you know, I thought I knew everything about coffins, right, and then so I actually click this again. I got this from brand analytics and then you I know you guys are a lot of you guys can't see what I'm looking at. This is insane, guys. There is these cat trees, oh, and the one that is out of stock. It's out of stock already. There is one that's a hundred and forty dollars and it's sold like 800 units or something. Here's one that's a 100 and it's a hundred and forty dollars. It's crazy. People are buying cat-shaped trees.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me see if, if that product is still here, that was number one. Where is it? This one here? It is right here. This is the number one selling one. This is cool, guys. It doesn't show up in Amazon search anymore. That's why I didn't come up, but because it's in Brand Analytics, which is another good thing about Brand Analytics. By the way, I bet you I could find this right here in what we just did. Let me coffin cat. There. It is right here. So, you see, I would have found this even if I was in Brand Analytics. There it is coffin cat tree. But it takes me right to this number one click one, which is now out of stock because it was being bought too much. People were selling this for ridiculous amount of money and they sold almost 1,000 units of this. But I discovered a completely new niche thanks to Brand Analytics and this new Helium 10 tool that incorporates Brand Analytics. So yeah, guys, brand Analytics is still very valuable. You can get some really cool ideas. Do you have any pets?
Yi:
cats or dogs or anything I don't have a dog or cat, but my boyfriend do have a Pomeranian.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now would he make a coffin shaped bed? Like isn't that kind of morbid? Why would you do that for your pet? Like I don't understand pet owners, but guess what guys? There's 1,000 people a month who want a coffin shaped toy or a bed for their cat to sleep in. I worry about those people, but I'll gladly take their $140. $140 is a really, really good price point. I'm quite sure the person's margin must be great, Considering.
Yi:
I mean, there are many other sellers selling at much cheaper price, but people still buy the $140. There must be something great about it right, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great, it's great, but my boyfriend's dog just lies on the towel. That's all we wanted to buy a bed, but it doesn't want it, that's normal.
Bradley Sutton:
see, that's normal. Putting it in a coffin shaped towel, that's not normal.
Yi:
Oh yeah, okay, anyways, anyways.
Bradley Sutton:
So I was. We were in. Let me go back to where we were. We were looking at the search terms. You were talking about the cool use of this. Anything left on this search term page or should I go somewhere else now?
Yi:
Now we'll move on to the next one, which is under the brand analytics as well, is the consumer behavior analytics.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, Okay, do I just click it, or do I click one of these three sub-options here, or you can click into the market but size analysis. Market MBA, so that normally stands for like a master of business something or other, like a degree that I don't have, but here it means market basket analysis. Correct, correct.
Yi:
What's useful?
Bradley Sutton:
And here's all my products. This is my Project X products. Right here I can see.
Yi:
So I think what's useful about this page is, let's say, if you already have an existing product that's already selling, right, you're wondering what kind of product can you extend to sell? What kind of new selections can you introduce? So right over here you'll be able to see what are people commonly buying together with your products and if this is actually something that is relevant, it might be something you want to consider selling as well. Let's say, if you want to brand yourself as, like, a coffin shelf or coffin team seller, maybe you can expand to sell even like those brush holders, et cetera, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, my skull shape. For those who can't see this, I just clicked in the very first one and 4% of people are buying it with a skull makeup brush holder.
Yi:
It must be like the person that's buying your coffin bookshelf, just like the coffin team, kind of like products. You know there are people who have like their whole house filled with Hello Kitty, so I'm not surprised there's someone who likes everything coffin related. So maybe this is something or like the brand, that brand positioning you want to go into, or like the team you want to get started with, so you do not need to sell, like you know, different kind of shelves. In fact, you can just go stick to coffin team products. Yeah, that's something that you can consider as well. So that's one way. Then the last way that I would like to just quickly introduce would be under the consumer behavior analytics as well, under demographics. So over here you'll be able to know at one glance who are actually purchasing your products, Like you know, the gender, income, education, the age of the people buying your products. So the way that you want to introduce new product, or like the type of product that you want to introduce to like the this customer segment that you have, it can be fully customized.
Bradley Sutton:
There are three people who make $250,000 a year. Who is buying the coffin shelves? All right, so it's not just for cheap people. This is for the high class people they have high class kids. Yeah exactly.
Yi:
So if you scroll to the left side, for instance, let me take a look at what is the age demographic? Oh, it's quite well spread out throughout, like 20s to 40s.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, that's actually surprising, maybe.
Yi:
I'll consider them, maybe the office crowd, so you may want to launch something that is favorable for them. Maybe, you know, it can be like the coffin pen holder, which can also be used for the brushes, right? Maybe you can position it as like a pen holder, something like that. So we need to understand who are actually buying your product so that you'll be able to launch products that suit them, right? So this just roughly gives you an idea to help you. You know, have like initial sparks or something to get started with initially. Yeah, so it's at the idea stage. Yeah, so I think, just for the purpose of like product research, I think these are the three common ones that you can start using first. Then maybe next time I can share more.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah this is like way more than I have been using lately. I guess you use kind of like the traditional stuff, but now this shows me that I definitely need to be in here a little bit more looking at stuff. All right, so, wow, this was a lot of information. Now, pretty much everything that we went over today is available in those marketplaces and even more, actually, the OX is available in those six, seven marketplaces that she mentioned earlier. You know Europe, USA, Japan Brand Analytics is actually available a lot of the stuff in almost all of the marketplaces. But also, you know, like he works here in the Amazon, Singapore and you do some like you know, if anybody's in your region, you actually have some cool programs. But first of all, let's talk about what is your region? It's not just Singapore. Like, right, like, like what. What countries are you servicing the sellers?
Yi:
So we are actually covering Southeast Asian sellers. There are from Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia and Cambodia, so any sellers that are coming from this country. Actually, we do provide free account management support To help them on board and start selling out Amazon.com. So I think many of the sellers May not know that we exist, but I just want to share that we are here beyond just the account management support. We do have many other educational resources available, for instance, seller university Live broadcast webinars so you can watch it anytime. We do have our monthly seller meetup and events yeah, every month, but this is only currently more for Singapore sellers. So if you are a Singapore listener, please drop by for our event and Do let me know. If you want to attend an event or do not know where is the registration page, let me know. We'll let you in. Yeah, so we do have many other pages, like our telegram community groups, as well as Facebook Pages as well, where we do share some practical tips from other existing seller on how to sell better. Yeah, and also we do share updates on like new products or any policy updates, etc. So just stay tuned. We do actually have a lot of different Pages available or have support that we can provide to Southeast Asian seller, so do reach out to us. If you are a new seller within this region, we'll be able to help you and then how can people do that?
Bradley Sutton:
How can people reach out like where's what website should they go?
Yi:
They can either go to sell.amazon.com.sg to Reach out to us, either through by attending our live webinar or signing up for our seller events. Alternatively, they could also hit us up via our Facebook page, which is the global selling Southeast Asia Facebook group, so they can also Reach out to the marketing team from there. Then they'll reach the seller with account managers like us. Then we'll be able to follow up accordingly to help them launch.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah and, by the way, guys, if anybody has doesn't have Helium 10, actually Amazon Singapore has special discounts that we don't give to anybody else because they help, you know, they help new sellers, you know, come and join. So, like, if you want to discount, like actually you can give you one that's probably better than the discount that I can give. So that's a. So make sure to go through Amazon Singapore, guys. They got the, they've got the hookups. And now I was talking to Anna in In China last week when I was in China and she's arranging the Potential Philippines.
Yi:
Amazon conference.
Bradley Sutton:
So I'll be hopefully going there and maybe March. There might be a smaller one in February, but I'm gonna probably go to the March. Any chance that you can go, that you can, should I? Should I put in a good word to Anna, like make sure, hey, we need a you over there talking about this?
Yi:
kind of stuff, maybe. Maybe if for the March one you might see me there, then I'll bring you around for good food. I do know some nice.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, yes, yes, that's, I am. Um. I've only been to Philippines like four times, but I am half Filipino and I need to. I need to connect more to my roots, but I have a team out there. I'm definitely gonna be trying to go in in the middle of March, whenever this conference is, to look out for more information on there. Well you, thank you so much for joining us, and this has been an amazing year, I think, for Amazon and for brand and little lakes, for search group performance, for product opportunity Explorer. Well, it was great to have you on here. I didn't realize it was gonna last two episodes, but there's just too much good stuff here. So, thank you so much, and then maybe you know, next year or in 2025, we'll definitely want to bring you back, because probably by then there'll be so much new stuff that have been released that will need you to talk to us about it, and then, until then, maybe we'll see you in Philippines, or maybe next year, some in Singapore hope to see you again with to bring you more good stuff so that we can share with all your listeners Next time round.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Global shipping rates set to jump as carriers avoid the Red Sea amid Houthi attacks https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/10/global-shipping-rates-set-to-surge-as-carriers-avoid-red-sea.html Walmart Connect now allows brand term targeting for Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Video campaigns to help suppliers and sellers gain new customers and defend and maintain share of voice. https://gecrm.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/#61000000ZKTc/a/8Y0000010m2h/7xTFu8gBw7LO5UHgY1DcW.oPCExzSEZqfWAJlat9k_g Improve your campaign performance on rest of search placements using Sponsored Products rest of search bid adjustment control https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/improve-campaign-performance/ Sponsored Display is expanded to Amazon Business globally https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-display-amazon-business-globally/ How Amazon Fashion is using AI to help you find the perfect fit https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/how-amazon-is-using-ai-to-help-customers-shop Walmart unveils new generative AI-powered capabilities for shoppers and associates https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/01/09/walmart-unveils-new-generative-ai-powered-capabilities-for-shoppers-and-associates/ Alibaba Boosts SMEs With New AI Feature at CES 2024 https://aithority.com/technology/alibaba-boosts-smes-with-new-ai-feature-at-ces-2024/ Sky High Ambitions: Walmart To Make Largest Drone Delivery Expansion of Any U.S. Retailer https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/01/09/sky-high-ambitions-walmart-to-make-largest-drone-delivery-expansion-of-any-us-retailer Walmart unveils latest technologies at Consumer Electronics Show https://drugstorenews.com/walmart-unveils-latest-technologies-consumer-electronics-show Our training tip for this week is how to add Helium 10's Follow-Up tool to your toolkit, gathering customer reviews has never been smoother. So, buckle up because you've got yourself an episode brimming with actionable insights and essential updates for every serious seller out there.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Shivali covers:
- 00:45 - Amazon Fees to Hike 300%?!
- 02:42 - Unenroll, Avoid Suspension
- 04:20 - Walmart Brand Term Targeting
- 05:48 - New Placement Bid Adjustments
- 06:20 - Sponsored Display Expansion
- 06:51 - AI Powered Innovations
- 08:20 - CES Announcements
- 10:18 - Comparison Charts Gone!
- 11:22 - Pro Training Tip: Automated Request A Review
- 14:00 - Join And Meet Bradley In These Events
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Shivali Patel:
Amazon shipping prices to increase by 300%, unenroll an automated AI, changes to your listings and a plethora of new AI-powered integrations. This and more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Shivali Patel:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you all the latest news in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce space and we also provide you with a training tip of the week that will give you insight into serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. First up, let's jump to shipping and logistics. I'm currently on CNBC and, as you can see, the latest news is global shipping rates are set to experience a steep rise.
Shivali Patel:
In order to divert ships from the Red Sea, where there has been a surge of ships being attacked with drones and missile strikes by the Houthi rebels in Yemen, new routes are being taken, extra fees are being imposed and, as a seller, you should expect longer transit times. Analysts are actually warning the chaos could bring about a second wave of inflation, as many container companies are electing to reroute the vessels through routes sailing around Africa's Cape of good hope, making the journey longer than usual. Of course, for sellers everywhere, this differs based on where you're sourcing. This also comes at the expense of time, money and delayed product deliveries, and while we can hope that the global supply chain will eventually return to normal, for the time being it's probably best practice for you to prepare your inventory, turnover and profit margins accordingly. I actually recently had a conversation with Brock from Foursquat and I quote he said that it does affect every line price and departure times and schedules. Majority of these shipping lines have 10 to 15 day delays. If we're talking about a departure from China, that container vessel has to go from China to England, which will then go from England to USA, and every sailing schedule is connected to one another. From China to UK. It's around 7,000, versus two months ago when it was $2,500. The main problem being the total turnaround time. And of course, this has a massive impact because Chinese New Year is also around the corner. Geez, talk about a steep height and a snowball effect. Understandably so, but as a seller myself, I don't love it, though I would prefer my shipments remain intact. Hopefully, as a seller, you are able to make feasible changes that sustain your business needs.
Shivali Patel:
Next up, we have this post that Jason made in our serious sellers club Facebook group yesterday. The meat and gravy of this post is actually based in something that we reported on the weekly bus a few weeks ago. At some point, amazon announced they would start potentially optimizing listings using AI. Now we've seen many, many sellers report that their titles, even their bullet points, were getting changed, sometimes without notice, and occasionally those changes end up being products that could get a listing suspended.
Shivali Patel:
Thankfully, there is a way that you can unenroll from this and if you are someone who wants to opt out, here's how you do it. So you're going to want to go to your seller central account and once you're there, go ahead and open up that left paneling click inventory, not inventory catalog, click add products. Once you're on this page, then you're going to go to this section down below where it says explore brand selection, click learn more, and by going to the page that this takes you to, you'll see there's an option right here that says you can unenroll from the program at any time. So go ahead and select that and then at the very bottom of this page, you'll see it says no thanks, I do not wish to enroll, and go ahead and select that From there. You are good to go. If, in the case that Amazon has already chained something like they did for David right here, then you will need to create a case for it to be resolved and affirm that you want to be the lead contributor, as you are the brand owner. So there you have it. It is really as simple as that. But you will want to make sure that you're doing this if you want to defend your listings against any changes that you haven't made yourself. With that, let's go ahead and move forward to a different fruitful note, where we have an article from Walmart Connect.
Shivali Patel:
Part of being a seller is gaining new customers and retaining loyal ones. So, outside of the clear variables to stay on top of, such as knowing your customer and ensuring your brand and products are relevant to the customers you're targeting, having great keywords, compelling listings, creatives and utilizing brand shop and shelf URLs, setting up a defensive for your brand by bidding on your own and your competitor's branded terms is really beneficial. So the good news with Walmart Connect is they actually allow brand term targeting now for sponsored products, sponsored brands and sponsored video campaigns, so that way, customers can discover your brand and products when you advertise, while simultaneously helping you defend and maintain share of voice, as it says right here. This is really cool because, statistically speaking, Walmart has publicly revealed that 58% of customers surveyed will spend time looking for a discount, while 54% of Walmart consumers are open to switching brands if it means getting a better value for the same products. I know my family is definitely a part of these metrics. So to use it, make sure that you bid on keywords related to your competitor's brands and products, and bear in mind that there are some restrictions. For instance, you cannot bid on Walmart private labels, and this is only applicable for exact match keywords. Now that's Walmart toggling gears.
Shivali Patel:
What's happening over at Amazon? Well, a few things. But to start, advertisers can now apply bid adjustment for rest of search placements in their sponsored product campaigns. Looks like they're saying that the new bid adjustment control for rust of search works pretty much the same as the adjustments available for top of search and product page placements. So, if you choose, you can adjust bids up to 900%, just like the other two placements. This is great for helping you balance out campaign performance throughout your placements. Amazon has also expanded their sponsored display to show up on Amazon business globally with placements on the homepage, search and detail pages, be it on desktop and mobile, meaning you can now promote to business shoppers with exclusive pricing, such as quantity discounts, as they tend to purchase in bulk and more frequently than regular customers. This is available in North America, parts of Europe and Asia Pacific.
Shivali Patel:
For a continuation of exciting changes, ai has been all the rage since its inception and when reading up on different news pieces, that definitely shines through. Platforms like Amazon and Walmart are tapping in. For instance, amazon fashion here is using AI to help consumers find the perfect fit. Alongside that fit insights tool If you remember, I talked about it the last time I hosted weekly buzz and hopefully for you as a seller, this can translate to less returns overall, while improving the overall experience that you deliver to your consumers. Similarly, in terms of Walmart, most families spend six hours planning household groceries and shopping. Many do it digitally.
Shivali Patel:
Now the company is moving towards using a generative, ai powered search function to expand their searches, with the intent of allowing shoppers to look for specific themes, ideas, products across a host of categories. As an example, here on Microsoft's blog, we have a parent who is planning a birthday party for a child that loves unicorns and, as opposed to typing in maybe independent searches or running multiple different things such as napkins and plates, you can now just type in help me plan a unicorn themed party for my daughter and instantaneously you have a goal based search as opposed to scroll searching, and I really liked that identification right here. So it says shifting from scroll searching to goal searching. At the end of the day, both of these news pieces are a testament to a move towards a more customer centric approach. In other news, at CES, which is currently happening, alibabacom also dove into their newly developed smart assistant, which acts as an intuitive personal assistant guide to sourcing, where an AI powered robot can help you with your basic queries regardless of time zones or language barriers. This is an in addition to their September 2023 launch of upgraded image searches and smart requests for quotations to allow business owners to manage data collection and insights from a single touch point, and I'm excited about this. I know something we always consider is how well we are able to communicate with our suppliers, and the language barrier can make it difficult to understand the efficiency of operations. With this, hopefully, it expands the efficiency and ability to work with even more suppliers.
Shivali Patel:
Ps, Alibaba debuted a new campaign to celebrate entrepreneurial spirit and innovation and, since we're all a little bit nuts about what we do, it's actually a super fun quiz. We have our own link so you can be eligible for prizes from Alibaba. Just go to H10.me slash nuts that's again h10.me forward slash nuts to see what kind of nuts you are. I think I was a cashier when I took this quiz and Bradley was a chest nut. Okay, more from CES.
Shivali Patel:
Walmart's Tuesday keynote expressed they will be expanding their drone delivery to 1.8 million additional households in the Dallas fourth worth metropolitan area. While their drone delivery system isn't exactly new, their expansion signifies demand, efficiency and growth. The company also revealed an in-home replenishment which uses AI to understand consumer shopping habits and then keep them stocked with their favorite groceries after determining a cadence, as well as a beta platform that's called shop with friends, which will allow customers to create outfits visually and then get some feedback from their networks. Lastly, if you haven't seen it yet, inside of the news section, directly inside of your seller central account, amazon has opted to make some changes on what documents are acceptable to standardized product listings, as well as make it easier for your consumers to understand the information that's available about your product.
Shivali Patel:
From January 29th 2024, you will not be able to upload or edit the following on your product detail pages. This does include brochure, comparison charts, compatibility guides, FAQ, size charts. There's quite a few things, but in the case that any one of these already exists on your page, then that will stay there until February 26th, at which point they will be able to remove it from your product detail page. And all this is to say that if there is certain information you want to ensure stays on your listing page, make sure you audit your SKUs and then move that information to the appropriate sections or at least respond to that in a supported format, reflect uploaded accordingly. So that concludes our news pieces for the week. With that said, we move forward to the training tip of the week. Having substantial social proof is such an integral part of driving momentum in any business, so I'm going to pass it off to Carrie, where she will share a little bit about Helium 10’s Follow-up tool.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone, I've been noticing lately that a lot of you have been asking how to get more reviews on your Amazon listings, and I have a very simple, easy and quick way to set up an automation that will help you to get more reviews with no effort, pretty much other than just setting this up. Now you have access to this tool If you're platinum diamond, elite. All the plans should have access to this, so it's a great thing to utilize. If you have not yet utilized it, the first thing that you want to do is you want to obviously log into your helium 10 account, and once you're logged into your helium 10 account, you're going to go up to the top here where it says follow up, and you're going to click on follow up, and then, once you're in the follow up tool, you can obviously set up your own kind of customized automations, but that takes more time and effort. I would recommend just doing what I tell you here, and this is an automation, so email automation is where you're going to go next, and then what you're going to do is you're going to go up to the right hand corner where it says new automation and you're going to click on new automation and then you're going to click here where it says send a message to request a review. Once you click on that, you're going to click on create a new automation and this is where you're going to kind of set up the parameters here. Now, if you wanted to use this for a certain ASIN, like you wanted this automated request to go for a certain ASIN, you're going to put that ASIN right. You can click on this and you can add this filter and you're going to put the ASIN in here. You can also do that by skew as well, but that is how you are going to be able to do the request review and this is an automated email that goes out through Amazon that they already do.
Carrie Miller:
The only other thing that you are going to want to edit is this wait time. So this is how long they wait after you had an order placed. I recommend 12 to 25 days. You mean you can really go anywhere in here. So maybe day 20, you can add that action and then you're going to hit save and exit and it's going to basically automatically send these emails to request a review from Amazon. This is a very quick and easy way to get those reviews that you want and if you haven't set this up. Once you've set it up, it'll automatically request those reviews for you. Basically, it goes through Amazon and Amazon requests those reviews, so check it out, if you haven't already. Again, that's the follow up tool and let us know what you think.
Shivali Patel:
Incredible. So there you guys have it. Make sure you're making use of our email automation functionality to help you streamline your processes and keep that Amazon flywheel in motion. Before I close out, I just want to briefly touch on some of our upcoming January meetups and conferences. I know Bradley covered these last week, but perhaps between then and now some things have changed and if you have the bandwidth, obviously we would love to see you. Don't forget to let us know in the comment section if you're attending any of these.
Shivali Patel:
First up, we have a Dubai meetup on the 12th, which is this Friday. I believe this event is sold out now, but if you are nearby or you already have tickets, you will likely be meeting up with Bradley and Crystal from Amazon Seller Society. It's a casual meetup in the morning, hosted at the Movenpick Hotel apartments in downtown Dubai. Find out more at h10.me forward slash Dubai meetup. And a couple days later, on the 14th, Bradley will be in Lahore at the Pearl Continental for a reality check. If any of you are tuning in from areas close to there, then hey, it might be something you want to consider heading over to. Then we have our Frankfurt event on the 25th. I'll be there. Bradley will be there. It's a Helium 10 Elite event we're hosting in collaboration with Avask that typically only elite members in Avask plus members get to go to. If you are an elite or Avask plus member, you get in for free, but what typically costs elite members in the 600 range, this time, if you're not a member, you can still access this full day event for only 75 euros, because it is the first of its kind in Europe.
Shivali Patel:
We have a carefully curated but killer lineup of speakers Matt Altman from ClearAds, Kara Sayer from Snooze Shade Both are flying in from UK, Nick from Boomed Silas, who used to be head of paid and organic search at Lego, and a few others. You don't even need to rent a car or anything, because it'll be at a venue located inside of the Frankfurt airport. Literally just fly in and come through. And the biggest event is in Berlin with AMZ Hackers live conference at h10.me/germany on January the 27th. Again, Bradley and I will both be there, so come, swing by and say hello. Hope you enjoy this week's episode. We will see you next week to see what's buzzing.
Imagine unlocking the secrets of Amazon's new cool data tools with the help of an insider. That's precisely what we did in our latest episode as an Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer team member joined us to spill the beans on how sellers can mine Amazon's data for hidden gems. We showed the Black Box tool by Helium 10, marveling at how it works in harmony with Amazon's own treasure trove of information to pinpoint profitable product niches. Our guest Yi Zhen also shared her inspiring climb from intern to account manager at Amazon Singapore. Amazon sellers, get ready to have your minds blown by the power of Amazon's Marketplace Product Guidance and Category Insights tools. We took a stroll through Seller Central's Category Insights and discussed the 'golden data' at your fingertips, data that can guide you to high-demand product categories ripe for the picking. The episode peeled back the curtain on critical sales and search data metrics, providing listeners with a toolkit for making savvy decisions that could propel their Amazon ventures to new heights.
Wrapping up with a masterclass in product validation, we outlined how to sift through the noise and hone in on opportunities that not only look good on paper but can actually translate into profits. Our conversation illuminated the strategic use of the Product Opportunity Explorer to validate product choices and identify niches with less competition and higher potential earnings. And for those feeling the pinch of low search conversion rates, we shed light on how these metrics can sharpen your advertising strategies, giving you the edge in a fiercely competitive market. But wait, this episode is so good we had to cut it into two parts! So stay tuned for part 2!
In episode 525 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Yi discuss:
- 00:00 - Leveraging Amazon Data for Product Opportunity
- 08:51 - Unmet Customer Demands and Category Insights
- 09:49 - Understanding Category Insights in Seller Central
- 13:48 - Product Analysis and Seller Considerations
- 15:32 - Product Positioning and Discovering New Types
- 17:31 - Exploring Product Opportunities and Niche Selection
- 25:21 - Using Product Opportunity Explorer for Validation
- 28:25 - Product Opportunity Exploration and Validation
- 34:50 - Low Search Conversions and Brand Analytics
- 35:15 - High Conversion Search Term
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got somebody from Amazon who works on the Product Opportunity Explorer team to do a deep dive in how sellers can use this Amazon data to find new product opportunity, and there was so much good stuff in this episode that we actually had to split it into two episodes. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Black Box by Helium 10 houses the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world. Outside of Amazon itself, we have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces, from USA to Australia to Germany and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might want to get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me/blackbox. Don't forget you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we've got somebody who's helping serious sellers from the other side of the world. I've met her a couple times now when I've spoken at Amazon Singapore events, and I really liked her presentation on some unique things. I'm like hey, I want you to come on to the podcast, be the first person from Amazon Singapore on our podcast. So, Yi Zhen, welcome to the show.
Yi:
Thanks Bradley for having me here. When Bradley was at the Seller's Meet this year, he literally just asked me like hey, do you want to come on a podcast with me? So I was like really caught off guard because my presentation was before his right. So I was like maybe, and now I'm here.
Bradley Sutton:
I don't take, I don't take, maybe I don't take, maybe I only take yes as the answer. Yeah, when I'm in Japan and Korea for my trip.
Yi:
Bradley's like when are we going to have our podcast?
Bradley Sutton:
So it's always bothering her on her vacation. Always on my mind. Yep, yep, you know it. You know we're going to talk about that a little bit, but I want to go back. I don't know too much about like your backstory. Were you born and raised in Singapore?
Yi:
Yes, born and raised in Singapore like a true blood Singaporean.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you go to university also in Singapore?
Yi:
Yes, in Singapore, actually, I went to Nan Yang Technological University.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, then and what did you study there? Business so now I'm helping sellers to run their business. Yeah, and was Amazon your first job out of university or do you work doing other things?
Yi:
Actually it is, and in fact I was intern here, so I actually got converted to a full-time account manager, living the dream.
Bradley Sutton:
University to intern, to full-time employee, one of the top ones in the product opportunity explorer department. Oh, my goodness, what was your favorite part of your trip? I love travel myself, and you went to the same, exact same countries that I just did recently. What did you like the most?
Yi:
Wow, I actually love Mount Fuji the most. It's like so magnificent. Every time you just see it in like the pictures and everything, you're like, oh it's just another mountain. But it just hits different when you're there yourself. And I think I was lucky because I could see the full Mount Fuji. A couple of like our colleagues, you know, like even two so she mentioned that she haven't had a chance to see like the full Mount Fuji before, even though she has been there a few times. So I consider myself quite lucky. And of course, the food there is great, thanks to Bradley's suggestions.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, awesome, awesome. You got to go to some of those places. I love it. Yeah, now are you a Korean drama fan?
Yi:
Of course Okay, so that's why on the Korean.
Bradley Sutton:
When you went to Korea I saw you and your husband were wearing like the school uniforms when you went to the photo shoots and stuff.
Yi:
Yeah, so we actually went to have our wedding photo shoot at one of the abandoned team parks where most of the Korean dramas are filmed there.
Bradley Sutton:
Nice Real life Korean drama Alright. Well, we're not here. I mean, I could have a whole episode about Korean drama and travel for sure, I could have two episodes about that, probably but we're here to talk about some cool stuff that you know, like, I think, a lot of our listeners. Of course, they use Helium 10, and what but people don't realize is number one. You can use Helium 10 with a lot of the amazing data that Amazon has given and have even more advantage. Or maybe you're not ready for Helium 10 yet. There's stuff that everybody, including people who don't even have brand registry which, by the way, everybody should have brand registry but even if you don't, for whatever reason, there's some cool information that Amazon has available and this is stuff that you know. Like six years ago, seven years ago, when I was first getting into Amazon, I would have never, ever, ever, ever imagined that Amazon would make this kind of data public and and it's kind of, it's kind of crazy, you know. So I want to make sure that people Kind of like know about this stuff, but before we get into it, I Want you to, I want you to quiz me, okay, all of the and people I'm trying to like see if I have my second camera, but my second camera is not, is not showing here. I want to prove to people I'm not going to cheat. I have nothing actually. Actually, I'm gonna show people my screen right now. Hold on, so this is you know. For those watching this on YouTube, this is my screen.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm just looking at you know I'm getting ready for what we're gonna talk about product opportunity Explorer. But I'm not cheating at all. My hands are up here. You test me on the acronyms on a bunch of stuff that we're gonna talk about today. You know the. We'll start with like OX. I know what that is. That's easy opportunity Explore. So we're gonna do that. Let's see, like I'm gonna pause before I answer because I want the people listening see if they know what these these Abbreviations stand for. All right, so OX equals opportunity Explorer.
Yi:
Give me another one something that Bradley was just clarifying with me earlier on. So what is MPG?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, you see, okay, hold on. I'm glad you mentioned that. You see you're in Singapore. Your cars go by kilometers, right? Yeah, yeah so here in America, mpg we go by miles. That means miles per gallon. Okay, well, like well, how much your gas mileage on the car? So that's why I asked you that today. So this one is kind of cheating, because I already asked about that earlier, because I was like what the heck is MPG? Yeah now you're ready for God? No, no, I got it. Mark marketplace product guidance.
Yi:
Yes, exactly You're right, You're right.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, got it All right. How many of you guys got it right? All right, give me. Give me another one, hit me. I think they're all easier than that one. That was the hardest one. What's another one?
Yi:
Have you heard of this thing called the CLA?
Bradley Sutton:
Is it not a Mercedes? No, like a kind of Mercedes.
Yi:
Nope, I can give you a CLA. It's actually something new under Amazon brand analytics which is an acronym in itself.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah that's a B, a right.
Yi:
Yeah, so something new yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Consumer doesn't start with consumer.
Yi:
Customer.
Bradley Sutton:
Nope, I give up. What is it?
Yi:
It's customer loyalty analytics. Yes, that's the new dashboard.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, customer loyalty analytics. All right, what's another one? So now we've done three. We've done OX, we've got a, b, a, we've got CLA. We don't know we've done, for we got MPG.
Yi:
What else is out there? Do you know what is SQP?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, that's an easy one. I had that team from Amazon USA on. Anybody else know who's listening. All right, search query performance. I think that's the one that everybody got. Everybody got right.
Yi:
Yeah, I watched the episode.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, you watch that episode. Do you know those people I had on the show?
Yi:
To be honest, I haven't really heard of them. Amazon is pretty big, but I know they are the growth consultants right Based in a yes, yes, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, I think that's most, that's most of them, but we'll see if we go over some, some other ones today. So, um, you know I wanted to. I wanted to get into some of these things because, again, you know, even even for me, like I have not done too much the customer, the customer loyalty dashboard, but what I wanted to start talking to you about today was the something else about? I'm not sure if this is the same dashboard, but before we get into it, you know, the first thing we mentioned was OX. You know, which is opportunity Explorer. So what is just the, the, the kind of like elevator pitch. Like us, you have like 30 seconds to a minute to explain to somebody in the elevator what is opportunity Explorer? What would you? How would you describe it?
Yi:
Basically, you are able to find out what are the unmet demands of US customers that are buying or searching on Amazon.com and, basically, based on the data that you have, you find new products to introduce and sell on Amazon.com.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Now you say Amazon.com it. I know it's in Amazon.com, that that's the one that I sell and that's where you I use it. How many other marketplaces is it available in outside of Amazon.com?
Yi:
They are actually six more. So it's in the five European store, namely United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan, and they are trying to roll out to other European stores in your future as well. So just keep a lookout, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
And pretty much any seller with a professional account can access it without Brad, even without brand registry right.
Yi:
Yes, exactly, you just need to have a professional selling plan and you can access, like this, golden data From Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let's talk about the, the one I didn't know too much, which was the category insights. First of all, where in seller central? Which menu is that? Even in?
Yi:
I'm trying to find myself actually under growth, then you can hit over.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm gonna share my screen for those watching here on YouTube. So I go to growth.
Yi:
Then marketplace product guidance.
Bradley Sutton:
Marketplace. There's that mpg. All right, there we go. That's the mpg.
Yi:
So, in fact, under mpg itself, there are a couple of tools which I think we can talk about it later on, but category insights is just one of it. So I see right here it's at the very top there's a there's a button looks like I have got 30 of them. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is based on Whatever account I'm in, the kind of things that the categories that I'm in, or the order, or I have access to all you have access to all category on a browse note level.
Yi:
So in fact you can see already over there you can choose the marketplace available. So in fact it's available. This insights is available for the US, UK, Germany, Japan store, so you can toggle to the other marketplace to view category based insights as well.
Bradley Sutton:
What, what it like? What's the benefit of this? What should I be looking at here?
Yi:
Yeah, I mean the benefits over here is, let's say you don't really know what kind of category you want to start selling in. You roughly want to shortlist and See what is the demand for the specific browse note as well. You can use that to do your preliminary research. So I would say product research right. So there are a couple of ways you can get started into it. So firstly, let's say if you roughly know, you know what kind of keyword, what kind of product you roughly want to sell. There's a search bar at the top of the item type, keyword Module. You can actually put in your keyword over there. Alternatively, let's say you are a blank piece of paper. You completely do not know where to start, but you just want to see what is like the hottest category in that particular marketplace. We do have a bar that you can see right over there, so that bar length actually signifies the demand in that particular marketplace. So that's how maybe also.
Bradley Sutton:
That means in home and kitchen. Curtain is a very popular product type right now.
Yi:
Exactly.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes.
Yi:
So you can narrow down to curtain and it seems like window curtain panels. It's one of, like, the hottest product under this product type. Yes, that's how you can roughly get an idea of when to start with. Then, of course, you can scroll down all the way to the bottom to see many other selection matrix that help you to determine whether this is something that you want to get into before you do additional research, using opportunity explorer.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah and so this is like you know, this. This kind of popularity index is this. Is this based on what people are searching for, or what people are buying, or just in, you know, a combination of both? Or how should I view this? The this list like scale here.
Yi:
Yeah, this is like, I guess it's like a combination. So in fact, actually when you scroll down, it will exactly tell you Roughly what it's like the unit. So what is the net sales for this particular item type, keyword that you have narrowed down Across, like the different window periods that you want to see? So there, can be like seven days, thirty days, ninety days, twelve months, yeah oh, wow, man, window yeah, window yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
window curtain panels are flying off the shelves at Amazon, exactly who would have thought that that's.
Yi:
Lands views.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's see what does it say? It says some of glance views received across these. What it what's a what's a glance view?
Yi:
that means who are basically viewing a sins? How many Ascends within this item type keyword are being viewed in the United States? Which ever month that you have filtered by? Yeah?
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. So what I mean, like all I mean, I'm still scrolling here and you know I know peace. A lot of people are just listening. They can't see what I'm seeing on my screen, but we've got here. Search to purchase ratio Return ratio. The reasons for returns yes. Number of new ASINs number 26 million ASINs in this. Oh, that must mean.
Yi:
That's why the bar length is extremely long for this particular item.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow, yeah, so doesn't mean that it's a longer, it's longer.
Yi:
It's something that you want to go into, so, but it's just another consideration for you, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, yeah, and the FAQ down here it says what is demand. We identified demand Considering 300 demand factors. Obviously we're not going to go into the 300. There's a lot of stuff that is going in here. Um, is there anything else that? Or is there anything here that you think really Kind of like sticks out, like hey, if I'm a seller, this and I'm looking for a new product, this is something that I should be looking at.
Yi:
Actually, for me it'll just be like three key things that usually I like to highlight to my sellers. So number one is actually the search to purchase ratio. So they want to see roughly what is the demand like, how many people will convert. Let's say, if I run advertising, what would be the ROI like? So that will give them a gauge right when they do their own calculations. Number two is the return ratio. We know how well the return that exchanges policy Amazon is.
Yi:
So this is something that you probably want to factor in when you do your profit and loss analysis at the very start. Maybe it's something that you want to bake in as part of your expenditure, right, because not all returns will Will allow you to get, like a food reimbursement. So usually our advice, seller, to consider that as an expense from the very get. Go for this particular product. Then the other one that I typically like to highlight, actually the features, right.
Yi:
If you scroll all the way to the bottom, it shows you a couple of matrixes like price Pattern, color, room type, etc. So it essentially already tells you what are the products typically purchased at like, which price range, and maybe in this case people like to buy solid curtains. There are blue in color and they like to place it in their bedroom. So maybe, when you want to sell window curtain panels, maybe you want to sell specifically Baked room curtain panels and, in fact, within your listing, this is something that you might want to highlight specifically is for bedroom use. So, yeah, this are some of the ways that you can, in a sense, give you a overall or initial understanding of how you should position your products. Yeah, we didn't this category.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. I'm looking here. There's patterns. I don't even know what it means. Oh, ombré, like what? The heck is a ombré? Do you know what?
Yi:
that means Different color, then it's like a bit fader, then okay, you do know what I mean. I don't okay.
Bradley Sutton:
There's interesting. I discovered a product type I didn't even realize existed. All right, so this is I think this one is one of the newer kids on the block that not a lot of sellers have been using. So, guys, this is good. If you're selling right now, you want to look into some numbers for your category or you just want to explore some new ideas. Now let's hop into the one that's been around a little bit longer, but it has been seems like it's been constantly updated over the last year or so. A lot of new features, and that's the opportunity explore. So Let me I'm sharing my screen again. It says here I can search by keyword or ASIN. So let's go over a use case. So what use case are you going to give? What pretend situation are you going to give me right now and we can walk people through it?
Yi:
Yeah, yeah, In fact right, maybe I can just introduce to you how you can roughly use Opportunity Explorer even without searching for keywords or ASINs. So recently, if you see, the dashboard has been updated where there are many more recommendations within it, such as recently review niche similar niche from the category that you're selling in. So let's say, if you're already an existing seller, they'll recommend you potential products that you can sell. What are the increasing searches? Decreasing searches and many more recommendations. So sometimes, if you completely do not know what to sell, you just want a second opinion. Do check out the dashboard over there.
Bradley Sutton:
There's a product that looks pretty cool. I'm seeing right now a book nook reading valet. Never in my life have I seen this product, but it seems to be getting popular. Okay, so, without even clicking anything or typing anything in, you can get some product ideas here. All right, what else?
Yi:
exactly. On top of that, I think we can just move on to quickly just showing an example of how we can shortlist or decide how to narrow down on what niche we should sell, because if you have been using Opportunity Explorer for a while now, you'll know that, let's say, when you type in a particular keyword within the search bar, sometimes it'll show you multiple customer needs. Maybe what I can share over here within this podcast is how can you shortlist the customer needs or like the niche shall be offered so that you'll be able to do further research based on that. So mainly is to see how we can narrow down your searches. Okay yeah, maybe for a start we could just key in shower curtain sets in the search bar.
Bradley Sutton:
Shower curtain set got it yeah.
Yi:
So I think, in general, I would just like to introduce like four different use cases where people can best filter or shortlist products when you arrive at this page over here, depending, of course, depending on your business objective and your goals, what you're trying to achieve out of here, and these four use cases are actually built together with sellers. So I'm sure it will be relevant to some of the people who are viewing this podcast here. Okay, so the first one would be how can you identify, you know, ASINs or, in fact, niche that are high in search volume and has fewer offers from other sellers? So, over here, I would just like to highlight that, if you want to review that filter by the search volume column as well as the top click products, oh, actually, you'll be able to see it within the niche page already. Okay, so you can just filter accordingly into the total the total search volume sorted by that. You can sort by that. Okay, got it, yeah. So, by the way, everybody listening.
Bradley Sutton:
If you guys are a bit, if you guys are on your computer, I want everybody to do this, like literally every seller can be doing this together with us. If you're driving your car, riding your bicycle, please don't try and do anything and get in the accident. But if you're in front of your computer, what we did was I went to the seller central menu bar, I hit growth and I hit product opportunity explorer. And now I'm right here in the product opportunity explorer. I entered in shower curtain set where it says search by keyword. And now I'm on the very page and everybody probably, you know, depending on you know, when you're looking at this. It might, you know, look a little different if you're listening to this, like two months later, but it's basically gonna be the same thing as what I'm looking at. And I just hit the under the search volume column. I sorted it by the total search volume over the last three 60 days and now it's in descending order. And now what should I do?
Yi:
Yeah. So another thing that we should focus on is also how many top click products are there, right? So you'll be able to know how many selections are available. Is it too crowded or is there still opportunity, right? So usually let's say if you do like keyword search, sometimes they will offer you many results. In this case I think there are about 39. So sometimes you need to click into the second page to view more results. So in this case, sometimes I'll recommend sellers to click the download button at the top right corner so that they will be able to transfer the results into Excel sheet to further shortlist. But in this case maybe we can just take a look at the screen that Bradley have shown, so at one glance you'll be able to see, for instance, we do have like shower curtains, that's like, where the search volume for the past 360 days is like 53 million and the number of top click products available is 61, which is, it seems, decent compared to many other customer needs which are above 100 or 285.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I see one that's 300 almost, and now again. This means, if I'm not mistaken, the last time I was studying this, I mean actually it did change before this number of top click products meant how many products it takes to get 80% of all the clicks in this niche, but now isn't it like 90% or something like that?
Yi:
90% now. So 90% of the search and purchase products, yeah, Got it Correct.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, and so yeah, that that is a big difference, like a 61 and then two. Down here there's Christmas bathroom decor 3 million search volume only, but 300 top click products that means it's like a wide open, too many going into it. Yeah, yeah.
Yi:
Yeah, yeah, okay, and I mean seasonality also plays a fact right, the one that you saw is actually Christmas bathroom decor. It might be because everybody just want to jump on the bandwagon and just sell Christmasy stuff. So, even though the growth is like 2000 plus percent, it may not be something that you want to go into right, especially if you haven't really launched Okay. So that's just two matrix down to highlight. First, let's say, if you would just want to explore, you know, products that have high search volume and have like decent selections available that slice you opportunities to go into. So these two matrix you can look at that.
Yi:
Then, another one that I wanted to highlight is actually the search volume growth, which I briefly talk about it earlier, so doesn't mean that you know the growth is 2934%, like you see, for the Christmas bathroom decor is definitely something that you go into. Consider, like the seasonality, is it appropriate for you to go into it right now? Right, of course. At the same time, you need to take a look at the search volume. There are instances whereby maybe the search volume is only 60,000, but then the growth is like 7,000. So even if it grows by 7,000, it doesn't mean much because the search volume is too small. So it's important for you to find like a healthy balance between like the search volume that you want to see, as well as the growth percentage you are looking at to find like 20 products.
Bradley Sutton:
Now it says here growth past 180 days. So is that mean it's taking Like what Like just the day search volume compared to 180 days ago, or like this month's compared to six months ago, or what is this percentage representing?
Yi:
So this is like past 180 days, like based on, like the day, because we refresh the opportunity dashboard, like on the weekly cadence right, so it's constantly being refreshed.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, and most of these I'm seeing are like kind of seasonal. You know I see Thanksgiving bathroom set and then I see Halloween and Grinch. You know it's kind of like a Christmasy thing. Aha, here's one that's not necessarily gothic. You know I'm in that niche because of my coffin shelf right. Gothic shower curtain that could be a possible. Well, here's something my daughter would love. Hello Kitty bathroom set is growing 27%. Dallas Cowboys I don't know who likes Dallas Cowboys anymore, but our orange shower curtain is getting up. Alright, this is interesting stuff.
Yi:
Actually there are another two which I think it's also quite important that I would like to share also. So the third one will actually be looking at the average price of the product that you want to sell, because sometimes you know when you want to sell a particular product, you want to earn a certain amount of margin, right? If the cost of the product is really, let's say, example, $10, including all the different fees, ideally maybe you want to sell something that is maybe in the $30 range, so that you'll be able to earn a healthy margin, so that you'll be able to factor in the promotional discounts that you'll give and advertisement spend that you'll be able to make, right? So in this case, what I recommend you to do is to hit on the filter results button which is on the left-hand side, and you can actually filter the average price to. Maybe you can put $30. Minimum $30.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Minimum $30, okay, and let's take a look at what's in the box and then submit yes.
Yi:
Oh, there's only one.
Bradley Sutton:
Only the Dallas Cowboys. People are paying lots of money for this. Yeah, yeah, stick in Dallas Cowboys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, alright, so that can be something that you can filter by.
Yi:
If, let's say, you have a target margin that you want to work with, especially if you already got a quotation from, like, your manufacturer, this is something that you can work backwards on to see whether this is feasible for you to get started on. Okay, correct. Then the next one is pretty similar to this, but what it actually tells you would be the annualized niche. That means your annualized opportunity. Sometimes sellers will tell me, for instance, I want to earn $30,000 in a year. I know it's quite little, but for new sellers maybe it's a good stretch. Sometimes they'll tell me I want to sell $30,000 for this particular category, but after we searched on Opportunity Explorer, we found that there's insufficient demand within this category. They want to sell in in order to hit the $30,000. Right, if the average unit. So it's not enough. On average, you won't be able to hit your goal. So you may need to have another strategy. Either you launch multiple selections in order to hit your goal, or you pivot to sell in another category. So how are you able to find out your annualized opportunity? You can do it through filtering the results as well. Maybe you can click on filter results again. Okay, maybe let's set the average price to $15.
Bradley Sutton:
Average price $15. All right.
Yi:
Then let me calculate, assuming let's say I want to earn $20,000. Okay, just put 1,500 units.
Bradley Sutton:
So average unit sold put $15,000, $1,500. Got it and then we've got shower, just regular shower curtain. Customer need of the niche yeah correct.
Yi:
So maybe you need to explore selling something within this niche, that something that you'll be able to meet the customers. Later we'll talk about how we innovate products looking at the niche page, but basically this is like the opportunity you need to start with. Let's say, if you want to keep that certain, you need so as well as the price that you want to sell. So you need to work backwards based on your goal.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool, all right. So you know like, let's say, I go through a whole bunch of these keywords and I come out with a few or something. You know like whether I'm doing this or I'm doing Helium 10, the next step is usually like a validation. You know like, all right, here's what looks cool. But then I can't just up, it's time to go to Alibaba and source it and like there's some more steps. So how can product opportunity explore help with validating my ideas?
Yi:
Correct. So I think maybe you can click into a niche, maybe the shower curtains one, since you're at that page already. So within the niche page itself, you'll find that there are multiple tabs that give you further insights on a particular niche detail that you are at, like product insights, search term insights, trends, and there's something I'm seeing brand new things here.
Bradley Sutton:
I've never seen before. Something that I want to purchase drivers and returns. Look at that, correct, correct.
Yi:
So, yeah, these are like a few other things you can take note off in order to validate your product and also to see how you can innovate your product. So maybe I can go through like the different tabs quickly to see what are the key matrix that you should take note off. Okay, so the very first one would be like the product steps. So over here you'll be able to see what are like the top purchase product right. Whenever people key in the search term shower curtains, for instance, so over here you'll be able to view basically the similar ASINs. You'll be able to see what they are selling at, who is actually having the most key share and what's useful about this. You'll be able to click into the specific product title in order to find out more information about this popular product Right.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh wow, Correct.
Yi:
So over here if you scroll all the way down, because, like some of the product matrix available at the top, you'll be able to see it from revenue calculator. But what's useful is, if you look at the bottom, there's this section called the niche. Product appears in, so that means this product is popular, not just in shower curtains, but this few other niche as well. Right, so this is just something for you to take note of. Maybe when you want to sell something similar to this, you can also cross, do kind of like across analysis, across the other similar niche listed over here as well, or maybe take a look at the top search there as well.
Bradley Sutton:
And this is kind of like I would imagine like for some people might view this as a good sign that it's in multiple niches. It's not just only getting sales in this shower curtain niche, but it's got one for non-toxic shower curtain liner Green. I mean green bathroom decor. That's a very broad keyword, so interesting Okay.
Yi:
Cool yeah. So the other one is actually the customer review insights. That is specific for this ASIN. Previously I've always heard from my seller they're still doing it the manual way. They'll go to like a similar ASIN. They'll comb through manually, like all the customer reviews, but you actually don't have to do it. Everything is all summarized within opportunity explorer, so at one glance you'll be able to know what's good about this product and what's bad. And what's bad about this product is an opportunity for you to innovate your product, to make it even better, and maybe you might even open up like a unique, like market demand for this kind of product that you are offering in the future. For instance, over here I think one of the negative review actually mentioned that the color is not what they wanted. So maybe the photos that you take in the future maybe you have to cross track with real life images to make sure that they match to a certain extent as much as possible, so that customers won't will be more assured of the product they'll be getting. They won't leave negative reviews. Maybe another one would be, for instance, water resistant. They mentioned that this shower curtain is not water resistant at all, which is very strange. I mean shower curtains is supposed to be water resistant, so this is something maybe you need to work on with your manufacturer to ensure that it's indeed water resistant.
Bradley Sutton:
This umbrella is not water resistant.
Yi:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, is that like yeah, yeah, quite funny.
Bradley Sutton:
No problem.
Yi:
Yes, yes. So these are just some of the things you can take note from here. Then maybe we can go back to the other tabs quickly. Okay, so maybe I can just go through the search term tab, okay, okay, so over here you'll be able to. Again, it gives you different matrix, such as the search volume, growth count, the demand in terms of conversion and click share for all the different search terms. So over here you'll be able to sort, for instance, by the different matrix you want to see. It can be search conversion, because you want to see which search term is giving like much more conversion for like the product that you want to sell shower curtains, buff roof curtains. Sometimes the search term over here can even give you insights on how you can develop your product to make it even better. So, for instance, I see over here, when I filter by search conversion, one of the top search term is actually cloth shower curtain. So I mean it's not water resistant. Maybe because there are people who like cloth shower curtain. So maybe that's why this product is still selling well, even though it's not water resistant. Maybe this is something that you can think of and because, in fact, it's one of the search term that leads to highest search conversion.
Bradley Sutton:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this, like the search volume and conversion, is this basically the same as search query performance, but not the same as brand analytics? Currently right, like brand analytics, I believe, like for top three click might be something different or it has to be something different probably because this is not even a week. You know like this is showing 360 days, right?
Yi:
Yeah, yeah, correct. Yeah, yeah, Okay. So the explorers should match with the search query performance.
Bradley Sutton:
Search query performance Okay.
Yi:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool Interesting.
Yi:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, these are some pretty low search conversions here, like some of these are 0.05.
Yi:
Oh, my God Like nobody Not as great Like 0.05.
Bradley Sutton:
That's like one out of every 1000. Yeah it's quite so, something crazy. Yeah, like less than less than yeah. One percent is one out of every 100. One tenth of percent is one. No, that's like one out of every 5000. Oh, my goodness gracious, it's quite bad, basically, the conversion is quite bad.
Yi:
It means that it might be quite, you know, competitive, I would say, because there are like a range of selections available, which is why maybe, let's say, if you even want to run advertising, it might be more costly to win the bid, right? So this might be a consideration, maybe it's it might be a little too tough for you to get into, right? It's just a signal for you to know.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, guys, we're going to have to cut the episode here because there's just too much good stuff, so make sure to come back. In the next episode we're going to go more into brand analytics, the new customer loyalty dashboard and a whole bunch of things more. We'll see you in the next episode.
Discover the best practices for Amazon product sourcing excellence as we welcome back Kian Golzari, the Amazon product sourcing sage, for his fifth appearance to impart his vast knowledge on mastering the Chinese manufacturing labyrinth. Kian's guidance takes you through the crucial steps from selecting the right manufacturers on Alibaba to conducting effective factory visits, ensuring you return home with more than just souvenirs – but strategies to boost your product quality and cost-efficiency.
Venture with us into his secrets of product differentiation and learn how to stand out in a saturated market by uniquely combining various components and embracing innovative packaging solutions. We dissect the art of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, from deluxe packaging to strategic bundling. Furthermore, Kian reveals the underestimated power of packaging in offline sales, sharing insights on making a product pop on the Amazon website and attracting crucial impulse buys.
To wrap up, we get into the strategic intricacies of forging long-lasting relationships with suppliers and the nuances of communication that can make or break a deal. We dissect how to scrutinize supplier profiles and the vital role that understanding your supplier's capabilities plays in aligning with your business goals. Kian and Bradley also uncover the best practices for sample evaluation, navigating the norms of sample payments, and why investing time in personalizing your interactions with suppliers can pay dividends in the long run. This episode isn't just about finding the right supplier; it's about creating partnerships that will sustain your Amazon business growth and success.
In episode 524 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Kian discuss:
- 00:00 - Guide to Factory Sourcing and Visiting
- 02:52 - Insights From Visiting a Factory
- 11:40 - Sourcing and Differentiating Products in Manufacturing
- 13:22 - Revamping Coffin Shelf Market Strategy
- 16:29 - Importance of Packaging in Offline Sales
- 18:20 - Clarity and Importance of Product Filters
- 18:44 - Finding & Evaluating Manufacturers on Alibaba
- 21:53 - Filtering for Top Factory Products
- 25:48 - Importance of Trade Background and Markets
- 28:31 - Selecting Suppliers and Communicating Effectively
- 31:40 - Price and Quality Selection Process
- 33:48 - Strategies for Sourcing and Product Defensibility
- 36:38 - Benefits of Attending the Canton Fair
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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got the world's foremost expert on sourcing, Kian, back on the show and he's going to give us step-by-step guides on how to source on Alibaba.com and an SOP for visiting factories in China. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you afraid of running out of inventory before your next shipment comes in? Or maybe you're on the other side and you worry about having too much inventory, which could cap you out at the Amazon warehouses or even cost you storage fees? Stay on top of your inventory by using our robust inventory management tool. You can take advantage of our advanced forecasting algorithms, manage your 3PL inventory, create PO's for your suppliers, create replenishment shipments and more all from inside inventory management by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash inventory management. And don't forget you can sign up for a free Helium 10 account from there, or you can get 10% off for life by using our special podcast code, SSP10.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We're going to the other side of the world to Dubai right now for a record breaking fifth time. That's how long this this, this show, has been out there. Guys, like we only have people on there, if they're really good, we'll invite them back. And if they are really good and we invite them back, it's only one time per year. The very first time ever in the history of Serious Sellers podcast, somebody's on the fifth time is the one and only Kian. Kian. How's it going? Welcome back.
Kian:
Oh man, thanks so much. It's a great intro man. It's an honor to be the only speaker to be on here five times and wow, I mean that must mean you've done a lot of episodes as well. So congrats to you to be plugging away. Like, how many episodes have you put out now?
Bradley Sutton:
We're like in the mid-500, like we're about 520 now, like we're in the mid the the five teens around there, yeah amazing, yeah, incredible man. Yeah great to be back and, yeah, really looking forward to sort of diving in and we're going to talk a lot about Alibaba, but before we get into that, I'm actually visiting, for the first time, Chinese factories. Like it's been years since I've even been to China and I've never visited the factories where we make the Project X, project 5K products. So what's some advice you can give me? You know like, hey, should I bring some gifts? You know like maybe some chocolates or something to the factory owners? Should I negotiate? Should I just, you know, talk away, ask about their family, like I usually deal with a sourcing agent? Yeah, and she's going to come with me, my sourcing agent who found these factories, and translate a little bit. But what should I do.
Kian:
Yeah, I mean, first of all, I think your mind is going to be blown Like I think everyone experiences this like the first time you go into a factory and actually see how your goods are made, because you have this idea and you have this perception in your head of, like how you think goods are made. But once you go in and you see the production line and like you know, let's say this is for the, for the coffin items, right? So like you'll see, like the wood, like arriving, you'll see the wood getting dried. You'll see, like the woods, like the bad pieces getting rejected. You'll see it getting sanded and filed down. You'll see it getting sprayed and painted. You'll see it getting cut to size and you'll see it getting assembled. You'll see it getting screwed, like you'll just see in some of the different compartments, and then your head will be like, wow, here's like 20 different processes and steps that this product went through to get made, whereas when I just see it in a store, I just see it like in a shelf or, like you know, online. I didn't think about it in this way. But why that really helps you is that, like you know, if you've got cost challenges and you're like right, I've got this like $8 product and I need to get it down to 6.5, you've got like 20 different places you can go to in your head because you've seen it on the production line, right?
Kian:
You're like well, was that spring really necessary? Are we cutting it in the most efficient way? Can we just do straight edges rather than these curved edges? Was it necessary to have that coating? Like? There's so many different things you can now think about. And then, on the reverse, if you want to improve the quality, you're like here's things that we could do better, based on what I saw and how this product is actually assembled. But you're going there for the first time, right? So, in terms of gifts, I would say it's nice. They'll probably provide a gift for you. If you've been doing business together for like a number of years, then by all means, maybe take something nice. I would say something that represents your hometown, so you could take them your favorite team, like a Lakers hat or something like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, those are fighting words. All right, guys. The fifth and last time that Keen will ever be on the podcast.
Kian:
So you can always and, by the way, Bradley’s the clipper's friend for anyone who didn't catch that but yeah, like you know, anything that represents your hometown where it could be like a hot sauce, it could be like a local tea or whatever like that. Just it doesn't have to be anything expensive. Like for me, I always used to take like a personalized bottle of whiskey because I was coming from Scotland. Suppliers, like really, really appreciated that and just a nice gesture to do. And if you have, like a sales assistant that you've been working with, I would get one for the sales assistant that you talk to and then one for the factory boss as well. Very, very important to get a gift for the factory boss and also to get a photo with the factory boss, because there's always going to be time where you're going to need to ask for a favor, right, and there's going to be a time when, like you know, chinese New Year is coming up and, like you know, your, your goods are getting rushed out and maybe they won't make it shipment before Chinese New Year. And then you say like, hey, please, can you just ask the boss, please can you rush this, please can you push this to the front of the production schedule. Please can you get this out before Chinese New Year? And you're like, who's asking? Again? Bradley's asking which one's? Bradley again, oh, he's the guy that brought you that Lakers jersey. Oh, yeah, I love that jersey. Cool, all right, get the items to the front of the line. So it's always something to like for them to remember you if you get a nice little gift.
Kian:
Now, talking about, like, actually arriving at the factory, I think a lot of people, maybe, if you're going to China for the first time, they have this like fear of like well, you know, google Maps doesn't work out there Like how do I get there? Like your factory will arrange everything for you in terms of transport, and like you've got a sourcing agent there. So so they'll definitely help you out, but you don't need to figure out anything by yourself. Like you can just tell your factory hey, I'm arriving at this airport, I'm flying into Hong Kong, I'm flying into Shanghai, I'll be there on the 19th of March. I'm going to come and visit you on the 20th. They'll just say, cool, what's your hotel? We'll come pick you up. Driver will be there outside 10 o'clock and, like, literally, driver comes out with your name, they'll have a Starbucks waiting for you. Like they really, really take care of you, right.
Kian:
And if you're like, hey, I need to get a train to where you are, I don't quite know how to get there. Like they'll book the train ticket for you, like they're so hospitable, like if you have any issues of like how to get there, or even like you know, when I go visit a factory, I tend to visit like two or three at the same time, like of a similar competing product, similar competing category, and I say, hey, look after you. After a visit your factory, I'm going to see this other factory, can you help me get there? And they're like, yeah, no problem, give us the address, we'll drop you off. Like, even if it's a competitor, if there's there very, very, very hospitable. So, in terms of getting there nice and easy, in terms of like what you're, what you'll learn, in terms of their product development, it'll blow your mind. But in terms of being prepared for your factory visit, like I always before any China trip, whether I'm going to the Canton Fair, whether I'm going to visit a factory, I always have to have a plan for my visit Right, like what is the main outcome I want to achieve from this?
Kian:
Right, do I want to learn how the goods are made? Cool, I'll spend a little bit of time on the production line. Do I need a better price? Because I'm getting price pressure? Well, I'm going to do my research in advance to see. Well, what were other suppliers pricing me? So, like you know, you could get a specification sheet for your product. You could but I'm sure we'll talk about this shortly reach out to the top three, top five suppliers on Alibaba.com, get pricing from them and you can go back to your existing supplier to say hey look, I don't want to move production, but just to let you know this is a pricing I'm getting offered somewhere else. I need you to match it. So, is it better pricing that we need? Are you getting a few too many returns? Or the quality concerns? Is there something? Is there chipping off the wood on the coffin box? Is that something we need to talk about? Then, like, we have the products right there in front of us, like here, let's address these quality concerns. Are you not doing the quality control? Let's check the end of the production line. Let's see who checks it. Let's see who boxes it. Let's see why they aren't picking up on these things.
Kian:
So there's many, many different outcomes that you could have. It could also be we want to develop new products for 2024. Please prepare for us some additional new samples and we can review them together or let's discuss together. So I wouldn't necessarily go into a factory without knowing what I wanted to achieve and like no lie. I've been in factories where I've been there for 10 hours sitting opposite the boss and we're just negotiating, because I'm like I'm not leaving until we figure this out and like, literally Some of the factory bosses like to smoke and I remember like the guy went through two packs of cigarettes while we were talking it. Like I'm not saying that's going to be the case right For everyone, but I knew I had an outcome that I wanted to achieve on that trip, right.
Kian:
Certain times I was doing production for the Olympics and they required certain certifications for the factory and I went to visit factories and didn't have those certificates. So I was training them. This is what this is. A certificate needs to comply with. This is what we need to fix. We were looking at, you know, lighting, fire extinguishers, dormitories, all that stuff. I was like you're the factory I want to work with. I need you to be compliant of this. I'm not leaving until I know you can do this. So there's so many different outcomes that we can have for visiting a factory and like. Those are just some of the things that we need to be prepared for, but, honestly, it's going to be so much fun for you. Like, I'm actually excited for you and I can't wait to see your stories on Instagram to see what it looks like.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you, thank you Now, right now, let's just say, you know, for that, a lot of people you definitely know suggest, hey, you should go visit the factory. But for a lot of other people you know, they might not have the way to go to China or they might not be able to go to Canton Fair or Iwu or other places, and so obviously the easiest place to to find suppliers would be Alibaba.com. So we're going to try something different today. I didn't 100 percent have this plan, but now I just like thought of it right now I just went to Alibaba, but or I went to Amazon and let's just, we're going to do a pretend thing where I'm which is halfway real, and that is, you know, one of the project X brands we do is not the coffin shell, but we also do egg trays. We have this brand called Geese Chicken Coops.
I just like threw in a keyword to Amazon right now egg storage for countertop. This actually used to be one of our main keywords, but now it's not anymore. And then I'm like trying to find something that looks interesting and these like this, this egg basket that has like a ceramic lid. Here let's just pretend that I'm like, hey, I want to have. I want to go source this from China. I want to look. So first step is what? Just go to Alibaba.com and try and figure out what keyword it might be like something similar to this. So you've got a couple of options here.
Kian:
Right, because, like you have the traditional egg trays, which could be, you know, wood and plastic, acrylic, whatever, and you could just type in egg tray and you could find it right. But for that particular one, for those who aren't viewing, with like a video, like Bradley, how would you describe this? It's like the shape of a chicken.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, it's really like the bottom part is this wire mesh like a basket looking thing. And then the like it has, this lid that shape like a, like a, like a chicken or rooster or something like that.
Kian:
here this is a really good example because, like here's a classic example of if you type in like egg tray or whatever on Alibaba, like this product probably won't come up, like we can have a look, but it probably won't come up the way that we're looking at this one, right, but like for you to have more defensibility in your brand, which is really, really important for 2024, you might need to go to another manufacturer which doesn't make egg trays. So you're looking at eggs right now and we don't see that particular product. Right, there's nothing like that. Yep, we could type in like caged basket for you know, holding fruit or holding vegetables or whatever it may, be right, and we could find the bottom part, but for the top part it was like a toy chicken, like on the top right, which is kind of serving as like the protector or the top of the basket, right, and so for that I would go to a toy supplier to be like different materials, right, it could be silicone, it could be plastic, it could be rubber, like I would say like rubber chicken toy or rubber animal toys, right, and you might be able to find this for, let's just say, 50 cent or 30 cent or 75 cent, and we could buy those separately and we could send it to the egg tray suppliers, or we could send it to the basket suppliers, right, and anyone wanting to copy that product wouldn't necessarily be able to, because they didn't know that they have to go to two different suppliers. Right, they didn't know that you could, just because if they type it in, they won't find it and they're not thinking.
Kian:
Right, I'm going to get an egg tray from a toy supplier. So this is something that gives you like, really, really good defensibility. And this is applicable to anyone like, not even people which are looking for egg trays, but, like, whenever I'm looking at a new product, I'm like, well, what other purpose does this product have? Like, for example, right now I'm using a podcast microphone, right With a boom arm or whatever, right, but like, I could also go to a supplier which makes selfie sticks and take the technology of the telescopic pole and use that right, and anyone who's looking to get like a microphone stand or a podcast mic stand is not looking at like telescopic poles. So there's so many different ways that we can look at other manufacturers to fit the purpose of the product that we want to manufacture.
Bradley Sutton:
I like that and that's something that's similar to what I'm actually doing. That's what I'm going to be going to the factory and talking to or, you know, checking out one of the first orders. So, like, what happened with the coffin shelf was that it got kind of saturated. You know, like you know, because everybody watched Project X and everybody started launching, you know, coffin shelves and now there's a million coffin shelves and I didn't want to do, I didn't want to play the race to the bottom price wars. You know, like, there's people now I used to sell the coffin shelf for like 32 bucks and now there's people selling it for like 19. I'm not going to try and compete with that price. So I'm like I'm going to go opposite, I'm going to raise the price back. Like I was selling for like 25. Now I'm going to raise it back to 30. But what I'm going to do is two things. Number one I'm going to buy a really fancy box and it's a box shaped like a coffin, like. So somebody would actually gift it to somebody in this coffin shaped box, and the box itself is almost a product. You can use that as a sock storage or something like that, because it's a really high quality. I mean, it's crazy. It's like almost 60% of the cost of the coffin shelf, you know by itself, but we're still only talking like two bucks.
Bradley Sutton:
And then I noticed in the customer reviews that a lot of people are putting like these little LED spooky little trinkets and figurines right. And so what I did was I also sourced like a pumpkin shaped LED candle and then a skull, like a, just a mini skull, because these are what people are using to display anyways. And so now I'm relaunching the coffin shelf at a higher price point with this box that's super hard to get custom made and from another, a third factory, these LED stuff. And so, like you know, these people who are just trying to make a quick buck and sell coffin shelves, you know, from China for $19, they're not going to take the time or effort to go and source three different things from three different factories. And so now I'm kind of like building this moat around and trying to dominate, redominate the coffin shelf market.
Kian:
I guess you could say that's mega and I'm glad you mentioned that as well because, like so, I was at this show called like global sources, just like last month or wherever, and I was filming a YouTube video, actually just posted it yesterday on like the highlights of that show, and I walked, assembled, into this guy's booth. His name was like Matthew and he had like he was just doing packaging, like really, really deluxe packaging, right. And I go in and I'm like, hey and? But the packaging was like super nice, like it was like magnetic boxes that folded flat, like he was doing it for a Sephora. He was doing like Pokemon boxes, like just high end stuff, right.
Kian:
And I was like picking up different bits of packaging and we were talking about like online versus offline and you know different styles of packaging and one color boxes. And then I was like you know how much is this box? And it was like a really small, flimsy one and he was like you know, less than 0.1. I was like, wait, less than 10 cents. He was like, yeah, it's around like 8 cents. I was like no way. And I was like, all right, what about this one? I picked up this like magnetic one. He's like that's around $1. I'm expecting the dude to say like three. He's like wow. I was like I was like these prices seem a little too good to be true. I was like where's your factory? He's like for Shan. I'm like okay, cool, so it's narrow way. I was like what are you doing this weekend? I was like I'm at the factory. I was like I'm going to come visit you this weekend. I was like cool, so rock up. And then I filmed a YouTube video in his factory. I showed the packaging process end to end, start to finish. All the like he had like machines which cost over a million dollars, like everything, like map finishing, gloss finishing, like everything. So the entire process, start to finish. And talking about like 2024 and differentiating and just what you just talked about. That's key. That's so key to being ahead.
Kian:
Whether you're selling online or offline, you want to win the click. Online, sometimes you show your packaging in the main image, sometimes you don't. But if you're selling it in retail, it's on a shelf. You have to catch people's attention. So if you're selling offline, you really, really have to catch people's attention. If and that's through the packaging, that's the first touch point and it can be catch for attention by color. It can be by innovative design. So packaging is going to play a super, super important role. So I'll definitely connect you with Matthew.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, Awesome Thanks, Appreciate it. All right. Going back to our olive oil, let's go to something more traditional, All right, so that's a great way for differentiation. Let's just say I picked something else while you were talking right now, Something that's kind of like all right, this is not something that you necessarily differentiate, Like we always. I think you should always differentiate, but maybe not let's not go to the effect where, like, hey, let's try and get stuff from three or two different factories and let's do fancy packages, Because you know, sometimes when people are just getting started, they want to get their feet wet. You know that might be a little bit too difficult. So then I pick again in the same niche. I hit this keyword egg dispenser on Alibaba, and so you know, for those watching on YouTube, you guys can see this. For those listening on podcast, we'll try and describe it here. But now let's just say that this, this kind of egg dispenser that has this like row, it looks like like a row on the top of eggs and it rolls down to the bottom row. I guess you just pick one and then it rolls down. So let's just say that, for whatever reason, this is the kind of product I'm getting. I just did my very first search on Alibaba. This is definitely the keyword. Next step would be so I start doing using some of these filters and then, if so, what would you suggest?
Kian:
Yeah, yeah. So I'm so glad you're showing this visually online as well, right, because you can look at that image. Right, see the second image. This says $2.50. The second one says, yes, 88 cents. It's the same image, right? So, yeah, this is what. This is where we need to get really, really clear on the filters. Right, because it looks like the exact same product. One is well, the one's three X the price of the other one, and you could see that I'm like, oh, okay, well, I'll go for the cheapest one. But you haven't necessarily done the research to know what already different materials or different sizes or different specifications. Does one hold more eggs? Does one have deluxe packaging? So we don't really know that, right? So you went to Alibaba.com and you typed in egg dispenser, and this is the first thing that came up. So the first point right, I would select verified manufacturers. So that's the first point that you see in the list right. Why this is so important, is that, yeah, perfect. This is where we need to be. The purpose of using Alibaba.com correctly is not to find the cheapest price. It's to find the best manufacturers. Once we find the best manufacturers, then we can start to negotiate the price. So the purpose right now we're just looking for the best manufacturers.
Kian:
So the first thing you did was you selected verified manufacturers. And what's that for? It means any information that they provide on their listing, whether it be number of years in business, how many staff they have, what certificates they have, what patents they have, what products they have, what does their production line look like, the images of videos in the factory. That's all been verified by a third party, meaning intertech, SGS, tuv. One of these very reputable companies have gone in and verified all the information is true, whereas if we didn't work with verified suppliers, then whatever information they want to put there, we just have to sort of take their word for it. So verified is the most important thing to search for first. Then on the left hand side of the page, you'll see trade assurance right. I would always click that as well, and trade assurance just means that your payment is protected. So if you've ordered an egg dispenser which holds 20 eggs and you do the production and you receive one which only holds 10 eggs, then the trade assurance will protect you and it will refund your order because you've selected that right. That's just a little bit of a safety net, important for, like you know, new sellers, right. And then as you scroll down on the left hand side of the page, you'll see something that says management certification, right. And if you scroll down a little bit more, yeah, so you see like BSEI, and you see sedx, you see ISO. I always like to select BSEI and ISO. So BSEI is your business social compliance initiative and ISO is just a really high quality standard and this just basically means these are factory certificates that they have. So BSEI will go in and they'll check, like you know, how many years have you been in business? Do you have, like, fire extinguishers? Do you have adequate lighting, do you have safety exits? Like we've checked the dormitories, we've checked like the canteen where the workers eat. So it's kind of like gives you confidence that you're working for a very, very good factory, right. So now, if we go back to the top of the list, right, we've now we've searched by manufacturers, we've got verified manufacturers, we've got trade assurance and we've got factories which have you know, bsei and ISO certification.
Kian:
So now, as I'm scrolling down the list, like if you zoom in on the company names, like the first word in the company name is always the city or the province in which that factory is located. So sometimes, like the factories like electronics are made in Shenzhen, backpacks are normally made in like Chenzhou. Like furniture, like steel tubing for furniture, chairs is made like Yongkang. So I'm just trying to get familiar Is there an area which specializes in egg dispensers? Maybe not, because it's such a niche product, right, that maybe you could make it anywhere. But as I scroll down, I'm trying to see, like, is there one name that pops up more frequent than others and in that interesting, the area which specializes in that product? But I see Ningbo has probably popped up a few times, right? So yeah, but anyway, doesn't matter. If Ningbo had popped out like eight out of nine times, I would say, right, well, that's the region we need to be ordering from, interesting. Then, as you scroll down as well, I would be like looking at the images as well, to see, like, do I find something similar to what I was looking for, like when we search by products like your first look somebody is specializing in that one crazy basket, one that we looked up earlier, that's crazy.
Kian:
But you know what's wild, though, right, I'm not surprised we found it because we had searched, like the highest level certification, so like that product would have required, like you know, some sort of standard. So it like the purpose of this filtering process is to align you with top factories, and top factories make top products right. And as you scroll down as well, I saw the main image. That was the one we were looking for the white one here, yeah, yeah, right here, that particular one, right. So now if you click on like view profile, we can just there's a couple of like boxes I need to tick of the supplier before deciding is this someone I want to work with? Right? So you see first on the left right Well, actually on the right where you were looking right, If you scroll through those like, you'll see videos of the factory. You'll see like images of the production line and you've seen the top left it says verified. So all these photos and videos have been verified. So like if you know that as the actual factory, because the third party has gone in and verified that's a factory, so you can actually see inside the factory and know that's them right. So we know exactly who we're dealing with.
Bradley Sutton:
They didn't just pull this, you know, like video or something like from stock video or something like that.
Kian:
Yeah exactly Right. So now, like before, without even going to China, I've got eyes and ears inside the factory that I can see what they actually look like. So if on their Alibaba listing they say, oh, we've got 200 workers in our factory, you're like, well, I can see the images that shows you've got 200 workers, right. Or if they said they had 200, but we see a production line with five workers and you're not verified, then we know that you know something isn't right there. So on the left side of that, you see where you have all those blue ticks. So it says, yes, all verified capabilities. So if you click on the bottom where it says, see all verified capabilities, this is everything the factory is verified for. So it says certifications, sedex, bsci. It will say, like you know, material trace. It says like quality traceability, things like that. So if you were like look, I need to know. Like, do these egg dispenser trays come from a sustainable source? We want to use like recycled materials, we want to use eco-friendly materials, then they can tell you yep, cool, we have traceability of our raw materials. We can find that out for you. So just by clicking that, we can find out what are the capabilities which are verified of this factory. And then, as we scroll down, like the main things which are really really important, see that where it says profile right, if you keep scrolling down, right, it's got right. See here so it says established yeah, years in industry 16. That means that they've got like 16 years worth of experience, right, so they've got the. See the audit there under certifications, where it says SMETA. That's part of the SEDEX audit and I know this so well because I was a board member for SEDEX in 2013,. After we did the production for the Olympics, every factory which made Olympic merchandise had to have a SMETA audit, right, and that was like they checked all the smallest details of the factory, right. So that's a really really good sign if they have that right. And then they've got the BSCI certificate. You can see that Now, as you scroll down, we're going to look at their production capabilities.
Kian:
See there it says production lines. They've got three production lines and they've got 18 production machines right Now. This is so important. This is so, so important, right, Because you are, let's say, doing this product for the first time. So they have three production lines means they're like relatively small company, right, so that's good for you because that means that they'll probably do a low MOQ. Let's say you wanted to do 500 pieces trial order, but let's say that production line. Let's say it said they had 250 production lines. You're like this company would never want to work for me. Like, why would like? I just want to do a small order, 300 pieces. They've got 250 production lines. We're not a good fit for each other. But on the flip side, if you're a big brand, if you're doing, you know, 10,000 units a month, then you want that factory which has got 250 production lines. So this kind of sizes you up to be like am I aligning with the manufacturer which is fit for purpose, right?
Kian:
And then the other really important thing to look at where it says trade background and main markets, it says North America 38%. Western Europe 35%. That is so crucial because 70% of their, more than 70% of their exports are going to the US market and it's going to the European market. And what does that mean? That means they're compliant with the latest FDA regulations in America, compliant with the latest like food standard regulations in Europe. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to sell to those markets if they weren't compliant with those standards. So if you're ordering this product for the first time and you know your factory has already got the certification or compliance needed to sell food products in the US market, because they're already selling in the US market. But if we looked at the trade background and it said, you know, 40% South America, 40% Africa and 20% domestic market, meaning China you're like well, you've never explored this product to America. So how do I know that you're capable of passing for FDA standards? So, but this factory, this is like one of the first ones we clicked on right, it's got everything we need right.
Kian:
But it was because of that filtering process. It's because we selected verified, we selected trade assurance, we selected ISO, we selected BSCI, so like it was in touch with the top manufacturer and then, like I'm pretty sure that if you go to the other manufacturers on that list as well, we'll find similar information that is a good fit for us. So that was kind of like the initial research to be like right, let's find a good factory. That's part one, right. Part two is now how do you read, how do you talk to that factory for your first message? Right, Because this is where I feel like a lot of sellers like stumble. They're like right, found a good factory. We followed your process. But, like, right now, what do we say? Like, most sellers go, hey, what's your best price? What's your MLQ? Can? I just heard this podcast? Can I get customized packaging Right? And then, yeah, so, supplier, bear in mind these suppliers are probably getting 50 to 100 inquiries a week, probably more, right, and my purpose with the original message is how do I get my inquiry to jump out at the top? How do I get the supplier reads my message and be like oh, I want to work with this guy, right? So I kind of write my opening message as like a three part.
Kian:
Like it first, introduction about myself hey, this is me. I'm passionate about eggs. I've been farming for 10 years and I want to start my own brand. Right, oh, cool, someone who really, really likes eggs. Right, they'll be a good person for this product. And then you can say, hey, we work with the biggest like influencers in the food space. Because I'm a beginner, right, I'm selling this, I'm ordering this product for the first time. So I don't want to say, hey, I'm a beginner. I want to say like, hey, I'm just ordering this, but here's my leverage. Like, I've got connections with the biggest influencers in the home and kitchen space. I've got connections with retailers that I've done business with before. I'm very, very skilled at selling on Amazon. I've exited a previous business before. I want to say something that gets them excited for them to work with me, not just, hey, what's your price, right?
Kian:
Second, I want to say why I chose that supplier, because all the things we just looked at, like a number of production lines you know 70% exports going to Europe, right, you having this meta audit. So I would say, look, quality standards are very, very important for our company. It's great to see you have this meta audit. I'm so, so happy that you also place a high importance on quality standards. I see that 38% of your exports go to North America. That's amazing because we'll be selling in America as well, and I'm glad to know you're compliant with the latest certifications. That's just me telling the supplier. I've actually read your company profile and I've selected you based on these reasons. I've not just gone into Alibaba, I've not just typed in egg dispenser and just selected the first 10 companies and copy and pasted the same message. I've actually had to read your company listing and I've actually had to write a customized message to send you this so they'll understand that. And then then you're like okay, this is a product that we're looking at. Here's the picture, here's the specification sheet, this is the materials. What would be your best price for this product?
Kian:
Suppliers now thinking I want to work with this customer because they have the ability to sell the product through their experience, through the influencers they have access to. They seem to understand quite a bit about manufacturing because they've told us what they've selected us. This is a customer which I think will go far because previously we've received messages asking for price in MLQ. We supply that and we never hear from those guys again. But this one seems serious. So we've gone through that process and we've found who are the top suppliers and then we've actually crafted a message that makes them want to reply to us. Because suppliers not thinking these are just egg-tracing, these are 80 cent. Maybe you order like a thousand pieces, right, a thousand dollar order. Suppliers not thinking they're going to get rich on this first order. They're thinking how much money am I going to make with this customer over the next three, five, ten years? So as long as you state look, business, partnership long term and this, together we want to grow this big business. You're saying the right things that get them interested to make your trial order first. Even at a break-even, they probably won't make money on the first order because of all the time and effort they have to put into sampling and things like that. They know that and they just want to work for you because you seem like a serious customer which you'll build with over the long term. So those are two really important things finding the best supplier and then communicating correctly with those suppliers as well.
Bradley Sutton:
At what point are you submitting like a RFQ request for a quote?
Kian:
So that's a really good point, right? So you can also do a request for a quotation. And I'm hesitating before I say this, right, because that process we just went through. We selected two of our best suppliers that we want to work with, right, we filtered out the bad ones. But when we go RFQ, we just submit our information one time and then the suppliers receive that request for a quotation and then they write to us. So now I have to do that filtering process again, but I have to filter the ones that write to us, right? So, because you might get an unverified supplier that writes to you or things like that. So you can also do RFQ because you think it saves you time, but realistically you have to go through all those applications of people which write back to you. And another thing I'd be cautious of as well and I'm not saying don't do it, I would just say that it might imply more work. It looks like it's going to save you time, but now you have to filter through every single manufacturer. But we just filtered through those suppliers really, really quickly.
Kian:
But ultimately the main selection criteria that we have to decide is what's the price of the sample and what's the quality of the sample. So once we get that information back, we have to then decide right. Am I happy with the price, does it fit within my target? And am I happy with the quality of sample? Because, as we saw, we might get a price for 80 cent and we might get a price for $3. I have to see the sample right. But by doing this exercise we're going to get a good idea of what is the market price for this product, because we went through that selection process to identify the top manufacturers and now we've got pricing from who we think are the five top manufacturers. So if our pricing is 95 cent, $1.05, 88 cent, like 112, we're like okay, we know it's around that $1 mark. But if I get pricing of like $3.50, $0.62, $4, I'm like this pricing is all over the place.
Kian:
Like I haven't. It's my fault I've not told them the specifications of which I require. I wouldn't just click on their image and say what's the price of that. I would send them a specification sheet of here's a picture of the product, here's the dimensions, here's the material, here's any testing that I need. And they like give me your best price. So they've all received the same information. So you're comparing apples with apples and then, once you see the price that you're happy with, you've compared it to the rest of the market. You see someone that you like communicating with. They have the right certification. You get maybe two or three samples from different suppliers. You compare them right. This is the one. Then here we go, let's place the order, let's go for it.
Bradley Sutton:
Normally? What's the standard as these days as far as factories and samples Like do you always need to pay for the sample 50% of the time? Do you need to pay for the shipping? 50% of the time? 25% of the time? What's your?
Kian:
experience lately? Yeah, so great question. And I would say that it depends on the leverage that you build, right. So, for example, that reach out message like if they think you're sort of wasting time, then they're like right, $100 for a sample, $100 for a freight, paid us $200 invoice and you'll get a sample, right. But if they're like I want to work for this guy, like I think he's capable of building a really, really big business and they'll do all right, cool, we'll just send a sample to you, no problem. Some people might say, right, we'll cover the cost of the sample, you just covered the cost of the freight. So, cool, right, fair. I always say, look, I've got no problem, I'll pay for the sample, but if I place the order, I'm going to deduct the sample cost from the first purchase order. That's always what I go with, right. And they're like fine, because I'm not trying to get free samples, right, that's something suppliers are fearful of. They're like but no one really wants a free sample of an egg tray, right. But if we took an example like a massage gun, you know, when massage guns got popular, everyone wrote to Alibaba manufacturers and said, hey, I want to order 10,000 massage guns, but I need a sample. They send the sample and then they never hear from them again. But that guy just got a free massage gun, right. So that's what they want to avoid. So I always offer to pay.
Kian:
I say, look, I'll pay for the sample, but I'm going to deduct the sample and freight costs from the first purchase order. And that is music to their ears. They're happy to hear that because they know that first of all, you're paying for the sample up front and then if the supplier ends up having to pay for it, will they go and order as a result of it, which is what they wanted all along, right. So that's normally the way I go. Sometimes they just send it for free. I'm like cool, very nice of you, and sometimes, if they charge me, I just always have that in writing. That will deduct that from the first purchase order.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you doing any like other website price matching or looking at like you know? Like maybe going to 1688 or something you know? That was a you know kind of like always suggested back in the day because there's a lot of price differences there and sometimes the Alibaba people, Alibaba factories, would be like, okay, yeah, we can probably go lower or that's not as much of a technique anymore and to be honest, I've always advised against that because, yes, you can.
Kian:
So 1688, for anyone who doesn't know, is like the domestic. It also owned by Alibaba and it's the domestic Chinese website. It's where, like, Chinese businesses buy from Chinese factories, everything's in Chinese. And then I think some people announced that it was a hack, that you could go to 1688 and get cheaper prices. And yes, there are cheaper prices, but that's because those products aren't being exported. So you know the things that we just looked at in terms of like, okay, is this egg tray FDA approved? Well, it doesn't need to be FDA approved because that's not a regulation in China, so they can use it with a different chemical. Therefore, it's a cheaper price. So if you go to 1688 and look for your products, yeah, you probably will find them cheaper, but then if you need them to match regulations of your market, then that's when it's going to make it more expensive.
Kian:
So I don't necessarily look at other websites, like I think you know you could go to globalsources.com, you can go to madeinchina.com. There's also sort of different websites as well, but generally enough, like, there's so many good factories on alibabacom and that definitely improved after COVID as well, because I never used to use alibabacom, like I was just used to go to China. I used to live in China. I used to go to the Canton Fair twice a year and that's where I'd find all my factories. And then, because Canton Fair was out for three years, that's when a lot of those factories started going online and Alibaba was like the first place that they would go. So I would suggest you're absolutely fine with alibaba.com. You can also, if you want to find the manufacturers of your competitors, you can look at importyeti.com, and I would say the best thing you can do for your business is really visit China as well. Go to the Canton Fair, and really because, yes, there's a cost in terms of a flight ticket in hotels to go to China, but I always say that cost more than pace for itself, because you are essentially fast tracking your product development.
Kian:
You're seeing products there for the first time that you'll see them in real life before you see them online from other brands, and now you have to make your own version. You'll be able to negotiate better prices. You'll be able to get better quality products. You'll be able to build better relationships with your factory. You'll be able to get samples very quickly If you're like Bradley actually. So you're going to the factory. I guarantee you, if you ask for a new product and you wanted that sample, that sample will be ready in two or three days and you can take it home with you right? They'll send it to your hotel by the time you leave. But if you reach out to these guys online, you're like, hey, we're working on this new product, we're going to take them two weeks to make it. We can have to send it. It'll take a month. So you can massively and imagine you've got multiple products across multiple brands. You've got a month edge on anyone in the market just by being there. So I would highly recommend. But you know, canton Faire is only April and October every year, so you can visit China anytime you want, but all year round. I would be visiting websites like alibabacom to get an idea of right, who are the best suppliers and what are the best prices, and are there any new products that we just found as well? And then I'd be going to China as well, on top of that as well.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, before we get into your last strategy of the day, how can people reach you if they want to, you know, see your videos or maybe reach out to you for some advice?
Kian:
Yeah, sure, so I'm putting a lot of work into the YouTube stuff. So if you just type in Sourcing with Kian on YouTube, you'll see a lot of cool videos there. I started making a bunch of different videos on this China trip. I went into factories, I went into packaging factories, product factories and filmed videos of like. So actually, brad, I'll try and send one to you before you go as well, just so you could get a little bit of an insight. But, yeah, Instagram as well @kian_jg. I've got a Facebook group of the same name Sourcing with Kian and yeah, it's probably the best way to reach out to me. But I've got some cool stuff planned in the coming year in regards to, like, trips to China and stuff. So, yeah, definitely look out for that.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, what's your last strategy of the day? Maybe a 60 second strategy or around there for that you can share with the audience.
Kian:
I would say like, okay, 2024. Something you want to focus on would be product defensibility, right, Because you know, as you mentioned, with the shelf, like you know, a lot of people copied it. It raised at the bottom in terms of price and we have to innovate on top. So just like sort of three actionable tips. In terms of product defensibility, there's three main things you can focus on An act's getting exclusivity on your product, it's having a particular mold on your product and it's also getting patents on your product right. So exclusivity you can like if we go into a factory and we see a product that we like we didn't innovate it, factory did right, I can still order that product. But I can say, look, I want exclusivity on that. And you can get exclusivity by time. To be like, give me three months, we sell it to me and no one else. You can get exclusivity by region. To say, right, give me exclusivity for Germany or give me exclusivity for USA. Like we can pick a market, not just the whole world, and get exclusivity by that. Or we can also get exclusivity by quantity. To say, I've forecast I will order 10,000 units over the course of the year. If I don't order those 10,000 units, then you can sell it to everyone. So we just got exclusivity on a new product and I did this countless times at Alaska Anton Fair. That's a great form of defensibility.
Kian:
Then, like patents, you know you can patent the product. Supplier might have a patent on the product, but the more. And then oh, by the way, this is such a sick hack, right, there was a particular product that we've been selling for a while. Factory has got the patent on it and then a lot of US brands were copying and infringing Chinese factory, trying to go after those US brands. They write to them and they're like hey, yeah, we're this company, we have the patent. The US brands just ignored it. They're like oh, it's a Chinese company, they're never going to sue us. I said to them look, make our company the co-patent, so we have our US brand. I was like make us the co-patent owner and then we'll go after them. Done Like, we now own the patent of that and then us, as a US brand, using US lawyers, are going after those US brands and are getting shut down left, right and center. So if you have a factory which is patented the product, that's a huge key if you can get co-patent on that as well. And then I mentioned molds as well. Like, molds are expensive. If you're developing a mold on a product, definitely get your logos embossed on the mold as well, so that they can't use that for anyone else as well. So, yeah, those are the key things defensibility, exclusivity, patents and molds.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Well, Kian, thank you so much for joining us. I'm sure 2024 will be great for you and hopefully we get to hang out at an event or here locally. I've got to get you on my Helium 10 basketball court here. We've been trying to do that for a while, so, hey, I'm ready, we'll anytime we'll settle at once and for all Lakers versus Clippers. I'll wear my Clippers jersey, you can wear your Lakers and we'll see. We'll see who comes out on top.
Kian:
Let's do it, let's do it. Good to see you, bro, and thanks very much for having me and congrats on the 500 plus episodes.
What’s buzzing this week? Listen in as we explore TikTok's bold aspirations to skyrocket its e-commerce revenue, Amazon's innovative theme targeting for sponsored brand ads, and more!
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We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. TikTok eyes US$17.5 billion shopping business on Amazon’s turf https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3247219/tiktok-eyes-us175-billion-shopping-business-amazons-turf Sponsored Brands introduces theme targeting to enhance goal-based campaigns https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-brands-introduces-theme-targeting/ Alexa is now available as a new supply source for Standard display and AAP-mobile app https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/alexa-available-as-new-supply-source-for-standard-display-and-aap-mobile-app/ Sponsored Brands video introduces video-only creatives on the advertising console and Amazon Ads API https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/sponsored-brands-video-introduces-video-only-creatives/ And for those looking to network and learn, Bradley extends an invitation to join upcoming events in Dubai, Pakistan, and Germany.
Finally, our conversation leads us to Helium 10 new feature alerts emphasizing the importance of competitor monitoring, emphasizing the convenience and impact of setting up a comprehensive Insights Dashboard. Bradley guides you through automating competitor tracking to save precious time and demonstrates how to assess a niche market - with coffin shelves as our case study - using analytical tools to scrutinize competitor listings and keyword strategies. Additionally, he stresses the advantages of the Listing Analyzer tool, which transforms the arduous task of comparing listing images into a seamless, one-click operation. Stay tuned for next week's episode, where we'll continue to share invaluable insights for sellers looking to thrive in the fast-paced world of e-commerce.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 00:57 - TikTok Shop 10X?
- 03:00 - Amazon Sponsored Brand Update
- 04:57 - Alexa Ads
- 06:18 - Brand Tailored Promotions
- 07:23 - New Video Ads
- 09:05 - Catch Bradley On The Following Events
- 12:18 - New Feature Alerts
- 17:00 - Pro Training: Using Listing Analyzer
Listen in as Bradley Sutton unveils the game-changing Black Box Brand Analytics tool, a groundbreaking resource that blends Amazon’s Brand Analytics with Helium 10's robust capabilities. This episode is a gold mine for Amazon sellers eager to master product research and optimize their keywords to increase Amazon product rankings. Bradley walks you through the ins and outs of using the tool to pinpoint high-traffic keywords, unpack the nuances of search frequency rank, and demonstrate how these insights can drastically improve your click and conversion rates. Using practical examples, such as the comparison between "coffin decor" and "coffin cat tree," he highlights the market saturation and what it means for your marketing strategies and listing optimization.
In the second part of our session, we turn our attention to the strategic application of data filters for laser-focused keyword research. Bradley guides you through advanced techniques to navigate through the data, revealing how to eliminate certain terms and hone in on keywords with substantial search volumes. Moreover, we shed light on how to identify products with low conversion rates and dissect the competition by examining click share and conversion share metrics. We also dive into analyzing Amazon's Best Sellers Rank to identify high-performing products and dissect the success factors driving traffic to top listings. By listening to this episode, you'll gain valuable insights into market gaps and learn how to strategically position your products to stand out in the crowded Amazon marketplace.
In episode 523 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:
- 00:00 - Introducing Black Box and Brand Analytics inside Helium 10
- 05:03 - Click Rates and Sales Dominance Analysis
- 08:44 - Data Filters for Targeted Keyword Research
- 12:34 - Searching for Dominating ASINs and Keywords
- 21:41 - Analyzing Top Clicked Keywords for Competitors
- 25:16 - Newer Home and Kitchen Products
- 30:19 - Keyword Analysis for New Product Launch
- 35:08 - Helium 10 Demo
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today I'm introducing a brand new, really cool tool to Helium 10. It's called Blackbox Brand Analytics and it allows you to combine Amazon data from Brand Analytics with Helium 10 data in ways that you have never used before. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. I want to know what keywords are driving the most sales. For a list of keywords. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10's keyword research tool, cerebro. Now, that's just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it's the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. Don't forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast discount coupon SSP10.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our monthly Ask Me Anything and training session. This is actually something that we do every single week for our Serious Sellers Club and Helium 10 Elite members. I got a cool demo I'm going to be doing today a little mini training on a brand new tool that Helium 10 launched a couple of weeks ago that maybe you haven't had a chance to play with yet. So we're going to be demoing that so that you guys can see how you can get benefit from it. So let me show my screen here. This is brand analytics. All right, so this is not Helium 10. Obviously, this is from Seller Central, but this is something that you guys have been using maybe for years, right, it's? Anybody with brand registry can use it. The way you access it is go to your menu in Seller Central, then you go to Brands and then you go to Brand Analytics and then you want to hit, under Search Analytics, the top search terms.
Bradley Sutton:
Now how I've been using this, how sellers have been using this the one, the version that's on Amazon, is you can go to a date range, like weekly, you can go monthly, you can go quarterly, and then let's say, first of all, that you want to see all of the keywords that start with the word coffin. Right, like hey, what keywords have coffin in it that was searched for the most? So here is one use case. All right, so I'm going to hit Refine Results after I put coffin inside the search term and then now all of the keywords that were searched the most on Amazon show up here for this week. Let's start with the word coffin. So we see, here we've got coffin nails tips, a lot of stuff that has to do with nails. Right, search frequency rank is how often it has been searched compared to other keywords. There we go. There's coffin shelf all right, c coffin shelf has been searched for is the 129,000th most search term on Amazon for the week of 1217 to 1214,. All right, you can see other other keywords here that have come up Now. This is great. Obviously, you know it's been out for a little over three years almost four years I think and it gave unprecedented at the time information you know, like, for example, let's take that word coffin shelf. Or let's go into a different one, let's go to coffin decor all right. So now if I see here under coffin decor, I can see the top three clicked. All right. So again, if you guys know this, you know you might be bored right now, don't worry, we're going to get into the new stuff soon, but I want to make sure everybody understands the value of this data.
Bradley Sutton:
First of all, what Amazon is telling you is, for whatever keyword, here are the top three clicked out of the after the search of a certain keyword. So if somebody searched coffin decor, the product that was clicked more than any other product in all of Amazon after the search of that keyword is this Gothic wooden makeup organizer. All right, and it makes up 5% of the clicks. Now, of the conversion share, it was 6%. That means of the actual sales of that product it makes up 6%. So, right off the bat, I know that they have a better conversion rate than just the average because, theoretically speaking, if they were converting at the same rate as everybody else on this page, well, their click share, or their conversion share, should be about the same as their click share should be 5%. Right, but it's 6%, okay.
Bradley Sutton:
The other thing I can do when I look at this and how I used to use this is I, right off the bat, can tell this is a wide open keyword. Why the top clicked product is only 5%, meaning that the other top clicked, the top three clicked, are less than 5%. What does that mean? That means that more than 85% of all of the sales from this keyword are from products that weren't even the top three clicked. Does that make sense, guys? That means it's wide open. That means people are probably purchasing like 30 different products on that page, and let me just contrast that with this keyword right here. This is actually the keyword that I found the other day using this tool. Look at this keyword here Coffin Cat Tree. Now, coffin Cat Tree. Take a look at the percentage of clicks that the top clicked product has 33%. You guys remember what the other one was 5%, right. The second top clicked product 27%. So, right off the bat, I know that this keyword, coffin Cat Tree the top two clicked products, already make up more than 50% of the clicks out of all the clicks on this keyword. Look at the conversion rate 33% for this top clicked one and 11%. That means that the other products on the page are only making up about 60%. You guys remember what it was on the other one it was more than 90%, all right, so you see the huge difference. So this is being dominated by a certain number of products.
Bradley Sutton:
The other thing that you could use brand analytics for is your historical data. Before Helium 10 had the historical cerebro, this was the only way that you could do historical research Like let's say, all right, hey, valentine's Day is coming up, right. What's interesting is I can actually look at what were the top keywords, and maybe I want to put valentines here. So here in brand analytics, I'm going to. What did I say I was going to look at 12th to February 18th. What were the top keywords? That has to do with valentines, all right. And yeah, I think I picked the right date because, look at these, valentine's Day gifts was the eighth most searched term in all of Amazon for the week of February 12th. So obviously this was a hot keyword. But if I were to try and do this right now, you know, if I was using not historical cerebro, it's not going to give me what are the best selling Valentine's products, because nobody's buying Valentine's Gifts in December, right. So this is was one of the ways that people could do Historical keyword research and see what were the products that were doing well, right, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
Now that brings us to this announcement of this new tool inside of helium 10,. All right, I want everybody to navigate with me there. It's going to be under tools and then go to black box. All right, black box is a tool you guys know and love to find products, and now this tool Is in black box, and there is a new Tool here called a BA top search terms so I call this black box brand analytics. All right, a BA is just a abbreviation, because that's too long. A BA stands for Amazon brand analytics, so just click that and let me explain how this tool works and why this is going to be beneficial for you.
Bradley Sutton:
This is going to be pretty awesome, guys, because this is pulling in all of that data from Amazon, and now it's combining it with the helium 10 data points that you already know and love, and it's giving you just a lot more targeted filtering ability and research capabilities. For example, I could just use it the same way that I was using it right now. Right, like again, hey, let me go in to the week of February 12th to the 18th and let me See what keywords that have the word Valentine in it, and then go ahead and apply the filters, and there those same keywords are coming up here right now. All of a sudden, though, I can see that, hey, what does being the eighth most search term mean? Right, it's not just that, which doesn't give me that much information, but now I can see, oh wow, the search volume was 2 million, because that's a Helium 10 Data point.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, I could see the top three ASINs, total conversions, share. I could see pictures of the top products All right, and I could also go to the history of the click share for this product. So I can do already just what current things that you can already do in Brandon Alex. But here's where it starts getting cool. Maybe I I'm like, hey, I want to Not see any keyword that has candy in it. So I'm gonna say exclude phrases containing candy, all right. Now I want to see. Maybe I want to see were there any products or Were there any keywords where the current the click share was wide open, meaning that people were clicking all over page one. There wasn't any dominant products. So I'm gonna say the top three ASIN total click share is a maximum of if I were to add them up together, a maximum of 20%. Let's just say, all right, maybe I want to see I don't want to see this two word Keywords. I want to say, hey, show me any keyword that hits this but that actually had three words. So like Valentine's Day wouldn't come up, but Valentine's Day gifts would come up, all right, what else can I do? Hey, I want to see the keywords that have a search volume of at least 20,000. All right, a search volume of at least 20,000? All right, let's just. Let's just see how that filters it down here.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, all of a sudden, those 2,600 keywords Go down to 36. Look at that. I went from 2,600 to 36 and now I can see Instant information, exactly what I was looking for. What are some other things I could search by? Like maybe I want to say, hey, what are all the the keywords where the top three products had bad conversion rate? All right, so let me reset these filters on and I'm gonna go and look at Just this last week. All right, guys, I have not tested any of this, I'm doing this all live right on the fly here. But let's look at December 10th through the 16th. Let's just say, out of any of the top keywords from December 10th to the 16th, if it was a keyword that had, let's just say, at least, let's just, let's just narrow it down. Let's try and find some low-hanging fruit. Let's go 2000 search volume to 6,000 search volume. All right, we're finding, from the week of the 10th through the 16th, a Keyword that had between 2000 and 6000 search volume. It's at least two words long, okay.
Bradley Sutton:
And then look at this. I'm gonna go hey, I want a Matt. Let's just say One asin had greater than, hmm, let's just say, 50% of the clicks. So I want to find a keyword where one asin is just dominating. All right, they were just dominate. I'm not sure if, you know, I can actually find something here. I might have to fix this a little bit, but we're one what had more than 50% of the clicks, meaning that you know, maybe they're, they're, they're just completely Dominating the clicks. Everybody's looking for this one product, all right. But if I take, look at this, the top three click asins, the average age is less than, let's just say, 12 months. All right, this is crazy, guys. You can't do this in seller central. Let me see, first of all, if anything comes up. I might have gone too narrow on this. Let's take a look here. And let's go 12 months average age 94 keywords come up. Look at that. All right, let me. Let me make it even more narrow conversion share let's just say we're one asin. Number of asin has greater than 40% of the conversions. That narrows it down to 62 keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Now let's just take a look at it now. Obviously, we've got Lego and stuff like that here, but Is there anything One? So a lot of brand names here? Okay, that that that explains it, right? Which would you expect Products to dominate on a certain keyword like this? Well, obviously, it's going to be brand branded keywords. Mostly, if I'm searching for a Lego, I'm not gonna buy something else, right? Or here here. But look at this bubble face wash, right? Maybe I don't know what bubble face wash is. Well, I just put my mouse over here. I can see the top 10 products. So I'm like what? Why in the world is A Product getting dominated? Well, it does look like bubble is a brand name, which I didn't realize, right? But let's say that. What? Let's pretend that bubble wasn't a brand name? This would be something I would want to look into. Like, wow, there's only one product that's really getting a lot of sales here and a lot of conversion rate, and so that means that if I add another product, it's gonna be that much more likely that I can, I can get in on the action.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's take a look at some of the other keywords that come up here to see if we can see any non, any non branded branded ones I might want. I might want to go a little bit. I'm gonna go a little bit wider on this. All right, let's go. One asin had more than 30% and the top three ASIN's total review count is less than 400. All right, again, this is stuff that you cannot do in Seller Essential guys. But what I'm saying is, hey, I wanna see where it has a lot of the clicks. I need to go a little bit wider on this, but if I add up the top three click products, their total review count is less than 400, meaning it's a relatively newer niche. Let's take a look at the keywords that come up here Bassinet, lipliner, and I'm still seeing a lot of branded keywords here. All right, which is what you would expect, but look at these conversion share Top three ASIN's total conversion share 70% for this one Top ASIN click share 73%, 98%, 46%, 30%. So this is just an example of the filters that I'm entering, but you can see the potential here of how you can instantly find keywords that might have opportunity here. I was going and I was looking on the opposite end of the spectrum, where I wanna see where one or two products are dominating. Maybe I wanna see the opposite, where I want to see the top products only have a maximum of 5% click share or conversion share.
Bradley Sutton:
The list goes on and on. There's literally a million different combinations of filters that you could enter into here. Let's just go over some of these other filters I could use. I could have an exclude phrases. I can have the top three ASINs have a total click share with a minimum and maximum total conversion share, minimum and maximum search frequency rank. That's from Amazon where it's like which rank of search volume does it have? I could use the helium 10 search volume. I can have the search frequency rank trend. All right, search volume trend. Like, let's say it's, I'm looking at the week list on helium 10. Let's actually do that because I think that's a cool one. Maybe I want to see what are the keywords from week to week from December 10th through December 16th. Are there any keywords with at least 5,000 searches that increased 200% and that had at least three words, meaning that, hey, these keywords had to have like less than 2,000 search volume if it increased? And there's tons of them. Good grief, botox face serum look at that. Botox face serum went up. Let's take a look at the search volume here. Good grief, look at this. Like I'm not saying guys, go and source this product. But would I ever have known that Botox face serum went in one week from 10,000 search volume to 200,000 search volume? That's way more than 200% increase.
Bradley Sutton:
Look at this one gag gifts adults, dog beds for large dogs Dog beds for large dogs obviously was a hot Christmas product because it went to 151,000 search volume from 22,000 search volume. All right, let's narrow this down. I don't want to see these humongous ones. Let's go to 5,000 to 15,000 search volume. Anything that increased 200%. Let's take a look. We've got 1,200 keywords. Grippy socks, women all right, grippy socks, women is a keyword that went from and we can take a look here. It went from last month 9,000, now it's up to 14,000 searches. Let's see another one here, mr and Mrs Gifts. All right, 14,000 searches. It is up from 6,000 searches, all right. So, as you can see, guys, here the possibilities are endless as far as what you want to play with. Now, the question is this is just version one of this tool is what do you want to see? How do you want to search brand analytics to find products or to find keywords? Remember, this is not just a product research, but this is also a keyword research. You can enter I didn't show this to you, but you can enter in an ASIN. I probably should show that, because that's an important way of using the tool that we didn't go at all.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's just go to Amazon. I'm gonna go to Amazon and let's just say that I am looking for a bat shelf. All right, or I'm thinking of selling in the bat shelf, or I am selling a bat shelf and so I wanna see, hey, who's one of the top players in this niche and I could see that, hey, this product here is definitely a top one, so I can copy his ASIN, all right. Now I'm gonna go into Black Box brand analytics and I can paste that here. Okay, and I don't wanna just do this top one, maybe, I wanna do a lot of the top products. So let's just take a couple more of these bat shelves here, all right. Here's another bat shelf that sold like 100 units. Maybe let's go ahead and copy that. I can actually put up to 99 different ASINs here, all right, let's do another one. Let's copy this ASIN, all right. So here's three ASINs. So basically, what I'm saying is here for the week of December 10th through the December 16th.
Bradley Sutton:
Show me any keyword that has over 500 search volume where one of these three bat shelves was one of the top three clicked. All right, so this isn't just hey, they were ranking high, which is what's the rebro, and you know keyword tracker and tools like that tell you. But they were ranking high, but they were also one of the top three clicked and there's actually only three keywords that these came up that had at least 500 search volume. Bat shelf, goth shelf and bath home decor Tells me right now. Maybe I wanna go ahead and take off this search volume. Let's go ahead and apply the filters, see if any lower search volume ones come up. Six keywords come up. All right, emo home decor, bat shelves. Plural, bat room decor. All right, so this tells me now where any of my competitors were one of the top three clicked products in all of Amazon for that keyword. So if I have 20 competitors, I drop them all in there and I would instantly I would instantly see that to see where they were one of the top. All right, let's go ahead and open it up right now.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you guys have any questions on how to use this tool and what I can help you with or how to use anything helium-tun related. Guys, this is your time here. David says I would like to see leave out a specific ASIN or choose a competitor. Hmm, the second part, to choose a competitor we have that, so you could put in there your ASIN. I would assume, david, the exclude is because you may. Are you saying that you maybe you want to look specifically at keywords, that you are not one of the top three clicked already? And if that's true, yeah, that would seem like a reasonable, reasonable request right there.
Bradley Sutton:
We got another question here from Joanna. Can helium 10 find out what's new sellers who are settling the top 10 and best sellers ranking are doing in order to get their Product the top 10 so fast? Well, yeah, absolutely, you could see on the keyword side, all right, so so I don't, I've never done that, but let's walk through this and let's see if we can do it. All right, let's go ahead, joanna, and let's do this as a nice little case study. So let's, first of all, I'll go to see who is in the top 10 BSR in a certain category and then again that's in black box. So I'm gonna go this time to black box products, all right, and let's go into a, a subcategory All right, let's go in the home and kitchen category and let's go into the Kitchen and dining category and let's go bakeware All right.
Bradley Sutton:
So let's go bakeware and let's just see who has been in the top 100, like in the last month in BSR. And I can do that right here using the filters, where I put a minimum one of BSR and Maximum 100, and I'm in the bakeware category, I go ahead and hit search. Let's go a little bit higher. Instead of looking at that category, let's look at what was I in home and kitchen. We can just look in all of home and kitchen. Let's see. They better not be doing maintenance on this. Let me get mad. Nope, the here we got, we got tons of products in the home and kitchen category, all right. So maybe I want to know are there any products that are newer here? All right, and we do that by age, all right. So let's, let's go and put here under age a maximum Of, let's just say, four months. Are there anybody within one to 100 of BSR that have a product that's only four months or less? And we've got a lot of products here that have variations. So that's why there's tons of products coming up here, let's see, that has a lot less reviews. I actually don't want. I actually don't want the variations to come up. So let's just say max variation one, let's see if anything comes up at all. Nothing comes up in the home and kitchen category. So what you were asking nobody in the home and kitchen is less than four months old. That doesn't have variation.
Bradley Sutton:
So let's let's check out another, let's check out another category here. Let's go under. Let's look up baby, let's look up beauty, let's look up the Entity of home and kitchen. Here we go. Is there anybody? That's a new product that's up. So right now, Joanna, there's not many products that are newer, that are really hitting your criteria. But let's just, let's just expand this out and just do a make-believe. Let's go to 1000 BSR or 2000 BSR and let's see if anything comes up. Here we go, sorry. So here is a product. Let's just take a look at one of these products strong ahead Hair kit. The heck is this.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's take a look at this product on Amazon Strong ahead hair kit. I have no idea what this product is, but it's fairly new. It's less than four months old and it's already got a strong BSR. So if I wanted to see instantly what was some of the keyword ways that this product is getting up here, I could actually just run Xray keywords on this page itself, all right. So if I'm on an Amazon page, I put my mouse over the Helium-10 chrome extension and Select x-ray keywords and then I could see, without even having to go into Cerebro, what were the top searches, and I can see there's tons of branded searches. So for this product, now I know instantly why is it one of the top BSRs and it's a brand new product, and the reason is they have crazy amounts of brand search. Like, look at this Olaplex brand search 232,000 search volume Right.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is the process, Joanna. Any product on Amazon that you are seeing is doing really well and it's brand new, maybe doesn't have that many reviews. Just run x-ray keywords on it. If you wanna go a little bit deeper, go into Cerebro and then you'll find out where they are at least getting their organic and sponsored traffic, all right. So this is this doesn't show you the sponsored traffic on x-ray keywords. You'd have to look into Cerebro for that, but that's not going to tell you. Are they running Instagram traffic to it, et cetera, but it'll at least give you a nice overview of where their organic traffic is coming from. That allows them to be one of the top sellers. So thank you for that question. Joanna Danian says how does this match up to competitor software using brand analytics data? Well, there's no competitors to Helium 10 that have this as far as, like all in one suites of tools, we're the only ones to have this in it.
Bradley Sutton:
Joanna now has a product, so this is the product that Joanna found. It's not selling that great. This is a top BSR, did you say. Let's take a look at their BSR, if it even says anything. So it is the number 33 in the Garment Steamer category right now. Okay, there we go number 33 in Garment Steamer category. Let's take a look here. What are we going? How old is this listing? Let's take a look at the BSR chart history and I could see that it has only been out for three days. All right, it's only been out for three days, so the odds that we could see words ranking for already is probably slim to none, because there's not enough time if this product has only been out for three days. But let's just give it a try. I don't think anything is going to come out here because this is too brand new Like even brand analytics is more than three days old. So brand analytics I'm not even going to look, because brand analytics is usually one week behind a little bit. So when I would check this, joanna is, I would check this next week, once the data comes out. But let's just see if Helium 10 has any data at all for this keyword, even though it was only launched three days ago. Oh, my goodness man, helium 10 is on it We've got.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's take a look at keywords where they're ranking in the top 20 and at least 300 search volume. Might not be too many here because, again, this product was just launched three days ago, but there we go, it's already ranking for 30 keywords in the top half of the page. So right here, look at this Travel steamer for clothes, portable mini. Good grief, that is a long tail keyword if I ever saw one. It already has 10,000 search volume and this product is organic rank 13. And look at their sponsored rank. They were one. So they are going hard and heavy on this brand new keyword and sponsored. So there you go.
Bradley Sutton:
I was kind of like selling Helium 10 short, saying that we wouldn't have any data since this product was just launched three days ago. Nope, I'm wrong. Helium 10, one Bradley, zero here. Easy to see where this product is getting sales from, because on a 10,000 search volume they're bidding for top of search and they're already ranking number 13. All right, so there you have it. That's where this product is getting a lot of its sales from that exact keyword, right there. Good question, joanna. I hope that was clear for you guys on how to do that for any product on Amazon. All right, you wanna know where their traffic is coming from, at least their organic search traffic. You just run Cerebra on it or look at it in the brand analytics, if it's been out there for longer than a week, and you're instantly gonna get an idea of the keywords that are driving sales for the product.
Bradley Sutton:
Jerov says I'm a new Amazon seller. I look for keywords to rank higher on Amazon, but I am still in 306 rank. So if you're 306, that means that you're not ranking at all, because Amazon only shows 306. I'm assuming that you're looking in Helium 10 keyword tracker and it shows greater than 306. That means that you're not ranked. Actually, how can you help me, because I've yet to make three sales. All right, the first step you need to do, jerov. If you're not ranking for keywords that you know are relevant to you, you need to make sure if you're indexed. Let me show you how you can do that. All right, so let's just take this product right here. This is the steamer that Joanna had found. I need to see if I'm indexed for certain keywords, all right, so let's go here to index checker. All right, what I'm gonna do is you're gonna take your ACI. I'm doing this for this travel steamer. You gotta put your ACI in here and I'm gonna put a keyword I know it's already ranking for, just to show you how this works. And so we already determined that this product is getting sales.
Bradley Sutton:
From what was that keyword? Here we go travel steamer for clothes, portable mini All right, so I'm gonna put that here. But what's a keyword that is probably not indexed for? I'm just gonna put a random keyword here sumo wrestling All right, but obviously you're not gonna put these nonsense keywords here. You would put the keywords that you think you should be ranking for, but you're not All right. So this is what you're gonna look for. You're gonna hit check keywords and then you are looking for the right column on index checker if there is a checkmark or not. Forget about all these other columns here. You just wanna see this cumulative and so I can see that travel steamer for clothes, portable mini.
Bradley Sutton:
For this product there's a checkmark. That means I am indexed. That means I am even if I'm not ranking. There's a potential for me to rank. But look at this keyword sumo wrestling. Maybe this was a product that I thought was super relevant to me, but you see here how there's a dash instead of a line. That means that I am not indexed. And what does that mean? That means I can't run PPC on this keyword. That means it's literally impossible for me to rank for that keyword. So the first thing you need to do, jerov, is make sure that on your keywords that you're trying to rank for that you even can. And if there's a dash there, the simplest reason could be you don't even have that keyword maybe in your listing. That means you're not indexed for it. If it does have a checkmark but you're not ranked, it's just. You know there's hundreds and hundreds of products that are indexed for certain keywords To be one of the top 306, it takes some doing. You probably gotta start running some sponsored ads to there. So, for any keyword that you are not ranking but that you are indexed for and you wanna get ranked, the path to doing that is running sponsored ads at the top of the search and hopefully people will see your product, click on it, buy it and that's what's going to move up your organic rank.
Bradley Sutton:
David says can you show us how Helium 10 works for Walmart sellers Interested in seeing its abilities for keyword ranking and finding arbitrage opportunities? All right. So, david, pretty much almost everything I've shown other than Blackbox. It works the same way for Walmart. So, for example, so let's look at walmartcom, all right, and let's go. I don't know, let's look up this product here Steamer iron for clothes. Let's do a search for that on Walmart. So let's just type in steamer iron for clothes. Okay, so this is not really for arbitrage, but this is more for ranking.
Bradley Sutton:
Like, hey, I wanna have, I'm gonna come out with you know some steamer, you know my own travel steamer and I wanna see the products that are selling a lot on Walmart in this niche. Where are they getting their sales from? All right, so let's just take, let's just go to this product right here. This is like the organic rank product. I'm gonna copy the item number, which I believe is this item number here at the very top of Walmart. Let's go into Cerebro and now I change this left hand marketplace chooser to the Walmart marketplace, all right, and let's type in that product ID. I'll know in a couple seconds if this is the right product ID or not.
Bradley Sutton:
And you just press get keywords and now this is going to find all of the keywords that this product is ranking for. And there it is. Look at that, let's find. Let's go search under the Walmart search volume anything over 1000 search volume, and now instantly I can see the top keywords where this product is one of the top 10 organic ranked. And now I know where this product is getting sales from. And these are the keywords I'm gonna have to put in my Walmart listing and I would also add this to keyword tracker for Walmart. If I'm already selling this product, I'm not ranking very high. I'm gonna put it in keyword tracker and track my organic and sponsored rank for these keywords Right off the bat too.
Bradley Sutton:
For this Hamilton Beach product, I can see that they are not running sponsored ads, so there's an advantage right there where I know, hey, Hamilton Beach is not running Walmart sponsored ads for this product, because Helium 10 doesn't show any sponsored ranks, so there's an instant advantage. I know that I can get as far as arbitrage goes. You just have to kind of like search for the products that have a high amount of sales, and we don't have as many sales estimates for Walmart products as we do for Amazon, because Walmart doesn't have what Amazon does, which is BSR, which allows us to make an algorithm, but we do have some sales estimates for Walmart products, and so that's another way that you could use the tool for Walmart selling. I'm about to actually start doing some arbitrage and some wholesale on Walmart myself. I was just talking to one of my team who I used to use a few years ago. We're gonna relaunch my Walmart business, so I'll have a lot more Walmart information for you guys soon.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you guys for joining us. If you're an Elite member or a Serious Sellers Club, we'll be back next not next Monday, but next Tuesday, I believe, because Monday's a holiday. If you are just watching this on YouTube or another platform, make sure to come back. At the end of January. We'll go ahead and have this available as well. But thank you guys for joining us, appreciate it. Make sure to use that tool and we'll see you later. Have a good one, bye, bye now. I'll see you guys next time.
Join us for a packed episode where we share the Serious Sellers Podcast’s cream of the crop e-commerce strategies this 2023, specifically curated for Amazon and Walmart sellers aiming to amp up their selling game. We kick things off by covering a slew of actionable tips, from the critical role of eye-catching main images to PPC campaign finesse and leveraging meta descriptions for Google indexing. Each insight is distilled to empower you, the serious seller, with tactics you can apply right away for real impact.
This episode doesn't stop there; we continue with the inside scoop on Walmart's Review Accelerator program and how it can significantly lift your Gross Merchandise Value by infusing your product listings with valuable customer feedback. We listen to the secret sauce behind crafting Amazon product titles that resonate with mobile users and discuss the art of bundling, showing you how to identify complementary items that could delight your customers and potentially lead to glowing reviews. The conversation shifts to strategic PPC advertising, underscoring the advantage of long-tail keywords to improve organic rankings without breaking the bank. It's a treasure trove of tips that will sharpen your competitive edge on platforms like Amazon.
As we wrap up, we reflect on the top strategies shared and their potential to redefine your Amazon business in 2024. Your feedback is crucial; we urge you to select and implement your top three tactics and join the conversation by sharing your favorites in the comments. The excitement is palpable as we look forward to featuring some of you in future episodes to celebrate the strides made in your Amazon and Walmart selling journey. Here's to taking the wins from 2023 and charging towards an even more prosperous year ahead!
In episode 522 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:
- 01:44 - Top Strategies for Amazon, Walmart, and E-Commerce This Year
- 05:53 - Find Trending Products on Alibaba/Amazon
- 12:00 - Strategies for Obtaining Product Reviews
- 13:10 - Walmart Review Program and Bundling Tips
- 16:32 - Surprise in Customer Reviews
- 21:54 - Increase Amazon Productivity and Selling Strategies
- 25:32 - Maximizing Product Visibility and Differentiation
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today is our yearly episode where we give you my handpicked top 20 Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce strategies of the entire year. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we've come up at the end of this year and, as we do the last four years now we do a kind of recap episode where I handpicked some of the strategies. There's a bunch of people on my team, you know, from Mhel, Nikko, John, Ralph, Bill, Maia, Klaudine. They all worked like going through all the transcripts and like gave me what they thought were some of the top strategies and then, from those like I don't know, like 90 different ones that they submitted, I like whittled it down to like 20 that would fit into this episode. So we're going to give you some stuff that you might not have heard, you know, if you weren't listening to every single episode or you might have forgotten about good reminders. We got some actionable stuff that have to do with, you know, Shopify and keyword research, product launch, just a whole bunch of different subjects, most of these like 60 seconds to just two minutes long, and so I hope you guys take advantage of this.
Bradley Sutton: A lot of it was really great when it aired and they're just just right now also as much, if not even more, applicable. So again, whenever we do these strategy episodes, I implore everybody, don't just, you know, listen to these and think, oh, this is so great. Isn't this amazing how smart these people are? No, I want you guys to actually pick two or three of these and put it in practice, and then let me know what you do afterwards. I'm wearing my Dodgers jersey today because, you know, just like we had a great year of strategies. Dodgers had an incredible year at the end of this year, hiring some of my favorite, or getting some of my favorite baseball players in. Shohio, tani and Yamamoto. But anyway, we're not here to talk baseball. I could have a whole episode just about that. We're here to get into the top 20 strategies, so here you go.
Dr. Travis Zigler
Best thing you can do, I’m trying, I was going the brand route, but I’m gonna try to keep it on Amazon route. Main images are key. Your main image has to be different. Go look up silicone coaster on Amazon, just go do that right now and tell me which one’s your brand because every single one looks the same. So it doesn’t matter, like for all those plastic widgets from China, everything looks the same, but what can you do to differentiate it? And the unfortunate thing is if you sell something that everybody else sells with no differentiation, then you can make a change to your photos, that works, then everybody else will repeat it. And so what can you do to make your product better and differentiated? And then how can you show that on the main image? And if you can show that on the main image that’s gonna lead to a higher click-through rate, what can you do with your branding and your copywriting to make it a little different to make it stand out a little bit more?
Aaron Biner
And another tip is your meta description of your brand store. Like, actually it’s super powerful, but there’s still so many sellers are this opportunity, if you’re gonna, like every page of your brand store has this meta description that is indexable by Google. So it doesn’t have any impact on Amazon, but it has really huge impact how your brand store will show up in the search result with sample who will type your brand name. So just, it’s only 160 characters. Do not keyword stuff make it readable and sometimes it’ll, like your brand store will show up like in top one in a Google search result. So it really works and it also helps you not only for your brand, for your brand name, but also for keywords that you can include in this section. So it’s really powerful. Well,
Bradley Sutton:
Where do you edit your meta description for your
Yana Tatochko:
You just have to kind of every it’s you have this meta description for every single page. So if you have five pages, you can fill in five pages of meta description. Okay. You just have to go to the settings of your store and when you will kind of click on the page, like you will see this meta description.
Bradley Sutton:
So why this is important is sometimes we might get into the rut of like, oh, I can only use like Helium 10 Black Box, or I can only search for product opportunity actually on Amazon. But a lot of times you can find some unique things that are trending on other websites. Like here is one of my strategies, like let’s say I just happened to be searching for a batch shelf and I find it on alibaba.com. What I like to do, if I find a factory guys that has a lot of reviews, I’ll actually click on their factory link in their Alibaba page. And then what I want to do is I just wanna search through some of their other products and see is there anything interesting that maybe I could just do some quick research into maybe something that’s trending in China that’s not here in the States yet.
Bradley Sutton:
So if I’m looking on this, this particular one who, this guy was selling batch shelves, but I clicked on his other products and I see he’s got something wood wine rack. So if I click into there, I see a whole bunch of interesting products that I didn’t even know existed. And then I see these a few of them here that are pretty interesting. This looks like a wall mounted wine bottle rack. I see a few of these here. Wall mounted wine rack. So what I can do is I can just, on this page, I can actually click the Chrome extension and I’m gonna hit this tool called Analyze Product Demand on Amazon. And then I would type right there, wall mounted wine rack, I haven’t left alibaba.com. And then I hit see analysis.
Bradley Sutton:
And what shows up is it’s going to show me if that exact keyword has search volume on Amazon and some related keywords to it and some data on it. Now, this right here, as you guys can see, those of you watching this on YouTube, there’s nothing much here. Like this keyword that I entered only has 633 search volume. But take a look at the variations down below of what it says, wine rack wall mounted. So just sh shifting the keywords around that has 9,000 search volume on Amazon. Here’s something that five minutes ago I didn’t even know existed, or at least this exact keyword I didn’t know was a thing, and now I realize it is something that has almost 10,000 searches a month. So guys, this, this is a great technique to use when you’re just like, ah, you just can’t seem to find new product opportunity to expand your brand, especially if you’re on your own suppliers website probably a lot of the products, like if you’re making coffin shelves or a back shelf at a, at a factory there, other wooden products probably could potentially go in line with some of your existing brands.
Destaney Wishon:
Yeah, so one of the first things I’ve been doing when I’ve been auditing brands is relying on the targeting tab. So if you go into advertising console in the top left-hand corner, you’re gonna see targeting under your campaign manager, something around those and the targeting tab actually allows you to add a column for conversion rate. So if you have been in advertising console for a while, you know we’ve never been given access to conversion rate on the keyword level, well within the targeting tab we now have that. So that’s been super, super helpful for any brand owner. Even if you don’t manage ppc, even if you outsource it, go into add console, open up your targeting tab, filter top down by spend and look at where your spend is going. Your highest spending targets should be your highest converting targets and the most aligned keywords for your products. That is like the number one quickest way to audit your brand performance. If you see that the top of your targeting tab has auto campaigns category targeting or product targeting, you’re probably not optimizing your PPC the best way possible because it’s not actually gonna improve your organic rank that much.
Ryan King:
So there’s that way of identifying competitors to match against. AB test, what I’ll say here is, is someone might be thinking do, are you switching it like every four or five days? You’re probably not switching that often. This is probably like you’re testing it two or three product types max cuz there’s not that many out there, right? And again, another caveat would be you’re not looking at, okay, I’m in herbal supplements and my product type is an herbal supplement. Am I gonna do well in protein shakes as a product type? Right? And we just one that’s just gonna be manipulation. It’s not, it’s not serving the end shopper. But also you’re not for that purpose. You’re not gonna index for any of the keywords you really want. The example I’ve given before is using herbal supplements was we had a product that was in herbal supplements as a product type and they were in an herbal supplement.
Ryan King:
But we were banging our heads up against a wall because we were not indexing for what we thought were no-brainer search terms for that product. And the algorithm just wasn’t letting us index for those. So what we simply did is in growth opportunities, I know you’ve shown this before as well. You go into growth opportunities on Seller Center, you go to those details next year, your listing clicks on one of your listings, and there’s a widget right in the middle there. Walmart makes it really easy. There’s a widget in the middle, it says product type. You look at that and you can say report issues. I think it’s a reported issue or something like that right below it. It’ll give you a dropdown of a few suggested product types there. And the herbal supplements case, what we saw was, although herbal supplements seemed to be an exact match, the end result wasn’t what we thought was gonna provide the shoppers with the best experience.
Ryan King:
And so what we saw was if we went one level up vitamins and supplements, there’s, so it’s, it’s, it makes sense in that vertical broader, and we found that instantly. We were almost instantly within a few hours we were indexing for the keywords we needed. So that’s, that’s what I mean. So you’re probably gonna be able to figure out product type pretty easily of what general ones make sense right now. That’s the best solution I know of. So I think it’s one of those, it’s just a helpful point of data as long as it’s available. And so hopefully that’s a help to you. Hopefully, that answers the question.
Lyann Nguyen:
First, we talked about keeping track of your three scores. Get cr experian.com or Identity iq. And if you have zero money and you’re broke as no joke, go to Credit Karma, get that account, put it on your phone, monitor that and find out what needs to be done. Number two, fix all your personal information, your name, your address, your employment, your phone number. Clean it up till you have one of each. Don’t have a whole bunch of stuff that would actually help clear a lot of bad data.
Bradley Sutton:
Wait. Hold on. Yeah, on on number two. Where do I go to do that again? I know you mentioned it earlier, but I forgot to write it down myself.
Lyann Nguyen:
No problem. You can go to experian.com or Identity IQ and the part where it says personal information, you can dispute a lot of that stuff. Or on Credit Karma, you’ll see all that information and then you’ll see like their name, address. The report doesn’t look right, you can contact the bureaus. You can just Google phone number.
Bradley Sutton:
So directly from like these experian.com and these.
Lyann Nguyen:
So you call them and then they’re gonna say, can you can you send me a get, make sure you get your utility bill because or your bank statement that has your name and your address, you would have to send that to them and a driver license to make sure that that’s your one address. You are not living in 10 different places. That’s gonna actually bump your score anywhere from 20 points to 50 points. Just that one move because it’s data.
David Milstein:
Reviews is a huge strategy. You definitely, it’s gonna help you with your conversion rate. I just do wanna point out, unlike Amazon where sales volume is the number one driver of ranking on Walmart, it’s the conversion rate and there’s two conversion rates that reflects, it’s the impression to click and to click the sale. And aside from price and basic content, the best way to get that conversion is through reviews. Now, how do you get reviews on your product? I’m going to suggest two strategies. You have reviews syndication, which is a free program from Walmart that I don’t know why people are not as into finding it. Maybe they should probably run a promo, Hey, sign up for reviews, indication, maybe send emails. If you have reviews on your website, Walmart allows you to bring them to the program. Two platform for free. This is a free program.
David Milstein:
Now you have to make sure that it’s legit and you’re not bringing in only some of your five star reviews. You have to bring in all your reviews to the program. Additionally, you cannot have your Amazon reviews on Walmart illegal. Amazon is against terms of service. They technically own their reviews. Technically you shouldn’t even have them on your website in the first place, but that’s none of my business. But Walmart is not gonna let you take those reviews to Walmart. You could try and they’re gonna say, Hey, those are Amazon reviews, you can’t use those. But it’s a great way if you have reviews on your website, sign up for reviews syndication hopefully you’ll get accepted as long as you answer the case correctly. Don’t, don’t try a lie and try to cheat the system. They’re just gonna shut you down and potentially suspend your as a seller.
David Milstein:
No one wants that. And go ahead and bring in your reviews. Legitimately A second program, I would su strongly recommend, this is a new launch from Walmart, which is the review accelerator program. It allows, it’s similar to I guess the Amazon Vine, but I think it’s actually cheaper. It’s where you enroll certain listings. There is a bit of a restriction on what is allowed and there’s up to, you’re allowed to get up to five reviews per product and it doesn’t recommend, it’s not necessarily gonna get you a five star review. This is important to note, it’s just gonna get you a review. Walmart does claim that five reviews on a product increases the GMV by 75%, which I think is that’s pretty crazy. So there’s just two restrictions. You have to have a sale in the past x amount of time, I think potentially 30 days.
David Milstein:
And you have to have under five reviews and therefore that will make your item eligible for the program. And it costs you $10 per view that you get regardless of the rating. And the incentive to the seller, or to the customer rather the shopper is that they will get $3 credit towards their next purchase. So Walmart sends out an email to them, Hey ’em, hey some li review and you got $3 credit and you will get up to five reviews per product. It’s a great way, the only thing is it’s kind of a bit of a cash 22 cause you’re like, I need to get sales in order to get into the program, but I can’t get sales cause they don’t have reviews. Advertising is key folks. With advertising you’re guaranteed to get at least one sale as long as you’re not extremely priced. That’s as simple as it is.
Jana Krekic:
It’s basically bilingual show, so I support that. But when it comes to translations, but we know this is basically maximizing on the keywords in the first 60 characters of your title. A lot of people forget about the mobile version of the website on Amazon which only shows first 60 characters. And a lot of people go crazy and wild with the keywords, like at the end of the title, just don’t put enough of the most important ones in the first part of the title. And I say like, you should definitely do that, if not because of like the mobile version. Cause a lot of people also will purchase products on their phones and people forget about it. They tend to forget a lot. Especially if you have like a really, really long brand name, then you couldn’t really wanna think about if you’re gonna like play with it or not.
Jana Krekic:
There was the one brand that we did, it was eye patches and then it had like the wordplay eye, like your eyeball, like Eye love it cause it’s an eye patch. And that literally took the whole first 60 characters of their title. And in the mobile version, it didn’t show any of the keywords. So that had to be completely redundant. We completely dropped the, I love it because also like in German and for Germans, it did not sit well, like too much English never work, works amazingly well for the German audience. So that is my tip when it comes to the title. And just like the mobile versions for Amazon. Cause brands really do not think about it a lot.
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing I wanna talk about is explore bundling options, not just as something to add to your listing or to your product. I mean that, yes, that’s definitely something that you can do. You know, maybe you see that people are buying a coffin shelf and a skull together, right? So maybe you’ll be the first one to have a coffin shelf with skull together. Of course, that’s an option, right? But take it a step even easier. Use Black Box product targeting. Enter in your competitor’s ASINs and then filter for frequently bought together.
Bradley Sutton:
This is gonna show you what has been frequently bought together over the past, like 30 days or more that Helium 10 has detected. And sometimes you might find a product that’s like seven or $8 or even $6. And basically what this means is this, this could potentially be a product that you could source for like 30, 40 cents. Like one of the ones that was showing up here is, is spooky stickers. You know probably you could source some spooky stickers for like, what, you know, 25 cents or something like that. But if you have a history that your competitors are selling their product, and then the buyer at the same time is buying spooky stickers on their own, because you can see it in frequently bought together. Now what you should do if it’s really cheap, just go ahead and buy that product, maybe even in a smaller quantity if it’s a little bit more expensive, and then stick it into your product costing you 25 cents each.
Bradley Sutton:
If it’s really small, like stickers. And don’t advertise it. Don’t even advertise in the listing, right? I mean, you could advertise in your listing, but I prefer that for like, you know, more impressive bundling opportunities. But here’s what happens if you don’t advertise, and this is a strategy that, you know, Toma Rabinovich has, has been teaching for, for a while now. It’s part of his like six star method, and I’ve seen this myself out, out in the wild. But what happens is now your customer gets the product, they open it up expecting whatever they bought, say it’s a coffin shelf, but then all of a sudden they have these spooky stickers that customers like them, like, now what does that mean? That means it’s like a pleasant surprise, and it gives, it makes them like double 2x, 3x, maybe even 4x more likely to leave a positive review than if they were just happy with the product by itself.
Jocelyn Jeffries:
But if you want, if you’re in the natural toothpaste space, you need to be competing on those terms. You know you know, Toms of Maine, 12 pack natural toothpaste, blah, blah, blah, blah, is only gonna get you so far. That’s not really gonna improve your rank. You’re probably already solid there, but if you’re looking to improve your overall rank for a product, you need to be going after the keywords that are gonna keyword lead to that improvement. So it’s very much about understanding where you need to be spending and what terms you need to be spending and what’s actually gonna lead toward you know, improvement and rank. I think that’s the, the first step, and then it’s going and executing on that. So PPC is really the tool that you can use to influence specific pieces of search terms and customer behavior and whatnot. So that’s really how you start going after improving your organic rank.
Jocelyn Jeffries:
Yeah, so there’s a couple approaches you can take. I think the long tail keyword is a good way to look at it. You know, if you’re spending money on again, natural toothpaste that’s gonna be probably a waste of money to be honest with you. It’s gonna be so expensive for you to even try and compete in that, that it’s gonna be a waste of dollars. So starting to look at what are some of the longer tail keywords that I can win, you know, if it’s, you know, the most br you know, specific keyword ever, but if it applies to your product, going after that and starting to just chip away at some of that organic rank is gonna be a good way to start. And then, you know, if you have a similar product within your brand or you have competitors, you can start targeting their product detail pages.
Jocelyn Jeffries:
So if someone’s not specifically searching for you, but they see you on you know, another product detail page, that’s a good way to kind of start again, chipping your way in and kind of moving from the outside in to the, the kind of larger volume because again, it’s gonna be a waste of money if you’re trying to go after those high volumes and you don’t have the foundation of strong rank. So starting to chip away I think is the best method and mantra of having it, and this goes to new products as well of if you’re starting from zero, it’s gonna take some time. So long tail and product detail pages is what I would recommend.
Lailama Hasan:
Yeah. So a lot of sellers can get nervous about like, main image strategies, and we give a bunch of those strategies out right at the end. You wanna increase, increase your click through rates. So one way, one hack that I have for testing that out if you’re nervous about it, is upload the strategy that, you know, your agency or whoever’s come up with versus like a fully compliant image. And you know, what you wanna do is upload it on, manage your experiments, and if it gets through the Amazon bots, then you’re good to go and you can upload that image, actually, it will verify it for you, so it’ll automatically upload it for you. Because one thing I wanted to point out is a lot of people will be like, oh, this is not compliant, but you theoretically, 80 to 90% of the main images on Amazon are non-compliant with including props, you know, let’s say a fruit and fruit bowls or including a model in there, or, you know, adding an extra sticker onto your label. All of these are non-compliant. So this is just a hack that I have if you’re worried about it, and plus you get extra insights on which version works better.
Vincenzo Toscano:
Yeah, so when I, when it comes to strategy something that we’ve seen a a lot, I know maybe you have heard this tip before, but it’s focused on the second language of the country you’re selling on. So, for example something we having a lot of success lately with our US brands is using Spanish cures in Canada, we’re using French related cures. For example, in Germany there’s a big population of, of Turkish people Polish and all of that. So there’s a huge potential of using second secondary languages on all these markets. And on top of that, what I would advise as well as an extra plus tip on, on top of this tip in the US for example, you can request your translation to be updated the Spanish one because some of the translation that have been done if the listen is old is it was done with the old translation engine that Amazon had, the backend. So you can actually request Amazon to redo your translation. And this sometimes can help you a lot to reindex for some Spanish queue that you’re not indexing the first time and actually be more relevant for Spanish related keywords. So that would be my tip. Yeah. Cool.
Crystal Ren:
So one tip I learned to increase your productivity by the way is to color different activities you do. So put everything together on your calendar. Like, if you go take a shower, you put it on your calendar. If you go to do some paperwork, you go put it on your calendar, but you want to categorize them differently. So, for example, I categorize them based on, you know, deep work, shallow work. So deep work could be something like a drafting agreement, right? With a supplier. And that would probably take like two to three hours of uninterrupted time. And shallow work would be something like I don’t know, like you know, putting together expense report, you know, so that’s some kind of administrative work that you need to do. And you know, there’s other things, for example, like personal time you know, a shower.
Crystal Ren:
So you mark them differently to make sure that you have enough of deep work time a week so that you know how much, how many hours you spend on deep work, how many hours do you spend on shallow work, which is something that you wanna shrink as much as possible and how, how many hours do you spend on personal time, which maybe perhaps that’s something that you wanna protect right? And you also want to make sure that you have a balanced life so you’re not overworking. So by coloring them into different categories, you can see that visually whether you’re being productive and whether you are having like a balanced week. And that’s what I’ve been doing for now, like six, seven months now.
Bradley Sutton:
Hey, you’re doing great on sales, about to run out of stock. Do you slow sales by raising price and turning off ads and then that hurts your potentially keyword ranks before? Or do you just go hard and heavy, run out of stock and then just get back in and hopefully you still have your keyword ranks when you come back in the stock in a couple of weeks?
Liran Hirschkorn:
I think, from a ranking perspective, it’s better to run out of stock at a better BSR. I think that’s the better way to go. Sometimes you’re going to make a decision that, hey, I just want the profits Right, because that’s what’s more important to me at this point in my business. I’m going to focus more on the profits now, I’m going to reduce, I’m going to raise the price. Or sometimes you may be able to raise the price and there’s so much demand that you’re still driving pretty good sales and you can still raise the price someone and there’s a happy medium. But I would say, from a ranking perspective and coming back in stock at a better rank, it’s better to go out of stock with great sales than to slow down your sales.
Bradley Sutton:
And this is why I said that kind of like off the wall thing earlier where I’m now suggesting that you might want to always do a test listing. Now, all right, I didn’t say that before you know. I said do kind of test listing so you can, so that you can know what kind of exposure you’re going to get on PPC to validate some, some theories you have. When there’s not enough information from existing competitors, you know you might want to make sure that you validate your idea with a test listing. But now, guys, I’m saying, if you’re selling in a newer niche, especially and maybe sometimes, even if you’re an established niche, it might be worth it to spend you know 50 bucks and get another UPC code and just do a fulfill by merchant listing, send a couple of or have a couple of units available and have your listing that you want to go with and then see immediately what does Amazon think that you’re relevant for right. And then if you’re completely fine with this listing and you have the right keywords for Amazon recommended rank from day one, all right, well, you’re good to go. That means go ahead and launch your regular product once you’re ready and you can have that exact listing, knowing that from day one you might have that.
Mina Elias:
So for me, I think what I’ve seen is the sale, the selling points, like the USB, the selling point being visible and you showing that you’re better than everyone else just from the main image. And so when I, when I put a bunch of you know like products next to each other, my competitors versus me, like I know that I’m looking for a product, not a lot of people take advantage of the text on their, on their boxes or on their products. So, for example, let’s say you know you’re selling like flip flops, the cloud flip flops, so you can have the flip flops and, and you know, in an angle whatever. Or you can have the flip flops put on top of a box, a fake box, and on that box, you have two sides where you can write text and it says, like you know, the softest material on the market or whatever a hundred percent recyclable stuff like that, right, because you can have that text on the box that you couldn’t have actually have on your package, and that box probably doesn’t exist. You know you’re probably shipping it in a of the day, they’re going to get your slippers. They’re going to look this, you know they’re going to look like slippers.
Mina Elias:
So for me, my product, my electrolytes if you go look at it on Amazon, it’s like shinier. There’s text on the cap, there’s like some different logos that show that actually don’t exist on the bottle and when they do get the bottle it looks very, very similar. There’s just a few things, and those few things those are the differences that when someone types in a keyword and they’re looking, you know they’re browsing, I catch their eye because I have, like some elements outside of the product that are eye catching and I have some text on the product that, like they’re looking at all like this is an electrolyte powder, so this is an electrolyte powder with no sugar, with no carbs, and it has this and it’s made in America and it’s all of these things on the label and so they’re like they’re convinced to click on me without having to read like title or anything like that.
Ritu Java:
For example, just this morning I was preparing for a new product launch for one of our clients and I’d got all my data from Helium 10. I was at the stage where I have to come up with some keywords for broad match campaigns. I wanted to make sure that all the right keywords are in there, not just the long tail ones with high search volume, but I wanted to make sure that I’m capturing all the seed combinations of important words that make sense. So what I did was I exported the Helium 10 cerebral analysis and I fed it to ChatGPT and asked it to come up with two words and three word combinations of seed keywords that would perfectly describe this product. Now what I’m going to do next with that is basically convert that into broad match modifiers, which basically means you add a plus sign in front of all the seeds and then I’m going to create campaigns with it. So that’s something that I do at every launch. I generally don’t skip that step. It’s an important one for me. So, in addition to all the long tail keywords, I will come up with enough seed words that will run at a slightly lower bid but will be like a discovery campaign for me through the broad match modifier channel. So that’s kind of one thing that I do.
Ritu Java:
Then, like yesterday, I was doing another one for another client, where we have a list of keywords that we discovered from the search query performance report, which is kind of this new, very valuable piece of data that Amazon is giving us these days. So from there I was able to come up with a structure for sponsored brand headline ads and I didn’t have to do the work. I just fed that entire list to ChatGPT and said, hey, organize this into groups of very related words and then give me a headline ad which is less than 50 characters, because that’s the amount Amazon will give us. And then it did that for me. I also gave it one other important instruction, which is to make sure that one of the keywords or a very close variant of that keyword in the group must be included in the title, and that’s basically my way of saying, hey, I want this to be a lower funnel ad, not a generic kind of upper funnel ad, because my sponsored brand ads tend to be more focused on RoAS rather than brand discovery and brand awareness. So those are some of the ways that I’m using it almost on a daily basis. I had switched to ChatGPT plus a long time ago. I’ve been paying for it and it’s totally worth it.
Matt Altman:
Yeah, so the great thing about Product Opportunity Explorer is it really shows you what keywords are driving the sales for those. So more than how many products are there we’re looking at, are there branded terms that are in the Product Opportunity Explorer. So like an example that we were looking at this past week was for a floor cleaning product and we saw that of the 20 top like 50 keywords, bona was one of the main sales driving keywords. Like, even if there weren’t that many products in that category, we aren’t going to be able to overcome that branded search deficit. So it’s just not something that we would go into Um, but we definitely prefer to go into categories where those sales are spread across more Um. The main reason for that is we really like to do kind of um I would call it kind of like tailgating. We like to kind of stay behind everyone and we’ll pull like 10% of the sales from this person, from this person, and you can kind of pick off keywords from certain top products and they may not notice that you’re coming up and then you can really use that to catapult yourself to the top of the category before the rest of the products in the category realized what’s happening.
Marcus Mokros:
Amazon recently announced that they will look for title images that are not meeting the terms of service and they will use AI to change that. They will download your image, remove everything that doesn’t belong there in their opinion and upload it again, and that is something you don’t want. You don’t want an AI to touch your title image. Yeah, and Michael from AMZ Boost, a product photographer, he told me, just use your picture, space number nine. Nobody looks there. Put a title image there that will meet the terms of service and because what Amazon is doing first, they will scan your product photos and check if there is something that is compliant to the terms of service and they will put it to spot number one as your title image. And if they don’t find something, they will change it in their terms. So that’s an awesome hack.
Listen in as we explore the latest buzz around Amazon, starting with their new advertising push on Prime Video to their billionth same-day delivery package milestone. Plus, let’s look at the latest features inside Helium 10. We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Amazon Prime Video viewers will have to pay an extra $2.99 monthly in January to avoid ads https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/amazon-prime-video-ads-commercials-when-does-it-start-how-to-avoid-rcna131369 Amazon customers have scored 1 billion packages from U.S. Same-Day sites https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-same-day-delivery-milestone Amazon.se: Three years in Sweden https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/job-creation-and-investment/amazon-se-three-years-in-sweden Bringing electric cargo bike deliveries to Croydon, England https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/sustainability/bringing-electric-cargo-bike-deliveries-to-croydon-england Meanwhile, Bradley is buzzing with excitement as he gears up to jet-set across Pakistan, Germany, and back to the US next year for multiple Amazon events. He’s excited to meet you in person! But before you think this episode is all about the hustle, he introduces you to slick additions and features to Helium 10: the product tag group, Chrome extension updates, and the new subscribe and save feature. It's all about giving you that competitive edge. And for a final flourish of wisdom, Shivali steps in with her training tip on using Inventory Heat Maps, ensuring you're never caught off guard by shipping delays again. This year might be winding down, but we're just getting started on setting you up for success!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley talks about:
- 01:17 - Amazon Prime Video Ads
- 03:19 - Billion Same-Day Orders
- 05:04 - Amazon Sweden
- 06:07 - Vacation Settings
- 08:00 - Amazon Delivery Bikes
- 09:19 - Catch Bradley On The Following Events
- 14:52 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
- 21:18 - ProTraining Tip: Inventory Heat Maps
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon sponsored TV ads are about to go into effect. Even more, amazon just delivered its billionth same-day delivery product the Amazon conferences you need to attend in Q1 of 2024. How to check which warehouse is your inventory is at in FBA All of these and more on today's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our Helium 10 weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that affect Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce sellers. We let you know what new tools and features Helium 10 has, and we also give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. We've got a few articles that we're going to talk about some various topics that are actually not that much going on in the e-commerce world. For a change, it's the holiday week and not a lot of news reporters out there or Amazon press releases going on, so a little bit light, but make sure to stay to the end, because we have some cool training tips. I think that will help you. Let's go ahead and hop into the first article
Bradley Sutton:
Now. The first article is actually from Amazon, and this article I actually pulled from CNBC. But Amazon announced that Prime Video viewers are now going to have to pay an extra 299 monthly fee in January to avoid ads. So ads are now going to go ahead and start coming in. This was announced a while back. We talked about sponsored TV. That was announced at Amazon Accelerate or Amazon Unboxed. It was talked about, and so how people are going to consume these ads is basically everybody who's been watching Prime TV shows or Prime movies. They're going to start seeing these ads more unless they pay this $2.99 fee starting in late January. That's going to be in addition to the $139 cost of Amazon Prime I didn't remember that Amazon Prime cost that much or the $8.99 a month Amazon Prime subscription. Now this should come as no kind of surprise as far as Amazon always trying to find new advertising lanes. This article talks about how Amazon's advertising is now 8% of the company's total net sales and advertising incomes surpass income from subscription services last year. All right, so are you going to be trying these sponsored TV? It's different than pay per click where it's like, hey, somebody sees an ad of your product and they could purchase it right away. Now there are some versions of this where that can happen. We saw that in was it the Black Friday football game a few weeks ago but this is more of a brand play, like an awareness. I think that's going to be the benefit of this, and that's a little bit harder to measure if you're a smaller brand. This totally makes sense for a huge nine figure and above brands. What about you? How many of you are interested in trying out sponsored TV ads? Has it? Have any of you tried so far? Let me know in the comments below.
Bradley Sutton:
The next article is also having to do with Amazon, and it was entitled that Amazon customers have scored 1 billion packages from US same day sites. Now, they had this quarterback from some college I think he's from Washington or something, Michael Penix and he actually physically himself delivered the 1 billionth package. This article brought out that there's actually 90 different metro areas where same day delivery is possible and 55 different locations that's delivering, and this is all just big cities like the ones mentioned here, which are San Francisco, LA, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Orlando, Detroit and Miami. There's a lot of other places like I live in like a suburb of San Diego and you know this is a tiny, not tiny town, it's like 50. 50, 80, 90,000 people, but a lot of the stuff I get is same day delivery. So this is, you know, something that just I think, makes Amazon Prime more sticky for customers. And so the more inventory you put into Amazon, the likely, the more likely, that a portion of the population are going to have it available for same day delivery. Now, where you're, you know if you actually get a list of warehouses where Amazon does offer same day delivery service. Now, that would be something interesting for you guys to check and cross reference with where Amazon is storing your products to see if you know how big, how much of the country or how many of these 90 locations are getting same day delivery. And actually, the training tip of the week this week, you know, Shivali is going to talk about how you can actually see where in Amazon your inventory is stored.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article, also from Amazon, it was entitled Amazonse three years in Sweden. Believe it or not, guys, I mean it just seems like yesterday this was one of the new kids on the block in Amazon. Europe was Sweden, but, believe it or not, it began in late 2020. So now it's three years and there's 550 million products available on Amazon Sweden in 30 categories. I'll tell you right now I have not heard of one amazing success story from Amazon Sweden. Obviously, you know you can look at this article that's linked in the comments. But you know there's Amazon Sweden is moving some numbers, but I want to hear from those who are crushing on Amazon Sweden, because I haven't yet. You know, like, like, we always talk about the big five in Europe, you know being UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany, but I don't hear too much about Amazon Netherlands and Sweden and Poland, about you know, some people crushing it. So if you are selling in that marketplace, let me know in the comments and let me know how it's going for you Speaking of Amazon there in your seller central dashboard.
Bradley Sutton:
There's just a reminder for those of you Maybe this is your first holiday season. Maybe you're going to go on vacation and you've got fulfilled by merchant listings. That would be me. I'm not going on vacation, but I have tons of everything I sell in Project X and in my own accounts is fulfilled by merchant and I also have another skew for FBA. Now what you need to do if you're not going to be able to fulfill. You know you have to be able to add tracking numbers right To orders. It's better to not close the listing one by one, especially if you have a lot, but set up vacation settings is what Amazon is reminding you to do. So you can actually do this by setting up vacation mode on the account. There's a link right on your dashboard to do that, and so just with a couple of clicks Now all of your fulfilled by merchant listings are going to be paused, so you're not going to be responsible for shipping anything.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, one of the things that this doesn't do is affect the time that you have to reply to customer service emails. Remember, you have 24 hours a day. Due to that, 365 days a year, seven days a week, you have to reply within 24 hours to customer service email. So I didn't know about this and I wouldn't pay for this. I'm just gonna always, you know, reply. But they say in this article hey, you should consider setting up customer service by Amazon. It's a paid program that's why I wouldn't do it but where Amazon will take care of customer service on, even on your self-fulfilled Orders, and they'll they'll take care of that by a phone, a chat and email. So, again, if you're going on vacation at any time of the year not not just here in the holidays and you've got fulfilled by merchant listings, amazon doesn't care that you're on vacation. You still have to deliver it within a certain time, so it's best to turn it off. Or if you've got a lot, go ahead and put that vacation settings on a last article of the day. It's just kind of like a funny article, you know, if you think of, you know FedEx trucks. You think of the white with the blue and red letters, right, if you think of, ups trucks is brown. You know those brown trucks. They all look the same and even now Amazon has mostly those like gray, amazon Prime kind of like electric looking trucks and other vans.
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon put out an article from Amazon Europe. They have got the coolest delivery out of everybody. I think, right, like I would rock this, like I would deliver pizza in this. But, guys, if you guys are watching this on YouTube or if you're watching this on the podcast, go watch us on YouTube. Take a look at this article. They've got these cool electric Cargo bikes, they call it. They're kind of like four wheelers, almost With no doors. It's kind of hard to describe if you're not, if you're not looking at this, but I would totally have rocked this when I was like in high school to go to school or something or you know, deliver pizzas on the side, but is this like what you guys in Europe, is this how you guys are getting your Amazon deliveries on these cool, these cool electric bikes? They even have like a windshield and a windshield wiper and it's just. It's kind of hard to describe here, but definitely take a look at it. If you're just listening to this on the podcast, I'm just curious is that what you guys are used to? As far as what's delivering your products? Let me know, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
Next up, I want to talk about the different Events I'm going to be at and all over the world. You know, you guys know I like to travel, but I like meeting helium to members in different parts of the world. Now, the very first event of the year that I'll be at will actually be back in for my third time in Lahore, Pakistan. All right, so that it's the reality check growth conference. Saddam from AMZ One Step is one of the ones who is putting it on. I'll be one of this speakers there, there'll be other speakers, you know, people I've met before and a lot of service providers and agencies Coming out. So if you are in the Lahore area or anywhere in Pakistan you're able to go. Go to h10.me/reality. It's January 14th in Lahore, Pakistan, you know, one of my favorite countries to visit because of the food, the hospitality. There goes my diet for my news years. If I had New Year's resolution in January, it's gone, because I cannot be on a diet in Pakistan with the Chicken Biryani and everything else I want. I want to eat. But anyways, January 14th, if you guys are in that area, make sure to come by.
Bradley Sutton:
The next event is going to be January 25th, all right, and I don't have a, a website for this yet. We'll announce it next week. It'll be in Frankfurt, Hermany, right in the airport. Like literally, you walk off the airplane and there's the airport and then it's a building that's attached to the airport. It's gonna be a co-hosted event with Avosk and this is gonna be the first half is gonna be an Elite workshop. So if you're a helium-10 elite member or serious sellers club member, go to the Facebook group and I'll give you guys a link to sign up for that. It'll be free for you and you can stay the whole day. For the afternoon it's gonna be open to the public. I believe it's gonna be 75 euros and there'll be tons of different speakers at the event, including myself. I'll be speaking at the event and there'll be other speakers from different countries around, including potentially speakers from who have worked at Companies like Lego, etc. So We'll be confirming the speakers and confirming the the how to sign up shortly.
Bradley Sutton:
But mark your calendars Frankfurt, germany, on January, the 25th, speaking of Germany, also going to be at AMZ Hacking live. That's gonna be in Berlin, germany, and that's gonna be on the 27th of January. So make sure to go to AMZ hacking line. You can go to the website by going to h10.me/germany to get tickets. I'm just one of many, many speakers who are gonna be at at this event. It's gonna be great. There's gonna be like VIP dinner the night before and then a social afterwards. So that's definitely one of the top events in for the entire year in Germany is the AMZ Hacking live, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
Another event this is actually a virtual one in February, all right. So after the Germany ones, the next one that I'll be doing is online wins the billion dollar seller summit. All right, this is gonna be an online event. You can go to h10.me/bdss, BDSS it's there's and then look for the online event, or it's called the virtual event, and that'll be February 21st and 22nd, put on by Kevin King. Tons of speakers there. I'm gonna be doing a presentation unlike anything I've ever done before, completely different than what you're used to when you're, when you're seeing my, my presentation, and we talk about stuff I've never talked about before. So make sure to go to that one, too.
Bradley Sutton:
Next up, there's going to be back here in the United States a Want pretty much usually the biggest conference In the United States outside of the ones that Amazon does every year, and that's the prosper show, and it's going to be in Vegas at Mandalay Bay, all right, from March 4th to March 6th, all right. So you know, I've been to probably every prosper Since like 2018, so I don't know how many. That is 6, 7 or something like that. Always a great show. I'll be speaking at that event too. If you guys want to get tickets, go to h10.me/prosper. And I'm not sure where this coupon code comes from, but there is a coupon code for this event that you can use to get a hundred dollars off, alright, and it is SANAR1100OFFSPEAK. So again, if you're, you know, just listening to this and you don't see the little ticker right here, write this down SANAR1100OFFSPEAK. And that should save you $100 off of the ticket. That again, that's in, that's in Las Vegas, and we'll probably do, like you know, maybe some, some mini socials or something that we can, you know, get together at that event. Now, shortly thereafter it hasn't been confirmed yet I might be going to do an Amazon event, like an event that's actually put on by Amazon in the Philippines, their first time Going to the Philippines. That'll probably be announced in the next couple weeks. All right, so that's it for all of the events in Q1 of 2024. A lot going on. I know there's other events too, but those are the ones that I'll be personally at, and others from my team might Be there as well, so you can meet us and hang out. We always love to do that.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, next up, let us go into the new feature alerts from Helium 10. This is something that we do every week, because literally every week, Helium 10 is launching either a new tool, a new feature, a new function, some kind of you know request that the customers have been asking for. The team is working year round. Here we are right after Christmas and there's stuff to announce, all right. So the first one I want to talk about is this again comes from the customers, because a lot of you guys were asking like, hey, yes, that's cool that in Helium 10, you know, in the profits and the insights dashboard, I can see products group by parent and things like that, and I could, you know, maybe even buy brand. But I want to have like full flexibility about Grouping products together so I can maybe see all of the sales of a certain you know like niche of products, or maybe it's not everything in a certain brand. Whatever the case is, you can now make custom groups and we call this tags. All right, so in your dashboard, your insights dashboard, I should say there will be a button that says tag, with a plus sign. So what you can do is hit that button and then you are going to go to this create tag. Like, let's say, I want to make a group of my products or a tag for all of my coffin shelves, all right, so I type in the name and then I add all the products that are coffin shelves, all right, and so I can just go ahead and do a search for coffin shelf. So what I can do is I can just go ahead and select, one by one, all of my coffin shelf products and then now I have this tag of coffin shelf and so I can just go ahead and hit this button uh, coffin shelves and then now in my insights dashboard, where it shows all of my product performance, I can just instantly see, like, all right, how's my keywords doing on on this? Um, how is my inventory doing? How many units have I sold in this timeframe? So a kind of cool feature there that you guys have been asking for is the ability to make groups of your products.
Bradley Sutton:
Next thing I want to talk about a couple uh updates to the Helium 10 Chrome Extension the most used Chrome Extension in the world for Amazon sellers, over one million active users and a couple of things you're going to uh, notice. First of all, this is just the beginning. You're going to start seeing widgets that are in other sponsored ad placement. So you guys know that in the uh, you know search results of Amazon when you run the chrome I mean, actually you don't even have to run the Chrome Extension It'll start showing up these little widgets that say where the seller is coming from, what the BSR is, how many sellers there are, et cetera, et cetera. But now, like, for example, in the sponsored brand headline ad you know that that you guys, hopefully, are running sponsored brand ads you're going to be able to go ahead and grab that ascent information right there, cause you know you can't really see what ascent it is unless you go ahead and click on the ad. So that's one update that has happened. Uh, another update is in this niche or keyword summary section that's at the top of any search result page, once you hit show full summary. Uh, something that a lot of customers were asking for was the ability to sort within the charts that come up here. So now, uh, if you hit the show full summary at this top little widget, any of these charts, you can go ahead and sort by organic rank, by the revenue by the market share, uh, things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
The last thing I want to talk about in the Chrome Extension is an Xray. All right, so when you run x-ray, first of all it's like loads, a lot faster than it did before and you can see tons and tons of rows. A lot of you guys were saying, hey, we want to see a design where there's a lot of rows showing up here. Now, something you're going to see at the very top right is this little section. Now you know there's no uh, more multi-factor success score. This is called the two-factor score that you can customize so it says top 10 products with revenue over $8,000 in mind and under 125 reviews. So what it's doing is instantly we just a click of the button on x-ray. You can take a look at the search results pages and now know from the top 10 organic positions how many have revenue over x and how many have reviews under y. Now everybody has different thresholds. Like, I put here $8,000 of revenue and so I can see six out of the 10. Top 10 organic ones have $8,000 revenue, but three out of the top 10 have under 125 reviews. Now if you want to customize, like, what thresholds you want to see with that quick access. Just hit your Chrome Extension button and go to the settings gear button and from there now you can go ahead and specify how you want your two-factor success score to work. So again you can. I put $8,000 revenue and 125 reviews because that's what I'm looking for in my top 10 products Last up.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you somebody who uses subscribe and save? Hopefully you are, if you have some kind of replenishable product, like in grocery or another category. One of the accounts I work on, as you guys know, is a hemp cream, and so this account definitely uses subscribe and save. So now you've got a way to quickly track, get some you know cool information on your subscribe and save in your dashboard. All right, so you're going to want to go to the very bottom of the page and then you're going to hit add chart. There's an add chart button and the chart that you're going to want to add is the subscribe and save chart. Once you go ahead and add that, it's now going to come up a new widget that will tell you exactly, in the timeframe that you have selected, what's going on with your subscribe and save. You'll be able to see your rate, the number of units that you've sold in, subscribe and save your sales, what kind of discount the customer got, and then your day by day chart. So this is just the beginning of this tool, but it's something that's going to allow you to just get a quick snapshot at how your subscribe and save is hopefully growing over time and then, if there's like any issues, watching this chart frequently is something that's going to help you out. All right, guys, that's it for the new feature alerts.
Bradley Sutton:
Last up, we've got Shivali with our training tip of the week. I talked earlier about you know understanding where your inventory is at in the United States, especially when you're launching that's important or when you're relaunching, coming back into stock, or you want to know how many people have access to you know same day service. So you have a list of those locations. Here is how you can see where your inventory is at in the United States. Shivali, take it away.
Shivali Patel:
Knowing where your inventory is located in warehouses across the country can really come in handy. After all, in the case that you were just launching, opening up your listing before your stock is nicely spread out means running the risk of having potential customers ditch your product for a competitors, all because your delivery time was two to three weeks compared to that gold standard two day shipping. Or perhaps you just want to see where the heck all of your inventory is because you're already selling, but waiting for a shipment to be checked in and save you from low stock or those incoming low inventory level fees that we discussed last week can be really beneficial. A great way to stay on top of both of those concerns is our inventory heat maps located inside of Profits. Think of it as the big brother of all of your Amazon FBA inventory, or a visual map that can help you see where everything is stored. For instance, I am looking at a product I recently launched this past month I actually had the shipment sent to a single Amazon facility a while ago and check out how you can see the inventory spread day by day across the whole country all the way going into December. The bigger the circle you have, the more product you've got there and it's updated every day, giving you the low down on sellable items, on damaged goods, defective items and the total count for each city.
Shivali Patel:
God forbid but say that there was a tornado that hit an Amazon warehouse or a worker strike, causing chaos. You need to be able to see if your product is affected. At the bottom, you can see how many units are available at every single facility that your shipment has been sent out to, and with heat maps. That is something within reach, because you always have a bird's eye view of your inventory. So go ahead and give it a try. Maybe you'll even get to make some correlations between where your inventory is situated and where it's being sold with the tab over, to help you make smarter decisions and ultimately keep your business on track. Cheers.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, thank you very much, Shivali, for that. So that's something you guys all have access to. Make sure to check that out in your Profits dashboard. All right, guys. That's it for the news and training of the week. Hope you enjoyed this episode. This is our last one of the year. I'll see you guys next year, next week, to see what's buzzing.
Unlock the secrets to conquering the Middle Eastern e-commerce landscape as we team up with Krystel, our Dubai-based expert, to navigate the dynamic marketplaces of Amazon UAE, Amazon KSA, and Amazon Egypt. Our discussion peels back the layers of these culturally rich and diverse regions, showcasing strategic entry points for foreign sellers and the innovative AE2SA program that's revolutionizing logistics and cross-border commerce. Embrace the tales of triumph as we reveal how a local Prada sunglasses distributor and a savvy Polish pet treat enterprise struck gold in the desert by leveraging Amazon's robust platform.
Crack the code on advertising strategies and product hijacking within Amazon's ecosystem, where we dissect the intricate dance between cost-effective marketing and the darker shades of competitive tactics. Our conversation extends beyond mere product listings, as we arm you with the know-how to refine your sales acumen and construct a resilient product framework. Plus, get an exclusive scoop on the upcoming seller meet-up in Dubai, a hotbed for networking and exchanging insights with fellow entrepreneurs.
As the sun sets on our enlightening session, Krystel and I invite you to explore the vast opportunities ripening in the Middle Eastern sun. Whether you're a seasoned seller or just planting your flag, the region's e-commerce growth is a fertile ground, ready for you to sow your business dreams. So, tune in and prepare to be whisked away on a magic carpet ride of invaluable strategies and heartwarming success stories that await in the Middle East's online bazaar.
In episode 521 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Krystel discuss:
- 00:00 - Fastest Growing Marketplaces on Amazon
- 04:34 - Amazon Marketplaces In THe Middle East
- 12:09 - Amazon's Middle East Market Expansion
- 19:05 - Increase Sales With Prada Sunglasses
- 22:47 - The Viability of Reselling Products
- 28:19 - Comparing PPC Costs in Different Marketplaces
- 29:02 - Advertising and Hijacking on Amazon
- 34:17 - Building a Customer-Friendly Product Framework
- 35:30 - How To Contact Krystel Abi Assi
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got somebody back on the show who is going to talk about some of the fastest growing marketplaces in the world for Amazon, amazon UAE and Amazon KSA. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Helium 10's got over 40 tools for e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know how overwhelming it might seem to try and figure out how you're going to learn how to use everything, or maybe even to know which ones you want to get started with, so for a completely free course that's going to guide you through learning everything you need in order to become a Helium 10 expert, visit the Helium 10 Academy. That is h10.me/academy. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we are going on the opposite side of the world today, coming to us live from, I believe, Dubai. We've got Krystel back on the show. How's it going?
Krystel:
Hey, Bradley, very good. Thank you so much for having me back. Very excited to talk Amazonian with you.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, let's do it. Let's do it. You know I'm here in feeling the nostalgic vibes. I'm here in my I'm not going to call this the original serious sellers podcast studio because we, when we first started, we were in another. During the podcast we were in another small we work office way, way back in the day, but this was our second ever podcast studio. I'm here in Irvine, California, at our original Helium 10 office doing some meetings this week, so not in my regular studio, but you, you are. You've been in Dubai. How long now.
Krystel:
Since, well, I officially moved to Dubai in 2019 myself and the company we moved to Dubai in 2019. So not a very long time.
Bradley Sutton:
All right About the same time, since I've been in this, this office here. So if you're looking for a Krystel's backstory, we're not going to go too much into it today. You can go to episodes 304 and 376. She was on, so just h10.me/304 or 376. And you can, you know, see, you know a lot more of her backstory there. But today I wanted to, you know, catch up, because now it's it's, you know, pretty much, it's 2024. And we are, you know, in a new world where Amazon is opening up again to other market places. You know, there was a time where, where it seemed like it, wasn't really opening up to to new marketplaces and there was a time where there was just booming, you know, opening up in UAE and Saudi Arabia and other places. So I wanted to kind of like see what's going on in that region. So, first of all, in that area it's not just Amazon UAE, but what are the other main marketplaces in your region over there?
Krystel:
If you are a seller that's based or you know, you launch on Amazon in the UAE, you're not just serving the UAE customers, but you're serving UAE customers, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and, most notably and recently, Qatar, which became quite a popular country because, you know, if you're, if you're soccer fans, or yeah, or World Cup fans, then that's a really cool country. So, yes, as a seller, now you could just send your products over to Amazon in the UAE and you'll be able to access all of those countries as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, interesting, interesting. Now, which token is that connected to? Because I like, for example, if I'm selling in Amazon USA, that's like the North American token, but it actually also includes, you know, Mexico, Canada and Actually Brazil. You know, if I'm selling in in in Singapore, that's part of like the Asian token includes like Japan. And then there's Europe, which, just with the, you know, once I'm in one marketplace, I'm in all of the others. Now, is that, is that region connected to Europe? Is it connected to the Asian Marketplace where, as long as you're selling there, it's, it's pretty much just a few clicks? And then, of course, your business information, where I don't have to apply like from scratch, or is it its own separate entity?
Krystel:
It's really cool that you brought this up. So let me just clarify again Amazon doesn't have an Amazon like, unlike in Europe, where you have, for example, amazon Germany, amazon Spain, amazon France. Amazon still only has Operations in these three countries that I mentioned. However, they do. You as a seller, it'll be much easier for you because you can simply have your products warehouse in the UAE and sell them all across the rest of these countries that I just mentioned as well. Amazon has its own entity for the region, dubbed as Amazon Middle East, so it is part of your global marketplaces. For anyone that is currently an Amazon seller, you could just log in, add a new marketplace and you'll find the Middle East, and you'll find three countries under the Middle East KSA UAE and Egypt. You will not, unlike North America. You'll not be automatically, automatically. You know not. All three markets are gonna be automatically. You're not gonna be enrolled in them. You're gonna have to enroll in them separately.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, interesting interest. All right now. I think as far as helium 10 is concerned, it's it's tied to one of them, if it's its own region or tied to another place.
Krystel:
I'm not a hundred percent sure you guys are tight counts, like when you're.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, oh tight to Europe. Okay that's important for some customers like, or anybody who uses software like helium 10, everybody does it the same way. Like they count, like how many Marketplaces you're in, not necessarily by each marketplace, but by the token. So so like, for example, a certain level of helium 10, if it says you're allowed to connect to Tokens, it doesn't mean just like two marketplaces like US and Canada, that actually still counts for one, even Mexico and Brazil, and then if you're in Europe, that actually counts for two. So I think what you're saying is like, hey, if you, if you are selling in Europe, or whether you're not selling in Europe, it counts as all, as just one token. So you don't have to like, get another helium 10 account, guys you know, to be able to to access our tools for the UAE marketplace. Now, what, how's it been? You know UAE is now, you know, been there for a few years Amazon UAE. Is that the number one grossing marketplace from the ones that that you mentioned? Or Saudi Arabia, come up, or what would you say?
Krystel:
So let me give you some numbers which are quite interesting. I'm looking at my phone cuz I have, like these slide See, these pictures of us in the actual event, so that I just mentioned. So If you forget all of the stats coming out of the region, you'll find that you know the numbers are really promising. Just to just as a backstory as well, the region isn't that big. Population wise, like the whole of the Middle East, is probably the same population of just the US alone, so this is not a very big market. So these numbers, which you might not consider very big if you guys sell in the US, but based on the population, it's quite.
Krystel:
It's quite interesting seeing that Two of the strongest countries when it comes to e-commerce are really just the UAE and Saudi, because they have also the biggest population. But what's estimated to Sales and e-commerce are estimated to reach about 56 billion US dollars in 2025, which is a really good growth and a really big spike. Very interesting, but that's e-commerce sales in general. Now, amazon in the recent year. What they shared during the event was what they saw in 2023 was a 69% sales growth on Amazon UAE and a 65% sales growth on Amazon KSA, which is quite interesting the reason why I think KSA is Picking up.
Bradley Sutton:
I know what it means, but just let everybody know what you're referring to with KSA.
Krystel:
Oh, kingdom of Saudi Arabia, sorry. Yes, so it's Saudi Arabia. So the official, the official or the shorter version of saying Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or Saudi Arabia.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I knew that, but, like you know, I think there's a popular youtuber with that name, so, like some, some people might have got a little bit confused, but yeah just make sure, we're all on the same page, but that's.
Krystel:
KSA. But yeah, you're right, You're right.
Bradley Sutton:
There you go, okay.
Krystel:
You're right. You're right, so it, so the sales growth, is quite significant. It's simply because Saudi Arabia started a little bit later than UAE Amazon wise, that's what I mean started. So Amazon launched in 2019 In the UAE and then at the end of 2020, early 2021, which is obviously not wasn't an easy time they launched in Saudi. So that's why, plus Saudi, Saudi Arabia, or KSA, is Bigger, like it has three times the population of UAE. So I think it's natural to see those growth. Another number that I think would be interesting to share is something that they call the new to brand, which is very much a Salesy type of platform type of metric that they follow. Will would would life to dissect it with you a little bit further, Bradley, but what they said was the UAE is experiencing about 38% increase in new to brand customer growth and Saudi Arabia is experiencing 67% in new to brand customer growth.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting, interesting. So that's you know some promising, promising numbers. Yeah, um, there now, uh, there's every. You know, for somebody who's not familiar with the region, uh, and the operations there, is it very similar with how amazon operates everywhere else? You know like most customers will be able to get, you know, same day or one or two day delivery, and, and you know there's different. There's FBA warehouses all over the place and, and just like the, the, the system is exactly the same. Um, or are there some intricacies due to local laws or or the region?
Krystel:
That's a really good question. Actually, they are exactly the same and I have another number to share with you, if I can find it. Um, it's based on what amazon is trying, how amazon is trying to expand in the region, what they're trying to do and this is according to amazon's metrics, not to mine, okay, not my metrics uh, what they're what they've done is when it comes to storage. So let's, let's dissect the storage part of of your question. Yes, all fba, everything's there. Same day delivery, um, next day delivery, probably not two day delivery, even Quite quite good fulfillment centers and quite good uh logistic support. Uh, when asked, uh, a lot of customers say the reason why they like buying from amazon is primarily because of convenience and not because of price. So that's something to to be aware of. It's not a very price sensitive market, but obviously everybody likes to get a bargain. You know, um, amazon currently is it's increasing its capacity in the UAE by about 70%. So they do have about five fulfillment centers and they're opening up mega fulfillment centers in the UAE. I think they're positioning the UAE in particular to be the hub for the rest of the Middle East. Um, they obviously also do have uh lots of storage warehouses in Saudi Arabia. I don't have numbers for that. And what they're looking is they're looking to showcase and to, but they call it showcase, but obviously they want to onboard new sellers. They want to reach a hundred thousand sellers by 2026, all focused on SMEs and not necessarily large brands and retailers. So that's cool, okay.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Now, you know, like, when you look on the amazon website and look up like, or Google like, amazon middle east, it mentions the two marketplaces we've been, we've been talking about um, which is, uh, you know, UAE and and KSA. Now what I don't see you know, their advertise at least is is amazon Egypt. But it but it mentions they like amazon Egypt was also something taken over from a Sukh website, like, like, is it fulfilled from amazon UAE? Is it completely separate or what's going on in Egypt?
Krystel:
You know, Egypt is one of the most interesting markets for me uh population wise. It has a hundred million people, so it is technically one of the biggest countries uh in the Middle East Um and it's a very promising market Uh. However, based on the logistics and how difficult it is for uh foreigners and foreign sellers to be able to import export products into uh Egypt, what amazon have done is they've just open, operating it as a local amazon market, meaning they're really focused on supporting uh manufacturers and sellers in the region sell on amazon as an additional sales channel and it's not really opened up to um to foreign sellers or to international sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting Okay.
Krystel:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
So then, if I am a foreigner international seller, would you suggest, uh, I go at the same time in UAE and KSA, or is one a better starting point uh than the other?
Krystel:
That's a really good question. We get a lot of people reaching out to us for support, especially brands that want to, you know, really come into the market. Um, they're potentially already have feelers in the market. They know their product might work well. So we always tend to suggest that you get started in one market, which is probably the UAE. It is the most easiest market for you as an international seller to get into, launch your products in the UAE and then sell on amazon and KSA. What do I mean by that? So amazon did recently release a program which we are a part of and we support all sellers with that program called AE2SA, which basically means they want to support sellers.
Krystel:
Uh, try to expand from the UAE to KSA with support with things like logistics, shipment, product registration and also being able to immediately open your global account from UAE to Saudi. The reason for this is because the laws and regulations in Saudi are quite difficult when it comes to importing products, in particular, as opposed to the UAE. Um, I think the country is definitely making a lot of changes. I'm sure you guys have heard a lot of things that are happening nowadays in Saudi, so it's a really, really interesting country. But still, when it comes to business, there's still this problem. Amazon really recognized this and they saw that um SMEs, which are the majority of amazon sellers, aren't able to easily logistically get into Saudi, and that's why they thought the easiest way would be to just help and support them get from UAE over to Saudi with the help and support of Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now, uh, I know UAE is in mainly English marketplace as far as the language that you make your listings in. What about, uh, KSA? Is it also English?
Krystel:
Um, honestly. Honestly speaking, let's talk about the actual consumer first. Yes, amazon in the UAE is like you said, Bradley, because you have a lot of insights here. Uh, yes, primarily English. You do all of your cataloging in English. However, in UAE they did actually have to change the backend, the Amazon seller central, to be also in Arabic, because primarily, the main language spoken in well, the language in the region is Arabic, of course, but the UAE has about 80, or maybe a little bit more than 80% expats all English speaking, so the market itself is very heavy in English, whereas in Saudi Arabia it's it's the national, the actual language of the country, which is primarily Arabic.
Bradley Sutton:
So you can list your, so then you need to create your listings in Arabic for for KSA, as opposed to English.
Krystel:
You can. You have the option of creating it in both English and Arabic. You have the option of creating it in Arabic and getting Amazon to translate it to you in English Sorry, yeah, and getting Amazon to translate it in Arabic if you want to or you can log in and tweak the Arabic content as well. In the UAE we don't have that option, so we catalog all of our listings in English and the website automatically just translates the language into Arabic. We can't, we don't have any input as to if there's anything wrong with the, with the wording.
Bradley Sutton:
Got it, got it Okay, so not a lot of work for translation companies here in the region.
Krystel:
So it's going to be quite easy for you guys to be able to list your products for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
How about one success story each? You don't have to, you don't have to mention names or exact numbers, but one success story each from somebody that you know having success in UAE from outside of the country. You know could be somebody from Europe, somebody from North America who you know, maybe one of your clients, or just somebody in your network who said, hey, let's try UAE, and then they were here and now they're here, and then also somebody living in in UAE. Like I know, we had a one of somebody from your network last year on the podcast. I think he was originally from Serbia, if I'm not mistaken, but another kind of like success, or just to give people like an idea of like what the potential is of, you know, showing examples of real people.
Krystel:
Of course, I'm going to give you two examples of actual clients that we've worked with. Being an Amazon service provider, we work with a lot of key accounts from Amazon, so they send us a lot of great accounts that we can help, especially when it comes to strategies, which is what we love to do. What we see in the region here is that especially you know the numbers that I told you about earlier new to brand numbers. Those are primarily because larger brands in the Middle East, such as the recognized brands that you guys know and love, that we all buy, like Apple, samsung those types of brands don't really take Amazon seriously in the region. It's just just another sales channel for them. So that's why I think really savvy entrepreneurs are able to just come in soup in, and if you know how to sell to the Amazon customer these days because you know, you really know how to sell, you really need to know how to sell in this market then you'll you're able to pick up where these brands have left off.
Krystel:
We recently actually started working with Prada Prada sunglasses. We don't work directly with the Prada company, we work with the distributor of Prada right here in the UAE and they are a prime example of a retailer that was just. You know, they just have their products on Amazon because they need to. They don't have their team is amazing, but their team has no knowledge of Amazon. They're just an e-commerce like a couple of e-commerce people. They know a little bit about websites, they know a little bit about that, but they don't know a lot about the interest cases on Amazon. And because we made a lot of the changes to their listings, we were able to understand who their key client was. And, mind you, prada sunglasses are not cheap, of course. You know that. So we were able to actually increase their sales during definitely during Black Friday, without doing like a crazy discount, but we focused a lot on some of the viral Prada sunglasses that were, you know, viral now on TikTok. We were able to increase their sales by about 500%, and that's just during Black Friday. So the key takeaway of this story is to understand that sales are there, customers are there, but it's also very important to understand how the customer operates on Amazon, how they like to purchase products, what are their buyer personas and how to talk to those buyers. And still large brands like Prada still need to do the same thing.
Krystel:
Another story would be one of our brands that we recently well as of three or four months ago we started working with. They are a dog treat company. They sell natural dog treats. Based out of Poland, they are one of the largest they're really really popular brand on Amazon in Europe. We help them from start to finish, enter into Amazon in the UAE. It was quite difficult because they sell natural, raw dog treats for them to enter into KSA, so what we did was support them. You know, to get these products into the UAE is not really that complicated If I were to compare it to any other country. They do require registration. Things like makeup, things like supplements. Of course, these products do require registration, but the registration is quite simple. It takes about 15 days. It's very inexpensive to do, very easy to get done. So we did that. We launched the products. The pet industry here in the region is booming since 2020. Everybody now has pets. You see pets everywhere, but obviously pet stores sell the same exact products because it's the same distributors. So customers who are looking for things that are different, looking for things that are unique whether that be pet accessories or food or anything like that opt to search for them on marketplaces like Amazon, and that's where this company was able to, you know, really come into the region and be able to take a huge market share on Amazon, and now, from Amazon UAE, they've also launched NKSA through the program that we just discussed.
Bradley Sutton:
Are there other kinds of of selling that are having success in KSA and UAE, for example? Obviously we mainly talk about private label here, but there's people who do wholesale arbitrage. I'm not even sure if KDP is a thing over there, but our other forms of selling like maybe entry points for people or pretty much the way to go is private label in those marketplaces.
Krystel:
That's a great question. Thank you so much for bringing that up. I mainly work with private label. That's why I always have the private label lens on. I love private label as well, but, yes, for sure, other selling models, and obviously you don't need to pigeonhole yourself. If you are doing private label, you could also do reselling as well. Kdp doesn't exist in the region. I would say retail arbitrage is quite impossible. Amazon is making it very, very difficult for sellers to just sell just products that they buy from stores. But reselling is available and, yes, we don't deal with I don't have direct relations with anyone that does reselling, but I do. Obviously, in our community meetups I do meet a lot of people that are doing reselling and they're doing quite well.
Krystel:
The only thing that you would need to think about is you would just need a larger catalog. Because of the size of the market. You're not gonna have products that are selling thousands of units per day, so you would just need to think about expanding your catalog, and that's what you need to do also for private label. You just need to think about the strategy. You need to expand your catalog so that you can generate the revenue that you're used to generating in markets like the US as an example. But yeah, reselling very popular as well. A lot of people actually go to the local markets here in because we have a lot of wholesale Chinese local markets. They pick up just generic products and they resell them and a lot of people sell branded products. They go directly to the distributors, buy products or they even buy them from. Recently I met a great young lady. She started selling on Amazon. She buys all of her beauty products, everything from a distributor based in France and she sells them. She sells like very recognized brands on Amazon in the UAE and she's killing it and she just started. She's in university and she's doing really well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, excellent, excellent. Now something that's I think a lot of sellers might wonder is all right, this all sounds well and good. How do I get started? Well, a lot of your clients using Helium 10 to do product research and keyword research. And then what are they for KSA? Are they kind of just using like brand analytics and things, since Helium 10 is not, doesn't have the research tools yet over there.
Krystel:
You guys have left us hanging in KSA. But you are promising me, Bradley, that soon nobody knows when we're gonna have Helium 10. Not, promising. Not promising.
Bradley Sutton:
But hey, what I can promise is that if the demand is there, we'll make it. So, like if somebody's listening on the show or some of your network want to make sure that Helium 10 opens up for KSA, you guys need to, like, make your voices heard and send customer service messages to say, hey, please, we need these tools for KSA.
Krystel:
I think that's what everyone did for UAE. I think your customer service team was like help. So, yeah, happy to do it in KSA as well. Let's go. The population is bigger, so I'm sure you're gonna get three times the amount of requests. So, yeah, exactly, we, almost everyone because Helium 10 is a really popular tool. You guys are doing great and we love it as well. Helium 10 is primarily the tool that people use in UAE. Unfortunately, there are no tools currently for KSA. For us, yes, we use brand analytics and such, but unfortunately for new sellers, they try to piece together any type of information that they can find. They maybe use Helium 10 for UAE and try to. They're very similar markets, very, very similar type of customers. So, yeah, they just try to make do with what they have.
Bradley Sutton:
What for a foreign entity? What are the requirements? What is Amazon asking to set up the account? Like, if I'm a UK business, can I just use my UK corporation? If I have a USA LLC or I'm a private individual, do I just register that? Do I have to have like importer of record, like Japan has? What are the obstacles that I need to think of before going ahead and getting started over there?
Krystel:
Really cool. Obviously, like any region, I know I'm painting it as very positive, but I look at it as a great region. Of course, but of course, just like any endeavor you guys want to do, you need to research it. Expansion is great, growth is great, but growth comes with risk and being uncomfortable. So if you're happy with that, go ahead and do it. I think and I did say that with you on the earlier, maybe the first ever podcast, I think Amazon UAE is one of, or the Middle Eastern general is probably one of the easiest markets that Amazon have for you to set up as a seller. Absolutely yes. You can get started with your LTD if you're a UK based seller. You can get started with your LLC if you are a US based seller. Absolutely no problem at all, and you can also register a company here in the UAE, avoid paying taxes if you like, and set up on Amazon in the UAE as well. But it is very, very simple. You just need a business license. You can even open a professional account without a business license. You can just use your ID. You just either need your business license and a copy of your ID or you need your ID and a bank statement Very simple and you'll get it done. It's a very simple process to open an account, for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
PPC costs usually in, I mean, I think in America now people are like, oh my goodness, ppc is so expensive. But in my experience I've seen some of the other newer marketplaces it's usually lower. So is that your experience, comparing it to like US and Europe, where the per click fees in UAE and KSA are a lot less than what somebody might be used to paying in other marketplaces?
Krystel:
I wish you didn't ask me this question. That's the only negative thing. No, ppc is actually quite expensive here, which is very, very odd. Yes, it's very interesting, very odd. However, this is where it becomes really interesting. Sponsored, brand sponsored display ads are quite expensive. However, everything that you get as a trademark or a brand registered seller on Amazon, such as video ads, banner ads, are quite inexpensive. The reason is the majority of sellers on Amazon, especially the new sellers, are not brand registered here in the market, however, so that's why that part of ads is quite Cheap, dare I say. However, standard ads are somewhat expensive per click Mixture of things. Obviously, everybody wants to advertise these days you know how Amazon is but also potentially because there are a lot of new sellers in the region. So when a new seller launches, they just want to get started, they really want to test out the product. They are willing to sacrifice that product. So they start bidding more than they need to. Guys come on. So they start bidding a little bit higher than they should, which basically gets the PPC ads to be quite expensive. Well, based on how I think they should be, but yeah, it is somewhat high. It's not a cheap place to advertise, for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
OK, all right, sticking on the potentially negative kind of things. What are the like? Is the same kind of maybe black hat things happening over there, or is it maybe less? You know, like in American marketplaces, there's a lot of maybe listing getting hijacked or a lot of fake reviews that maybe don't get policed, or people trying to do shady things, like again, since that's a smaller marketplace, is that not happening as much, you think, like some of these shady practices, or is it just as prevalent over there as it is in other marketplaces?
Krystel:
That's an interesting question, I think. When it comes to reviews, no, not that much. When it comes to hijacking, yes. But listen, I get a lot of messages on Instagram. I got a lot of like. We get a lot of calls to the office, people just asking us for help and they say, oh, my listing got hijacked. And then I discover they're not brand registered, they're just selling a standard product. And I say, well, that's not hijacking, that's just another resender. So, yes, if I were to say are there hijackers? Yes, there are, but mostly it's not actually hijackers, it's just the standard business format of Amazon.
Krystel:
But some sellers don't actually know that that's the case. When they launch on Amazon, they think they own the product. They created the listing and nobody else is allowed to set it. And some hijackers that we have discovered don't do it because of black hat tactics or anything like that. They actually resell a product because they think they're allowed to. They think that's how it works. So we normally actually just communicate directly with the seller and we say, look, you're selling this product. We haven't permitted you to sell it. We don't even have to go through Amazon brand support, like. We could just talk directly to the seller and they're willing to just remove themselves. So it's not as prevalent and it's not as tough. It's quite easy to handle, for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
OK, cool. Before we get into your strategy of the day, a couple of things. So I'll be in Dubai on January night of January 11th, 12th. So we're going to be planning Krystel something. I maybe, either. I'll probably come in too late on the 11th, so it'll probably be like a seller breakfast or something like that the morning of the 12th. So if people want to first of all, just if they want to reach out to you at all to ask follow up questions or get help with UAE, or they want to reach out to you to find out details about whatever we're going to do on the January 12th, how can they find you out there?
Krystel:
First of all, I'm really happy. You've got really great loyal listeners, me being one of them, of course, but whenever we did our very first podcast, I got so many follow up questions and it's really, really exciting to see people excited about the potential of coming into the region. Please feel free to reach out to us. You know we're happy to help you in any question that you have, even if it's just a small question. The easiest way to reach out to us is through our official website, which is wwwasasamazonsellerssocietymiddleeastorg, or you could just simply find us on Instagram, amazon Sellers Society. Dm us and we'll be able to help you with anything that you need.
Krystel:
We will be, obviously, once we decide, bradley, what we're going to have for breakfast and where we're going to have it, we will be announcing it as well. So very excited to see a lot of people come to the breakfast. A lot of Helium 10, you know, a lot of Helium 10. People from the network also now live in Dubai, especially that, as you know, in January the weather is absolutely wonderful. So I hope maybe even people will fly in, who knows? Because the region is really quite close. So if you live anywhere close, you could just hop one hour and come to the breakfast.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, Awesome, awesome, all right now, what is your, you know closest, with a 30 or 60 second strategy of the episode. Go ahead and hit us with one.
Krystel:
So thank you First and foremost. I always hear from new sellers, especially in the region here, that Amazon is such a saturated market. I think we've been hearing about Amazon being a saturated market probably since the beginning of Amazon. Tools like Helium 10 can definitely help you find really cool products to sell, but nowadays the Amazon customer, the e-commerce customer, is no longer just build it and they will come type of customer.
Krystel:
You really need to hone in on your sales skills. You really need to know how to build a framework for a product that customers can buy. We see it all the time. Customers come to us and they say sellers come to us and they say I'm spending so much money on ads and I'm not generating any sales. Is it a platform problem? What is it? Is it a product problem? And 99% of the time, it's because they don't know who their buyer is. They don't know how to talk to their ideal customer, so they're just listing the product and hoping for the best. Nowadays, that's not something that you can do. Make sure that you work on your strategy and you'll be super successful on platforms like Amazon or anywhere you decide to sell. And good luck.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. All right, Krystel. Thank you for coming back on the show and it'll be great to see you in person again. So my first event I did an event with you a couple years ago in Dubai. That was great and I look forward to seeing you in person again and wish everybody the best of success if they're expanding to Amazon Middle East. See you guys later.
Ever wonder how an Amazon ranking maestro maneuvers the complex chessboard of e-commerce strategy? Alina Vlaic, the founder of AZRank and our go-to guru, returns to the show with a fresh cache of tactics for conquering Amazon's ever-changing TOS and algorithm. With a pivot towards market research and feedback-driven methods, she reveals how her business remains a tour de force in enhancing keyword relevance. Our conversation is a riveting game plan for sellers eager to sink their teeth into compliant and effective ranking strategies, tailored for those who play to win.
Navigating the e-commerce seas requires a versatile captain, and in this episode, we chart the course through the distinct waters of Amazon, Walmart, and Etsy. Discover how social proof anchors Etsy's success, why Walmart's ecosystem is the new frontier to watch, and what Amazon's virtual bundles mean for your bulk sales strategy. I even share a personal tale of triumph with these virtual bundles that's revolutionized how my industrial scientific brand approaches the bulk market. This is your masterclass in adapting to the unique currents of each platform, a conversation not to be missed by merchants sailing towards profitable shores. When it comes to marketing artillery, press coverage and user-generated content (UGC) are the cannons of the day. We dissect when press really packs a punch for brand awareness and the shift towards a cost-per-click payment model. Then, we turn the spotlight on UGC, contrasting its current clout with the fading glitz of external traffic channels. To cap off, I let you in on a strategic secret using Amazon's Opportunity Explorer to sharpen your PPC and ranking initiatives. For visionaries ready to unleash the power of authenticity and innovation in their online presence, this episode is your treasure map to success.
In episode 520 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Alina discuss:
- 03:13 - Dynamic Year in Amazon and E-Commerce
- 05:34 - New Strategies on Amazon, Walmart, Etsy
- 15:05 - Ranking and Variations in Virtual Bundles
- 18:50 - Press X and UGC in Marketing
- 22:07 - Discussion on UGC and Expanding Opportunities
- 23:03 - UGC and AI in Amazon Selling
- 31:03 - Expanding Brand With Miraclecom Dashboard
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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/video
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we got Alina back on the show, and she’s gonna talk about what is working with Amazon and Walmart ranking strategies, as well as some cool Amazon virtual bundle that I didn’t even know about. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10's Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we're going to the other part of the world. I believe she's in Romania right now. We've got Alina back on the show here, and what city I'm trying to remember? What city in Romania are you at?
Alina:
Sibiu
Bradley Sutton:
How far away is that from the Dracula castle that I've always wanted to visit?
Alina:
Very close, like 100 kilometers.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. So, yeah, all right if we visit your family over there. I know we've hung out in Turkey, another place in around the world, but not in your home country, so I definitely want to visit over there. Now, guys, if you want to get her full backstory we're not going to go too much into it today because she's been on the podcast before, make sure to go to episodes. 122 was one of them, and also 267, and then most recently she was on in 406. All right, so this is now her fourth time on the podcast. Each time she's expanded what she's done, and you might know her from AZRank, which I've talked about a plethora of times. I've always joked with her that I wish I had some kind of contract where I get $10 every time I mention it. I might not be working at Helium 10 anymore. I'd be so rich. But hey, I mentioned things that I organically use, and no, you know, Alina doesn't pay me to, I'm not an affiliate, but I naturally will recommend services and things that I use and that I trust, and that's definitely AZRank.
Bradley Sutton:
Throughout the years has changed because of Amazon differences, and then last year we talked a little bit about one of our newer companies called Press X, and so let's just first talk about what people know you for what's going on in the AZRank world these days. Like somebody might think that, oh, AZRank must be completely out of business because now there's no search, find, buy and stuff. But you know, you guys are obviously still doing things that are above board. It's not, it's not, it's kind of on purpose. I'm wearing a gray hat, I'm not wearing a black hat, not a white hat, but it might be some gray here, but no, but anyways, update us on what's been going on the last year on the AZRanks.
Alina:
Yes, First of all, hello everybody and thank you so much for having me again. It's a pleasure, always a pleasure. It's been a very interesting year, a very dynamic year all around, I feel. I mean, from all the five and a half years I've been in the industry, it's been the most dynamic year from all points of view in the Amazon and e-commerce world. Yes, we're still alive and breathing in our ranking business. Things are working still very well In terms of TOS compliance, because I know everybody has this question on their lips. I feel like and I know we've talked a lot before about this everybody has its own, their own, risk tolerance about how the Amazon TOS is interpreted. You've known me for a bunch of years now and we've always tried to be TOS compliant or as much as TOS compliant as possible, because even back in the days, people have always been debating about even the search find buys were they compliant or not. So it's pretty much the same thing right now. We have pivoted and we have changed our way of doing things. We're mostly focused on market research and we have combined that with some surveys and with some feedback that people give you back while you're still ranking for keywords. And from my point of view. Now it's been like two years since Amazon has changed completely the TOS and I strongly can admit that the way we're doing things right now it's working much better because you're going on a broader experience with everything that means ranking and that helps you basically be more relevant in the algorithm point of view.
Alina:
So, yes, working, still doing it. We have a lot of, you know, tweaks and tricks and different strategies depending on. Depending first of all on the product, second of all on the marketplace, because Amazon is one thing, Walmart is another thing, Esty is another thing, and so on and so forth.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now what about on? You know you're talking mainly about Amazon, but did refer a little bit to, like Walmart and Etsy. Still the same old school stuff. Working on platforms like that, as far as you know, like, like you know, potentially search, find, buy, which is not against Walmart's service, and then on Etsy is something similar, is what's working for ranking.
Alina:
These days, etsy is pretty much in the same place you need to. On Etsy, we don't have too many tools yet. It's still the E rank that we're mainly getting the info from and the organic search that you're doing and finding your ranking. But at the same time, what we've seen lately I mean not lately, like lately in the past year or so, a year and a half on Etsy is that you need to have some social proof, like you said, you need to have some reviews, you need to have some, some people talking about you posting some real, real life photos of your product, because you know, etsy is all about visual. So Etsy, that's pretty much it. And on Walmart is very dynamic, it's extremely dynamic lately. They're changing so much and, yes, search, find, buy is not against terms of service you can do those. Add to cart are not against thermal service you can do those. And there are a bunch of strategies that we were working on right now and we're doing a bunch of tests to see which way to better go on specific situations. But it's going really well and I feel like Walmart is going in the right direction.
Bradley Sutton:
Finally, Now, going back to the Amazon, you know, like you know you're kind of like me in the sense that you like, you like experimenting and different things and you've had different theories. You've tested. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But you know, I know you've talked about experimenting with the questions and answers and potentially finding the scene you can find the secret sauce of if Amazon posts. You know influence, you know algorithms and stuff. But what can you tell me like in the last year or so, like even ones that failed, because you know if you tried it, I'm sure somebody else probably had the idea that maybe it would work. So what are some experiments that worked out well? Some things that are like Nope, can't really influence, you know, can't really help this ranking at all. What are some stuff you've been doing?
Alina:
So a lot of stuff, but what? I can tell you something? That it didn't work and it's related to my latest episode of the last year, one in December, when I was very sure that I am very close to discovering the secret for Amazon posts. Unfortunately, something happened and I think in the algorithm at one point it just didn't work anymore. If you're already doing the Amazon post, go on and do them. If you don't do them at all, maybe it would be a good idea to have that content out there and more visibility for your brand, but not in the terms of doing them just for ranking. I couldn't find the secret sauce yet. Hopefully it's still going to be out there. What I found to be working, and working real well, is something about virtual bundles. I know we've talked about that a lot lately in the past. So virtual bundles before pretty recently I couldn't say exactly when, but before recently you couldn't shuffle the quantity of the same product within a virtual bundle.
Bradley Sutton:
So then yeah, because I know, let's say, I've got a coffin shelf and a coffin bath rug I could make a virtual bundle, and it's one each. But now you are ready. Now are you saying that I could do a virtual bundle with 10 each, or I can do a virtual bundle with 10 of one and one of another.
Alina:
Both. Now you could also make a virtual bundle out of two coffin shelves only.
Bradley Sutton:
Of the same ASIN. I really Well, since when I haven't even been. You see, that's what happens. That sometimes boggles my mind. You know, like Amazon, obviously we were just talking about how I had to delay you because I was on the, I was doing the weekly buzz and you know I Amazon announces so many things and a lot of it is just like little tiny things, but that seems like it would be a pretty significant announcement or a change, and I never saw that announced. Anyway, were you just like playing around with it? And that's how you?
Alina:
discovered it. Here's the story. Uh, I think I told this like back two years ago in one of your podcast. So I'm selling uh, one of my brands is an industrial scientific and I'm selling some lab supplies, which usually are a pack of 10, pack of 20, pack of 100, because there's small stuff, you know. So I I saw at one point that people were buying more of the same product, right, like two units, three units five units. But since the virtual bundles were there, I couldn't do a virtual bundle with shop with the same quantity, I mean more of the same um quantity of the same product. So then I I created some FBM listings with pack of 500, you know, and combined and basically I was it's it was the same product but I was selling. I was sending the buyer five packs instead of a pack of 500. I was sending five packs of 100 because my pack of 100 was the product I was selling on Amazon. Make sense. So.
Alina:
But I did them at the end because I couldn't do them inside Amazon and I couldn't and I didn't want to do it FBA back then, because the FBA fees and all the stuff wasn't worth it. The, the package would would be too big and everything. So the, the profitability wasn't that great on the, it wasn't worth it to keep it into FBA. Let's say so. Then I did this. And then one point recently, very recently it's a matter of 10 days, two weeks maybe I discovered that that it was allowed to. I mean, amazon allows you to create virtual bundles, two of each, two of this, with one of these, three of this was one of this five of the same thing, you know, and at that point I well hold on.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm trying to, I'm trying to do it here and I can't figure out. Let me share my screen here. Let's see. All right, so well. First of all, I was able to add more products. I never did that before, like right then how, where you can only add two, before I was able to have like three here.
Alina:
You have the couple there to add more products, if you see, like on the left.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So I'm looking here and at first I didn't see it. But right here under quantity I can now individually change this.
Alina:
That's crazy To as many as you want.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, like, and then now it's gonna reflect in the ASIN. That is super cool. I never. Why in the world would Amazon not make this an announcement is kind of crazy. And did you just randomly discover it? Like you were creating a virtual bundle and you're like, hey, what's this button do? And that's how you figured it out.
Alina:
It's not entirely my personal discovery. Like me, Alina, I was working with somebody from my team and all of a sudden was like he said I need to try this, I need to try this. I think I saw a plus button somewhere and then that's how it worked. But I have more on that, and this is something even more crazy. That was absolutely not possible at all until now. You can run PPC on the virtual bundles.
Bradley Sutton:
You couldn't run PPC on the virtual bundles, yeah, before I think you could only do sponsored brand ads back in the old days, right.
Alina:
Now you can do anything. He discovered this Really. Yes, my team made discover this first by mistake because he was doing some bulk uploads in the campaigns and he forgot some bundle ASINs out there and all of a sudden we had like some huge conversion on one ASIN and he said this is a virtual bundle. How on earth this one got here? But then we started looking into that and apparently it works Mostly. What I can guarantee for is it's working through bulk upload. I don't know if you can add them manually in your campaigns or with some tools that you're using for the PPC, but with the bulk upload 100% working.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I don't think you can do it in the campaign manager. I'll just double check or add products to advertise.
Alina:
I would check this. If anybody has some bundles that really work, I would definitely check this because, since these changes are happening, they might allow this as well.
Bradley Sutton:
And then you've actually seen it then in the wild where you see a sponsored ad and it's showing the virtual bundle as opposed to so you like confer, wow, okay, that's pretty cool. But bulk upload, then very interesting, okay, so that's like super cool. Now what about ranking? In the old days it was mainly if you're ranking for one of the component units, like the coffin shelf. Let's say, I had a double coffin shelf bundle I could only rank. It's almost like a variation listing where you can only rank for one and you can't rank for the virtual bundle. But I swear I've seen recently where I had a placement for the virtual bundle and the individual. Are you seeing that too?
Alina:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now I've seen it and I've seen it a lot. I haven't run any tests for clients, but on my product, since we have a lot of this type of bundles I mean in the hundreds probably I see it a lot. So it's 100% valid for my category at least. Again, I'm not sure for all categories, but I think it's out there for everybody. If you're ranking on a keyword with your main product, you can rank on the same keyword with your virtual bundles.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool, so really cool virtual bundle stuff going on. Any other hacks that you can share with us that's been working for you. These are not hacks, but another strategy or anything else.
Alina:
Relevance is still the main thing that helps you with your product launch or relaunch or ranking campaign or PPC or whatever. If you're not relevant, you cannot do anything. Basically and I know you were saying a couple of months ago about the Amazon recommended thing. Amazon recommended rank. I tested that myself and it works like a charm and it's very much valid in terms of ranking campaigns. I mean, yes, if you're having problems ranking, I double you and I say you need to check that Amazon recommended rank. Because there you have your answer and something related to keywords. I would say make sure you stay focused. I mean, of course, all of us want to rank on hundreds of keywords, on thousands of keywords, on as many keywords as possible, but for Amazon, especially when you're launching a new product, you need to be very focused on a particular set of keywords so that you can find your relevance and your ranking juice and then Amazon will start showing you on its own on some related keywords. If you have some root keywords, some good root keywords, in your title, in your bullet points, then you will have ranking on a lot of additional keywords. As I said before, try to have a logic for everything. If the common sense and if everything makes sense to you, then it will eventually make sense for the other people and for the algorithm itself.
Bradley Sutton:
What's been going on the Press X side? Last year you were doing a lot of cool work with getting a lot of traction on the Press side. Is that still a valid tactic, using Press during launch or to promote products at all?
Alina:
After one and a half years now, I can say that you should look at press and especially press acts. I mean, since we're talking about press acts, but press in general, not necessarily as a conversion tactic or a launching tactic or a ranking tactic, but it's a brand awareness, it's an appearance, it's something that people want to talk about, it's traffic. If you're looking at sales, conversions, this type of numbers, and you're planning on making a press article or getting your product featured in a magazine just for sales, then I would say, think again. And especially if we're talking about a new launch Press from what I've seen over a year, it's not necessarily for new brands. You can look at it if you're a very established brand launching new products. That's a different thing. You can very much look at it. If you have a strong Shopify website or outside Amazon and you have I mean, people know your brand and it's not just on Amazon only then, yes, you could look at that. You could also look at that, for example, if you have an extraordinary product, something that is unique, innovative, something that is very special, you can look at press too. And also an idea maybe you can look at press if you're looking at Kickstarter. I know it's very popular right now, but if you're planning a Kickstarter campaign, you can maybe consider also press to driving traffic to that Kickstarter campaign to make more money.
Alina:
So that's how press works. It's working better for some products, not that great for some other products in terms of again, in terms of ranking, in terms of sales, in terms of traffic. It's there. So it depends a lot of what your expectations are. Our model is a CPC cost base, so you only pay for the clicks you get. It's not like a retainer fee, it's not a fixed amount. If your article drives only 10 clicks, that means, for example, $20, that's all the amount you're going to pay and you're still going to get the article. And you need to consider that as the more articles you get, the more love you're going to get from Google and for all the external or outside Amazon platforms that are out there, because once the article is there, it's just there. It's there for everybody to see and click on it.
Bradley Sutton:
OK, all right. Any quick experiences of somebody it's worked out for in the last year like hey, they were doing this and then they ran a series of articles and this is what happened from it.
Alina:
We had a brand which is into the dental hygiene niche and we've had a few campaigns very successful. I mean, I remember the ROAS was six, so for $1 spent they made six, which was good. I mean, on top of the traffic and everything else, this one also made money, you know.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. All right, now switching gears. You seem you're kind of like me. You can't stay doing one thing. You have to have your hand in like 75 different things. So you and I are liking that. So the latest thing I heard you talking about which I purposely didn't ask you about because I wanted to kind of like find out about here I know nothing about what you're doing there is you've mentioned you're doing some things on the UGC side. So first of all, what prompted that? You know like you don't just dream. One time I actually did have a dream about a tool and it eventually became something in Cerebro, the advanced rank filter. It literally came from a dream ahead. Most people, I think, don't dream up things. There's a reason why you thought of doing UGC. So what started that? And then, what exactly are you doing in that field now?
Alina:
OK. So UGC I think it's the. You know how external traffic was two or three years ago, when everybody was talking about external traffic. That's how I feel UGC is right now. So I started this because, from the community of people that we have and that we use for our ranking campaigns which is huge at one point I thought these people can do more than that. So what do we need as Amazon sellers? What does the market need that we can help with? And so this came First. We only started with UGC because it's more than that. I have something else that even you don't know about.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh my goodness OK.
Alina:
So, ugc, I don't know what's your take on the AI. I love it. I'm a little bit afraid of it as well, but what I can say is that, as much as people love it, eventually everything is a cycle and they will turn back to real life photos, real life commercials, real life billboards. I've seen this happen in Europe, at least Romania, and also other places in Europe. There are billboards with burger photos or commercials saying this photo was taken using a phone and they're showing real people. Those brands could afford an AI and they probably are using AI in different other type of places. I've done some research lately and I found some really interesting data.
Alina:
For example, brands huge brands that are running Google ads, and they compared not necessarily on AI, let's say a professional studio photo which is a wide background, blah, blah, blah, everything with a photo taken with a phone, a little bit of editing, but nothing serious, and they ran Google ads on it. Guess what? The CPC was 60% lower on the UGC one. The user generated a photo and the conversion was 38% higher on the same photo. So that's how we started. I think that's where we're going to go.
Alina:
It's a lot of stuff that you can do with your UGC. We do photos and videos, especially videos that we recommend people using, filling Amazon with content on their listings. In places where it's still free, For example Q&A, you can answer every question with a video and every event I go to and I speak when I ask this question, I get a maximum of five people in the room raising their hands. Who uses this? Almost nobody's still nobody's using this, and it's a free place on Amazon where you can post content. And then there's videos about your product line, right, or it used to be called related videos, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
I have brand.
Alina:
I have eight and nine figure brands I work with. They do not launch a product without at least three to five videos filled in that section, because if you don't put them yourself, then your competitors will come and they will tag your ASIN into one of their listings and then their video is going to show on yours. So when I want to buy your product and I scroll down your listing, I'm going to find theirs and maybe, I don't know, maybe it has a thumbnail that attracts me, and then I'm going to click on that and I'm going to go buy that instead of yours and then all that content, for example, all the UGC we do. If you want to, we can post on TikTok Just like that. Not on influencer accounts we don't work with yet we don't have those type, but we're working on creating a few influencer accounts from our people, but we're posting it there. As I said, you never know what happens on TikTok. We use hashtags. Everything can be there, and this is something that you don't necessarily have to come to us to do it.
Alina:
You can do it yourself in the beginning. You can do your own Q&A videos. You can do your own unboxing or whatever More explanations you want to do about your product and post in your Amazon listing, and then you just go post it on TikTok. It just has to be there. And then, of course, as I said, you can use it on Google Ads. You can do a bunch of things with it. One of the things I do believe it's very important nowadays is that we have so many tools, including AI, because sometimes you can combine these two. You can combine UGC and AI and have something amazing without going to a professional photo studio. I'm not saying that they are bad. They have their own thing. Which they do is great and necessary, but for some things you don't need to go to a professional studio to do it and pay an arm and a leg. Most of the time you can just do this. I hope I didn't ramble too much about this.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Now, before we get into your tip of the week, which you even prepared, so that means it must be a good one here is can you just let us know how people can contact you for any of these 75 different things that we've been talking about today? How can they find you on the interwebs?
Alina:
So if they search for my name, which is Alina, like vlaic on pretty much everywhere, they can find me and message me in person. Or I'm going to just say one website which is azrank.com Contact form, or my email is alina@azrank.com. Feel free to contact me with every I don't know, critique, feedback, idea. I'm always trying to reply to everybody as fast as possible.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. All right, what's your strategy of the week?
Alina:
A lot of people ignore opportunity explorer section in the seller central. I know all of us love the search query reports and everything that's. It's out there, right. But when you're launching a new product, you don't have that data, unless you use one of my older strategies that you can have. You can have the data, but I'm not going to go into that. When you launch a new product, you don't have that data right. So you should go into opportunity explorer, because Amazon gives you a list of keywords, right. First of all, you need to identify your niche and your perfect list of keywords, because maybe your product will be in several niches, so you need to go there and find all the keywords that are relevant to your product and those should be your focus keywords for your listing and for your PPC and for your ranking campaign. Because if that data comes from Amazon and it's basically given to you for free, if you use it, I'm pretty sure you have much better chances of success to become relevant in Amazon's eyes, rather than I don't know doing your own keyword research and focusing on 3,000 keywords at the same time and spending a lot of money.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah.
Alina:
And again, that's valid. That starts with your listing and then your PPC and whatever other ranking strategies you may use. So something else that is maybe a little bit for advanced sellers, but I found it very interesting. I spoke about this at the last Billion Dollar Seller Summit. If you've mentioned Kevin King, it's something called mirakl.com. It's Mirakl, but mirakl.com. It's a dashboard that helps you expand your brand on thousands not thousands, hundreds of marketplaces all over the world with a click of a button. What does that mean is, basically, they create you an account, you have a dashboard, you list your catalog there and they will take care of everything else. You just need to fulfill. You can connect it with your Shopify for now, but they can get you into I don't know, into Best Buy, into Target, into marketplaces that are very difficult to get in otherwise. Just give it a try and I know a lot of people will find it interesting.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome, all right, well, Alina, thank you so much for joining us today. Very few people make it to four episodes on the podcast that means that you're a popular guest. So you've made it, and I'm sure you'll be one of the ones to make it to five. So we'll reach out to you at the end of next year perhaps, and see what's going on with you In the meantime. I look forward to seeing you, hopefully at one of these upcoming conferences. And yeah, thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you soon.
Alina:
Thank you. Thank you, see you soon. Bye.
Curious about how the latest Amazon innovations could reshape your selling experience? Let’s see what’s buzzing in the tech giant and Helium 10’s newest features that are stirring the E-commerce pot! We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. We're dishing out the details on Amazon's revolutionary Fit Insights tool and the game-changing low inventory level fee, set to shake up the way apparel and shoe vendors approach their trade. Experience firsthand how Amazon's shoppable A+ content module is making waves with its compelling conversion rates, and join us in tipping our hats to TikTok's staggering $10 billion consumer spending landmark, a true testament to the app's growing prowess in the digital realm.
As we navigate the ebb and flow of online retail, we're also spotlighting Amazon's translation feature for sponsored ads, now making waves across North America and Europe. And for a quirky twist, don't miss our take on California's recent ban on donkey skin gelatin sales. TikTok becomes first non-game app to reach $10B in consumer spending https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/11/tiktok-becomes-first-non-game-app-to-reach-10b-in-consumer-spending/ Language translations are now available for Sponsored Display custom creatives https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/language-translations-available-for-sponsored-display-custom-creatives/ Amazon will stop selling donkey skin gelatin, but only in California https://www.engadget.com/amazon-will-stop-selling-donkey-skin-gelatin-but-only-in-california-212555337.html
We're thrilled to have Bradley with us, sharing his expert insights into the new Black Box Brand Analytics tool, a powerhouse for sellers seeking to maximize product research efficacy. This episode is brimming with strategic insights, so plug in and prepare to power up your Amazon and Walmart selling game!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Shivali covers:
- 00:44 - Minimum Inventory Tool
- 02:00 - Fit Insights Tool
- 03:35 - Shoppable A+ Content
- 04:45 - Tiktok Hits 10B?
- 05:43 - Language Translations for SD
- 06:33 - Partnered Carrier
- 07:32 - Your Donkey Meat
- 08:05 - Subscribe to Helium 10's YouTube Channel
- 08:17 - Pro Training Tip: Helium 10 BlackBox x Amazon Brand Analytics
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Join us as we navigate the intricacies of ranking on Walmart and gauging customer sentiment on this platform with our special guest, Costin Vlaic, from AZRank. Listen in as Costin shares his unique e-commerce experience, shedding light on the importance of product ranking at Walmart.com and how it directly impacts sales. He also shares valuable tips on ranking, from using microworker platforms to leveraging your social circle to place orders.
Further, we explore the value of Walmart Plus and Amazon Prime as essential additions to households. We discuss an interesting survey that reveals a trend of consumers comparing prices and offers on both platforms, with groceries emerging as a hot favorite on Walmart. Get the inside scoop on the potential growth of the Walmart platform and strategies sellers can use to optimize their product range and pricing. Our chat with a successful Walmart seller is sure to provide you with unique insights, from testing and patience to avoiding common mistakes. Listen in as they share their future strategies for selling on Walmart. Tune in for a comprehensive discussion on all things Walmart!
In episode 519 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Costin discuss:
- 00:00 - Ranking on Walmart and Customer Sentiment
- 04:57 - Developing and Ranking Products on Walmart
- 09:01 - Insights From Walmart Shopping Experience Survey
- 10:08 - Walmart Plus and Amazon Prime Insights
- 13:52 - Online Shopping Platforms
- 17:19 - Initiating Google Exposure Through Walmart
- 21:54 - Starting to Sell on Walmart Advice
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Carrie Miller:
On today's episode we have Costin Blake from AZ Rank and he's going to be talking with us about how to rank on Walmart and customer sentiment about shopping on Walmart, as well as some of the most popular categories to sell on Walmart. So this and so much more.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you like to network with other Walmart sellers? Make sure to join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually search for that on Facebook or you can actually go to h10.me/walmartgroup and you can directly go to that page. So make sure to join, you can tag me or Carrie for questions and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Carrie Miller and I'm going to be your host, and this is our Walmart Wednesday, where we answer all of your questions about Walmart and we bring in guests that are experts in the Walmart field. So today I'm very, very excited to bring on Costin Vlaic, and he is from AZ Rank and so I've actually worked with him and, if many of you probably know his wife, Alina, I've worked with both of them for a lot of different projects, and so I'm very excited. They've been selling on Walmart for a while, and so I'm going to go ahead and bring Costin on Welcome.
Costin:
Oh hi Carrie.
Carrie Miller:
Thank you for coming on and talking with us about Walmart.
Costin:
It's nice for me to be to be here. I'm pretty nervous about but I hope we can bring back. We can bring some very useful information for your audience.
Carrie Miller:
I think you're going to do great. All right, so let's go ahead and get into the question. So the first one I want to ask you is can you tell us a little bit about you know, your background and experience in the e-commerce space, just particularly with selling on Walmart?
Costin:
So my background I'm based in Romania, so that this is the reason why it's 10 pm I'm speaking at. I'm trying to speak at 10 pm. I guess I was an early adopter of e-commerce in Romania and also an early adopter of Walmart marketplace. I liked the challenges. So this is why when they open, the marketplace is the marketplace. I applied immediately. Luckily for me, I didn't have any issues to be approved, because right now there are still people that have issues with getting approved by Walmart. I don't find any logic from Walmart to not approve big sellers on Amazon. But that's, that's life. So I like to play with the Walmart platform and I discovered things. I'm discovering things, new things every day.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, very cool, thank you, and so so I guess that kind of answers. My next question is like what would inspire you to sell products on Walmart? So I think it's you had already answered that, but do you have any kind of insights? A lot of people are asking you know, should I sell on Walmart? They're not really sure if it's a good opportunity. So Do you have any insights or like success stories from your experience in selling on Walmart?
Costin:
So, first of all, because all the people are talking about brands and branding and building a brand, in my opinion, if you want to become a real brand, you need to be on more platforms or more sales channels, not just rely on Amazon, because I think most of the people that are trying to apply to Walmart are coming from Amazon. So my insight is I mean all the time. I advise especially my European friends that are selling on Amazon in Europe and they want to expand in US, because most of them have a big range of products. I encourage them to try Walmart first, not Amazon. Amazon in US it's pretty difficult than Amazon Europe Just to get their feet wet with American customers. I always said that maybe they should think to start with Walmart in US.
Carrie Miller:
And so have you seen some success for many of those people selling. Do they get more familiar?
Costin:
Most of the people I refer to are people that are afraid, but I know some people that they've been to our company and they are successfully on Walmart. I really think that at some point this is actually one of my personal projects for next year is just to develop a range of products just for Walmart.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, that's actually an interesting thought, because I have talked to Walmart and they said that the products that do the best are complimentary products to what's already on the Walmart marketplace. So kind of creating products that are just for Walmart, for products that are just not even on there, I think is a really good idea. So I think that's a great plan. The next question is, since you all have a company called AZ Rank and I've used you all for ranking on Amazon and Walmart and so you basically help people to rank in these different platforms, so how important is product ranking on Walmart and how does it impact the sales for sellers?
Costin:
We can talk about ranking in every platform. So in every platform you are, you just need to think about the ranking. So, particularly for Walmart, I just show you that just before today I did some tests and lately I mean especially for the niches that are not so big add to cards and even some clicks. Sometimes they are working and they are working fine. So you don't just need to place orders, but at some point if you want to be on top of the page, you need also to place some orders. But just to start some add to cards and some clicks, even from your friends and family, because the TOS it's not like in Amazon. You can do.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, that's a really good tidbit there, so can you maybe give a little bit more insight about what you all do, what your strategy is for ranking products on Walmart? You don't have to go into details, but how do you usually go about helping people ranking on Walmart?
Costin:
It's depending on the niche. So basically we tried for some customers also the add to cards, which are pretty difficult to be made. But you can always use a micro workers platforms Even you can use even a mechanical Turk or I don't know. I think there are also other platforms for micro tasks and with a few cents you might get some clicks or some add to cards and just to see evolution. And from time to time just ask your friends just to place from in the first week one order. And it always depends on the niche. But if the niche is not very crowded you can try that and you might be successful.
Carrie Miller:
What kind of keywords do you recommend focusing on when you're trying to rank? Do you think that Long tail keywords are good, or what do you think about the types of keywords you focus on for Walmart?
Costin:
Well for Walmart. I don't believe in long tails, I just believe in pretty broad keywords. I mean, of course they need to be specific to your products but not to be long tail keywords. You should try always the search bar recommended what Walmart is recommending in the search bar. I found them very useful and not focusing, like in Amazon, on a bunch of keywords. Just take two or three in the beginning, the most important ones, and focus on them in the beginning and if you are ranked well, you can develop this strategy with other keywords.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, and just for anyone who doesn't know, that we actually do have two keyword research tools for Walmart. We have Magnet and Cerebro. So you can do a lot of really great keyword research for Walmart on those tools through Helium 10. Okay, so we talked a bit earlier and you mentioned that you conducted a survey with over 300 people about their shopping experiences on Walmart. So what were the main objectives of the survey and what kinds of things did you discover?
Costin:
First of all, I'd be very curious to apply the same survey next year and see the changes. Maybe we can share these results of the survey on the chat. So we always share our opinions about Walmart, but I think it's better all the time to return to the people, the people in our community, and ask them what they think about Walmart. So I found it very nice that I mean very encouraging for the ones that are starting a business on Walmart Just to see that, for example, 50% of them have Walmart plus, even if they have Amazon Prime. So they consider a very good add-on to their household to have Walmart plus and Amazon Prime. So that's a very interesting information. Also, I found out that a lot of people are checking both Amazon and Walmart for the prices and a lot of people are following the offers and the prices.
Costin:
We found out also that the main categories they are buying in Walmart are groceries. Most of the people said that groceries in Walmart it's much better than Amazon Fresh Groceries. It's a category that's much better than Amazon Fresh. Other categories where people are shopping in Walmart are toys, electronics, things like that, but all those categories are in that survey. I wanted to make the people to write with their own words instead of just checking some boxes. And also I think the results are very interesting. So, for example, around 30% of the people said that they have some products that are buying only one Walmart, not in Amazon, things like that. I guess these are useful information for the ones that are trying to build a range of products in Walmart, because they have also a direction with some categories. And also, in my opinion, after seeing the results of this survey, I believe that this is a platform that will grow in the next future.
Carrie Miller:
I think that there's a lot more exposure to Walmartcom, especially because they also have this advertising where you can basically do Google ads through the Walmart platform and your stuff will show up in Google shopping, so you can see a lot more exposure of your products there. When you're searching for anything on Google, you'll see Walmart pop up pretty quickly, so there's a lot more exposure there. Also, I noticed for Walmart Plus, a lot of credit cards are giving free Walmart Plus access. So if you use the credit card to pay for Walmart Plus, then the credit card company reimburses you. Like American Express Platinum is one of them. There's a few other cards that I've seen where they literally give you a free Walmart Plus membership. So Walmart's doing a really good job of kind of giving people incentive to start shopping on Walmart too. So I think that's very interesting that people are intending on getting Walmart Plus or they already have it. So very, very good insights.
Costin:
Yes, I'm not living in US, so I don't know all those information, so I was just preparing to say that I mean, I don't know if Walmart has a one year subscription like Amazon has. I think it would be a good way to attract people to their platform and also it's very good for Walmart. I mean this is a plus Walmart has, that they can pick some goods in stores.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, definitely. Was there anything on that survey that you found that you weren't expecting? That you thought was not something you thought people would say on the survey, or was everything kind of what you were thinking?
Costin:
I was very surprised that a lot of people that are buying usually on Amazon, are checking also the Walmart platform. So I mean I was really surprised.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I think that's pretty surprising too. I think it's definitely growing, because I think probably a year or two ago it wasn't the same. So that is very, very interesting.
Costin:
This is why I'm very curious what it will happen with this survey next year to see the trend.
Carrie Miller:
Is there any kind of strategy that you think, based on what the survey revealed, like, what kinds of things do you think sellers should focus on, based on what you found in that survey?
Costin:
We all knew that Amazon, that Walmart, likes pretty cheap products. So if they want to move their brand from Amazon to expand to Walmart, I think they should create a few products that are cheaper than in Amazon and just to sell on Walmart and also on the other platforms, but just not to have them in Amazon. I think this is number one. If they are starting right now an e-commerce business and the brand, they should focus on the category, the order, on specific categories. First of all, of course, they can see in the survey what people answered and also they can check where Walmart is not selling many products, because if they are selling products, it's pretty difficult to rank there.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I know there's a lot of brands that do a different brand. That's a cheaper brand, and I've noticed big brands in Walmart when I've actually gone into the store. I see Ralph Lauren, like Ralph Polo Lauren. I saw BCBG and a few other really bigger brands that I would have never thought would have been there and they're basically the cheaper version of what they already sell. So it's kind of I think that's a really good strategy and I do know some other sellers who have maybe some products on Amazon, but they do the little cheaper version. They kind of rebranded a little bit for Walmart and they've done well that way. So that's really good on that.
Costin:
Exactly. I mean, in this moment we have three or four products we are selling on only one, walmart. Two of them we used to sell on Amazon but the cost of advertising was very high, so we moved them to Walmart. We sell pretty decent quantities but actually we get some profit in Amazon. We just selling but no profit.
Carrie Miller:
That's a challenge one. I did see a question in here that somebody asked. Jeremy asked how do you initiate the Google exposure through Walmart? So the way to do this is what you're going to do is you're going to go to your growth opportunities tab once you log into Walmart's seller center and then it's a tab that's called SEM. So SEM is where you can create these Google campaigns. So it's not through Connect, it's actually on the Walmart seller center part. So growth opportunities and then SEM, so that's where you find those. That's a really good question, because it's kind of some of these things are hidden and you kind of some days, oh, you go in there and you see some new things that pop up. So it's kind of interesting that way.
Costin:
By the way, also in growth opportunity. You can see the performance of your products. Of course it's not like very detailed like in Amazon, but, like I said before, just to follow a strategy for ranking, you can see if you really have exposure. You know clicks on your products. First of all, I think you need to start with some clicks for your product. You can do it with friends and family Doesn't matter if they are doing that, if you have five friends that can do that every day for one week and see what it's happening. So it's not, I mean Walmart, it's not. I find Walmart it's not a data-driven platform like Amazon. So for the ones that are very data-driven, I think it's pretty difficult to work on Walmart. But Walmart it's more of a, let me say, instinct platform or you need to feel a little bit. You need to try.
Carrie Miller:
You got to kind of play around with things a little bit more, since it's so new, you got to figure it out a little bit. Yeah, exactly, okay. Let's move on to a different topic and I'm curious to know what you think the most common challenges that you faced as a Walmart seller or that you've seen other sellers have. So what are some of the challenges you think that are on Walmart?
Costin:
First of all, it's opening the account. I mean, I guess you discussed that a lot of times here, so I don't want to go into very big details. Maybe at some point you will have someone from Walmart to explain as the strategy, if there's the approval strategy of the accounts, because it is really annoying. There are people that are selling millions of dollars in Amazon and on Shopify or on the other platforms they can open an account with Walmart. So I don't understand why. So this is the first one. Second of all, I think the common mistake is copy-paste listing from Amazon. I think this is the biggest mistake everybody does Until now. I was about to say that the listing score is very important. I guess it still is because Walmart tries to take care of the catalog. But I did a test if I can rank a product just by optimizing the score in a very, very small niche. It happened.
Costin:
So right now I'm tempted to say that the listing score is not so important. So maybe you can sacrifice a little bit the score just to have a listing that it's rolled for your customers and not for Walmart. The same is that in Amazon you should write listing for your customers, not for indexing. I guess this is the common mistake. The common mistake, and also the other mistake, is that sometimes people are panicking. In Walmart things are not happening very fast Like in Amazon, so you need to test a lot of things, you need to have patience. And also for the keywords if you really want to be index and rank for a keyword, you need to have it in the title.
Carrie Miller:
A lot of people. When I ask them why they think they're not doing well, I ask them have they optimized their listing or have they focused on some keywords? They run ads and a lot of times people haven't they just copy pasted. So I think that that's probably a big challenge for people is they have to kind of focus on Walmart, like you said, and kind of test things out, because each category is different too. So when I have two different categories of one things that work in one category or not working as well for me in the other category, so it's kind of an interesting thing.
Costin:
Yes, things are happening, happening differently in the different categories in in in Walmart.
Carrie Miller:
Another question is for any anybody starting to sell on Walmart or that wants to start on Walmart. What advice do you have to give them to start selling on Walmart?
Costin:
You can make really good money in Walmart by starting with a big assortment. You I mean you, you really don't need for testing out some products, you just need to buy them from a wholesaler in US. Just put it on your list, it with your own brand, different, different UPC, and just you can just test it. With 20 pieces, I mean, you can start this kind of business in one week.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, you can start. A lot of people do actually also wholesale that I've talked to you where they actually use the brand but they bundle it so like they'll bundle a bunch of different things together that they see people already buying together on Amazon and other places, so they'll just bundle those and they create their own UPC for that bundle and then there's no competition for it because other people have that bundle.
Costin:
Right now Walmart, it's really allowing you to play with different brands. It's not like the same policy with Amazon, so you can play with those those brands. Yeah, if you want, or even if you are thinking to to have a private label brand, you just buy from a liquidator or from an out-sailor, just to bundling, just buy some product from anywhere else and just test it. Even if you are losing a few dollars, it's very important to test.
Carrie Miller:
You can also test, you know, with AliExpress too, because you can, you know, get things in shipped and do smaller quantities. So AliExpress is a good place too. What do you, what do you think is the future of selling on Walmart, and how are you kind of planning on changing your strategies for what? What do you see as the future like? What does 2024 look like, you think, for Walmart?
Costin:
Well, I think Walmart is is still flexible and you can test a lot of things, but unfortunately I see a trend that they will become like Amazon, I guess because they have a lot of employees that leave, leave, left Amazon and went to Walmart and actually I thinking they are doing the same mistakes like Amazon. I was expecting for them to listen a little bit more. The sellers, of course, every company is focused on their customers, but guess what? Also, the sellers are focused on the customers, so they at some point I think I think this will make a big difference, just to to to listen some sellers and some some needs. So the strategy for 2024, it's also from my side and from my point of view it's just testing a lot of things. A lot of things will change. Maybe the rules will be different in two months in Walmart platform, then they are. Now it is possible Because you you can see also a trend that they are changing a lot of things, but I guess, for next year at least, it's still a platform where you can test a lot. All right.
Carrie Miller:
Well, I think that's pretty much. We're coming to an end here. So thank you to everyone who joined live and thank you so much, Costin, for sharing all this information with us. You you have a lot of really good, valuable tidbits on ranking for Walmart and just strategies for Walmart. So thank you so much for for joining and and answering those questions and and talking with us about those strategies. So thanks again and we'll see everyone again, I guess in the new year in 2024, for Walmart Wednesday in January. Bye, everyone, thank you very much.
Costin:
Thank you very much for having me. Bye.
Are you looking to lead a healthy entrepreneurial lifestyle and diversify your business? Our special guest, a fitness celebrity, shares her journey from being a successful Amazon seller to becoming a wellness influencer after a tough E-commerce business setback. Her story is not just about overcoming trademark issues but also navigating a major shift in her personal brand and adapting to a new market niche.
This episode indeed offers a goldmine of insights. From harnessing the power of Helium 10 Chrome extension for Amazon keyword data to branching out into drop shipping, wholesaling, and even selling audiobooks, our guest offers a wealth of knowledge. We also revisit her previous episode about her brand, Dollface, exploring the trademark drama that ensued and the valuable lessons learned.
Finally, we delve into the realm of fitness, discussing the transformation of our guest's YouTube content and the decision to open her own gym. Packed with her wisdom on personal branding, niche-finding, and maintaining a balanced lifestyle, this episode is a must for both health-conscious Amazon entrepreneurs and those seeking to diversify their businesses. Tune in to learn, get inspired, and glean wisdom from our guest's entrepreneurial journey and her commitment to fitness.
In episode 518 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Carabella discuss:
- 03:38 - Beauty Products to Fitness Celebrity Transition
- 10:02 - Personal Branding and Followers
- 17:46 - Unwanted Attention in the Gym
- 20:53 - Entrepreneurship and Healthy Habits
- 23:09 - Non E-Commerce Questions for Guests
- 28:42 - The Importance of Health and Discipline
- 33:05 - Tips, Tricks, and Transformations for Success
- 34:34 - Diet Plan for 30-Pound Weight Loss
- 36:38 - Introduction to Bella Tech Studio
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton.
Today we've got a guest back who at one point was doing over a quarter of a million dollars per month on Amazon. That had it all taken away and now she's reinvented herself as a fitness celebrity. Out there, she has her own gym and everything and she's going to talk about her Amazon journey and she's going to give us tips and tricks on how to stay healthy as entrepreneurs. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Esty, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on? Well, while you're on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension demand analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we've got a serious seller. Probably this might be the record of the most time between coming on the podcast. I think the first time you came on the podcast is probably like three, maybe four years ago.
Carabella:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton.
We've got Carabella here. The last time you were on the podcast, did you film it here too?
Carabella:
We didn't film it here.
Bradley Sutton.
But you came here for something else.
Carabella:
Then I came here, for there was a conference or some sort. We were teaching something. It was an Amazon event.
Bradley Sutton.
Yes, Okay, I was about to say, like you might be one of the only people have recorded in this old this is the original Helium 10 pPodcast or the second Helium 10 Podcast Studio, but we don't even, I don't even record here anymore. But okay, so this is your first podcast here, first time in a few years. All right, so if you guys want to get her like full, full backstory, her original episode was actually episode 64. Now we're like at 500 something. But anyways, let's kind of like catch up, because at that time you had your brand Dollface and then you were going through some drama back in those days because then somebody was trying to come and say, hey, this is no, this is our trademark. And I believe how we left it off was you basically had to like sell them your inventory or sell out of your product or what happened.
Carabella:
Yeah, exactly. So the company was named Dollface but they were selling cosmetics. I was so new to business and online business I was very naive. My thing was I'm just going to reach out to them see if they can approve me getting my trademark, cause the USPTO, I think, who does trademarks. They were saying there's somebody else that has something similar, you can't do it. So I said I'll just reach out to them. We're not really competition. I'm doing, you know, skincare tools. They're doing skincare creams. They said no way. So then I said okay, I have all this inventory. You're already selling skincare. Why don't you just take it? They said, okay, sold it at cost. And then we went from there and then I went out of business, out of Dollface, out of Amazon completely at that time.
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, completely at that time.
Carabella:
And then I started doing drop shipping, wholesaling. I started doing audio books. I still have my audio books on there. I made the uh all of these on Amazon all of these on Amazon. So I did a fitness tracker book, things like that, and I was selling those, yeah, so completely different business.
Bradley Sutton.
And then that was around the time, like at that time you were kind of like a micro influencer in the beauty uh, you know, seen, because that was what your product was Right. But then you kind of like I remember that was when you first started doing like fitness videos on YouTube. Yeah, did you like make a new YouTube? Channel or you just switch your existing YouTube channel to the fitness stuff. Yeah, I switched my existing.
Carabella:
YouTube channel. I completely pivoted. I just started posting workout content and all my subscribers were like what is going on? And I just took down all my skincare stuff and a lot of people unsubscribed. They were like we're here for the skincare? And I said, okay, see, you later, but I just started posting workout videos. I had a tiny little apartment and I started doing these little workout videos in the dark. Basically it looked so bad, and then, little by little, I started my community there. What, uh, what prompted that?
Bradley Sutton.
Like, were you just so like, so fed up with what happened with the beauty, so like I don't want to do this, or the skincare stuff, that I don't want to do this anymore. Or you're like you know what. I think there's a need, I see a, you know, like an opportunity for me in the, in the fitness world, or how did that happen? It was kind of like a passion thing.
Carabella:
I took Tai Lopez's course 67 steps and he was saying what could you do all day long and love it and talk about it? And I was getting burnt out. On the skincare thing, I was making too many videos. My skin was breaking out. I didn't even wear makeup in reality. It was just like not aligned with me. I was just selling it to sell it and it was selling. So I was focused more on money there when I said what could I really do and just do it endlessly? It was fitness. I worked out every day I ate healthy. I was just in that lifestyle and it didn't feel like work. Okay, so I just jumped in.
Bradley Sutton.
All right now how you know the other Amazon stuff. You know audiobooks, drop shipping, like how did those work out for you? In the meantime was like was that the income that was sustaining you?
Carabella:
in those days. So I did drop shipping and I did wholesaling and I didn't do anything for fitness. I just kind of learned how to do all this drop shipping.
Bradley Sutton.
What kind of drop shipping?
Carabella:
I was pulling products from Walmart and I was selling them on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton.
I used to do that too Until.
Carabella:
I was on sorry tracking down and it was money making baby.
Bradley Sutton.
Like I think in one like November, December, I probably did like maybe $200,000 in just like one or two months. It was insane in those days.
Carabella:
Yes, literally million dollars in like a few months, just in. You know that selling and it was crazy. And then slowly and I started opening more Amazon accounts. This was before they got so strict. So I had multiple selling accounts, I had multiple LLCs and I was doing all this stuff with Walmart and then I was also using Home Depot, I was using a Costco, I was using all these other places to fulfill from because Alibaba and AliExpress. It just took way too long and people on Amazon they want their orders but people started telling on me taking pictures of their Walmart bags why is this that was so ghetto.
- Bradley Sutton.
Walmart was ghetto in those days. They would straight take DoorDash I think they still do it a little bit like DoorDash drivers and they would like literally leave a plastic bag of Walmart.
Carabella:
And this is supposed to be an Amazon order, it's all yeah, I got busted, but I made a lot of money very quickly and it was pretty successful for a while.
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, and then how about the books? Did that do anything for you?
Carabella:
Yeah, so I wrote a few. I wrote a planner, a fitness planner. It was like scan the QR code and work out for 60 days with me in a planner. So you scan the work out, you scan the QR code, you get a workout and then you do. You know, I ate this today and it's a weight loss book basically A little bit digital because the QR code. And then from there I said, okay, what about Kindle books? I took a course called publishing.com or something like this, where they teach you how to build out Kindle books and eBooks, and so I started doing that. I made a couple of those and those are still on Amazon, just listed there. I don't even look at them.
Bradley Sutton.
So around what year? From when to when I'm assuming it was after we had the podcast, obviously so like 2019, you started doing the drop shipping. How long were you doing the drop shipping?
Carabella:
I did the drop shipping for, I think, two years, so okay. So it was a decent amount of time. Decent amount of time, Made a lot of money, built a little team. I had a bunch of VAs, you know it was pretty successful. And then from there I was already doing the fitness recording.
Bradley Sutton.
I had my YouTube channel. Yeah, I had my.
Carabella:
YouTube channel and I had the drop shipping thing going on simultaneously.
Bradley Sutton.
And then you said you were doing a little bit of wholesaling, like what kind of was that?
Carabella:
That was like Amazon business, where I found pretty big suppliers that were selling in bulk and I would list on Amazon and then same thing like using Costco, using Sam's Club, these type of places, and I would just fulfill bulk orders at a discount.
Bradley Sutton.
What do you mean by bulk? Fulfilling bulk orders?
Carabella:
Like wholesale. So somebody orders like 200 units instead of one or two On Amazon.
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, so also you made like a, like a very, was it like a variation where it was like 200 or they literally had to order 200 items.
Carabella:
They literally have to order like 200 items of something Interesting. There was a there was an Amazon business section sector and I got in there and I was able to sell bulk orders, yeah.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, interesting, and then all right. So now, what year are we about? Like when we were talking about the second year of this 2019.
Carabella:
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, and then on the YouTube side was there a time you know where it just started taking off, or has it just always been gradual, Because I don't really start really small, but that was really big.
Carabella:
Actually it's not crazy big. It's like 6,000 subscribers still kind of small, but I feel like I have a very loyal following. And then I started doing selling from there, so selling inside of there. So I created a Shopify store with, like some workout things from Walmart. People can come by from my Shopify store, things like that. And then obviously YouTube pays you for ad revenue and super chats and all these things that you can do when you're going live and stuff like that. Okay, yeah. So that was always just gradual, steady, steady, steady.
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, I think that's important, you know, cause it's not always about the number. Sure, yeah, if you're like MrBeast, you know like having he's a beast. Yeah, having that number of followers obviously is good for you, but other you know, you could have like a hundred thousand followers and then if you're not doing branding or you're not really personal, like it doesn't really do you any good because people only they're not following you, they're just like all right, I'm subscribed to this. Oh, there's another video. That was like when I started on YouTube, like a long time ago for the Zumba stuff, I was following a lot of people. Then I thought about it was like, if I saw these people like in an Amazon or Amazon see, I always think about Amazon nowadays If I saw these people like in a Zoom book conference, I literally wouldn't even know who they are, right, I don't know their names and stuff. So I'm like, if I'm gonna do YouTube, it's like how do I make myself memorable? And that's why I created that character. I wear the crazy socks and different things like that. But you kind of have to have a thing that makes it personal. Then you can have like six or 7,000 followers, yeah, and then it still works out for you.
Carabella:
Yeah, and you can monetize it and it's still good. And then, from there, I started doing fitness for brides and teaching online. Ah yeah.
Bradley Sutton.
I was doing that, I would do Zumba classes. For you know, guys, don't get twisted for bachelorette parties. It wasn't, the clothes stay on, all right, but you know, like, like, weddings are very stressful, oh yeah. And they're like for weeks, they're just like going crazy and they're like, hey, right, a couple of days before the wedding we just want to kind of like get our indoor friends out and just like work it out. You know, we're kind of and so like I would make a lot of money doing bachelorette and there'd be good dudes there too, you know that'd be kind of strange, you know, but you know so. So that's a, that's a interesting thing. So you would, you would like, was it mainly like, hey, get the bride in shape over?
Carabella:
a certain amount of time, or something like that. Exactly From there, I started doing my YouTube. Amazon was like way gone, didn't even focus on it. I started doing more personal training, one-on-one stuff, and then I said I can't do one-on-ones, this is going to be crazy. Like I have no time, yeah. So then, from there, I took a course and look at me taking all these fricking courses. I learned Amazon from a course, though, too.
Bradley Sutton.
But hey, see, see, hey guys, real quick takeaway here. Everybody takes courses. Very few people actually act or actually do what they learn. You know, I take a course, oh great, I learned so much, it was great. Or are you doing it? No, like maybe they haven't all worked out, but literally she, you know, she took a course on Amazon. She started Amazon. She took a course on wholesale and then drop shipping. She started doing that and now she took, she took a Tylopus course. She started. You know, she did something off that. I like that. I wish more people were like you. But go ahead anyways.
Carabella:
Yeah, it's a finisher, mindset, right.
Bradley Sutton.
There you go.
Carabella:
I did the publishing course I made books on Amazon. They're still there selling like you get royalties from them. So I took this course. Ruben Brooks he's a coach and he teaches coaches how to build their online presence for fitness. So I took his course. It was expensive like $6,000, $10,000 course and I was like I'm going all in. So I built out my online program. He said you need to niche down. I said okay, who can I teach? I had experience in the bridal industry from way before I started selling on Amazon. I worked with weddings and events. So I said brides, they got the money, they want to look good in their dress, feel sexy, they're honeymoon after, they want to be like ready. So boom, that became my niche and I started building out my course for brides and then from there it just was kind of easy, because there's a lot of brides in LA, especially Beverly Hills, that have the money to take training.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, so all this time, like you were saving money too from Amazon, because I'm assuming you weren't like living it's not called paycheck, they paycheck, but disbursement to disbursement from Amazon. You started saving up money and then. So that means when, that you know, when Amazon cut you off on some, it's not like you were on the streets or anything.
Carabella:
No, no, yeah, Always definitely have savings, have backup plans, keep your and I did one-on-ones between. So after that I did my one-on-ones, I made clients. I mean, I made money doing, you know, one-on-one training in the gym and things like that. So from there I said, okay, online is the way to go about the course. I went to conferences in Arizona to learn about the industry and then I started making money online again, but in fitness this time.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, all right, cool. So at what point were you like, did you just kind of like, shut down almost all of your Amazon? Like, today you have no physical products, it's a hundred percent, just like your digital product, digital books.
Carabella:
yeah, Two digital books. They just are on Amazon. I don't even look at them.
Bradley Sutton.
Was it? Did you have like tons saved up or was it a little bit? Was there a time where you're kind of scared Like, okay, amazon's not going to work out, like I better get something else pretty fast. Or was that other income from the training and stuff already going by that time?
Carabella:
Yeah, it was already going by that time. I was also. I'm also very much a worker person. I look ahead a lot. So I'm seeing like, okay, I'm stopping Amazon, they're closing my channels, I'm gonna get my personal trainer certification so I can start teaching people what I love already. And this was already in my mind, because I was teaching people how to do it on YouTube without a certification. So then I thought why not be more legit and then offer these things in person? And trainers can make a lot of money. Especially where I live, you can make a lot of money per hour. So I had already kind of foreshadowed what I wanted to do before Amazon cut me off completely. So I had savings and I didn't live beyond my means, which a lot of people I feel like do, which is bad running up their credit cards, especially in California, not paying the thing, I had a Mazda. I think you knew me then. I had a Mazda. I lived very humbly, so I didn't have all of this debt on my head and I didn't have too much to play catch up with.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, cool. Was there a point where just the trainer on their own like completely replaced what you were doing on Amazon, or was it still a little bit less?
Carabella:
Still a little bit less. It was less in person for sure. And then when I started to build scale with the online program and I could have way more clients than just like six a day, because six a day is like six hours of your life.
Bradley Sutton.
Hold on, like I'm kind of like spazzy anyways, are you saying you were doing like online, like Zoom? Like oh okay, For some reason I missed that.
Carabella:
Okay.
Bradley Sutton.
So that just widens your bait. Instead of trying to have to find some, all right, let's find a gym that we can both go to or come to my house or something you were, somebody could be anywhere.
Carabella:
Yeah, exactly. And then I was doing training for brides and things like that. And then I built out courses. I already had libraries of videos on YouTube. I just put them in trainer eyes, which is where all the videos live like a course, and then all you have to do is reach out to people who are getting married. And I did the hashtag thing, the cold DM thing. Hey, I see you're gonna get married. I see you just got proposed to. Hey, da, da, da, I'm a trainer, this is what I do. I'll give you a couple, you know, seven days free, 14 days free. Check out my course. Boom, get a sale. This type of thing.
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, Okay, yeah, Interesting. Now at what point did it get in your head where it's like I want to have my own like brick-and-mortar location, like a physical studio or Always. Always, so that was always a dream.
Carabella:
I love equinox, I love working out and I always wanted my own place and literally I put it on my vision board. It's on my vision board, this little studio with perfect yoga mats, laid out with little yoga blocks. And then, when I got my studio, I did the same photo shoot in there and I matched it to my vision board. It was one year later. Wow, I put it on my vision board and then, one year later, I got the opportunity.
Bradley Sutton.
That's awesome. So what was your thought process? Cause I believe it's a little bit unique where you're only catering to female clients, right Like was that always the plan, or were you just like kind of like thinking like an Amazon seller, how can I niche down? Or what was going on there? A?
Carabella:
little bit like the Amazon seller. How can I niche down? How can I make it special? Also, being in the gym as a woman. Sometimes you get unwanted attention. A lot of women feel the same way. It was a consistent thing I heard from my brides about being in a physical gym. It's uncomfortable. I have a husband, I have my man, this and that I don't want to get gawked at all this stuff.
Bradley Sutton.
So I have to deal with that. I don't know. I'm just like.
Carabella:
So I just thought what a concept. And I know the majority of gyms are full of men, so I cut my audience in like half, maybe even 60, 40. Cause men just are in the gym. But we're doing something very different. It's only group classes and it's only for women, and if you go to gyms and you look at their group classes, it's all women.
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, when I was teaching Zumba it was like 45 women and like two dudes only. Yeah.
Carabella:
And it's all feminine. You know style of movements, classes, so I feel like we're on the right path, Okay.
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, all right. So yeah, basically this episode is about guys. Hey, you guys are Amazon sellers out there and if you want to do this for the rest of your life, do it. I think I might do Amazon for the almost rest of my life. You know, like I have no plans to do anything, but it's important to have you know kind of backup plans too, and if something goes wrong with your Amazon business, it's not over. You know, like, like she, she's had a couple of two kind of major bad events happen on Amazon. One because of her trademark. She didn't, you know, do enough research and she got shut down and then she started it again. And then again because Amazon kind of changed her policies with drop shipping and things, and again she didn't, she didn't let it knock her down. So do you have, like you know like financial advisors, or you know planning and stuff, or have you just done everything on your own?
Carabella:
Yeah, no financial advisors, no planning. I mean I had a financial advisor when I got life insurance, but that's as far as I've gone, you know, so far. Yeah, hopefully I get huge and I'll need all of those. But yeah, from where I'm at now and where I was, no financial advisors, I did QuickBooks, I had an accountant, but that's the extent of it.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, yeah. So what's in the like on the horizon for you? What's your plan? I mean, obviously the studio just started like a few months ago, right? We?
Carabella:
just opened about a month and a half ago. On the horizon, I want the studio to flourish. I'm only focusing on this one location first, but my big dream is to have a clothing line with this company, more locations with this company, and I want to go worldwide. Oh my goodness.
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, I want to have.
Carabella:
Bellatec clothing line yoga mats. You know huge events. You know how Aloe Yoga teaches yoga too, so we're actually going to do our first event with Fabletics and USC. Wow.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay.
Carabella:
Yeah, that's exciting. And the Clippers came into our studio looking for a place to train their girls.
Bradley Sutton.
Yes.
Carabella:
So we're right in the middle of downtown it's my team right there. There you go.
Bradley Sutton.
Yes.
Carabella:
So, yeah, wow, I really want to expand and make this a huge, huge company. I'm looking at it right now Like realistically. I just want to make this baby grow up.
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, so then you're almost guaranteed going to find your way back into physical products and online and e-commerce.
Carabella:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton.
Because you know, if you start doing merch or something for your brand and start to, you know making your own, I mean you're going to. If you get popular here, you know like right now you're probably just buying all your own like yoga blocks and mats and stuff.
Carabella:
Exactly, we actually bought everything from Alibaba.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, but then you see, you could still do that. But then now you put your logo on it and then you know, sell it for people, especially since you're, because you're still doing the online courses and stuff like that. So then in that case, you know, like it's not just, oh, only the people who go to your physical location would be buying your stuff. You know, if you have customers all over the world, they could buy yourself online.
Carabella:
Exactly, and Bellatec is going to have an online portal as well, where people can work out with us from all over the world, even from this first location. I've already started building out with our web developer an online portal for girls to work out from New York, and they can join our Bellatec community from anywhere.
Bradley Sutton.
Awesome, awesome, alright. What's your advice for somebody else out there, like, maybe people nowadays obviously can't make money that quick the way you did, because it literally doesn't exist anymore where you can just do drop shipping and stuff like that Bye. But is it a matter of like, hey, if you're selling on Amazon or Shopify or TikTok shop or whatever, like Start putting some money to the side. Or what's your advice? Like, how were you able to succeed with life after Amazon?
Carabella:
I feel like you just have to play it smart. Be careful, but also take risks. And finally, don't be scared to like Burn it and keep moving, but also just be careful. Like I'm not a financial advisor, and so I can't really say much, but definitely focus on having a cushion, a fallback cushion, save money, plan things for longer term. You know, think smart, think about your future, because Amazon changes every single day and, like you said, you literally can't do that to type of drop shipping anymore, those type of selling anymore, and that was insane. But yeah, I would say just you know, focus on being a little bit careful but also still taking risks, because you can't be too careful or else you won't grow.
Bradley Sutton.
We're going to talk you know the rest of this episode is actually something I've been doing. The last year for guests on the episode is I've been asking them a lot of like non e-commerce questions like, hey, what do you do when you need to step away from your business? Because I think all of us you know, you remember how it was like you can get so engrossed because it's fun, you know sometimes, but you know like what's that mean? There's like a meme like hey, amazon sellers are the ones who want to quit their nine to five just so they can work 16 hours a day. You know, like because we just get engrossed and especially when you're work from home, you know you could just like kind of let yourself go and not have great eating habits. So let's talk about healthy habits. But first of all, what's yours? Like you, it's kind of like fitness is almost like your job. That was like for me and like people ask me back in the day what did I do to stay in shape? When I was in shape, like doing zoom, but like I didn't have to. That was my job. Like like I was doing 10 classes, 12 classes a week. I could almost eat whatever I wanted to, even though it's not good, but I would never gain weight because I'm just working out. But like, what about you? What about mentally? Maybe I need to take away from or take a step back from the studio, take a step back from my training. I just need to have some me time. What's your go to? Hobbies or things?
Carabella:
Yeah, this is the most important thing for all of us entrepreneurs, because we get obsessed and there's no work life balance and at the moment, I have a brand new baby. I have no balance, but I force myself.
Bradley Sutton.
You have a brand new baby?
Carabella:
Yeah, at Bellatec.
Bradley Sutton.
Oh, okay, I'll say wait a minute. Okay, I was like, did I miss something?
Carabella:
No, my business is like a month old. I'm looking at it like a child.
Bradley Sutton.
It's how born, yeah, newborn.
Carabella:
So things that I do to step away. It's very hard to get away from my phone, just I don't know, it's an addiction thing, obsessive controller thing, but I just go get massages, turn my, turn my phone off, get a massage, put it on, do not disturb. I ride horses, I get in nature. I love to run on the beach, I love to meditate. Journal I'm a big journal. If anyone read the book, the artists way Okay, this book is amazing, it'll change your life. And so she talks about in that book that to sit down and do morning pages where you brain dump three pages a day and you give yourself time and then you can, you know, understand yourself better. But healthy habits for me is giving yourself time alone, alone, alone not with friends, you know. I like to take a bath, I like to spend time in nature, go see my family. Sometimes I mean they're not very far, but I don't make enough time.
Bradley Sutton.
They're my neighbors. I know they are your neighbors.
Carabella:
My sister just had her sixth baby. Can you believe your sister has six? Wow, that's crazy, yeah. And then I'm in the gym every day, were they were.
Bradley Sutton.
they when we're not tri-city, hmm, tri-city hospital right there, I don't know. That's where my kids were born.
Carabella:
Yeah, I don't know, but I saw the new baby on Thanksgiving and she's so cute, oh yeah, but yet I I work out every single day 5am. Make sure that you're choosing healthy foods. You know your food is your fuel. Yeah, so if you don't choose good fuel, you're not going to have, you know, a good day. You're going to feel slow.
Bradley Sutton.
Let's talk about that, for a little Cause entrepreneurs out there, I think 15 years ago was different, but nowadays, thanks to the apps from the devil AKA door dash, uber eats and everything else, like it's just so easy to you know, at least back in the day maybe you were lazy you actually ate better because, all right, I'll just make myself a ham sandwich or something you know which is probably more healthy than all right, let me order McDonald's to be delivered to my doorstep.
Carabella:
Exactly.
Bradley Sutton.
What are some eating habits for the stay at home entrepreneur? Simple things that they can keep in mind to stay healthy.
Carabella:
Yeah, no breakfast. Do intermittent fasting, I would say.
Bradley Sutton.
How many hours on, and I would say 16, eight 16, eight 16, eight.
Carabella:
So 16 hours fast eight hours. Eat no breakfast. I don't eat until 11 o'clock. My biggest meal is lunchtime and then I take breaks. Make sure you take breaks, guys. Get off your butt, walk around, get your steps in 10,000 steps, minimum 10,000 steps a day.
Bradley Sutton.
Minimum. We just did the okay hold on Minimum Hold on hold on. We did this thing at work where it was like a challenge and they were like all right, we need to do 7,500. And I was struggling, like I was walking, like I would go an hour on the. I have like a standing desk so I have the treadmill on the bottom and then I would do like an hour on that. And then there was some time where I was traveling. So I would like walk like two miles and I'm like I'm still not at 10,000. I'm like what is it? Or not even at 7,500. So like to get to 10,000, what does that mean? Does that mean I need to walk like three miles? Does that mean I need to spend an hour and a half on a treadmill? It's about six miles?
Carabella:
Oh, my goodness, it's about six miles If you walk. So I wear an aura ring. Usually it's dead right now and I see my step counts are insane. I mean, I walk 25,000 steps a day. But if you want to be, if you want to be like the hunter and gatherer people that we used to be walking everywhere, they did minimum 10,000 steps for women.
Bradley Sutton.
Wow.
Carabella:
Men's steps should be way more, cause you have higher testosterone, you have different bodies. So I would say 10,000 steps a day minimum. Get up and walk around and then your smallest meal should be dinner. So you go to bed light but you're not hungry. You know, and then I don't eat after 7pm. Okay, so 11 to 7 is my window, and that's all I get to Just water. Yeah, water, I like green juice, celery juice, ginger tea, things that'll flush you out also. Yeah, that would be my way to how to eat if I'm going to stay at home and even if I don't stay at home. This is how I eat. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton.
So maybe like, hey, you know, maybe that seems unattainable, I mean, it seems unattainable to me almost 10,000 steps, but you can get a treadmill, that's on. You know, you can still be on your computer, but on your treadmill, like while you're doing it, but then I, the thing that I don't do enough of is, you know, like, take walks outside. Hey, do you have a zoom call or a call that doesn't require to be in front of your computer? Take that zoom call on your phone, maybe and just take a walk. Wow, okay, yeah, I need to step on my. I need to step on my game here.
Carabella:
Yeah, but don't forget, health is wealth and you don't want to get to your wealth and be sick because you're not in good shape. Like, don't forget that your body is should be your number one and the sharper you are physically, the better your wealth is going to be. You know and I saw something somewhere, I think it was the guy who does the 75 hard, andy Fersilla. He told me he said when people see a person in shape, they want to do more business with them, they want to work with them more because they see the discipline. So that discipline from your health transfers into other places of your life, like your business, getting things done on time, planning things out, showing up to meetings on time early. Da, da, da da. Cause you build that habit.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, what about I mean, apart from just steps? You know, like, like, if that's all we're doing, that's great, but it's still not enough. Like, what are some easy maybe exercises? The desk jockey, you know, can do just like break. You know, like you said, take breaks and stuff, so like, what should? We? What kind of little mini exercises can we be doing during our breaks?
Carabella:
Yeah, jumping jacks, pushups, sit ups I would say planking for sure. Keep that back strong. Anything that's in the area that you're, anything you can do in a very small area. So think about it. If I were to stand up here, I could probably do some jumping jacks. I can get on the floor and do some pushups, simple things like that For guys. If you have a pull up bar at home, hang it on your door, do some pull ups. You don't need a full gym to get in shape or to stay in shape, and then you burn calories a lot. Jump rope get a jump rope, stand outside. That's the best one.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, yeah, All right. What about as far as counting calories portions? You know you talking about having dinner as your smallest, but, like you know, how much vegetables, fruit should we be having? Like? What do you think about these different trends, Like you know, like carnivore diets and all this crazy stuff?
Carabella:
I feel like it depends on the person. Not one diet fits all, but I would say depending on. For calorie counting, if you want to lose weight, you got to eat less than your, your basal metabolic rate, which is like the minimum calories that your body burns at rest.
Bradley Sutton.
How do you, how do you find that out? Calculate that?
Carabella:
There's a, there's a or a ring will track it. Your Apple watch will track it.
Bradley Sutton.
Oh, I have an Apple. I didn't know I had that Okay.
Carabella:
Your Renfno scale will track it. These scales that scan through your feet they'll track it. So they do this scan and they'll you'll be able to see, you know your weight, your body fat, your muscle mass, your water, your you know metabolic age, which is the age that your body is at in the state that you are in now, and then how many calories you burn at rest. So if you burn 1500 calories at rest and you want to lose weight, you better eat a thousand calories a day and you will naturally lose weight. If you want to gain weight, you eat 2000 calories a day. It's very simple math.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, and I mean that is definitely going to help you lose weight. But then you want to have you know if you go to a physical checkup and have your good cholesterol high, your bad cholesterol low. So what are some foods to stay away from? What are some foods that you think are must haves in your, in your diet?
Carabella:
Yeah, Whole foods diet is the best diet, which means not whole foods. See instantly, See, instantly See what I thought about. No whole foods like anything that comes from the earth chicken, eggs, spinach, greens, fruits, anything that comes from the earth. Anything that comes from a bag and you don't know what's in it when you read the ingredients, that's automatically not good for you. I don't drink sugary juices. I would stay away from sugar completely. I would do just foods that come from the earth must haves in your diet eggs, chicken, steak unless you're vegetarian, which I did, vegan, and it was a shit show for me. I'm sorry, Can I say that? It was it was not for me. You know, I did some blood work when I was vegan. Going through that, my protein tanked, my hair was falling out, I had low iron, low vitamins not for me. Some people are thriving on vegan, so I feel like it depends on the person's body. But Whole Foods diet is the best way.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, yeah, cool. What are the tips, and tricks or anything can you give to our community out there?
Carabella:
Try to de-stress. Get an animal. I don't have an animal, but a lot of my friends have dogs and I ride horses, so getting around animals makes you feel happy, release dopamine, release stress. Also, you have a companion and then just spending more time outside, fresh air, grounding, just staying. Staying a human in a digital world is so important and that we get lost in that. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton.
Yeah, any inspiring stories of people like transformations that you've had, you know, like maybe it's a bride or maybe it's just one of your you know clients, your one-on-one clients, um, where they actually like, all right, we're just going to go ahead and do whatever you tell me. And then they saw some like incredible results.
Carabella:
Yeah, actually I have a lot, but I'll tell you this one which I absolutely love. This guy I was training. He's a pharmacist, very successful pharmacist, very busy guy. We started training and he was basically lying to me. He's like I'm not losing any weight, I'm not losing any weight and we're working out three times a week. This isn't, this is not working and not everybody can eat healthy and lose weight. And I said what are you eating? And he was like I'm eating healthy. What are you talking about? And we sat down one time and I was so ruthless I'm like you're a liar. You're not following the diet I'm giving you. Show me a picture of your food every day, every meal. So then we I we had this really tough conversation. Two months later he lost 30 pounds. He was eating clean, he was training consistently and 30 pounds he looked like a different person.
Bradley Sutton.
He went what did he take out of his diet? Mcdonald's Also. He was eating McDonald's and complaining that he wasn't losing weight.
Carabella:
He was eating out every single day, drinking alcohol, and he took all of that out of his diet. He started work. I had him on something very strict like tuna, salad water and just almost like a keto, and he lost weight so quickly. He went from 193 to 163 and literally like two months.
Bradley Sutton.
How tall was he?
Carabella:
He's 5’10.
Bradley Sutton.
Okay, Well, I mean 193 is not, that, you know, like for for a guy, unless you're like five, six or something that's all right. Can you give me his his diet plan, or the one that you gave him?
Carabella:
I could give you a diet plan. I want to lose 30 pounds. It is strict.
Bradley Sutton.
It's strict, but I'll give it to you All right.
Carabella:
Yeah, I have it on my phone right here.
Bradley Sutton.
Awesome.
Carabella:
Yeah, I'll give it that to you.
Bradley Sutton.
Cool, all right. So this has been a great episode because it's like, you know, we don't have, you know, like we have tons, of course, amazon success stories on here. But success doesn't mean just success on Amazon, just success in life is like, hey, are you happy, are you, you know, supporting for you and your family and stuff like that, and you've achieved that and it's, you know, sure, amazon, you know paved the way, but then you completely transition and it's nothing wrong with that. So, guys, don't be thinking that Amazon is the only way to success. It's a. You know, it could arguably be said that you wouldn't, you might not have been able to have enough to start this, you know, uh, business and stuff If you hadn't done the Amazon, absolutely use Amazon. And then if Amazon keeps working, great, keep it rolling. I'm sure you would have loved to have kept doing like six figures a month.
Carabella:
I'm coming back when I get my, when my clothing comes out and I know how to work it and I'm going to come back to it. I love it All right.
Bradley Sutton.
But then, most importantly again this you know, you guys know I've had some lot of health issues in the past, and so that's why this year I made sure to always ask the guests about their health regime. And this is, you know, one of the experts in the game as far as that goes, so I hope you put her advice to use now. If somebody is in, you know, if there's any of our female listeners out there who are in the like LA area, how can they find out about your, your studio?
Carabella:
Yeah, check out bellatec.com and you can come in for your first class free, and all you have to do is register on the website. It's very easy. The steps are there. You can find me @carabellariazzo and DM me on Instagram. I'm very personable. I talk to everyone. I'm not the type of person who's going to ignore people, except Bradley, except me when I'm trying to get her on the podcast for like a year. Just kidding, but yeah, so check us out there. We're at Bellatec studio on Instagram and everywhere else. Yeah, come say hi.
0:37:15 - Bradley Sutton.
It's great to see you again, and I hope the next time you see me, you don't recognize me because I'll be like the more fit version.
0:37:22 - Carabella:
Let's go. I believe in you, I love it.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Senior Brand Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. TikTok Shop Wants to Beat Amazon at Its Own Game https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-13/tiktok-looks-to-challenge-amazon-amzn-with-tiktok-shop Let shoppers engage with your brand across multiple products using Amazon Video Builder https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/amazon-video-builder-powers-use-of-multiple-product-asins/ Walmart pushes ahead with e-commerce platform https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/29475-walmart-pushes-ahead-with-e-commerce-platform Etsy lays off 225 workers after ‘essentially flat’ sales, says CEO https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/13/etsy-layoffs-online-business-retail-industry
But wait, there's more to this episode. We'll guide you through the process of automating Amazon keyword research using Helium 10. We'll help you streamline your efforts, saving time by setting up keyword insight settings to alert you when a competitor ranks for a new keyword. Plus, we're handing you a roadmap for business growth in 2024. We're talking about a free downloadable checklist that will help you develop essential daily habits, and keep you focused on your goals. Go to: https://h10.me/habittracker for more information! So, whether you're a newbie seller or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with strategies that will give you an edge. Grab your headphones, and let's get started!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Carrie talks about:
- 00:42 - TikTok Shop Vs. Amazon
- 03:19 - Seller Support Chat
- 04:36 - Video In Multiple Languages
- 05:41 - More Products in Video Ads
- 06:51 - Walmart Investing in Marketplace
- 07:33 - Etsy Sales Flat
- 08:21 - New Apparel Tool
- 09:35 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
- 13:36 - Pro Training Tip
- 17:26 - 2024 Daily Habits Seller Checklist
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Carrie Miller:
TikTok is giving Amazon a run for its money. Chat is now available in Amazon seller support, and now you can upload videos in multiple languages on your Amazon listings. This and so much more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Carrie Miller:
Welcome back to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast. My name is Kari and I will be your host, and this is our weekly buzz, which is our weekly episode, where we give you all of the latest news and updates for Amazon, Walmart and the e-commerce world. We also give you updates on Helium 10, new alerts and features, and we also will give you a serious strategy for serious sellers of any level. So let's go ahead and see what's buzzing. Okay, so let's go ahead and get into this first article, which is how TikTok shop is giving Amazon a run for their money, and I do know that they are doing a lot of amazing incentives for sellers. First of all, there's no fees. They're also covering shipping costs for you and if you give discounts with some of their promotions, they often will actually cover those discounts. So, for example, if you give a 30% off discount through one of their promotions, they'll cover the 30% discount cost so that you don't have to pay for it. And I've actually talked to sellers who have made more money than their usual listing price for products. In addition to that, they're giving customers coupons to purchase and really helping to incentivize them to start purchasing on TikTok, so they'll give them a $20 off coupon. I know I bought something that was $21.95 and I got $20 off, so I only paid a doll her 95 for it.
Carrie Miller:
Let's go ahead and get into the article that talks about this. This article is titled TikTok shop wants to beat Amazon at its own game. It's from Bloomberg and they talk about a seller who had started getting all these incentives to sell on TikTok shop and they were really surprised at how they even did $10,000 in sales the day after Cyber Monday, even after all this was done. Really really cool stuff that they started selling and learning how to use TikTok shop and because of all the incentives they're more profitable, which I know. A lot of people on Amazon are kind of wondering what's going on with profitability because it keeps shrinking. So this could be a potentially good opportunity, especially while they're giving these no fee incentives to get in there.
Carrie Miller:
But something that's really interesting is that they're saying that Amazon shouldn't be too worried yet because basically people are seeing things on TikTok. They don't necessarily yet trust the platforms that are purchasing elsewhere, so they might go to Amazon. In addition to that, the shipping isn't as fast on TikTok, so you can see that people are going to go and want that two day shipping, which is why you'll see a lot of people buying something on Amazon. Maybe it's the same brand, so a lot of times people will look for the same thing that they found on TikTok to see if they can actually find it on Amazon to buy that. Something else that I found very interesting in this article is that they were talking about how people are saying it's kind of like a farmer's market or a digital craft fair, because you can do live selling on TikTok shop and people can ask questions and you can interact with the product live and show people how to use it. So it's a really good opportunity to kind of have a different experience for people and really incentivize them to purchase. I'm really curious to know if any of you have started selling on TikTok shop and how you've done so far. Put your comments below and just let us know how you're doing. Have you had a hard time starting? Have you gotten some success on TikTok shop? We would really like to know.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, so let's go ahead and get into the second article, which is something I think a lot of people are going to really like, and hopefully this is something that is really beneficial for a lot of sellers and that is that now that you can actually get chat instead of just email and phone call on seller support. So this is a little press release document that was released by Amazon so you can now chat with an actual person. So, instead of having to call, you can actually chat. So there's an FAQ. So one big question that's what I had. I thought is it going to be a chat bot, because I can't stand dealing with those. So they said will I be communicating with an actual human? And yes, all live chats will be handled by a seller support associate. Will I see if this receive the same level of service that I do with email? And it says many cases you will, and then you don't have to go back and forth with email. And in what cases is it not available? It says they can currently help you with the majority of support issues with chat. So that is a really good thing that they'll be able to kind of help with a bunch of different things with chat, and basically you have to go and find it in the same way that you would any other support and there will be an option for chat. So my question is what do you think about this and are you going to start utilizing the chat feature instead of email or the phone call, or what do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, this next article is really exciting, especially for the US, because there are so many people with different languages in this country and you want to really market to as many people as possible, and I know I've been noticing a lot of Spanish keywords when I'm doing keyword research in our helium 10 tools, and this is a great opportunity to be able to reach Spanish speakers and all speakers of a lot of different languages. So this article talks or this is actually an announcement from seller central that now you can actually upload your videos in other languages. So now you can upload Spanish videos, you can upload Chinese videos or other languages that you think that your customers might be looking at your listings and maybe they might need it in their native language. So this will help you to be able to sell to those people and really showcase your product to a wider variety of people, and I'm really excited about this. I think this is really a great thing to be able to kind of further expand the languages on your listings that you already have. Now Let us know in the comments below if you think this is a great thing and if you're going to get started doing it right away, or what you think about, you know, being able to upload these videos in different languages.
Carrie Miller:
This next article is about being able to upload more than one product to your videos for your ads. I think this is a great opportunity to showcase more than one product. I noticed that when I was able to show more than one product on my brand story and my A+ Content that people were buying in bulk or bundles, basically, of things that they weren't buying in bundles before. So this is a great opportunity to showcase all of your products in one video and catch the eye of a lot of different customers. So this is actually an announcement from you know advertising on Amazon and the way that it works is you're going to be able to upload those three different products, and why it's important is you know you're going to be able to get more brand exposure and just a lot more reach. Maybe one person might not be looking for one thing that you sell, but maybe one of the other items they're going to be interested in, so it's a really good opportunity there. Also, this is where the feature is available. It is. It is available in the US, Canada, Mexico and then all these other countries across South America, Europe, middle East and in the Asia Pacific. So check out to see if your country is allowing this and start getting some of these video ads up, and so I think this is going to be a really good thing for showcasing even more of your products and incentivizing people to buy more of your products all at the same time.
Carrie Miller:
So the next article here is in the Walmart realm, and that is basically that Walmart is going to continue to invest in their e-commerce platform in 2024. And this is according to an article on meatpuletry.com. They have they did see quite a bit of growth on their digital market, so they want to keep growing it. They actually talk about how it was even more. They had more growth in China. However, they are still just overall, growing this marketplace so that, you know, more customers can buy their products online, since more people are switching to online shopping. So it's a really you know good time to get into Walmart as well. If you really want to grow your, your brand and your products. You know, maybe consider selling on Walmart as well.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, this next article is a bit of sad news and that is that, um, basically, Esty had to lay off a bunch of workers because their sales were flat, so they laid up 225 workers. I'm not sure what this means for the future of Etsy or what they're thinking about sales trajectories, but it is really a curious thing. I know there are a lot of Etsy sellers who watch our content. So if you're an Etsy seller, have you seen sales kind of stay the same? Have you seen growth? I know it really is dependent on the individual seller, so, um, you know this really could be dependent, um, you know, seller to seller, but also Amazon does have Amazon hand made and you can get these products pretty quickly. So that might be something that's been causing some competition for Etsy. But hopefully this doesn't mean that it's doomsday for Etsy and that we'll see them revive again.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, this is the last but not least, but this is a really good thing for apparel brands and I think that because of Sheen and Temu, those are really big platforms that are really competing with Amazon right now and they sell mostly apparel and basic. We saw last week with the fees, they're reducing fees for apparel, which I think maybe has something to do with the fact that they want to compete with those, those platforms. But now they have a new fit insights tool that's going to help give you know apparel and shoe brands access to fit specific insights about their products to help you know the customers you know get the right sizing so they can help reduce returns. I think this is a really good thing to help offering you know sellers the opportunity to you know, improve upon their actual sizing measurements to make sure they're the most accurate for customers to prevent the most amount of returns. I do sell in this category and I think this is a really good thing. Um, you know, for all of us, I do sell in this category and I think this is a really good thing to add and really help us to be more specific with our sizing so that all of our customers can get the exact product that they want with the exact right fit. All right. So that is all of our news. So let's go ahead and check out with Shivali what our Helium 10 feature updates. So, Shivali, go ahead and take it away.
Shivali Patel:
Hi guys let's get into this week's helium 10 new feature alerts. We have some ground to cover today, the first feature being located inside of Cerebro, our reverse ASIN keyword research tool. Let's talk about the Amazon total search volume and Amazon average search volume metrics Diving into Cerebro. Essentially, when you're performing a keyword search and say you end up filtering down any group of keywords or phrases, then the tool will actually tell you what the total search volume is for that given pool of phrases, as well as what the average search volume is per phrase. The first number is especially helpful if you want to understand the combined impact or reach of all the keywords that your products are ranking for on page one, while the latter is great for understanding individual averages of your pulled key phrases, since the multi ASIN search that I have pulled up here is quite broad and it includes indexed keywords and phrases. We have a Amazon total search volume that is upwards of 3.5 million, but let's refine the search to have an organic ranking somewhere between positions 1 and 50. In applying these filters, what you're going to see now is the combined value of your page one reach, and that for us in this cuff and shelf market is 22,000 roughly. Alternatively, in the case that you want to see the search volume of all the keywords that your competitors are beating you on, you could use a different filter. Instead of the position rank filter, you could use the relative rank filter and then proceed to take a look at those metrics. How cool is that? Right, all right.
Shivali Patel:
And the second thing that I want to talk about now is filter presets available inside of Atomic. So what do I mean by that? Well, if you navigate over to Atomic, you can actually access this inside of the, the analytics or the add manager tabs. I'm already inside of analytics and I'm in the search terms tab, so I'm just gonna stay here, but you guys are more than welcome to do this inside of the add manager tab as well. You probably are gonna see this inside of Cerebro, too, and going down say that instead of going through all of these 1450 search terms, I want to take a look at the last 60 days. I know that I want to see those different search terms that have 20 clicks but no orders, no PPC orders, and I'm spending at least three dollars on that search term. Well, now I can actually go in and click save the filter preset, and when I click save filter preset, you're gonna be able to name it and then click apply, and every time you go back into Atomic, you're actually going to be able to access it quickly with just one click, by clicking filter library, and then select whatever you'd like to see and it's automatically going to take those search terms and narrow them down based off those filters that you selected.
Shivali Patel:
So be sure to take advantage of this. If you are really interested in minimizing your actions maybe you have a lot going on and you really want to get straight into the actionable data and insights that will move your business forward then this is a really quick way to do that, to optimize those PPC campaigns you have. Or even if you're doing this inside of Cerebro, you're using the filter presets to quickly get in and take a look at any new keywords or phrases that might be relevant to your niche. So be sure to take advantage of this if you really want to minimize the actions that are needed to get to actionable data and insights, and I wish you much success.
Carrie Miller:
Alright. Thank you so much for those updates. Helium 10 is always doing a great job of just updating products that we offer and then coming out with great new tools that can help you to further your business. So we are so excited about all the things that are going to be coming in 2024. So keep staying tuned to the weekly buzz so you can be the first to know about all these new updates. And, last but not least, we have our training of the week, so we will go ahead and send it on over to Bradley for the training video of the week.
Bradley Sutton:
How to automate your Amazon keyword research. Alright, we've been talking about a lot of strategies as far as how to find top keywords from your competitors. You know from your own listings, etc. Now I the way I showed it to you guys. It doesn't take too much time. But you know, maybe you've got 10-20 products and you want to be checking your competitors keywords once a week. Well, it can start getting pretty tedious and time-consuming and a lot of data that you're gonna have to process to every single week or every other week, go through all of your products and all of your competitor products and no, alright, is my competitor ranking for any new keywords that I didn't know? So I can put it in my listing. So how would you like a way to just put time back in your hands? I mean, time is money, right, so that you know this could take hours and hours a month, but instead of that, let Helium 10 do the work for you.
Bradley Sutton:
How can you automate keyword harvesting from your competitor's keywords? Well, it actually goes back to your dashboard, all right. So what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to go back to just your regular dashboard, okay, and you're going to hit insight settings on the very bottom left of the screen insight settings all right. Once you do that, you are going to find the keyword insight settings and then you are going to hit four insight types and you are going to select customize under keyword suggestions based on my competitors, all right. So hopefully you've set your competitors, and if you haven't set your competitors on your Insights Dashboard, you know there's videos that we have on our dashboard on how to do that but you want to put your top five competitors for all of your products and these are the ones that you probably are running Cerebra off of. Once you've got that done, like I said, go to your insights types, hit under customize under keyword suggestions based on my competitors, and what you're going to do here is you're going to enter exactly whatever you like to do inside of Cerebro. You're basically automating your Cerebro process.
Bradley Sutton:
So maybe you said, hey, I want to know any keyword where the search volume is at least 400 and my rank is like maybe I'm not ranking at all, so I'm going to put zero and zero, but at least one of my competitors is ranking in the top 20 positions. All right, that's it. You just fill it out just like you would on Cerebro. So now, any time that one of my competitors for any one of my products right, is getting sales from a new keyword that I'm not ranked for now, I'm going to get actually an insight on it or a notification right here and it'll tell me hey, your competitors rank for these new keywords. Would you like to start tracking it? Would you like to start putting it in your listing?
Bradley Sutton:
This is like super, super cool guys, next level. If you don't have access to it, you're going to need the diamond plan in order to access this. But I mean talk about putting money and time back in your hands. I mean this saves hours and hours of work. You now don't have to even run Cerebro almost ever again on your products, unless you want to do some advanced filtering, but you can now get those keywords delivered to you in a message saying hey, your competitor is getting sales from these keywords. Do you want to put it into your listing? So, guys, if you want to start automating it, make sure to set that up on your Insights Dashboard.
Carrie Miller:
All right, everyone, thank you so much for staying at this point. I do want to leave you with something that I think will be really helpful going into this next year, and that is our 2024 daily habits seller checklist. Now, I actually helped to put this together, and it's daily habits that are going to help you to stay on track, to monitor things that are really important for your business, things like your sessions and your page views and all the kind of metrics that you need to make sure that you're staying on top of your account. There's a ton of different things in this checklist that are going to help give you really good habits to help you to continue to grow in 2024. So I hope that you all check it out.
Carrie Miller:
It's really just an easy, free, clickable download. You can actually check these things off digitally, so you don't even have to download and print this thing out. You can do it all on your computer, so we will have the link ready for you in down below in the description so that you can check out this Daily Habits checklist, and I think you all are going to love it. So go ahead and check it out and we will see you all again next week and we'll see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.
What happens when you blend the minds of Adriana Rangel and Marcus Mokros, hosts of the popular Serious Sellers Podcast Spanish and German shows, with the world of Amazon and its ever-evolving marketplace? As it turns out, a captivating concoction of strategies, trends, and real-life success stories. From the transition from UPC codes to QR codes to new monthly networking calls for Spanish and German-speaking audiences to an imminent event in Germany - we dissect it all with our esteemed guests. We talk about special highlights featuring their recent guests.
Buckle up as we take a ride through the ups and downs of outdoor sports sales on Amazon with two seasoned sellers. One recounts their thrilling journey from a booming 2020 to a challenging 2021, all leading to a triumphant comeback in 2023. Hear their plans for product expansion and driving website traffic, and learn from their experiences. From across the pond, our European seller shares his wisdom on improving product images, revealing two crucial photography tips. We also touch on the advent of a novel 3D rendering service, eliminating the need for physical product delivery to a photography studio. All this while emphasizing the critical role technology plays in growing an Amazon business.
Did you ever wonder how selling on Amazon varies across different European countries? We've got you covered as we compare and contrast Amazon sales in the top five European countries: the UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain. We navigate through the VAT-related intricacies in these nations and how Amazon aids in VAT declarations. Find inspiration in the story of a successful Spanish seller who has grown her Amazon business with a unique approach - collaborating with artisans in Spain and Mexico through Amazon Handmade. We also chat about avoiding burnout while scaling up your Amazon business, ensuring a healthy work-life balance. Wrapping up the episode, we shine the spotlight on two entrepreneurs who’ve built flourishing podcast communities and Amazon businesses. This journey is filled with challenges, triumphs, plans for the future, and valuable advice for budding entrepreneurs. So tune in for an episode filled with information, inspiration, and innovation.
In episode 517 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Adriana, and Marcus discuss:
- 00:00 - Tips and Strategies From SSP Spanish and German Hosts
- 01:19 - Celebrating Podcast Milestones and New Networking Calls
- 06:33 - Insights From Amazon
- 08:28 - Trends in Outdoor Sports Sales
- 14:42 - Using AI Tools for Content Creation
- 18:19 - Build Brand With Technology and VA's
- 20:50 - VAT and Selling Strategies on Amazon
- 24:11 - Artisan Networks in Spain and Mexico
- 29:19 - Uniqueness and Innovation in Saturated Niches
- 31:50 - Tips for Balancing Work and Relaxation
- 36:06 - Amazon's AI Strategy for Product Listings
- 37:55 - Celebrating Podcast and Amazon Success
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got the host of our Spanish and German podcast back and they've got lots of tips and strategies from themselves and their guests on a wide variety of topics, such as Amazon, image creation, KDP, amazon handmade European marketplaces and much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hey guys. Heads up, Kevin King is the new host of the AM/PM Podcast, so if you love Amazon strategy, make sure to subscribe to it. Whatever you're listening to this podcast on, take a listen to AM slash PM podcast just by searching for it on that platform. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we've got a couple of our host from different parts of the world here today. We've got Adriana from Mexico and Marcus, who is in Europe right now. Welcome back to the show, guys.
Adriana:
Hi Bradley, thank you for having us.
Bradley Sutton:
It’s really great to have you both here. This is now. We just celebrated two full years of Serious Sellers Podcast and Espanol Serious Sellers Podcast of Deutsch, and the numbers have been going up, you know, record months this year. It's really great to see what you guys have created just from zero, like literally zero, and now you've got podcasts that are listened to by thousands of people out there. We have YouTube now, you know, for the podcast. So, guys, make sure, if you speak German or Spanish, you need to be listening to Serious Sellers Podcast and Espanol or Alph Deutsch. You can search for either of that on whatever you're listening to this on, even on YouTube now. Now we're doing full videos so you can get kind of like a better vibe of it as well. So guys, this is this is really cool. And just one more thing that's new We'll go ahead and promote it right now is that you guys are now hosting in Spanish and German like monthly networking calls, zoom calls, for Spanish and German speaking community. So, Adriana, tell us about yours like, like when we just had the first one on December 6, but is it always like on the 6th, or is it going to be like the second Tuesday of each month, or how is yours going to work and how can people sign up for it?
Adriana:
Yes, of course we're meeting the first Wednesday of every month, so I'm not sure what that is for January, but of course that's going to change for February as well. So basically, the first Wednesday of every month at 6pm, Mexico City time and people can sign up. They just need to visit our link, h10.me/llamadaconadriana and that's it. You can, and that way you will get the reminders and the link to join us in a live call networking call every Wednesday.
Bradley Sutton:
All right Now, Marcus, you too are just had your first ever German call in December, but starting in January. When is it going to be? And also, what is the link for it?
Marcus:
Yeah, we want to keep it simple. It's the first Monday of the month, 12 o'clock, and the link is h10.me/elite-de.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, h10.me/elite-de for German speakers. And when you say 12pm, that's 12pm Germany time, 12pm German time. Correct, speaking of Germany. Guys, I'm going to be in Germany. I'm not sure if anybody out there is going to be in in town, but I'm going to be out there on January 27th in Berlin. I'm going to be speaking at an event and also I will be hosting an elite workshop. So if you guys are interested in going for the event I'm speaking at h10.me/germany. So h10. h10.me/germany. All right, enough of the kind of like logistics here. I think, hopefully, if you're a Spanish or German speaking person, you got enough information there to take advantage of these. Everything we just mentioned is free resources for the community. But you know, you guys, let's start off with. What I like to do is because I don't. You know, I obviously can't speak German, so I can't listen to the episodes and understand what's going on. So I'm going to first start with you, marcus. What are some notable guests you've had in the year that really had like some really cool strategies or really cool story that you can relate to us?
Marcus:
Yeah, really some really awesome guests and it's hard to make any kind of selection. But one recent one was from GS1, the company who is doing the UPC codes, and the employee. He told me that they are preparing a big change. They want to go in the next couple of next years from barcodes to QR codes and they call it as a 3D code, and that will be more than just a number to identify your product. That will have like access for you to, for marketing, for example, the customer. Obviously, obviously the shop can scan the QR code, see the price, but the customer can scan it as well and you can put your promotions in it or, for example, like giveaways, anything, and he says it will even support promotions day by day. You can have one promotion set on a Monday, something different on a weekend, or like if there's like a bad batch should produced, you can add it into that QR code and the cashier will know I shouldn't sell that. So there will be a lot of functions and features coming and I mean that's where that will be a big task. They will have to change all systems in all shops worldwide. That will be something very interesting for marketing.
Bradley Sutton:
Huh, interesting, yeah, I mean because you know the traditional barcodes is kind of like what the world's been used to for so long, but the move to QR and having extra information, that'll definitely be interesting. Alright, going to Adriana now, the first kind of story that comes from your mind, or Stragia, or something that's one of your guests in the last year talked about.
Adriana:
Yeah, well, one of the highlights is that we had Amazon join us on a call or on an episode for the podcast, maybe a couple of weeks ago, maybe two or three weeks ago and that was great because we had the opportunity to ask them stuff such as you know, what's up with seller support, how can we best go about getting an issue fixed and, let's say, something happens to your listing, your listing is down, or an FBA shipment, or you know, these things we deal with as a sellers on a weekly basis, right, and so that was a big one. I was very excited to have them on a call because, you know, it's our opportunity to get answers right, instead of, you know, searching in forums or asking other people. It came directly from them and they gave us really interesting tips for how to go about certain issues and also they shared with us really interesting well insights, of course, but also resources on how we can learn more about the platform, etc. Right, and I think that this is very valuable because it comes directly from the how do you say, the horse's mouth? Or, yeah, I guess, directly from Amazon. So that was a lot of fun. That was two weeks ago and, as I said, for me, the main takeaway that I got from them was basically how to work the seller support system to get them to answer and fix our issue, as opposed to getting you know, like the template response that we sometimes get when they don't understand. What is it that we need help with?
Bradley Sutton:
I'm curious how are your own Amazon businesses going? Like, are you, do you think you're going to be up this year than before, or how things been going for you?
Adriana:
So for me, 2023 has been a good year, actually compared to 2022. 2022 was weird. I sell in the outdoors sports category, so 2020 was amazing because, of course, at least the second half of 2020, because, of course, everyone wants to be out of the house and in some place. You know that was outdoors, not indoors at a restaurant or at a mall. So it was. It was a great year sales wise, 2021 as well. 2022. It had, yeah, I experienced a deep, I would say, because everyone was, you know, out and back in the clubs and the restaurants and the concerts and all of that. So people just forgot about outdoor sports. And then 2023 came back strong. Of course, I did focus a lot on my ranking and, yeah, basically, like optimizing my listing and all of that, my images especially. I was like you know what, like if I up my conversion rate, then everything else will fall into place in a way, you know, like my ads and all of that. I do my own PPC, but I'm like you know what, as long as the conversion goes up, then I can send as much traffic as I want via ads and it should convert right, Like it should turn into sales. So 2023 was great and I'm hoping for a good 2024. I want to expand my product line and I also want to work on getting more traffic to my website and, yeah, basically growing that channel too.
Bradley Sutton:
Now going back to Marcus, what about for your Amazon businesses, your communities? What's some trends that you've seen this year like, especially since your community and you are mainly selling in Europe? Like are things in? Is there inflation in Europe? Is things getting harder? Is competition getting more? What's going on in the European Amazon market?
Marcus:
It's an interesting question because, like over the years, I always got that kind of question is it still worth it? Should you still start Amazon? But that somehow that dried out. Everybody knows that Amazon is big and I mean like yeah, like the whole world is in a tough time, I guess, right now. But as I see it, like Amazon sellers, they are doing good, they're doing well.
Bradley Sutton:
On the strategy side. You know like one of your specialties and you have people in your community who are specialists about this is like photography and things like that what do you see as kind of like working? Now, what's some tips you can give the audience about, like how they can really make sure their image deck and or videos are really better than the competition?
Marcus:
Yeah, actually I have two photography related tips and first one is from JP. He was a guest in the podcast. He's quite young guy but like living the dream, traveling to through Bali, Thailand and doing Amazon FBA. He's like selling a lot and he also started a photography business. But he has a totally different approach. He doesn't need your product. You're providing photos from your smartphone. You get a tutorial. You have to send him six photos from every site and here's a team who does a 3D rendering of that product and, um, that way he's at a price point that's just a fraction that you expect for a product photography. And, yeah, his team will do a 3D model of your product that looks like totally photo realistic and they will put it into a lifestyle photos, put it into Infographics and send you the whole products as a product shots that you expect, but without touching your products. And I mean one.
Marcus:
One thing is interest. It's interesting for people who sell, who just start out, or sell products that have like two thousand five thousand dollars of revenue, but also people who don't have time, because imagine your product is being produced in China right now and you don't have a master sample right now and as soon as the first product is finished in China, you can ask your manufacturer Do these photos for me with your smartphone, send it over. He does your product shots and the moment your delivery arrives in your local warehouse, you already have your listing completed. By the way, that website is JPD Dash advertising dot com.
Bradley Sutton:
And yeah, that's what I think I remember. You know, I again I remember. I don't, you know, I don't speak German, but I remember that episode because I look at the videos just just like see how they look. And he looked like a, like, a Like, almost like a, like a tick tock celebrity or something like crazy, crazy hair right, yeah, okay there. There we go cool. So that, yeah, that's interesting because Just recently, amazon announced that there's no longer going to be the three hundred and sixty degree Images that have been for a while. Like, if you look at the project X coffin shelf, it has it like we didn't we didn't put it there, amazon just did it themselves. It's being replaced with a 3D image that I think you can you can still like, turn around and then they were saying that all they need they're making some kind of app where you can actually take the images with your phone, and then the Amazon app, I'm assuming, or something, yeah, and then submit it. So that's interesting. You know Concept, because you know, like, I'm still using, like, traditional photography studios and that's. You know, logistically, you know you have to send the product there and then they you know they have to shoot it. So have you seen images that? Or have you seen listings that actually came from this model where they just take the pictures and they do it 3D and it looks realistic, or what's your experience with looking at?
Marcus:
Yeah, I mean, I saw it on his listings he sells thirty thousand units a month, and he's just using his service, of course. How many units thirty thousand a month is selling? Europe, US, Japan?
Bradley Sutton:
Wow, it's quite, quite busy cool all right, so that's a good one. Let's go back to a either a strategy or some kind of cool story from your experience.
Adriana:
Yes, going back to technology, per per Marcus comments I feel like many people, many sellers, that want to Be able to grow without having to invest all of their money into, you know, launching a ton of SK use or Paying people to to write blog posts for them or kindle books for them, etc. I am seeing how many people that come on the podcast. They say how they Work with either either they do and themselves, basically they they use to create content. They are using this To, such as me, journey, etc. Ai tools basically to help them create content, to help them generate user generating content, etc. Right, and so I chatted with Casspin. She was episode 90, actually episode 100 a couple weeks ago and she was telling me how she will.
Adriana:
First of all, the way she Gets ideas on how to expand her product line. She goes to her competitors stores and she's like, okay, let me see what else they're selling, right, and they some. And she sometimes finds ideas that way for complimentary or supplementary products to grow her product line and she says that it's actually very easy to launch this new SK use because, of course, you already has the Relationship with the manufacturer and it's a matter of basically just sending other products that can be, that can actually, you know, sell on their own or become kids, right, or become a brand new SK you and she was telling me how she even launches act With every SK you that she, or with every main product that she launches on their her brand. And so, of course, she, she can do this very easily because she can either get a BA to write it for her that that content for the Kindle book, or she can do it be a chat GPT, which I think it's like you know, this is something we couldn't do maybe a year ago, right, and that way, she, of course, she adds a thank you card inside of the store and then you know, for them to get the free Kindle book, because it's, I feel like people see a Kindle book Like a more valuable, I would say, gift as opposed, as you know, like just like a regular, regular PDF. And so you know she tells them that they will, that she will give them that Kindle book, access to the Kindle book, for free.
Adriana:
And then she gets that email and then, of course, through email marketing, basically she sends a coupon For, you know, 10% off, 20% off, so they shop the product via her Shopify page, basically right, and that's how she starts creating her email list. And then, of course, she has when, when people visit her site, her Shopify site, they see that she has, you know, six or eight SK use, right, and so people, I feel like six or eight SK use, it's a good enough quantity to you know, for people to see like, oh, you know, this is a legit brand, right, like this is not a brand that you know, only has one product and that's it. And she says that it's like a fairly easy and it doesn't exhaust her, basically her resources to launch up, you know, like a complete brand off of one product. Really, you know she finds the main product and then she gets ideas on what else to add, what other SK use to add and, of course, grow her Shopify brand.
Adriana:
Get that images from either me, journey or, you know, get different variations of the content, charge EPT for the, for the text, for the Kindle, or, if you want to, I mean you can create the first draft with charge EPT and then have a VA. Basically, look, you know, do some editing on on on her part, and that's about it, and I was like, okay, I mean that sounds like like something we can all do. Even I feel like when I have some guests in the podcast, I tried to find Useful information for sellers that are starting out and that maybe they have a full time job right and they don't have, you know, eight or 10 hours a day to put into this business. Or, and maybe they don't have a ton of you know money to put into the business. So, finding ways to basically leverage technology and leverage you know help from VA's etc. To to build a brand and, you know, have a brand in a matter of maybe six months.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, she doing this in English or Spanish English, in the US market English, okay, all right, cool, marcus in. Let me give you a couple scenarios here. Talking about Amazon Europe, under what scenario would you suggest somebody in or outside of Europe to, or would you suggest that they only launch in one marketplace to start like, hey, you know, go ahead and start in UK, or go ahead and start in Germany? Or would you always recommend you know, you should go ahead and take advantage of the Amazon Europe network and at least start in a few marketplaces? Is there a scenario where you would suggest one or the other, or it's all one or all the other?
Marcus:
I mean, like it's up to you If you're from the US, you could start in UK and you already can reuse your listing, your PPC campaigns, because it's the same language. Germany is the biggest market. That would be also a great test if your product works in Europe and if it works in Germany, you could go to the smaller markets. I mean, france is still a quite big, italy and Spain as well, and then it gets a lot smaller. But yeah, that could be a good strategy to start in one of the bigger countries to test your product and then go all Europe.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay Now, as far as those smaller ones go, like are there any that you think is going to one day become, you know, better than the others? Because I think the core five is the UK, germany, Italy, france and Spain, and then like there's a big gap, you know, between all of the new ones Like I forgot, like Netherlands and Poland and a bunch of others. Like are there any of those lower ones that you think are better than the other? Or they're all kind of just like equally low?
Marcus:
Yeah, I mean, it's a question of the population and I guess, like the Scandinavian countries are also very interesting. But yeah, you already named the top countries for the moment.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So now I'm just curious about like VAT and things like that. So let you know, there's obviously not an Amazon in every country, so I'm assuming that, or you correct me if I'm wrong, but if I'm living in Austria, am I ordering from Amazon Germany? Or what website am I using if I'm just living in that country trying to buy something?
Marcus:
Yeah, actually, austria shares the website with Germany. You order from the German website.
Bradley Sutton:
And then. So in that case, like I know, like with for VAT, do I have to have VAT in every country? I'm selling things in from day one, or it's only until I hit, like a certain kind or amount of revenue in that country. Is it by country or by marketplace? But and what I mean by that is all right, well, there is no marketplace in Austria, so does that mean I never have to have a VAT for Austria? Or or how even does this work, because I've never sold it?
Marcus:
over. That's a good question, and that's where it gets a bit complicated. So Austria shares the website with Germany, but there are warehouses in Austria and as soon as you got your products in the warehouse in that country, then you have to register for a VAT number in every single country that you have your products in and regardless how much you sell. Yes, and Amazon has has has a program for that, where they help you with that VAT declarations.
Bradley Sutton:
Back to Adriana another story or strategy that you can share with us.
Adriana:
I interviewed Noemi from Spain I know there's a big, big community in in Spain that basically they, they do Amazon full time and she was telling me how actually she works with another two partners I have one of her partners here at the podcast too and she was telling me how she is growing her Amazon business through Amazon handmade. And I was like, oh interesting, because I mean, yeah, I mean I guess we usually we focus on, you know the regular Amazon program to launch you know products. And she was telling me how she works with people, people that artisans I wait, yeah, that's the correct term, right, artisans, is that a term in English?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I mean, that's English, but it's too fancy for my language. But I know what that means.
Adriana:
Yes, she basically so. She likes doing, you know, handmade stuff for herself too. But she started basically connecting with artisans in Spain, apparently and I didn't know this I mean, I've traveled to Spain for, for vacations, but I haven't, you know, spent much time there. But she was telling me that there's a big, big network of artisans in Spain and of course, as she was saying this, I was like, oh my God, I mean I'm from Mexico and of course, there are a ton of artisans here in Mexico, like a ton, ton, ton, especially cities such as, like, of course, Mexico City, Guadalajara, etc. And she was telling me how she has scaled this, because that thing I guess the first thing that comes to mind to us Amazon sellers were like, yeah, but how are we going to scale this, this business? And she's managing I mean she's, she's managing to scale her business because she, of course she doesn't do or like work on this product herself, of course, right, Like she has a network of artisans.
Adriana:
And I was, I was thinking, as she was telling this to me, I was like yeah, that's true. I mean I see, when I travel to the US, how much more expensive, or like highly priced, these products that we manufacture in Mexico are selling in the US, right? Only because they're like unique and they are and they are just like more attractive than you know like the regular products. And I was like, oh, wow, this is interesting. Like I guess I always knew that there was that option over there, but I just didn't see how we could scale that. But it makes sense. I mean, if you just work with artisans and you already know, you know like you start and of course one artisan connects you with another artisan and that's the way it goes and she's I mean, she sells a lot of, you know, at the end of the day, a lot of units of different SKUs and you know the price point.
Adriana:
That's at least where my mind went right. I was like you have no competition really, because if it's something very unique, then of course you can play with your pricing strategies, but usually you won't be concerned with you know someone else, that competitor, lowering their prices or you know going 30% off. You know of the sales price, etc. So I was like that's interesting. I mean, even you don't have to be selling a ton of units a day to be making good money, because if you have 40% margins or 50% margins or even more, because I've seen in, you know in the US at the retail shops how they sell Mexican or yeah, artisan you know this type of products and they sell and I'm like what the hell like, do people buy these products at this price? And I know how much they go for in Mexico. So I was like, oh, this is very interesting. And so I thought that was a very interesting. I think that was episode 98 with Noemi. She's based in Spain and yeah, I mean, Spain has a big next to us.
Bradley Sutton:
Is she doing all of this in Spain, or is she doing this in Amazon USA?
Adriana:
No, amazon. No, she's doing it in Spain and I think she expanded already to Europe. Basically, you know how they have that.
Bradley Sutton:
I didn't even know there was Amazon, handmade in Europe, in Spain and other. Okay, interesting yeah. It's like oh interesting because definitely a way to make it the key, that of that you mentioned, there is the no competition. You know, like, like. This is a very unique product. It's not a cookie cutter, you know, by definition. So I like that Back to Marcus. One last story or strategy from you.
Marcus:
Yeah. One last story that's from Michael. He doesn't sell on Amazon. He runs an Amazon agency called me to you, but he's like the Amazon detective. He's every day on the website looking what is Amazon testing right now? What, what did they change right now? What do other sellers miss? And he's like he comes with the craziest things. And one thing he told me, like would you start to sell a drinking bottle on Amazon? I mean that's like super competitive, me probably not, yeah, and I mean everything is the same. You just fill water in it and that's it. So it's difficult to stand out and there's a company they found a way to differentiate themselves. It's called Arup and they have a small cartridge on top and you can get it in all kinds of flavor, like sherry, melon, whatever. And when you drink your water you still drink 100% water, but you breathe the sherry flavor. So your mind is drinking like sherry juice, but you're still drinking 100% water. But the thing is he pointed out that they just sell the bottle and the cartridges. But if you have, like, all your different flavors and you want to change them during the week, what do you do with your cartridges? So you need like airtight, sealed box for it and people are searching for that. You can see it in Cerebro but they don't sell it. They just concentrate on their bottle. So every Amazon seller should find like an imagine like Apple are selling just their iPhone and you can sell chargers and cases, like I bet there's like in every niche there's something, yeah, and it's a big innovation and the company is just focusing on the product. So, yeah, that was a really awesome takeaway to look for.
Bradley Sutton:
Two things there. Number one is never think that a niche is 100% saturated, because there's always, like, a fresh idea you could bring. And then number two you don't always have to be the one that has that idea, you know, let somebody else come up with the idea. But then how can you take advantage of that? Like, is there a unique storage or a unique accessory that's needed?
Marcus:
Maybe even a coffin shelf to store your cartridges.
Bradley Sutton:
Hey, there you go. Hey, coffin shelf to store your water bottle cartridges. I'll get on that Okay An episode. I'll give you guys, or everybody here, a preview of a coming episode. I'm launching some new project X products and one of them is a bat shaped bathroom mat or rug and that potentially might make a coffin one as well. But you know, the possibilities are endless and that's one of the ways that you could also get into saturated niche is take a saturated niche like bath mats you know like they're going for like $10, you know who knows how they're even making margin on it. But then do you bring in a unique material like make a bamboo one, or make a coffin shaped one, or a bat shaped one for like spooky. So you can almost take any niche on Amazon that's saturated and just come in with a unique idea or unique design or unique material and now all of a sudden it's not saturated because you're the only one who has that. All right. So I'm going to ask for your final strategies, your 30 second or 60 second tips. How can they find you guys on the interwebs? They know how to find your, your, your Helium 10 podcast, but both of you have, you know, audiences and communities out there. Marcus, how can they find your communities on the internet?
Marcus:
You can look on YouTube for Amazon FBA by Marcos and everything else is linked inside the videos.
Adriana:
For me, my YouTube channel is Adriana Rangel Vende. Just like that, adriana Rangel Vende, and yeah, in there, there you can find everything else that I have going on, and I have a free like 90 minute like masterclass. I would call it because I go from product research to like keyword research, to what kind of keywords you need to put in your listing, et cetera. So, yeah, I would. For people that maybe need some free resources to kind of like figure out how this works, I would advise you check out that video. Adriana Rangel Vende in YouTube.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, adriana. Like, do you have any last, maybe 30 second tip or parting words of wisdom for the audience out there?
Adriana:
Yes, well, you know, one topic that I've seen guests come with and share with us in the podcast has been basically focusing, you know, at the first. You know, when we start our business in Amazon, we usually focus on launching products right, and launching new variations, and doing your PPC and ranking and all of all of these activities that we have to, of course, take care of. But one topic that has been coming up very often in the in our episodes here at the podcast is that we at some point, especially maybe like two years into the business, we need to focus on growing our team, right, because if not, we'll get burnt out at some point, right, like I know that happened to me and now I'm working, I already have a VA and, of course, I already have a designer that helps me, of course, with my you know, my products, my listings and also for my thumbnails for my YouTube channel. Like, he helps me for a ton of things, and I feel like that is the way. You know, that marks a big difference between someone that is making, of course, a few thousand dollars a month in Amazon and, you know, the seller that is doing several dozen thousand dollars in Amazon a month.
Adriana:
Right, because you cannot do it all by yourself, and also so you keep your motivation right, because at some point, whatever it is that you are doing repeatedly and that you're doing for 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day, after 18 months or 24 months you're burnt out. As much as I mean you can love it, but still you know your body gives out. So that is something that I would like people to start thinking about. Maybe this is your first year in Amazon and that's fine, but maybe start listening to you know these episodes where people such as Rolando and I know you had Rolando Rosas in the podcast because he speaks English too you know Juan David as well talked about this, rod as well talked about this, and I think it's just like very important to start planning this before it's like, before we're like burnt out and it's too late, right, and that way we get we can scale faster and just like with less effort.
Bradley Sutton:
What's your Adriana, what's your hobby or what you do to take your mind off of work? You take off your mind off your Amazon business, to you know. Relax like what do you do for fun.
Adriana:
Yeah, well, before I got into this whole Amazon business world, I was in the art business. So I of course like to, you know, business museums and you know, if I can business museums with friends and all that that you know, the better, of course. But I try to yes, to, even if it's like at nighttime, right, like I try to consume content that it's not, or like even listen to podcasts that are not like business related. I basically try to put you know if it's after 8pm, even though, even if there's like this really good podcast episode, I'll watch it tomorrow at 6pm or whatever when I take a break from work. But I try to put like hard limits because I just do it. I mean, I just do it for the business, right, like I remember I saw this at the other day that says that says something about your performance of tomorrow basically depends on your recovery tonight. Right, you know something in that frame of words and so I think it's just very important because we talk about, we go on YouTube and we saw, we see everything about. Yeah, you know you can scale to blah, blah, blah and you can be making all this money, but you have to be feeling okay, right, you know, your body has to be healthy and your mind has to be healthy as well. So that is something to we cannot ignore, that, even if that doesn't sound like you know, like the sexy tip, I feel like that's as important, or even more. To grow a business, scale it to as big as as you want, really.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, I like killing two birds with one stone. So my advice to you if you wanted to do that, go to the museum while listening to the podcast in your headphones, and then now you can kill two birds with one stone, all right. So, marcus, what about you? One last 30 or 60 seconds strategy or tip for our audience.
Marcus:
Yeah, one tip I learned that will make a lot of changes. Amazon recently announced that they will look for title images that are not meeting the terms of service and they will use AI to change that. They will download your image, remove everything that doesn't belong there in their opinion and upload it again, and that is something you don't want. You don't want an AI to touch your title image. Yeah, and Michael from AMZboost, a product photographer, he told me, just use your picture, space number nine. Nobody looks there. Put a title image there that will meet the terms of service and because what Amazon is doing first, they will scan your product photos and check if there is something that is compliant to the terms of service and they will put it to spot number one as your title image. And if they don't find something, they will change it in their terms. So that's an awesome hack.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow, I never heard of that one. That's a really good one, All right, cool. And then same question to you also is you know, like me, that sometimes we can get and Adriana, we can get burnt out and if we put too much emphasis on work. So what are your hobbies, what are you doing to take yourself out of work when you need to relax?
Marcus:
Yeah, my hobbies are working out. I've got my home gym in the basement and that's also a good place to listen to something. Or I go for a walk at the beach with my yeah EarPods in and listen to a podcast. That's where I get new content.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome, all right, well, guys, thank you so much for joining us. Wish you the most of success. You guys have had already a lot of great success. It's going to be really cool to see the next milestone for you guys, I would say is like hitting that 10,000 downloads per month. I never thought that would ever happen, but the numbers that you guys are doing are getting close to that, so it's probably within the realm of possibility. But I wish you the most of success with your podcast communities and also your Amazon businesses, and we'll see you next year.
Get ready to immerse yourself in an enlightening discussion and AMA session with Matt, an expert in advanced strategies and Amazon PPC. Join us in this TACoS Tuesday episode, as we answer questions about variation listings, auto campaigns, broad campaigns, and ranking. We also take a peek into Matt's impressive background in e-commerce, recounting his experiences with selling textbooks and private-label products. Hear us as we dissect Amazon's latest data tools like Product Opportunity Explorer, Search Query Performance, and Brand Analytics and discuss how these can help sellers optimize their advertising strategies in this highly competitive market.
As we journey deeper into Amazon PPC campaigns, we touch on our “north star metric” of two sales and a click-through rate above 0.2%. Learn about the significance of negative matching and how to identify underperforming keywords using the search query report. We also shed light on the benefits of using software like Pacvue for automation and analytics and how it can save you time and effort. Plus, discover the advantages of day partying and understand the impact of different match types on campaign creation.
Lastly, listen in as we dissect the topic of Amazon PPC and how to leverage it to drive sales and boost profits. We share the calculation for adjusting bids based on target ACoS and emphasize the importance of not solely focusing on ACoS as a metric. We also touch on the recent announcement of Sponsored TV and its potential for both large and small brands. Tune in as we demystify the misconception that PPC must always result in immediate profit and share strategies for effectively utilizing broad keywords despite their increasing cost. This episode is packed with practical advice, insightful discussions, and cutting-edge strategies to help you win in the world of Amazon selling.
In episode 516 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Matt discuss:
- 00:00 - Expert Matt Altman Discusses His Amazon PPC Strategies
- 07:59 - Keyword Promotion, Sales Metrics, and Negative Matching
- 11:59 - Maximizing Advertising Efficiency With Pacvue
- 15:44 - Bid Adjustment and Amazon Sponsored TV for Sellers
- 23:28 - Amazon PPC Strategy and Optimization
- 28:21 - Analyze Ad Performance With Feature Pack
- 32:25 - Using Keywords for Effective Campaigns
- 35:27 - Boost Search Ranking With Brand Name
- 37:29 - Amazon Variations and Outside Traffic Strategy
- 43:08 - Invitation for January Case Study
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got one of the world's foremost knowledge experts on Amazon Advanced Strategy and PPC Matt back on the show and he's going to be answering all of your questions live, as well as answering a lot of my advanced questions on things like variation listings, auto campaigns, broad campaigns, ranking and much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Want to keep up to date with trending topics in the e-commerce world? Make sure to subscribe to our blog. We regularly release articles that talk about things such as shipping and logistics, e-commerce and other countries, the latest changes to Amazon Seller Central, how to get set up on new platforms like New Egg, how to write and publish a book on Amazon KDP and much, much more. Check these articles out at h10.me forward slash blog.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our tacos Tuesday PPC show of the week or of the month, I should say where we go in-depth into anything and everything Amazon advertising with special guests that we have, and this week or this month we're going to have a special guest. We're going to invite him up. We're having some technical difficulty. I'm here at the Helium 10 office actually here in Irvine, California, today. So I don't have my regular setup here, but wanted to make sure everybody's having a great Q4. So far, all right. Let's go ahead and bring up our guest of the month, and it is Matt from Clear Ads. Matt, how's it going?
Matt:
Good, how are you doing, Bradley?
Bradley Sutton:
Doing awesome, doing awesome. Where are you actually watching us from? Where are you located?
Matt:
So currently in London. So we're here in London for the next few months, but we moved to Spain about six months ago.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, nice, how's that been.
Matt:
We're in Barcelona. It's been great so far Loving it.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. Have you been to any FC Barcelona games since you've been out there?
Matt:
We haven't yet now, but it is at the top of my list.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I've been to a couple when Messi was still there. Of course, those are good times. Love Spain Now, just in general. We've had you on the podcast before and you gave us really cool strategies in general. Today we're kind of going to be focused on PPC. That's like one of your specialties, but can you talk a little bit about your background and how you came into that Amazon space, if maybe somebody might be listening to you for the first time?
Matt:
Yeah, definitely so. Been in the space since around 2011, started in college actually selling textbooks and retail arbitrage, so did that for about three to four years. Kind of scaled up my bankroll to where I could get into private label and jumped at it and honestly launched a bunch of crap. We did really well for a few years until a lot of the manufacturers just started going direct to Amazon and had some pretty bad years. But pivoted, got into supplements and food and that's been for like the last six years.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Now you are known for a lot of like really next level strategies. We've had you before at our elite workshop and things. And so thinking just first of all, I mean it could be about PPC, but just thinking outside of PPC, almost with all this new data that Amazon has come out with in the last couple of years, I mean I think a lot of us were even surprised years ago when Brand Analytics came out. And then nowadays, search career performance and things like that, this is stuff that I would say I don't know about you but me. Like four years ago I would have bet $10,000 that there's no way Amazon would ever tell you exactly how many sales are coming from a non-normalized search and what the click share percentage of top 10 competitors are, and this and that I mean people were paying Amazon employees thousands of dollars for these underground reports that weren't even as robust as what is now available for everybody. So what's your favorite thing? I'm assuming it's search career performance.
Your favorite thing that Amazon has come out with? And then what part of that especially do you think is super powerful that Amazon sellers should be using?
Matt:
Yeah. So I would definitely say search career performance is up there. I would say they haven't changed too much about it in the last like year and a half, but really, where we've been getting a lot of knowledge and data from is Product Opportunity Explorer. I would say like this used to be kind of bland, like years ago. They recently updated it, and the amount of data that they are giving you is insane. I mean, they're telling you exactly if you sell such and such supplement. These are the 15 keywords that matter. Here's the trends on that, here's the seasonality. Like every data point that you really need is there, and that's what you need to win on, I would say. The other big one, though, is the new reports in the brand analytics, where it's giving you greater details into your customer segments. So, like we sell and consumables, and we've always kind of taken a strategy on ads that's hey, like, even if our cost is 100%, what is our cost per net new customer? And we were trying to manually calculate that previously, and now they're telling you specifically by week, how many returning customers, how many net new customers you have. So it's really helped us dial in the ads for that specific strategy.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool, like. One thing I always liked about Product Opportunity Explorer even when it was kind of bland, as you said was seeing how many, for example, how many products it took to make up or in the old days, 80% of the sales for the entire niche. Now they kind of like, without even announcing it, they change it to 90%. But then it'll be interesting to see that you know some, you know quote, unquote markets or niches, what they call it you know, would have like 200 products, means like it's kind of like wide open, it takes 200 products just to make up 80 or 90% of the sales. And now you know there might be some where it's like only 40 or 10, you know like or like wow, there's 10 people dominating this. Now how would you personally use that information? Like is one or the other like better than the other?
Matt:
Yeah, so the great thing about Product Opportunity Explorer is it really shows you what keywords are driving the sales for those. So more than how many products are there we're looking at, are there branded terms that are in the Product Opportunity Explorer. So like an example that we were looking at this past week was for a floor cleaning product and we saw that of the 20 top like 50 keywords, bona was one of the main sales driving keywords. Like, even if there weren't that many products in that category, we aren't going to be able to overcome that branded search deficit. So it's just not something that we would go into Um, but we definitely prefer to go into categories where those sales are spread across more Um. The main reason for that is we really like to do kind of um I would call it kind of like tailgating. We like to kind of stay behind everyone and we'll pull like 10% of the sales from this person, from this person, and you can kind of pick off keywords from certain top products and they may not notice that you're coming up and then you can really use that to catapult yourself to the top of the category before the rest of the products in the category realized what's happening.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting, interesting, all right Now. Just, you know switching gears and going, you know kind of like PBC. Let let's do like some kind of beginner question, then let's do some some, some, some advanced things. But just, I always ask a lot of the, the the tacos Tuesday guest, about their strategy on this, because I think this is applicable almost to any level of seller. But what's your, your kind of like rule set as far as uh, when you promote keywords from like an auto or broad to to an exact, and also when you negative match on the promotion side, like, in other words, like are, are you looking for at least you know just one sale, or does it have to be two or three, like in the auto and then, and then, and then you, you put it in um or what. What's your criteria for for moving something from an auto to a exact?
Matt:
Yeah, so short answer. We're usually looking for two sales and a click through rate above like 0.2% Um. That's kind of like our North Star metric Um, but it really depends on the strategy of that campaign. Um, like, if we're wanting to run a lot of just awareness, we're going after ones where we may not even have sales at all but we have a high click through rate because it's a discovery keyword, that someone's kind of navigating that category with Um. So it varies, but typically it's two orders and above like a 0.2% click through. Okay, Awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
On the flip side, when are you negative? Uh matching, like uh, is it a certain number of clicks? Uh, is it a certain number of clicks that, uh, you have to have? Is it spend that you're looking at without a sale? Um, and then the follow-up question to that is are there scenarios where you're like not just automatically negative matching but you're like, oh shoot, this is like an important keyword. I got to figure out why in the heck I'm not converting on it before I go and just blindly negative matches. So it's kind of like a two prong question there.
Matt:
Yeah, Um, so this is, this is where really the search query report kind of data comes into play. Um, we're looking at, hey, like for competitors, um, like, is this performing? Kind of what's happening? Why aren't we getting sales? Um, we'll go ahead and test, possibly changing out our titles, our images, um morph towards those keywords and seeing if we can produce some sales through that. Um, but again it kind of goes back to, like, you know, the, the, the, the sort of focus that we used over a year and a half. Back to like, what is the source of that keyword? Is it really a converging keyword? Is it a discovery keyword? Like, we have a few keywords that we spend thousands of dollars on a month on my own brands, where we maybe get one or two sales Like it's out of loss, but we know it's a keyword that someone that's looking for a type of product uses is like their first term when they're trying to figure out which one to buy. And we just want to make sure that we're always top of mind really hard to like, distinguish that out and see that you were getting benefits from that. But now we're able to go a little bit deeper in that funnel and see that like yes, this is actually driving sales further down the funnel for us.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool, cool. Now on the more advanced side, like you know, as I just threw on my, my pack view, my pack view jacket here, what, what are you? You know, like I know you've been using pack view for a while, but you know somebody out there my in general not understand, like you know, some of these services. You know pack view is not like oh yeah, you know, $49 a month subscription, but no, it's, it's, it's, you know costs, costs some money to you. So at what point does does it make sense for somebody to to like say you know what, I'm overdoing these Excel spreadsheets, I need to use a software. And then what? What makes a software suite like Pacvue so valuable? Like, how to you know? Cause you're not going to be paying money for something for you or your business or your clients that doesn't give you good ROI. So why is it worth it for you?
Matt:
Yeah, yeah. So we've been using Pacvue for gosh almost like seven years now. I think we were one of the first like agencies at my prior agency to come onto the platform and we love it. Honestly, wouldn't go anywhere else. So first thing I did when we came to Clare ads, we actually started switching all the accounts over to Pacvue. But in reality I would say it's usable for every level of seller. But we've had a lot of accounts come to us that may be using it but they don't know how to actually use Pacvue to its full advantages. They aren't taking advantage of all of the automations and analytics that are on the back end there. But I would say, even if you're a smaller seller like in using something that, like Bradley said, is $49 to $59, like even though Pacvue is gonna cost more, you're going to get so much more out of it. It will make your ads been more efficient. You will see better results as a whole. Like make the switch now, because it's a lot easier to switch when you're starting out and you have very few campaigns. Like migrating accounts over that have 400 campaigns already. Like it starts to get hard and you've got to really rework a lot of that. So I believe in doing it right from day one, and you're gonna save yourself a lot of work down the line.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, one of the things Pacvue does that probably eventually is gonna come to regular sellers might have some visibility in this aspect, but it's kind of like the ability to do like day partying and things. So is that something that you guys actually do Like? Do you use that service of turning off ads or changing budgets at certain times of the day and if you are, what's your criteria when you're looking at that?
Matt:
Yeah, so we do use that on every single account. We use it in one of two ways. One is we're manually adjusting it based on, like our peak sales hours that we know of, if it's a high selling account. But on other accounts, Pacvue actually has an awesome feature where you can set up a day partying scheduler based on conversion rates, click through rates, number of orders by hour, and it will dynamically update that based on a trailing two week, three week period, whatever you set it to. So Pacvue really does a lot of the thinking for you and eliminates kind of that concern from your mind.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let's see we've got from Dota In Amazon PPC campaign. Should I create one campaign containing an ad group for phrase match exact and broad, or should I create each match in their own campaign or like? So I guess he's saying like maybe he should have different ad groups in one campaign or do you just have like one ad group per match type, per campaign?
Matt:
Yeah, so I'll tell you why we do it a certain way. I would say this is definitely kind of interchangeable depending upon how you want to manage your campaigns, but in order to have full and absolute control you need to have a separate campaign for each of these. A good example of this is we had a client who came to us. They had a lot of mixes within their ad groups during Black Friday, cyber Monday, they upped their bids with top of search modifier and they didn't realize that it would affect their broad targeting terms, that they were spending like $7 on broad terms and just getting placements everywhere and tank the performance. So we always break them out into their own campaigns and then even from there we'll typically segment out, like superhero keywords, into their own single keyword campaigns.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, excellent. Let me see we've got another one here from Kim Kim K. I don't think it's the Kim K. Hey guys, do you have a calculation that you use to determine how much to adjust bids? Longstanding sponsor campaigns with lots of history is the focus target. Acos, thanks to Vets.
Matt:
Yeah, so this is pretty easy. You can put together a pretty simple formula to figure out bids based on your target ACOS. So, off the top of my head and I could be saying this wrong we have it in Excel sheet. But you're really just looking at cost per click times, conversion rates, and then equals your ACOS over that. I would say we typically don't optimize any campaigns towards ACOS. I think it's something that's been brought up a lot across, like the Amazon ecosystem, and it's never really the best metric to look at. We've had a lot of accounts that have come to us where their sales have depleted over the last year, year and a half, and they're running very efficient. Like 20% ACOS. Tacos are like three to 5%, like the account looks healthy but you're undermining the daily velocity per keyword that you can achieve, which ultimately kills your organic ranks, and then you may not see it now or three months from now, but six months from now you're gonna be like what the heck happens and it's really hard to climb yourself back out of that pit.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah makes sense. But just in general, before I go into some more specific ones that I had. You know, we recently had Amazon unbox and there was a number of announcements one of them being sponsored TV, that create a lot of buzz. But the question I think a lot of people have is is, well, that's still something, or maybe only for humongous, you know sellers like first of all, is that true, or is there a path to using sponsored TV for, you know, maybe there's a low seven figure seller, high six figure seller, and then is it kind of only for brand awareness, or do you think that there's? You know the way that they're doing it, sometimes with QR codes, you know, like on Black Friday football game that they had, where there's a direct to purchase link or is it more for brand awareness, do you think?
Matt:
Yeah. So we ran some over Black Friday, cyber Monday, across large and small brands and actually saw decent performance on quite a bit of them. I would say the biggest factor that really drove it was the quality of creative. A lot of our smaller brands didn't have the creative backbone to really fulfill a huge TV push like that, and that's probably the guardrail that smaller brands are going to have trouble getting over. Like you can't take a $200 video off the Fiverr and put it on TV and expect it to do well. So really focusing in on the creative and making it more like a TV commercial definitely helped for us. But we did have some very basic like stop motion slide animated videos with just some text over them and they did pretty well as well. So I would say it's worth trying out. Just make sure you're really narrowing down those audiences that you're targeting, because the CPMs on it are extremely high. But test it, put $20, $30 behind it per day and just really see what you can do. I do think this will kind of be a big lever that larger brands can definitely lean more into to increase that awareness as they tap out other pieces of DSP and Amazon ads. But smaller brands is like it's just as evil, even as a playing field. But the creative does have to be elevated.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. William says should I expect to see profit from PPC? I rarely see profit, however, the volume of sales increases. Where I see profit Maybe he's kind of like talking a little bit of tacos here, or like you know people, I think the narrative nowadays when you hear, when you hear sellers, is oh my goodness, like PPC is so expensive, like I don't even know how I can be profitable. But it's not always trying to just make profit on the exact ad. Right, talk a little bit about that.
Matt:
Yeah. So like one question I always ask sellers that even like potential clients that come to us when they're complaining about profits or tacos or a cost, I'm like, what's your CPA? And honestly, I can count on one hand the number of people that actually knew their CPAs by product that we've talked to. Every other ad channel you look at CPAs, whether you're running on meta, TikTok, whatever you're looking at CPAs, and every time we've run the numbers the CPAs are way cheaper on Amazon than they are on any other channel. What that means is yes, probably there are some categories where you're going to run PPC at a loss, Like on my brain, main brands. We run PPC at a loss because it keeps our velocities up, it keeps our organic rankings up and you'll see those metrics in your tacos. So really, tacos is kind of your guiding light on that, but really setting in stone a target CPA and not adjusting your bids based on a cost or tacos. But as long as you're hitting that target CPA, you're continuing to see growth. That's what we really like to maximize towards.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent, thank you for that. William Guarov says hey, amazon PPC is getting costly. What's a strategy to play with broad keywords? And then maybe I can piggyback on that and take a step back. Broad it seemingly has almost changed over the last year or so. I could kind of predict what would come with Broad. I would use Helium 10, magnet, I would do the smart complete and then I could see all the Broad kind of variations. I kind of know what could potentially come up here Now. I might have coffin shelf as a Broad match and then I'll get thrown in like Gothic decor, like not even the same, doesn't even share the same keyword, and so maybe I'm not sure, if that's what he's talking about there, how it might be getting more expensive. And then if, if so, like, like, how do you deal with that?
Matt:
Yeah, so I'll answer this and I'll answer more about kind of what you went into, Bradley, because I think that's a bigger picture that people need to look into in the future of Amazon. But really when we're running Broad, we're running modified Broad campaigns so that we're at least trying to get more exact towards what we wanted. I will say it doesn't always work. Sometimes you still get those keywords way out of left field, but you have a bit more control. But I would focus again really on the search query performance data and the product opportunity. Explorer, like Amazon, is telling you specifically what keywords are being searched and what's being purchased. Broad isn't as useful for us as it used to be like. All that data now is getting piped back to us and using Helium 10, using Pacvue, you can find pretty much every keyword that's going to be a converting keyword. The biggest thing that we've seen Broad actually do for us here recently and I would say for the last six months, is it's allowed us to catch on to like TikTok trends that are basically going viral and it's picking up those keywords quicker than we would be able to pick them up. So that has been a huge opportunity. But there are a lot of other, like TikTok, specific tools that you can use to kind of find those trending things to get them into your ad campaigns.
Matt:
The bigger thing kind of on how Broad has expanded is Amazon, like Google and other search engines, is really kind of shifting towards a semantic search, which is why, like you're coming up for Gothic decor and things like that and you've probably heard other people in the space talking about semantics this has been key in, like Google, seo for the last few years and it's only going to get more and more relevant in Amazon as Amazon starts to switch more towards an AI learning model for their specific search. So a lot of what we've been doing and working on is, for example, typically if you're creating your listing, you'd find your keywords through Helium 10, you'd use Scribbles to craft your listing, make sure you get all your keywords in there, but, like in your example, gothic decor that is a huge semantic keyword that is relevant to your coffin. We would go ahead and put that on the back end or try and figure out how to fit it into the bullet points, because it's just a checkmark that Amazon's looking for now because semantically they're saying you should say something about Gothic with your current product and a lot of products that we've been optimizing towards this on, we've seen success like crazy, probably more than anything else that we've done in the last year and a half.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, interesting, let's see. Guarev has another question here. What would be the ideal ratio performing and non-performing keywords in broad? Not sure if I understand that question fully, but do you know what you might be listening for?
Matt:
Say like in broad you're going to have a lot more non-performing just because of the control factor. Unless you're using a lot of negatives, negative phrases, throughout it, I would say we don't really look at the ratio of performing and non-performing in broad because really where we're caring about performance is on our exact match. We aren't caring as much here. We're using this to seed keywords, so even if they are performing, they aren't staying in broad that long if they are. So typically for us it would be like 90 to 95% are non-performing.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, Now switching gears to auto campaigns. What's your strategy as far as, like the close match, loose match substitutes? Do you keep them all in one campaign or do you actually segregate those targets in separate auto campaigns?
Matt:
Yeah, so we actually mix it up. We've seen hit or miss performance on these when we break them out, for whatever reason. Sometimes they work better even with the exact same beds when they're all together. I don't know why that happens, but we typically test both and then whichever one's performing, we pause out the others and let one continue on. We do do a lot of negative matching in our auto campaigns that we're bidding on elsewhere, but we do also always still run a super low bid auto campaign. We negate out brand of terms and run them at like 30 cents per click, and I was just looking at account before I hopped on here Last week one of them got 135 sales for like $22. Like these campaigns still work, I've used them honestly as long as I've been selling on Amazon and we always set them up for all of our products.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, going back to software, software like Pacvue Adtomic. One cool thing that we can do is I could just see a search term, but not just at the campaign level. I could see it in all campaigns. Like, let's say, in an auto campaign, for example, I got a coffin shelf and in that campaign I had 40 clicks and zero sales. And let's say I felt that it wasn't too relevant of a keyword. I'm like, yeah, I don't want to keep spending money on this. Obviously, at 40 clicks I would negative match it. But with the software I can see that, hey, it's getting impressions and clicks in a broad campaign over here, maybe an exact campaign over here, but in those campaigns there's only like maybe five clicks. So, theoretically speaking, if I was just looking at that campaign in isolation, there might not have been enough information to be a negative match. But since you have so many negative or clicks with no sales in one campaign, do you just go ahead and say you know what, across the board, I don't want this keyword showing up in any of these campaigns. Or do you let the number? Do you let it roll? Do you let it ride in those other campaigns?
Matt:
Yeah, so great question. This is actually a feature pack view that we use every single day because you see a lot of variance in this and even like moving keywords over to exact match. But it may be in phrase that have dead like a third of what your exact match one is. Whatever reason, the phrase one is serving like crazy and you're getting sales. The exact match one isn't. So we look at this daily and we're trying to figure out one like why isn't our exact match getting served? Like hey, what's going on here? And adjusting the bids and keeping a close eye on it. But typically if we're seeing performance elsewhere, we'll keep it on, mainly because we don't know exactly where that ad is appearing Like. I mean, we now know like top of search, rest of search, product pages, but we don't really know granular details. This is also something that pack view does really well. When you have your share of voice turned on, you can see exactly where your ads appearing and what placement, what percentage of time. So using pack view or actually I don't know any other tools that do it as deep as pack view does on that We've been able to really narrow it down and figure out like, hey, this one's performing really well and slot four of ad positions. Like we can't get served for this one and slot two or three, and we can readjust our entire strategy for that keyword for position four and actually set up automations in pack view to make sure we're always in sponsored position four.
Bradley Sutton:
Nice. Now, speaking of that, how are you keeping at top of search? You know like I'm kind of old school where you know you're more old school than me, but you know like in my days when I first started learning PPC, there was no, you know, top of search modifier and things like that. You just raise and lower the bits and I kind of kept doing that because, like you know, I obviously with helium 10, like I'll turn on the boost and keyword tracker and it's checking 24 times a day, rotating, you know addresses and browsing scenarios. So I kind of like, no, am I showing up in top of search and sponsor or not? And I've just kind of like kept doing that. Now, are you still doing that, or do you use those those? You know like, hey, I'm going to go 200% for top of search or some kind of formula like that.
Matt:
Yeah. So I'll say when the bid modifiers first came out like they were amazing. We could bid like 60 cents with 900% top of search and get crazy conversions and everything was great. Too many people are using them now and it's kind of just a battle of who's going to pay more to get that position. What we've actually switched most accounts over to is actually using pack view organic and paid position bidding. So we'll set up rules to basically increase the bids until we're in position one and that will like set our new base bid if we're going for top of search and then we'll use that and then look at our percentage of serving time through pack view into that and adjust as needed. Like. One nice feature is you can set like I want a 90% top of search share of voice for this keyword and pack view will automatically update your bid without the modifiers, because sometimes using the modifiers can get out of hand quickly and you could spend your whole budget and one day, if the keywords big enough, within a few hours on one of the 50 keywords in your campaign. So we really rely on pack view to figure a lot of that out for us and optimize the perfect position for ads and we've kind of stepped back away from modifiers. The one place we do still use them quite frequently, though, is product page modifiers. We do a lot of product targeting where that's really what we're going after, and it does seem to still work well for us there. Rest of search hasn't been a great modifier for us as of yet. We have better success using set rules and pack view to manage that versus the rest of search modifier.
Bradley Sutton:
OK, cool, I got a fight to bring that into Adtomic. I didn't know that pack view had that Nice Two part question here from Duda how do you use these keywords Electrolyte protein phrase match and then electrolyte protein powder phrase match? My issue is that they are my main keyword but they generate different variations in customer search terms with different variations. With only one click or two, the most Out of those 50 different search terms that get that those main keywords are generated. How do I pick those that convert it? So I'm assuming that he's got two targets here and that maybe he's getting clicks on a whole bunch of long tail versions of this. Perhaps, if I'm deciphering this correctly.
Matt:
Yeah. So it depends on how that campaign is set up. So a typical phrase match campaign for us we would never put those keywords into the same ad group or campaign because electrolyte protein is electrolyte protein powder phrase. If you do have them split out into separate campaigns, if you have different bids there, one's going to serve over the other always. You have no real control in that. So I would say if it were me, I would just do electrolyte protein as a phrase match and get rid of any type of variation possible and use that as my guiding light. If you aren't getting served typically I know that's a high volume category your budgets probably aren't enough within that campaign to keep it serving constantly and you're getting middle of page or bottom of page placements. So that's how it's getting your budget throughout the day. I would test increasing the budget on that campaign and seeing what it scales up to and you'll probably see a bit more even click distribution between those.
Bradley Sutton:
OK, Cool. Sergio has a question here. Hey say, when launching, you tell your friends and family your brand and your product and hey, go buy it. Should I do an exact campaign for the brand name so they don't have to scroll? So first of all, at least it's good that you're like, don't be doing search, find, buy things or something which it sounds like you're not. Otherwise you wouldn't even have this question and hopefully you're telling your friends and family, do not leave your reviews just at all, to make sure that you're not getting in trouble with Amazon. But yeah, if you're trying to get your friends to support your product, I mean I think regardless, if you're trying to get your friends and family to support your product, shouldn't you always target your brand name, or that's only kind of like when you're more of a mature brand, Does that really come into play? What do you think?
Matt:
Yeah, I would say it depends on your brand name. If it's a unique brand name that, like nothing else is really going to come up for, like yeah, I wouldn't run ads. But if it's something that could be construed as something else, I would definitely run some ads to get towards the top. The one thing I would say about this and it's something that we do when we're launching and you're telling friends, family, anyone about it, we leave it kind of bland and just say, hey, this is my brand and it's a protein powder. I would really appreciate if you can buy it. You're not telling them to go search, fine, by keywords. But if you tell them that, hey, it's protein powder, and brand names are probably going to search protein powder, that brand name without you doing anything, Because it's always better, which is why search fine buys work to get a real keyword in there beyond your brand. But even just pumping the brand name does work as well. We've seen it with TikTok. Brand name searches can skyrocket you for every other keyword that you're relevant for.
Bradley Sutton:
William says yeah, this is a universal question, I think, or universal debate, I think. For successful exact keywords, do you recommend making those keywords negative in the broad? Some people teach that although you're converting for a keyword in the exact, do not remove that keyword from broad.
Matt:
Yes, this is debated quite a bit and I'll tell you from our experience it can kind of go either way, like sometimes we'll negate it in broad and then the exact stops performing. Sometimes we'll leave it and the broad performs better. Like it can go either way. I would say it's something that you should definitely test. Amazon ads is still kind of finicky on some of these things. For whatever reason. Older campaigns still tend to work better for us. So if your broad campaigns older than your exact match, it may still continue to outperform for a little bit. But what we do typically do is if we're going to leave it in broad, we lower the bids in broad I'm not specific keyword quite a bit and try and give the exact match as much room to run as it possibly could.
Bradley Sutton:
OK, cool, let's see. Hina has a question. I have 10 variations. They're not page one ranked. What strategy can I apply to get a good conversion on it? So I'm not sure exactly what he's saying here. But let me just change this into another question here. Like I've got betting that has a bunch of variations, or a consumable that has a whole bunch of different flavors, are you putting all the variations into one campaign? Do you have different campaigns for each variation? Do you only promote maybe one or two child items out of the whole variation? What's your strategy on variation items for PBC?
Matt:
Yeah, so we run a lot of variations. This is the one place where we do run ad groups. So our main products, the main variation, is flavored. So if someone's searching for a lemon flavored one, you obviously don't want that running against a chocolate flavored one. So an exact match campaign would have an ad group for each flavor and we'd be breaking out the different flavor variances within there. If it's a more broad term that doesn't include a flavor name, we're usually pushing it towards our hero product within that variation. But something that you can definitely test. I would say one thing to look at is search query performance and also the top I think they call it top search term report Now it used to be the old brand analytics report and see what the other top click products are. In our instance, if someone's searching for a sugar cookie, it may be that they're searching for a specific flavor and you can see that by the click through rate and a commercial rates from brand analytics.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Now, before we get into your final strategy of the day, can you talk a little bit about clear ads? I mean who you know, who, who you guys might be able to help the most, and what you guys do.
Matt:
Yeah, definitely. Um, so we're an ads agency um based in the UK. Um, we work with sellers and actually every single amazon marketplace now, so can help you across the board there. Um, we also do offer like full service management. So if you're looking for content creation, lipstein optimizations or even just day to day like inventory management, case log management, we can help you with all of it. Um, we also run DSPs, so pretty much a to z on amazon, we've got you covered. Um, and many of you may know George Um the founder. Um, he's everywhere. Um, so, yeah, head us up if you need any help with any of those things.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome, all right, now um 60 second strategy of the day could be about PPC. It could be about search career performance. Could be about how to live as a foreigner in Barcelona. It could be about anything you want, so go ahead.
Matt:
All right, um, so I'm going to take it away and I'm going to do. Uh, outside traffic to amazon Um, so I think one of the big questions that search career report has brought up with a lot of people is like, hey, these sales numbers in here are extremely low. I know I'm selling more for this keyword or this product. Like, why isn't this represented? And I think majority of people don't ever look at outside traffic to listings and what's happening. But if you actually take the time to dive deeper, you would be amazed at how much traffic comes straight to your listing from other sources outside of amazon. Um. One great way to do this is how we do it. Um, you can use SCM, rush or a trust or really any kind of SEO tool. Plug in your canonical um amazon URL and just see, like, what articles have been written about you that you know nothing about, where you're getting posted on social. It will highlight all of these things. Um, but really the big key factor that we've been looking at is if you have a competitor in your category that you just you can't figure out how they're doing things. Chances are it's all coming from outside of amazon and that's why you can't compete. So doing this simple search, you can see like, hey, these are the bloggers that are talking about it, these are the articles that they got. You can reach out to those people directly. Most of those positions are paid. Like, don't trust any of those top 10 articles, they're all paid. Um, you can reach out and pay for those, and sites like a H refs SCM rush will tell you how much traffic that bloggers are, so you can kind of estimate what your return is going to be on that dollar. Um, I would say another big piece that we've been kind of working on for these is for a lot of terms like your, your coffin example.
Matt:
Like there's no one out there that has a website about coffins, like that specific product, it would take you with AI a few days to whip together a basic word press site that has everything you would ever want to know about small coffins and since no one else is writing about that, you're going to rank in Google like top three within a few weeks. If you're in these categories where there isn't that much competition or it's a unique product, start making some micro sites. Um, like I've shared some examples at some prior events and presentations, we have a few of these micro sites that are giving us seven to 8000 people a month now to our Amazon listings, and we used AI for the entire process. Um, so it took us maybe an hour per site and they just continue to produce. And the big thing with that is it's a traffic channel that no one else can really steal from you, because most people aren't looking at this and you'll always kind of stay at the top of your category because your velocities will just always be higher.
Bradley Sutton:
That might be something I'd like to dive into, if you are able to come out in January. Like your step by step case study on that, that sounds fascinating. Alright, well, matt, thank you so much for joining us. I know it's late over there. I appreciate it and hopefully we get to see you in January.
Matt:
Sounds good. Thanks for having me.
Ever wondered how Amazon's impending FBA fee changes could impact your selling journey? Let’s tackle this complex web and break down what these changes might mean for you.
Join us on a journey as our special guest, Ritu Java, takes us from her beginnings in India to her experiences in Japan, ultimately transforming her into a data-driven entrepreneur. With a unique perspective on the blend of culture and commerce, Ritu shares insights on how she leveraged her expertise in data and analytics to excel in Amazon PPC strategies. You'll also hear her intriguing tales of running an Etsy store from Japan and overcoming the complexities of helping Amazon sellers worldwide.
The conversation doesn't stop there. Discover how AI has become a game-changer in running Amazon PPC campaigns as we discuss our personal experiences combining AI with other data sources to optimize campaigns. Listen as we unveil the advantages of using chat GPT for keyword research and translation over traditional methods like Google Translate. This episode offers a unique perspective on integrating AI into workflows and SOPs, driving efficient and effective results. We also underscore the value of incorporating AI into Amazon PPC strategies for successful product launches and campaign management.
To cap off this enlightening conversation, we tackle the future of Amazon selling and the role AI plays in it. From generating keywords for Amazon searches to creating images for sponsored brand ads, we unravel how chat GPT and mid-journey can elevate your selling game. Don't miss out on our tips for creating effective lifestyle photos and the significance of close-up product images. We also shed light on the evolution of Search Query Performance on Amazon and share our strategies for effectively managing and analyzing data.
In episode 515 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Ritu discuss:
- 00:00 - AI Power for E-commerce Sellers
- 07:54 - Utilizing AI for Amazon Sellers' Success
- 09:05 - AI in PPC Strategy With Chat GPT
- 20:52 - Search Term Modifiers and Word Order
- 23:04 - Enhancing Amazon Ads With AI
- 31:24 - Generating Posts Using Canva and Amazon
- 32:19 - Utilizing Search Group Performance Data
- 33:47 - Optimizing Data Strategy for Efficient Analysis
- 41:23 - Convert Snapshot Data to Time Series
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got a first time guest who I think is probably top five in the world these days as far as actionable Amazon strategies, and she's going to give us an absolutely value-packed episode full of tips on generative AI, PPC and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. How can you get more buyers to leave you Amazon product reviews? By following up with them in a way that's compliant with Amazon terms of service?
Bradley Sutton:
You can use Helium 10 Follow-Up in order to automatically send out Amazon's request, a review emails, to any customers you want. Not just that, but you can specify when they get the message and even filter out people that you don't want to get that message, such as people who have asked for refunds or maybe ones that you gave discounts to. For more information, visit h10.me forward slash follow-up. You can sign up for a free account or you can sign up for a platinum plan and get 10% off for life by using the discount code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We've got a special guest today Ritu. So, first of all, we're going to get into your backstory about how we can even talk in Japanese, because that's something that's crazy. Were you born in Japan or were you born?
Ritu:
I was born in India, but I lived in Japan for 17 years.
Bradley Sutton:
So from what age?
Ritu:
You want to know how old I am.
Bradley Sutton:
No, no, no. From what age were you living in Japan?
Ritu:
Mid-20s. Yeah, so mid-20s.
Bradley Sutton:
Also was, so you didn't go to school in Japan.
Ritu:
No, I didn't. I went there as an adult. I was working at a company and I take company 17 years.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, that means you had to have gone there when you were a child. Then because you can't be over 25 years old. So I don't know what's going on here.
Ritu:
That is very cute.
Bradley Sutton:
I was all the reason. I was asking if you grew up because I wore this shirt today. Do you recognize this character here? What is this?
Ritu:
Yes Doraemon. Yes, I grew up with Doraemon when I was a little over there, that's awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, I grew up with Doraemon when I was a little over there, that's awesome. I know a little bit about you, but I for some reason had this idea that you actually grew up in Japan and that was why you were so fluent in language. Once you go as an adult, it's a little bit harder, unless you really immerse yourself in the culture.
Ritu:
I did. I really immersed myself in the culture. I went there just for a year, honestly, and ended up staying 17. It's so crazy how that place had such a big impact on me. It was such a stark contrast to where I grew up, which was India.
Bradley Sutton:
Whereabouts in India.
Ritu:
In Delhi, the capital city of chaos that's how I describe it from chaotic to super orderly. You can imagine what a difference, that is A stark difference from the world I knew. I was just drawn to the calm and the orderliness of that place. How things were punctual, everything happened as expected, there were no surprises, everything was planned in so much detail, which I kind of liked. I think where I'm at right now is a nice middle ground, because I think I like the chaos. It has energy. It has a certain type of progressive energy that all of us need, especially as entrepreneurs. We need that energy to be able to kind of keep moving forward. But then I also like the organizational skills that I picked up while I was in Japan, because you need that to have good execution. I think best of both worlds is what I'm trying to be at right now, trying to draw from both my cultures.
Bradley Sutton:
Then did you go to university in India.
Ritu:
I did. I'm an engineer. I did my electronics engineering from India. I went back to school much later in life. I went back to school in the US and I did a course in data science, which is why I'm very attracted to PPC and data and data analytics and that sort of stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
When you graduated with the electrical engineering degree, did you start working in India, or is that when you went to Japan?
Ritu:
Yeah, I started working right away and I started working in India and I worked for an IT company and it was a pretty long stint there as well, like I was very interested in technology right from the start and it kind of aligned with my life's goals and stuff like that. At the time. I mean, little did I know that I would completely switch at a certain point. When I was in Japan I worked for not only the company that I was in India, I kind of went to their Japan office and I started helping them out. But then later on I switched to a more technical role at a school, at a high school, American school in Japan, and then I had my kid and took a break from work and then I kind of dealt in a little bit of entrepreneurship. I started running my own business. I had an Etsy store. Yes, in Japan, while I was in Japan, I started my Etsy business selling jewelry. It was like kind of one of a kind jewelry and I realized that, gosh, it's not enough just to create a listing and people are not going to flock to that listing. So I had to teach myself a whole lot of stuff like marketing advertising. So I learned Facebook ads, Google Ads, blogging, YouTube, all of that stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
So Etsy in the United States, or is there an Etsy in Japan?
Ritu:
No, there's an Etsy in the United States, but I was selling on the US market from Japan. So I was producing my stuff there, but I was shipping it worldwide wherever there were shoppers. But shipping costs are exorbitant. Sending stuff from Japan it's very expensive. Yeah, so mostly was attracted to the data side of things. Yes, I have both left and right brains, because the creative side was just all my creations, the jewelry that I made. But then I needed the data science side of things to kind of round things off and make money out of my business, because everything we do here is based on data and I know he's intended the data company. So is PPC Ninja. We might think that we're in the business of selling goods, but actually we're in the business of leveraging data. So that's why it was so important for me to get that knowledge and make sure that I'm kind of ready to go with my own endeavors.
Bradley Sutton:
Now. So, Etsy was kind of like your first online marketplace. Now, did you ever end up selling on Amazon or did you go straight into software and consulting etc.
Ritu:
Yeah, so I've never sold on Amazon, but I've helped businesses sell on Amazon. So it's basically the data side of things. So, I only sold on Etsy. I sold on my own website for a bit, but then I have never sold on Amazon myself. But PPC is where I'm focused on.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Now you talked about having an analytical mind, and that's kind of like what you're known for. When you've spoken at events like Billion Dollar Seller Summit and others is especially in the last couple of years, you're one of the go-to people as far as AI and things like that, now me, I'm a little bit behind. I use even on this podcast, we use AI to generate title options and transcripts and things like that, but I would say I'm not one of those full force ahead like, hey, ai is going to replace hours and hours of work. I haven't really adopted it to that effect. So, the typical Amazon seller what are some things that you don't have to be a seven, eight, nine figure seller but just like any Amazon seller if they have not started utilizing AI to help them in their operations or business? What are? Let's take it to that spectrum first. What are some things that you think that any Amazon seller could benefit by utilizing AI?
Ritu:
Yeah, there's so much. Actually, the magic happens when you start combining things. So AI by itself may not be the be all and all of things, because it's not going to operate in a silo. You've got to combine it with other pieces of data that you have access to. For example, just this morning I was preparing for a new product launch for one of our clients and I'd got all my data from Helium 10. I was at the stage where I have to come up with some keywords for broad match campaigns. I wanted to make sure that all the right keywords are in there, not just the long tail ones with high search volume, but I wanted to make sure that I'm capturing all the seed combinations of important words that make sense. So what I did was I exported the Helium 10 cerebral analysis and I fed it to chat GPT and asked it to come up with two words and three word combinations of seed keywords that would perfectly describe this product. Now what I'm going to do next with that is basically convert that into broad match modifiers, which basically means you add a plus sign in front of all the seeds and then I'm going to create campaigns with it. So that's something that I do at every launch. I generally don't skip that step. It's an important one for me. So, in addition to all the long tail keywords, I will come up with enough seed words that will run at a slightly lower bid but will be like a discovery campaign for me through the broad match modifier channel. So that's kind of one thing that I do.
Ritu:
Then, like yesterday, I was doing another one for another client, where we have a list of keywords that we discovered from the search query performance report, which is kind of this new, very valuable piece of data that Amazon is giving us these days. So from there I was able to come up with a structure for sponsored brand headline ads and I didn't have to do the work. I just fed that entire list to chat GPT and said, hey, organize this into groups of very related words and then give me a headline ad which is less than 50 characters, because that's the amount Amazon will give us. And then it did that for me. I also gave it one other important instruction, which is to make sure that one of the keywords or a very close variant of that keyword in the group must be included in the title, and that's basically my way of saying, hey, I want this to be a lower funnel ad, not a generic kind of upper funnel ad, because my sponsored brand ads tend to be more focused on ROAS rather than brand discovery and brand awareness. So those are some of the ways that I'm using it almost on a daily basis. I had switched to chat GPT plus a long time ago. I've been paying for it and it's totally worth it.
Bradley Sutton:
So there's how much is it for somebody to subscribe to?
Ritu:
that it's about $20 a month. It's not much at all, yeah, it's just $20. And what it gives you is all the beta features, all the new stuff. So right now you can actually upload files very easily. You can upload any kind of file to almost any kind of file to chat GPT and then ask it to analyze, analyze the file and then you can ask it a bunch of questions. So it's just made life so much easier. And I mean I think sky is the limit with what you can do with AI. It's like I always, always feel like I'm not using it enough, even though I'm using it probably quite a bit more than a lot of people, but I still feel cautioned to use it more.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, interesting, interesting. So there's some of the ways that you can use it in PPC. Now I remember you presented something. I've seen you speak, you know, various times, but I don't remember which event, this or what it was. That might have been a billion dollars, but where were you doing? You were doing like translation, using like Helium 10 because, like you were doing research, you weren't translating the English keywords. That's obviously a big mistake that some sellers make. Hey, I've got my Amazon USA listing, let me just translate it. Or let me just translate the keywords. No, you need to do the research in that marketplace. So you switch Helium 10 to Amazon Germany, for example, but if you're not a German speaker, you just see all this Deutsch keywords and you don't really know what it means. Or so they're doing it in Amazon Japan and they don't speak Japanese like you, so they might not know. So what's your? I'm not sure if it was AI or just something in Google you were doing to kind of like make that process a little bit easier.
Ritu:
Yeah. So what we've done is we have integrated chat GPD right into Google Sheets, and we had to write a little bit of code for that. But once we did that, what's happened is that we have these ready to go sheets where we simply change the prompt and add a bunch of keywords and then it will just translate into whatever language, right? So? And I've noticed that any translation done by chat GPD is way better than Google Translate and I've tested it, especially in Japanese, because I can read it. I know that the quality is much better.
Ritu:
Just to give you an example chat GPD will use the right combinations of Kanji and Hiragana, whereas Google Translate will not. It just doesn't do a great job. And if I tell chat GPD to give me a translation in all four different scripts, that's, kanji as well as Hiragana, Katakana and the Roma G, it will give all those to me. It's a no-brainer to use chat GPD for that sort of thing rather than Google Translate and then other languages as well. Like we're just onboarding this client that has four markets and we have no speakers of those languages on our team. But with chat GPD, we can simply include that into our SOPs, into our workflows and just use those sheets to kind of get the final product out. So it's really great the combination of Helium 10 and chat GPD workflows. They work really well for us.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Now going back a little bit, just remember you were talking about broad match modifiers. There might be people out there who don't know what that means. Can you explain that a little bit?
Ritu:
Yeah, yeah. So a broad match modifier is a type of broad match, so when you're setting your add up, it'll still be a broad match. However, by simply adding a plus sign before every part of the keyword which means if it's a two word keyword, then both the parts will have a plus sign in front of them what you're gonna ensure is that the buyer search must include those words in exactly that format in order for that match to happen. So this eliminates any kind of kind of synonyms or related words that Amazon might try to kind of connect to, which you don't think need to be there. So at this point, amazon is even replacing exact matches with weird sort of words that it thinks are similar. So we don't want that, because we've done all of the research to find out which exact version of that keyword is giving us the highest search volume, so we wanna stick to it.
Ritu:
In order to make that happen, we're actually finding ourselves doing more and more work with broad match modifiers, because all the other match types are being weird anymore. Like exact matches are not behaving like exact matches. Same thing with phrase match and broad match anyway, always was a bit too broad and it was always kind of giving you all kinds of weird matches for sponsored brands, but then it started doing the same thing for sponsored products as well, and that makes it a little challenging. It can be wasteful. So yeah, broad match modifiers is a great way of making sure that your matches are clean and that they don't bring in kind of extraneous, superfluous words that you shouldn't be targeting.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you use that 100% of the time when you have a broad campaign?
Ritu:
So you always have if it's a three word phrase.
Bradley Sutton:
You'll put the plus in between each of the.
Ritu:
Yes, 100% of the time. We've been doing it for the past two years and we actually future proved ourselves because we knew this was coming. It's kind of like Amazon always follows Google. So we knew this was coming because Google introduced broad match modifiers first. Now they've already sunset it. So I don't know where this is gonna end up for Amazon, because what I've heard and I don't wanna just speculate, but what I've heard people say is that Amazon might be moving toward a future where there aren't any match types. There's only a word, there's only a keyword, and then it figures out how to match it the best way. Now it's plausible, especially in this AI world. It's plausible that that might happen. But in the interim, I'm betting on broad match modifiers and exact match. Of course, can't do much about the fact that Amazon isn't treating exact matches the way they ought to be treated, but that's the best we have right now.
Bradley Sutton:
So what would the difference be between using broad, doing broad target with modifiers compared to phrase for the same, the same, you know, like coffin shelf, like. So if I do coffin plus shelf in broad or coffin shelf in phrase, what's the difference in the potential? You know showings of that keyword.
Ritu:
Yeah, no, I think the showings of that keyword might totally depend on the bids and they might also depend on relevancy. So it's very hard to predict which of the three match types are gonna win. You know that's been a struggle. I mean you can't really say if you put coffin, what was it? Again coffin shelf.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, coffin shelf.
Ritu:
Yeah, if you say coffin shelf broad coffin shelf phrase and say coffin shelf exact, what we would want it to do and what would be logical is that if I had a higher bid for exact match, then you know all the searches should come in match through exact match. But that's not always the case. You know, we've seen so much variability there. It also depends on which campaign, you know, starts out those keywords and then each campaign has its own story, its own history. Because let's say, you combine that keyword with a bunch of other keywords and let's say those other keywords got a majority of the early data points, like it started hitting some other words coffin longtail words Before it hit your coffin shelf word, then what happens is that this word starts getting starved of impressions, the other words start to take dominance and these words that get starved of impression give you the false impression that they're not working, whereas it's just a matter of how things started off, like what were the set of searches on that day, on that very moment that Amazon decided to match?
Ritu:
And then it's going to just take its cues from whatever little data it has in the beginning, because that's all it has to play off of, and then it just keeps giving more and more and more impressions to the early data points and everything else just gets ignored, you know. So it's like a game Like PPC is a game that you know you've got to be able, you've got to be willing to keep playing, trying different things, different ways, moving things, you know, trying it in a different match type, in a different campaign, restarting, stopping, all of that you know.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay now you know like, for example, if I just do you know, going to this same example, you know coffin shelf, no modifier and broad. You know, yeah, nowadays you know something crazy can come up with, like, you know, spooky decor.You know, potentially it could even come up not even including the word, but ones that are traditional, would be like, you know, coffin shelves for men, coffin shelves for women, but then also it could be coffin shaped shelf, like it could insert a word, or shelf shape like a coffin. You know, like changing the order, but if I put that modifier in there, does that force it, in your experience, to be only longer tail, like it's coffin shelf has to be in there as a phrase and then it's only putting words at the beginning or the end, or still. It could switch it up a little bit.
Ritu:
Yeah, it will switch it up. So coffin shelf could be shelf coffin even. As long as the word shelf and the word coffin both exist in the match, it will match. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, going back to Helium 10, now I was looking at, I did it. I still haven't seen your replay of your presentation you did for Helium 10 Elite a few months back. But I was looking at your slides and there was something that you were talking about magnet and seed keywords and just by looking at the slide I couldn't tell what the strategy was. So can you explain what are you doing? I'm not sure if this has to do with chat, gpt or, but just how are you using magnet in a unique way?
Ritu:
Yeah, so what I do is basically I start off my keyword research by looking at audiences, like who is the right target audience for a product, right? So that's my first step. Now the audience list will help me figure out what words these people use. So if it's a garlic press and let's say there's five different types of people, there could be just regular straight up chefs, there could be restaurant owners, there could be whatever. So there's like five or six different types of people who might use a garlic press.
Ritu:
Now I ask ChatGPT to tell me all the words that these audiences or avatars are likely to use when they search on Amazon. So I'm actually starting from a suggestion of a seed keyword. That's my starting point, and then I use those seed keywords that chat GPT generates to go and dump that into magnet. And then I use the expand option the second one, not the first one and that basically gives me all of the keywords and their search volumes, and that's what I need Basically.
Ritu:
I wanna kind of run it by search volume information to figure out if it is really a word that I should be going after. Now I don't always come up with those words, probably because the search volume is too low, in which case I don't need to worry about it, but I can still use that information as broad match modifiers to just generate some sort of discovery. So like, for example, eco-friendly. I don't know if there's any sort of garlic press that's eco-friendly, but let's say someone in that audience wants an eco-friendly garlic press made out of bamboo or whatever. I will still create broad match modifiers that have those important words in that combination so that I can at least start to do some keyword research through an ad rather than through existing search volume data.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool, switching gears from keywords now to images. I know you've talked about mid-jurdy Canva. Have you played around at all with the new Amazon one that they made kind of for sponsored brands? And then, if so, what's your results? I've had very different, like some of it are absolutely terrible, but then I know that part of it's because I don't really know how to prompt them. I'm not very good at prompting, but what's your experience with the new Amazon AI image generator for sponsored brand ads?
Ritu:
Yeah, I mean it's not bad for someone who's really struggling with image creation in general, but it's not really usable for every case right? In some cases, it's gonna be hard to come up with the perfect background for your image. The other trouble I have with it is that the product image is too small on the canvas, and that's not how I like my sponsored brand headline ads Generally. This is a tip actually for our listeners when you create a sponsored brand lifestyle photo, the biggest mistake people make is that they fully capture the lifestyle setting in which that product is being used, but then the product itself is so tiny. That's a big mistake. That shouldn't be the way right. The way to do it is to have the product front and center. It has to be blown up right in the middle and then you could maybe suggest what the background is. You might just use suggestive creatives rather than have it in absolute terms. It's being used in the setting that it's being suggested, so for that reason I generally like to request for zoomed in, highly close up type of images so that we can have better conversion rates.
Ritu:
And there's a story that I just wanna share here real quick. We had one client with a dog product and the product was being used on a dog that was sitting in the lap of a woman on a sofa, and then there's a living room in the background so you can imagine the size of the product. It's like so small you can't see it right. So then what we said to this client was give us a zoomed in image. So then they zoomed right in, so all we see now is the pop and we see the product. Right. So it completely changed the metrics for that ad and then we started using that particular image for many other of their sponsored brand headline ads, and then the rest is history.
Ritu:
They really started growing after that. But the point is that close up images are more important than pretty images, right? So pretty images anyone can create pretty images. You wanna make them highly converting images and for that reason I might not use the Amazon's AI generated images right away, unless they become better, unless they can kind of keep the product as the hero it needs to be, front and center. Yeah, I'm trying to figure out any prompt that can help me get to that stage, but I'll keep testing. I'm not sure yet.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, so then what outside of Amazon? Then, like I said, I know you're using like mid journey, which is another one that's not too expensive it isn't like 10 bucks a month or something like that to use mid journey, or yeah. So then what if somebody is like all right, you told us what some basic stuff that people how chat GPT for 20 bucks a month can help Amazon sellers. What is something that Amazon sellers of any level can use mid journey for? That's kind of simple and definitely adds value.
Ritu:
Yeah, I think mid journey is definitely the leader and if you can learn to use it, there's nothing like it yet. But even straight up, chat GPT is now getting pretty good with images, so you can describe whatever you want and then it is connected to dolly in the back and then it generates those images and gives them back to you right in your chat GPT prompt, right. So if you have the paid version, then you can start testing that as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so let's say I've got all right, I've got a pretty nice image. You know, maybe it's a white background image or something of my product. Would the first thing I should do with experimenting with AI and mid-journey and things? Would it be making an infographic? Would it be trying to make a lifestyle? Like I remember in the early days of AI, like you could never put a human being in there because they would have like 17 fingers and just crazy faces and stuff like that. But like what should I do then? What kind of images? Or is it not really don't use it for your main images, but use it for, like, the sponsored brand and sponsor display, things like that?
Ritu:
Yeah, so okay, I think we need to think of images as layers, just like we think of layers in Photoshop. Right, there's layers like a background layer. So if you want just the ambience, the mood, the background, you generate that layer independent of anything else. That's one way of going about it. And then you layer in your product. You have your kind of no background product. Then you can always place it right in the middle, do those sorts of things. So it would probably be a two or three step process where you think of each layer separately, even the humans. You could bring humans in from a different source. You can get humans from there, you can get your backdrop from somewhere else and then you can get your product from your own product images and put them together. That would probably give you the best results.
Ritu:
But if you tried to have mid-journey to all of that, you might experience some failures there or some surprises with, like you said, 17 fingers and stuff. Now, mid-journey, the latest versions of it are getting better and better, so it's very human-like and it doesn't appear awkward. The facial expressions aren't awkward anymore, so that's good news, just means that we're going in the right direction. It's only gonna get better from here. So I would think of layering as one concept, and then, of course, where you wanna apply it is another thing infographics. I don't think chat, gp or even mid-journey would be good for infographic other than just generating the background for it, because text it still doesn't do a good job with text. You'll have to use some of your other tools for text. So again, it's layering, combining tools and coming up with the concept. So yeah, those are some of the ways in which you can use images.
Ritu:
Now posts is another interesting one. A lot of people are using mid-journey for generating posts, and that's a good way of generating lots of posts content, because Amazon doesn't allow you to repeat an image twice. So what you can do is you can have Dali or even Canva. I've used Canva AI, which is different from Canva normal. I can explain the difference, but anyway. So Canva AI can generate based on your description of what kind of backgrounds you want, and then you just slap in your photo your kind of hero image on top of it and there you have your posts. It takes barely any time to create like 20 different posts and most people don't realize this, but posts are free advertising. I would highly recommend generating posts on a regular basis and take advantage of it.
Bradley Sutton:
I've seen them more in search results lately too.
Ritu:
Posts. Exactly, it's one of those widgets that comes up.
Bradley Sutton:
That never happened, like six months ago or something. But, now it's right there on page one, so it's important to do, I agree.
Ritu:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So earlier you talked about search group performance. I love search group performance. My self is just like it's stuff that three, four years ago we would have. I would have bet a million dollars that Amazon would never release this kind of data to the public, and Amazon definitely has come a long way. What are some other ways that you're using search group performance, analyzing the data that Amazon gives?
Ritu:
Yeah, so search group performance. Like you said, it's unbelievable that Amazon is actually sharing this information out, so it's really up to us to take advantage of it as soon as possible. Almost feel like time is of essence here, because everybody's going to have access Everybody has access to that information. But right now most people are in the state of overwhelm. They're like, oh, I have this great data, but I don't know what to do with it. So most people are stuck at that stage.
Ritu:
But if you want to take the next step, then I would suggest start downloading those reports right away, because these things also get lost. Amazon discontinues things that you think they're going to be giving us forever and forever. For example, the brand analytics data that used to be I don't know millions of rows has certainly been compressed to just 10,000, and so on. So I mean there's a loss there that cannot be replaced. So I would say, number one start downloading your at least your monthly data at the ASIN level and then stitching all that data together, and by stitching I mean maybe putting it into a data warehouse. We use BigQuery in order to bring data in, and the way to stitch it is by making sure that your reports have some extra columns like the date column has to be there Then you have to make sure that you have the brand name in it and you want to make sure that your market is in this, so that when you stitch all that information together, then you can use a single report like a looker studio to dip into the data warehouse and you can basically use switch filters to switch between your different markets. So if you plan your data strategy well, then you will be able to use it more efficiently than just using it in a throwaway style, which most people do.
Ritu:
Most people go download a report, they look at it, they stare at it and they're like, ok, whatever Done, and it's thrown away. You don't want that. You want a system. You need an ecosystem for managing your data so that you can look at those from time to time. You get a month over month review. You get a month over month trend. You can see if anything has lost its search volume over time. It's so easy to check that at a search term level. Once you have stitched all that information together and is available in maybe something like a looker studio, how about something that's good?
Bradley Sutton:
it's important to understand the you know, like how to get started and not just like, all right, let me. Let me just look at search career performance or this data, just, you know, in the UI on on Amazon. But then what's the next step? Now I've got everything in my data warehouse and stuff like, for example, me. One of the things I like to look at in search career performance is comparing the conversion rate by the keyword for for just the overall niche, compared to my own. You know my own conversion rate. But you know, I think that's probably one of the most no brainer things. What are some other maybe not so common things that you're looking at when, when you get all of that data into your, your data warehouse, and start you know, start looking up stuff?
Ritu:
Yeah. So one of the things that I find really interesting is the average price per search term. So this is you know, amazon gives you the average price and that, basically, is a good indication of whether that search term is going for cheaper products or is it going for slightly more expensive products. Just to give you an example, let's say you have the word lotion right Now. You have a $50 lotion by L'Oreal, maybe, and you have a $5 drugstore brand Same thing, selling lotion. But if you're going after, if you're looking at the search term lotion, whatever, daily lotion or whatever and if you see that the average price for that search term is going at $6, let's say that's the average price of the product being sold. That is telling me that, no matter what I do to compete on that, on that search term, it's going to be hard because I'm going to be competing with lots and lots of cheaper brands. So we actually have filters on our search terms or search query reports, so that we only look at those searches that are in the ballpark of our products price point. That basically eliminates a lot of the noise, because otherwise you might be led into thinking that gosh, this is a great keyword and then you spend lots of money on it and ends up being a high cost scenario. You don't want that. So you look at both of the things one that you mentioned, which is what we call strength, keyword strength, which is determined as a ratio of purchase share and impression share. If you can get that ratio to be above one, then that's a good keyword. That is strong, inherently strong, because you're winning more of the purchase share than you're winning of the market, which basically puts it in a good spot.
Ritu:
And then the second one would be the filter on price. The third filter I would put is search volume, because, again, we don't want noisy, insignificant terms to distract us. And I think the fourth filter I would put there is data sufficiency, like how many sales have you had for that keyword over that period of time? So yeah, those would be the four filters to kind of get everything else out. And then, yeah, I mean that would be our way of figuring out which search terms are good. Then the other use cases of that would be to stitch that data with your ad data. So when you stitch those two together you can find gaps in a systematic sort of way, not just like a one off, throw away kind of way, where it's always being merged and it's always coming together and you can always see these are the ones that I'm not advertising yet. And then, yeah, I think those were the two main ones.
Ritu:
The third, slightly more advanced one, is when you want to figure out if a search term is good for product A, product B, product C, product D off your catalog because they might be sharing those keywords. Then you can see relative strength across your different products and see where you want to channel your information. Now that comes with the caveat, and that caveat is that there's a very high halo sales ratio on Amazon, which means you might be directing traffic to one of your product variations and something else is actually getting picked up eventually. So you need to know all of the. You need to know all those pieces in order to make the right decision and essentially in terms of using your, your traffic source as a fire hose, literally, and saying, okay, I want to direct it to this product and not to this product. Unless you know what the halo sales are, you could be off.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Yeah, well really great stuff. Now, before we get into your last strategy you know, maybe it could be a PPC strategy, since that's your specialty how can people reach out to you if they, you know? How can they find you on the interwebs if they want to? You know, get some help with some of the stuff that you've been talking about today.
Ritu:
Yeah, absolutely so. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there, so just look up my full name, Ritu Java, and you should be able to find me there and just say hi and I'll be happy to help. Yeah, and other ways, you can just reach out to our website, ppcninja.com or anywhere else. You see me.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. Now we have some of we do on our show. We call it TST. That's the 30 second tip. So you know you've been giving us lots of great tips and strategies, but what's like a hard hitting one you can give us in 30 seconds or 60 seconds or less. I'm not going to cut you off, go ahead.
Ritu:
So I think that you know we're all sitting on tons and tons of data and we don't know how to use it. I would suggest start thinking of strategies to use your data by connecting them up. Every piece of data that we get from Amazon or other sources, whether it's keyword rank tracking or search volume data, or your ads data or organic data. Also, you know competitor data and stuff like that. It's in different locations, it's hiding behind wall gardens and stuff like that.
Ritu:
You want to figure out a system to bring it all together, and I would recommend using a data warehousing strategy to start bringing everything together so that you can start looking at it holistically. So I would recommend start to think of simple ways in which you can convert your snapshot data into time series. That that would be my advice, and time series is basically for people who don't understand that. It's basically assigning dates to all your downloads. If you're downloading a business report, make sure you add a column and put the date there so that that becomes a way of identifying when that event happened. When you're connecting so many pieces of data together.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, Awesome Well thank you very much. Thank you so much for your time.
Ritu:
Than you so much Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
This was really awesome, awesome and we'll definitely be having you back on the show sometime next year to get your latest strategies.
Ritu:
Awesome, we'll look forward to that. Take care, Bradley, have a good one.
What if you had the power to manage over 200 Amazon PPC campaigns in just 10 minutes each week? Imagine the time and resources you could save with the right tools and strategies. Join us in this episode as we share how we use the Helium 10 PPC tool, Adtomic, to streamline our campaigns and work smarter, not harder. Bradley shares his best tips on campaign structure and show you how to apply rules to automatically transfer successful keywords from broad campaigns to exact ones.
Ever wondered how to navigate the labyrinth of Amazon PPC management? Allow us to guide you. We've harnessed the power of Helium 10's Adtomic tool for campaign automation and optimization. Discover how to conduct regular campaign audits, use negative keywords to curb wasteful spending, and use Adtomic to pinpoint unprofitable keywords. Now, let's talk profitability. We know you're in this business to make money, so we'll show you how to optimize your Amazon advertising costs to maximize your return. We'll demonstrate how to set goals for ACoS and TACoS and use the Adtomic tool to optimize bids. And before you think about outsourcing, let us convince you of the merits of understanding Amazon PPC yourself. Despite your busy schedule, we believe learning how to manage your own PPC should be a priority - and we'll help you see why and how.
Google ads, Amazon PPC techniques, factors to negate keywords, and insights beyond the attribution window - we've got it all covered. We know the value of data and why you need to pay attention to it. Intrigued? Excited? We hope so because this episode is packed with strategies and tools that could revolutionize your Amazon campaign management.
In episode 514 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:
- 01:09 - Manage 200 Amazon PPC Campaigns Efficiently Using Adtomic
- 03:53 - Campaign Grouping and Targeting Strategies
- 11:04 - Optimizing Keywords in Amazon Ad Campaigns
- 11:52 - Effective Amazon PPC Strategies
- 14:05 - Keywords and Campaign Management Simplified
- 16:41 - Optimizing PPC Costs for Profitability
- 17:56 - Profitability and ACoS
- 27:39 - Keyword Negation and Pausing Decision Factors
- 27:50 - Google Ads and PPC Techniques
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today I'm going to show you guys how I managed my 200 PBC campaigns in only 10 minutes a week, plus answer all the questions you guys submitted live. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Do you want to see how your listing or maybe competitors listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you want to compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other? Maybe you want to see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings? You can do that and more with the Helium 10 tool Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly Ask Me Anything, where we go ahead and take your questions live after giving you a demo of a cool tool that can definitely give you serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Today you'll notice I've got my what I call my Adtomic hat and shirt on. That's because I'm just going to give you guys kind of like a 10 minute run through of what I do to go through and manage my PBC accounts. I've been using Adtomic for since it was before Adtomic Used to be called At. So I've been using it for probably about three years now and you know I have probably over 200 PBC campaigns, over three, four accounts that I use it on, and I pretty much you know some. There can be a week where I don't even open it once, like it's doing everything for me. On average, I would say I spend about 15 minutes a week just checking out what's going on and implementing suggestions and things like that, and that's over 200 campaigns. So let me just give you kind of like a little idea about how I roll through it. Like maybe you used to use Adtomic before but trust me, it's like way different Now. A lot of this stuff. I already just recently audited the account, so you might not see too much new information here, but let me just show you what like my process is and why it only takes me like 15 minutes Now.
Bradley Sutton:
First of all, I have everything set up in kind of like my campaigns talk to each other, all right, and regardless if you guys use Adtomic or not, this is how I feel you guys should set up your PBC. All right. You have these groups of campaigns that all go to one product, and you've got one that's a exact manual campaign. You've got a broad or phrase match campaign I like to call that a research campaign You've got an auto campaign and then you've got an ASIN product targeting campaign, potentially a sponsor display campaign and then potentially sponsored brand headline campaign. So all of these kind of talk to each other, the auto and the broad campaigns. You can view those as kind of like keyword harvesting campaigns, discovery campaigns. You're discovering keywords that you might not be targeting yet and then, if you find some good ones now you move it to the exact product marketing campaign. Maybe you move it to the exact match keyword campaign, all right. But again, everything talks to each other so that you know the campaigns are benefiting each other, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is where I let me just show you how I set up that, that kind of like flow that I just talked about. So, for example, here is my large coffin shelf rule rule group, all right. So we've got a large and a small coffin shelf, or a large coffin shelf, and then there's a variation where it's a large and a small together. All right, I'm targeting both of those in my PPC campaigns. And here's the rules that I have set up so that I am not having to just, you know, every day download Excel sheets and make pivot tables and things like that. What I did is I put all of those campaigns right here in a group of campaigns. I've got my performance campaign. I actually have two. You know I probably hit like 25, 20 or 25 targets in one. So, like now, I only add it to a new one.
Bradley Sutton:
I've got my product targeting campaign. It's an ace in targeting campaign, sponsor display, my auto campaign and my research campaign, which I actually have as a broad and, as you can see what these checkbox that I'm showing on the screen for those of you watching this is. I'm saying, hey, if you find a keyword in the research campaign, like a broad right, like, let's say, I'm targeting a broad target coffin shelf and all of a sudden I get sales on this keyword coffin shelf for gothic decor, like a long tail keyword that I wasn't targeting, I'm saying, hey, find it here and then go ahead and put it in my performance campaign because instead of waiting for Amazon to show me in this broad match and just like hope that Amazon shows me, no, I want to target it specifically, all right. So that's basically all of these little boxes up here is me telling Adtomic to look for keywords in certain campaigns that I don't have in the other one and then, if it's good, go ahead and add that keyword as a manual target, be a product or keyword. Now, it's not just any keyword. Um, you can put your own criteria. So, as you can see what this is, just me, this is not saying oh, you guys have to copy what I'm doing right here.
Bradley Sutton:
I said I only want you to move this keyword to an exact campaign or suggest to me to do it if it gets at least two orders, cause, you know, sometimes there might be one, or like it might be complete fluke. You know, like maybe Amazon has me in an auto campaign and for some crazy reason, they showed me for my coffin shelf or, uh, you know a keyword egg tray or something like that, right, and then it could be like five days after clicking to add maybe the person actually does buy a coffin shelf. You know, it's probably not going to happen again, right? So I I put here a minimum of two because to me I'm like, hey, I want two people to order something. Then I know, hey, this is probably kind of like a good, a good keyword. And then I said, and I want my ACoS to be 30%. You know, if I had to spend 200% ACoS just to get these two sales, probably not that great of a keyword. And so, basically, that that's what it's doing, it's going to, it's going to, it's going to look at this.
Bradley Sutton:
I could set here the look this is, by the way, this bottom part is all new. I could look at the look back period. You know, some people might say, hey, I want to look at the last 30 days. Some people say, hey, no, I want. I'm a big seller, you know I'm doing spending $1,000 a day. I want to look every five days if there's new ones that meet this criteria. I put last 60 days. And then, hey, how often do I want to check this? I put daily. And then, what time zone do I want this rule to be off of? Now? I could automate this, right, I could automate it, but I'm not going. I don't automate my mind because I just like to be able to, to to click on it. Now, what about? On the flip side?
Bradley Sutton:
It's arguably more important to have good negative match, good negative match rules set up, all right. So I've got a negative match on this auto campaign and let me just show you how I have that set up. In the negative match, my, my rules aren't talking to each other, my campaigns aren't talking to each other, all right, cause I just like to do it in isolation. So I put here hey, I don't know why I didn't put this, somebody put six clicks. I don't want to get a negative match if it's just six clicks. So I'm going to split $10 here or $5 spent. So what does that mean? So some people people have their hands on the cookie jar in the project exit count and keeps screwing up my, my things that I have to end up changing it back.
Bradley Sutton:
Anyways, what this means is I'm saying, hey, if I get 15 clicks on a keyword or a search term in this auto campaign with getting zero sales, I want Adtomic to suggest to me to go ahead and negative match this so that I stop spending. Or if I spend $5, regardless of the number of clicks on a certain search term with zero sales, I want Adtomic to suggest to me to negative match that. And that's all this is doing, all right. So this is what. Again, I don't care if you guys are not using Adtomic, if you're just downloading spreadsheets. This is kind of like what you should be doing, right? I hope you're doing something like this where you know every few weeks, you kind of uh, you know audit what's going on on your PPC so that you're not wasting your spend, all right. So that's the kind of just the simple structure.
Bradley Sutton:
I can go a lot deeper into. You know budget rules and and different kinds of uh. You know situations there for what I want Adtomic to look at, but I like to keep my stuff real simple and then so, basically once a week, I come in here to my suggestions and oh yeah, by the way, one thing I forgot to tell you guys is I set everything at target ACoS, all right, there's different rules for my bidding, all right. So I was talking about keyword harvesting, keyword negative, what my rules were? Well, there's different rules that I could pit for uh pick for my bidding.
Bradley Sutton:
As you can see, I put everything here on uh and this is like AI powered. I want to target ACoS, like I want the campaign to perform at a 20% ACoS on almost all these. All right, I could choose max impressions or max orders, that it's not looking too much at the ACoS, but just just for this account I have everything on uh target ACoS and then I could put min, max, max bid. You know, like, maybe I have a $10 product and I know I never want to go past $1 on a, on ACoS per click. So I could say, hey, for my bid, I never want Adtomic to try and raise this bid on this search term or on this target. I should say for more than $1, or I want to. I never want to suggest to me something lower than than this. All right, so so that's that's. Uh, that's another thing.
Bradley Sutton:
So now, once a week I have my, my bidding, uh, you know, targeting, uh algorithms. Here I've got my rules as far as my positive keywords, my negative keywords. All I have to do is go to the suggestions, all right. And then, for example, uh, what I'm looking at here is the AI bids. So, hey, my, my target ACoS is 20% and let, on this keyword, my ACoS is 86%. So it's telling me to go ahead and lower my bid. All right here. And then, if I, if I agree with the suggestion. All I have to do is click one button. I can actually click the whole entire page here If I agree with all these suggestions, and it happens instantly.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm not finding it in seller central. Where is this campaign? Where, you know, let me click on edit bid and let me, you know, find it. This and that that would take just by itself. You know like how, how many. I have a hundred and seventy nine bid changes I need to make. Do you know how long it would be to find these in my, in this account only has like maybe like 75 campaigns, but to go find them in these 75 campaigns and go into the ad group and everything and change these one by one, that would take forever. I could literally do it in 10 seconds right here if I just click a couple of buttons.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, here is my new keywords. I actually do have two ones, all right. So let's take a look at what it found. All right, take a look at this, look at this keyword here Coffin shaped shelf. All right, I spent $7 on this and I got $89 worth of sales. All right, and this was from an auto campaign. And so what is it telling me to do. It's saying hey, click me and then go ahead and add this to your manual campaign and, potentially, your broad match campaign. Now again, am I having to go find these campaigns, add a target, set the bid and all that stuff, like I would if I, if, if I'm down, if I'm working in seller central, uh, manually? No, I just click one button and boom goes the dynamite. It is now done. It is now added to that campaign so that I can go ahead and target that manually.
Bradley Sutton:
Here's another keyword that it just found. Again, it must have found this in the last four days because I just audited this. I just went through all my suggestions. Like three days ago, wooden egg rack, I spent $5 on uh, which campaign is another auto campaign. I got $55 worth of sales. It's saying hey, go ahead and add these to your manual campaign. All right, it would do the same thing for ascent targets as well. That it might find in the auto campaign.
Bradley Sutton:
Again, negative keywords. It's, it's, it didn't find anything right now, but that's where it would be All right. Now, what if you're just getting into Adtomic and you don't have all your rules set up and and you're just setting up your campaigns? It might take a while. What I suggest doing is like audits on your account, all right, and I just did this audit. Let me show you the kind of audits that I do. I go right in here to analytics and the first thing that I want and again, nothing should come up here that's not already negative matched, because I, like I said I already went through this.
Bradley Sutton:
But let me show you what I did to, in seconds across my account, find the worst keywords. So what I did was I said, hey, I'm looking back at the last two months of PPC activity here and I'm saying, hey, I want to see something that gave me zero sales, all right, but I had at least 30 clicks and I'm on the wrong page. I need to go to the search term page. Let me go to the search term. I can look at this at the ad group level, campaign level, target level. I'm going all the way down to the search term level in this case, all right. So again, I'm saying, hey, I had zero PPC orders, but I spent, let's just say, $8 at least on a keyword or on a search term, and what came up? Look at this Right instantly.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, great, I'm positive. I already negative match all of these because, like I said, I just did this audit. But look, if I had done this earlier I would have saved myself $152. Right here. This is not a big account, guys. This project X account doesn't do that much in sales anymore, but still, this is how much money I was wasting $150. I can just negative match all of these in one fell swoop. Right, right, instantly. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
What about the flip side? What if I want to find some killer keywords again? All of this is automated anyway, so that that's why I don't have to negative match any of these, because it already did it. But what? What if I'm like hey, is there anything that is is is doing really well for me that maybe I could increase my bid on? So I'm going to go to my target instead of search term level, all right. And I'm going to say, hey, show me something that got at least one order. But the ACOS was less than 5%, like crazy kind of ACOS. Right, and take a look, there was three targets that hit that. All right, now you can see I already change it.
Bradley Sutton:
But look at this. I was targeting this asin in an. It must have been in a product targeting or sponsor display. Look at this. It was a sponsor display campaign, guys. I spent a dollar and 42 cents and I sold $119 worth of product for a 1% ACOS. I could be leaving money on the table by having such a low bid. So my bid before was 47 cents. So you can see I already took action and I raised it up, almost doubled the bid, to see what would happen. Look at this one. Here's one where this broad match target fresh egg holder countertop. I had the bid at 51 cents and after one click I got $18 worth of sales. So now I raised the bid to $1. Cause I'm like, all right, let's see if I can get some more action on this keyword. But again, I click literally two things to be able to find this. So this is why, guys, I have four Amazon accounts and over 200 campaigns. This is why I can spend 10 minutes a week doing all of it and manage everything.
Bradley Sutton:
Now I was going to go into a refund gene a little bit, but I went kind of long here on Adtomic, so I want to just make sure there's enough time for Q&A. So at this time I'm going to check back in the questions to see what questions you guys were asking. You can ask me about anything Helium 10 related here, and it doesn't have to be about PPC, it doesn't have to be about Adtomic. Another Facebook user says what can we do to reduce PPC? I pay a lot and every product I sell is paid for by Amazon, all right. So one thing is don't think about it. As far as you know, reduce PPC Like, if you're profitable, who cares if you spend a million dollars on PPC, if you're making $8 million, right, and you're profitable, right.
Bradley Sutton:
So it's not just about the amount you're spending, but if you're be thinking more of, in terms of profitability, if you're spending so much on PPC that you are no longer profitable when you make a sale, yes, that is something you absolutely need to tackle and there's different metrics. You can look at that, you know. Maybe you're looking at your TACoS, your total, ACoS. Maybe you're looking at just your ACoS at the campaign level and you need to know what is your breakeven point, what? At what ACoS or TACoS are you able to turn a profit? And then that's the goal you set. And again, I just showed you guys how to do an Adtomic. You put in that goal of what you're trying to do where you know you can be profitable, and it's gonna kind of give you these suggestions automatically on what how you need to lower your bids in order to hit that goal. And, at the same time, it's not just about lowering bids, it's about stopping altogether spend on keywords that just are not doing it for you. So pretty much everything that I just showed you today, that is exactly what you need to be doing. You know, even if you whether you have Adtomic or whether you don't have Adtomic doesn't matter. You need to be auditing your account, looking at those metrics.
Bradley Sutton:
Another Facebook user says what is the best ACoS? So the best ACoS is what you can make money on. All right, for some people it's 5%, because they have very slim margins. Some people it's you could be like 80% ACoS right, and you're not making money. But guess what? It's okay because you've got products in like Subscribin' Save or some kind of replenishment right, where you're willing to lose money on that first order, because you're selling tea or you're selling coffee or something like that, because you know that they're gonna turn on Subscribin' Save or a certain percentage of customers, so you're willing to lose money on that first order and because you're gonna get that money back, all right. So again, the answer to your question is there is no magic ACoS number. The magic number is whatever you can still be profitable at.
Bradley Sutton:
Somebody says my ACoS I'm not sure they're the same person because I can't see your name but they said my ACoS is 70%. You know, for me, if it was 70% that would be terrible. I'd be losing money, crazy money, because I do not have enough margins on my products where I can afford 70% ACoS. But three years ago me, I was doing a lot of supplements which I'm not doing anymore. I absolutely wanted 70% ACoS, all right. I've got an account that is a hemp cream, all right. And I'm totally fine with 50% ACoS because I'm getting people and Subscribin' Save, absolutely fine with 50% ACoS. But you know, in my coffin shelf, brad, I want 20% ACoS, all right. So you gotta use these kind of you know reasoning here in order to know if your ACoS is good or not. I've got a shout out from Tony from YouTube. He or she says cheers, cheers. Back to you.
Bradley Sutton:
Another Facebook user says what subscriptions should we upgrade to so I can communicate with me more? The way that you can communicate with me, regardless of levels is here Once a month. We open this up so you can talk to me on these, on this. Ask Me Anything. If you want to be able to reach out to me in a Facebook group that I check every day, it's the Elite Group, so only Helium 10 Elite members have direct access to me. You can even book one-on-one calls with me if you're a Helium 10 Elite member, and we also have weekly Zoom calls that usually I'm on as well. So lots of touch points in the Elite Program. I'm not trying to sell you Elite right now because, guess what, if you want to sign up for Elite right now, you can't. It's closed. It only opens up certain times of year and right now it's closed. But you know, go to helium10.me forward, slash elite. I think there's might be a waiting list there. And if you want to join that so that you could be able to talk to myself and Kari and Chevali and Kevin King, then yeah, make sure to sign up for the wait list for that.
Bradley Sutton:
Another Facebook user says I hired somebody, but unfortunately I don't get any profit. I pay a very high fee. For instance, the payment is 500. Are you talking about you hired somebody for PPC management? If so, don't do it. I suggest to anybody out there don't outsource your PPC unless it is a resourcing thing, in other words, that you, you're, you're trying to expand and you're a one person one man or one woman show and you just don't have the bandwidth to do PPC. But you know how to do PPC. Okay In that sense, go ahead and hire an agency or or a service provider to to to take care of it. But it's important that you know PPC really well yourself first. Otherwise it's going to be hard for you to judge the work of an agency or a service provider if you don't know what is good and what is bad management.
Bradley Sutton:
Now my suggestion if you do have the bandwidth, you 100% should be doing PPC yourself. All right, you absolutely should be doing it yourself. Like, it's not that difficult, it's. It's complicated, right, there's a lot of moving parts, but, as you can see, tools like Adtomic just completely simplify the process and make it really fast. And that's why, to me, it's not even a bandwidth issue, if I can manage to I mean, guys, I work at Helium 10 full time, more than full time. Like you think I have time to be managing all the all these things on my own. I that's. I only spend 20 minutes working on PPC and that's that's for four Amazon accounts and I have a full time day job. Right, it's not that much. You should be doing Adtomic yourself or you should be doing PBC yourself.
Bradley Sutton:
In my opinion, if you have a tool like Adtomic Now, if you were trying to do it on your own and you have to do it manually and you've got 200 campaigns, what I do in 15 minutes would take you maybe five hours a week, if not more. All right, just look at that. Remember that bid page that I was showing you guys 179 bids after just five days to change, like what. That just takes forever to do manually and even to get to those calculations. So if you're on your own, I highly recommend not hiring out and there are plenty of great agencies out there and there is a need for them, like, we love agencies out there, I have them on this show, right. But those, the ones who I suggest using those, are the ones who have kind of like outgrown. They're like hey, I'm a seven figure seller and I've got 3000 campaigns to manage and I've only got one employee. I don't want to have to train somebody from scratch. Okay, go ahead and hire an agency, but if that's not you, I think you should be doing PBC yourself.
Bradley Sutton:
Somebody says the ACoS was 1%. Yeah, on that. On that example that I showed of how I had this crazy good search term, I had one where the ACoS was 1.18%. And then so that's a situation where it's like, let me raise my bid up right on this target because you might be leaving money on the table when your ACoS is so low. Because, like, let's say, my bid where I got that 1.18%, what was it? It was 47 cents. Right, maybe that 47 cent bid is only getting me impressions 10% of the time, like at the end of the day, when other people's budgets are out. Oh, then I start getting some bids or I start gaining impressions at that 47 cents. Maybe if I raise it to $1, I could be getting impressions all day long. All right, is my ACoS going to be 1%? No, but I don't care. If my ACoS is 10%, 10 times as much, I'm still making money like crazy. Because if my break even point is 20, 25%, that 10% is still making me money. So that's why you want to look at the small ACoS and don't just like pat yourself on the back and say I'm a PBC king, no, you want to raise that bid up because you might be leaving money on the table. All right, let's keep going with the questions now.
Bradley Sutton:
Dennis says what should be an approximate ad spend to justify Adtomic monthly fee. It depends on how you value your time. It's $1.99 a month for Adtomic and that includes $10,000 spent. So basically that means if you are spending less than $10,000, if you're paying Amazon in PPC fees less than $10,000 a month, you're only paying that flat rate of Adtomic $199. So at that point it's a matter of how do you value your time. Like, if you value your time at $50 an hour, right, if you value your time at $50 an hour and it takes you 10 hours a month to do your PPC, that means you're kind of spending $500 of your own time on PPC and in that sense is $200 of Adtomic to take that 10 hours down to 30 minutes or less than one hour. Is that worth it? Absolutely it's worth it. You know Every week Above that it's still a matter of time savings. All right, if you're spending $20,000 a month to PPC, you've got a pretty big operation. All right, you know you're probably a million dollar seller. If you're spending $20, $30, $40,000 a month on PPC, it probably would take you a full-time employee to manage your PPC, or paying an agency like $1,000 a month or something like that, right? So in that sense again, it's probably worth it to have Adtomic, it's all. There's no right or wrong answer here. It's about how you value your time. If you only value your time at $10 an hour and it only takes you 10 hours a month to do PPC now manually, is it worth it to get Adtomic? Probably not, I'll be honest, probably not. But if you value your time more, then I would say it's worth it.
Bradley Sutton:
Dennis, how to get initial reviews apart from the Vine program? That's pretty much it you know like. If you're talking about like some actual service that is, terms of service, approved, it's Vine. You know that's the only program that Amazon has for reviews. Now if you just wanna get a better chance at getting more reviews, you can use the Request Review. Amazon allows you to send one Request Review per order to customers. Has to be at least, I believe, eight days after the product delivers. So you can automate that in Helium 10 follow-up, right, you don't have to click one by one each order to say hey, let's say hey, 13 days after the product is ordered, send a Request Review. That actually triggers the Amazon Request Review inside of Seller Central. But you're doing it from Helium 10 follow-up and then you could just say, hey, do it on this day and only orders in this marketplace or only this ASIN, this schedule, this other ASIN, this other schedule. You can automate that and basically do, set it and forget it, and then that can give you a better chance to get a review, because your customers are theoretically reminded to leave a review more.
Bradley Sutton:
Sergio says what factors do you decide to negate a keyword or pause campaigns? It's very rare that I pause a whole campaign, right, like I don't think I've ever paused a whole campaign because my campaigns will have five, 10, maybe 15 targets. Sure, will I pause a target in the campaign, but all 15 of my targets are bad and I'm like that's very rare, you know. But to negate a keyword, I showed you what I put in Adtomic. I put, hey, I want at least 15, 20, sometimes 25 clicks and slash or a spend that's equal to 50% or more of the retail price of my product. So if I'm selling a $30 product, I put $15. In other words, if I get $15 worth of spend on a target with zero sales, I'm probably gonna go ahead and pause that target. What if?
Bradley Sutton:
Another question from Sergio is what if the keyword is highly relevant but competitive and have to spend a lot to rank? Check your conversion rate, all right. So look at your conversion rate for that keyword in search query performance and see if it's really bad compared to your niche as a whole. You gotta figure out why. All right. So it's not just a matter of, oh, let me pause this or let me just keep spending a lot more money, et cetera, et cetera. It's a matter of you gotta figure out if that is your most important keyword, why are you not converting for it? Why are people converting for others more than yours? Is it your price? Is it your pictures? Is it your bullet points? What is it? That's something that's very important to consider. I don't just blindly change bids or just pause or just give up on a keyword just because I'm spending too much money. At the same time, I don't just blindly keep it going because I know this keyword is important. I have to understand why my conversion rate is not good on it and try and fix it.
Bradley Sutton:
Matt says I've noticed that my overall ACoS for my PPC has almost doubled to 28% over the last two weeks. Does PPC usually get expensive around Christmas? Yes, ACoS per click goes up. A lot. People raise their budgets, they raise their bid sometimes and that's just gonna drive up the cost. So that is. I'm not saying oh, you gotta deal with it and be happy with losing money. But no, if you're asking, is this typical for this time of year, the answer is yes, and the reason why is because, again, people's budgets are higher, so that means less people are running out potentially of budget, so that you're not getting in at those cheaper prices that maybe you would towards the end of the day. Normally Other people are just like taking a blanket raising of their bids across the board so that to try and make sure they get top of search and that could be raising the bids as well. But yeah, this is a very competitive time for PPC.
Bradley Sutton:
Tony says what is the thing with the electronics category? Why don't you get data All the time? I mean, we can only give what Amazon gives, and so a lot of products in the electronics category, amazon doesn't give parent level BSR, so that means we can't have a sales estimate for it. Uh, now the says I spent $500 a day in ads. Uh, I get over 200,000 impressions, 350 clicks, but zero sales from those. However, my organic sales are extremely good. Is it because my impressions, my clicks? I'd make sure you're.
Bradley Sutton:
Uh, what is your look back period? I would not look this week. Make sure that you're looking at least one to two weeks back, and if those are the numbers you're seeing, that's very strange. I don't think I've ever seen 350 clicks in zero sales. Now, if that's across, like you know, 40 keywords or something, okay, well, well, that makes a little bit of sense. But first of all, make sure you're you're looking outside of just the, the attribution window. If you're looking within the seven days, it could very well be that somebody today is going to click on something or going to buy something that they clicked on maybe a week ago or something, uh, and you might be looking at the data and they'll say zero sales. But if you look at that same data for this week, in two weeks, it'll say you had sales. So I would make sure you're looking back at least two weeks, first of all.
Bradley Sutton:
But then, if, if it is true that you're just not getting sales, you got to figure out why are these keywords relevant to your listing? Now, if you've just got a whole bunch of those 350 clicks is across 50 keywords, right, so that each one is less than 10. I'm not sure it's time to panic yet because, like I said, I wait until I get 15, 20 clicks with no sales before I start worrying or thinking. That's not going to be good for me. You know, maybe only seven clicks per keyword has happened. Who knows, maybe your eighth click you're going to get a sale. So it all depends on what kind of um, what time period you're looking back on.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, and your, your second question kind of alludes that uh, now that it says could clicks that haven't been attributed to sales for that day be attributed to a high organic sales the following day? Uh, clicks can't be attributed to organic uh sales, like it's either one or the other. But if, if, if the sale, uh, the, the sale that you see might not be updated in Amazon as a PPC order, if that's what you're asking, then yes, that is possible, which is again why I suggest looking no less than uh a week, a week back and an older, instead of looking at this week. We got one more here. Let's see.
Bradley Sutton:
Matt says I love the freedom ticket course. Great job, learned a lot. Can you recommend a Google PPC course? I'm looking to drive more external traffic from Google directly to my Amazon listing. I've actually been looking into trying to create some content not myself because I'm not a Google expert but we might be bringing some Google ads into uh Helium 10 as far as in our training, so that we can, you know, let people know how to drive that external traffic. But even you know something that's very lucrative these days, even more than Google ads from right here is Tik Tok uh shop, and, and so I I suggest looking into Tik Tok shop If you haven't done so yet, matt, and we'll have some content about that soon as well.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us. This is something that our serious sellers club and our elite members get every single week here, which is our ask me anything, but once a month we go ahead and open it up to everybody, like we did today, and we also repurpose this as a podcast. So thank you, guys, so much for joining us and we'll see you next week. If you're an SSC member, we'll see you guys next month. If you're just in our Facebook groups and make sure to write all your questions down about Helium 10, I'll try and get them answered right here, live on the air. Thanks a lot, guys. Bye, bye now.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Amazon Hosted Record-Breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday Holiday Shopping Event, and Announces Millions More Holiday Deals to Come https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/11/amazon-hosted-record-breaking-black-friday-and-cyber-monday-holiday-shopping-event-and-announces-millions-more-holiday-deals-to-come They did it again! Shopify merchants break Black Friday record with $4.1 billion in sales https://news.shopify.com/they-did-it-again-shopify-merchants-break-black-friday-record-with-41-billion-in-sales Save the date for Amazon #unBoxed2024 in Austin, Texas. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7135687573812768768/ Focus: Walmart shifts to India, cuts China imports https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/walmart-shifts-india-china-cheaper-imports-2023-11-29/ Stay tuned as we explore Helium 10's newest features, including an exclusive AI-powered image generator for Amazon Sponsored Brand ads and the ability to generate custom images for Amazon ads and Amazon Posts. We'll be sharing hands-on demonstrations on how to use these features and their potential benefits for third-party sellers. Plus, we have news on a monthly networking call in Spanish, designed to help Spanish-speaking sellers connect and share strategies. Join us for all this and more as we continue to provide you with innovative tools and updates that are transforming the Amazon and E-commerce landscape.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley talks about:
- 00:52 - Amazon 3D Images
- 02:32 - Amazon Black Friday
- 04:31 - Shopify Black Friday
- 05:17 - Amazon Unboxed
- 06:02 - Amazon Transparency
- 07:01 - Made In India
- 08:45 - Spanish Networking Call
- 09:50 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
- 16:54 - Pro Training: How To Instantly The Most Searched Word On Amazon
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► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Soon, you can upload 3D images for your products on Amazon. Results from Black Friday. Amazon Unbox Conference date and new location announced. Amazon transparency update these stories and more on today's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that are going on in the Amazon Walmart e-commerce world. We also let you know on the brand new tools and feature updates that Helium 10 has, as well as a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. All right, let's go ahead and hop right into the different news articles Now. The first one was an announcement this week from Seller Central itself, so you can see this in your dashboard, and it's entitled 3D models to replace 360 degree images starting December 14th. All right now. This is going to be for US, UK, Germany, Spain, France and Italy. All right now.
Bradley Sutton:
In the past, you could supposedly it says here you could put 360 degree images. Now, project X products had it, project 5K products had it. We never requested it. It was like Amazon just choosing to do on your own. I never actually heard of many people, if any, who were able to request the 360 degree images where you can kind of like put your finger in the app and like drag it around and see the whole thing. I've never actually known somebody who outside of like vendor central who could request that. But regardless, 360 degree images are going to be a thing of the past. And what is replacing it are these view in 3D, different kind of like experiences, view in your room, virtual try-on and showroom? So this was announced a while back at, I believe it was Amazon Accelerate. There was some talk about this. Now, what Amazon is going to come out with, what they said is, hey, to make it easier if you do create 3D models. It's not like we have like imaging software, right, they're working on a tool that'll allow you to use your phone in order to scan your product and create a 3D model. So more news on that coming soon, they say. But that is a change that is pretty imminent, because it says, hey, this is going to happen in December 14th.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so next article is going to be also from Amazon. It was a press release that they did, and this is about Black Friday results, right? This article says Amazon hosted record breaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday shopping event and announces millions more holiday deals to come. All right, now I don't know how they calculated this, but they said customer save 70% more on Amazon during its 11 days from November 17th through Cyber Monday compared to the same period last year. Now it also cited a recent independent study from Profitero and it said that Amazon had the lowest online prices entering the holiday season, by an average of 16% across 15 different categories, compared to other leading retailers in the US, and they're on pace to deliver fastest delivery speeds for Prime members in the company's 29 year history 29 year history I didn't even know Amazon's been around for 29 years. That's crazy. Anyways, just some random stats here that Amazon talked about says customers ordered more than 500 million items from third party sellers. All right, and so that's a lot. This is just again. During 11 day period, and also some new programs started getting the limelight with their first kind of Black Friday. It says for the first time, prime members purchased great deals directly from Buy With Prime merchants during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday event. And it said merchants who participated in promotional activities experienced an aggregate more than a 300% increase in units purchased through Buy With Prime versus their daily average for the month of October.
Bradley Sutton:
So let me know out there, what about you guys? Anybody have some good numbers to report? I heard some people say hey, you know, cyber Monday actually worked out better than Black Friday, but how is your whole Cyber Five altogether? You know how was it from Thursday all the way through Monday? Let me know in the comments below, speaking of Black Friday, how many of you guys have Shopify websites? An article from Shopify, similar press release, says they did it again. Shopify merchants break Black Friday record with $4.1 billion in sales. So it says hey, from the crack of dawn in New Zealand, which is where you know, it becomes Black Friday first through the final minutes in California. Well, that's not right. The final minutes of Black Friday is in Hawaii. It says our merchants drove a 22% increase in sales over last year Shopping peak, when collective sales reached 4.2 million dollars per minute At 12 pm Eastern on Friday. Uh, what about you guys out there who've got Shopify websites. How is your Shopify Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Uh?
Bradley Sutton:
Going back to amazon now there's an announcement on amazon ads linked in Uh for amazon unboxed. You might remember amazon unboxed just a few weeks ago in New York, where it's been the last couple of years, you know, we did a podcast live there. They announced all kinds of cool stuff like sponsored tv and things like that. Well, uh, is amazon unboxed going to be in New York? Uh, in October next year? Well, it is going to still be in October, but guess what, guys? Uh, it is now moving to drumroll, please, Austin Texas. All right, so save the date, guys. If you miss this year's unboxed Uh marketing your calendars. Amazon unboxed 2024 for the first time Austin Texas, October 14th through 16th.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article, going back to amazon seller central Uh, we announced this update a while back, where they kind of teased that this was coming, and now it's uh going to be in effect, and this is about amazon transparency. Amazon transparencies, a way to to help kind of uh dissuade counterfeit sales of your product. And they now announced amazon being that you can now have use your own serial numbers for transparency. All right, this is new, you know, you don't have to use theirs. You can use your own Uh serial numbers. And, again, you know, if you are uh active with your products in transparency, it means that they can't be listed or shipped to customers without valid codes. So if you have trouble, like with hijackers and things, basically this means that people you know, other sellers trying to like, list your or you know, add their uh the skew to your ASIN, it's not going to get accepted or shipped if it doesn't have these transparency uh codes. So for more information on that, check your uh dashboard.
Bradley Sutton:
Now interesting article. This one is coming from Reuters and it was entitled Walmart Shifts to India Cuts China Imports. Now, this is interesting because, uh, it basically said that they're moving more for the Walmart products that they produce themselves. They're moving the production more and more to India. All right, the world's largest retailer, Walmart, this article says, shipped one quarter Of its us imports from India between January and august this year. All right, that compared with in 2018 2018, guess how much? 2% it went from 2% to 25% being produced in India in just the last five years. The data, according to those articles, shows that it only 60% of its shipment only quote, unquote, only came from China. Now, the reason why it's only 60% is because in 2018, it was 80% of all of Walmart’s products were made in China. But China is obviously still Walmart’s biggest country, but it talks about, you know, hey, there's a shift happening at Walmart, you know.
Bradley Sutton:
Guess what guys? Project x, all of our products have been made in China. Until Two months ago, we produced our very first product in where? India? All right, so that is going to be coming. You're going to see a feature podcast where we talk about the development Of that product, and we'll have Meghla on here. She helped us source it.
Bradley Sutton:
But big companies like Walmart, amazon, third-party sellers more and more are moving production outside of China. What about you? Are you still producing everything in China? Are you producing in India? You producing in Pakistan or other countries? Let me know in the comments below, all right, uh, one more thing before we get into some really cool feature announcements. We're not gonna some moss. I'll let spaniel.
Bradley Sutton:
So one more thing Do you speak Spanish? We have our very first monthly networking call in the Spanish language starting next week. All right, this is going to be something that will be hosted by our Serious Sellers Podcast en Español host, Adriana Rangel, and this first one is going to be on December the 6th All right market calendars, December the 6th, at 4 pm Pacific time. And then, for those who speak Spanish, for everybody who speaks Spanish go to h10.me/llamadaconadriana. h10.me/llamadaconadriana. Go to that website and you'll be able to register for the zoom. So again, if you guys want a network with other Spanish speaking sellers, whether you're here in the States, in Latin America, in Europe, in Spain, wherever you are in the world, go ahead and sign up. This will be a monthly Networking call where you can, you know, talk about what's working, what's not working in your business, get some help and I might, you know, pop in there every now and then as well.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let's get into the helium 10 new feature alerts, and we've got some doozies today, guys. Whoo, the Helium 10 product team is been cooking with fire for sure. All right, the very first one is guess what, guys? Helium 10 kind of low-key now has an AI generating or an AI Powered image generator. All right, now, this is actually the Amazon Sponsored a brand ad image generator. But I'm gonna show you, guys, how you can use it for Amazon post. You can use it for you know, potentially lifestyle images or infographics, or getting you know other ideas for your, for your images. It's not perfect right now, but this is cool. The only place Outside of Amazon that you can get this tool is in helium 10. Why, cuz? Amazon chose helium 10 to be its exclusive partner, namely in atomic? Amazon chose helium 10 atomic to be the exclusive software for now. It'll open it up later to others, but we are the only ones that you can get this in. Let me show you how it works, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
So basically, you go to your atomic and then you hit a new campaign. Once you get into your campaign builder, you're gonna want to hit single campaign. Once you get there, you're going to want to hit sponsored brand, the middle one. Once you hit sponsored brand, you're gonna hit next and then here you are going to go ahead and Put enter a couple of your products from the brand that you are trying to do. You know an image for, so I'm gonna go ahead and choose what up right here on my screen the helium 10, a coffin bookshelf and Coffin coffin egg tray here and then scroll down. Make sure under sponsor brand campaign, you select the actual brand that you're trying to do this actually kind of doesn't matter, because you're gonna be able to enter your own images yourself. But since I'm actually gonna do one for the coffin shelf, the coffin bookshelf, I'm gonna go ahead and choose Manny's mysterious oddities. Now, once you select that, you scroll down here to this new section called Creative.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the whole purpose of this is actually to create sponsored brand, so you can actually create the, the custom sponsored brand image right here. But I'm gonna show, I'm showing you guys, how to just create any image you want right now. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna first just do this coffin bookshelf and I'm gonna put a different background, all right. So right here, under custom image, you're going to hit AI generated image, all right. Now I'm gonna go ahead and since, like I said, I'm gonna use the coffin bookshelf, so I'm gonna go ahead and choose that again here.
Bradley Sutton:
Now what I'm going to do is, in this prompt, I'm gonna say what I want I it to be like in the room. So I'm going to say put this coffin bookshelf hanging on a light colored wall and there are other bat themed decor items hanging on the wall, all right. So I mean that that's just a super, a super simple thing right here. I can actually choose theme here, so I'm not going to. I'm not going to choose a theme for this. Let's just see what happens. This usually takes about a minute to do, so I'll come back as soon as it generates and here we go.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, you know, sometimes you're going to get some crazy stuff, like here it actually changed our coffin bookshelf a little bit, but take a look, you know, here it put. It did exactly what I said. I said, hey, put it on a light colored wall and you could see, here's the coffin bookshelf hanging on a wall and there's some like bat shape, like little decor items on the wall. Now I will. I did not give it a good prompt. You know, I only wrote about 121 characters. I can write up to 300. I didn't even include a theme, but you, you know you can get pretty specific.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, is this AI going to be perfect? No, this is coming directly from Amazon, you know so. Helium 10 doesn't have control over this. So you know, like, if you're not getting good output, it's it's. You know that's because Amazon's AI is not great yet. But again, this is using connecting directly to the API, to the Amazon's AI generation, and what I can do here is I can actually, you know, choose some of these. I can zoom in and then I can actually save these. I can select them and save them right here, download it. I can save it to my creative assets. So it's kind of like a cool way to, you know, generate Amazon post images without ever even leaving helium 10. So that's the first thing that I wanted to talk about today. The second thing is also super, super cool, requested by a lot of our users, and this is wherever you see keywords in your insights dashboard and cerebro, in magnet.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, sometimes you see a whole bunch of keywords and you know you can see the, the score there for how important the keyword is, you know, based on maybe it's search volume or or competitor performance score. But sometimes you're not quite sure how maybe what I call real world relevant the keyword is like, for example, you know, coffin shelf. I think you could understand that probably all the results are coffin shelf. That's the top 10 on page one. But what about other keywords like coffin decor? Maybe it's not coffin shelves, but just random coffin products, and so what, what have you always had to do before.
Bradley Sutton:
If you just want to kind of take a quicker or a quick look at the results of, you know, keywords in cerebral magnet, well, you would click one by one on those keywords and take a look at them on Amazon. Well, now you know you're not going to have to do that anymore. Let me show you exactly what you can do. Anywhere where you have cerebral magnet, any keywords, you just have to put your mouse over it, like so, for example, if I want to say what is in coffin shelf, I just put my mouse over and I can see they're mostly coffin shelves here. But then maybe I'm like, all right, well, what about goth gifts? Are there any goth gifts that are showing up here in, you know, for coffin shelves? And I can just all I do, I'm not clicking on anything. I just put my mouse over here and I can see there's some Spooky looking slippers or some skulls, and I'm not actually seeing any coffin shelves in the top 10. So now I know you know what this, this keyword you know, probably might not be too too relevant here. I can look at a coffin box. I'm like, hey, what kind of things are coming up for coffin box? Okay, there is one coffin shelf, but the rest of these are just like maybe some jewelry boxes. So again, I am not clicking on anything, but now anywhere where there's a key where I can put my mouse over. So we're get an idea about the last time healing.
Bradley Sutton:
Then 10 check the top 10 results Little thumbnails that show what products were ranking for these keywords. I could see their price, how many variations they have, how many reviews they have. You know, that can be cool, like instantly I might see a keyword was like wow, look at this. Out of the top 10, most everybody only had, like you know, 10 reviews or 20 reviews. So like it's a great way to do product research as well. So I hope you guys can enjoy these two new feature updates from helium 10. Make sure you use it and let me know what you think.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, last up, today we have our training tip of the week, and this one is going to be courtesy of Carrie, and this is another keyword based strategy where, in seconds, if you want to find the Keywords that have the most search volume, that start with a word or two words or three words, within seconds. Again, this is one of those no click strategies like. This last one I gave you was a no click strategy. This strategy has zero clicks. How can you see what are the top searched keywords that start with any word or phrase? Carrie, take it away.
Carrie:
I'm going to show you how to instantly find the most search terms that start with a specific Keyword. It's very easy and it's something that you can do for Low-key keyword research. If you're just kind of curious about something, maybe you found a product that you want to kind of look a little bit more into. You can see what the top phrases are that start with that particular keyword, and I'm going to show you how to do it. Right now. All you have to do is you just need to go to magnet and it's very, very simple. The next thing you're going to do is you're just going to start typing so we sell a coffin shell. So I'm just going to type in the word coffin and with this it's going to basically show me all the keywords that start with coffin. That in the order of the most searched to the least search. So we've got coffin nail tips. That is the most searched, and the next is coffin, and then the next coffin press on nails. So we can take it even further. We want to say I want to see all the keywords that start with coffin shelf from the most, you know, search to the least. So we've got coffin shelf, coffin shelf, large. So all these great keywords.
Carrie:
Another thing you can maybe try like the most popular search term or search product is garlic press, so maybe we can look at garlic Okay, so we've got garlic, garlic press, garlic powder, so we can say garlic press here and see if there's any other keywords. It looks like garlic press stainless steel is the next most searched Garlic press. Oh, so, as you can see, this is a great way to find. You know, kind of do some low key keyword research and you can see all the keywords that start that exact keyword that you want to find, and In the order of the highest search volume to lowest. So I hope you check it out. It's very, very easy and really interesting to take a look at.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, thank you very much, Carrie, and thank you guys all for tuning in this week. I will see you next week to see what's buzzing.
Get ready to take your Walmart selling game to the next level! Our brilliant guest, Michal Chapnick, a Walmart expert, talks about Walmart's ad certification, the unveiling of innovative beta programs, and the integration of Google ads into promoting your Walmart products. She'll also shed light on Walmart’s commitment to third-party sellers through initiatives like fee discounts and personalized product suggestions. This is the inside scoop you need to unlock the potential of Walmart's marketplace and see your sales soar.
Discover the power of Google ads in driving traffic to Walmart and how it can work wonders for your brand exposure. Dive into the advantages of Walmart's SEM program and learn why it may be more beneficial than directly sending Google ads to Walmart. Michal reveals the abundant opportunities awaiting sellers at Walmart Canada and uncovers the potential impact of beta programs, such as brand stores, on your sales figures. This Walmart Wednesday episode is packed with insights and advice for those seeking to extend their business reach on Walmart.
As we approach Q4, the busiest time for e-commerce, Michal shares her expertise on maximizing your sales during this hectic period. From planning and implementing promotions to optimizing your listings and enhancing customer service, we’ve got you covered. Uncover the impact of the beta version of coupon codes and the power of video ads in holding customer attention. We wrap up our episode by acknowledging all the diligent sellers out there and remind you to make the most of the opportunities available on Walmart's platform, particularly during the holiday season. Buckle up for a wealth of knowledge, and best wishes for a profitable Q4!
In episode 513 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Michal discuss:
- 00:00 - Selling on Walmart Updates and Opportunities
- 03:13 - BIS Mentor and Customized Suggestions
- 06:07 - The Growth and Opportunities With Walmart
- 12:35 - Walmart's Influence on Black Friday Sales
- 15:23 - Running Ads for Walmart Benefits
- 19:17 - Opportunities for Selling in Walmart Canada
- 23:53 - Promoting Walmart Sales With Coupons and Videos
- 31:56 - Optimizing Keywords With Helium 10
- 33:24 - Q4 Selling Tactics and Appreciation
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Transcript
Carrie Miller:
On today's episode we have Walmart expert Michal Chapnick. She's going to be talking about Walmart ad certification, new beta programs for Walmart, as well as Google ads for Walmart. So this and so much more on today's episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. My name is Carrie and I'm your host today, and this is our winning with Walmart Wednesday, where we talk about all things Walmart. We answer all of your questions and I'm very, very excited today because I have an amazing guest. We have Michal Chapnick, who is going to be joining me. I'm going to be asking her lots of questions because she's a Walmart expert. She has a Walmart agency and she's had a lot of success on Walmart. I know a lot of you are familiar with her. Hey, Michal, how's it going?
Michal:
Hello, I'm good and good. How are you doing?
Carrie Miller:
Very good. Thank you, nice to see you, and thanks so much for coming on. I'm really excited to have you because you're one of the you know Walmart gurus one of the few Walmart gurus. I would say, probably one of the top in the industry here for Walmart. So thank you. Yeah, so I'm really excited because I know that you have a lot of kind of cool updates to share with us. Okay, so I'm going to get into it. I'm going to get into some of the first things. I'm going to ask you just what kind of updates are there that you would like to share with us about Walmart? Do you want to share any updates of anything new for Walmart or what's new?
Michal:
basically, I think there are so many Recently. You know, every week we do Walmart updates and we have, like you know, 10, 15 slides every week because they're really on top of it, they're working really hard and a lot of them are really exciting because and I'm telling that all the time Walmart really wants you. They want you on Walmart, they want the brand, they want you to sell and a lot of people you know sometimes having a hard time to enter Walmart or when they're on Walmart they're having a hard time to sell. But Walmart really wants you there and they're doing everything they can from their side to help you and, you know, give you help to set up, give you help with fees. There's always some kind of promotion there is doing for sellers that are already on Walmart or new sellers. So right now they're doing a lot of like. They're cutting off fees in different ways.
Michal:
So either if you have the Pro Seller badge and you can get deep discounts on fees and you can get credit that you can use it for run ads or to use it for the review accelerator program, so you get this credit back. The only thing you need to do is go to your BIS mentor. It's in every account. It's on the, I think, top left and Walmart is giving you customized suggestions so it just specifically for you.
Michal:
So from things like items that they think you have an opportunity to get more sales if you lower your price and they're willing to cut your sell off fees, so they will cut your sell off fees so you'll be able to take your price lower to sell more. So this is just one example of the second thing they will give you like a customized list of products that they think you should add to your account. So they're basing that, based on the category you're selling or the brand you're selling. So if you're a resale, of wholesale, you will see a lot of opportunities and I know that some of my sellers that I'm working with they're taking really good advantage of those and they're they managed to get a lot of sales because usually Walmart will tell you something that is out of stock or something that the other sellers are not using WFS.
Carrie Miller:
So once you got this inventory and it's already selling very well and you're the only one selling it or the only one WFS, imagine that is like so much self I actually talked to them about this and they said that they anything in the assortment growth tab, that those are really the best opportunities because they kind of compliment what they already have on Walmart. So they're looking for complimentary products. So I think that's why is they're really going to. If you take those suggestions, they're going to boost you and then you're going to get a lot of exposure and sales. Like I know, I was talking to an account manager and she said that somebody in the toys category had a bunch of assortment growth suggestions for toys and they started manufacturing them and basically have been killing it on Walmart, just making tons and tons of sales. So that's a that's something that is really interesting right now for opportunity for selling products.
Michal:
It is working. I know that one of our clients that he have an account manager. You know in the past you know they were doing it personally, they know exactly the opportunity so they can do it all and you know he's selling in the category of backpacks. They told him you know what styles right now there is like a lot of demand, for example, clear backpacks and things like that, and the same thing is killing they're. They're making six figures a month.
Michal:
They're just amazing. So Walmart is there to help you. I think, if you, I don't know I was selling on Amazon for 12 years, but I remember the 10 years ago. I used to get emails from Amazon every day with items to sell. They were like telling me hey, you know these these, you know those items right, and I don't know if they still do that. I have no idea, but I haven't gotten any recently. And but with Walmart is the same thing. They want to know.
Michal:
For them to get to the same or as close as Amazon sells, their catalog have to grow and that's their focus. They're focused in growing their catalog and they're using the sellers, the third-party sellers, to leverage the catalog. There's still far away in a couple of hundreds of millions of products from Amazon. There is so much place for new sellers and even people that come into Walmart and they're new and they don't know what to sell. I can show them so quickly. So much opportunities. There's endless opportunities. One of the coolest things with the mentor base even if you're a private label, walmart know you're selling, for example, in the toy category or kitchen, and they know exactly what product, have a lot of demand and they will tell you. And then you need to go and manufacture that or source that or there's so many ways you can get your hands on these items. This is one of the things that I really like, that they're really encouraging you and we just talked about it.
Michal:
Right now they have an update for the category of automotive. They will tell you all the products they're looking for in automotive and they tell you please bring those products, list them. We want you to create the listing. They do not want you to sell something. Yeah, of course you can sell. Something is already on Walmart but what they're trying to do is to get you to create new listings. They want you to not just to create new listing. They also expect to need to create good listings, because when they're good listing, they can be in front of customers. Customer can find them. When customer find it, the content is good, so he will buy it.
Michal:
Right now they give you the option to upload videos to your listing. Everybody can do that right now. It doesn't cost you anything. You can just go ahead and there's a when you go and open the case. There is one of the section it says upload rich media, upload video, and they will give you an instructions and a file to upload your video. So they're really doing a lot for the sellers and going a little bit back. The most important things that you need to remember is that you have to follow the guidelines, because you're going to have so much benefits coming after that, Getting the processor batch, for example. Now they're offering the SEM, that's the searching agent marketing, and what is that? So let's talk about that for a second, because that's I think this is one of the most exciting updates the last couple of months.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I saw it pop in my account and I took a look at it. I think my biggest question is because this is basically advertising through Google Shopping, through the portal, and they basically do it for you. As long as you're really well optimized, you'll show for the best keywords. But is this now the paid version of what was free? Because I remember my product used to show up a ton on Google Shopping just for free and I hadn't been advertising on Google for Walmart but it would say available on Walmart.com. Is it now kind of paid and not free, or do you see both?
Michal:
No, it's definitely both. So here's the secret. Walmart is spending millions Even I wish I could see their budget for Google Ads. It's insane, it's really crazy. They know the power of Google Ads. We saw in many, many clients a lot of time when we went deep into the sales and trying to understand where those sales are coming from. Between 30% to 40% of a lot of item sales coming from Google Ads. So Walmart is pushing all the listing to Google Ads.
Michal:
But there's a couple of criterias, like your listing have to be following the guidelines, you have to have good images, so you have to have not too long title and all the things that are very important, and you can see it in your listing score. There is a tool that show you exactly the score for every little part of your listing and if your score is high, there is no reason why you shouldn't be eligible to show up on Google Ads. So Walmart is not going to put you on Google Ads if you don't have enough images, because then the pain for your item to show up on Google a customer is going to click on that is going to come to Walmart and he's not going to end up buying because there's no information or there's no images. So again, they have to make sure your listing is going to have the chance to convert before they will do that. So the only thing you need to do is make sure your listing is following the guidelines. And so now Walmart is telling you we're giving you the option. We know how powerful is Google, we know how powerful the ads are coming. We are spending a lot of money, but if you want to do some extra, you want to spend more money, you want to put more product. We're giving you the option to start doing campaigns on Google, and I think that's huge and I think whoever is going to take advantage of that is going to see amazing results in their conversion rates.
Michal:
Because Still, 40 percent of people will start their search on Google. I think 35 percent going to go directly to Amazon, 40 percent on Search and Agent, and then the rest is spread on different things. Some people will go through Pinterest or even social media. They're going to look and stuff in there. Another thing that why you want to be optimized is the same thing as more you optimize and you listen to high quality. Walmart is not just advertising on Google or Bing or Ad. They're advertising with a lot of social media advertising, with a lot of bills website. They're advertising with a lot of really big influencers that they're paying them a lot of money. As more as you're listening is good. They will expose your items to all those channels they're advertising at.
Carrie Miller:
That's possible. Yeah, I know that.
Michal:
Yeah, I was talking with one of the account manager and they have the option to pick items and put them on this bucket, this list, and then website deals website like a silk deals, and there's all websites like that or influencers have the option to look at that list and pick the items they want to promote this week because they're getting paid and they get also getting paid affiliates. Yeah, there's things like that. Sometimes, if you follow influencers on Walmart on Instagram, they're doing a lot of Walmart. You can see they're pushing a lot of passion. Yeah, kitchen items. And right now it's crazy because people are waiting for influencers to show them what's the deals on Walmart, because everybody know that Walmart have the best Black Friday deals.
Michal:
Yeah, we always have the biggest selection, the biggest selection of deals in each category. Because other stores can be just electronics, best buy with Walmart. The Black Friday deals are on home, on outdoor, on Christmas decoration, toys, clothing, jewelry, everything. Walmart is very known in Black Friday.
Carrie Miller:
We did have a question about SEM. It says do you do Walmart SEM and your own Google ads at the same time? That's a really good question Because if you don't want to cannibalize your own Google ads while doing the SEM Google ads, that is a really good question.
Michal:
Usually, when you do your own Google ads, you choose where the traffic is going to go. You can run Google ads for your website. It's good because many times I remember I had items that I used to sell in the past. There were not all of people were selling them In the category. I would say it was a kind of a shoes, a specific shoes for kids. When I used to go to Google and I used to write that specific keyword. I get Google ads and I sell my shoes on Walmart. Next to it I saw my shoes on my website and next to it on Amazon. I used to get all the Google ads I could. Now, most likely, the customer will buy my shoes. It doesn't matter where, but he will buy them. Again, you're creating brand awareness. It's more ads you can create. It's more exposure. You can put your brand in a product. It's better for you because the customer remembered that.
Carrie Miller:
I think that they clarified it. I mean sending Google traffic to Walmart. Maybe not do your own Google ads to Walmart if you're doing SEM, potentially.
Michal:
Yeah, that's what it's going to do. That's exactly what it's going to drive traffic from Google to your Walmart. So I say you know, try, try, you can put a budget. It's not too complicated to run those campaigns. So I would say, give it a try. And before you do that, also go and search for your item on Google and see if it's really coming up, if Walmart is already promoting your items. And again, the most important thing, make sure your listing is following the guideline.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, for my own Google ads. I did do an experiment where I was trying to see if it would help with ranking if I sent outside ads, like from Google, like at U-Kan on Amazon, and I noticed that it did not make a difference when I sent my own Google ads to Walmart. And so I think that probably, if there is going to be a benefit, it's probably going to be through the SEM program doing ads to Walmart. So if if I were to choose between the two, I would probably do the Walmart SEM over Google to my own Google ads to Walmart, whereas I would still obviously do Google ads because I have Google ads to my own sites as well. But that's what I would think because I know that they are kind of looking at their own metrics and the more you convert on their side, I think that the better it is. But that could be just a guess, but I do know for a test that it did not help my rank. So there is that, because I know a lot of us do that for Amazon. We send Google traffic and it does help with rank, but it didn't on Walmart.
Michal:
Yeah, one more thing I'm thinking of is that it's probably going to be much better because they have better pricing, so it might be going to end up being much cheaper than you spend it yourself.
Carrie Miller:
Yes, it's Walmart.
Michal:
It's going for Walmart account. It's not your Google account, it's Walmart account having their own pricing. So you will get that. And the second thing it's known because I can see it. Every time I go to Google I can see Google love Walmart. Google will always place Walmart ads in first five. So this is another thing you will get better exposure and you have better chance to shop in a better ad in a better location Because, again, it's through Walmart. So just that it's worth it.
Carrie Miller:
We have another question. Actually Bradley asked this one and it says is Walmart Canada worth it yet?
Michal:
I absolutely think so, absolutely. It is very like with Walmart.com, the same thing with Walmart Canada. Not every product will be a huge success because those marketplaces are still building their customer base, but I think Walmart.com is doing very good. Now for Canada, from a lot of people that I have a lot of friends that live in Canada people online. When they go online they usually will go either to Amazon Canada or Walmart Canada. There is not too many options. Some items people can go to the store and have some problems to find Like there is not always big selection of things. So if you know to find those items that people having a hard time to find in the store or next to their house, you will know that Canada will be very, very good.
Michal:
So actually, going back to the time when I used to sell kitchens, we had exact same styles on that farm in Canada and actually it was a period of time that we met sales on Canada. Because I guess you know people need, you know everybody needs shoes for their. Yeah, you don't need to do much, it's going to sell. If you have nice shoes with quality, it will sell. And I think the thing is that, again, people when they go online, they don't. There's not too many brands that are selling on Walmart.com or Canada. So again, if you find those opportunities and there is tons of opportunities on Walmart Canada and also in Canada people, the Canadian, are paying high prices on stuff, so you don't have to sell nothing to cheap, you can sell it in your price or even higher and customers are paying and they're also paying shipping as well, so I think the profit is also very nice on Canada.
Carrie Miller:
All right, let's go into some other things I know. Can you give us some insights to you know, like I think, some beta programs I think coupons, brand stores, any other kind of beta programs that you've seen, and have you been able to use them and what's your experience been with those?
Michal:
Yeah, so brand stores are available for very selected amount of sellers. Right now it's mostly they started with a lot of sellers that do it fashion, so we do have a couple of our clients that they have the option to do brand stores and right now it looks great. I cannot wait for it to be available to everyone because we need that. You know you want to click on the brand and go to a nice storefront that you can display your. You know what are you selling. I think it's going to help a brand grow really nicely on Walmart and I think the best part is, again we see the people that selling on Walmart. There's not a lot of brands that take Walmart really seriously and doing those extra steps, but the one they do, those that want to see really success on Walmart. So I'm excited to you know, to see some of the brands we're working with, you know, using that feature and growing. The second thing is coupon codes. So coupon codes again are in beta right now. Yes, and it's available from whatever.
Michal:
Only like 50 sellers got that, yeah, maybe now a little bit more, but I cannot wait for that because, again, this is huge for doing social media marketing, because people love those videos and those ads and everything that you give them. Coupon code is, like, so popular right now with Amazon, and I think it's going to help get so much more traffic and sales to Walmart when you can, you know, and display your items with the coupon code. I think so.
Carrie Miller:
I think that it's a bummer we don't have it right now because my sales when we started doing a coupon on Amazon have done really, really well, because I just think people are always looking for a deal. So, seeing that coupon, they're like, oh, I might as well just get this item too in here because it's on sale or there's a coupon, whereas you know we don't have it on Walmart yet. I'm kind of antsy to get coupons on Walmart. It would be really cool if they just decided next week to release those, because I'm desperately waiting for those because they work really well on Amazon. We see that they work because people are already shopping on there and they're like, oh, I'm looking, they're looking for deals, right? So the more access we have to give deals, I think, the more sales we're going to make on Walmart.
Michal:
So, yeah, in beta anymore. It's available to everyone. If you're a brand, you have to be brand and register, but is the video ads. Yes is the most exciting thing I think happened recently for brands is that you can create a video ad and you get your customer attention so fast because you know the minute they search for something, your video is and it's big, it's really big. You saw on Walmart, it's not like tiny. It's like yes, really like the page. It's really nice big deal, and I'm still amazed that so many brands are not using that. There are so many people and sellers that are not using the video ads or even just to upload the video to the listing. So many people are not doing that. So and so, yeah, this is I think the key to this with Walmart is paying attention and doing all this stuff. I agree.
Carrie Miller:
I think I've talked to some people and because the minimum is a dollar for the video ads, they haven't been utilizing them. Have you started doing video ads and have you seen some good conversion on those, like just better conversion overall? Or what do you see with the video ads Currently?
Michal:
yeah, we do have one of our clients that is running video ads and their sales are are really going high, Like we're talking about 30% more than before, so that's really nice. They're very happy with that, and so this is one of the things that you know with advertisement usually you should see growth and you know with sales.
Carrie Miller:
Mm, hmm, that would be. Yeah, that's amazing. Okay, so let's see, there was something else that you mentioned, and it was ad certification. Do you want to talk a little bit about Walmart ad certification? I think this is a completely new program, so yeah, that's a new program that Walmart is.
Michal:
see that people struggling with ads Like they're trying to run ads and they don't know, they have no clue what they're doing. So they're saying, hey, let's give you a certificate. So I think it's just to make people feel like, oh, if they're going to go through a course, they're going to be certified and they know what they're doing. So this is what they're trying to do. Or they're even offering that to your team. It doesn't have to be you, it's going to be somebody from your team. So if you have a VA, or because Walmart advertisement is not difficult, but you have to take the time and and learn how to create your campaigns correctly, how to optimize them, how to find the right keywords, a check your competition.
Michal:
If you're running ads and you don't spy on your only competitors to see what they're doing, you're missing out. Because this can be. I always find. When I do, you know, when I look at competitors, when we run ads for customers, we can always see that there is, we have a list of all the relevant keywords and then we look at the competitors and sometimes they're missing one or two, or sometimes even more. And that's your opportunity. So I think it's just to make sure that you're not missing out, and so we can always see that there is.
Michal:
We have a list of all the relevant keywords and then we look at the competitors and sometimes they're missing one or two or sometimes even more. And that's your opportunity, because nobody's paying for that keywords and you can pay for it and get all the traffic. Or Another thing that I see all the time with the competitors is that they're paying for a lot of phrases but they're not coming out as relevant because they don't have that phrase in the listing. So the ad algorithm is very smart, so he will sometimes place them for these keywords, but only because they don't have somebody that looks more relevant. Once you come and you're more relevant, you're not really competing with him because you will always get the first spot in the first page because the algorithm know you're relevant. So it's easy. Even if somebody in your confederate is advertising sometimes they're not doing such a good job you can always come and find those little holes where you can take advantage of something that your competitor is not doing.
Carrie Miller:
Very good, very interesting. Well, I think we're pretty much at our time limit, but I was wondering if there's anything else that we didn't talk about that you might want to give advice on or share with the audience. Any final thoughts?
Michal:
Yes, I think through the end of the year. Right now it's a really good timing for a lot, especially of the new seller, to see the potential of Walmart because a lot of them will be surprised right now with the sales. So I really want a lot of you to catch the momentum of the end of the year. Right now it's the best timing to add new product because there's a lot of traffic. So take the time and add new product. If you have a product they're doing very well, sometimes you can even just create another offer. It can be two-pack, three-pack, it can be a bundle. Again, it's more items you add, more customer can find you, you create more brand awareness. So add as many skills, as I always think is a good strategy to build your brand and stay in stock, even though pay attention, because a lot of people what happened right now? They're getting out of stock because they didn't thought they're going to sell so many, so much on Walmart and they're getting out of stock quickly. So try to stay in stock so you keep your momentum and your ranking. So add, advertise. Now is the best time.
Michal:
Advertise, pay attention to your budget. Make sure you're running ads during those peak days and peak hours. You don't run out of your budget too early of the day, so take advantage of the Google advertisement promo code. One thing that I wanted to say it's going to be super cool when you run ads. So your item is showing up like write the first thing the customer seat and then you use a promo. Like promo it's mean you're doing something like reduce price. So your item right now instead of $29.99 is $24.99. So you already catching the customer eye because you can see this item is on sale and then they click on your product and then they see there is coupon code. Right, it's going to be like. I think it's going to create a lot of conversion.
Carrie Miller:
I think so too.
Michal:
Together, and so I cannot wait for the coupon code to come. But right now you can run ads, you can do promo and that's going to catch some eyes. You will get a lot of sales just by doing that, as well as running ads going to help you get ranked. So this is a really good timing to not just sit back and say, oh, it's too late. No, it's not too late, you have enough time. Continue optimizing. Even right now. I'm telling all our customers please run a new keyword report.
Michal:
One of the things that people don't do is everybody that listen right now. When the last time you optimize your listening maybe you upload a year ago did you optimize it since then? Keywords is something that change all the time, especially in Q4. Because in Q4 there's a lot of new phrases. So if you sell toy for girls and right now you can add something to one of your key features, it says that toy make a great Christmas gift for girls. Christmas gift for girls is a very high search term at this time of the year and if you don't use it, you're missing out thousands of thousands of customers that potentially can come to your listening because that phrase is in your listening. So it's the perfect time right now, today, or even if you're on vacation or something next week, whenever you listen to that at any time.
Michal:
Go to Helium 10, run keyword refresh, keyword report to your product and do a couple of adjustments. Go and add those keywords to your description, to your title, even to your key features. Even your attributes can use some refreshment. Go to your listing tool score and see your score and see what you can improve in there. So just by doing that and you know what I love about it, that if you do that, you will see that in the next week or two you will get more traffic. It's working, guys. I think this tip is always working.
Carrie Miller:
One more question on that Do you use Helium 10, Cerebro and Magnet to find those keywords, or where are you finding those keywords? Is that kind of the best option?
Michal:
I'm using both. So Magnet, we're always doing searches just to see what's coming up, and I always like to use Cerebro because I will go to my competing items. At least two or three of them will take their item number, go to Cerebro to see what they're ranking for, which keywords, and almost always I will find the phrase that I never got in the other search. So always do both.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, we're updating those keywords every week, so you should be able to find new keywords on Helium 10, Cerebro and Magnet. So thank you everyone for listening. Thank you so much, Michal, for coming on. I always love having you on because you are definitely one of the top in the industry, so I appreciate you taking the time and answering questions and giving advice. So good luck to everyone who's selling this Q4. I think we've gotten a lot of really great tactics here from Michal on what to do, from you know, for Q4. So we will see you all next time on Walmart Wednesday. So thank you.
Michal:
Bye Carrie. Thank you so much.
Carrie Miller:
Bye.
Imagine navigating the exciting landscape of launching an Amazon KDP business and entering the glitzy Miss Universe spectacle at the same time. That's precisely what our incredible guest, Shivali, has managed to do. In this episode of SSP, Shivali takes us on a fascinating journey that begins with the debut of her original beauty and personal care product in the electronics section of Amazon and ends with her unforgettable time competing in beauty pageants. Gain insights into the tactical maneuvers she employed to overcome the hurdles in the fiercely competitive Amazon landscape and enjoy the open discussion of her unique approach to launching an Amazon product.
In the second half of our talk, we change topics and focus on the colorful realm of cosmetics and beauty, emphasizing the need to create styles that accentuate unique qualities. With her unique take on the process of creating digital products, Shivali shares the details of her next cosmetics training initiative. She also discusses her amazing book writing and publishing endeavors, as well as her first experience publishing KDP books on Amazon. In order to bring your private label endeavors to new heights, we conclude the episode by getting into the specifics of Amazon's KDP platform and providing insightful advice about quality control, marketing techniques, and pricing strategies. So, listen to this episode and take away some wisdom from Shivali’s inspiring story.
In episode 512 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Shivali discuss:
- 00:00 - Starting a KDP Business
- 05:19 - Passion and Celebrity in Product Success
- 11:07 - Versatile Looks and Digital Product Creation
- 16:43 - Promoting KDP Books on Tick Tock
- 21:52 - Effective Usage of AI Writing Tools
- 23:53 - KDP Book Publishing and Marketing Tactics
- 27:52 - Understanding Amazon Royalties and Profits
- 34:11 - Being Proactive in the KDP Market
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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we're sending Shivali to the other side of the microphone and she's going to talk about her advice for those wanting to start a KDP business, her super unique Amazon product launch that she's doing that would be impossible to copy, and much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Want to check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon? Or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result have the actual search keyword in the title? You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome Extension tool, X-Ray. More than 1 million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. I'm not going too far away in the world. We're going to North Carolina right now. Shivali in the house. Welcome back to the show. How's it going?
Shivali Patel:
It's going good. How are you?
Bradley Sutton:
I'm doing all right. We're going to talk about KDP how Amazon sellers can do it. I'm going to talk about I know you're just going to be launching another Amazon product soon. We've got a lot of a business thing to talk about Before there. We were talking earlier that there was just recently Miss Universe. You said a couple of people that were in this Miss Universe pageant you were actually in the same pageant with them last year, the year before, right.
Shivali Patel:
Yes, correct. Miss Universe Thailand this year was actually our reigning international girl when I competed at Miss Super National in 2021. Then Miss Universe, Puerto Rico Carla, who also made top five at Miss Universe Miss Thailand, actually took first runner up. Carla was also, I believe she made top five. Yeah, really really strong group of girls. They're both wonderful. It definitely gives me the pageant itch as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, I've joked with you before that, hey, I'll approve time off, but there's got to be like some. I put a Helium 10 logo on my basketball court. I think that on your gowns or your evening wear or talent competition, there's got to be like Helium 10 logos displayed somewhere. Then I'll go ahead and approve that time off if you go back to pageant life.
Shivali Patel:
Yeah, that would be a wild gown.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, but hey, it will bring us lots of impressions to Helium 10 and then all of a sudden our site traffic will spike and then we can attribute it. We've got this metric that we go evangelism reach and that'll definitely help the evangelism reach. Anyways, here let's go to business. First of all, the last time we talked was a while back. I mean, you're definitely no stranger to show, you even host a few podcasts yourself or a few episodes yourself with the weekly buzz and tacos Tuesday and things like that. But as a guest you haven't been on here in about a year and I remember at the time you were looking for a new product to sell on Amazon, and now, as of today, you've got it all in Amazon. But you were having like, didn't they like? Put them all on reserve status or suspended or suppressed, or what was going on there?
Shivali Patel:
Yeah, so my product is actually. It's in the beauty and personal care category, but it was also an electronics item, which is very interesting because when I was getting started a few years ago, I remember telling myself you know what? I'm not going to touch electronic items with a stick. It's not for me. I don't know all the regulations.
Bradley Sutton:
And then I think you have a death with electronics.
Shivali Patel:
Yeah, that too. Let's forgot about that part too. But yeah, that was one additional reason that I didn't want to touch the electronics category. But I think the more time that I've spent in this space, it changes your mindset a lot, because then it becomes about well, which barriers are you willing to cross? Because problems are such an integral part to running any business system and it just comes down to what or how you're willing to overcome it. And so when I found this product, I was really, really interested in launching into it because I felt like I could deliver value into it. You're always thinking creatively well, what can I add to this product so that way it will sustain competitors regardless of when they're coming in? And with my first product, I had about nine months before I actually got that product to market because of some backend issues, and this for this particular product. You carry all those lessons that you learned through time with you, and so I really wanted to ensure that, regardless of when the product goes out, it actually sells. And it really came down to okay, yes, it's an electronics item, but I can learn it's a higher barrier to entry for my competitors. And then I did feel like I could add value to the space. So, yeah, that's really my mindset of going in.
Bradley Sutton:
But along those lines it ties in with what we were talking about with pageant, life and stuff. But people, I've always suggested to people, hey, you can't always go with what your passion is, because if there's no opportunity there you're not going to have success. But in a perfect world, if you can do a product that you're passionate about or leverage some kind of like off Amazon, you know, following, then I think you know people absolutely have to do that. Like you know, I always thought before like if I was still like really big in the Zumba world, like I was in the old days, that you know, like I could have had a lot easier way to launch some kind of Zumba fitness related product or something. So then you kind of, you know you said it's kind of like a beauty product, but then you're kind of taking your quote unquote celebrity status a little bit and offering like coaching or some kind of like digital service along with your product.
Shivali Patel:
Right, that is correct. So I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to do this, but pretty much anybody I talked to, yourself included, said it was a good idea, and so, yes, I have chosen to represent myself as Miss Supernational USA 2021. And I, whenever somebody buys the product which it's actually I'm fine with sharing it. It's a makeup bag with LED mirror and three settings, but it comes with makeup lessons as well, and it's not just live group coaching calls, it's like a full blown course, because I wanted people to not just walk away with a product, but walk away with an experience where they can buy this one bag and learn how to use all of the tools that they'll be putting inside of that bag, where they can now go into their everyday life and actually carry themselves with confidence because they now know or have a skill, sets and techniques on how to use those products. So it really was a long game for me and that's how I approached it.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, but yeah, the reason why this is, I mean, nothing is guaranteed success. Guys in Amazon. You know like maybe something weird might happen and she has to like lower her price or something. But I know you're starting at a very high price and you actually have a chance of success. Like if I were to come in with an LED makeup bag and like, let's say, all of them were like 60 bucks and I'm trying to sell it for 120, I mean it's not. Not only is there not a guarantee of success, it's almost a guaranteed failure. Because why, you know, why would anybody pay 120 dollars? But with the fact that you're bundling this, this is now all of a sudden you actually have this ceiling, like it actually is possible for you to have success at that price, price point. Also, this is something that nobody can duplicate. Nobody can copy like any. You have some like super fancy water bottle, you know, that has like this really crazy design spout or whatever. So somebody can copy that. Eventually, can a can a you know Chinese factory or a factory from India just go and say, hey, let me get another country's miss super national or miss universe or whatever and offer coaching classes. You know that's like not going to happen.
Bradley Sutton:
So, again, this is not a guarantee for success, but this is the kind of thing guys those of you are selling on Amazon look for these kind of things that are hard to duplicate, whether it's on the product side, like something you have a patent for, or or it's on the you know the personal side, you know where you're offering digital courses or something like that with it, and then that just sets you apart. So that that was why I really liked that, that idea, and I think that other other people should think about. Not, not everybody has something you know, but, but sometimes we sell ourselves short A lot of people. We might have something that we don't even know. Maybe it's one of our relatives or something that we can offer as as part of a bundle. So how are you delivering? Like, is this course live? Is it like something you recorded and they get access to it once they opt in? Like, how does that work?
Shivali Patel:
I was actually listening to Alex Hermosi I'm not sure if I pronounced this last name correctly, but he talks a lot about the $100 million offer right, and something that is very principal to that is providing an offer. That is a no brainer, and when I was thinking about what I wanted to offer in terms of an experience and what would be most impactful, you want leveraged impact right. You want somebody to purchase this bag, transform their lives, and then they go and tell their friends and say, hey, oh my gosh, like I learned this incredible thing. I feel so much more confident, and I think that's a mixture of prerecorded lessons, but it's also live coaching, where people do have access to you. They do have the ability to ask you questions.
Shivali Patel:
Now, I would not consider myself a makeup guru by any, by any milestone, but I think you really only need to be a few steps ahead of somebody to be able to offer help, and with makeup, I have spent a considerable amount of years in the fashion and the beauty industry. I started very young and I grew up in that field, and so I do feel like I can say something to someone and help them with their confidence in applying makeup or even just in presentation, right. I think it takes a certain level of courage, or even foregoing some of the expectations other people might hold of you, to compete in something like a beauty pageant. And so I can take those and transfer them over to somebody else and hopefully that will allow them to be equipped with skills they can put into their day to day life, and so it's actually a mixture I'm sending them over into a funnel, right, and that funnel will set up the drip email campaign, which then leads them into this whole course. So it's a four module course as of right now. I plan to add to it. I want to update it consistently as new trends come out.
Shivali Patel:
As you know, there's so many versatile looks you could do. You could do a day look a glam look. Maybe you are somebody who's going day into glam, that sort of thing as well as just expression. So it talks a little bit about color psychology. We have what else? We have undertones, we have foundation matching just a lot of different broad ideas that are important when you are trying to figure out what's going to work on your face, because everybody's face is different. I can't actually go and give you the exact same things that I do, and it's not necessarily going to work for you, because you know you might have almond shaped eyes.
Bradley Sutton:
I think my beauty is a little bit different than yours, yeah.
Shivali Patel:
Exactly, Exactly. But for those of you that are listening, you know you might end up if you're a woman and your are planning to use the same exact makeup techniques that I am, well, it might not work, because you might have hooded eyes and I have almond eyes, that sort of thing. So we do have the four modules plus bonus lessons, where I'll have some of my pageant friends come on, some of the you know influencers that I can get on and they'll do lessons as well, and then I also have a group and they'll be promoting this product, like once you know, now that you see there goes again, guys, there's, it's not.
Bradley Sutton:
She's not just going off of what you know she has, but what you have is your network too, and so if you have people who are influential, you know, and who are down to down to promote, that's another great advantage. Like, like, I'm doing something different on the coffin shelf, you know, like I'm not making a community or anything but the coffin shelf market is very saturated. All of a sudden, you know, people come in low balling and I'm going to go a little bit more in depth in a future episode, but what I'm doing is I'm just experiencing again, again. I might fail at this, but I'll never know if I don't try. I'm actually raising my price and not going lower, like everybody's 20% lower than me. I'm going to go not only not lower, but I'm going to go 20% higher and I'm adding Products that almost double my cost of manufacturing. I'm giving, like, a coffin shaped box, like the box that it's gonna come in is literally coffin shaped and it can be reused as something else, like you know, a sock box or something like that, and I'm offering some other stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
So for me, that's what I think is gonna differentiate, because there's no way that any of these other cheap Coffin shelf makers are gonna go and spend two dollars and fifty cents like is what it's costing me to make this custom box for Shivali. There is no way any of her competitors are gonna go and have multiple pageant beauty queens From countries like you know offering courses. So, guys, again, the moral this part of the story is is do what you know, use your advantages, that you have to be unique and offer something that is that is not duplicatable and and that's kind of like along the lines of it doesn't always have to be a physical product. Mine, mine, is a physical product. I'm doing a box right and along those lines is a perfect segue. Your first entry into Amazon wasn't even in the physical product, wasn't didn't. Before you make physical products, you were doing digital products, namely KDP books correct.
Shivali Patel:
I got started by selling on KDP and I wrote books fairly fast. I had some ghosts written, but I also wrote some of my own and I knew that if I spent too much time on Writing them that I most likely would be disappointed in the results. Not trying to be a pessimist, just a realist, where if I spent, let's say, months preparing a book and I put it out into the world and people don't receive it well, or maybe it the field is changed by then, right, I would be so disappointed and so I worked on. I Just focused on putting it out there as opposed to perfection, just progress, not perfection sort of ideal.
Shivali Patel:
And yeah, it went okay. I wouldn't say it was. I became like a best-selling author or anything, but I sold copies and I continue to sell those copies actually from the books I wrote when I was I think I was 23 at the time- so those books you made years ago You're saying you're still getting, like you know, per like it's not, it's not free, you have to pay for it or you're free, so people are literally are still paying you for this book you wrote years ago.
Shivali Patel:
Yes, yeah, I mean, granted, my books are very, very cheap, because again I was like, okay, I wrote this in 24 hours. I think it was like 24 to 36 hours max, but I went through, wrote it pretty fast. One was on positive self-talk, the other one was on engineering powerful habits successfully. I've actually published way more than that. I just only tied those first two to my name and so those actually that are under my name, they're tagged to my socials and so I actually do end up going in and still seeing sales from those even today, and that's cool, because I don't actually actively promote them or anything.
Shivali Patel:
They just end up selling, and so I really, really love digital products because digital products cost you little to no money To actually set up right. You can go into Canva today and create something. In fact, last month I wrote four books and I need to actually get them published this month, hopefully this month. Hardcover paperback would be great. I wrote one on AI. I wrote one on what was my other one, even on, can you believe I like I struggle sometimes even in float Instagram, because I had done a case study with Instagram at some point where I quickly grew it from Zero to 10k followers in the span of like three to four weeks.
Shivali Patel:
Now, of course, that case study is a little bit old, but I learned a lot through it and I can still sell that information, and so it's really easy to go into Canva, build out a full fledged book and then it takes you maybe five minutes to upload into KDP. And KDP isn't even the only avenue you can use. There's many other platforms that allow you to do that. Now I specifically focus on KDP and I Was talking to Bradley not too long ago about potentially doing a case study about that for helium 10 content, which hopefully, if you guys stay tuned, you'll be able to see that. And that is just experimenting with tick tock, because tick tock is also growing. Tick tock shop just became a thing and.
Shivali Patel:
I'm really interested in seeing how you can kind of combine both of those landscapes into one Right now you can't actually add links, I believe, into the captions to promote your Amazon KDP books, but you can Send traffic using a link in bio to a funnel page or a landing page or even into those books via that route so you can attach your KDP link. I think as long as you have the link in bio. You can't actually do it inside of the Video that you're uploading, like the post that you're uploading.
Shivali Patel:
Okay and so there's so many things you can do there too, right, you can go in and do like a reading what is it? You read like an excerpt of your book and that's a reading. You could do Q&A. You could add Just some knowledge to the space. If you have something that is non fictional, you could do so many other promotional videos that can lend itself to traffic for your pages.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so let me give you a couple scenarios. Scenario number one I am listening to this podcast and I'm not selling on Amazon yet, and the reason why I'm not is because, you know, I don't have $3,000 or maybe my product is like super expensive, it's $10,000 what I would need to invest. You know, $5,000, what have you? And I'm just like, hey, I'm not on any kind of like strict timeline. You know, I got a few months like I can build, you know, save for my day job, but I want to kind of like X, you know, start making some more money on the side Without investing. How, what would I? Where do I start? Like, like, what's my research? Like you know, maybe I don't have the time to do an Instagram Case, that you know you know. Whatever, whatever you do like, do I need to pick a topic that I know or you know? Do I do like product research and in helium 10 and find some kind of Subject that way that there are searches on like, like what's my step one, two and three?
Shivali Patel:
I think that's an excellent question, and it's when I can get very excited about sharing information on because you absolutely want to do product research. There's no point in you building a book and then set trying to sell it in a market that's super saturated, or maybe you don't know how to market and so use the helium 10 chrome extension. That's what I recommend is make sure you download it. You can go to helium 10 comm forward slash extension and once you add that to chrome, you can actually use x-ray to see a lot of back-end data. Go inside of Kindle, the Kindle store, go into categories, subcategories, use x-ray to see how people are doing and then from that, maybe, if you find a book that you Are interested in creating a book on, you feel like you could do something better, you can optimize that listing better. Then what I actually recommend that you do is open up Canva, open up ChatGPT and Open up quill bot. Okay, and what you can do is, first of all, use review insights which is also a part of our helium 10 chrome extension on your competitors inside of that niche. Figure out what's good, what are people talking about, what do they like about that book, what are the topics that you want to focus your book on and then go into chat GPT, provide a title, come up with a title. If you don't want to go directly into that, you really want to get granular. Go into Cerebro before you go into chat GPT, go and see what people are typing in and then from that Make a list of all the chapters you want to have for that book, all the keywords you want to rank for, and then you can use those keywords as chapter titles. Then you go to ChatGPT, you feed it inquiries and if you put in garbage if you put in garbage you're gonna get garbage out. So make sure you're very, very hyper specific about what you're inputting in.
Shivali Patel:
When you do that, you can start with an outline. You can say, hey, I'm writing a book for this, this is how long I want it to be. I'm going to, over time, over the next few prompts, feed you a set of Subject or chapter titles, chapter topics, and I'd like you to Draft a written response in the tone of XYZ. Maybe you have a favorite author, a favorite artist. Whatever the case may be, get very, very specific and, as you go through first, still provide you with the outline. So I would recommend really starting with the outline. Once you have the outline, the outline will present you with maybe two or three different markers for inside of each chapter. So even if you don't know the first thing about that niche, that is okay. You don't need to do a case study like I did. I've written plenty of books that are on topics I don't know anything about, and that is okay for you too. So go in to chat GPT, go into the outlines and then actually take each chapter Section, so maybe just the two or three. Copy and paste that and then you'll see I'll draft an entire thing for you.
Shivali Patel:
Now, the only thing that I don't love about ChatGPT is, yes, it has limits, but it also is quite redundant sometimes in its language. So you'll see some words pop up over and over again. You'll see vast, you'll see realm, you'll see Ecommerce landscape if I'm talking about something in E come and so you might want to go in and be specific, say, hey, don't use any sequential words or don't use these specific words, include these keywords, and it will actually go through and refine what you've written. The point, or the best way, rather, to use chat GPT is Start broad and get more and more granular, refining your results every single time, and so pretty soon actually even in the span of 30 minutes you can have a full book that you can then put into quill bot, which is a paraphrasing tool, and Actually change out those words. So now you have a Section of your book that is AI generated but it looks more human because you've gone in and actually changed out some of those words.
Shivali Patel:
Of course you want to add a little bit of personal touch, but can you imagine how hard it must have been to write books that are 500 600 pages back in the day, not to say you need to write 500 600 pages. Most of my books are somewhere between some are as low as 20 pages and others are I think my highest might be about no, actually 120 pages, I think is my highest. But you can go in and go as little or as Long as you really want to keep in mind that if you go and upload this to KDP, you will need to do some formatting beforehand, as well, as if you are making that book a paperback or hardcover book, you're gonna have certain associated printing costs because this is print-on-demand if you're using KDP. Anyways, I've gone completely into a whole splurge based off of this initial question of what the heck do you do if you're just getting started right, and so that was really to start with product research. Do the keyword research.
Shivali Patel:
If you want to figure out which chapters to create, use ChatGPT with Canva and I say Canva because you can actually transfer over, not transfer over with Canva. You can make the book title, book cover, page, and so you're. You now have a free book cover that you've created. You can create a really nice manuscript inside of honestly like word. I've done word before. I've done this inside of Google Docs before. I've also done this inside of canva before, where you can really make it nice with different fonts, and then you will want to throw it into KDP after that and make sure that the manuscript looks okay.
Shivali Patel:
That's really, really important because people who are Kindle readers read this on a handful of different Devices and you will want to make sure that they can actually read what you're writing, because the they want to consume the content. They don't want to be distracted by mistakes. When I was 23 and I published them on my first books, some of the feedback I got, I thought, okay, I'll just get feedback and refine it afterwards. Well, I did get some things that in in the reviews and oh, like the grammar was a little bit, you know, off for one of my fictional books and I was like, okay, it's fine. Whatever, you know, this was ghost written, I don't really care about it, I'm not gonna go in. I refined it as much as I could and I feel like the story still got across just fine.
Shivali Patel:
So once you have your book built, your book cover built inside a Canva, you've saved it, you're uploading to KDP. Create a KDP account, go in, upload all of it. It's pretty simple to follow. If not, we do have blogs on KDP. So I suggest that you go and you check out our blog section on Helium 10 to to figure out how to actually upload it, if you need some help, and then, from there, focus on marketing. I honestly, through mistakes, have learned that it's not enough just to build a high quality product. You will need to do the marketing side of things as well, and KDP is no different. If you want to stay low on costs let's say you really want to save for private label then go into existing blog forums, go into Facebook groups, create that TikTok account and do what we talked about earlier, where you're creating promotional videos, maybe you're doing reads Q and A's, you are getting on live, maybe, and talking about the book. I have seen some lives that are ridiculous. Bradley, do you remember the Chinese seller who made $18.7 million just by promoting products?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, like three seconds per product. It's kind of ridiculous.
Shivali Patel:
It's absurd and people still sell based off of those three seconds. You also have people who are doing the whole NPC trend, if you've seen it, and they make money on that. If they can make money on that, can you make money on a book that sells content? Absolutely, but will you have to put in the work to actually make the promotional videos? Yes, so you can go in and do stuff. The trade off is really going to be the time investment, so you will need to spend some time inside of Facebook groups. I've done this before. You find niches that are related to your book, go in, actually post that. Hey, you know what? Like I just released this book. I would love to get some feedback. I'd love if you guys could show some support and you're not telling anyone to buy, really, but they can go in and select or or, you know, purchase that product if they feel like it's up their alley and hopefully leave you an honest review, as long as you were very, very forthcoming with what you were hoping for in the beginning.
Shivali Patel:
Outside of that, I've also used blogging sites so you can go in, find niches where there's tons of readers subscribed to an email list and those email lists are really, really helpful too, because I've used those to launch books before, where you can go in and essentially maybe some of these sites are free, some are not. Some are like 20, $25 book beam there's. There's other ones that cost a lot more and they have millions of readers who are waiting for books to be published. So you can also tap into Kindle Unlimited. You can go in and actually end up promoting, let's say, even the book for free while they're doing these promos, so a lot of people can read them, you can garner those reviews and then hopefully start your PPC campaigns to sell really well.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so that's, let's say, I do all that. I make a book about 60, 70 pages. What's about the target price? And then, at that price, what am I taking home? You know, based on you know what, what Amazon is charging me.
Shivali Patel:
So you can select from two different royalty options. With KDP, you can do 35% or 70% of royalty from your list price, and that's if you're based in I think it's UK. No, if it's based in Europe, then that's without the VAT tax. So it's just taking a look at your list price 35% or 70% and it really comes down to you on what you want to market at.
Shivali Patel:
You'll see books that are $40. You'll see books that are $2, which is what my book started with way in the beginning and so you can go in and choose and then base off of the royalty price that you select, you'll be able to figure out what sort of profits you're making. Then, of course, if you are saving for private label, you know maybe you'll want to focus on building really quality books, not not making too many, and then just work on marketing them. Or you could go wide right. You can make many, many books that are really really cheap and just focus on the launch side of things to garner that initial revenue or not revenue. Revenue, yes, but also the initial capital you need to get started with private label.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Now, you know, that was a scenario that I gave, where it's like, all right, I'm just trying to get some extra revenue. Theoretically speaking, I could be already selling on Amazon and that's still you know, like I want to. You know, get more revenue so I can do that exact process. If I'm an existing Amazon seller, we would have nothing to do with my current Amazon business. It would just be, you know, me doing product research for something. But let's just you know. The other scenario, number two that was kind of like scenario one B, but you know. Now two is like all right, I sell coffin shelves and egg trays or what have you, and I want to leverage KDP in a different way. I'm not really necessarily making a revenue play, but maybe it's. It's something like I'm giving a free, you know, yeah, lead Magnet or add on what is a scenario? That I'm not necessarily making a revenue play, but as an existing Amazon seller, I could potentially leverage KDP and it'll benefit me.
Shivali Patel:
So I think a really good play for that is the leads generator, and that's just. You already have your product set. Maybe you want to tap into these Kindle users, because these are people that are already reading books. They're interested in that topic. Well, maybe they might be interested in a product in that setting, and so you can go in create a book using the process we just talked about right. Go into ChatGPT, go into Canva, into quill bot, and you can transfer those skills over and end up leading, putting in pages into your eBook that are for a leads generator. You tag that you can use portals inside of helium 10 to create a landing page and then actually end up taking that link and put it into your eBook, put it on KDP and then work on also ranking that book, so that way those readers end up hopefully navigating into your product and you end up capturing those emails as well through KDP.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so that's KDP. Now you know, one of your other specialties here at helium 10 is you work with our market tracker 360 program, something that I don't know too much about. It it's mainly for those who reach, like the eight, nine figure level. What's some new things that you can tell us about for those like, hey, I'm high, seven figure, eight figure seller, some new things that I can get excited about if I'm using market tracker 360.
Shivali Patel:
So the beauty about market tracker 360 is you can go as broad or as granular as you want, something we have been talking about today with this podcast. But what's really cool is now you can divvy out into how you want to build your market. So if you want to build your market, let's say, at a brand level, you can input up to 100 brands and focus on it simply at the brand level. If you want to put in keywords and asins, you can still do that, but you can go in and refine it based off of categories, subcategories as well, as something that is newer is being able to create markets based off of those subcategories too. So it takes a little bit of time to set up that market, but once you have it set up, you can always go in with filter presets and get an understanding for how your market is moving, not only from a year over your comparison standpoint, or a month over month or week over week. You can also just look at it from a competitor level, check out your market share, check out how your other competitors are doing year over year the historical comparison of your products versus their products, whether it be at a brand level or at a product level. You can also dive deep into your keywords, into their keywords, check out what strategies they're using and then how they're rising and falling in terms of a keyword heat map. And so it's really nice being able to not only set up the market as you want, you can go in at the.
Shivali Patel:
I've heard so many you know six, seven, eight, nine figure sellers talk about how important it is for them to be able to see their category or subcategory just at that level, and we're actually coming out with that. Now is before you could go in and get granular, do it as a filter preset. Now you can actually create the market based off of that. So that's something exciting that you guys can look forward to, and if you are on the diamond plan, I believe you have access to a market. So I highly encourage you to go in and make use of that single market you have. Okay, cool.
Bradley Sutton:
So I always forget about that. You know, like I even said right now, market tracker 360 is like, mainly on our supercharged plan, but if you're a diamond, you can actually, you know, go ahead and get one started. So, even if you're not a eight figure seller yet, go ahead and, you know, take advantage of that free one If you've got a diamond account, all right. So now we're at the end of this episode. Do you have our, our 60 second tip or 60 second strategy of the day you can share with the audience?
Shivali Patel:
I think my 60 second tip is going to be be proactive because, first of all, we are very close to new years and we talked a lot about KDP today, but you can absolutely tap into that market now because there are going to be so many people that are out there looking for goal setting things, for habit planners, and it's a really easy way for you to start with a no content to low content book. Maybe you don't need to do the whole ChatGPT thing just now. You can go in create something inside of Canva that is maybe template base, that you can go in, switch out the formatting, the colors and try to start working with the marketing side of things to get a feel for what it would be like if you posted a medium to high content book inside of KDP. So you can start really, really easy with low efforts and then also be proactive in terms of maybe you want to go out, maybe you want to check out some trade shows. You want to find a really good product for your FBA business. I know we didn't fully talk about product research for a FBA business, while I might have shared a little bit about my mindset about finding my latest product that I'm going to be selling. You absolutely can go in into trade shows, into stores even, and start thinking outside of box. What value could you bring to that niche with that? I hope you implement and you don't just listen to the podcast.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. All right Again. You're no stranger to the podcast. You'll be hosting some upcoming episodes of Weekly Buzz. And then also, you were definitely instrumental and part of our relaunch of Project X and you were handling one of these products that was actually sourced in India and so definitely have you back soon to talk with you and Meghla, who helped out with that project, to kind of see how it was. We've never had a Project X product sourced from India, so that one is going to be launched soon. So as soon as that launches we'll definitely have you back. But thank you for sharing your knowledge and we'll be seeing you soon.
Shivali Patel:
Sounds good. Thank you so much.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. How Amazon is using AI to ensure authentic customer reviews https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/policy/how-amazon-is-using-ai-to-ensure-authentic-customer-reviews Temu, Shein far lag Amazon as online holiday shopping ramps up https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/temu-shein-far-lag-amazon-online-holiday-shopping-ramps-up-2023-11-22/ Amazon to Launch Live Shopping Deals During Black Friday Football Game on Prime Video https://variety.com/2023/shopping/news/amazon-black-friday-football-game-prime-deals-1235805778/ Hyundai to Sell Vehicles on Amazon Starting in 2024 https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a45896102/hyundai-amazon-car-sales-2024/ Stay tuned as we discuss the latest new features from Helium 10 and share some valuable newsletters to keep you in the loop. Later on, we share some game-changing strategies with Mina Elias for auditing your Amazon PPC campaigns. You'll learn how to manage campaigns effectively and monitor and improve campaign performance. Join us for this exciting episode!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 01:02 - AI Review Police
- 03:20 - Temu, Shein Lagging
- 04:53 - Black Friday Football
- 06:45 - Amazon Posts Videos
- 08:15 - Hyundai Buy Box
- 10:00 - Billion Dollar Seller Newsletter
- 11:00 - Commerce Accelerated
- 11:35 - Weekly Buzz
- 12:19 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
- 16:20 - ProTraining Tip: How To Audit Your PPC Campaigns with Mina Elias
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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon is employing AI to police fraudulent reviews. Timo and Sheen are lagging in holiday sales. This week is the first ever Amazon Black Friday football game. You soon can have videos for Amazon Post. These and much more stories on today's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the goings on as far as news goes in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We give you all the latest new Helium 10 features that have been released this week and we give you training tips the week that will give you serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. All right, today is Thursday. Yes, I'm recording this on Thursday. Yes, it's an American holiday, but we at the weekly buzz do not take any time off, guys. We want to make sure you guys know what's going on out there, so let's go ahead and hop right into the news.
Bradley Sutton:
The first article of the day is actually a was a press release by Amazon, and it's entitled how Amazon is Using AI to Ensure Authentic Customer Reviews. All right, you know a lot of us worry, sometimes complaining about, you know, a lot of competitors doing some black hat strategies in reviews, right, and so this article goes in to talk about how advanced AI helps publish authentic reviews and weed out the fake ones. You know it mentions how the vast majority of reviews pass this Amazon bar of authenticity and they get posted right away, but that they're using AI to kind of look or try and detect if there's potential review abuse and if that happens, they either delete the review, they take action against the reviewer A lot of interesting things this article talks about. Now, the thing that almost kind of like worried me was that I still see, in 2023, a lot of obviously fraudulent reviews. You know where it's reviews that have to do with, you know products that you know are not even part of. You know the listing and a whole bunch of other things. This article was talking about how, in 2022, amazon observed and blocked more than 200 million fake reviews. So it's like that's kind of crazy if you think about it. Like that's last year and this year I'm still seeing reviews like man. That's a lot of reviews and a lot of you know, fake reviews and bad reviews. So it's funny because you know, we've been talking about that FTC lawsuit and I I've always mentioned how there is like so many other things I think that Amazon sellers are worried about. Uh, as far as Amazon goes, that the things that that FTC thing is and I would say the like, the fake reviews is one of them where all of a sudden, some new competitor comes in and within like three days, there's like a thousand reviews or or all of us, and they, they merge a whole bunch of listings and or resurrect some dead listing, those reviews for a phone case, but you know it's really for a coffin shelf or something. I mean, these are the things that, uh, you know I think a lot of Amazon sellers hope that you know Amazon would crack down more on. Hey, this article might be a move in the right direction If it's utilizing more advanced AI. Obviously, ai in 2023 and 2024 is not what it was in 2022. So maybe there is uh kind of like light at the end of this tunnel.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is from Reuters and it's entitled T moon Shane lag far behind as online holiday shopping uh ramps up. So you know, like I've been talking about this cause it comes up in the news a lot, how you know they're making a lot of waves, so many people are going to their websites and stuff. But I'm not. I never really was worried, uh, about you know, t moon she like biting into Amazon sales. Even Amazon's not worried. We talked about in the weekly buzz before how Amazon is not even doing price matching on these websites Cause it doesn't even really consider it like on the same level. Now, uh, similar web in this article said that hey, nine out of 10 visitors to T moon and sheen and when I say a lot, you know visitors there's millions of uh, uh visitors coming this holiday season. This article says nine out of 10 are window shoppers, not buyers. All right, sheen's website drew 28.6 million unique visitors in October, which is up from a year before, but visits that resulted in actual transactions, you know, a visit to the website that ended up in a sale went down to 4.1%. How does Amazon compare? 56% of Amazon's 268 million monthly visits in October resulted in sale. So, again, like I don't think Amazon is is scared or we as Amazon sellers need to worry about all this traffic that's going to, like T moon and sheen, people are not really buying on there right now. You know things could, of course, change, but as of now you can. You could see that. You know, buyer intent is really lacking on those other websites.
Bradley Sutton:
Uh, speaking of Amazon, uh, this next article is from Variety. The title is Amazon to launch live shopping deals during black Friday football game on prime video. All right, so the very first ever black Friday football game is happening. Usually, you know, thursday, thanksgiving, Thursday, football is kind of a big thing. Now, the first ever Amazon black Friday game and it's going to be broadcast on Amazon and says deals are going to go live during pre game, half time and post game sales. All right, and there will also be one big limited time deal per quarter.
Bradley Sutton:
Now there's rumors about what these might be. You know some say it's like. You know, might be some big uh from beats by Dre and Lego and different things. Now you might think, well, you know that it doesn't. That's not me, you know I don't have my deals on there. But again, we've been talking about kind of like a move by Amazon to start having more deals with their prime video and their video assets, and even though this might not have regular third party sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
You know we're not going to afford uh, you know, a spot in this once a year. You know, you know football game. But imagine, you know if millions of people are watching football and you know a certain percentage of them are going to go to buy these beats by Dre, or these legals or these other things. Now, all of a sudden guess what? It's a you know, commercial time, or it's a break, it's halftime, they're on the Amazon app and they're buying something else, but now that they might go ahead and browse other other things, you know. So this is good for for Amazon sellers. Even though you might not be taking advantage of this exact kind of advertising, you are advantaged by it because Amazon is sending all of this new traffic directly to Amazon and hopefully you know that they can find their way to one of your listings if they start browsing, you know, while they're waiting for the second half to start, or something like that.
Bradley Sutton:
So, interesting, interesting things, how you know, the world of advertising for, for Amazon and the world of sports and entertainment is coming a little bit more together. Next, one article is actually just from you know, from my buddy, jeff Cohen's LinkedIn. I've been seeing this. You know multiple people post about this. I don't have access to this in my account but I wanted to, you know, show Jeff's post here because he was the first one that I saw talk about it. But on LinkedIn he says that Amazon post is going to soon support video. So Amazon post, you know, hopefully you guys are utilizing that. We've talked about how you can use the Amazon AI and the helium 10. I had to create images and captions completely automatically with Amazon or for for Amazon posts, but soon you're now going to be able to upload video. You know I personally have been seeing Amazon posts come up more in search results than in the past. Perhaps you've seen that before. So imagine if now in the search results you can see Amazon posts that have video. All right, so it's going to be pretty cool. Jeff talks about here in his his LinkedIn posts that he says that, hey, shoppers who interact with a post end up performing 45% more branded searches, and brands with 10 plus post have, on average, compared to brands with fewer than 10 posts, two and a half more time store visits and almost four times more followers. And so you know, the thought being that, hey, that's just with static images. How much more could, potentially, having video now increase your branded search and some of your traffic? So if you don't have it in your Amazon post section yet, you know, like me, it's probably going to come in the next few days for you. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is actually from car and driver First time we're quoting car and driver here in the weekly buzz and it's entitled Hyundai to sell vehicles on Amazon starting in 2024. All right, says looking for a 2024 Hyundai, look no further than your Amazon Prime account. Now, again, does this affect third party sellers? You know, maybe, maybe not. I just thought this was an interesting kind of like article here, because that's just kind of crazy If you think about where things are going now. Basically, this article is saying that, hey, you're going to be able to like, pick your color and everything. You're going to use the buy box. There's going to be different dealers that maybe have different offerings. Different dealerships are now playing the game of fighting for the buy box like arbitrage sellers. There's no, there's no haggling here, and I just think it's like kind of like fascinating where the world of online commerce is going to. You know, buying brand new cars online is not new, but Amazon obviously is going to be the biggest website ever to sell new cars. And who knows, you know, maybe I'm just waiting for the first dealership to make a mistake on their coupon and they don't realize there's some coupons or deal of the day stacking and I'll be able to get a new Hyundai Santa Fe for like 50% off or something. My very first ever new car was a 1999 Hyundai Elantra. So yeah, I kind of only drive like he is and things now, but I still love my Korean car. So, who knows, maybe I might be one of the ones to be one of the first ones to buy a brand new car on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, that's it for the news articles this week. Actually, not that much going on Now. Before we get into the helium 10 new feature alerts, I wanted to call attention to a couple of newsletters. I've never really been one to promote newsletters, never even had my own until a couple of weeks ago, but there's only three newsletters that I subscribe to, or that I actually read out of all the ones out there, and so the first one is actually the billion dollar sellers newsletter. All right, so that's made by, obviously, kevin King from the helium 10 elite program and the AMPM podcast. It's very, very valuable. All right, there's not BS in here. There's actionable strategies. There's not a whole bunch of fluff. A lot of humor in there, though. So if you guys want to get strategies that you can use right away and some no BS newsletter, go ahead and go to h10.me forward slash BDSN. H10.me forward slash BDSN. Completely free to subscribe to that newsletter and a lot of great stuff. That's the first kind of like outside newsletter I ever read in my life, just because it's the only one worth it to me.
Bradley Sutton:
Another one that I've been subscribing to for a little while is made by Pacvue’s own Melissa. All right, so this is on LinkedIn and this is called commerce accelerated. So if you guys want to subscribe to it, go to h10.m/melissa. Another great newsletter. A lot of advertising in there and a lot of, you know, high level strategies as well as stuff that affects, you know, third party sellers. The last article was a recap on Amazon unboxed that Melissa was at, and so I highly recommend subscribing to that newsletter. And then, of course, you know shameless plug. The last newsletter is the new weekly buzz newsletter that I'm doing. It's not just like a transcript of this weekly buzz. I go break down all of the news articles and have some video on there and some other. You know strategies as well. So if you guys want to subscribe on LinkedIn to my Helium 10 weekly buzz newsletter, just go to h10.me/newsletter. h10.me/newsletter. All right, now let's get into the Helium 10 new feature alerts. Every week, we are launching new tools, new features, new functionality. A lot of it comes from you, the users. So what do we have cooking for this week? Even though it's a short week, we still launching things. The very first one I want to talk about is for Cerebro and Magna, and these are custom filters.
Bradley Sutton:
This has been asked for by a lot of you out there and you know you guys all have maybe your own strategy of how you run Cerebro as part of your process, like right, like maybe. Hey, I'm going to analyze, you know, 15 different niches and for everyone, one of my criteria. For example, what do I have? Here I'm showing a search volume of a minimum 400. And then a minimum number of one competitor. Maximum two are ranking between one and 20. And these keywords have a title density of three, like, like. There's like six filters that I'm using right there. Now, if you're having to do this search 10 times a day, right, because you know you're just doing some bulk research, it's probably a hassle for you to have to, one by one, re-enter all of these filters in. So now what we have is, once you enter some filters, at the very bottom of Cerebro, you are going to want to go ahead and hit this button called save as filter preset, right. And once you hit that button, another window will come up allowing you to go ahead and put a preset name and you can say, hey, this is my, you know, keyword research version one or whatever. And now this is going to show up as a one click filter at the very top of Cerebro, so that when you get into Cerebro, you enter the ASINs, you can just hit one button and it automatically populates your filters. Same thing for magnet. All right, let's say I have this process where I'm like hey, I out of all these keywords from what came out from, you know, these thousands of keywords that came out inside of my magnet search show me everything that has 500 search volume, that's at least three words, and that there's only 300 competing products for this keyword. Right, again, it might take a little bit of time to enter all these filters in. Once you do that again, just hit the save as filter preset and what's going to happen is you can just name this filter and then now, when you enter in, go into a magnet search, you are going to be able to just, you know, hit that button and your exact filters are going to come out.
Bradley Sutton:
The next and the only other update for the days is for those of you who are on the Helium 10 supercharge. You know, plan our supercharge plans for like eight, nine figure sellers. You guys have some pretty crazy graphs that you're going to be able to do, all right. So on your insights dashboard you're at the very bottom there's a, there's a button that says add a chart, right, you know everybody else has access to this too, but you got supercharged members have access to kind of like a crazy, crazy next level charting system. All right, and this is just the beginning.
Bradley Sutton:
So it takes you to a new page and then basically, what you're going to want to see is you can choose any two metrics that you want to compare, like, hey, I'm going to compare my ad click through rate with my unit soul. I want to compare RoAS, ACoS, ad spend and net profit. You know, all in the same chart. I want you know the dates to be preset. At this. I mean, like, pretty much, you're going to be able to now take anything that is in your, you know, helium 10 account, which comes from seller central, obviously all of your data, and then start putting it on graphs and tables and compare different things that you normally wouldn't be able to compare, because a lot of again, why do we have this? A lot of people were saying, hey, I love the data that's in Helium 10, but I end up having to, like, download it into Excel files and make my own power points and reports. No longer you can just compare anything you want, download the graphs and, and you know, make tables, et cetera. So that is for supercharged members. All right, that's it for the Helium 10 new feature alerts for this week.
Bradley Sutton:
Last up, we have our training tip of the week and it's actually a PPC training tip, and it's with a guest speaker, mina Elias, who you guys all know and love, and this one is going to be about how you can audit your account. Like, maybe you haven't been paying enough attention to your PPC, well, how can you go in there and give it an audit, mina, let us know how. Mina question that we've gotten from our audience is hey, you know, I've been running PPC for a while. I'm running it on my own for now. How can I run like an audit to know if I'm doing well or not? What are the things that you look at so that somebody can really understand like, hey, I'm doing excellent. Or you know what? I need some improvement here and there?
Mina:
Yeah, so I'll walk you through our audits and basically how I do an audit like step by step. Step number one I'm looking at portfolios. Are you organizing your products into portfolios, you know? Do you have like multiple child ASINs that are that have different campaigns, or are you lumping all of your, your child ASINs into the same campaigns? So then I would create the portfolios.
Mina:
Next is my campaign naming convention. So are the campaigns named? Easily? For us it's like product code space dash space. You know the type of the ad, like close match, loose match, complements or substitutes, if it's auto, broad phraser, exact, product targeting, expanded ASIN, so what's the type of the ad? Space dash space. And then it's like the purpose of the ad. So if it has a purpose like ranking or you know branded, something like that, if it's like brand, brand name, and then you know space dash space, the source of the keywords, and so that's like if it came from helium 10 or if it came from the search term report or if it's like a main keyword or something like that. And that allows me to sort through campaigns pretty quickly, because whenever I'm looking at like show me all of the performance of my, like exact, you know keyword campaigns, then I can just type in exact in the search and it pops up.
Mina:
Next I'm looking at the budgets of the campaigns, especially for campaigns that are either running out of budget or have a good row as. So if your campaign has a low a cost or a good row as, there's no reason that the budget should be low, even if you feel like, okay, my budget's $50 and I'm only spending $25 a day, it doesn't matter. Because what I've noticed is if I go from 50 to 250, I'll go from spending $25 a day to $80 a day, and if the ACOS is good, then you're just going to make more sales with the good ACOS it's definitely worth trying. And then if you're running out of budget, obviously that's also red flag. You should always control your spending based on a bid level. So lower the bids to spend less, as opposed to capping, you know, your spend on a budget level, because that I've seen just kind of effects performance negatively.
Mina:
Then from there I'm going to click into the campaigns and I'm going to make sure that each of them have only one ad group. What I've noticed is multiple ad groups cause like, let's say, you have $100 budget, it could be $80 to one ad group and 20 to another ad group Again doesn't make any sense. I don't know why it happens, but it's something I want to avoid, because it could be that the $20 ad group is the one that has the better row, as but Amazon is. Primary objective is to make you sell more. And then, once I'm in the ad groups, the next thing I'm looking for is how many keywords do you have in there? If you have, you know, more than five keywords, I start suspecting that you might have keywords at the bottom not getting enough like budget. So I'll just sort by sales or sort by spend and then I'll see. Okay, you know keyword number one, two, three, four, five, they all have sales. But like six, seven, eight, they have like one sale in the last 30 to 60 days. And then keyword number nine onwards, they don't have any sales. So those keywords are all areas of opportunity. If I pause those keywords in that campaign, move them to, you know, create a new campaign with those keywords, give them another, another chance. With a good budget they could end up spending a lot more money on making sales. So that's the next thing that I look for.
Mina:
Then I go into the placements tab. So, you know, do I find any placements like top of search or product pages where the ROAS and the click through rates are significantly better than they are in the rest of search? So, for example, if I look at, you know, in a campaign, I look at the placement tab and I see the top of search has like a 8% click through rate instead of like a 0.4 in rest of search and it has like a 7x ROAS instead of a 3x ROAS. What I'm going to do is I'm going to increase the bid by placement, you know, by 25% or something like that, just a small number, to what I'm telling Amazon is, if my bid is a dollar, I'm allowing you to spend up to a dollar and 25 cents. If it means that I'm going to show up on the top of page one, because, you know, I've seen, based on the data I'm converting, well, there, then I'm going to go into the targeting tab or the bulk sheet. You know, if you don't know how to use the bulk sheet, just stick to the targeting tab.
Mina:
In the targeting tab I'm sorting for keywords that are not profitable, so only exact and product targeting. I'm going to, you know, just do either two types of keywords. One where I'm like orders equals zero and spend is greater than a certain number. So orders equals zero means it didn't make me any sales and I spent money. Let's say I spent more than $15, or like half of my product costs, with no sales.
Mina:
I'll tell you how to handle them in a second. So those ones, I'm going to lower the bids or eat or pause them. You know, if it's spent $30 in the last 90 days and it didn't make any sales, just at this point it's not going to make any more sales. It could in the future, once you conversion rate significantly higher, but not right now.
Mina:
So, and then the other thing is okay, I'm going to just sort by a cost. So show me everything that's greater than 75% echoes and again all of those. And warning guys, you know, for anything that's greater than 75% echoes, do not touch things that have a really good, like a really high number of sales, because the ACoS could be bad but in reality it could be driving a lot of sales, even on the organic side that it's just not being attributed. So again, ACoS is high. I'm going to lower the bids and then vice versa, I'm going to sort by anything that has like a row as greater than, let's say, 5x, for example, and then I'm going to increase the bids of all of those keywords, meaning I'm willing to show up higher in the search. And you can always do like a cross check with you know cerebral and see where you're ranking organically for those keywords. If you're ranking organically and sponsored high, you don't need to increase the bids, but if your organic and sponsored rank is low and your row as is good, it's worth trying to increase the bids, get more visibility, more clicks and more sales. Then I'm going to go into the search term report. That's the final piece. And in the search term report, again two directions.
Mina:
Number one keywords that are not working. This is for auto broad phrase and expanded ASIN. The reason is for a broad keyword, it could be 30 different keywords that are being triggered in the search terms that are, you know, resulting in bad performance. So maybe five of them, 10 of them are bad, like low row as or spending, no sales, and then five or 10 are very good. So you want to keep the good ones and then negative the bad ones. So, again, a filter sales equals zero, spend greater than $15.
Mina:
Take all of those keywords and go into the campaigns and add them as negatives, negative, exact, and then you know a cost greater than 85%. Again, be careful for keywords that are generating a lot of sales. But I can take all of those keywords, add them as negatives in the campaigns and then vice versa, I can identify any keywords with like greater than five RoAS. Take all of those keywords, find which match types they're not currently being targeted in. So maybe they're in broad, they got discovered in broad but I'm not actually targeting them in an exact campaign or a broad campaign or whatever. And then I take those keywords and start launching them in new campaigns so I can get more visibility on those keywords. But that's essentially what I'm doing, that, step by step, awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, all right guys. So if you want to get more tips from Mina about how to you know run PPC, make sure to check out his company and hubhealium10.com. You can look for Trivium. Or if you have a platinum account or higher, make sure to check out PPC Academy. It's in your learning hub on your Helium 10 dashboard. He's got tons of great modules there. Mina, thanks a lot for joining us.
Mina:
Thanks for having me All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Thanks very much, Mina, for that, and thanks to all of you guys for tuning in. Hope you guys enjoyed this edition and we'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.
Are you ready to skyrocket your knowledge of Amazon PPC? In this TACoS Tuesday episode, prepare to be amazed as we bring you the secrets of the trade from none other than Elizabeth Greene, the co-founder of Amazon ads agency Junglr. Dive into the world of data analytics and learn why understanding the numbers behind the numbers is crucial. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned seller, we've got insights that are bound to give your Amazon PPC game a boost.
We talk about the core strategies for launching new products, from using supplementary keywords to strategic ad placements. We uncover the importance of context when branching into new markets and how to leverage different keyword match types to target specific search terms. Learn about optimizing strategies for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and how to manage your budget effectively during these peak seasons.
Lastly, ignite your understanding of advertising for branded products on Amazon. We debate the significance of tracking the share of search and using Search Query Performance reports, and reveal our strategies for advertising for products with only a few relevant keywords. Tune in and take away valuable strategies and insights that will elevate your Amazon advertising game to new heights.
In episode 511 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Elizabeth talk about:
- 00:00 - It's Time For Another TACoS Tuesday Episode!
- 05:34 - Evaluating and Auditing PPC Strategy
- 08:10 - Analyzing Ad Spend Efficiency and Impact
- 12:34 - Advertising Strategy and Keyword Targeting
- 17:45 - Advertising Strategy for New Product Launch
- 25:32 - Keyword Research Using Helium 10
- 30:51 - Using Keywords and Sales Volume
- 36:31 - Optimizing Bids for Better Ad Performance
- 42:22 - Control Ad Spend, Gain Campaign Impressions
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Shivali Patel:
Today, on TACoS Tuesday, we answer all of your PPC questions live, as well as discuss what you could be doing in terms of launching and auditing your PPC campaigns during the Q4 season.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Want to enter in an Amazon keyword and then within seconds, get up to thousands of potentially related keywords that you could research. Then you need Magnet by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/magnet. Magnet works in most Amazon marketplaces, including USA, Mexico, Australia, Germany, UK, India and much more.
Shivali Patel:
All right, hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Series Dollars podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday presentation, where we talk anything and everything Amazon ads. So today we have a special guest with us, and that is Elizabeth Greene, who is the co-founder of an Amazon ads agency called Junglr. So with that, let's go ahead and bring her up. Hi, Elizabeth, how are you? I'm doing well, how are you?
Elizabeth:
Very good.
Shivali Patel:
So, nice to have you on. Thank you for joining us.
Elizabeth:
Yeah, thanks for having me. These are always, always fun.
Shivali Patel:
And what an exciting time to be talking about Amazon ads to a fat. It's cute for you. Oh my goodness, you must be slammed.
Elizabeth:
Life is a little bit crazy right now, but you know it comes with the territory.
Shivali Patel:
So it does. It is peak season I see we have someone coming, so it's a very exciting time to be in business and I'm looking forward to reading your questions and hopefully having Elizabeth answer them Now. The first question here says what can you suggest for a beginner like me, who is just starting out, and what and where can I learn to grow as much as possible?
Elizabeth:
I would actually say there's two skills that one, in the beginning, none of us have, and they are skills and they can be learned, even though they're considered more quote, soft skills. Data analytics made it not as much.
Shivali Patel:
My two things are going to be.
Elizabeth:
Data analytics and communication skills Community Asian sales are, you're going to find, are quite important when it comes to management of accounts management of accounts that are not your own. So if you are, even if you're a brand manager in a company or, you know, obviously, at an agency seller and a sourcing person, okay then I'm going to go with data analytics. Data analytics are going to be your friend. The things that I've kind of discovered have been, like you know, sort of mind blowing. For me are the numbers behind, the numbers Meaning. So when you're trying to evaluate ACoS, right, a lot of people are like, oh, it costs one up, it costs with down. Great, I know this, I can look at the account. What the heck am I going to do about it? Data analytics really good data analytics not only tell you the what, but the why and then the what next. So you're, if you can get really really good at the why and the what next, that's going to really set you apart and the way that I kind of have come to it. This is my own personal journey. Maybe there's other people who are way smarter than me, have way better journeys, but for me it has been, again understanding the numbers behind the numbers to have, for example, right, you start in a little bit of a way, it's kind of like the matrix.
Elizabeth:
So when you're breaking down, say ACoS, right, you go, okay, ACoS one up, big, else one down. Why right, what the heck happened? You're like, oh, wait, I can calculate ACoS by ad spend divided by ad sales. Okay, so it's either that ad spend went up and sales remain consistent or went down, or ad sales went down and spend remain consistent. She like, oh, okay, there's those two variables. Okay, now I can say, okay, ad spend increased. And then I can go, okay, ad spend increased. Great, I know that why. And then you're like, okay, so I can calculate my ad spend by my cost per click, by my number of clicks.
Elizabeth:
So either my cost per click went up or the number of clicks happening in my account went up. And then you can look at those two variables and go, oh, okay, it's the number of clicks. Why? Oh, I just launched a whole bunch of new stuff. Okay, that's why. Or my cost per click went up exponentially. Why? Maybe you know, it's just a natural market change thing. Talking about prime time, peak season, now you're probably going to see cost per clicks going up. It's a market thing. Versus other times you might have aggressively increased a whole bunch of bits in your account and so then you go check back. So data analytics that's the way I view it. I am not classically trained on data analytics, I just have looked at it for over five years now and tried to figure out the what the heck is going on a question and the what to do about it questions, and so those. That's my way of sort of. I've learned to sort of peer into the matrix. So if you can get really good at understanding not just what the data is but what it's telling you, that's really going to get you to the next level.
Shivali Patel:
Definitely, and I think a lot of people have very different strategies. I think Elizabeth's strategy, you know, is definitely one you should take into consideration. But also, the best way to learn is going to be trial and error and until you're really sifting through your own data, I think it's going to be hard to you know gauge sort of what's happening. I think a lot of things in business are just as they come. Now I want to kind of take the other side of that and go into, let's say, somebody's not a beginner, right, somebody's been selling for a while. They're more established. What do you recommend to somebody who might be evaluating or trying to audit their own PPC strategy?
Elizabeth:
Next level is going to be evaluating things on a per product level. And let me clarify when I say per product, I mean per listing. The reason why is the data gets kind of funky when you pull it down to a skew level. You definitely can, but there's some nuances that you really want to be aware of that can kind of lead you in the wrong direction if you're looking at a per skewer, per child days and level. But if you can start looking at your ad strategy, your sales growth, everything through the lens of listings, that's really going to take you to the next level.
Shivali Patel:
So when you see listings, are you talking about maybe like the conversion metrics? Are you looking at the keywords that you're using, sort of what is like the underlying factors? I guess all the above.
Elizabeth:
Honestly, but to make sense of it all. Because, to your point, like force for the trees, if you look at like everything, then do you walk away being like I have no idea what in the world I'm supposed to focus on? So the way that we've begun looking at it and the reason why we started looking at it like this is because we managed several clothing accounts. Talk about complexity, talk about force for the trees. You're like where in the world do I start? And you want to make impact on these accounts. Right, you can't just like all right, I did my bit, adjustments and call it good. Like you really want to get at our hands dirty and like really start improving the accounts. But you're like where in the world do I focus? So what we've started doing is percentage of total have been a little bit of a game changer. They're not, it's not the newest thing on the block. A lot of people use this percentage of total, but the two things that we look at is the percentage of total sales of each. Again, we're talking about a listing level. Again, reason clothing you have up to hundreds of different SKUs on a per listing level. Like how the heck do you make sense of it. So how do we make sense of it is rolling it up to the parent listing level and then looking at the percentage of total ad spend, again on a per listing.
Elizabeth:
So this gives you a lot of clarity into what products are driving the most sales for the brand. And then, what products are we spending, are we investing the most ad spend on? And when you look at it this way, it's very common to have these things happen in the account. If you haven't been paying attention to them, you oftentimes will see like oh wow, this product's driving 2% of my total sales volume and I'm spending 10% of my total ad spend here. Like that's probably a discrepancy. Maybe I should go and adjust those ads. So that gives you a lot of clarity. And then to court of gauge because again we're an ad agency, so ads are the thing that we focus on the most to help and drive improvements for the brands is we will look at the impact of the total spend on that per product. So again, percentage of total ad spend, and then we'll look at what we call like quote ad spend efficiencies, meaning ACoS, Total ACoS, ad sale percentage, also the delta between your ad conversion rate and your total conversion rate. Our unit session percentage is actually really helpful gauge. And so we're like, okay, we're investing most of our dollars here. How is our efficiency on that large investment?
Elizabeth:
And then you can sort of pinpoint like, oh, wow, I'm investing most of my ad spend into this product, to the point of like 5% of total brand sales, 13% of total ad spend investments. And wow, the ad spend investments are really unprofitable. Now, if you're in a launch phase, there might I mean there's context that you need to add to the numbers, to the point of like telling the story with data. And if you're managing the brand, you probably know the context. But at least it goes as okay. So here's two products we should dig into more. Here's two products we need to probably invest more of our ad spend on. And it really starts to clarify things when you really kind of understand how to see the picture in that way.
Shivali Patel:
To kind of follow up on that how do you really end up deciding which keywords to go after, as well as, maybe, how to really structure them into campaigns in accordance with your budget, because I know that's different for everyone?
Elizabeth:
Yes, it definitely is. We will always focus on relevancy first in the beginning. Now there are certain times if you're doing like a brand awareness play or you're like, wow, I've really targeted my market and I need to branch out, like what's the next hill? Absolutely go after categories, you know like, go after those brand awareness plays. But if you're in the beginning and you're in a launch, the nuance of Amazon advertising is you're not building, you don't build the audience. Amazon has built the audience for you.
Elizabeth:
All we're looking to do is use specific keywords or search terms to get in front of the audience that is already existing and that's where relevancy comes in. So you're saying where is my specific shopper? What are they using to search for products like mine? And I need to make sure I'm showing up there. So we're always going to prioritize that. That typically is going to get you better conversions, you know, better clicks, more interactions with your brand and which leads to more sales. And then also on the flip side, and if you're doing this on launch, it is a really good product sort of evaluation, because if you're showing up exactly in front of your target shoppers and your click rate is terrible and your conversion rate is terrible and like nobody's buying, there's probably a signal that maybe there's things to adjust with the listing or other factors that you should look into.
Shivali Patel:
Do you ever go into, like branch into, I guess, supplementary keywords where maybe it's not exactly for the product but it's maybe like a related product, and where do you really place those sort of ads?
Elizabeth:
Yeah, so when we'll do it is really dependent on the overall performance and the ads spend or profit goals, right? I mean, it seems so stupid, simple, but if you are advertising more, you're going to be spending more, and if you're struggling to bring down Total ACoS or ACoS again, ad spend divided by ad sales, the one thing you can control with ads is ad spend. So in those cases when we're looking to bring down Total ACoS, we're typically looking at pulling back on ad spend. So if a product or brand is in that phase, I'm not going to be like let's launch all these broad things and we're not quite sure how they're going to convert, right? So context is really key here, but when it comes to branching out, it really is dependent.
Elizabeth:
You will find certain products on launch where, like, for some reason, it's really difficult to convert on the highly relevant terms but, like adjacent markets or, to your point, like somewhat related keywords or related products, actually work really well. So we're always going to prioritize what's working. So if we're like finding all of these search terms that are popping up through, like, say, broad match or autos or something, wow, we weren't aware that this is actually a really great market for us. But it's very obvious, looking at the data, that's something that we should, that's a direction we should go in. Then obviously we'll push towards that direction. But depending on if we're going to like decide to branch out on our own, it probably is highly dependent on the ad spend and then also sort of the phase of the product, meaning like how we kind of conquered everything and what's our next play.
Shivali Patel:
And in terms of when you are launching, yes, we're going for the most relevant keywords, right, that are where you can find your target audience. But what about in terms of exact match, like yes, are you going directly into exact match and auto and broad all at the same time? Are you just kind of doing exact first and then branching into auto?
Elizabeth:
Yeah, so we do like exact first. I'm still a huge fan of like all the above, exact phrase and broad. The one thing that we have found is like within your exact match, you can just be more specific on what search pages you're spending your ad dollars on. So if you, especially if you have limited budgets in the beginning and you're like, hey, I really want to make sure that I hyper target these keywords, exact match makes a lot of sense. Now, if you're talking about you like branching out, we're still going to prioritize putting a higher bids on our exact match keyword. So we're still going to try and have most of.
Elizabeth:
Let me say this if you're going to be aggressively spending on a specific search page, you're like I've identified this keyword, this is my ranking keyword, I'm going to put a lot of budget behind it. Exact match all the way. Now I don't want anyone to say that clip and be like wow, she hates broad and freight. Like, no, I love all the above. Like we run autos, run multiple autos, category targeting, like all the above, do it. But if you're trying to get really aggressive with something, it's just it's the nature of how the match type works more than like it's quote best, because they don't really think it is.
Shivali Patel:
Now I do see that we have some new questions, so let me go ahead and pop them up. We have can you give a refresher on how people can do modifiers, since nowadays exact sometimes performs as phrase match and phrase sometimes is like broad. So if someone wants to make sure that an exact is that exact two word phrase is adding plus in the middle self that.
Elizabeth:
Yes, it does, but caveat, it only officially does in sponsor brand ads. If you look at the document, I mean I gotta go check it because they're like they keep updating the documentation on the slide and like not notifying us. But from my understanding and from the reps I've talked to, and also the search storm reports, I've seen modified broad match I don't believe a hundred percent works all the time in sponsored product ads, which is super annoying. So for those of you listening who are unaware of what a modified broad match is or modified search terms, modified broad match is a thing in sponsor brand ads. So the way that broad match keywords work in sponsored brand ads and they have sense care that over to sponsor product ads is that it cannot only target. You know we do classic broad match, right, you can put keywords in the middle, you can swap stuff around. But like if I had the keyword running shoe, right, both the word running and the word shoe must be present in the search term for your kind of traditional sponsor product broad match. It's not the case anymore.
Elizabeth:
You can target what's called related keywords. So for example, one would be like sneaker, right, it's kind of related to running shoe. And if you wanna say. I stuck a screenshot out on LinkedIn not that long ago and I was like, how is this relevant? Like one of them, it was like targeting like a bread knife and the search term that it triggered was like ballerina farm, go figure, I don't know, but like, so you can get like this really weird, funky stuff. So what we do to kind of combat that one, just keep up on your negatives these days, like, keep a sharp eye on your search and reports and add those negatives.
Elizabeth:
But the one thing that you can do is just sort of like to Bradley's point make each those individual words have to show up is if, in front of each of those words that you want to make sure are present in the search term, you can add a little plus symbol. So in the example of like, say running shoes, I would say plus shoes, plus what is our running whatever? Plus running, plus shoes, right, and then that would trigger to the algorithm. Okay, you have to use these things inside of your searches, which again is a factor in sponsored brand ads. If you look at the documentation, they do say that modified broad match is a thing and it's been a thing for a while. I just hasn't been super popular. But I haven't read documentation that they've rolled that over into sponsored product ads. I don't think it's a bad idea to get in the practice of using modified broad match and sponsored product ads though.
Shivali Patel:
Okay, thank you for answering that question. We also have another one that says I'm going to be launching a brand new store for FBA and Shopify for my own manufactured product. What will you suggest that I do for the first few months?
Elizabeth:
Well, I'm gonna assume that the question is saying, with ads because that's my area of expertise like new product launches, there's a lot. So definitely follow @HumanTank because they way more than just add advice to offer you. But as far as the advertising, I would prioritize keyword research for the product launches. That actually would be really helpful when you're trying to vet even the space for your particular products. And then I would again, I would hyper focus on relevancy in the beginning. I would run that in exact match, probably high bids.
Elizabeth:
In the beginning you're looking for two things. You're looking to get eyeballs on your product, ideally those eyeballs conferring to sales that is remain to be seen, based on how appealing your product is to the market and how good your search pages et cetera. But you want to get eyeballs in the product and then you want to use those eyeballs to sort of vet again how much these shoppers like your particular product for purchase. So that's what I do. I would focus on those again for like the first couple weeks is typically what we do, and then you might sort of branch out into phrase match run, auto campaigns et cetera. Now here's a trick is how many keywords you choose in the beginning to launch is actually going to be determined by your budgets. So I have seen so many sellers in the groups like they'll be like oh my gosh, I just launched and launched my ads and I'm spending like $1,000 a day and I can't afford it and I don't know what's going on. Again, it's simple, kind of seems like stupid logic but the more keywords you're advertising on, the more clicks you're gonna get, the more cost per clicks you're gonna pay, the higher ads spent. So you actually want to factor in what you're doing for your launch strategy with your budgets.
Elizabeth:
Like I just got off a client call and we're like all right, we have these new product launches. Yeah, it's a really competitive space. It's like skincare. We're not gonna have reviews in the beginning. You know what? In the beginning we're gonna keep ad budgets really lean and we have a really good brand recognition. We're just gonna leverage brand recognition because we know the conversion rates are gonna be there. It's gonna help us get the initial products. But we also are understanding that if that's the strategy we're running again a little bit more limited, just leveraging brand lower budgets we're not expecting the sales to be exponential in the beginning. So it's like setting expectations and then kind of understanding what makes sense for you at this stage.
Shivali Patel:
Okay, and, keeping that in mind, the review portion that you're mentioning, right, yeah, you end up like, let's say, for example I'm not sure if I'll pronounce it right, but in Sweat's example right, his question when he's launching, do you end up waiting for the reviews to file in before you are running those ads or do you end up just kind of going in? And of course, there's many moving components, yeah, there's a lot of moving parts.
Elizabeth:
It depends on what the brand's wants to do. Typically we will start running stuff out of the gate Again. We just kind of set expectations. The reason why ACoS is so high in the beginning is for two reasons. One, your conversion rate tends to be a little bit lower and then, two, your cost per clicks tend to be a little bit higher because you really are trying to get aggressive to be able to get that visibility on the product and then over time, ideally, conversion rates improve because you get more reviews and then cost per clicks hopefully go down as you optimize. So between those two things, that helps it get better. So we just set expectations with like hey, because conversion rates are low means it takes more clicks to convert, which means ACoS is gonna be a little bit higher and we expect potentially sales not to be still or out of the gate. Sometimes it'll be surprised. Sometimes you launch a product and you're like, wow, this is amazing, this thing just absolutely took off and I hope for all of you listening, that is the case for you and your new products, but it's not always the case. So it's really more setting expectations and then just deciding what makes sense for you.
Shivali Patel:
Why would someone create like a branded campaign If they've already have their standard stuff? Do you maybe want to talk a little bit about branded campaigns?
Elizabeth:
Yeah, there's two kinds of branded campaigns. One is considered branded, or maybe brand defense is what you might call it. One of them is you have a whole bunch of products. Which you might do is you would advertise your own products on your other listings. The goal of that is you'd be like, hey, if somebody is going to click off, they might as well click onto my own product. Again, it's called a defensive strategy because you're plugging people off and refer to it. It's like plugging the ad spots. My competition can't get this ad spot on my listing. The other thing that you might do is if you have any branded searches happening so people searching your brand on Amazon then what you can do is you can again advertise your own products.
Elizabeth:
There's a lot of debate out there. They're like, oh, if I already have people searching for my brand, why in the world would I be spending on it? Because they're going to convert for my brand anyways. Yeah, there's arguments to be made. The things that you can do is you actually track your share of search in using search query performance reports to look at your own branded traffic and be like am I losing out on sales through my branded traffic? That's something you can do if you want to be like, is it worth it for me to run? But the second thing and the one I was referring to when I was talking about that more specific launch that we're doing is if you have great brand recognition meaning there's a lot of people searching for your brand you've already built up a lot of traffic to your current listings and you have a new product that fits very well into that brand.
Elizabeth:
So example I just gave was we have a brand that has a skincare line. Right, they have their launching complimentary products. They have really good repeat purchase rates. What we can do is for people searching their brand, we can make sure that the new products are then advertised and show up high on their branded search, where they might show up lower before if we weren't leveraging ads for that. And then what happens is someone's typing in the brand like oh, wow, there's a new product from this brand. Awesome, and most likely not always, but of course you know you read the data, but most likely you're going to get people purchasing very similar. You know you can use ads to be able to get visibility again on your own products, but you're using your new offering. So that's kind of a way to like. If you have a good brand, share to be like. Hey, I got a new product. I want to try it out using ads.
Shivali Patel:
Got it, and I see Sasha has a question here, and it is what's the best way to research Amazon keywords for low competition products? And I'll go ahead and add as well what do you do in the case if, let's say, there is not necessarily a market, maybe it's a brand new product that doesn't end up having any sort of crossover? You're creating a sub niche.
Elizabeth:
Yes, those are the most difficult. The two most difficult products to advertise for are one to your point of like there really is no relevant traffic for it. Or two, when you only have one keyword that has any search volume and there's like nothing else besides one or two keywords, because every single one of your competitors knows those one or two keywords and there's really not anything else to choose from. So there's not really a way to like play a sophisticated game. You just got to like grin and bear it in those categories, which is like kind of painful sometimes. So reword I mean your keyword research is really going to be exactly the same as for any other product. You're going to be looking at your competitors, seeing what they rank you for. I mean, we use Helium 10, love Helium 10, just did a walkthrough of how we did keyword research using Helium 10. Like it's a really great tool.
Elizabeth:
The one different way that we have of generating your first keyword. We actually generate two keyword less in the beginning. So what we'll do is we'll use, say, like a commonly searched keyword. So a lot of times people will start with like all right, type in a commonly searched keyword and then like, look at the ranked competitors, choose them, you know, choose the relevant ones and then go through that. What we will do is we will take that first you know pretty general keyword that we're pretty sure is relevant to the products, and what we'll do is we'll type that into.
Elizabeth:
I'm going to get them mixed up. I'm going to say it's magnet, it's the keyword research tool, so you type it in and then you look at search, so you sort by search volume and what we'll do is we'll actually go down that first list and find what we call our highest search volume, most relevant keyword. So what you're looking for is the intersection between where you actually have good shop or search, and it is also relevant to your product, because the more hyper relevant you get to the product, typically speaking, not always the lower your search volume is going to be. On those keywords You're like all right, what's my top of the mountain? Because oftentimes people will be like, oh, metal cup, that's a great keyword, yes, but it's not highly relevant keyword. So you're looking for, like women's metal cup for running or something like is there a good search volume there? How can I like niche down a set? And then what we'll do is we'll take that search page for a highly relevant keyword and use that as our springboard to find our top competitors.
Shivali Patel:
So we do also have a question from David where he asks how would you use not sure what that's supposed to say for top competitive keywords when your product have multiple attributes such as gold diamond ring, gold solid hair ring and engagement rings should I run through, bro, on each? I'm assuming that's just supposed to be. How would you search for top competitive keywords? So? Yeah so I would, I would just look for.
Elizabeth:
I would look for whatever is the highest relevancy, highest search volume, one that's going to give it and you're going to have a lot of applicable keywords. So the walkthrough that I did I think it's just yesterday what we did is we were looking at baby blanket, and what we start doing with our final keyword list when we're looking again we're prioritizing relevancy is you will find what we call buckets of keywords, right. So when I was doing baby blanket, it was like girls receiving blanket, receiving blanket for boys, like some like okay, there's a bunch of girl keywords and their bunch of boy keywords and these are actually a little bit related to specific variations. You can start getting really sophisticated with it. But as you do that keyword research and as you're looking for that relevancy, you're probably going to find a lot of these buckets. So what we'll do on launch is we'll like take our group out and be like okay, so to your point, we have a bunch of diamond keywords.
Elizabeth:
Oh wait, I have a bunch of solitary keywords, right. So you can actually group those. I can take all my solitary ones and be like hmm, I wonder if the search term solitaire is. I wonder if people like my product in relation to that search. Okay, so let me take that out. Let me put those in their own campaign. I'll label the campaign like solitary keywords or something and then I would advertise the products there or engagement ranks, right, okay, maybe that's applicable to my products. Let me again pull those out and put them in a subgroup and a campaign. The reason why I like doing this is because then I can just scan campaign manager instead of having to like go in and like, look at a campaign with, like the solitaire keywords, engagement ring keywords, gold, diamond keywords. I can be like, oh, these are sub group in campaigns and then when I'm in campaign manager, I can simply look at how each of those three campaigns are performing and be like oh, wow, it seems like gold, diamond ring keywords actually perform best and you still want to analyze at a keyword level. But that makes it a little bit more scalable to like understand shop or search behavior in relation to your product.
Shivali Patel:
Now I see that David also would like to know about the filter for keyword sales filter, which it is essentially just telling you on average how many sales occur for that particular keyword every single month. So that's really what you're looking at there, but, Elizabeth, maybe you want to expand on whether that's something that you end up looking at when you're doing your keyword research for these different brands that you work with.
Elizabeth:
I don't really Everything honest. The two things that I look at actually probably three things is I would like to look at. We look at numbers to the count of competitors that are ranking again, because we're doing that whole like find, you know, do the first list to find the second keyword, to find the really really super specific products. So if you can find good super specific products, then you can kind of like use their ranking on the keywords. So actually I love that Helium 10 added in that column because it was one that a lot of us were like calculating.
Elizabeth:
When I'm like God, I don't have to do the formula, I just already filter for the list, so it's really awesome. So we'll download that list and then you know, we'll just see what's the highly relevant and the kind of cross check that with search volume you can use. I don't think it's a bad idea to use, you know, kind of like the sales volume, because sometimes what you'll find is that even though there's like a high search volume, if the keyword is sort of like a little bit broader keyword, you might actually not have as much sales volume through those keywords as you would think. So it's not a bad idea to analyze it at all. We just find if we're like again, we're super honed in on that relevancy factor, then we tend to come up with the ones that have better sales volume anyways.
Shivali Patel:
Okay, I think that's really, really insightful. We also have Sergio. Sergio, do you like to use the same keywords for each campaign in broad phrase, and exact campaigns?
Elizabeth:
I do. I would say the one sort of not qualifier would put on it, the one thing you should be aware of. I would recommend keeping the bids lower in the broad and the phrase match. I don't always agree with Amazon's recommendations, but if you listen to their recommendations on this, they actually recommend that you keep it lower.
Shivali Patel:
And Sasha has a question. If I was to start selling a product that has a monthly volume of 60,000 units a month, how should I position myself? Should I run out?
Elizabeth:
I would first want to know how the product performs. That's your first goal. You want to figure out what your average cost per click is and you want to figure out what your actual conversion rate is. Once you have those factors, you can actually start building production models and sales production models and stuff. Actually, it's not hard to build or not search. You want to search traffic production models based on oh, I want to hit $50,000 a month in products, this is my conversion rate. What you need is you need your conversion rates. You really need your conversion rates is the main one, and then you're going to need your cost per clicks in the ads to be like all right, this is what it's going to cost me. Right now, you're going off of nothing. I know I've said it about 20 different times on this live, but I'm going to say it again relevancy, focus on your exact target market, see what your numbers tell you, and then you can build up from there.
Shivali Patel:
I think that's a good plan, so hopefully that is helpful for you. Sasha, I see we have Sweat's leaving, but he has found the response was informative. Now I wanted to touch on something we talked about at the beginning of this call, which is Q4, right, we've been talking a little bit about auditing your strategy and some general PPC knowledge, but also what about, I'm sure a lot of you guys that are watching? If you're already selling, then you probably aren't full swing. Maybe you've already gone ahead and optimized your listings for Q4. But what happens if maybe somebody is just starting to be like oh no, I completely dropped the ball? Do you have? Hopefully, not Hopefully, none of you guys are in that position, but let's say something like that happens, sort of maybe if you have a take on what somebody can do to make sure that they're still able to tap in on Q4's potential.
Elizabeth:
Yeah, so we're assuming it's a brand new launch product and we have nothing.
Shivali Patel:
We can assume that they've been selling for a while, but they haven't changed anything for Q4.
Elizabeth:
Got it, got it, got it. Ok, no, that's fine. So I would say if you're already selling, most likely you probably have some ad structure. You're not in a bad spot. Ok, q4, right before Black Friday, December and Monday, we're not launching a whole bunch of test campaigns. Don't do it, because what happens is Black Friday, Cyber Mondays Really, what you're doing, you don't get same.
Elizabeth:
I know there's not really data available, but honestly, nobody's really looking at that. An inside campaign manager. You're not going to be able to say, oh OK, I got 20. My ACOS was so much better this last hour, so let me increase these budgets, right? What you have to do is you have to look back at historical data. So if you want to test anything, do it before this week is out. Get those campaigns up, get that data, because you're going to be completely flying blind If you launched a bunch of stuff a day before. You're completely flying blind on performance metrics and it's so easy because of how many clicks are happening on the platform to really lose your shirt. So I would say, if you're like oh my gosh, I don't have any specific campaign set up for Black Friday, so that's fine, you're actually in a really good spot. So what you want to do these weeks leading up to it you actually still have time you want to go into your account and you want to evaluate what is working now, what is crushing it right now, and then I'm going to make sure, as that traffic comes in, that those have good budgets. I have healthy bids on them.
Elizabeth:
To be honest, days of for the most part, unless we have a really specific keyword on a very specific brand, they're like we have to be aggressive when we must win top of search for this particular keyword. For the most part, we're adjusting budgets. Day of is our typical optimizations. So what we're doing prior to that is we're like all right, if we're going to be increasing budgets, we want to make sure that all of this is super solid. So you're doing two things. One, you're identifying all the stuff that really works and you're like all right, I need to make sure again, budgets are healthy, bids are healthy, all my optimizations are done. And then the second thing we're doing and this is also very important is what is all the stuff that's not working, meaning Clips with no Sales? Where are all my high costs, low sale keywords going on? Here's a good one. What are all my untested stuff, that I've just been increasing bids. So it's so easy.
Elizabeth:
If you're like normal optimizations, right, we're going to go in what has no impressions, increase the bids. We do this as well. It is not a bad practice. What often happens, especially if you don't have any caps so we have caps, we're like, all right, we're never going to increase past x amount of dollars or whatever If you don't have any caps. Sometimes what happens is you're like you can end up with like $10 bids.
Elizabeth:
So what I would recommend doing go into your targeting tab. I would filter for everything with zero orders, or you could just leave it totally blank, sort by the bid what has the highest bid in your account and you might look at it and be like holy crap, I had no idea that was in there. And what you want to do is what we call a bid reset. So you're just looking at all this stuff and you're like, hey, it's not getting any impressions. Anyways, it's not going to hurt me if I lower my bids, but then at least I know when that traffic hits all of a sudden that random keyword that didn't have any search volume, that I had like $10 bid on. It's not going to like pop off and waste all of my ad budgets.
Elizabeth:
There's another filter that is really helpful to identify the irrelevant stuff. I'm not saying pause all these things. I'm saying use this filter to bring to the top everything that you're like how the heck did that get in there? Because it's super easy. When we're looking in our search term reports we're like, oh, this converted once. Let me go test it Again. Great practice. What happens is sometimes you get these random things in the account so easy for it to happen. So what you do is you go again. Targeting tab is going to be your friend here. You're going to want to filter for anything that has what is it? Zero clicks, zero, maybe once, two clicks.
Elizabeth:
We're looking for impressions. It has probably at least 1,000 impressions on it and you want to filter the click-through rate by anything that is lower than maybe a 0.2 or 0.15. So this says it's got a lot of impressions, it's not really doing anything in terms of sales volume and it's got really bad click-through rates. And then sort that by either your click-through rates highest or lowest to highest, or you can maybe start by impressions, highest to lowest. So what you're trying to do is what it has a bunch of eyeballs that nobody cares about and what you're doing is that brings up.
Elizabeth:
So a lot of people saw it. Not. A lot of people clicked on it, which oftentimes means irrelevant stuff, and because it's only got a couple clicks, there's not a lot of data, so it hasn't moved into our optimization sequences. So again, it's just a once over of the account. The first time you do this you'll probably be like what the heck, why is that there? And then, if you find that great pause, it put low bids on it, just kind of. Again, we're doing clean up. If you don't find anything that doesn't make sense for you, conkudos to. You're doing really, really good targeting. But either way, it's a really good thing to give it a once over before again traffic hits and things kind of go crazy.
Shivali Patel:
Now we do also have your keyword sale filter. Says 89 with low search volume, and another keyword has 20 keyword sales but a higher search volume. Is there one that you would kind of opt for? I know you said you don't typically look at the keyword sales Filter.
Elizabeth:
Yeah. So the two things I would look for is one I'm gonna say again, relevancy. I believe in it so strongly, I'm gonna say it again. And then the other thing that you would look at is, you know, the Helium sandwich. Again, another thing that I appreciate that you guys have added to the download keyword reports is the Recommended bits. Now, again, you guys are pulling them direct from the API, like Amazon does provide the recommended bits. However, as we all know, like if you go in you launch campaign, you like add different products, the recommended bids change, so their benchmarks don't take them as gospel, but they are really helpful to again kind of help you identify how competitive a particular keyword is over the other. So, like a budget's were concerned, you're like, well, you know, this one has like 20 sale, like the sales volume is pretty good, but like, wow, that one's Really competitive. I got to pay two dollars cost per click versus the other one where I'm like, well, I only have to pay like 50 cents cost per click. That probably would play into my decision.
Shivali Patel:
Okay, all right, there's. I know I said to, but let's just do this last one and then we'll. We'll call it. And so how do you structure your top keyword campaigns versus your complementary keywords? I know we briefly touched on this earlier.
Elizabeth:
Yeah, so I will cash with. So I saying I'm not a huge fan of doing everything as a single keyword campaign. I think it's way too overkill. You end up getting way more confused than you do in sight From doing it like that. That being said, if we do, I definitely have like a top keyword. We are going to put that in a single keyword, exact, match, specific campaign. The sort of it depends Questions and answers that I always give is the more the higher amount of Control I need over where I'm going to be directing my ad spend, the less keywords I want to have. Then more important it is for me to gain impressions on this keyword. For, again, for my campaign strategy, the less keywords I'm going to have. So if it is a top keyword, if it's my main ranking keyword, if it's super, super important to me, single keyword campaign right, because that's I need to control ad spend. I need a lot of impressions on this and super, super important versus another keyword set, right. Maybe I don't really have it. So the other, very other end of the spectrum is going to be like a whole bunch of a Campaign that actually works really well.
Elizabeth:
For us is single word meaning, like you know, cup bowl dish In broad match low bits. Do not put high-pits on these. Even if you have great ACoS, don't put high bits. Not a good idea. But we'll run these all the time. But what happens is because we cap our bids at, say, I think it's from 25 cents, maybe 30 cents, maybe in 15 cents. We never intend to grow our bids past that, right.
Elizabeth:
So how is it important for me to control ad spend at the campaign level? Not really because I'm controlling it at my bid level, right. How important is it for me to gain impressions? Not really because I'm expecting half of these keywords to not get impressions whatever. So I would be fine with putting, you know, say, 50, 100 keywords in that campaign, right, because for me it makes no sense to create 10 different campaigns that I have to like keep an eye on, versus just one important like oh yeah, that's that strategy and that's kind of like my background thing, right. So I would look at it through that lens again. How important is it for me to control spend at the campaign level? And then, how important is it for me to gain Impressions on these particular keywords? The more infatily you answer yes to those two questions, the less keywords you should have in that campaign. The more you don't really care about those two things, or they don't really matter as much then I would be okay with a lot more keywords.
Shivali Patel:
Alright, well, wonderful. Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for your time and your information, your knowledge. We appreciate it. I know a lot of people learned quite a bit. Sasha says thank you. We have sweat who says you know he was also waiting on those other questions that you were answering. That was very informative, so we do appreciate it so much. And yeah, that is it for today. You guys will catch you on the next TACoS Tuesday. Thank you!
Elizabeth:
Awesome! Thanks, I appreciate it.
If you've ever wanted a peek into the world of Amazon selling, this episode is your golden ticket. We're joined by elite sellers and Amazon specialists, Christine Douheret and Sasha Zubatov, who share invaluable insights and strategies they've used to overcome challenges and achieve incredible success in the E-commerce space. With their unlikely backgrounds - Christine hailing from Hollywood with a degree in interior design and Sasha from New York with a computer science degree - they bring unique perspectives to the table. Our guests reveal their strategies, such as utilizing flat files and Helium 10 Elite training, that have helped them stay ahead of the curve. They divulge how their diligent manual research, constant learning, and strategic use of VAs have been instrumental to their success. Listen in as Christine recounts her staggering 300% sales growth in just a year, and Sasha shares her client's seven-figure sales accomplishment. We also delve into the not-so-pretty side of things, including having listings hijacked and the struggles of facing stiff competition. As we wind down our engaging chat, Sasha shares her take on Walmart's competition and the suitability of products across platforms, offering her top flat file strategy. We also discuss the potential risks and rewards of creating product variations. Christine, always ready to help, extends an invitation to listeners who may need assistance or have questions about their Amazon journey. We wrap up the episode with a look at possible future Amazon and Walmart meetups and the unique challenges these could present. However challenging, the future of e-commerce remains thrilling, and we're here to help you navigate it. Tune in and let Christine and Sasha's success stories inspire you to create your own journey to success.
In episode 510 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Christine, and Sasha discuss:
- 01:53 - Sasha's Funny Helium 10 Swag Story
- 10:35 - Sell on Amazon, Overcoming Challenges
- 16:25 - Sales Success and Expansion
- 19:11 - Successful Strategies and Challenges On Their Amazon Journey
- 25:18 - Organize and Inform for Successful Outcomes
- 27:26 - Understanding and Protecting Flat File Strategies
- 33:18 - Profit Margins and Competition
- 35:01 - Sales Performance: Amazon vs Walmart
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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got a couple of elite sellers and Amazon specialists who have come from completely different backgrounds but now have found success on Amazon, Walmart and what is even going to share his unique flat file strategies with us. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think we know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/keywordtracker.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We've got a couple elite sellers on with us from opposite sides of the coast here, if I'm not mistaken or I'm not. Let's find out. Actually, where are you guys actually from? Let's start with Christine. Where are you at right now? Where are you calling in from?
Christine:
I'm in San Diego California.
Bradley Sutton:
You're in San Diego, so forget it. You're local to me. I don't know why I thought you were on the east coast for some reason. Where in San Diego are you at?
Christine:
Carmel Mountain, Carmel Valley area.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, about like 30 minutes away from me. You know towards what is it? Towards the stadium down there, right? No, not like about 10, 15 minutes, okay, cool, wow, you're almost my neighbor and Sasha, about the distance south of me, you're north, you're up in like Orange County, California, right?
Sasha:
Yeah, I'm within like half an hour of any local workshop you guys put on.
Bradley Sutton:
I love it. I love it. Now here's a funny story about Sasha, like one time our you know, one of our executives, Bojan, he in our private Slack channel he posted a picture and he's like sell and scale summit t-shirt spotted in the wild or something like that, and he had snapped the picture of somebody that he saw in the checkout line in his grocery store up in I don't know somewhere in the OC and I was like wait a minute, that looks amazing. I was like yes, it's Sasha right there. So you're famous inside of Helium 10. There for wearing a Helium 10. Swag out in the wild, love it.
Sasha:
From now on, every time I go to Costco, I put that on. All right, you never know when a Helium 10 employee might capture you, awesome, awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, Christine, let's go to your origin story. Is San Diego where you were born and raised, or are you a transplant, or what?
Christine:
I was actually born and raised in Los Angeles. My parents were transplants. However. They came from Switzerland on the Queen Mary for their honeymoon, and so they landed in Los Angeles, and that's where I grew up.
Bradley Sutton:
The Queen Mary. That's now like in Long Beach, that one that you can actually.
Christine:
Wow, nice, that one 1955, that came over.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome, Sasha. What about you?
Sasha:
I'm originally from Odessa, Ukraine, and so I speak Russian, and I wound up doing a lot of business with Russia, and that's what actually led up to Amazon eventually.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay now, how long have you been here in the States?
Sasha:
I grew up here. I grew up in New York in 1980s.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so you must have moved here when you were one or two years old, all right. So growing up in New York, you had emigrated over here. What was your aspirations? Were you just wanting to be a fireman or an astronaut, or what did you think you'd be when you grew up? Quote unquote.
Sasha:
I had very little choice. My dad was an engineer and my mom was an actress, and all my life isolated between the two. So jump back and forth.
Bradley Sutton:
What did you end up going to college for then.
Sasha:
I ended up going. I got my bachelor's in computer science initially, and then, when my business was doing well enough, I went into a theater program.
Bradley Sutton:
So you still made both of them happy after my goodness, the model son here, Love it. What about you, Christine? What did you think you'd be when you grew up?
Christine:
I always wanted to be an interior designer and actually that's what my degree is in. So I was an interior design when I lived in LA, in Hollywood, for a big firm and often did a lot of the studio sets with the studio designers and maybe did something for Sasha's mom or there, you never know. Actually Johnny Cochran's office, I did.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, okay, all right, wow all right. So now you know what. How many years were you in that field, Christine?
Christine:
10 years.
Bradley Sutton:
10 years and then after that?
Christine:
Then I went into nurse recruiting.
Bradley Sutton:
Nurse recruiting.
Christine:
Well, yes, recruiting nurses for travel assignments. So a travel nurse assignments across the US in every hospital there's probably 20-30% of travel nurses, so that they can adjust their fluctuations in census, and so they bring in travel nurses when it's high census and reduce the travel nurse population when it's lower census.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm half Filipino. Is it true that, like 30% of nurses, are Filipinos?
Christine:
They do bring a lot of Filipinos over, yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right, so you're moving Filipino nurses around all the country, and others as well, and then how long do you do that?
Christine:
Ten years, at least ten years.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, so you stick with stuff. You start. I like that. All right, so well. There's 20 years of work, so you must have started working when you were three, four years old, yourself there, okay, and then after that, did you find e-commerce or what's next in your life?
Christine:
Yes, and I found e-commerce, so it brought together everything I've learned and I just wanted to be able to do something that I could do from anywhere in the world. Since my family is from Switzerland, as you know, since my parents immigrated, I like to go there frequently and I wanted to be able to do a business I could do from there, if I needed to be there for two, three months, or from anywhere in the world, and I found this.
Bradley Sutton:
So did you just like Google at the time? Do you remember like where you know things I can do on the road, or something like that? Do you remember what you searched for?
Christine:
No, no, I um. I always like to buy things on Amazon, and I knew that it was growing, that people would be buying online more frequently, and so I started searching how to do that, and I did several webinars and classes and seminars In fact, I did probably six months of education before I even jumped into selling to make sure it was something that I could do, that I had the skills for, that I had the money for and that I would be able to grow with. See, like in nursing nurses, they can grow, they keep growing in their careers, they do all kinds of different things, they advance, and I wanted something that I could also grow with, so I could become a bigger seller, I could expand selling to different regions, different countries, and so I found this fit the bill.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. What about you, Sasha? How does somebody who studies theater and engineering end up in e-commerce?
Sasha:
I went to Russia with a suitcase full of computer parts. That's how I started in business, and from then, on, I think one dollar Sounds very shady.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, I don't know how.
Sasha:
Listen, I mean nothing with. Russia is a white hat, let's put it this way. So yeah, and so that led eventually to doing a lot of exporting to Russia. I did everything from computer parts to software to eventually slot machines even, and mining equipment, so that kind of led naturally to.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you say slot machines and mining equipment? Amazingly, yes, never in the history of vocabulary has that, I don't think, been used in the same Both of those things? That's interesting. So you're basically exporting whatever and whatever they wanted there. Huh Okay.
Sasha:
So it really does depend on relationships there as well, just like here in the States, and so wherever you can find a competitive advantage, that's a good place to go, and so eventually, when that died down as a market and now essentially it's almost entirely out of reach, you look for other opportunities, and by that point I've already had a number of other businesses that I was involved with, and so I started Amazon on a dare with a friend of mine who really did not believe that we could do any sales on Amazon when his website was doing so well.
Sasha:
So I bet him that we could beat his website sales with Amazon sales, and that's how it was what year are we? Talking about this was just not too long ago, I think it was 2018,.
Bradley Sutton:
I think it was Okay so that's about five years ago. All right, and then, and did you make that bet without even knowing a lot about Amazon? Or at that point, had you done some studying and research into it, or something?
Sasha:
I knew very little about Amazon. I did not have any experience selling on Amazon or listing on Amazon, but just simply understanding the marketing and the size of the market and the demand there. It just seemed it was a bet I couldn't lose.
Bradley Sutton:
So yeah, okay, I took it, Christine. What about you? What year approximately was it that you made this leap into e-commerce?
Christine:
Well, I launched my first product at the end of 2019.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, Around the same time and are you still selling that exact product today?
Christine:
No Can you tell us what it is, then well, there's still kitchen products, but Well, I am still selling the remainder of that particular Also, somebody is still active.
Bradley Sutton:
That's pretty impressive for your very Not many people are still selling, like four years later, their very first product. Usually, it's like they just get their feet wet and they're like, oh nope, this was the wrong choice, but that's pretty impressive. You still have some inventory left and still going on that yes. Now how did you learn to how to sell on Amazon?
Christine:
You know I did a course. I did a course, but I can't say that I really learned how to do it from that course. What I really learned was when I started believe it or not signed up for Helium 10, because they have so many of the courses, you know the get started courses. That's where I really Like I was already on the platform beginning the sales, but there is so much to learn.
Bradley Sutton:
So in Helium 10?
Christine:
I did all of the modules you know, from the first set to the second set. I mean literally everything and I would say that, and also being part of the elite meetings, that is where I really learned how to sell, so you joined elite even before you were that big of a seller. Yes.
Bradley Sutton:
And then that that was me, Like in 2016, 2017, I wasn't even a seller and I was like you know what I just want to, like be a fly on the wall in these trainings and learn, and that's how I like. I probably learned more in six months than I could have, you know, in like two or three years taking a course or something. So I took a very similar path as you, All right, so that's interesting. What about you, Sasha? Did you take a course too? Or you just like got just dove right in? Or how did you learn to do what you were doing in the first?
Sasha:
year or 18? It was all just manual work, digging into Amazon specs, so really digging in into the specifications of flat files and categories. And I actually started with there are not category listing reports, but with transaction reports. You know those reports that list every transaction and the challenge there is that Amazon doesn't give you a flat file there. It actually is grouped by different categories. It's very, very hard to figure out exactly what the expenses are, so it really makes you work to break it up and clean it up. And that took a lot of time to break up that file and eventually I made it so that every column would be would represent a single type of expense, so it'd be easy to run pivot tables on it and analyze it.
Bradley Sutton:
There goes your engineering background a little bit there. Now, where are you still selling the very first product that you started with?
Sasha:
No, and it's not because it wasn't selling well, it's just it became less of a product for the manufacturer. So I don't really sell my own products. I help partners that I have sell products in their accounts typically, and so it depends in a way what they're.
Bradley Sutton:
So that first one that you launched was that for your friend, who you made that with.
Sasha:
That's right, that was his products and businesses that have storefronts that are brick and mortar they have other channels, so they have other needs, other interests, so they might have distribution, they might have a retail store, and so Amazon website aren't always their first priority.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, that's another thing that one of you have in common with me is when I first started until I worked at Helium 10, I didn't have any of my own products 100%. I launched over 400 products before I started working at Helium 10. 100% was for other people partners or people who hired me. Just my mindset was like I'm good at what I do, I have a specific thing I'm doing and I like doing this where there's not risk, like I'm not risking my family's savings and it could totally fail, so I'm gonna get. I mean, it's not.
Bradley Sutton:
Of course, I always try to have success, but I didn't have to stay up at night knowing that I risk my second mortgage or something to do this product launch. Amazon could just close the account down back in those days. Now, if I had things to do over again, now that I know what I know, I would have probably gone ahead and launched on my own products. But in those days I was very happy just getting a paycheck and if they made a million dollars from my $1,000 work, great for them. But then if they lost money, it's like all right, sorry, not sorry. We did it. We did what we could.
Sasha:
I hear you. I hear you, but for me it's entirely different. I prefer to work with somebody else's product and do the marketing. In a way. For me it's sort of more customer facing for me. To figure out what it is they need, what their needs are, and make it work.
Bradley Sutton:
What's the biggest success story? Like some projects that you've worked on and now they've scaled up to X number of sales in a year or something like that. Anything stick out in your mind.
Sasha:
For me. There was a client that had not been on Amazon at all, but their products have for years and years. They're a large manufacturer of beauty products who sold through retail and distribution and when I took them on, they had hundreds and hundreds of listings that were not created by themselves but by other resellers that needed to be on Amazon. So in the end, when we eventually were able to capture that market share, those beauty products wound up being really large, really large numbers for them.
Bradley Sutton:
Hmm, well, how large we're talking. Well, we're talking about seven figures. I like it all. Right, excellent. Now going back to you, Christine, like you've been selling now for like three years or four years, which year was your peak in sales and approximately how much was it?
Christine:
I would say this year is the peak in sales. So this year's increased like 300% over last year.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow.
Christine:
An increase, and well, we're in the high six figures at this point.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent, so this is your full income now.
Christine:
Yes.
Bradley Sutton:
And do you have employees, or are you doing this all on your own?
Christine:
Oh no, I couldn't possibly do it all on my own. Now I have a VA who does all of the reporting and all of the things like that for me, and of course I have a team. I've got the photographer, videographer, social media.
Bradley Sutton:
So that's in-house, or you just like have somebody on retainer or something.
Christine:
I just contract out as I need it yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. Now, what's been your biggest L, your biggest loss, still with you, Christine, like the worst thing that's happened to you since you started selling on Amazon, because that's something that I like to keep it real. Amazon is not all rainbows and unicorns Listings gets shut down, you get hijacked and bad experience with customer service. Let's keep it real here. Let's be vulnerable. What's your biggest loss you've taken, or worst thing?
Christine:
Well, I had a. It's a product I still sell, so it was actually selling very, very well and it was like top you know top numbers and a new person had designed a similar product and so they came in and cited us as patent infringement. Amazon pulled all the listings down, which, of course, stopped the sales immediately. Now we had authorization to sell, we had a patent, we had everything, and I contacted Amazon with I mean right away and sent that document, sent it to the person that claimed the IP, and it still took over two and a half weeks to bring the listings back up. Of course, by then sales were lost. It had to sort of rebuild its rank and everything, and this person did it which I've learned since in order to launch his product right.
Bradley Sutton:
So he wanted to clear the way so that he was the only kind of player in the chain.
Christine:
Exactly, and so that's my first time really realizing the tricks that people play just to get ahead and that was disappointing. It was sad I lost money, but you know what? I wasn't going to let him win, so I just worked hard to get those sales back.
Bradley Sutton:
I love it. Now let's flip the script. What's the coolest thing that's ever happened? You like something unexpected or something amazing where you went viral, one of your products you sold out of inventory in two weeks or you made ridiculous profit on something. What's one of the coolest things that's happened to you?
Christine:
Well, yeah, I have sold out of inventory, but I've learned now to keep that in stock in backup. But actually this last prime day was probably one of the most exciting for me because I sold over a thousand units on that day For me that was A thousand units in one day, wow. Yeah, for me that was big, that was a big, exciting moment.
Bradley Sutton:
How many SKUs?
Christine:
In that particular product line there were five SKUs.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow. So how many units did you have in stock to cover that? That's a huge day.
Christine:
Well, here's what happened is I did run out, but I have a backup over at Deliver. So when it ran out it pulled from Deliver and gave me enough time to get more in. So I had, thank goodness, in the backup warehouse. I had a whole another thousand units ready to ship. And was able to send them in immediately as Deliver was fulfilling the overflow orders.
Bradley Sutton:
What would you say is the reason you did so well on Prime Day? Did you have some kind of, you know, Prime Exclusive Discount? Did you have a coupon? Did you send some outside traffic? Is there one thing that resulted in that crazy sales day?
Christine:
Well, I did a Prime Exclusive Discount. I also, prior to that, made sure all my ads were prepped and primed and that I made sure that the listing was 100% perfect and the pictures were perfect all before that Prime Day. So I guess I was just prepared.
Bradley Sutton:
I like it, Sasha. What about you? You know, sometimes, working with multiple accounts, you get exposed to even more things than the average. You know, seller, what's the worst thing? It doesn't have to be from you, but just like you were part of an account and you heard that something crazy happened. What's?
Sasha:
on Amazon. I think the most heartbreaking thing is when listings become hijacked. I mean, I've seen policy violations on Amazon and all sorts of difficulties that we have working with Amazon, but when listings get hijacked, that's just. I think. To me that's the toughest part.
Bradley Sutton:
And so what was one of the worst? Like somebody who had like, was there any? That was like they were selling 100 a day and it went to zero because of it, or something crazy like that.
Sasha:
They've got an entire product line with something that competitors were able to put Covid-related keywords in there somehow During the time when Covid items were hot and Amazon was blocking sellers, and so their entire list product line was shut down.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, all right. Well, let's not be doom and gloom. Christine talked about her. Great, you know, 1000 sale prime day. What about you? What's a crazy, amazing thing that's, like you know, can't happen, probably in the rain or it's very. It would be very impossible or very difficult for it to happen off of Amazon, but you've seen it happen on Amazon.
Sasha:
Gosh, I have to think about that, but the thing that comes to mind that the most satisfying thing that I had experienced was when I finally figured out how to put attributes up on Amazon that they don't give you in the category listing report. There are, for some, certain categories, like in the, for example, a grocery category that I work with a lot. When I was finally able to put up the nutrition table to get all the nutrition values up for products when it's not it's not regularly available in your category listing report, that was probably the most satisfying experience.
Bradley Sutton:
Where is that show on the list? Or does it show on the listing, or is this is only? We're talking about the back end here.
Sasha:
So it shows on the listing right above the bullet points. It's in that prime space below the title and right above the bullet points it'll show like nutrition information. It'll show ingredients and it will show the nutrition table that you usually see on products in the grocery store.
Bradley Sutton:
But for most products you don't actually get those attributes even if you download the flat file that you would, you know like it's not going to. It's not going to show up there.
Sasha:
It's not going to show up, even though it should.
Bradley Sutton:
So how do you do it? Do you like copy it from another category listing report that it does show up and then just paste those columns or something? Well, at this point, at this point.
Sasha:
You could probably find it. You could probably find it in some other category. I had to search for those attributes throughout the internet. I found them eventually in a European Amazon catalog. So I had to scrape them off of there and that's how I populated those columns. It didn't exist anywhere. My suspicion and I don't know this for sure, my suspicion is that they were available for products that were sold through Amazon Fresh. You know Amazon Fresh that product line, and so if you were in stores at Amazon Fresh, you had access to those fields, but not if you were in seller central, and so that was a bit of a hack.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, we're going to come back to you because I know your specialty is like flat files and stuff like that. So we're going to be getting lots of strategies. But going back to Christine, let's talk some strategy. Not anybody can have a thousand sale prime day. Not anybody can scale up on their own to high six figures. So what are some things that you think you're doing that is unique or that you're focusing on? Maybe it's not so unique, but it's like you put a big focus on it and you feel that that's part of the secret to your success.
Christine:
Well, I have these master files on literally everything that's required. So I think being organized and having all the information in one place is really important for me. For example I have, since I'm on both Amazon and Walmart I have like a spreadsheet that's got you know the UPC, the ASIN, the titles, the bullets, I mean literally everything on it that I can then, you know, adjust before fixing a listing, and I can refer to that sheet at any time I need to when I'm doing something else in Amazon, and also the same with Walmart. They have different IDs, different things, and this sheet goes as far as it has dimensions of the products and the pricing of the products.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, guys, I don't know if you picked up on this, but something I like to tell people is, no matter what career you come from, there's things that you can take from your previous life and apply to Amazon. You know if you guys picked up. You know Sasha used to be, you know computer science and engineer and stuff, and now he's got this analytical mind and now he just happens to be an expert on you know Excel and flat files and stuff. And listen, Christine, you know being an interior designer. You know she couldn't just like throw stuff together. You know like she probably had.
Bradley Sutton:
You know this system where she would really plan out her sets and very detailed, and now she's taken that and applied it to the way she manages her interior, designing her Amazon catalog, so you can always take stuff from and then play. You know, plus, sasha, you know being a service provider too. You know he's taking his acting lessons. He's very well spoken and eloquent there and very good looking too, so he's using whatever he can do right there. Sasha, back to you Another, maybe a flat file strategy that you can share with the community.
Sasha:
So with flat files, I think it's important to know that the category listing report is not necessarily what's live on the product page, and that's a major misconception that people have is that when they receive the category listing report, when they download it, they think that that accurately reflects what's up on the system, and it's not the way I would. The way I think about the CLR is that it is just a suggestion. It's what you've uploaded to Amazon and then Amazon makes a decision about whether they will accept that recommendation and update the data in the system or not. Conversely, the file itself, the category listing report or the category template, that is also Amazon's suggestion to you, what you can upload to the, to the cloud, and you don't necessarily have to follow that recommendation.
Sasha:
That's why there are a lot of ways to hack the file, the Excel file that comes down from from Amazon, and so one of the first things that you do if you do have a conflict, if you have an issue, you may take a look at what's in your category listing report and then compare it to the, to the UI, to the data fields that you see in your seller central when you click the edit button and take a look at the shaded text and numbers that are right above the field, which shows you what's what's on the cloud live, and very often you'll find that what you've uploaded is not exactly the same as what's on that now, and that could be things like title, it could be bullet points, clearly, product ideas and other other fields that Amazon doesn't think that you have the right to update or you have the priority to update. So that's one check that I would do once in a while to make sure that what you think is being uploaded is actually getting up there.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, is it? I mean, I know this was the case years ago, but you know what would happen and how some people would get their listings, you know, shut down. Is you know, like, like, like COVID type keywords, but any adult keywords, drug related keywords, they would go to a marketplace where that seller wasn't in and where there's open spots in their flat file sometimes they would get to, you know, throw some of those keywords in there and then it would stop it. And then you know what was you know one way years ago of how to stop that is like hey, hey, you know, make sure everything in your flat files are filled out and even upload it to different marketplaces. Is that? Can that still help? Or what is the latest protection on how you can stop people from abusing the flat file system? Where, where they can get your listing, you know, shut down?
Sasha:
That is absolutely the right thing to do is fill out the category list and report with all the fields that are relevant to your product, and there's a couple that that are sort of not part of your product listing unless you're in the adult category that you should also update. But that is the good recommendation to update as much as you can that is relevant to your product, because bad actors can update your listings by doing that in other marketplaces or by virtue of having access to higher level of Amazon account, for example, they can do it through vendor central right. So that is that is a good recommendation. It is getting harder for people to to hijack casually because Amazon is making it more difficult for people to create and modify listings for that are owned by brand registry. But they they could still do it, and so I would.
Sasha:
I would say don't go overboard and try to complete every single empty field in your listing report, because you really cannot do that. There are many more fields that are related to your product. Then you can actually see when you download your category listing report. So you can't really even contemplate completing every possible field, but you should fill out those fields that are relevant. You should fill out those fields that have to do with compliance has met and so on, and you should fill out the field that has to do with is is this an adult product? To make sure that those don't get in there. Aside from that, you could you could still have bad actors put bad, bad keywords in your product. They'll get you shut down so that yeah, that's that hijacking process still exists out there.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, I'm just curious what's your ratio of sales from Amazon to Walmart? Five to one, 10 to one. Amazon more, Would you say it?
Christine:
for me it's. Let's see, last year it was like Five to one, this year it's more like eight to one on one.
Bradley Sutton:
It changed so eight to eight. For every eight dollars you sell on Amazon, you sell one dollar on Walmart.
Christine:
Yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, are you using WFS?
Christine:
Yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, how's your profit margins? You know like after, if you know calculate out what you're you know selling or you know doing for PPC, etc. Is the profit margins similar or you making more money than one platform, than the other?
Christine:
Well, last year I made more I mean profit margin was better on Walmart. This year the advertising Something's a skew there. So the profit margins not as good On Walmart as it was last year and I'm hoping they fix that and that goes back up. But typically because Walmart doesn't charge as much for delivery, they do still charge the 15%. They don't charge as much delivery. There is room for a better profit margin on Walmart.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, interesting, interesting. Do you find that there's less competition for your niche on Walmart compared to Amazon? Are you fighting more competitors on Amazon or is similar to the same ones? You who are there on Amazon are also there on the Walmart.
Christine:
I think it's less competition. It's less competition, but it's harder to rank up for some reason. But you know, it's a unique client. Each platform has its set of unique clients, right and certain products. Like I, have five different products With many, many skews. So one product does very, very well on Walmart and Not so well on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
So you're doing better on Walmart than you are on Amazon for one product.
Christine:
Yes, yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I know Kerry's got one or two like that too interesting.
Christine:
Yeah, and where the other products do better on Amazon. It's interesting. So I I come to where I'm picking out different products for the different platforms.
Bradley Sutton:
Could you have predicted that, like you know, when you were looking in helium 10 at the search volume or the competitors, like could you have said you know what I think this might be, or it did it just happen, and then now, in retrospect, you know what to look for as far as science about what could be better on Walmart than Amazon?
Christine:
I think it just happened. But yes, now in retrospect I can look a little bit more, I have a bit more information about what to look for and you know, price is a key it's just a key thing on Walmart. So having good price products so if you have a product that's a little bit higher priced For me I'm putting it on Amazon it just doesn't move as well on Walmart. In my category I'm talking about kitchen now in another category it might work just fine, but in my category the lower priced products that appear to have the best value for the price let's put it that way Move better on Walmart. And yes, now I'm picking out things that fit that category.
Bradley Sutton:
Sasha you doing anything at all with Walmart, or everything that you do is all on Amazon.
Sasha:
I help with Walmart as well, but it really varies by client. There are certain products that don't do well on Walmart at all because they are on Walmart shelves and so if it's a, if it's a product that can be purchased from Walmart, in the store and Amazon and Walmart will ship it at their Walmart price, it's very difficult to compete with an Amazon price that includes FBA fees. So it it's really kind of all over the board where some products do Better on Walmart when there's no competitors and there's some products that really don't even have opportunity to compete.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, and what's your last strategy for us? If I were to ask you for your 60 second, your 60 second strategy of the of the day for you? I mean, I said flat files because that's your specialty, but it could be about anything.
Sasha:
I'll stick with flat files. My top recommendation would be to create variations. Create them often and Don't wait until it's too late. You're your ASINs, your, your product listings are your assets on Amazon and they're constantly at risk. They could be taken down for multiple reasons, and so when your product reaches a level of maturity, when you have Thousands of reviews and is doing very well, create a variation, even if you don't think you need one. Create something with small, small modification. Pair it up with your best seller and let that new product gather reviews and that new product becomes a new asset and Then, once are doing well, you have the option of splitting it off from your main parent and take up Amazon real estate. So that's one of the top strategies I use with clients is I create variations with, with new products cool, cool.
Bradley Sutton:
Now. If people wanted to reach out to you, Sasha, to see if you know to contact you and ask for your you know Russian escapades, or perhaps talk about you know flat files or whatever, how can they find you on the interwebs out there?
Sasha:
If, if they want, if you want to have, they want to have that beer, I'll tell them the local bar. But if they want to talk about Amazon I'm usually on the Friday calls at 11 o'clock that those are always great case studies, so I'm usually. They are also in the Helium 10 elite Facebook group and of course it. If you want to reach out directly, my email is at amazon@cutterstone.com. Cutterstone spell, just like it sounds.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool now, Christine, you know, no pressure, you don't have to say your contact information, but if somebody was inspired by something you said and they wanted to reach out to you, dude, would you like anybody to reach out?
Christine:
Yeah, I'm happy to help. I mean, so many people help me along the way I want to do the same, so I'm happy to help, and my email would be christioinfo@gmail.com.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, all right. Well, you too it's. It's a great, you know, been having you and you know weekly calls and seeing you at the elite events. And Next one, probably neither of you can make it to because I'm doing it, we're probably doing it in Germany, so that'll be a bit of a bit of a drive for you guys who are used to being here in Southern California, but perhaps I'll see you at the next, you know, like online meetup or Next conference. You know be great to see you again.
Christine:
Thank you.
Bradley Sutton:
Great to be here.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Snapchat users can now buy Amazon products without leaving the app https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/15/tech/snapchat-users-shop-amazon-products/index.html Meta lets Amazon shoppers buy products on Facebook and Instagram without leaving the apps https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/09/meta-lets-amazon-users-buy-on-facebook-instagram-without-leaving-apps.html How Shein and TikTok Shop are trying to shake the ‘Made in China’ reputation https://restofworld.org/2023/china-shopping-shein-tiktok-shop-global-sellers/ 3 new shopping benefits Prime members get when using Amazon’s Buy with Prime https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/buy-with-prime-new-shopping-benefits-2023 Advertisers Are Investing in TikTok Shops Despite Mostly Tepid Results https://www.adweek.com/social-marketing/advertisers-are-investing-in-tiktok-shops-despite-mostly-tepid-results/ Walgreens Shifts eCommerce Fulfillment From Warehouses to Retail Stores https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2023/walgreens-shifts-ecommerce-fulfillment-from-warehouses-to-retail-stores/ Join the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz newsletter on LinkedIn. We break down all the week's news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-Commerce World, New Feature Alerts, and Training Tips!
But that's not all, we're also diving into Amazon PPC and keyword research techniques. With new updates and features to Helium 10’s Amazon PPC tool, Adtomic, we discuss how you can sharpen your spending strategy and optimize it. Our special training tip from Shivali will guide you on how to mine long-tail keywords from a root keyword or phrase to boost conversions. So, strap in and stay tuned for a session packed with valuable news, tips, and insights!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 01:02 - Amazon & Snapchat
- 02:51 - Amazon & Instagram
- 05:10 - Shein Sellers Wanted
- 07:37 - Buy With Prime
- 10:02 - TikTok Shop
- 12:11 - Fulfilled by Walgreens
- 14:40- Manage Your Experiments
- 15:38 - Amazon Robots
- 16:41 - Weekly Buzz Newsletter
- 17:08 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
- 20:30 - ProTraining Tip: How To Find Long-Tail Keywords From Root Keywords
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► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Customers will soon be able to buy Amazon products without leaving the app Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram. Buy with Prime launches, more benefits for dot com sellers. There's now new kinds of split testing that you can do in manager experiments. These new stories and more on today's Weekly Buzz how cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown on all the news stories that's going on in the Amazon and Walmart and e-commerce world. We also give you the new Helium 10 features of the week as well as a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. We've got tons and tons of really exciting news stories today. sometimes it's a little bit dull out there. You're trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Sometimes it seems that I'm trying to like find news stories, but this week we got a few bangers out there, so let's go ahead and hop right into it
Bradley Sutton:
Now. The first story is actually from CNN and this is entitled. Snapchat users can now buy Amazon products without leaving the app. Now, this I thought was an interesting story. It's going to be followed up by another story that was actually announced last week, but according to CNN here it says Amazon will now run shopping ads for select products on popular photo messaging apps, snapchat, and Amazon spokesperson confirmed to CNN Now. This spokesperson said that for the first time, customers will be able to shop Amazon Snapchat ads and check out with Amazon without leaving the app. All right, so. So that means like a lot of these social media apps, the last thing that they want you to do is leave the app. So there's been a lot of reluctant sometimes for links that just take them out, because what are these social media apps want? They just want you to just stay. Stay in the app, right like you see the moves that TikTok shop is making, they don't want you to have to go to Amazon, they want you to just buy right there in TikTok shop. like a lot of these apps make it difficult to go outside of the social media app because they just want you consuming the content there and consuming the ads, et cetera. So this is actually interesting. On Snapchat, you don't even have to leave the app to purchase Amazon products anymore. Now it says in app, shopping with Amazon is available for select products advertise on Snapchat and sold by Amazon or by independent sellers in Amazon store. So this is not just like a shipped and sold by Amazon. This, these are products that are you, you sellers out there are going to be able to sell. Now the bottom of this article says this Snapchat news comes on the heels of a similar Amazon initiative announced with Meta's Facebook and Instagram platforms last week.
Bradley Sutton:
So that's actually our second news article of the day, and it's by CNBC, and this was from last week, in case you missed it out. There this was entitled meta lets Amazon shoppers buy products on Facebook and Instagram again, what's the key? Without leaving the apps, all right. So meta debuted this feature that lets users connect their Facebook and Instagram accounts to Amazon so they can more easily buy goods, promote them their feeds. Now it wasn't clear. If Snapchat is doing the same thing, I mean you'd almost have to. If you're not leaving Snapchat, that means that your Amazon account must be linked inside of Snapchat in a way. Now, this is just like super, super interesting to me because TikTok shop, as we know, has been making all of the waves lately and and this could be like Amazon answer to social commerce, as it's called, and like hey, maybe they see, like hey, this is the future. people are browsing social media and you want to kind of capture them while they're browsing, and at the same time, make these apps happy by not taking them to the Amazon app.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the Amazon spokesperson said to CNBC said customers in the U? S will see real time pricing, prime eligibility, delivery estimates and product details on select Amazon products ads in Facebook and Instagram as part of the new experience. So it's not just oh, there's going to be like a little button over here where it says, yeah, go ahead and buy with prime or buy this on Amazon. It sounds like like the buy box experience almost on Amazon where you can see all these details about when it's Going to get there. So, like this, this is, I don't know, I don't want to say like as flown under the radar a little bit. this is already like a week old. I'm reaching out to a lot of my contacts at Amazon to try and get some more details on what this is gonna entail, but I think this could be depending on how it's rolled out could be huge for third-party sellers to be able to advertise Directly on some apps and, especially, depending on the kind of flexibility we're gonna get for targeting so it could be something super, super cool and, again, like just more and more opportunity for e-commerce sellers out there now with this kind of like new Thing of social commerce. be it tick tock shop, be it snapchat, now Instagram, Facebook Really exciting times to be an e-commerce seller.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of e-commerce sellers, the next article is from restofworld.org and it's entitled how Shein and tick tock shop are trying to shake the maid in China Reputation alright, so it's talking about how these platforms are looking for global sellers and it gives a couple of examples. Like it talked about somebody who was in Latin America who was selling on the platform there that we all know, is one of the top ones in Latin America, which is mecca libre, and she was, she was doing, like $15,000 of revenue and she actually said that. like, when I first started considering Amazon, the process was confusing. There's too many documents required. The process to become a seller was very long, she said. But then this year in January Shein I hope I'm pronouncing that right, I don't even know Shein, but anyways Shein Contacted her and I was like, hey, would you like to sell on our platform? And there was actually Mexico based advisors that she could reach out to and they helped her set up the account, so that what she had said was difficult on Amazon, wasn't on Shein, and she's already sold $16,000 worth of goods on Shein's marketplace since it launched in Mexico this this past June and it's already surpassed Her medical Libre sales that she's been selling on for years now.
Bradley Sutton:
in the past for those who don't know much and including myself, I don't really know much about Shein never bought one thing on it, but Before it was almost all like. China, Chinese sellers on there and made in China products, but then last year they opened up distribution facilities in Poland, us and Canada this this article says and it's also opened up factories in Brazil and Turkey and also one coming in India. Now this article says, they're trying to compete with Amazon and that's why they're trying to build their fulfillment network and also open up to international third-party sellers. Now go ahead and check a link in the description, for the rest of this article is actually a super long article, but interesting. I really don't think she is like a big threat or anything to Amazon. I'm I think the reputation of the products and service is kind of low right now. But it's something to look out for and I'm curious. Shein reached out to this seller To sell on Amazon. What about any of you guys watching this? Have any of you been reached out to by Shein and Temu and TikTok shop to sell on the platform? Let me know in the comments below.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is a press release from Amazon and it's entitled three new shopping benefits prime members get when using Amazons buy with prime. So buy with prime, was announced earlier. We actually talked about it on the show where you can take like the Amazon Prime experience and kind of put it on Dotcom websites. All right, so until now you could see, like reviews and things and things like that. You can have the buying, literally buying with prime, right, you get the same day or one day or two day delivery. But now Amazon is announcing three more updates to this program.
Bradley Sutton:
This article says that this holiday season, prime member benefits now will include 24 seven customer service through a live chat feature. Again, this is for buy with prime obviously this has always existed for just regular Amazon. But now if somebody's shopping on a Shopify website and that Shopify sellers using buy with prime, these are the benefits that the customer is going to be able to get. So, again, 24 seven chat, live chat for customer service. Another main benefit is that you're gonna be able to see all of your orders in one place. So let's say, today I buy something from my Amazon app right. Tomorrow I buy something from the Amazon website. Day after tomorrow I go to dot a dot com website that's using Buy with Prime. I buy something there, I can go in my Amazon app and I'm going to see all of those orders in the same place. So that's something that's new that you know. Now is another benefit again, 24 seven live Support. you can see here in the screenshot what that is going to look like.
Bradley Sutton:
And then the returns. Amazon's already kind of pretty easy to have returns, but now by with prime can go through the same return process Even though they're buying from a dot com website. Now it says customers are gonna be able to choose from an expanded number of convenient drop-off locations at UPS stores, whole food markets or Amazon fresh stores, without boxing up or labeling Items. All they have to do is show a QR code and hand over the item being returned. All right, remember this is something bought from a dot com website. And now by with prime, members are gonna get all these kind of like regular Amazon prime Benefits. I'm just curious how about you guys out there Anybody start by with prime? Does any of what I just mentioned here make you more inclined to perhaps do buy with prime? If you've got a dot com website, let me know in the comments below.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is from ad week calm and it's entitled Advertisers are investing in tick-tock shops despite mostly tepid results. And this is interesting to me because the title says, oh, mostly tepid results. But then the article goes on to just like give example after example of people, kind of like crush it on the platform. So the article to me didn't really match the, the, the headline here. But it says hey, there's mostly lackluster results in tick-tock shop. It says like, that's not what I'm that's not what I'm hearing. But then in the next paragraph it says hey, cosmetics brand beat BK beauty Join tick-tock shop. When it opened up three months ago, barely ab, barely spent anything on advertising and since joining the company has more than doubled revenue. Don't you see how, like why I'm confused with all this negative talk. Like in the title, in the first paragraph. The next Paragraph says oh yeah, somebody has spent digital, a single digits advertising and now they've doubled their revenue.
Bradley Sutton:
The article talks about how the platform is offering incentives such as ad credits, customer coupons, they're covering fulfillment charges, offering tons of promotions to gear up for Black Friday. I've talked about how helium-ton elite members like Elizabeth have been really absolutely just crushing it on that platform. In this article another story they give they say hey, mental health focus journal company, Zenful note, has generated 45%, pretty much half of their sales from tick-tock shop in just two months. So again, I don't know why they're kind of dissuading people from TikTok shop but at the same time talking about how people are just crushing it on there. But it's going to be interesting to see how this work. how this goes because, like I, really have high hopes for TikTok shop. It seems like they're doing the right things and it's not just taking like a whole bunch of random products from manufacturers in China that they're shipping snail mail. that takes three day or three days, so three weeks or something to deliver, like Shein or Temu. I mean, this is just like regular, kind of like Amazon level of product. So I really think that's next year that is going to be the platform that a lot of sellers are going to want to expand to.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is from payments.com and this is entitled Walgreens Shifts Ecommerce Fulfillment from Warehouses to Retail Stores, and it talks about how they're, instead of fulfilling their dot com orders from their Walgreens warehouses, they're trying to do it at its 8,700 stores. They had this quote that says 78% of Americans live within five miles of a Walgreens. How about you guys listening out there? You probably have a Walgreens pretty, pretty close to you, but 78% are near there. So this maybe doesn't necessarily affect third party sellers too much, because this is. Walgreens mainly sells a lot of their own products.
Bradley Sutton:
But this is what I've always tried to talk to you guys, especially when I talk about Walmart and other places. We think too much only about selling online. If you can get and brick and mortar, it can be very lucrative. I've talked about when I worked at another company and they would sell in Walmart the kind of PO's that would cross my desk where one PO was like way more than what our entire year of Amazon sales were and we were in seven figures of Amazon sales and that would be like one PO from Walmart's because of how many Walmarts there are. We had accounts at that same company. I worked at Walgreens and it was still a big business and you don't have to worry about. a lot of advertising and customer service and all this stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
So like, when you are building your brand, absolutely start on Amazon, start on TikTok shop, but be thinking bigger picture, like, like, really create a brand and great packaging and things like that. Because now, if you start crushing on Amazon, you're going to get on the radar of buyers and at some of these places potentially, and maybe you can get your product in a Walgreens or a Walmart. And then this kind of move that Walgreens is doing is like pretty cool. Like imagine if you were making some kind of supplement, right, and you got it into Walgreens, brick and mortar. Now your online sales for Walmart, or Walgreens.com would also be pretty high because the fulfillment process potentially could have even same day delivery. Walgreens is saying that they're going to use, like Uber, eats and DoorDash drivers to deliver their stuff. But anyways, just something to keep in mind, guys, don't just confine yourself to thinking that you're only going to sell on online marketplaces. Getting into brick and mortar can be very lucrative.
Bradley Sutton:
The next article is not really an article at all, but it's something that is in your manager experiments dashboard. So if you go to manager experiments, that's Amazon's kind of like split testing tool. It's always been free on live listings and you've been able to do stuff like test your, your main image and things like that, but now you can actually start testing your A plus brand story and also you can do simultaneous experiments to where you, where you test two separate things, all right. So this is something newish that maybe some of you didn't know about is available. I still recommend Always doing your split testing and audience kind of like polling before you even have your listing. You can do that with Helium 10 Audience. It's just right there in your Helium 10, dashboard. It's also available. it's made by a PickFu and I've been using that for six years now and that's like a game changer. But if you didn't do it before you launch and you're having trouble, absolutely you can use manager experiments on your live listing.
Bradley Sutton:
Last article of the day is just kind of a funny one I wanted to throw in here because it kind of has to do with Amazon. But it's kind of crazy what we're going to. And this is CNBC and it says Amazon's Astro Robot is now a roving security guard for business. I mean, guys, we are literally going into the Terminator world. Amazon is selling this robot for $2,300 and it's for businesses and it's like a security guard. it's on wheels but it like roams your store during the day, make sure people are not stealing it roams it. During the night, when you, when you leave your place of business. But amazon is more than just a marketplace. They're like at the forefront of a lot of different technologies. And now there's robot security guards. Guys, in 2023, 2024, what is this world coming to? Ai robots, what is next? All right, that's it for the news this week.
Bradley Sutton:
One thing I wanted you guys to know about was if you like to get the news and maybe you're not always about watching a video, you just want to watch it or read about the news. I have a brand new newsletter that covers in depth A lot of these news articles. We're talking about a lot of the things that we discuss in this show. So if you would like that, just email to you from LinkedIn and you have LinkedIn super easy, one click to subscribe to it completely free. Go to h10.me forward slash newsletter. H10.me forward slash newsletter takes your LinkedIn website and then just hit subscribe and you'll get notified every time if there's a new article.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, now let's get into the New Helium 10 Feature Alerts of the week. every week, Helium 10 has is releasing new tools, new filters, new features, new functionality that you guys have been asking for, and so here's a rundown of what is cooking for this week, the first one that I'm going to talk about actually, all of these are an Adtomic, our PPC management tool, and the first one is about day parting. All right, so in the past, you could select certain campaigns and then in helium, you can look at the data that Helium 10 provides and see that, wow, my, my, a cost is like infinity. It's like terrible Saturdays from 7am to 9am. So what I'm going to pause my campaign every Saturday at that time so I can save some money, right, but that's just kind of like partially.
Bradley Sutton:
Why people like day parting. a lot of people might want to increase their bid. Like maybe on Sunday mornings a cost is like 6% on a certain campaign or a group of campaigns. Well you might want to increase your, your, your bid at that time. Other times, maybe you don't want to pause the whole campaign, but maybe you want to decrease your bids. Well, now you're going to be able to do that if you go to your day parting schedules section and you go to the bottom here where you can create the rules. You can just select which day you want to choose the time period that you're wanting to do. Like, let's say, I pick Mondays from 3am to 7am and now I can do increase bid, I can decrease the bid or pause the campaign, and I can do this at the campaign level or at the portfolio level or even at the product level. So, super cool update from Adtomic. That way really allows you to kind of like laser focus your spend and optimize it based on the previous performance, but on time of day and day of the week.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, another quick filter that is new in Adtomic. we have our AI bidding suggestions and that's like based on the algorithms that you, that you choose. I'm going to talk about a New update to the algorithms too, but like, for example, I've got a whole bunch of AI suggestions here about how, what I need to do to my targets as far as on the bidding in order to reach my goal, right, and so we have a couple new filters where I maybe I just want to see hey, show me all of the suggestions, the AI suggestions, where it's asking me to increase the bid or decrease the bid All right. So that's a new filter that you're now going to be able to see on your suggestions page. The last update or feature alert for the day is the ability now, on auto campaigns, to choose a bid rule. All right. So a bid rule is kind of like.
Bradley Sutton:
maybe you're trying to hit a certain kind of target ACoS. Maybe you want to use our algorithm that maximizes the number of impressions. Maybe you want to maximize the number of orders. Maybe you want to use one of your custom bid algorithms, all right. So before for auto campaigns, you weren't able to set these, but now for the auto campaigns, you can go ahead and choose one of our algorithms or one of your own and go ahead and activate it right there. So I highly suggest everybody go ahead and do that if you're using Adtomic. Last up, we've got Shivali here for our training tip of the week and it has to do with a keyword research technique, a very, very simple way that, within seconds, you can get tons of keyword ideas based on you entering a keyword into our tool, Magnet, Shivali. Take it away.
Shivali:
How to find long tail keywords from a root keyword or phrase. Why is this important and how can you use it to make money? Well, as an Amazon FBA seller, of course you're interested in ranking on the top half of page one for your main keywords as well as your supplementary keywords. But how exactly can you lead to even more conversions? Well, of course you want to get in front of a audience that is ready to purchase, and the best way to identify that is by taking a look at your long tail keywords. What exactly do I mean by that? Well, these are those keywords that have maybe two, three, four, five additional words in the actual search term. And by taking a look at those search terms, right, you're starting to take a look at those people who are ready to purchase their warmer leads. They know what they're looking for, and that means that they are ready to buy so long as you can convey exactly what it is that you are selling and it matches what they have on their mind.
Shivali:
So let's go ahead and take a look at Magnet. I'm going to show you a filter you can use, and that is simply this word count filter right here inside of Magnet, that you can use to input a minimum or maximum and narrow down your search results. So I went ahead and inputted coffin shelf as our main seed keyword and clicked get keywords. We were outputted 3,204 filtered keywords in results. And then I want to narrow that down further by finding those really excited consumers. I'm going to go in and input in a minimum of four, I'm going to click apply and, as you can see, it immediately narrowed that down to 792 filtered keywords compared to the 3000 plus we had before. Now, of course, not all of these are going to be relevant. I'm already seeing that instead of the coffin shelf, we're now taking a look at Vampire Diaries makeup. That's not really relevant at all. So let's go ahead and combine this with the phrases containing filter and I can input in coffin, click apply filters and you'll see that automatically narrows me down even further to 157 filtered keywords.
Shivali:
Now this was a very, very fast way for you to go from 3000 filtered keywords into 157 and find keyword phrases where people are looking for something very specific. Of course, if I were a consumer and I were typing in bookshelf, that's going to be a significantly different feel and probably browsing for different styles of bookshelves, compared to somebody that's typing in coffin shaped bookshelf or coffin shelf or coffin bookshelf large six feet tall. So this is a very precise market and of course I'll still want to go in and open each one of these up and see whether or not the search term is relevant to our product. But of course this is really easy to also remove if I realize that that's not a phrase I want to maintain as part of my listing later on.
Shivali:
So, as you can see, this is a really easy way for you to find those really strong buyer intent keywords or key phrases that you are looking for. That can help you boost your conversions really fast. Of course you want to be ranking for those keywords and you want to drive traffic and all of that's great, but you also want to convert and so when you're using those longer tail keywords, you can get in front of audiences that are looking for something specific and that allows you to make that conversion a little bit easier. So that barrier to entry to actually get them to purchase is so much better when you are using words that are a little bit longer in length. So with this, I hope you go into Magnet, you implement, you take a look at those long tail keywords and you find success. I will catch you in the next video.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you very much, Shivali, for that. I really recommend, if you guys haven't done it recently, even if you've already been selling for a while, go ahead and put some of your main keywords, especially if it's a not a long tail keyword. Put that into Magnet and just see what comes up. hit the smart complete button, for once you have the keywords that come up. After you put your main keyword in there and see how many keywords come up, and I bet you, I guarantee you, there's going to be keywords that are completely related to your main keyword because it's your main keyword is literally a part of those keywords that you possibly didn't even know had search for him. So that's just like a cool little homework assignment for you guys. All right, thanks everybody for joining us this week. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.
Picture this: Three successful Amazon sellers from each corner of the globe sat down in a quaint Italian café, their journeys colliding over a shared passion for selling on Amazon. In this episode, we're chatting with Peter and Franco, our guests who symbolize the true essence of a global Amazon seller. Born in the US, raised in Australia, and operating out of Asia, Peter's journey through the world of Amazon selling is a fascinating tale. Then we have Franco, an Italian native who transitioned from a traditional upbringing to become a leading e-commerce entrepreneur. We listen to their stories, not just the triumphs but also the trials, like the time Franco’s competitor created fake test reports to tarnish his reputation. Venture with us as Franco shares his extraordinary journey as an Amazon seller. From hitting his peak year of gross sales to navigating the fiercely competitive medical device field category, his story truly is a rollercoaster ride. Then we turn to Peter, who climbed to the number one spot in the health and personal care category within a mere three weeks. His dedication to producing reliable products and setting the right price point made him a standout entrepreneur. His unwavering commitment to his product and the pursuit of excellence are lessons for every budding e-commerce entrepreneur.
As we bid our Italian farewell, we delve into Franco and Peter's strategies for success, from image testing to understanding European selling regulations and leveraging social media. Get a peek into Franco's vision of reaching nine figures and perhaps even owning a football team in Italy. We draw the final curtain discussing the potential of the Italian Amazon community and the role Amazon plays in shaping the European market. Join us for this riveting conversation brimming with success stories, challenges, and unique experiences in the world of Amazon selling. We promise it's worth the listen!
In episode 509 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Franco, and Peter discuss:
- 00:00 - From Italy to Amazon
- 01:55 - Discovering Cultural Diversity in a Podcast
- 04:01 - From Australia to Italy
- 11:21 - Launching Products in Global Markets
- 14:58 - Challenges and Successes on Amazon
- 16:29 - Medical Device Field Competition and Tactics
- 24:32 - Strategies for Amazon Success
- 27:54 - Challenges With Listing Product on Amazon
- 32:35 - European Market Testing and Selling Strategies
- 36:21 - Discussion on Translations for International Marketplaces
- 39:25 - Italian Farewell and Appreciation for Italy
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got sellers in the show that I originally met in Italy and now they're selling millions of dollars on Amazon. We're going to hear their story, which includes a case where one of their competitors even sent fake reports to the media about their product safety in order to get them kicked off of Amazon. How crazy is that? Pretty crazy, I think. What was your gross sales yesterday, last week, last year? More importantly, what are your profits after all, your cost of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool Profits. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash profits. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And today we are doing what I think is a first we are having a three continent podcast at the same time. We're not recording this separately. I'm here in North America, we've got Peter, who, I believe, is in the Asian continent, and we've got Franco, who is in Europe. So welcome to the show. And the funny thing is, I met all of them in person, at least in Italy, which is why I'm wearing my Mona Lisa shirt, my Mona Lisa shirt, here. So anyways, welcome to the show, guys, and good afternoon and good morning to Franco, and it's good evening here.
Peter:
Thanks for having us.
Bradley Sutton:
Now I, as I said, I met these gentlemen at a conference in Milan, Italy, recently and you know, just talking to them a little bit and I was like man, all right, I don't want to know too much more because this sounds interesting and I just love to find out about the rest of you know your stories. You know, along with everybody else, the podcast. Now, that was like a couple months ago. So the cool thing is, you know, with my terrible memory, the little that they did tell me I've already forgotten. So, guys, I am going to be learning everything you know, right, right with you, with all the listeners today. So let's, first of all, you know the first thing that that that blew me away was, here's Peter, and you guys can't see him. You know he, he is, he's in Asia right now and he is of Asian descent. You know like he looks. I'm half Asian. I don't look Asian. Peter looks Asian and here he is sitting with me in this Italian restaurant and ordering in perfect Italian, like, what? Like? Do I really have jet lag? What is going on right here? Let's start with your backstory, were you? Uh, oh, yeah. And, by the way, the way he speaks English was also a little bit different, so were you. Were you born and raised in Australia, or were you born and raised?
Peter:
Yes, sir, I grew up in Australia, but actually I was, I was. I was born in the States. I don't know if I mentioned that in the state.
Bradley Sutton:
That makes it even more interesting I love it when we're about here in the States, in Minneapolis, minneapolis Okay, man, that's, that's. That's still the coldest I've ever been. Uh, not sure I want to go back there in winter, but all right. So you were in Minneapolis, and how? I mean? You know, the Minneapolis Australia connection is not very common, so how did that happen?
Peter:
Yeah, so if I take it back a step further, as you said, um, I'm, I'm Asian. My parents were born in China.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Peter:
And they. They met in the US, so that's why I was born there, okay. And then, after um, they finished their studies, they decided they wanted to move to Australia. So when I was a baby, still be immigrated to Australia.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. And then now, growing up in Australia, what do you think you're going to be when you grow?
Peter:
Yeah, I didn't have any, you know, any special, different aspirations. I was like all the other kids.
Bradley Sutton:
Fine.
Franco:
Anything like that.
Peter:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Peter:
I didn't think of being an entrepreneur or a commerce guy or anything like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you go to university in Australia?
Peter:
Yes, I did. I studied engineering Engineering. I had a very traditional upbringing?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, okay. And then, upon graduation, did you start working in that field?
Peter:
Yes, I did I um. So as I had no real exposure to my Asian roots, I wanted to do one year in Asia. So I ended up working in Hong Kong. So I worked in uh in Hong Kong for a little while with uh in the engineering field related to engineering.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you speak Chinese?
Peter:
I did not. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to go to Asia, because, growing up in Australia, yeah. At that time, I was the only Asian kid in school. Um, there was no real interaction with other families or anything, so, um, I just spoke English.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, Now you know USA to Australia, to Hong Kong, how do you end up speaking Italian?
Peter:
So when I was in Hong Kong, um, I got headhunted for a job in Italy. So, yeah, I took the opportunity and went over there and um lived there for a few years and worked there for a few years.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, that's cool that you learn the language. You know some people, uh, you know, go to other countries and you know years and they don't are not able to learn the language. That's a, that's a cool, uh cool skill there and and all right. So so that brings us to. I mean, obviously you're not in Italy anymore, so how long did you stay in Italy?
Peter:
Right, uh, I think it was about five years. About five years, about five years in a minute. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, and it was it during your your run in Italy there that you learned that you started on Amazon. Or how did you go from engineering to e-commerce?
Peter:
No. So, um, while I was in Italy, I also got headhunted for another job and I was moved to Shanghai. And while I was in Shanghai, I met a one of my friends who I did sport with, was very much into Amazon, and he always kept talking about it. And then, finally, uh, one day I said this sounds really interesting. Why don't you show me what you're doing? And I offered to invest in what he he was his business, because it sounded like it was really good. And he said no, why don't you just try yourself? So I did it as a um, as a hobby, for a while, and then eventually it became became a full time thing.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. All right. Now we're caught up to to kind of like the e-commerce list. Let's go ahead and take the journey with with Franco. Now for you it's a lot easier backstory Were you born and raised in Italy and lived there your whole life? Or or do you live in 17 million countries like, uh, peter?
Franco:
No, I was born and raised in Italy. I passed a couple of years in China, but it means that I was there like uh, every month of April and every month of October since 2003. So it's not was not like living permanently there. I was living in a hotel. So basically, I've been living my life in Italy.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. Now. What about you? Uh, what did you go to university for?
Franco:
I did pure maths and when I was starting at the university, I thought that I would be doing academia after that. Okay, and then it changed my mind.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, what so? Upon graduation then, what did you enter into if you didn't want to go ahead and take that route that you thought you were going to take?
Franco:
Yeah, I did. When I graduated I didn't really know what to do because I changed my mind. I didn't want to be a university professor of math, so I was going into my other side of me, that was, being an entrepreneur. So I did an MBA and after that MBA I worked for a couple of years as a marketing assistant in a company and during that time I founded two companies, two different ones, with friends of mine. And then I resigned and from that point I always been an entrepreneur.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. So what year did you go full-on into e-commerce? Then what did you say?
Franco:
I went into e-commerce probably more than 10 years ago.
Bradley Sutton:
Dot com or other marketplaces, or what Now?
Franco:
in Europe, we're selling.
Bradley Sutton:
At that time, what I meant was yeah, the dot com is on Europe, but what I meant was like online sales or was it like a marketplace that you were on?
Franco:
No, it was our own e-commerce, our own website, and I was selling on with my company. I was selling rubber trucks that are the equivalent of tire for excavators and accessories for construction equipment, so something that probably even today you cannot sell on Amazon because like super huge and super heavy.
Bradley Sutton:
So you exited that company and then you said you became like a full-time entrepreneur. What was that endeavor like Full-time into? Like what was your? Was it just still online sales, or now you got into Amazon, or what happened there?
Franco:
Okay, so well, now most of my time is well, 100% of my time is on Amazon. But yeah, the other company, the one that's now, is doing Amazon as a long story, because it started in 1999. And we've been doing so many different stuff because we started from scratch with nothing. So we started doing multimedia content, then we went into doing CD and DVD duplication that means producing physical discs, then USB flash drives, accessories for smartphones, electronics in general, and then medical devices. When we went into medical devices, we went quite big on our e-commerce. That was not something that we were doing in this company. We're doing business to business mainly. And then from that, we went into Amazon. Not that we even had tried to do Amazon before, because we opened the Amazon account in 2014. But it was just a sort of let's see what's happening there, not really investing in that. So we were becoming big on Amazon since 2020.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, now we're kind of caught up in a similar timeline here. Let's go back to Peter then. Are you still selling your first product today, peter?
Peter:
Yes, I think I started with two or three, and all of those three products I'm still selling. How? Long has that been?
Bradley Sutton:
I started in 2017.
Peter:
Wow.
Bradley Sutton:
The same product. How many reviews do you have now approximately on that one?
Peter:
Maybe 3,000 or something like that. Reviews and ratings.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so you're still selling the same stuff that you got into. How did you find that first product? Did you just take some course that a lot of people did and then just use the criteria to find the product and just struck gold in your first one? Or how in the world did you hit a home run with your very first product?
Peter:
So my friend had done the ASM course and so he suggested I did it as well. He told me the beginnings that I was doing the normal thing everyone was doing Just looking for a product that had an opportunity, that seemed like a good, not too competitive, good price, etc. Etc. And I was just lucky, I picked something that could last well.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, during this time you said you were back in China or were you in Italy?
Peter:
No, I was already in Shanghai at that point.
Bradley Sutton:
Ready in China? Okay, and then. So what marketplace did you launch this product on? Usa or Europe?
Peter:
Yeah, so I started in the USA. But I think within the first year I knew I wanted to be in Europe. So I immediately started in the European marketplace. I applied for VAT and everything. So yeah, pretty soon after the US Europe, I was into Europe.
Bradley Sutton:
Now? Was it any more easy than another person because you had lived in Italy before, or that meant nothing? Were you an American citizen, since you were born in America?
Peter:
Technically I have dual citizenship, but I always traveled on Australian passport. But, answering your question. So when I started Europe, I wanted to try the UK and Italy first before going into all the other countries. So, yes, there would have been a small advantage, starting with the Italian market, because I didn't have to worry too much about translations and more understanding what things were going. So small advantage, I would say, but not huge advantage.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, All right Now. In the first couple of years of selling on Amazon, what was your peak of sales for like a year? Gross sales.
Peter:
I think it was about the second or the third year I reached seven figures. So I was going at seven figures for a while, but in the last two years I decided to focus more on profitability than revenue. So it's now in six figures, but making more profit overall. Now at what?
Bradley Sutton:
point did, like you said, it become your full-time job. At what level did you have to get to for it, to replace your engineering jobs that you've been doing for most of your adult?
Peter:
life. Yeah, I was able to replace it. I think it was maybe three or four years into the business, maybe four years.
Bradley Sutton:
You say you sell in multiple marketplaces. Do you aim for the same profit across the board, or is there a marketplace that's giving you better profit over another?
Peter:
For sure, Europe is way more profitable than the US, for products Is it? The shipping? Is it the?
Bradley Sutton:
PPC or what's you know, you're able to charge a higher price. What's the difference?
Peter:
It's the sellers in Europe. There's less of them, in my category at least, and the sellers are less sophisticated so they're not as good at branding PPC and just the basic stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right, let's go back to Franco then. So when you started on, amazon sounds like you started doing different things, but was there a point where you were only doing the medical devices, as you said, or did you start with only medical devices and that's all you've been doing this whole time?
Franco:
When I started in 2014,. We started with electronic, with accessories for smartphones, but I mean, we were making money with other stuff, so we were, we didn't really take it care of a lot about that and we were a little bit inexperienced. So we also did a couple of mistakes, like in the quality of the products. So we just like got a lot of bad reviews and we say, okay, we are making other stuff, we don't care about this, and we just kept the account open but we didn't use it. When, in 2020, we started doing medical devices, we went big almost immediately on Amazon. But before that, as I said, we were doing pretty well, like six or seven months before, on our e-commerce. That was the same e-commerce that was selling the electronics. That was like that website that we changed it and were you?
Bradley Sutton:
and were you only selling in Amazon Europe?
Franco:
Yes, because I'm proud to do not have the certification for selling in the US. They are very highly restricted and certified, so the regulatory stuff in US is completely different.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, what's been your peak year of gross sales? Approximately how much? 10 million, 10 million only in Europe in one year in medical devices. Yes, wow, is it safe to say that now Amazon is the main, as opposed to your?
Franco:
website. Are you still even?
Bradley Sutton:
doing anything on the websites or just all Amazon.
Franco:
We still have it. But I think it's very important because one of the reasons why we were successful on Amazon is because we know so well our customer. We know so well what they want from the product and when we launch a product we can tell to our customer. There is also this new product. You can also find this in Amazon, so it gives a lot of help. But because of the growth that we had on Amazon, we have a little bit of neglected our website. So as soon as we have more banned, we should keep making the website better and grow the website as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, as Peter was saying, europe is very profitable for him, partly in fact due to low competition. I would imagine being in the medical device field makes it even less competition. Would that be a fair assessment that it's very few competitors you have, or has it gotten a little bit more tough to?
Franco:
So I would say there are not so many, but the ones that are there are very aggressive, okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Aggressive as in they might do some black hat strategies and things like that, or what do you mean by aggressive?
Franco:
Yes, also Because on medical, it's very like you can get suspended for any kind of claim. So yeah, it's quite an aggressive field.
Bradley Sutton:
What's the craziest thing that has happened to you. I would assume that you've maybe had your account shut down or at least products suspended or what's been some crazy experiences you've had.
Franco:
The craziest things that happened to me was a competitor that wanted to get rid of all the big seller of the same product, so it creates some fake test report. It passed those tests to the media and from media they went on national TV and that was insane At the same time. Hold on, hold on.
Bradley Sutton:
So he made some fake report about like that your product is like unsafe, or something gave it to like a TV station and it got in TV.
Franco:
The first thing to give it to the media, to a newspaper To a newspaper and it made the biggest newspaper. From the newspaper, bump it to the national TV.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, and then and then. So what was the result? Like, did Amazon see that and then shut you down, or did you start getting bad reviews, or what?
Franco:
happened At the same. We were waiting experience on all the way to do stuff properly on Amazon. I mean, we didn't even have the brand registry at that time, so they were also able to hijack. At the same time, they hijacked our product and they left all our picture, the branding of our product, but we could not access our listing anymore. It's insane. I know it's insane.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow.
Franco:
Up to now I haven't heard of anyone that has an attack like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, it's intense.
Franco:
Yeah, and after like so the listing was destroyed because one month to get back the ownership of the listing and when it happened it was not possible to. I mean, it was like flu. That was probably more than a thousand of bad reviews, one thousand of, like one star reviews.
Bradley Sutton:
Now did the newspapers and media and stuff? Did they ever submit like retraction or correction?
Franco:
Oh well, yes, the newspaper, they we submitted like a press release, the newspaper, the newspaper added our press release to our today news. But customers don't really care. I mean, amazon business is a quick business, it's very quick. So we went, we look into that with, probably I think that the best lawyer we could find we usually have very good lawyers and there was no other way to have it fixed as soon as we wanted or to have like an economical compensation because of the way it was structured. Okay, the attack.
Bradley Sutton:
All right Now, peter, you know like it's safe to say that you've never had that level of attack, or you know?
Peter:
I don't think anybody has had that level of attack. So but I'm sure you have had my things on national television.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I'm sure you've had some crazy things happen. Anything like anything that's happened to you. That would you say. You would call it. You know, your, your, your your kind of like worse experience on Amazon or craziest experience.
Peter:
I haven't had anything really horrible. I've had a lot of the standard like minor attacks from competitors, but probably the scariest one I had was Just I think it was three weeks before Christmas a big competitor in our space did an IP complaint against me and had my products suspended, but luckily I was able to get it back within a week. That could have easily dragged on for months, but I was very lucky. I got it back in a week. That was obviously very scary. How did you get it back? Just submitted appeals I used. I have a lawyer which I use all the time and even they said that's way faster than we normally see. You were really lucky. So I was just super lucky.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now you know let's not just scare everybody with all these bad stories. Peter, you know, sticking with you what's the best thing that's happened You're the craziest in a good way or biggest surprise, or biggest win you've had over the years on Amazon.
Peter:
I think the first one, which was really a happy experience for me. I've heard other guests on your podcast. I think they're similar. I had a product, one of my standard products, and in the UK suddenly I was having 10 times sales that I normally have. So and this was quite early on, so I still didn't know about being attacked, so I wasn't worried like I would be now, and in those days you could still write to the customers quite easily. So I was writing to a few of them and I got a response back that a celebrity. I've seen the products used by a celebrity on their you know, on their social media. So yeah, that was fantastic and yeah, I knew that celebrity. So it was pretty cool.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. Now you know you've sold in multiple marketplaces, but you know you're probably an expert, I would say on the Italian one. Is what you do on Amazon Italy, 100% the same strategy across the board? Like, I mean, obviously the language is different, but is your PPC strategy the same? Is your branding strategy the same? Is your keyword research strategy the same, or is there something different that you're doing in Italy? You know due to your experience there.
Peter:
No, I would say everything's particularly the same. As I mentioned before, it was a small advantage, and even now it's practically no advantage with the translation software that's available. So I'm just doing the same thing in all the marketplaces.
Bradley Sutton:
That's good to know, because you know some sellers out there. You know they start in a marketplace, whether it's Italy, whether it's Germany, whether it's USA, and they're like kind of scared sometimes to branch out because they're like oh man, I'm gonna have to learn a whole bunch of new strategies to go to this new marketplace. But no, it's across the board. I mean sure. You know every now, and you know there's VAT, you know, and then in Japan you might have to do a little something different. You know, but for the most part the strategy is the same. Now, what's going on these days with you know? You mentioned you sell in UK and Italy. What changed after the Brexit? Like, now do you have to send inventory to UK and then send inventory to Italy separately, and it's completely separated and segregated, or what was the difference after Brexit?
Peter:
Yeah, so you've probably heard of Pan-European and probably you'll. Listeners who have some experience know about Pan-European. Maybe I can explain that really quickly. Go ahead, please. It's like the US when you send a shipment to, it goes to one location and then Amazon will spread it out all over the US, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, we call that. North American remote fulfillment is what it's called over here.
Peter:
Right, so they have the same thing in Europe. If you're VAT, you registered in their core countries, which was UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain I think that's all of them. It was the same thing. You'd send it to one country and then they would spread it out amongst all the countries as if it was one country. So that was very convenient. When Brexit happened, the UK became its own separate country, so all the work that you do logistically, which you used to do for Europe, then you had to repeat it for the UK. So it's a bit of a hassle, time-wise.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. Now, switching back to Franco, you had the worst thing that somebody could possibly imagine happening. Now the same question that I gave Peter what was the best thing that's happening? I mean, other than the fact that you're not even selling the USA and you can still gross 10 million a year? I mean that by itself is pretty amazing, but what else other than that is a cool thing. That's happened to kind of like pump up people's spirits after feeling so sorry for you.
Franco:
Yeah, well, I think that if I put on my hand the bad thing and the other thing, the good things, the good thing outweigh the bad thing. And the best one was the velocity to which we could reach the number one in health and personal care category with our products like in three weeks.
Bradley Sutton:
So number one, as in BSR, one in the whole health category.
Franco:
Yes, yes, Wow, that's pretty impressive. Yeah, that was between 2020 and 2021,. We reached that position in like three weeks with our product.
Bradley Sutton:
that's why we got a time Three weeks from the time you launched yes, Wow, okay, well, okay, well, then tell me, I gotta pause you there. Then how in the world did that happen? Like, did you have some crazy campaign? Was it all organic?
Franco:
How would you go from zero to number one so fast? No, they were proud of the COVID.
Bradley Sutton:
Ah, okay, okay, that's the reason. Now, did you was this after COVID you started? Or did you just get lucky, like it was something you were starting and you had no idea COVID was happening and the timing was just right? Or how in the world did you manage that?
Franco:
Well, we have been manufacturing in China since, I told you, since 2003,. We have a very strong presence in China, and so when COVID hit in China in January 2020, I knew it was coming to Italy or to Europe. I was pretty sure. I also wrote article about that, and so when that happened, I was a sort of reference for many people to say, hey, can you help in something? Because you know, italy was the first country in the Western world to be hit very hard, and so we started doing those like masks, those kind of product for COVID, and at the beginning, we were just doing that for hospitals, like for what was really needed.
Franco:
And then after that, we went to doing this on our e-commerce and the reason was that we ran out of money because the request was so insane Because we look into that so deeply that we were 100% legit. Our problem was like, probably the safest you can buy at the right price. We didn't want to speculate. We really want to have the country, and so we had a good product at the right price and we have an insane amount of demand for all those state-owned stuff, like the police even the finance police was buying from us. And so when we ran out of money. We opened the e-commerce because we need some very short money cycles and you know, on e-commerce you get the money like right away. And so after that, six months later, and also we got a lot of. Our e-commerce was an instant success as well, because we were supplying all the hospitals and so our product with our brand was in every hand, everyone hands and so our e-commerce was an instant success.
Franco:
And then we asked it like in April 2020, to our product to be listed on Amazon, and Amazon didn't accept it. And you have to consider that at that time on Amazon, it was fluted with product that were not legit, like all the things you were finding on Amazon related to the kind of product was like not compliant. We submitted our product. We were rejected. We said, okay, I don't care, I have other stuff to do. And then in October, I tried to resubmit the product. It was rejected again, okay, but in November, for I don't know what I receive, like Without asking again to to be listed, the I so the listing the listing was there but was not like, not active. The list he became active.
Franco:
From that point, I think that because we have so much, I'd say, brand recognition, yeah. Trust from the customer. As soon as we told the customer we are on Amazon was like that. I mean, we could have been number one, probably in a week. The only problem was the, the velocity, and that we need to have the product on their warehouse. Yeah, and so it was like giving three days out of stock. One day, then three, because of the space that Amazon was giving us, because when you are number one, you have to send a truck every day, or even more and and so, yeah, that's the story, that's cool.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, you know, for the last part of this, you know let's just go back and forth with some, some strategies, you know, and I don't mean, oh, you know, keep your a cost down and and and have a nice logo, or you know it's just standard stuff. But you know each of you to be at the position you are, you know which is, you know Amazon is your full-time business and you've reached six, seven, even eight figures. You know you've got to have some, some unique strategies and some, some things that are that you feel are the difference of why you've been so successful. So we'll start, you know, franco, with you. What is something that you know? So you know, it could be a PPC strategy, it could be a launch strategy, could be branding strategy. Uh, what? What's your first strategy of the day?
Franco:
I think that's still uh, the obsession with the product is a key. So like, uh, having the best product you can have for your customers, and so listening to all the advice and Now you can use AI and do all your research. But, uh, do the extra, the extra mile. Don't only use AI, because AI is very good to finding, um, like patterns, like to put in together Something that is saying a different way, but it's not good to find out liars, and many times in the outliers there are some very good gold nuggets, so talk with as many as you can, even even call them and Understand what are they paying, what are they, what they really want.
Franco:
When you have the best possible product, then you need to apply all the techniques that amazon Required. Like I have the best possible page. Uh, add those pains and uh, emotion of the customer reflected in your stack image At the best possible main image ever. Like, do a lot of testing, an insane amount of testing, until you know you will be the number one choice and never Let the customer down. Whatever they have a problem, solve it, solve it. Solve it, because then you have To, you have to reach the position, then you have to stick to in the position. Yeah, it's an ever-ending story.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, switching back to peter. Uh, what's your um first strategy you'd like to share?
Peter:
Uh, I'd give a general one and then maybe an amazon specific one. Very general. Uh, I think there's a lot of listeners on your podcast that are maybe just starting out, so I would suggest just to keep things simple. I've seen some people they they try and go to advanced from the beginning and it's uh, they get in over their head. They don't understand what's happening. So I would just keep it simple, even though I've been doing it for a long time. I I also Follow the same principle. I don't have any, I don't have any full-time staff. I I just try and keep things as simple as possible. And then, specifically for amazon, as I mentioned before, I think if you're, especially if you're getting started, you really need to think about products or a product that you can brand. And if you, if you can't brand a product for example, if you're doing I don't know stationary or Cleaning accessories or something, it's very difficult to build a brand around that, to build User excitement. So that's something you probably need to consider as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, Going back to Franco, you know like you can give us another strategy, but before you do that, I wanted to kind of like double down on what you were talking about. You know you were saying hey, you know, have the best listening, have the best images and and do a lot of testing. How are you doing this testing and how are you making sure that? You have you know the best.
Franco:
Well, I'm using all the Software as a service, as a this are available. So I like take my few four competitors and I test my main image against their, I mean against the main image of my competitors. Then I got all the advice from the pollers, like we choose this because of this, we don't like this because of that. We run AI on that. But we don't only run AI.
Franco:
I read all the response one by one and I try to see how can make it. I can make it better. And then I write like Something that, what, what need to be done. I pass this to my and I try to be very, very Pacific. Like many times, I take a piece of paper and make driving by myself, like this is how I want this to be, and then I pass to my designer and then the designer make a new Couple of variation and it test again and sometimes I go very deeply on that. Like I am not happy until, like I get that out of five possible choice of main image, my main image gets 60% of the clicks and the other four share the 40%.
Bradley Sutton:
So it's not just a matter of all right, hey, I won with 30%, another one has 28, another one has 26. That's even though you won. That's a failure to you until you can get to the 60%.
Franco:
Yeah, I won like 60% and 40% spread between the other four, then I know that I'll stand out, and this is the first step. Then I need to like the page has to be consistent. And then I need to maintain my promise to the customer.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you selling? You're still with Franco here. Are you selling in all European marketplaces, like including the newer ones like Poland, netherlands, or are you focused only on the bigger ones?
Franco:
So my sellers, I sell both on one P vendor center and three P seller central and I have all the accounts. I mean all the nine accounts in Europe, but the only one that really matters are the big five UK, Italy, Germany, Spain and France. And for the most of my product I cannot use the Pan European, as Pita does, because there are specific regulations for each. So there is on top there is the EU regulation, but then there are specific regulation on a country level. So, amazon, do not allow us to do the Pan AU. We need to stop the product on each country.
Peter:
Okay, that's a lot of work and increases your workload to manage your logistics in each country like that.
Franco:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, going back to Peter, you have any more strategies for us. But before you get to that, what about you? You mentioned UK and Italy. Are you also selling in all nine marketplaces, or are you only keeping your listings active in the big ones?
Peter:
Yeah, it was only UK and Italy when I first started in Europe to get an idea of how it worked.
Bradley Sutton:
And almost immediately.
Peter:
I think I only did UK and Italy for three months and then straight away I went into the Pan European.
Bradley Sutton:
So for the last few years.
Peter:
I've been, yeah, outside of the big five.
Bradley Sutton:
If you have to pick one of the newer ones, are they all doing equal or is there one that you feel? Hey, down the road, this could become the sixth one, that's a good question.
Peter:
Now I haven't really focused on any of the new ones. I think whether you're Belgium, sweden, I can't remember, but Poland's Check for public. But from what I've seen they're all very minimal. I haven't really put an effort into them. I wouldn't say there's one that particularly stands out.
Bradley Sutton:
And then for all of those, are you just using what Amazon does for the auto translation, or did you, did you commission official translation with a service or something? Obviously, you did the Italian one yourself, but what about for these other languages?
Peter:
Actually, I didn't do the Italian one myself. I used Yana's service, ylt shout out to Yana. But for the other marketplaces, no, I haven't specifically worked on those. I've just left it with Amazon doing their own translations, and then they have a similar system to NAF. So, for like for Canada and Mexico, then for the other countries that we just mentioned, they'll take the product from Germany or France or wherever, and then send it over. It's a similar system.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. Any more specific strategies for us that you'd like to?
Peter:
share. I do a lot on social media. I don't know if you've seen that's been a huge part of improving profitability in the last two years. So the PPC costs were going up incredibly Like for us. It was getting. Tacos was getting up to 30%, maybe even 40% for some products and now, with some strong, a lot of work on the social media side and managed to bring that down to less than 5%, which I think is quite rare in the industry for the TACOS Less than 5% TACOS. Wow, that's very impressive and most of the TACOS is brand defense on the product page. So, yeah, that's been huge for us to make that change.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. What does the future hold for you, Franco? Like you, just hey, let's just keep going. Or are you looking to exit your business and retire? You looking to start any more brands, or what's your you looking one year down the road, five years down the road? Buying a lower division Italians football team, or like what's gonna, what's gonna.
Franco:
Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe Now. Well, my dream would be to. I have my figure. My company reached nine figures. That's a very, very difficult endeavor, and at that level.
Bradley Sutton:
I think you might be ready for Inter Milan or AC Milan.
Franco:
Forget the lower division, you'll be ready.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's buy one of those.
Franco:
What else. And that could be through acquisitions of other brands or through expanding our product range. We have been looking to many, many things, okay what about you, Peter?
Bradley Sutton:
What's the future hold for you?
Peter:
Yeah, I'm just happy doing what I'm doing. I don't have any new term plans to sell the business. Enjoy what I do and just gonna keep going.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, excellent. Now why don't we just go ahead and close this out with a one or two sentence words of farewell in Italiano here. Start with Franco. Say something for the Italian community out there.
Franco:
The Italian community of the Amazon vendors has to grow to a great potential. Amazon has become one of the most important markets in Europe. So, guys, we're gonna win Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, and, peter, where were your Italian words of wisdom?
Peter:
Italian. If someone in Italy hears this, I'll pass their Shanghai. So they're content with the Vedetti.
Bradley Sutton:
All right.
Peter:
I have no idea.
Bradley Sutton:
This host of the podcast is a crazy guy.
Peter:
Shoot a sexy host of this podcast is what I said.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, there we go. That's good, I'll believe that. All right. Well, guys, thank you so much. It was great to have you on. It was great to meet you and hang out in Italy. We found that little nice restaurant that I was not expecting much, but I was really, really delicious food. My whole time in Italy was good food, but I look forward to seeing you at a future conference, whether it be in Asia, north America or Europe. So thanks for coming on.
Peter:
Thank you.
Franco:
Thank you.
In this third installment of our Seller Strategy Masterclass for Amazon keyword research, we pull back the curtain on advanced Amazon keyword research strategies, unveiling how discovering what keywords competitors are getting sales from - ones you don't even have in your listing - can revolutionize your Amazon FBA business. We shed light on the power of Helium 10's keyword research tool, Cerebro, and how it can swiftly identify highly searched keywords that your product is ranking for. We also discuss the clever use of the multi-ASIN search to see which keywords your competitors are capitalizing on that you aren't even indexed for.
Continuing the conversation, we explore the advantage of understanding your relative rank on relevant keywords, and how to use filters to spot keywords where your competitors outrank you. We share some keen insights on how to leverage sponsored ads to boost your rank, and even how to find keywords that your competitors aren't running sponsored ads for. We believe that this strategy could make you a ton of money. Listen in as we divulge ways to automate keyword research, and how to use Magnet to identify loosely related keywords and get quick information on a list of keywords. Wrapping up the discussion, we delve into how you can get ahead of your competitors by finding hidden gems and uncovering keywords that your competitors are getting sales from that you may not have thought of. We provide guidance on using Magnet to find the most searched terms starting with a word or phrase and using the word frequency feature to identify trends. We also show you how to use auto-complete to quickly find the most searched terms. Don't miss out on this episode filled with actionable strategies that you can implement right away to give your business a competitive edge!
In episode 508 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:
- 00:00 - Advanced Strategies for Amazon Keyword Research
- 10:36 - Product Placement for Competitor's Importance
- 16:39 - Sponsored Rank Average and Keyword Competitors
- 20:05 - New Feature in Cerebro
- 23:16 - Automating Competitor Keyword Tracking
- 27:47 - Analyzing Keywords Using Magnet
- 32:55 - Expanding Niche With Keyword Filters
- 39:32 - Keyword Search Volume and Popularity Ranking
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today is the final part in a three part series on advanced Amazon keyword research, and we're going to talk about really cool strategies, such as how to find out what keywords competitors are getting sales from that you don't even have in your listing. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think you want to know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10's keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that's just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it's the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. h10.me/cerebro. Don't forget to use the Cereous Sellers podcast discount coupon SSP10.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and today is part three in a three part series where we've been giving you guys just nonstop fire strategies all about keyword research, and I've been telling you in these episodes these are the kind of strategies that could potentially make you thousands of dollars. And if you want to raise my flag in other words the BS flag on that statement, let me just illustrate why I say that it could mean thousands of dollars easily. All right, let's just say you're a newish seller, all right, maybe you've only got one product and it's doing pretty good. You know, maybe you're projected to get about $100,000 worth of sales for a year. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Now how many sales come from search? You know it varies by category, varies by product. If you take a look at your search career performance and look at the attributed sales to keywords that actually happen within 24 hours of the click, it's kind of a long, a long story how to calculate that out, but you know, maybe you see that 30% of your sales come from keywords. Now, obviously there's probably more that comes from it, just from your PPC alone. But again, let's just talk about that stuff that happens within 24 hours of a search of a keyword, which is called a denormalized search results. All right, so 30% of your sales come from keywords and you're doing 100,000 a year. That's like $30,000 come from keywords. Right Now, let's just say that, hey, that $30,000 that comes from keywords, it's from like 30 main keywords that you have already, on your own, found and you're getting sales from.
Bradley Sutton:
Now. Imagine if you could just add five more strategies, all right, total, I've given you, or at the end of today, you'll have 30 different keyword strategies that I've been giving you in episodes, or the the first edition, the second edition, now the third edition uh, over 30 strategies. From those 30 strategies, let's just say, for some strange reason, all you can get out of it is only five more keywords to get sales. Only five more keywords, all right, how much is that? If you were already getting $30,000 from 30 keywords, you just added a thousand dollars worth of sales for the year. All right, let's just say, no, you don't just have one product. You've been selling on Amazon for a few years. You got maybe 10 products doing about a million dollars a year. Total, all right, not even each, just just total.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, how much if you're adding like five, only five keywords that you've discovered through these strategies, all right, that's $10,000 worth of extra sales just by following some of these strategies. Now, I really think you guys can get more than five new keywords out of these 30 strategies that we've given you. So, again, if you're just hopping in on this episode, you can go ahead and listen to it, but, but I suggest watching the? Uh, the other two episodes first. Now, those episodes are 506 and 507. Uh, if you're watching this on the web, you can just get that at h10.me forward slash 506 or forward slash 507 and catch it on YouTube. But anyways, um, even if you just want to go ahead and keep watching this, no problem, all right, let's go ahead and hop into the strategies. All right, uh, this is, if you guys have been keeping count, this is strategy number 21,.
Bradley Sutton:
Out of our Cerebro strategies, all right, and this one is how to see which keywords your competitors are getting sales from that you aren't even indexed for. Now, why is this important? How can it make you money? Well, this is like the easiest no brainer of them. All right, your competitors very similar product to you. They're literally getting sales from a keyword because you know they're high on page one. Uh, for a decent search form keyword and you don't even have the keyword in your listing. All right, doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand how this is one of the easiest strategies of everything that we have here that can put money in your pocket. Uh, how do you go ahead and do it? Let's go ahead and hop in.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the first thing you're going to do is this works on a multi-ASIN search in Cerebro. So you put your product first in Cerebro and then you had put, you know, like four, five, six, seven, eight, nine other competitors right there as well. Now what you want to do is you are first going to hit position rank, zero and zero position rank. What that filter is is it means your rank, which is why you have to put your product first in this list. So if you put zero and zero for minimum and maximum, that means you're saying I am not ranked at all. And then what you're going to want to do is you're going to go ahead and go to the number of competitors, filter All right, number of competitors, and you're going to go ahead and put minimum one. That's all you care about. You just want to at least sell at least one person, and then nothing on the max. And then you're going to go to competitor rank and then you're going to put, let's just say minimum one, let's say maximum 10. So that means not only are your is at least one of your competitors on page one, but they are, like you know, at the top of page one. Like I said, they're probably getting sales. I'll go ahead and put since this is the US marketplace, I'll go ahead and put a minimum search volume of 400. You know you can do more or less than paying if anything comes up. And I mean the goal is for if you do this, you don't want any keywords to show up, right, you know that's the goal, like you're doing. All right, if no products or if no keywords show up.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, in this particular case, only one keyword came up Gothic cabinet, all right. So the way that you can see if a keyword you have is indexed or not you might not even have it in your listing Go ahead and take this list of keywords. Now, in this case it's just one keyword and you're going to want to go into index checker, right, that's the next step. So normally you might have, you know like 10, 15 keywords. Me, I'm doing all right. So I only have you know one keyword on there, but you're going to go ahead and paste the keywords into index checker and you're going to put your ASIN as the ASIN and index checker that you are checking, all right. So I'm going to copy my ASIN, I'll bring it over into index checker and then you just run index checker and then what you want to do is see does it say that you have indexed or not? All right, in this case. Yes, I am indexed. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Now let's just say one of the some of these keywords was not indexed. Well, the way to know if you are indexed or not, make sure to check the videos here in index checker and you can find out how exactly to check if you are indexed or not. But again, super simple, just a few clicks. Again, you want to see where you are not ranking at all, not even in the top seven pages, but your competitors. At least one of them is getting sales from a keyword because they're in the top, in the top 10 positions. And then the next step, if you just want to see if maybe you're not indexed at all, is go to index checker. One more quick thing I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but in another video we have match type here, all right. So I've been talking in strictly about organic ranks in a lot of these videos, but helium 10 is checking if they're also in the now defunct editorial recommendations.
Bradley Sutton:
If they're showing up in an Amazon's choice widget, that's different than just the regular Amazon's choice button, but in our badge it's an Amazon's choice widget. That's sponsored ads. There's a highly rated widget. They're sponsored brand header videos or sponsored brand header ads and also sponsored brand video. So these are all different match types in Cerebro, where it'll have a little letter next to the keyword showing that, hey, this is what keywords you know what's the match type of this keyword. It'll say oh or s or other things like that. So this is also valuable. Like, maybe you want to know, hey, where is my competitor showing up in the search results? And they've got a sponsored video ad. All right, hey, where's my competitor showing up in a sponsored brand ad? Hey, well, what are the keywords where my competitor is showing up for like five or six or seven different things all on page one. I mean they literally could be, could be doing that. So this is a great way to look at that as well.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let's get into the next strategy how to find the keywords. Competitors are beating you on. All right. In the previous strategy, we talked about looking for the keywords where a competitor is getting sales from, but you might not even be ranked or indexed at all, and definitely not ranked. But you know what? If you're ranked on page four, five or six, or even on the bottom of page one, but most of your competitors are ahead of you, all right, why is this important? How can this make you money? Again, this is one of those no brainers. Hey, you want to show up before your competitors, right? So maybe you know there's a keyword Gothic decor and there's six competitors on there that are coffin shelves, and you're a coffin shelf. Right, there's customers who are searching for Gothic decor, who are looking for a coffin shelf. Now, they don't see all of those other products on the page. You know, maybe there's some Skull Candleholder or some moon shaped mirror or some weird Gothic thing, right, they're looking at only the coffin shelf. So it doesn't really matter the position placement there. Like, hey, is this page one, position five? Because if the first four products are all something different than what they're looking for, it's almost as if those don't exist, right? Does that make sense?
Bradley Sutton:
So, in this sense, like what we call your relative rank is important. Where are you showing up in the search results compared to your direct competitors? Because those are the ones who you are fighting for. You know the sale from. How do you view that? All right, so, again, this works if you have done a multi-ASIN search and then I, you know, I like to go ahead and let's put a minimum of 300 search volume. Now, what you want to go to is where it's called relative rank. All right, so I'm going to go here to the relative rank and let's just say hey, where am I? At least three, four. All right, that means I'm at least the third one that comes up. And let's go ahead, apply filters and we probably going to have a lot of keywords here. Yeah, look at this, 38 keywords show up. And so, again, these are all the keywords now where at least two of my competitors are beating me on. All right, if I wanted to, if I wanted to see all the keywords where four out of the competitors were beating me on, I would go ahead and put a minimum of four in relative rank.
Bradley Sutton:
Now let me explain how, again, this relative rank works. Here's coffin shelf. It says over here under relative rank, I am six. That is terrible. This is the most important keyword for my listing and it says I am six. So what I can do is I can put my mouse over this relative rank and I can see where my competitors are ranking. For Now, the one that is my ASIN. It's going to be in bold. So right here, clear as day, I can see why my relative rank is six. I see one competitor is one, another is two, another is nine, another is 14, another is 15. And then there I am, at 17. So here is a complete list of keywords where at least two out of my main competitors they are showing up on page one before me or just anywhere in the search results. You know, maybe I'm on page two, maybe they're on page two and I'm on page five. You know, regardless, this is a great metric that you want to look at. Where are your competitors being on? You are ranking for the keyword, so at least you're in the. You're in the ballgame, right, but you're not getting sales when your competitors are all showing up before you. So a great quick way to see where your competitors are being you from, find those keywords, figure out, you know, like, how you can increase your rank. You know, maybe it's by putting some more money at your sponsored ads for those keywords and hope your conversion rate goes up. But find a way to start beating your competitors so that you're the first in the relative rank On those keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Next strategy how to find keywords that your competitors are not running sponsored ads for. Now, wow, how can this strategy make you money? Um, you know your main keywords. No matter what, if none of your competitors are, you know, doing ads for it, or if all of them are, you still got to do ads for it. All right, you want to rank for it, for you know your most important keywords. But sometimes you know you might want to look for keywords that have a little less competition, or maybe at least your main competitors are not the run the ones running sponsored ads. You could view that as opportunity to make some money. So how can you find that out? Again, if you are in a Multi-ASIN search, you have the results here. Um, sometimes you can go ahead and put a minimum search volume of 300. That's what I'm going to do right here.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, what you want to do is you want to. There's a couple ways you can do this. One way is finding out where not many people, not many of your competitors, are running sponsored ads at all. In that case, you're going to want to find the filter that says sponsored rank count and you can put like a maximum of, let's just say, two. What that means is, hey, show me the keywords here where my competitors a maximum of only Uh two are even running sponsored ads. Now, a lot of times, a crazy number of keywords are going to show up here, like even this one says a thousand keywords. So in this situation, I'm actually going to go ahead and put another Filter, which is the competitor rank average. All right, that means, hey, these aren't just random sponsored ads they're running. These are ones where they're probably, you know, getting organically around page one or two. So I'm going to go ahead and put minimum competitor rank average one, maximum 50, and then when I apply that filter now the number is going to be a lot less of these keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
And here, 56 keywords, like, for example, here's one right here gothic bookcase. It's probably is fairly relevant, right, and I can see there are only there is nobody running sponsored. Good grief, I can't believe this. There is zero competitors running sponsored ads on gothic bookcase, which is a very relevant keyword. Here's another one coffin bookshelf. Only one competitor is showing up in sponsored ads. Uh, for this keyword gothic cabinet Nobody is running sponsored ads. So that's a great way again to see which keywords your competitors are not even focusing on.
Bradley Sutton:
Another situation could be instead of the number of competitors, you might want to look at sponsored rank average and maybe you want to see where their average is like, at least Like 30, you know meaning they're probably a lot of competitors are not even on the first. You know few pages of sponsored ads and if I go ahead and apply the filters on that, so again, sponsored rank average, minimum 30. I'm not putting anything in sponsored rank count. Now I see nine filtered keywords and see here, here's one keyword right here coffin decor. There are a couple of competitors showing up in sponsored ads and this is a keyword that a lot of people are on page one for. But look at this the main competitors are are 33rd and 69th as far as sponsored ads. That means that's like page three and page Six probably in sponsored ads. That means if I come in, I would potentially be the only person. If I bid high, I would be the only person on page one For this keyword in sponsored ads.
Bradley Sutton:
So another great way to find valuable information that can save you money in advertising so that, uh, you know that you can focus on certain keywords and you're not going to have much A competition at all on the flip side. Maybe you're just curious hey, where are most of my main competitors? Uh, you know advertising for where they, where are they, concentrating their top of search spend? You can go opposite on there, say you can say, hey, show me, uh, you know, put in the filter here, show me where they're sponsored rank average, regardless of their competitor rank average. So me where it's between one and 20, meaning that on average they're on page one, and that's going to show you where most of your competitors are concentrating their spend. So a lot of different ways that you can filter through this information, but it's important to do that so you can really like dial in your ppc game.
Bradley Sutton:
How to get a quick view of top products for amazon keywords. Why is this important? Well, as you've been seeing from a lot of our Cerebro strategies here, sometimes when you do search results, uh or in Cerebro, you can have hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords. Not all of these keywords are completely relevant to your product and you shouldn't just base it on our competitor performance score. You know, like I said before, that that doesn't mean it's always 100 relevant or that there's not other Keywords that are very relevant.
Bradley Sutton:
If you're looking for uh keywords where most of the top you know 10 products or the pages, the ones that are at the top of page one, are somewhat similar to your product, you know how would you? How would you do that One by one? Well, you would have to go and click each keyword and look on amazon to see all right, gothic decor, are these all coffin shelves? Oh no, when I click on gothic decor, I see a whole bunch of of random products like dream catchers and and gothic bed frames and stuff like that. Right? So now you know, okay, this is probably not a keyword where a lot of people are searching for coffin shelves. Right on the flip side, if I search for, um, you know, mini coffin bookshelf, all of the all of the products might look like one of my products. I hope that makes sense.
Bradley Sutton:
So, instead of having to go one by one and just checking what these keywords look like, we have a brand new way in order to uh see this inside of Cerebro. Let me show you how to do it. All right. So, in in Cerebro, if you mouse over any of the keywords, you're going to see this pop-up window, if you don't have the advanced view on, and you're going to see thumbnails of the last time, helium 10 check the top 10 products, the thumbnails of the main image. Super, super cool. You no longer have to go to amazon to take a look at the keyword. You'll instantly see the thumbnails. If you're looking for a little bit more information, you, you're gonna. You can hit the advanced view and if you hit advanced view Now, you can actually see the titles of those products, you can see the price, you can see if it has variations. The rating Super, super cool guys is one of the uh, newest features of Cerebro. Um, you know, depending on when you're watching this, you might not have full access Uh to it yet. Um, but this is a really cool feature where you no longer have to go click one by one and then look off of Uh, helium 10 back on amazon to see what kind of products are on the top of page one.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, how to automate your amazon keyword research. All right, we've been talking about a lot of strategies as far as how to find top keywords from your competitors. You know from your own listings, uh, etc. Now, the way I showed it to you guys, it doesn't take too much time. But maybe you've got 10, 20 products and you wanna be checking your competitor's keywords once a week. Well, it can start getting pretty tedious and time consuming and a lot of data that you're gonna have to process to every single week or every other week, go through all of your products and all of your competitor products and know, all right, is my competitor ranking for any new keywords that I didn't know? So I can put it in my listing. So how would you like a way to just put time back in your hands? I mean, time is money, right, so this could take hours and hours a month, but instead of that, let Helium 10 do the work for you.
Bradley Sutton:
How can you automate keyword harvesting from your competitor's keywords? Well, it actually goes back to your dashboard, all right. So what you're gonna wanna do is you're gonna wanna go back to just your regular dashboard, okay, and you're going to hit insight settings on the very bottom left of the screen insight settings, all right. Once you do that, you are going to find the keyword insight settings and then you are going to hit four insight types and you are going to select customize under keyword suggestions based on my competitors, all right. So hopefully you've set your competitors and if you haven't set your competitors on your insights dashboard, there's videos that we have on our dashboard on how to do that. But you wanna put your top five competitors for all of your products and these are the ones that you probably are running Cerebro off of.
Bradley Sutton:
Once you've got that done, like I said, go to your insights types, hit under customize under keyword suggestions based on my competitors, and what you're gonna do here is you're gonna enter exactly whatever you like to do inside of Cerebro. You're basically automating your Cerebro process. So maybe you said, hey, I wanna know any keyword where the search volume is at least 400 and my rank is like maybe I'm not ranking at all, so I'm gonna put zero and zero, but at least one of my competitors is ranking in the top 20 positions. All right, that's what you just fill it out, just like you would on Cerebro. So now, any time that one of my competitors for any one of my products, right, is getting sales from a new keyword that I'm not ranked for now. I'm going to get actually an insight on it or a notification right here and it'll tell me hey, your competitor is ranking for these new keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Would you like to start tracking it? Would you like to start putting it in your listing? This is like super, super cool guys, next level If you don't have access to it, you're gonna need the diamond plan in order to access this. But I mean talk about putting money and time back in your hands. I mean this saves hours and hours of work. You now don't have to even run Cerebro almost ever again on your products, unless you wanna do some advanced to filtering, but you can now get those keywords delivered to you in a message saying hey, your competitor is getting sales from these keywords. Do you wanna put it into your listing? So, guys, if you wanna start automating it, make sure to set that up on your insights dashboard. All right, guys.
Bradley Sutton:
So we just went over a lot of strategies in the last three episodes on Cerebro 25 of them in total. I've just got a couple of strategies here using our other keyword research tool, magnet, so let's go ahead and get into it. How to find loosely related keywords to an individual keyword phrase. How can this be important? How can it make you money? Well, we showed you in Cerebro I had to get a lot of really specific information. But maybe you're doing a little bit broader research and you wanna kind of like, hey, instead of just looking at what these exact products are ranking for, let me have a broad view of keywords that are very loosely related and some closely related and see if something comes up that maybe didn't come up in Cerebro. Let me show you how to do that. If you go to Magnet, our tool, let's go ahead and enter a coffin shelf if that's my main keyword and I'm gonna hit get keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
And now what's going to show up here are all of the keywords that are loosely related to coffin shelf, and how these keywords are sourced is from different databases. One of the sources is organic, meaning these are the keywords that other products ranking for coffin shelf are also ranking for. Right, we've also got smart complete. Smart complete means hey, let's take this word, coffin shelf and then what are some long tail keywords related to it? I'll show you guys in a later strategy how to a little bit more recent. I'll show you in a later strategy a little bit more detail on that. And then last it's showing Amazon recommended keywords for other products that are on the coffin shelf search results, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
So for example, I just typed in coffin shelf and take a look, even without any filtering at all. Look at some of these interesting keywords that come up Gothic kitchen decor, punk room decor, creepy room decor, goth bedroom, curiosity cabinet. So these are other keywords that maybe wouldn't have come up in my Cerebro searches. But I'm just getting a little bit more information here and a little bit more keywords on things that I might want to put into my listing. There's a lot of filters here. Like, maybe I just wanna see all the keywords that have over a thousand search volume, I can use that filter. Maybe I wanna have all of the keywords that have at least three words right, I don't want any one word phrases, I don't want two word phrases. You know I could use that filter. Tons of filters here. Maybe I'm interested in what are all the keywords that have a title density? Maximum three, all right. What does title density mean? Title density is the number of products on page one of the search results of a keyword that have that exact search keyword in its title. So there's tons of different filters you can use.
Bradley Sutton:
And then again, this is a great way to round out your keyword research or perhaps get other ideas how to get top level information on a group of keywords. All right, let's just say that you came up with, you know, 30 keywords from Cerebro that your competitor is beating you on. Or let's just say you've been, you know, getting a whole bunch of data off of Amazon, like you've been looking at Pinterest trends or Google trends or TikTok hashtags or whatever, and you just have this random list of keywords and you're like, hey, I just wanna see you know what's the search volume of these keywords. Let me show you how you can just get some really quick information without having to, like one by one, go through these. All right, so let's just use the scenario, first of all, that maybe you were on Cerebro and you found nine different keyword phrases that your competitors are beating you on and you maybe wanna know what is some information on those keywords. Well, I'll just go ahead and copy these keywords right here and I'm actually going to paste them into Magnet. All right, and again, these keywords can come from anywhere.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, where I want to go, if I want to analyze multiple keywords, is the second tab of Magnet, all right, so once you're in Magnet, hit the analyze keywords tab and then go ahead and paste all of those keywords. I can put up to 200 in here and then you can hit the button analyze keywords. All right, now what comes up is not all of the long tail keywords or not the loosely related keywords. This just brings up the exact keywords that came up. All right, from the ones I pasted, and now I can just see the information, such as the estimated keyword sales for each one. I can have the buttons that go to the brand analytics. I have the search volume for each keyword. Let's just say these were the keywords that my competitors were beating me on, or that my competitors are on page one from. Well, the cool thing here is I can actually see a keyword summary of the total search volume. So instantly I'm like, okay, wow, my competitors is beating me on keywords that have a total search volume of 7,200. All right, so there's a lot of cool information that you can see here.
Bradley Sutton:
So again, this is a great way to just get some like quick information on a group of keywords instead of having to go one by one on your keyword list, how to find long tail keywords from a root keyword or phrase. Now, why is this important? How can this make you money? Well, you might know what your main keywords are. You might know what other keywords products are ranking for, but it's important to understand that there might be longer tail versions of these keywords. Maybe they don't even have that much search volume that can really round out your keyword research, and maybe you'd be the only competitor who is ranking for these keywords, all right. So how can you do that?
Bradley Sutton:
Let's hop into Magnet. I just use one of my main keywords coffin shelf. Here and again, there's thousands of keywords that came up, but if I wanna see the long tail versions of this, all I have to do is I'm going to select the match type of smart complete, all right. So smart complete is allows me to show what keywords coffin shelf is the root of. Where are maybe there are some plural versions of this keyword? Where are some keywords where the order is different than the original word?
Bradley Sutton:
Do you know how you do autocomplete on the Amazon search bar? If you type in coffin shelf, it'll just show you keywords that just start with the word coffin shelf. But look at some of the words that came up when I did smart complete here for coffin shelf. I see coffin shelves. I see coffin shelf large six foot tall. I see glass coffin shelf. So there's a keyword where it starts with a different word. I see book shelf, coffin. So there, all of a sudden, it mixes up the words and even adds another one. Here's another one coffin wall shelf. It took those two words, coffin shelf, and then put a word in the middle of it. So this is like a great way to kind of like look for longer tail versions.
Bradley Sutton:
Now that what I just showed you, that smart complete. It's also indicative of what could come up in a phrase match target for PPC. All right. So if you do phrase match or broad match, right. So Amazon sometimes will change the order of the words. It'll add a word before, it'll add a word after In broad matches. A little bit, you know more crazy the kind of things that it does. But now, instead of just all right, let me just see what's gonna show up on a broad or a phrase match. You can actually get a preview of what kind of keywords would come up if you do a PPC campaign on a certain keyword. That's kind of crazy if you think about it. What is everybody else on Amazon doing? They're just like all right, amazon, take the wheel. You know, let's just see what you're gonna show me for no, now you can know the exact keywords that potentially could come up in one of those campaigns.
Bradley Sutton:
Another way that you can use this information is by trying to see where you know like maybe you wanna expand out in your niche, like I am selling coffin shelves here. I have this list of 3000 keywords ready to coffin shelf and I just wanna make something coffin shaped, right? Maybe it doesn't start with coffin shelf. Let me show you what you can do With the list unfiltered. The first filter you're gonna do is you're gonna go to phrases containing and then I'm gonna go ahead and put coffin there, all right. And then, once I apply the filters, now any keyword out of these 3000 that came up that have coffin in it show up. So maybe I'm like all right, where are the keywords that have at least 400 search volume that have the word coffin in it? And now, all of a sudden, I see 40 keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Right, and if I'm selling coffin shelves, all of a sudden, something else might strike my fancy here, like I'm just looking at this and here's something that I didn't realize. There's 400 people searching for coffin coffee table all right. There are 500 people searching for coffin decorations. There's 500 people searching for coffin bowl what the heck is a coffin bowl? I might wanna look at that. There's almost a thousand people searching for coffin rug all right, and here's a creepy keyword skeletons carrying coffin.
Bradley Sutton:
These are like new product ideas that I can expand my brand out to, that I didn't even know existed and all I did was I just put in my main keyword into MAGNET and I was like, let me do a filter for any keyword out of these 3000 where coffin is in it, and now I can see tons of product potential. So here's three different ways that you can find long tail versions of keywords what might come up in a PBC campaign, or even new ideas for product line extensions, how to see the keywords in a niche that are trending up in search volume. Now, why is this important? How can it make you money If you've got a lot of keywords that you're considering to use and maybe you can't fit them all in? Or maybe you're looking for new product ideas.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, how are you gonna prioritize it? Sure, you can prioritize it by search volume, but let's just say that even there, hey, all these keywords, there's a lot of products that have this, or a lot of keywords that have the same search volume. Well, how do you prioritize then? Well, what I like to do is I like to prioritize by the ones that are trending up. Right, if a keyword is going down in popularity compared to last month, I might not wanna focus on that keyword. So how can I easily see which ones are trending up?
Bradley Sutton:
There's a filter right here in MAGNET. So if I have any search results up in MAGNET, all I have to do is look for the filter search volume trend. And maybe I wanna see something that has a minimum of 50% increase compared to last month. I'm gonna put a minimum of 50 and I'm gonna hit apply filters. And now any keyword that has a big trending up is going to show up here. And look at this. Oh, my goodness gracious, I see coffin Zen garden is up 104% on search volume compared to last month. Coughing candy bowl is up 261%. So if I was looking to prioritize keywords, do you think I'd wanna prioritize some keywords that are up by over 100%, absolutely. So an easy way again to see in your niche what keywords are on the way up. Or, conversely, maybe you wanna see what keywords are on the way down. Just put in any keyword into MAGNET, check the related keywords and use that trending filter how to find common root words in an overall keyword niche. Now, why is this important? Well, again, I like to use this almost as a product research tactic. It could be, and also a PPC play too.
Bradley Sutton:
When I enter in Magnet a certain keyword, that's my main keyword and I'm looking at a whole bunch of loosely related keywords. Maybe there are certain trends that I don't realize. Like it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that if I put in coffin shelf, there's probably gonna be a lot of coffin related keywords, but sometimes there might be other keywords that could give you other ideas that you weren't even thinking about. How can you find that? Let me show you. Let's just say I searched coffin shelf here in MAGNET. I'm gonna look at this box called word frequency and what this means is, of all the search results that are showing up and I can also filter it down even a little bit what keywords appear the most in the phrases. And again, just like I thought the number one keyword here or actually the number one keyword is decor at 1000, but then coffin was 600. But maybe there's something else here that looks interesting. Like, for example, I see a spooky and I'm like spooky, 131 of these keywords have the word spooky in it. So if I hit spooky, what happens is is now all of the keywords on that list that start with the word spooky are gonna show up here and I can start getting some ideas. Like look at this 38,000 search volume for this keyword. Spooky basket 1400 search volume for spooky home decor. Spooky desk accessories has a couple hundred searches a month. All right. So now, all of a sudden, I just discovered, maybe in like a new sub niche where I'm looking at coffin shelf. But I see, wow, look how this keyword spooky is trending in so many of these keywords. And again, I can use these keywords in my listing or use it as potential PPC test or use it as an idea generation for new ideas for my brand. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Last strategy of the day how to instantly see the most search terms on Amazon that start with a word or phrase? All right. So this is pretty cool. Like how can this help you out? Well, you know, you might just be doing very, very like kind of low key research where you discover something you're like, all right, well, what is the most search term? Like, hey, I saw this garlic press, you know, is garlic press the most search term that starts with the word garlic? Or is there something else you know, coffin shelf. Is coffin shelf the highest search term that starts with the word coffin, or are there longer tail versions of this keyword that have even more search volume?
Bradley Sutton:
Check out a super simple way to find out in seconds which keywords are the most searched. When you start with any letters, word or phrase, all you have to do is just go directly to magnet guys and start typing. That's it. So let's just say I'm gonna type in coffin. If I pause just a few seconds, any keyword that has a lot of search volume is gonna show up here. And here I can see that the number one keyword that starts with coffin it's not coffin shelf. Coffin shelf isn't even top 10. It's coffin charcuterie board. That's crazy. I didn't realize that. All right, maybe I'm wondering. All right, what are the most search terms that start with coffin shelf? Here we go coffin shelf is number one. Coffin shelf large is number two. I mentioned garlic press earlier. What are the most search terms that start with the word garlic? Well, whatever shows up here in this autocomplete, right here in magnet, it is the words. It is sorted by the number of searches. All right, so I can see. If I put in garlic, the number one keyword is garlic, number two is garlic press, then garlic powder. So any keyword you can possibly think of on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
If you're just really curious, hey, what are some other keywords that might start with this keyword and one of the most search ones? Just start typing anything you want into magnet. Don't even have to click anything. Whatever comes up in the magnet autocomplete are the highest search terms. All right, guys, there you have it. We just did, I think, by my last count, 31 keyword research strategies over the last three episodes. Now don't just sit there and be like oh wow, that was amazing, Bradley, those are some incredible strategies and that's it All right. That does nobody any good. That means I just wasted my breath here in all these strategies. What I want you to do is pick some of these strategies and start doing it right now on your own account.
Bradley Sutton:
Maybe you haven't even found a product yet, but there was ideas that I brought up in this keyword research on how you can find product ideas. Maybe you've got an existing brand and now you know of how you can come up with expanded ideas by doing keyword research. Maybe you've got your product on the way to you right now from your supplier and you need to start building your listing and you wanna make sure you've got the best keywords. These 31 strategies are going to help you with that. So, guys, hope you enjoyed these episodes. Bookmark these, go back to it, refer to it. I'm gonna try and put copies of these videos also inside of our tool and inside of our Helium 10 Academy so you can have them as reference. Let me know, guys, in the Helium 10 members Facebook group or, if you're watching this on YouTube, in the comments. Let me know which one of these strategies you thought was the coolest, which ones that have helped you find new keywords that can help you get those extra thousands of dollars of sales on Amazon.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. TikTok Creating Its Own eCommerce Fulfillment Network https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2023/tiktok-creating-its-own-ecommerce-fulfillment-network/ Amazon beefs up Prime loyalty program with One Medical discount https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/08/amazon-beefs-up-prime-loyalty-program-with-one-medical-discount.html FTC: Amazon halted Seller Fulfilled Prime enrollment despite strong delivery performance https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/ftc-amazon-lawsuit-seller-fulfilled-prime-enrollment-shipping-delivery-performance/698780/ Walmart Black Friday deals 2023 start today https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/walmart-days-of-deals-2023-day-6-165846150.html Watch how Amazon delivers to customers in favelas across Brazil https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/how-amazon-delivers-to-customers-in-favelas-across-brazil
Stay updated with the newest features from Helium 10 that can help you stay on top of your Amazon game. Plus, stay tuned for Carrie's hands-on tips for leveraging the power of AI inside our Listing Builder tool for quick and efficient listing creations. So, gear up for an expedition into what’s buzzing in Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce with us!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 00:55 - Fulfilled By TikTok
- 02:02 - Amazon Analytics
- 03:55 - Amazon Medical
- 05:16 - FTC Case Update
- 08:23 - Walmart Black Friday
- 09:19 - Brand Registry Update
- 10:11 - Amazon Brazil
- 12:40 - Helium 10 Feature Alerts
- 18:40 - Pro Training Tip: Amazon Listing Builder With AI
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Bradley Sutton:
TikTok Shop is building out their fulfillment network. Have you used the new customer loyalty dashboard in Amazon? Seller Central? FTC again gets things wrong in their case against Amazon. Walmart Black Friday has started.
Bradley Sutton:
These stories and more on today's edition of the weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton and this is the show that is our Helium 10 weekly buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that's going on in the Amazon, walmart and e-commerce world. We also give you all of the new updates for feature alerts to Helium 10, and we give you training tips of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. We have a lot of news articles today, so let's go ahead and hop into it Now. The first article that we have today is actually from paymentscom and it's entitled TikTok is creating its own e-commerce fulfillment network. Now, this is interesting because this is not completely new news. We've talked about some of our Helium 10 elite members who have gotten in the beta program on some of these fulfillment, but for most of you who sign up for Tick Tock shop, you have to fulfill your own products or maybe fulfill it through Amazon, but they've been investing in a warehouse and fulfillment network. According to this article, wall Street Journal also confirmed that you know, talking about some of the endeavors that they're doing, so they're really making some kind of like waves in the industry, just even without fulfillment. It's kind of amazing what they're doing, because they're investing a lot you know, like giving sellers the ability to not have, you know, commissions for right now and giving incentives to influencers to promote products. So now imagine once their fulfillment network is fully in place. It's going to be pretty cool. What's you know to be selling on Tick Tock shop?
Bradley Sutton:
Next news article is actually from your seller central dashboard, and this is just a reminder about something that released a little bit ago on Amazon. It's called the customer loyalty analytics dashboard. Now this news article that came out talks about how it helps brand segment and reengage customers based on their past purchase behavior and engagement with your brand page. Some of the things that it allows you to do are identify high value customers, build your strategy for the right customer, engage customers at the right time, it says optimize marketing ad spend, reduce customer acquisition costs. So if you haven't taken a look at it, it's in your customer loyalty analytics page and it's, you know, in the similar places brand analytics and you can see a lot of interesting information, you know, at the weekly, quarterly, monthly or even yearly level, and you'll see some interesting unique metrics that you've probably never seen before, like the number of hibernating customers that you have. You'll see some interesting charts here.
Bradley Sutton:
There's also a cool feature on the right hand side that you'll be able to see. It's called new and potential customers. All right, and then it says, like you know, for for Manny's Mysterious Oddities, right here it says hey, there's 12,000 people have recently shown interest in your products but have not yet purchased, and allows you to create a promotion to send these customers a promotion code to encourage a purchase. And so if you click on this button, it actually brings you to the brand tailored promotion page that we've talked about before, and so this brand tailored promotion function allows you to send coupon codes to customers and have it show up if they happen to browse on your page again. So pretty interesting stuff, you know. Take a look at that. Have you been using it? Has it helped you at all with, you know, getting some customers on board and you can see the metrics and brand tailored promotions on how successful they are. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article up here is from CNBC and it's entitled Amazon Beef's Up Prime Day Loyalty Program with one medical discount. So this is something that is going to be a subscription that's going to be $9 a month or $99 a year. All right, now what is one medical? I guess it's kind of like I mean almost like a medical insurance kind of thing. This article from CNBC says, you know, one medical operates a network of boutique primary care practices in some parts of the US and it's around major cities, and users can access care from a doctor through the one medical app and they can also schedule virtual or in-person appointments at a brick and mortar location. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
So again, you know you might be wondering well, what in the world does this have to do with being an Amazon seller? Well, we always like to talk about what are Walmart doing for the Walmart Plus program? What is Amazon doing for the Prime program? The more sticky an Amazon Prime member is, you know that means they're not going to cancel their Prime because there's just so many benefits. Guess what you know. That's going to be better for you, you know, because obviously the majority of Amazon seller sales come from Amazon Prime members. So the more benefits that Amazon gives to its Prime members, that's going to benefit us, the third party sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, you know we haven't talked about this in a few weeks. There hasn't been much news articles. But again, you know, FTC is showing that they really have no idea what the heck they're doing. Um, at least you know, with what I see in the news, you know who knows, maybe they've got some other stuff. That just news. You know, casters haven't picked up on, but I can only report on what I see in the news.
Bradley Sutton:
And this article is from supply chain drive and it's entitled FTC Amazon halted seller fulfilled prime enrollment despite strong delivery performance. All right. So basically, what the FTC is saying is hey, you know, uh, back in 2018, when there was seller fulfilled prime, now they're seller fulfilled prime again. You know, sellers met the delivery estimate requirement more than 95% of the time. Now FTC even said, you know, went on to say, oh, these sellers at times outperform orders covered by Amazon's own fulfillment service. Uh, had Amazon genuinely cared about improving shipping speeds, it would have encouraged seller fulfilled prime sellers to use independent fulfillment providers instead of shuttering SFP to impede those providers growth Wrong, all right, guys, this is not right. You know, like Amazon prime now, amazon prime in 2018 is a lot faster than than what the majority of sellers can do for seller fulfilled prime.
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon clapped back at this whole story. They're like saying, hey, the fact is that in 2018, the sellers using SFP Amazon says this is a quote we're promising deliveries within two days less or within two days or less less than 16% of the time. So what? What is FTC thinking that? Oh, yeah, you know the. They think that all these sellers were were beating Amazon's prime one day and same day and two day delivery. No, they weren't. You know there's a few who could match it. Sure, like these gigantic companies that had their their own humongous, uh, logistic systems and and things like that. But you know, a regular seller couldn't just go to you know from California and like, hey, let me go ahead and send this two day shipping to Florida, you know, for $5, you know, like you can with Amazon prime. No, that never was happening in 2018. It's not happening now, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
So I, I really, I mean I really wish that FTC focuses on the things that Amazon sellers, day in and day out, are complaining. You know like uh, you know sometimes the customer support uh service that they receive and and things like you know getting suspended with no notification and and differing rules and allowing a lot of hijackers and and listing abuse and and and allowing too many subsidies for for sellers from China. I mean, the list goes on and on. You guys probably have a lot of complaints for Amazon, and rightfully so. No system is perfect, but I haven't even seen any of these complaints kind of like brought up in this FTC trial. Instead, they're they're like focused on things that are like literal non issues. Anyways, I guess that stuff like makes my heart race. Let's go to the next article, and this is from Yahoo, just giving a reminder that, hey, walmart Black Friday deals. We're starting yesterday, uh, on Wednesday. We announced this a couple of weeks ago in the weekly buzz that you know it's crazy what Walmart you know.
Bradley Sutton:
Black Friday you know used to be Black Friday. You know that's the Friday right after Thanksgiving. We're not even close to Thanksgiving, we're at the first of November and Black Friday deals are coming up. But the reason I mentioned this again is because this Black Friday deal has deals have started going on. You should see a little bit of increased traffic on your Walmart store. So so let me know over the next couple of days, are your sales up on Walmart? Keep an eye out there. You might want to check your ad spend if you're running Walmart ads, because your budgets might run out a little bit earlier If you, if you're reaching the budgets, because there's probably a lot of extra traffic on the platform at this time.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the next announcement was actually from an email that went out to a lot of brand registered sellers and it was from Amazon brand registry and it said hey, just launched managed selling accounts tool. So this is a new self-service tool that gives users with the brand administrator rule the ability to unlock brand benefit eligibility for users that have a active seller central account. Now, in the past, you had to like if you wanted to like, give access to another account, or or maybe you know you've got a reseller selling your products. You wanted to give them the rights you've got to like contact, brand registry, support and open up a case and do all this stuff. But now you can do it directly from your managed selling accounts on your brand dashboard. So if you want more information, just go to your brand registry dashboard and you'll be able to uh to see your managed selling accounts.
Bradley Sutton:
Last up, uh, they had a cool video on one of Amazon's website, uh, and it was talking about how they deliver in a favela from Paraisopolis in Sao Paulo, brazil, and this is a place that's like a really like kind of like dangerous neighborhood it was talking about and like nobody else would deliver packages to this neighborhood. But Amazon is using AI and machine learning to be able to ship. And it was just an interesting article. You know, we've we've talked about before how Amazon delivers on donkeys in some places, but here Amazon, you know, delivering to dangerous uh uh areas where other carriers might not deliver packages to, but Amazon is. And it got me thinking uh, there was an announcement that kind of flew under the radar. But did you know that North American remote fulfillment by Amazon also now covers Amazon Brazil. Uh, when I posted that in a couple of Facebook groups, you know most of the sellers didn't even realize that. You know, I think everybody knows that NARF, or North American remote fulfillment, that allows you to take your U S FBA inventory and open up listings in Canada and Mexico and be able to deliver there. But now, as long as you've got your Amazon Brazil set up you know you've added it as an account on your seller central and you've set up a bank account and stuff, you can actually now, uh, have North American remote fulfillment going to Brazil. Obviously it takes longer, but you know you don't have to. You know, set up inventory down there, you don't have to worry about taxes. Uh, the, the listings are translated and then if somebody buys the product it comes from your USA inventory. So let me know in the comments below did you guys know that Amazon is now shipping your FBA US inventory down to Brazil? And if you didn't know it, how many of you are have taken advantage of that? You know Brazil is a rapidly growing marketplace and so that's something to definitely look into.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, that's it for the news this week. Now one thing I want you guys to do is go ahead and follow our this podcast Instagram page. All right, it's on. Just go to Instagram and just go to serious sellers podcast. All right, serious sellers podcast, give us a follow. Sometimes I'll you know post. You know stories about my, my trips and different things on there. But mainly this has all of the clips from every single podcast episode. We do even this one, the weekly buzz. So make sure to go there If you have missed a couple of episodes. You can get some clips on recent episodes. A serious sellers podcast.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let's go over this week's helium gas Weeks. Helium 10 feature alerts. Remember, every week we are launching new things at helium 10. Here are the new things for this week Now. The first one we talked a little bit about last week, that is in listing builder. All right, so if you guys go to your listing builder tool, you have your regular part of the listing. You know all the top of your description and bullet points and things like that. But if you scroll all the way to the bottom now you'll see a new section called Amazon post and if you have, you know if this is the actual listing and it's all filled out with the information up above. Now you can just hit a button, write it for me, and then helium 10, using AI, is going to write a bunch of Amazon post captions. All right, so this is good if you are, you know, having kind of like writer's block and you have a lot of images that you want to go ahead and put to Amazon post, but you can't don't want to have to think about making a unique caption every single time. We have a caption generator right there.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, next up a really cool feature to your competitor tracking. So for a while, we have Allowed you to add up to five competitors for every product that you have in your store and then you can start tracking if they're running coupons and get alerts, if, if they raise their price, if they lower the price, if they change their Image, if they change their title, if their BSR changes dramatically, etc. Etc. Now this was limited to, like I said, five different Competitors for every one of your products. Now, what if you've got more competitors you want to track in addition to those five? Or what if you're just like examining a new niche and you just want to start like tracking some products randomly and you don't have, like your own product to tie it to. Well, now you know, really cool we have the ability inside your competitors to just add competitors, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
So how you can add competitors to this new section? Just go to your, your main dashboard. If you've got the diamond plan and you're gonna want to hit Competitors here on the top left, all right. Once you hit competitors, this is going to show you probably all the competitors you already have here. But now, when you hit the button add competitors, now you have the option on if it's a current competitor and that means you're gonna have to tie it to one of your products so that you can get the full benefits there. But if you have a brand new product, what's new this week is now you can put potential Competitor and then you don't have to tie it to your product.
Bradley Sutton:
Like you can see here, I'm tracking a Battery operated LED light, right, and there are no competitors now. But now I can track this guy's revenue. I can track their sales. I can see they've got an $8 coupon going. I can track their price changes, etc. Etc. So super cool addition Start tracking your competitors. Guys, start looking at other niches. Maybe you're trying to expand your brand. Add those to this Competitor dashboard so you can see what's going on, not just like be able to track it in this dashboard that I just showed you. But remember, you are gonna start getting insights Into things that you said that you want to know about that might be changing with that Competitor, you know. Maybe they're ranking for new keywords, maybe they have a coupon, maybe they turned off a coupon, etc. Etc. So, super cool.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of insights, we've got some new changes To or some new insights that are happening in your insights dashboard. Now, for those who don't know the insights dashboard, this is like next level. You know we're giving, we're doing the work for our customers. Like, for example, you've seen my insights dashboard. It says, hey, we discovered 15 keywords that your competitors are ranking for that you are not. Hey, you're ranking For a keyword in the top 10 and you don't even you might not have noted because you're not tracking this keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, some of the newer insights that we now have Refund rates. So you can see here hey, refund rates for five products have decreased by 6%. That's great. That means I'm giving out less Refunds than before. All right, the opposite. We also added as an insight hey, maybe your refund rate is increasing or your return rate is increasing. You'd want to know about that, right? Well, you don't have to be downloading your reports every week, or even looking at Helium 10 and looking at the reports there. We will give you an insight based on the settings, the triggers that you set, on what you want to know about, on if your refund rates are going up or down.
Bradley Sutton:
We have some new atomic alerts that come on your Insights dashboard. So if you use that Helium 10 Atomic and you are getting a lot of clicks or a lot of spend in a certain target, you are going to get a notification. Hey, you've got. Look at this one I got here. You've got four targets with zero sales that have spent $70 in the last 30 days. You might want to review your targets and maybe negative match that. Again, you're not having to download reports. We are telling you this information. Another new one that has come up recently that we have is your storage fees. If your storage fee month to month is dramatically increasing, you're going to get a notification now about that. We're adding new Insights left and right. Guys, this is crazy. I mean we're living in the year 3000 while other Amazon software tools are parting like it's 1999 still I mean, this is not only our have. We had these advanced tools in Helium 10 where you can find these things, but now you don't even have to use those tools because now we're just giving you these insights and giving you these notifications to let you know what's going on. So that's it for our Helium 10 feature alerts that we have added in the last week or so. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Next up, we have got a training done by Kerry on listing builder with AI. Just a quick review on how to generate listings and let me tell you the things that she's going to show you today. I literally created two listings. I'm doing a test listings for some project, five case draws. I use her exact strategy. I created two brand new listings that were for identical products because I'm testing it in two different accounts, but it created two separate listings in about three minutes. For myself. That would have taken me maybe an hour to have done back in the old days. So how did I do that? Kerry will show you how she does it.
Carrie Miller:
When I started out in the Amazon space, I was actually a freelancer and I actually was writing listings over and over again for a lot of different companies and they always wanted to know what my secret was, and I never told them my secret. But I'll tell you my secret now. Helium 10 was my secret. I use the keyword research tools and listing optimization tools that Helium 10 had at the time, so around 2016, 2017, 2018. And now they've gotten even better. So I want to show you how to use our new tools, especially for any of you who have a hard time writing or maybe have higher writer's block, we have a great solution for you to help you really optimize your listings in the best way using Helium 10. The first thing that you want to do is you want to log into your Helium 10 account and you're going to go to tools and then you're going to click on listing builder. I'm going to show you how to do this from scratch. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to just click on add listing up here and we're going to click on get started from scratch right here. You can choose whatever language you want to do, but I'm going to show you first in English how to do this, and I'm just going to start building. I have a keyword list and I'm going to just show you this from our for our coffin shelf. Here they are. So when you click add to bank, these keywords are going to be added to your keyword bank and if you wanted to add some more, you could add some more keywords up here manually, or you can actually go ahead and import keywords from an Excel spreadsheet or, if you wanted to do a cerebral search, you can do it here. I always recommend just making sure you have all of your keywords squared away before you even start writing your listing, so you should have your list already created. The next thing is you're going to go over to the listing optimizer. Now, this has AI in it, so it's going to help you to be able to write this very quickly and efficiently and it's going to give you, you know, help you get past that writer's block. If you ever have it. You don't know where to start. This is going to be great for you.
Carrie Miller:
Now you can write if you want to, if you wanted to write your own listings. So you know Manny's mysterious, you can just go ahead and write your listing there. Or what you can do is you can add in product characteristics and this will write it for you. So I'm going to put in coffin shelf black. I'm going to put Halloween, I'll just put Gothic Dwarfers actually Gothic decor, perfect gift for a Goths. Witchy decor, maybe something like Goth decor for home, goth decor for bedroom.
Carrie Miller:
You can put as many as you want, up to 500 characters, and the more you put, the more input that you put into this, the better it's going to be. And the next thing is you can put your brand name in and the next is that is the product name. So I'm going to put you know Manny's mysterious oddities here and I'm going to ask for it to be put at the beginning of the title. You can have it put at the end of the title if you want to, and then the coffin name is, or the product name is coffin shelf. You can choose the tone. So you can do casual, friendly, humorous. I'll just put casual in there. The target audience is got Gothic, goths, halloween and I think I'll leave it at that. So the more input obviously you put here, the better these are going to be. But I want to show you how quick and easy this is. So I'm going to ask it to write a title for me and I'm going to click on write it and it's going to come up with a title for me in a very short amount of time here. That's going to be, you know, helpful for me to get started, or it's something you could use right away.
Carrie Miller:
So Manny's Mysterious Oddities coffin bookshelf with coffin mirror unique Gothic decor coffin shelf home and bedroom. So I actually I put coffin mirror in there and coffin bookshelf, which we actually don't really need those. So I'm going to go back here and I'm going to take off bat shelf and coffin mirror and coffin bookshelf here and I'm going to hit next and I'm going to try this again and I'm going to click rewrite for me. So we don't have those keywords on the list and it's going to probably be more accurate. So you want to make sure all of these keywords are you know exactly what you would want in your listing. See Manny's Mysterious Oddities coffin shelf black Gothic decor for bedroom. Witchy and goth decor for home. Perfect gift for Goss Halloween fans. Intriguing coffin shelves for your dark side.
Carrie Miller:
I'm going to go ahead and use that suggestion and you know you can if you wanted to also kind of ask them to rewrite it. It's not going to erase that once you click on use suggestion and then you can get more ideas and you can kind of manually edit this as you go and just keep getting more ideas. If you want to see if it's worded better in the second suggestion, you can do that or you can discard it. Once you click on, you know, add suggestion, it's going to cross off the keywords over here to make sure that you optimize this fully and then for the bullets you click, write it for me, and the same thing it's going to write these bullet points for you and it's going to give you some great suggestions. Now, a lot of people what they do is they use this as a great starting off point to writing their bullets. Some people use this, just just these bullets that the AI created. It really is up to you how you want to do it, and this is the most updated form of chat GPT that is integrated in here, so you can see some great stuff here.
Carrie Miller:
So goth shelf our coffin shelf is a perfect addition to your goth a come to core. It's black, eerie designs out of unique touch to any room, ideal for goss or Halloween fans looking to show off their spooky stuff. I like that. I'm going to go ahead and say use that suggestion, and then you can see that it actually crossed out some of those keywords. And if I just go ahead and say, use suggestion, use suggestion, and I use all of these as suggestions, they have pretty much used all of the keywords in there. You can also have it write a description for you and it's going to write the description and you can choose to use that or not.
Carrie Miller:
Search terms If there's anything that doesn't get used and most of it usually does get used in the bullets you can add those into the search terms and you can put that in the back end. And so if you, you know, maybe aren't a writer and you want to really get some help with your listings and you are really good at keyword research, you can put those keywords in and AI can help you. You can always go back and edit it. You can keep getting more suggestions and editing as you go. It makes it so much faster and easier. So I want you guys to check it out and let us know what you think.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Thanks a lot, Carrie, for that training tip of the week. Have you guys used Listing Builder yet? I hope you have All right guys. That's it for the weekly buzz for this week. Don't forget to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.
Ever wondered how to turn strategic insights into a goldmine? This episode brings the secrets of Amazon analytics to your ears, highlighting the pivotal role of keywords in boosting your revenues and leaving your competitors behind. We've got a masterclass in the works that will open your eyes to the capabilities of organic and sponsored ranks, the art of tracking Amazon keyword ranks, and decoding the difference between ranks in Cerebro, keyword tracker, and a browser search. Fasten your seatbelts, as we explore deeper into the labyrinth of Amazon Brand Analytics and trends. We will guide you on how to use data inside Helium 10 from Amazon’s brand analytics data to unveil what's happening with specific keywords and how to turn this knowledge into strategic decisions. Plus, watch out for our segment on the "time machine method" in Helium 10, a secret weapon to fuel your Amazon business’ growth. Finally, we'll share some hard-hitting strategies for uncovering the top Amazon keywords for your market niche and revealing hidden opportunities in keyword research. We'll discuss how to use Amazon Brand Analytics to see the history of Cerebro keyword searches, identify sales spikes, and compare organic and sponsored ranks. By the end of the episode, you'll be armed with the knowledge needed to dominate your market and boost your Amazon business to new heights. So, are you ready to elevate your selling game?
episode 507 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:
- 01:27 - Advanced Amazon Keyword Tracking Strategies
- 08:11 - Amazon Brand Analytics for Keyword Strategies
- 13:54 - Comparing Amazon and Helium 10's Data
- 16:53 - Analyzing Historical Trends in Keyword Distribution
- 19:56 - Keyword Analysis for Amazon Sales Increase
- 25:52 - Top Amazon Keywords for Multiple Products
- 32:58 - Optimizing PPC Strategy With Competitor Analysis
- 37:19 - Opportunity Keywords and Competitor Analysis
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today is part two of our seller strategy masterclass, where we do a deep dive into keyword research using Cerebro, and the strategies we're going to go over today, if implemented by you and your team, could potentially mean thousands of dollars of extra revenue for you. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS, free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And this is now part two for a series that we've been doing that we call seller strategy masterclass, where we do a deep dive into Amazon keyword research. Now, if you haven't seen part one, you should go back and, you know, hop on that video, because a lot of what we're going to talk today is based on some of the things that hopefully you've mastered already in part one. So, for any reason you just happen to find this episode randomly, go back to episode 506. You can do that h10.me/506 and make sure to listen to that one. Take a lot of notes. Make sure you've mastered that before getting into this one. All right, for the rest of you who already watched that, let's go ahead and hop into it.
Bradley Sutton:
Last episode, we went through about 12 different strategies that can definitely help you, mainly looking at like individual products, using Cerebro and how to like reverse engineer, organic ranks and sponsored ranks, and how to use some of the advanced features of Helium 10. Today, we're going to look at even more advanced features. A lot of these are or most of these, all of these are available to anybody with a diamond and above, a lot of these are still available to anybody with a platinum Helium 10 account as well. But again, even if you don't even have Helium 10, let alone one of those plans, still pay attention to this, because these are strategies that you should be using, regardless of what software you're using. It's literally stuff, some of this that I would say 95 to 98% of Amazon sellers even if they have Helium 10, they're not using it, so it really can give you a competitive advantage over others. Again, the way that we do this in case you forgot it from the last episode instead of just making this some step by step guide, we'll show some step by step, but the main focus of this is to give you goals. All right, all right, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is like a how to guide. We're going to say stuff like how to compare organic and sponsored rank to the being the top clicked in brand analytics. All right, so we're going to start off with a how to and then, as soon as we do that, we're going to talk about well, why is this beneficial? Why do you even want to achieve this goal? What can it mean to your bottom line? And then we're going to get into the strategy. Ready to go? All right, strategy 12. How to start tracking Amazon keyword rank up to 24 times a day. Now, why would you even want to do this? How is this beneficial to you? How could this make you money?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, as we have talked about in previous videos, the ranks organic and sponsored that you might see inside of Helium 10, Cerebro are either from, could be from today, could have been from five days ago, could have been from 29 days ago. It's anywhere between one and 30 days old. We're not checking it completely actively. It gives you just a holistic look at ranking. Now there might be something that you really want to focus on, like your top keywords. You might not want to see something where it could have been taken last week. It could have been taken a couple of weeks ago. You really want to focus on that keyword? Well, in that case, you're going to want to be looking at your rank a lot more frequently than just looking at it, you know, once a day or even once a week. So one of the ways that you can do that, if you really found some good, most important keywords for your listing, is by exporting to a different tool keyword tracker.
Bradley Sutton:
And again, just to kind of set the scene here, what is the difference between a rank in Cerebro, a rank in keyword tracker and a rank you might see on your browser right now? You know, some people say wait a minute, how come my rank is different from what I see in Cerebro, to what I see in my browser? Remember, these are not estimates that are taking us to Cerebro. This is an exact rank taken from an exact browsing scenario. You could have 10 people at the very same time in different parts of the country. You could have three people in the same house at the same exact time search for something on Amazon, and it could be different ranks. All right, whether somebody's on a mobile browser, somebody's on Safari, somebody's on Chrome. Somebody signed in, somebody signed off. Somebody signed in in Los Angeles, California, somebody signed in in Brooklyn, New York. It could have different ranks. It usually doesn't fluctuate that much, but that's why you might see something different. It doesn't mean that one is wrong and one is right. They're all actual ranks but, you know, based on the browsing scenario, amazon might show something different.
Bradley Sutton:
Anyways, how can you track up to 12 or 24 times a day? Let me show you how. You're going to want to take your keywords that you want to go ahead and export let's just say, coffin letterboard, halloween DVD collection and coffin bookshelf. So you go ahead and click this button, add to keyword tracker, find the product that you're wanting to add this to, and you can add track a new product if you haven't added this to your keyword tracker before, and then, basically, you are going to automatically have these products in keyword tracker. Now, once you go over to keyword tracker, you should see those new keywords that you had added in here. Now I mentioned at the top of this section is how to do it 24 times a day. Well, by default, keyword tracker, unlike Cerebro, it's checking once a day. If you wanted to check up to 24 times a day. You're just going to hit this little rocket chip that is next to each keyword and then now you are going to get ranks 24 times a day for this keyword. So that's just a great way. Again, if you want to get more into detail on keyword tracker, there are other videos that kind of help you with that.
Bradley Sutton:
So that's just one of the ways to export keywords out of Cerebro. There's actually a couple more ways that you can do that. One of the ways is a lot of people like to manipulate the data, maybe in an Excel spreadsheet All right. So if you want to do that, all you have to do is hit the export data button directly from Cerebro and then you could say, hey, download to a XLSX file or a CSV file, and then what that does is it downloads all of the raw data, keywords and all the search volume and everything into an Excel spreadsheet, and then you might be able to do a little bit more filtering or something like that that you might not have been able to do inside of the Helium 10 dashboard.
Bradley Sutton:
A third way that you can export the data from Cerebro is to our word processor tool, which is called Frankenstein. All right, so if you export, if you hit export and then you hit it to Frankenstein, what it's going to do is it's gonna open up a new window and it's gonna open up Frankenstein. So what this allows you to do is it allows you to take away duplicates and maybe filter out certain words, allows you to do word counts. You wanna see. Hey, show me all of the keywords that have at least four words. Show me all the keywords that have coffin. Take out any keyword phrase that has Halloween. Whatever you wanna do in Frankenstein, you can manipulate the keywords in that way. If you wanna have a better instructions on how to work with Frankenstein, there's a video that's in the Frankenstein tool that helps you with that. So there's three different ways to export. Number one go to Keyword Tracker. Learn how to track these keywords 24 times a day in rotating browsing scenarios. Number two export your keyword list to Excel and then manipulate the data that way. And then, number three export it to our keyword processing tool, Frankenstein. That gives you even more options.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let's get into the next strategy how to see the top clicked and top purchased products for a keyword using Amazon brand analytics data. So Amazon brand analytics is something that Amazon released about two, three years ago, really helpful. It is a data point that tells you, for any keyword, what were the top three products that were clicked and then, from those top three click products, what was the percentage of their click share and what was their percentage of their conversion or purchase share. For any keyword that comes up in Cerebro, you can actually see that number. Now, why is this important? How can this metric help you make money? Well, all keywords are not created equal. All right, there are some keywords that result in a lot of clicks and a lot of purchases. There are some keywords that don't have a lot of purchases. There are some keywords where maybe the top three products that are clicked, they're dominating the clicks, they're dominating the purchases. There are other keywords, when you add up the top three products that are clicked, that they might not have a big percentage of the overall clicks and conversions for a keyword, and that could give you information to let you know, hey, that market might be a little bit more wide open. There's a lot of ways to look into this data and get ahead of the game. Like you might wanna focus on a keyword where you see a couple of really bad listings that are just dominating the sales, and you know that you can take over. That might be a more attractive keyword to focus on as opposed to something else. So how do you do that? Let's go ahead and hop into it In your Cerebro results.
Bradley Sutton:
You'll notice one of the columns. There's two columns. It'll say ABA, which stands for Amazon Brand Analytics Total Click Share and ABA Conversion Share. Now, right next to that, you're gonna see a little graph button, so like, for example, I can see Coffin Shelf and it says ABA Total Click Share 30.5%. What that means is the top three click products over the last month or over the last week for that keyword resulted in 30.5% of the overall clicks. It says ABA Total Conversion Share 15% for that same thing. Now, that right there just tells you something that you know, because, theoretically speaking, if the conversion rates were all created equal, if three products got 30% of the clicks, they should get 30% of the sales. Right, if all things were created equal. But this means that of the top three click products, a lot of people are clicking out of it and that means 85% of the sales that come from these keywords are not even from the top three clicks. So that right there might give you some strategy that you can look at. You can actually filter in the Cerebro results for this top three total click share and top three total conversion share.
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing you can do is click on the graph. Like, if I click on this graph that is right next to ABA Total Click Share, another graph comes up and you're gonna wanna put your mouse over the different months or the different weeks. I can actually change the date settings to say, hey, I wanna look at this data on a weekly basis and maybe I'm just gonna look from October 1st all the way to October 28th and now, week by week, I put my mouse over this graph and then here at the bottom I can see which ones are the top three click Like. For example, for this week, October 22nd to October 28th, I can see that my product had 9% of the clicks. It was number three and it had 11% of the conversions. So that's pretty good. Look at this. There was one other product on here that had 13% of the clicks but only 3% of the conversions, so their conversion rate was not very good. So again, a lot of great data that you can see in here. This comes directly from Amazon. This is not some estimate from Helium 10 or some algorithm. This is directly from Amazon. So use this data in order to get some additional insights into what's going on on certain keywords. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Next strategy how to compare the organic and sponsored rank and see how it relates to being one of the top three click products. Now, why is this beneficial? How can this make you money? When you talk about spending money on Amazon, as an Amazon seller, what do you think? You spend a lot of money on Sponsored ads? You're probably right, right. Apart from inventory, of course, and shipping and things like that, what do you pay Amazon the most for? It might be PPC, and so you wanna know hey, am I getting the best bang for my buck with my PPC? Do I even need to invest heavily in staying at the top of search for PPC? Do I need to, like, stay top of search and do some kind of campaign to bring my organic rank up? There's a lot of these questions that you might have, and without looking at this next measure, I'm gonna tell you you might not be able to see the answer. So let's go ahead and hop into this. How you can see this If you click on the graph inside of Helium-Tensoribro, on one of the ABA total click share figures here and, by the way, if you see an NA, that means it wasn't available inside of Amazon brand analytics, so let's go ahead and click on one that has the graph.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm gonna focus here on the right side of this graph, and this is giving me the last three months of what was the top three click products and these first columns that I'm looking at. It'll say click share and conversion share. Again, this is directly from Amazon telling me who were the top three clicked and purchased products. And the thing that is interesting is the next two columns are the organic rank average and the sponsored rank average. So we're now comparing Amazon data to Helium 10’s data. All right, take a look at this. I'm looking at my product here. For the month of October, I was a number three clicked product okay, but look at my organic rank average 21. So you might think that you probably would get zero sales being page one position 20, right, but I am one of the top three clicked and I was even converting at a higher clip than the number one clicked product. Why I could see here from the Helium-Tens data that my sponsored rank average was number two.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so how does this knowledge help me? Well, now I know I don't necessarily have to do some crazy campaign to get ranked organically. As long as I can stay ahead of the game on my sponsored rank, it is going to keep me to be one of the top three click Other keywords. You might see different data where the sponsored rank might not even be that important, but the organic rank seems to drive all of the sales. You might see another keyword where it's unless you are at the top of the page in organic and sponsored, you might not be one of the top three clicked or purchased products. So again, this is a super, super valuable data point that only Helium 10 has, where it compares Amazon brand analytics data with our keyword tracking data so you can find out which keywords to focus on and which keywords to focus on organic versus sponsored, how to view the history of how many keywords a product has ranked for organically or in sponsored ads. This is one of my favorite ones, something I've been asking for for years before the team finally put it in.
Bradley Sutton:
I like to call this tool the time machine method, but actually it's called historical trends inside of Helium 10. Now, why would you want to know this? How can this make you money? Well, you might see what a product is doing right now on Amazon. That's what Cerebro is for right, and it's always been for that. Hey, where are they ranking for now? But what if you're in a seasonal niche? Or what if you're curious about what happens during November of each year, because that's when sales spike? Or what happens when it's a beach ball and it's in the summer? You know, like, if I'm in December and I'm looking at Cerebro for a beach ball item, the keywords that people are finding this product now it's probably very different than the keywords in June and July.
Bradley Sutton:
Another way that I'm looking at this data is that you know what if there are trends in how a competitor is doing sponsored ads, or maybe trends in how their organic reach flows, like maybe they do outside campaigns that give them temporary spikes at different times of the year, let's hop in to see how you can see all of this data, and even more so whenever you are in Cerebro. There is a button in the middle under keyword distribution that is called show historical trend. You are going to want to go ahead and click that and it's going to open up the historical trends for up to two years if the product has been active, for where their organic and sponsored keywords have been showing up, and you'll see it in different colors. So like, for example, you could see that in October of this year they were ranking for 698 different keywords and also they were ranking sponsored 281. Now here's something that is cool. If I'm going to go back in history and I could see, wow, look, in November and December of last year, these guys were going hard and heavy. They really upped their PPC spend. This is not my coffin shelf here, I'm looking at somebody else's coffin shelf. So now I know, going into November of this year, hey, I got to be on guard because it looks like this competitor really ups their spend on PPC during November and December. But take a look at this If I look in January, it looks like they pretty much turn off their PPC ads.
Bradley Sutton:
They were only showing up for 84 different keywords in sponsored ads during January of 2023. So now, all of a sudden, I've got some data that shows, hey, they didn't really do any sponsored ads in January. January might be the time where I can kind of overtake them with my reach if I go opposite of them and go a little bit hard and heavy, maybe in November and December I'm like man it might be too hard to compete with them. Maybe I'll dial back my spend and let them go ahead and go crazy with their spend. I mean, there's different ways to interpret this data. There's no right or wrong way.
Bradley Sutton:
But for the first time, you can have visibility into the reach of your competitors. Maybe you see a competitor sales going up and up and up, right. Well, I would go ahead and look at this historical trend and see why are they ranking for more keywords? Are they advertising for more keywords? Same thing Maybe their sales are going down. Well, I'm going to check Are they ranking for more keywords? Are they advertising for more, more keywords? If not, that means they just got more efficient, right. If their sales were going up and the keywords were actually going down, it means that they were just laser focused on certain keywords. Which keywords were they focused on? I'm going to show you in the next strategy exactly how to find that. But, guys, take a look at this on your listing and your competitors listing, so you can see the history of all of the number of keywords that they're organically and sponsored ranked for All right. Now the next strategy is how to check an Amazon products organic and sponsored rank history. All right. So in the previous strategy we talked about how to just see the total number. But how do you actually see what they were ranking for and when? Why do you want to see this? Why is this important? How can it make you money?
Bradley Sutton:
Again, the example I gave earlier of a beach ball. You know if I'm going to launch a beach ball in July of next year, or maybe I'll launch it in spring, but you know the main focus is gonna be in June, july, august. In December I can't really Do keyword research on this product and know what are the best keywords. Right, I need to go find who was One of the top selling beach balls in June, july or August of last year and then I want to Analyze them. Not in December of this year, what, when nobody is searching for beach balls and they might even have their listing active.
Bradley Sutton:
But I want to see what were the keywords driving the sales of that product during that time of year. Maybe there's other products where I could see that they had a certain spike in a certain month. Regardless of see. Maybe it's not a seasonal product at all. It's a product like a power bank or something that people buy throughout the year. But I noticed in a certain month they had a lot of sales. Well, you know what I'm gonna do I want to compare what keywords and where they were ranking for in the month before their sales went up and then compare it to the month where their sales went up and which keywords increased in rank organic or sponsored. Guess what? That is the reason of why their sales went up. I can literally tie a sales increase at least part of their sales increase to Exact keywords, so that now I know for my product which keywords I want to focus on Of which potentially could increase my sales.
Bradley Sutton:
So how can we do that? Let's go ahead and hop into it. So again, if I see a, let's pretend that this coffin shelf here had a spike in sales on a certain year, like November of 2022 what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go in click historical trend and then I'm going to find the month when they had the the big sales. Now, before I even do that, I might go into the previous month and have that cerebral open in another window so I can see where they were ranked on a quote-unquote neural month. But let me show you. I just click on this exact date here of November 2022 and then I'm gonna hit apply filters. And now this is like taking a time machine, because it is now going to show me the cerebral, as if I was doing this in November of 2022.
Bradley Sutton:
That's what it is showing now, and then now I can go ahead and use Helium 10 filters and say, hey, show me of the keywords that had at least 300 search volume during, you know, october of 2022, where were they ranked? Between positions 1 and 20. And then now, all of a sudden, I can see the exact keywords that they were probably getting a lot of their sales from. And then again, what I'm going to do is, if I was trying to see a Spike in sales, like where the keywords coming from, I'm gonna take one of the months where their sales were down and then compare, keyword by keyword, which one they had a big increase or which one they hopped to the top of page one. And now I know Exactly why they had a spike in sales.
Bradley Sutton:
That customer. If they're not even using Helium 10 or they're not looking this data, they probably don't even know themselves. Uh, I say that customer, that competitor, they probably don't even know themselves why they have the spike in sales, but I can actually see that now and now I'm gonna use that data to make sure that I get ahead. So, guys, this I Cannot emphasize how valuable this feature is. Nobody has ever had anything like this super, super important that can really get you ahead looking at either spikes in sales, valleys in sales. You know it's the opposite. I didn't really mention that. But let's say you notice a competitor a certain month had a terrible month, even though they were in stock. Obviously, if they're out of stock, well, they would have a bad month, but they were in stock. They had a terrible month of sales. Well, I'm going to look at when they had a great month right before and I'm gonna look at what keywords they went down in rank, what keywords did they take the pedal off the metal for their sponsored ranks? And then, now I know the keywords, I need to make sure that I don't fall off, because now I know that, hey, if I fall off on these keywords, it could result in another sales. You know, sales lull, like it did for my competitor. So, guys, this is probably top one, top two around their favorite features in all of Helium 10, out of the 75 million things that Helium 10 can do, this right here is one of my favorites and this is what could really really give you a leg up on the competition Historical Cerebro. So make sure to use it.
Bradley Sutton:
Next strategy how to view the history of your Cerebro keyword searches. All right, why is this beneficial? Can this make you money? Well, a lot of this data changes over time and maybe you are like always checking somebody's Cerebro and you or somebody's product in Cerebro and you want to see the history of something like Amazon recommended and how it changed over time, or some of the graphs you know over time. Maybe you don't have access to the historical Cerebro? Well, what you can do is you can actually go in and see your history so that you know what was going on and when. All right, so how you can do that is by at the very top of the screen. Even before you get into any search, you're gonna see a very button at the top right called history. If you click on that, it is gonna show you all of the history of every single product you have ever searched in Cerebro and it gives you the date of when you looked at it and you can even search. Like you can see, I've used Cerebro here 1,500 times. I could search hey, where's all the coffin shelves that I searched for? And if I hit open, what it's going to open up in is the Cerebro as I looked at it as of that day. So this is a great thing to look at if you want to look at how things have progressed since the first time you looked at a product or a group of products really important to check your history in Cerebro.
Bradley Sutton:
Next strategy how to find the top Amazon keywords for a niche or a market, or multiple Asins, a group of products. Why is this important? How can it benefit you? We've been talking until now about looking up individual products in Cerebro, which is absolutely a great method and a lot of tools can do that, but now we're taking it to another level, where you are analyzing multiple products. Well, how this can help you is you know you might if you just look at one product like the top seller in a niche and understand their keywords, their top keywords. That's valuable information, right, but do you think that that one product is the only one making sales on keywords. No, another product might have discovered a different keyword that this first product doesn't know about, and so if you analyze that product, you know you might want to know what keywords they're ranking for. Maybe you want to know what's the most important keywords overall in the niche. Where are most of the top competitors all getting their sales from, because they're all ranked high? What are the keywords where maybe only a couple competitors really know about it? So these are kind of under the radar keywords that might have less competition. All of these are reasons on why you should analyze multiple products at the same time.
Bradley Sutton:
So let's just again talk about how you can find the top keywords, the top keywords for a group of products, or the most relevant keywords. Well, I actually like to start this outside of Cerebro. I mean, you could just go ahead and copy Aysons one by one directly in this Cerebro. I actually like going to Amazon itself and then looking at the products that way. So here I just searched for coffin shelf here in Amazon and what I'm going to do is I'm going to run Helium 10 X-Ray on this page Now. Once I do that, the top products are going to come up.
Bradley Sutton:
Now here is something very important. I'm going to select from X-Ray right on Amazon the keywords that I want to look at in Cerebro. But what's important to do is Cerebro Multi-Aysons search is built on comparing your product to your competitors. So if you have a product right here on this page, you want to make sure to select it first. All right, so I'm going to select my product, my coffin shelf, first. Now, if you don't have a product, maybe you're just doing keyword research in a brand new niche. I like choosing a product way from the bottom of the page. That's not one of the top sellers as my baseline product, and the reason is is because I don't want to exclude it from the search results. All right, so the way that Cerebro is built is to compare your product to competitor products. But you can kind of use this mini hack if you don't have your own product, just by selecting a random product here from the bottom of the page and then selecting your coffin shelf, so I can choose up to like maybe 10 or even 20 of the top coffin shelves.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me go ahead and choose, you know, some of the top ones that I see here on this page, and then, once I've selected them. I'm going to go ahead and hit the button Run Cerebro and it's going to open up Cerebro in another tab and it's now going to show me my rank versus all of the other competitor ranks in Cerebro. Or, if I didn't have my product as the first product, it's actually going to show me just the baseline product versus all of the competitor products. But it's really the competitor products that I'm going to be focused on. So now, if I just want to find out what the top keywords are, as you can see here, it found over 3,000 keywords that any one of those competitors that I looked at are ranking for. All right, that's valuable, but you know I really want to focus on the top keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
There's one button you can do right here at the very top of the page. If I just hit the button Top Keywords, it actually goes in and does some filters for me so that I can see what some of the top keywords are, and you could see it filtered that you know 3,000 keywords all the way down to five keywords. What is this based on? It just threw in some filters that make sure to show me what are the keywords that more than a few of, more than just one or two of these products that I chose are ranking for, and they're all kind of ranking high. The competitor rank average is between one and 40. That's what it did. So maybe this five keywords is not enough. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, hey, you know, show me the 300 and up search volume. Maybe the competitor rank average is between one and 50, and at least three ranking competitors are all ranking for it, and then, if I go ahead and apply those filters, more keywords might show up. Now, as you can see, 22 filtered keywords show up.
Bradley Sutton:
The column that I like to look at here is the competitor performance score. This can be viewed. As you know, some people call this relevancy. I don't like calling it relevancy because it could just be a fluke. But if you see a 10 out of 10 competitor performance score, that means that a lot of these products you know I think I had five or six products that I entered in here a lot, if not all of them are all ranking for it and they are all ranking relatively high. That's what this competitor rank average is.
Bradley Sutton:
Look at this this keyword has competitor rank average of 7.6. That means the five products that we're ranking for this keyword. If I average where they're showing up for it's page one position seven, right. So that's pretty crazy. If I wanted to know exactly where they were ranking for, I just put my mouse over relative rank and then it shows why that competitor rank average is so high. Look at this. It says one is number one, one is number three, one is number five, number 13, 15 and 16. You take that on average and it goes to a 7.6. All right, so this is a great way to see what are the top keywords in a niche. That means all the top sellers, if that's what I chose when I was looking in Amazon. If they're all ranking highly for a certain keyword, it's gonna show up here on this top keyword list. This is a great way to get your best keywords for your Amazon listing.
Bradley Sutton:
How to find the top sponsored keywords for a niche or a groove of products. Why is this important? How can this help you? If you are trying to enter a niche where you haven't run PPC ads before, you might not have the best idea about what are the most important keywords to advertise for. But if you're going into a niche where there's competitors who have been on there a few months or a few years, theoretically speaking, maybe they have already gone through a lot of auto campaigns and they know what the best converting keywords are. So if you look at where they are focusing their spend, where they are focusing on top of search, where they're showing up on page one in the sponsored results, it can actually help you go ahead and start from date one to be focusing on the right keywords in sponsored ads.
Bradley Sutton:
So how can you do that? Well, let's just say you did a multi-acent search, like I showed you in the last strategy, and you are looking at about four, five, six, seven or however many acents. What you're gonna want to do is you might want to look at sponsored rank count, and I like putting a minimum of two there. That means, hey, show me the keywords where at least two out of these competitors are advertising for you might wanna go three out of five instead of just two. Let's just start with two. And then sponsored rank average. You might want to choose between, let's just say one and 20, kind of like saying, hey, these are the keywords that if I take the average rank, they're on page one or two of sponsored ads, and then maybe I'll go ahead and do a search volume minimum of 300.
Bradley Sutton:
There's no magic numbers here, guys. You guys can play with these filters. That's why we have so many of them and, as you can see here, eight keywords came up for this coffin shelf niche and so I can see here coffin shelf, coffin shelves, mini coffin. If I look at the sponsored rank count, I could see how many people are advertising from the top players and then what the sponsored rank average is, and I could see some of these. Look at this one Cough and shelf. We've got somebody page one, position one, somebody page one position nine, eight and 10 in sponsored rank, and then one is 65. That brought down the average a little bit. This gives me a really quick way, within 30 seconds or less, to see who the top players are all kind of focused on in order to focus their PPC spend, and then you can definitely use that for your own PPC strategy.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, last strategy of the day how to find the keywords that most of the top competitors are sleeping on. Why is this important? How can it make you money? We talked earlier about how to find the top keywords for a niche, and that is just period. End of story. The top keywords just because a lot of the competitors are ranking for it doesn't make it a bad keyword. That actually makes it a good keyword. But, that being said, it's understandable to know that, hey, if all of the top competitors, all the top sellers in a certain niche, are all getting sales from this keyword because they're all ranked high, it's a very competitive keyword. Again, I reiterate, that doesn't mean it's a bad keyword or something you shouldn't have in your listing. You absolutely have to have the top keywords. But what about the keywords that maybe only one competitor or two competitors are getting sales from? This could be a potentially non-competitive keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, sometimes these keywords are a little bit less relevant to your product. An example might be like Gothic decor. Right, maybe only one or two competitors of coffin shelf are ranking for Gothic decor, but all the other products that you see when you search for Gothic decor? There are things like maybe like a spooky skull holder or some Gothic bed frame or some Gothic looking wall ornament or what have you. But here's the thing, the reason why sometimes certain keywords work for products you might not think are relevant.
Bradley Sutton:
Like maybe you didn't think that a coffin shelf is Gothic decor is that there are people out there who search for a keyword with different buyer intent. Right, there is maybe somebody who, in the back of their mind, they really do want a coffin shelf, but they don't call it a coffin shelf, they call it Gothic decor. So what they're looking for is a coffin shelf. So they type in Gothic decor. They see a whole bunch of random products. But if they're looking for a coffin shelf and only one or two products are coffin shelves on page one, guess what? Those one or two products have a 50-50 chance or a 100% chance if only one of them is ranking for it to get the sale, because all those other products on page one is kind of meaningless to that customer who went there with an intent to buy a coffin shelf. They just use a different keyword than most people. So this is why looking for these keywords while they might not be the top keywords that can get you sales, they're a great way to kind of like take advantage of special keywords that certain competitors out there have found that's relevant to their product and they're getting sales.
Bradley Sutton:
And now, instead of having to fight seven, eight, nine of your competitors for a sale, you're only fighting one or two competitors. How can you do that? Let's go ahead and hop into Cerebro. So if I did my multi-acent search that I've showed you guys how to do in the other strategies, all I have to do is hit one button for this, and it's the button at the top left that's called opportunity keywords. This puts in a kind of like preset filters that you can play around with later and it's telling me a competitor performance max five, and then only one competitor is ranking between one and 15.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so, as I can see, as you can see here, there are 12 keywords that came up. For example, one of them is Gothic shelf. Now, why did this keyword come up on this search but not the top keywords search? Well, if you look here, there are only. There is only one competitor here who is ranked between one and 15, and it's somebody rank 13. The rest of them were ranked on. You know, here's one that's 16, here's one at 76, one at 77, one at 96. So, only if I get on the top page of Gothic shelf, guess what? I am only fighting one competitor for that sale, for somebody who might buy a coffin shelf.
Bradley Sutton:
You see how valuable this keyword list can go. If you want to, you know, fool around with some of these filters to narrow it in other ways. You can absolutely do that. But this is just a great way to see what we call opportunity keywords. Or maybe only one or two competitors getting only you know, maybe a couple sales here or there from this keyword because it might not be fully, fully relevant to the niche as a whole. But you're only gonna be fighting one or two people for sales for this keyword and usually you know all the top 10, 15, they all have a few of these keywords that they might be getting sales from. And now you can combine all of those top keywords into your listing and be one of the only ones that has all of those keywords in there and getting sales from them.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, as kind of an addendum to this strategy, some of these filters they're really great to use, just like get some insights right. So forget about that preset opportunity keywords filter, if I clear this, I really want you guys to play along, or play around with these filters here, which are number of competitors and competitor rank. All right, basically, the number of competitors filter means of how many ASINs do you want to hit a certain criteria that you are about to specify. So, as you can see, here I had put five ASINs. So maybe I say, hey, I just want to see the keywords where a minimum of one competitor any one of these, or all five of them, it doesn't matter is ranked between one and 10. So what I'm doing is I put number of competitors minimum one I don't put a maximum and then under the competitor rank filter, I put one and 10. Now this is going to show me all of the keywords where just any one, any two, any three, any four, any five of these ASINs are ranked between one and 10, and I came up with 83 keywords. So, as you see, guys, the possibilities are endless here.
Bradley Sutton:
With all of these filters, there is no one magic way that's going to get you the best keywords. Everybody has their own strategies. That's why we have these filters. But even that one could get you sales trying to look for keywords that at least just one of your competitors is getting sales from. All right, guys, that ends part two of our keyword research masterclass. We're going to have an unprecedented part three coming up soon, where we're going to show you the rest of the Cerebro strategies and we're even going to get into our other tool, magnet, to get you strategies that are going to give you sales that can help your business. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll see you in the next one.
What if you could unlock the potential of keyword search volume to exponentially boost your sales on Amazon? Imagine using a comprehensive tool like Helium 10's Cerebro to not only identify the keywords a product ranks for but also understand the demand of a keyword, observe products gaining the most clicks and purchases, and even keep track of your competitors' PPC strategy. In this Seller Strategy Masterclass episode, we break down these complex strategies, which, if utilized wisely, could lead to extra sales amounting to thousands of dollars.
In the realm of Amazon selling, understanding search volume and history is paramount. We guide you on how to capitalize on these essential metrics using Cerebro's robust features. Ever wondered how to leverage the power of reverse engineering the success of your competitors? We've got you covered! We dive into how to identify hot keywords in your niche, understand your competitors' PPC strategies, and find common roots among relevant keywords, all by harnessing the power of Helium 10’s Cerebro tool.
In our quest to empower Amazon sellers, we reveal new features and how to use the Cerebro IQ Score to identify profitable keywords and optimize their impact on your business. Plus, learn how the Amazon Recommended Rank can revolutionize your product listings. From the USA to Canada, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, UK, India, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, United Arab Emirates, and even the Walmart USA marketplace, these strategies are designed to supercharge your Amazon-selling experience. So, buckle up and join us for this riveting masterclass on Amazon seller strategies!
In episode 506 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:
- 01:13 - A Seller Strategy Masterclass For Cerebro
- 06:11 - Using Helium 10's Cerebro to Analyze Amazon Keywords
- 12:38 - Understanding Search Volume And History
- 19:18 - Understanding Competitors' PPC Strategy
- 22:59 - Finding Common Keywords on Amazon
- 26:35 - Optimizing Title Density for Amazon Rankings
- 30:59 - Amazon Keyword Indexing
- 45:02 - Frequently Bought Together Products in Cerebro
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Walmart Announces Black Friday Sale Details and Previews Early Deals https://www.cnet.com/deals/walmart-announces-black-friday-sale-details-and-previews-early-deals/ EU Store Transparency Report https://assets.aboutamazon.com/cd/28/4d02dd2e41ec8c6d1bc341e9d919/amazon-eu-store-transparency-report-jan-june-2023.pdf Bad Review Removal https://www.linkedin.com/posts/h10bradley_dont-remember-getting-this-notification-activity-7125484541426708481-WmJx/
Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit's collaboration with brands and law enforcement result in global raids https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazons-counterfeit-crimes-unit-successful-raids-worldwide Exclusive: How Walmart is using AI to supercharge its holiday plans https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-how-walmart-is-using-ai-to-supercharge-its-holiday-plans-190849969.html?guccounter=1 Shopify merchants seek AI boost for key sales decisions https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/shopify-merchants-seek-ai-boost-key-sales-decisions-2023-11-01/ TikTok tests new ways to embed commerce into the in-app experience https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/tiktok-tests-new-ways-embed-commerce-in-app-experience And don't miss our deep dive on how to generate unlimited Amazon Post graphics using AI. Let’s discover how to elevate your business and create engaging content for your customers. It's an exciting time to be in e-commerce, and we're here to help you navigate it!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:
- 01:12 - Amazon MYCE
- 02:37 - Walmart Black Friday
- 03:38 - FBM Update
- 04:22 - Premium A+ Content
- 05:21 - Amazon EU Details
- 06:33 - UK SAS Program
- 07:24 - Bad Review Removal
- 08:22 - Amazon CCU
- 09:41 - AI Everywhere
- 12:30 - Follow Helium 10 x Pacvue on TikTok
- 13:05 - ProTraining: How to Generate Amazon Posts using AI
- 19:48 - Helium 10 New Features Alert
- 23:48 - Did Bradley Hit 1 Mile?
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon's allowing sellers to send emails to customers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There's new requirements for premium A plus content, amazon's now sending emails out when they remove bad reviews, and there's tons of new AI news in the e-commerce world. This and much more on this week's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our weekly buzz. We give you a rundown of all the goings on in the e-commerce world this week. We also let you know what new features Helium 10 has and we give you a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week, all right? So first of all, if you're watching this on YouTube, you see I'm moving a lot. Well, I'm trying to be the first ever newscaster here to do a whole news segment while walking a mile on a treadmill. So that's what I'm doing. You guys know I've been trying to push health and wellness this year, so I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is and do some exercising here. Live on this show. My goal is to do one mile before this broadcast is over. Anyways, let's go ahead and hop right into the news. There's lots going on, all right. The first news article of the day is actually from Seller Central. It's on your dashboard and you may or may not have known this, but you can do marketing emails, all right. So now what you can do. This article here is talk is entitled increase visibility of your holiday deals with marketing emails. And so if you're a brand registered, you're able to use manage your customer engagement tool to you know market, to repeat purchases from existing customers and also your brand followers. Like you know, maybe you've gotten some brand followers thanks to Amazon Post, and if you take a look at this article, it talks about that. You're you can offer percentage off discounts, seven day deals and product launch announcement emails, and they're especially saying hey, you should try and do this during Black Friday and for Cyber Monday. So where you can do this, you can hit the link for manager experiments right there in that article. You go to your manager customer engagement page, you hit create campaign, you select your brand and then basically, what you can do is you can hit market product or promote a promotion and then you can market to recent customers brand followers or more and once you hit the next on this entry form, you're going to be able to pick your product and write the email, put the delivery window and more. So a lot of cool stuff that maybe you haven't taken advantage of, but if you've got some brand followers, you're going to be able to go ahead and take advantage of that.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, the next article of the day is actually from CNET and it's entitled Walmart announces Black Friday sale details and previews early deal. So this is kind of like a cool because it gives you kind of like a timeline of what is going on on the Walmart side. So they've actually got multiple events. So, like the first one is actually starting Wednesday, November 8th, you know, super early, at 3pm Eastern time, and Walmart plus early access goes from 12pm Eastern time. The second event starts on November 22nd and then Cyber Monday, November 27th, and so I'm bringing this out because you know if Walmart is going to be pushing these deals, that means there's going to be more traffic on Walmart.com, and if you're selling on Walmart.com might be a great opportunity to do some kind of discount or promotion or just be expecting extra traffic, so don't think that you have all the way until Black Friday, Cyber Monday, in order to start getting some more traffic on Walmart. It's starting as early as November 8th, according to this article.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is also from your seller central dashboard and it's entitled update on default handling time for seller fulfilled orders. So if you're doing seller fulfilled or FBM, you know traditionally you've had like two days in order to fulfill the orders. But make sure to check your dashboard. There's some new news. It's talking about how more than 85% of seller fulfilled orders are shipped within one day. So it's going to start putting by default one day, all right for the order window, and so I think this, you know this could be good because, if I'm assuming that, if this happens now, customers are going to see one day less as far as the estimated delivery time and obviously that's going to help your conversion rate, theoretically speaking. So check out that update in your dashboard and see if that affects you.
Bradley Sutton:
Next update is again your seller central dashboard a lot of the news articles in your seller central dashboard that you need to be checking out and it's entitled update to premium A plus content eligibility requirements. All right, so the new update is that first of all, I think before you actually had to have like 15 approved A plus content modules to be eligible for premium A plus. Well, now All you need is five All right, so five in the last 12 months. And then also you need a brand story module published on all of your brand-owned product listing. So again, premium A plus content allows you to put like really unique information, like video and other things. So if you're able to do that, make sure to qualify yourself for that. You know, so you can also get, even if you only have one or two products. You can still get qualified by having that brand story and then doing five times, getting some kind of A plus content approved, even if it's for the same listing.
Bradley Sutton:
Next up, there is an article from Amazon Europe and it goes it's just called a transparency report and it goes like super into detail about tons and tons of facts and figures of what's going on on Amazon Europe and, like you know what they do to protect sellers and things. But the thing I wanted to show is the number of monthly active users for Amazon on the customer side for each of the countries in the EU. Now, obviously, uk is not in the EU, so that's not here. But if you guys thought that the number one country was Germany, you would be right 60 million active users. What do you guys think is the number two country? Number two country is actually Italy at 38 million, number three is France at 34 million and number four is Spain at 25 million. Those are the only ones that are in that bracket. The next one is Austria, with five million monthly active users in that country and there's not even an Amazon Austria, so they're probably shopping on Amazon Germany or one of the other marketplaces. So again, check the link in the description below. Kind of interesting if you guys want to see this whole EU transparency report.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article, again going right back to the seller central dashboard, but this time in Europe. All right, so if you are in Europe, you now are able to get a SAS or a strategic account services representative. You know sellers in the US have been using this to do tricks like what's called anything in the buy box. We've had that on the podcast before. But again, you UK and EU sellers, go to your seller central dashboard. You've got this notice. That's not on the US side, but you are now able to register here for the SAS plans and it's actually migrating a couple of the existing EU plans where you were able to have some kind of rep into this SAS core You'll rep service. So make sure to check the dashboard. You'll see a link that will allow you to go ahead and see if you can apply and then see if you qualify.
Bradley Sutton:
Next up there's this email that I got this week from Amazon. I hadn't seen it before. I'm not the only one who's gotten a lot of sellers I've been getting it some this week, some last week, some the week before where Amazon is now letting you know when they remove bad reviews or reviews from bad players on Amazon. So if you look, I put a link in the description on one of my LinkedIn posts where I talk about this. But here this is how the email looks. It says we remove product reviews from bad actors. All right Now, by bad actors. It doesn't mean Owen Wilson, sorry, bad joke, but anyways by bad actors. It means you know, whatever, they're probably abusing the system somehow. But I got an email that said hey, we notice there's some bad actors. We removed X and Y and Z reviews. You know happy selling pretty much. So I'm curious did you guys? Have you guys gotten this? Click the link below to my LinkedIn post and reply there. Let me know if you've gotten this email or not.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, for the next article, we have a theme song for it. Yes, we are talking about the Amazon department called the Amazon law and order CCU the counterfeit crimes unit. That actually is a real thing, guys Amazon counterfeit crime units. If you guys are listening on the radio or the your radio in your car or something, hopefully you heard the law and order theme song right there. But anyways, amazon has had this CCU, this counterfeit crime unit, where every month they seem to be doing new things to kind of crack down on counterfeits out there, and so they have a latest update that gives and kind of updates on the kinds of things that they've been doing. They did like raids, like crazy raids on with 150 Chinese law enforcements in China to like kind of like break down this smuggling ring on a bunch of fake products that were coming out. They took action against counterfeit rings across Europe. But this, this department, is doing some some cool things to try and break down on the bad players that are out there. So make sure to take a look at the link that we left in the comments below or in the description below, so you can see the kind of steps that Amazon has been taking to keep Amazon clean from the bad players.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, the last few articles we're going to talk about are all about AI, and it's kind of crazy how AI is just taking over every marketplace, as being like in the news. Last week, as you guys know, we talked about the announcement on Amazon how they have now generative AI to help make images. We're actually going to have a demo of that in just a couple of minutes here. But now even Walmart is getting in on the AI. Bandwagon says how. This article from Yahoo Finance talks about how Walmart is using AI to supercharge its holiday plans, and it's talking about how they're using it to try and distribute the inventory across the country a little bit better across there, more than 4,000 stores and this is going to be able to allow them to deliver same day to more locations by having the right inventory in the right distribution centers and stores Again, a benefit for Amazon sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
Moving on in this AI craze, there is an article out of Reuters about Shopify Says. Shopify merchants seek AI boost for key sales decisions. So make sure to check out this article, where it talks about Shopify's new kind of like features that are now featuring AI. And then, of course, not to be outdone, TikTok shop is testing new ways to embed commerce into the in-app experience, according to insiderintelligence.com. Now, this was almost the most interesting story for me, because they're rolling out this kind of like AI tool that can use AI to identify products in videos and suggest similar items for sales on its e-commerce marketplace. This isn't using the affiliate program.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, this is interesting because, like, what that means is, let's say, somebody has got a just dancing video or they're doing a Amazon or a TikTok shop or a TikTok live or something, and then, in the background, all right, they've got I don't know some barbecue. Well, it sounds like what's going to happen is the AI is going to try and like, detect if any TikTok shop seller has a that exact barbecue or something similar, and then give a suggestion to somebody who's watching this regular TikTok video hey, do you want to buy that product that you see in there? You know, I mean, people follow these influencers and they want to copy them. They want to have what they have. They want to have their same furniture or have their same phone case and stuff. Now, without the influencer even promoting directly other products, TikTok shop is going to be promoting other TikTok shop products from there. Now I think the influencers might get a little bit upset, because this article talks about that. They're not actually going to get any affiliate commission for this. Anyways, this is interesting Another way that AI is being used. All right, that's it for the news this week.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, before we get on into the next segment, one quick thing. Speaking of TikTok, do you know that Helium 10 has a TikTok page? Guys, make sure to go to it, add it. Go to your TikTok app, search for Helium 10 pack view. All right, helium 10 pack view, no spaces, and then you'll see tons of videos from our social media team. Like Sydney, we've also got clips from this podcast and we've also got educational content on there. So again, give us a follow, like a couple of the videos to help the algorithm. Helium 10 pack view is the name of our account. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Next up, we've got our training tip of the week, and this is a great one by Shivali. She's going to be talking about Amazon post, but did you guys know that you can actually have an infinite number for free of Amazon post, that you can post pictures every day and you don't have to make new images by yourself, or you don't have to take new pictures and you don't even have to make the captions. Guys, all right, it is completely done by AI, thanks to Amazon and thanks to Helium 10's new AI feature for Amazon posts. You guys want to find out how to do it. Shivali is going to explain how in this next video.
Shivali:
Hi there, Shivali. Here I want to talk to you about Amazon posts, which is a really powerful tool that you can use to elevate your business, create engaging content for your consumers, all while showcasing your products in a way that tells the story behind your brand. Now there are a lot like social media posts, but you can't just copy over the product listing copy and images. There has to be some intentionality, because it has to be visually appealing and attention grabbing. Let's take a look at an example. You can find Amazon posts by selecting the storefront underneath the product listing page and navigating to posts here. As you can see, it's not just a plain image with boring description. In fact, it's designed to be visually appealing and catch your attention, and that's what you really want. This brings me to my next point, which might answer your question, and that is what if I don't have a bunch of photos laying around from a fancy photo shoot? Well, that's what AI is for. You can use Generative AI to generate the content that you need. It can create images, captions and even suggest the best times to post for maximum visibility. It's kind of like having a creative assistant right at your fingertips, making your Amazon posts look like a million bucks, even if you're on a budget. I'm going to show you a quick and easy way to enhance your sponsored brand campaigns on Amazon. So I'm going to go ahead and navigate to my Advertising Panel, click Campaign Manager and, once I have that open, what you will want to do is select the sponsored brand campaign that you want to try this with. If you don't have one, no worries, you can just create a new active sponsored brand campaign and then, once that page has loaded, you are going to click on Create so Creative is on the left-hand paneling once again and then select Edit Creative.
Shivali:
Here comes the fun part. So you select Custom Image, click Change Image and then click Choose an AI-generated image. So this is in beta at the moment of recording, and what you will want to do is select whichever product that you want to try this with. I'm going to type in an image description, so this one's quite simple. It just says Product Hanging on Wall in a Bedroom, above the Bed with a Gothic Bed Frame. I would click Generate and ideally, what you would see on your end is multiple image options. Then you would go through and select the ones that you like that you find appealing. As you can see, we were given three outputs based off the query that we inputted, so I would then go ahead and open each one of these up and click Save to Creative Assets. I'll show you where these are getting saved in just a moment here, but let's go ahead and click Save for each one of these. All right, let's X out of that and then, once we have that stuff saved, it's going to be in Creative Tools, underneath Creative Assets, right here.
Shivali:
This, guys, is your gallery of images of your creative assets that you can really use anytime that you have generative AI images being saved. This is where they are being funneled. So what I'm going to do is just click this three dots icon and click Download and then, once I have that downloaded, I can then go into my brand content, go into Posts and begin creating a post. Let's select Manny's Mysterious Audities and then click Create Post and upload our image. Here I have the AI generated image, click Open and, as you can see, for us it's saying the image is too wide because, again, this design was built underneath our sponsored brand campaigns when we were trying to just generate AI based image. Keep in mind that this has saved us a lot of time and money and efforts in just being able to get images without actually having to do a photo shoot. So it's pretty simple to throw this image then into a sizing machine or even something as simple as Canva to resize it and then upload it.
Shivali:
After that I'm also going to need a caption. So what I'm going to do is go into our listing builder and as long as you have the product characteristics, the brand information, product name, tone, target audience, etc. Filled out at the top of your listing builder, then you can actually go all the way down to Amazon Posts or just select the tab right here and click Write it for me. I did already go ahead and click Write it for me, just to save a little bit of time so you guys can see it. But, as you can see, it's really good. This pulls from your keyword bank, it helps with your generated search volume and it absolutely makes your Amazon posts process a lot easier. Let's jump back into Amazon Posts and get that pasted in and once you have that part filled out, you can just add in your product. I'm going to click Add. Mine says out of stock, so it says one available. ASINs won't show in your post and posts have to have, of course, at least one ASIN in stock to be visible, but this was just an example. I wanted to go through and show you guys just how easy it is to generate images and captions so you can quickly create posts even if you don't have access to a wide gallery of images. Go ahead and click Submit for review. As long as you've followed along and you've created this with me, I hope you guys recognize that, with this new AI generation tool and the listing builder tool with Amazon Posts, now you really have access to a never ending supply of Amazon Posts. So with that, we look forward to seeing your content on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, thank you very much for that, Shivali. So, guys, that's available. I believe you might have to have diamond for some of that feature functionality inside of Listing Builder, the feature that she talked about for Amazon Post or creating those images that's pretty much open to anybody. So, guys, you, there's no reason anymore for you not to do Amazon Post. You can generate the images now for free and then, limited amount, you can generate captions for free, so you don't have to always be thinking about what am I going to write for a caption. So, guys, get into that now. And we've got announcements coming soon. Guys, that's going to make that process even more easy because we have an exclusive Helium 10 as an exclusive arrangement and access to a certain I can't really, you know, completely spill it, but a certain data point and a certain functionality that only Helium 10 has for the next few months, and we're going to try and give you guys that functionality as soon as possible. Stay tuned for more, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
Next up is a brand new feature that we're going to start doing weekly. Helium 10 is actually launching new features every week, guys. You know, sometimes you guys might not know everything that we're releasing. So here in the weekly buzz. Starting this week, we are going to start letting you guys know in a special video here what all we have launched in the last week so you can see if it benefits you and then make sure that you and your team use it. All right, so this week's Helium 10 new feature alert, let's hop right into it. The first one is actually on your dashboard in Helium 10. All right, or it's actually in a couple places. So you just go to your insights dashboard right here as soon as you log into Helium 10, if you've got the diamond plan on the above, you've got. You're going to see all of your information down here at the bottom. That's not new. What is new is that now, if you put your mouse over any of your products, you have this whole new widget of information that is going to come out where you can see the BSR in the parent category, the BSR in the sub category of your product, your listing age, you know who's, what seller has, the buy box, what your current price is, the review count. Now, that's for your product. So maybe you're thinking like, well, I already know all of my product stuff, but the other thing is on our competitors page. All right. So we have a competitors page now. If you're tracking your competitors, you can also again now mouse over and then you're going to see all of that same information. So that's a one cool thing that just got launched in Helium 10 insights dashboard.
Bradley Sutton:
A couple of things now in Cerebro. If you're in Cerebro and you do a multi-ASIN search, one of my favorite filters were the advanced rank filters. Now they are no longer called advanced rank filters. I just wanted to let you know we change the name so it's a little bit more easier to understand what the advanced rank filters do is. It allows you to filter out and say, hey, I want to see at least this number of the competitor ASINs and this multi-ASIN search are ranking between this and this right? Well, now, now in those headings, if you guys want to find those features, it's right down here and it's called number of competitors. This is the filter the artist, formerly known as advanced rank filter, one which really kind of like confused some people. So again, what you're looking for is number of competitors, and then you put a minimum and maximum here of of how many of the competitors you want to kind of be ranking a certain range. All right, so if you put in 10 competitors and then you put a minimum of two and a maximum of five, basically, what you're saying is, hey, of these 10 competitors, I want minimum two and maximum five of them to be ranking between X and Y. And that's where you go to the very next field, which is called competitor rank. So you can say, hey, I want these to be ranking between one and 20. I want to know all the keywords, or at least two of these competitors, but a maximum of five are ranked page one, position one to 20. So, again, this is not a new filter. Is this a new name? And I'm just kind of reminding you guys about it. Again, it's called number of competitors and competitor rank.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, if I actually go in and hit the show historical trend, we've got a small update feature there. This comes directly from you guys. So if I hit this, I can actually go in and pull out hey, show me the certain ranks, let's say, of June 2022. And now what you see? When you see this search volume, like before, we just picked the last week of this month. All right, so this is showing me the ranks of all of these products during the month of June of 2023. But now what this search volume represents that you see in the search results. Again, this is by, you know, customer request. It is now showing for that month of June, the week that had the highest search volume. All right, so 1468 was what the highest search volume was during the month of June. All right, that's it for this week's Helium 10 new feature alerts. Well, guys, that's also it for this week's Weekly Buzz. As you can see, I didn't hit my one mile goal here on my Apple watch. I only got 0.67 miles in. I'm going to have to keep walking for the next 20 minutes to hit that one mile. Anyways, guys, thanks for tuning in this week. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.
Unlock the secret to a successful Amazon launch strategy in our latest episode, where we discuss the fundamental aspects of the Maldives Honeymoon launch and Bali Blast pre-launch strategies, including keyword research, test listings, PPC campaign setup, and much more. We promise to equip you with an arsenal of tips, tricks, and strategies to help your product launch be successful. We'll kick off with the importance of sending relevant signals to Amazon, particularly when exploring a new niche - a component many entrepreneurs often overlook. Shifting gears, we'll discuss how the Amazon Recommended Rank can be your secret weapon in product visibility. We'll walk you through optimizing your test listings, and share real examples of how to enhance your titles and send targeted traffic to specific keywords. We're also sharing how this strategy works in the Amazon Germany marketplace and all other Amazon marketplaces in the world, providing you with a comprehensive understanding of different markets and how the strategy adapts accordingly. Lastly, we'll dive deep into the world of Amazon PPC campaigns, bid modifiers, keyword tracking, and the power of product bundling. And if you're confused by Amazon fees or finding a reliable 3PL - we've got you covered. We'll explore fee structures, pricing strategies, and 3PL selection to ensure you’re set up for success. Plus, we'll answer all your burning questions in our monthly Q&A session. So buckle up for a jam-packed episode filled with actionable insights, personal anecdotes, and real-world examples designed to elevate your Amazon selling journey!
In episode 505 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:
- 03:32 - Amazon Launch Strategy
- 08:04 - Understanding Amazon Recommended Keywords
- 11:29 - Maximizing Amazon Impressions
- 13:03 - Utilizing Test Listings for Product Launches
- 16:37 - Launching and Ranking Products in Amazon Germany
- 25:59 - Surviving and Thriving Amidst Price Wars
- 28:31 - Launching a Product and 3PL Recommendations
- 31:25 - Launching Product at the Right Time
- 34:19 - How To Get Monthly Q&A for Serious Sellers Club Members
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got a recap strategy session on Amazon launches and we answer all of your questions live, such as how to do keyword research on combo product listings, how to set up PPC campaigns and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you looking to learn how to sell on Amazon? The freedom to get course, made by Kevin King, is one of the most popular courses ever created for Amazon sellers. It's got over 90 modules and 40 hours of detailed, step-by-step training to help get you started on your entrepreneurial journey. Now this course costs $997, but Helium 10 actually covers that cost of the course for any Helium 10 member. Find out why tens of thousands of students love this program by going to h10.me forward slash freedom ticket. Don't forget that if you do sign up for a Helium 10 account, don't pay full price. Use our podcast discount code SSP10 to save 10% off for life.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is a show that is our monthly ask me anything and presentation. So once a month we open this up to all of our Facebook groups and our YouTube channel etc. To open up to any questions that you guys might have for me about Helium 10 and a lot of the functions, but we always start out with like a mini training session as well. Now we actually have this every week in our Serious Sellers Club. So for our serious sellers club, which are automatically enrolled in, if you've been selling on Amazon for over a year and do at least $500,000 a year of revenue, you're in our serious sellers club. This is something we give to them, as well as our Helium 10 elite members, every week, but once a month we open it up to everybody. So that's what we're doing today. We want to make sure that you guys just get a little taste of what happens behind the scenes here. But anyways, what we're going to be I want to present on while you guys are getting your questions ready and putting them in the chat.
Bradley Sutton:
Is Amazon Launch Strategy, all right. So we just had episode 500 come out where we talk about a recap of the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy, which that goes way, way more into detail on that. So you should definitely go to that episode 500 for a recap. And then another one that I want you guys to look at is what we call the Bolly Blast Strategy. That's like your prelaunch strategy. We just make up funny names for for stuff because it's easier to remember. But go back to episode 466 and 467. All right, episodes 466 and 467. You can go to h10.me forward slash 466 or h10.me forward slash 467 to go to those like prelaunch strategies about how to do your keyword research and how to set yourself up for success. But let's just focus for next. You know, five minutes or so on the, just the actual launch strategy, and I'm going to be doing this this week. I'm relaunching something and launching something. I'm always doing tests, as you guys know, and I'm going to be losing this exact strategy this week for this new launch. But basically, if you've done all the right keyword research, you know part of that Bolly Blast Strategy that I was talking about. Basically, what you want to do is is set your listing up to make sure that you have the most relevancy signals sent to Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, this is something new that we hadn't talked about in previous episodes of the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy. Right, we just said, hey, start your. You know, do the right research, start your listing, get ready to get ready to go and you know you're off to the races. But what I've noticed in the last year is a little bit of a I guess you could say algorithmic, you know, shift a little bit, where the effects of not being relevant from day one to Amazon is kind of like far reaching, like it's going to mean that you can't get, you can't get impressions in your PPC. Obviously you're not going to start ranking for certain keywords. And so one of the new things that I have been suggesting when you're launching, especially in niches that are not that competitive and that there's not that much, you know, established sellers, this is probably not the same thing as launching for collagen peptides or garlic press or something like. Or you know, neck pillow or something like that. Like, I would think that if you have optimized your listing the right way, probably Amazon knows what you are from day zero or from day one, right, but even in that situation it's not 100%. But especially if you're in a newer niche where there's not that much data out there, any little thing could mean that Amazon is coming completely confused about your product. And this is how I discovered that.
Bradley Sutton:
So I did some testing, test launches on this coffin bath tray, like a think of like a regular bath tray where you're just chilling your bathtub. You got a tray that goes over your your bathtub and you put your candles on there and your books or whatever. So I had some, some test products that I was launching and from day one, like I could not get, it didn't rank me right away for coffin bath tray and I wasn't even getting that many impressions in PPC, if any. So some some zero at all on some keywords that were highly relevant to coffin bath tray, which is what the product was, and it's not like oh, I didn't make my listing in the correct way or anything like. No, I had this in my title, I had that keyword in other places in my listing. I did the list. Trust me, guys, I did the listing the right way. By the way, I'm sure this has happened to you guys. How many of you guys have launched a product in the last year or two where you're one of your, some of your main keywords? You couldn't get impressions in PPC or it was like impossible to rank in the beginning. Has that ever happened to you? I'm sure it has. But basically now there's a way to predict that.
Bradley Sutton:
So you look at Amazon recommended rank this is in helium 10. All right, this is in helium 10, uh cerebro. That is actually a live feed from Amazon. Now there's no, there's no metric in Amazon called Amazon recommended. We made that name up, but where that data comes from is directly from Amazon. It's in real time, all right. It's not some estimation or some aggregate uh information. It is actually uh directly from Amazon in real time, and what it's referring to is is which keywords Amazon thinks is most relevant to your listing. Now, in the past, this one data point that we've been getting for years, it was only for in the context of Amazon PPC. All right, it's the keywords that Amazon suggests that you uh advertise for the most in PPC, but now it's kind of more.
Bradley Sutton:
For over the last year I've been noticing these, this trend, where it's a great indication of just in general, what Amazon thinks your product is. All right, you know what. I wasn't planning to do this, but but let's go ahead and and maybe just do a live demonstration Throw me a random product in the chat that that's got some, um, that's got some decent reviews. It's been on Amazon for a while, like maybe it's got a thousand reviews or more, where the keyword should be kind of obvious what Amazon thinks uh for. All right, here we go. I see somebody threw in something.
Bradley Sutton:
Aubrey says recipe box. All right, let me look that up. Recipe box or book box? I guess it's a box. I never heard of this uh product before. I think I think I, um, I misspelled it, but that's fine, all right, let me. Let me just show you guys what we're looking at here. All right, here we go. So this is a recipe box. All right, let's pick one that has a lot of reviews. Uh, heart and berry recipe box. It's kind of weird, though it hasn't had that many sales at least. Oh, there are 200 sales for this one. Um, 300 sales for this one. Let's maybe use this one right here. All right, sensory for you recipe box. That's pretty hilarious. Let's just take a look at this box really quick. Okay, I see what this is. All right, now I'm going to put this into helium 10's cerebro. Let's go ahead and go into cerebro here. All right, here we go. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
So now, as you guys know, the the regular helium 10, you know, we've got all of our organic keywords and and sponsored and and and all that information. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to sort by Amazon recommended rank. That's one of these columns right here. Okay, you guys see that right here. All right, amazon recommended rank by me sorting it right when it goes one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. What this means is this is the the top keywords that Amazon thinks you should advertise for. But take a look at these top keywords, guys. Look at this 10 recipe box. Recipe box. Recipe keeper box. Recipe box cute. Is Amazon confused about this product? No, absolutely not. It knows exactly what this is. All right. Now I don't know if this is going to work. I'm just going to go and pick an older, an older listing here.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's go to like to page something that's not doing very good for recipe box. Let's go to like to page three. Maybe there's a brand new product here. Let's see, is there? Is there still a box that allows me to choose the top new products? There used to be a filter here that says like brand new products. Maybe it's not here anymore. Oh, here are new arrivals last 30 days. Let's take a look at this. All right, so this is last 30 days. Okay, perfect. Now I'm going to go to like something that's like way at the end here, like that's not ranked on page one, something that was brand new. All right, here we go. This is not a recipe box, but this is a tea leaf storage container. All right, let's take a look at this. I'm going to take this asin right here, copy this. Actually, I'm just going to run it directly in Cerebro. I'm going to hit this button and go run in Cerebro. So this is not a recipe box, obviously, but it's a. It's a newer product and if I'm looking at this, this product, it looks like a rectangular tea. Oh, tea leaf storage in here. That's probably what this product is. All right, but I'm just curious what is Amazon going to think that this is? Let's take a look right now. All right, let's go to Amazon Recommended and again, I obviously did not choose any of this. I have never looked at tea leaf boxes in my life here. But let's go ahead and do the same thing where we sort by Amazon Recommended rank and look at this. All right, this is not too bad.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the number one keyword this has made a little bit worried. It says coffee tea, and the number two keyword says storage container. But there it is right. There. Tea box is number four tea storage, but a lot of okay. So this kind of is a good. This kind of is a good example here guys, look at. Do you remember how on the recipe box, how in the recipe box all of these keywords had recipe box, the top recommended rank, like there's no doubt what Amazon thinks is this product. But notice this newer product. It's got some random stuff here. Like it does have the good keywords here. But then look at this. It says can storage is the number three keyword, coffee container it's not necessarily a coffee container. Seal container T10, okay, well, t10 might be a good one. Empty tins all right. So this is interesting here because, as you can see this newer product, can you see how Amazon is a little bit confused, maybe about what it is? All right. So that's why, right here, how this can be powerful.
Bradley Sutton:
What I suggest doing when you are how does this tie into launch? All right, what I suggest doing is do a test listing, all right, because if Amazon is confused about your product, guess what's gonna happen as soon as you launch it day one. You're not gonna get top impressions right away for a keyword that Amazon doesn't think is your product, right? Sometimes it takes a little tweaking, like should you maybe tweak a little bit of your listing optimization to make it more relevant. Yeah, you gotta tweak that to get this Amazon recommended number fairly high and to see if you can get these impressions. So when you do a test listing, this is the reason why Number one is for Amazon recommended. Number two is to make sure that from day one you're gonna start getting impressions. Now, if your Amazon recommended is non-existent for an important keyword, it's probably it's gonna be difficult usually to get those PPC impressions.
Bradley Sutton:
So now the question comes in well, what can you do to influence the Amazon recommended rank? Well, sometimes it is about listing optimization. Usually, if you don't have any of your title, you having your title, well then Amazon will figure out what it is. Sometimes it's sending traffic to a certain keyword search. We talk about that a little bit in episode 500, about the kind of things you can do to make sure that Amazon gets that relevancy signal. But the point of this discussion is about making that test listing. Is, if you just launch your product and you're having to figure things, these things out, like all right, how do I send this relevancy signal? Do I need to change a part of my listing somewhere to make sure Amazon knows where my product is. And let me do this test wait an hour for it to update. All right, let me see. Does this have an effect on my PPC? What's happening during this time? Time is being wasted right In, like your honeymoon period and initial velocity.
Bradley Sutton:
You want to kind of like start off your product with a bang from day one, where you're potentially getting clicks and sales and ads of carts and different things from organic customers out there. Well, if you're having to spend all your time trying to fix things, you're accumulating days of bad like interactions with your listing right and then so it's gonna be that much harder to write the ship. So that's why in episode 500, I was recommending people to make this test listing do all these like test and figure this stuff out beforehand like on a quote unquote fake listing. Now, when I say fake listing, you still have to have a real UPC. So you have to pay 10, 20 bucks for a UPC. You're wasting, but for me it's invaluable.
Bradley Sutton:
Testing, get everything right so that you know what you need to do to your listing to get your Amazon recommended. Rank up what you need to do to your listing to get those PPC impressions, and then now on your real listing from day one day zero. Now you're starting off on the right foot, and sometimes it's not just about optimizing your listing. It might be that you have to send some traffic to a certain keyword. Well, at least, instead of trying to figure out what that traffic is, you already figured it out on your test listing and now you can just go ahead and start off doing that from as soon as you make your listing live. So again, that's just like a summary of the. You know the recent differences in the Maldives Honeymoon strategy. Again, go back to h10.me forward slash 500 to get you know all the details, and then I show some of my, or I talk about some of my tests. I did that that brought me to this conclusion, but I hope that is going to that episode, plus the 466 and 467 about how to set up your listing, should help you have a good launch. You know whether you're launching here in Q4 or going to launch in Q1, these strategies definitely should help you.
Bradley Sutton:
So now what I want to do is open it up to questions. Okay, js says how do you run a test listing before you order inventory? No, no, this is not before you order inventory. This is you've already got your inventory ready to go and it's probably in Amazon almost, or on the way to Amazon. At least it could be at any time during this time. It could be before you order inventory, but to me I wouldn't do it. That that's way too far in advance. I would do this test listing like one week before you're ready to actually launch, and the reason is is you want the freshest information. You know you want to do something three months beforehand and then basically it's out of date by the time you're launching three months later, right? So this strategy is to have all inventory handy and start with a dummy listing. Yes, that's what I do. That's what I'm literally doing, literally today. I'm doing that on one launch. I'm relaunching some holiday related products that are going to be good in December, and so I'm doing a test listing to just like check what's going on right now. But, like, the product is already on the way to Amazon from my warehouse in California, so it's going to be there in like four or five days. So, yeah, that's what's going on there. Good question Farhand says if we launch in Germany, then what strategy is the same strategy?
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so everything that I just showed you guys right now. You can also do for Amazon, germany, as far as looking at the Amazon recommended, and Cerebro, as far as you know, sending the traffic you know to your listing. Everything I mentioned today absolutely is applicable to the German market. Here we've got somebody who said how to rank a product which is a combo of two different products. Okay, great question. So there's different ways to do it. All right, and I've done it both ways. I've done a product where I have the exact same product and I make two separate Asins for it because the keywords that can go for it are different, and I was just like you know what I want to kind of like tailor, make my listing and the image and the copy for people searching for this thing, but the product could be used for something completely different and so I made a completely separate listing for that. So that's one way to do it, not very recommended unless you're in a very niche thing, like I am, if you've got like two products, like I don't know, like I'm looking here at my desk, like like headphones and a microphone right Now.
Bradley Sutton:
Number one you want to make sure that you are relevant for the customer who is most likely to buy that product and who is the customer that's most likely to buy a headphone and microphone combo? It is somebody searching for headphone and microphone. So you've got to find the keywords most related to somebody looking for that combo, right, which is different for every product. Obviously it could be for this one, it could be podcast, podcast beginners kit or something Headphone and microphone combo, right. Those are words specifically for somebody buying a microphone. But then what I think you're asking is sometimes maybe somebody's searching for headphones but they're like oh, there's headphones and microphone together. I might go ahead and buy that. Well, yeah, now you've got to optimize and be ready for those headphone only related keywords and the microphone only related keywords. So it's kind of like you are doing three different keyword research. You're doing the research on other products and other keywords that have already the same combo that you have. You're doing research on the ones that have just one of the products and a research on ones that have the other one of the products, and then what you're going to want to launch on for me is going to be still the keywords. That is most likely to get you a sale and that's going to be on the combo products, right. So, or the combo keywords. So that would be my suggestion to you there.
Bradley Sutton:
Great question from Dan says is there a Helium 10 workflow chart checklist to help launch a new product on Amazon? It's pretty much that, that, those podcast episodes I mentioned. Now we're going to make that into like a PDF form soon. A lot of customers have been asking for that. But if you want to like it to go through a checklist to make sure you've done, you've done everything you can on the keyword research, you've done everything you have on the listing optimization, again, go to episode 466, then 467 and then 500. And those three episodes is kind of like my virtual checklist of everything you need to do, from the keyword research to listing optimization, pre-launch and then launch.
Bradley Sutton:
Now that the CLA says Bradley, what do you suggest? Create a campaign with each ad with all three match types, or create one campaign with one ad group containing all three match types? I'm not 100% sure I'm understanding, but if I understand what you're saying, basically what I would do is or what I would do what I do do is I make separate campaigns, each with one ad group, and it's a different match type. So I always start with one exact match campaign. Okay, I have another campaign that is a broad match. Usually. I have another campaign that's auto, and then I'll have two different product targeting campaigns. One is an asin targeting campaign and then one which, and then one that is a sponsor display campaign. But yeah, if you're talking, if that's what you meant by the match types you know, like broad, exact and auto, yes, I always keep those in separate campaigns, personally, in atomic Of course I'm talking about.
Bradley Sutton:
Kassar says new launch in Canada market. Give me some tips about how to rank in Canada. 100% the same. So everything Kassar, that I said today about launch, I obviously was talking about the US market, but that would be the. That would be also the Canadian market, german market, whatever you're launching, and you would use those same strategies. Everything works. Or back to Dota says I have gold cross necklace as phrase, match and gold cross necklace as exact in the same ad group. At which point should a performing keyword be moved as an exact keyword? Yeah, so, so again, for me, I wouldn't have that when I set up my campaigns. And helium 10, atomic, I keep the, the, the match types separate, all right. So what, what I'm going to have is I'm going to have a. Let's just say I don't have gold cross necklace as an exact match, but I have gold cross. Gold cross, all right, or no? No, no, let me say gold necklace as a phrase match, right? Okay, I set up atomic rules to say if I get two orders at a certain a cost or below, to go ahead and suggest to get that and make it an exact match in my Exact campaign. So then, if gold cross necklace, which is a phrase match from gold necklace, if gold cross necklace gave me two orders at 25% a cost or whatever you know I had chosen for that, it's gonna actually suggest to me to hit a button and it's gonna move it to my exact match campaign which again, is separate from my phrase match campaign.
Bradley Sutton:
Very important, in my opinion, to keep things separately for this reason, so that you could kind of like segregate what's going on as far as the a different, as far as your different campaigns and match types go. Constance says, when creating a new manual exact single word campaign, would you suggest to go above the suggested bid and do placement strategy a hundred percent for product pages and top of search to collect data or burn money? Yeah, somebody asked me this before. I'm old school, alright. So me personally, I don't use the placement strategy. That does not mean that it's bad or that you shouldn't do it, it's just because I have a system that's been working for me for years where I just changed my actual bid instead of doing the placement. You know, you know the bid modifiers and it works for me. Now, if you want to play with the, you know the top of search and stuff like that, there is nothing wrong with that. I know plenty of a very successful Amazon sellers who use that. But me personally, I keep everything in atomic, just strictly about the, the bid, and I'm looking at my keyword ranks right In atomic you can actually see, if you're tracking that keyword and keyword tracker, where you are ranking and sponsored. So that's why it's easy for me to like just modify my bid, because if I have boost on and keyword tracker, I know exactly where my sponsor that is showing up, if it's showing up in in 10th or 15th or 1st or 2nd, and so I know that. Alright, let me raise my bid up. Alright, then I'll get a little bit higher rank theoretically, alright. So that's that question.
Bradley Sutton:
Dauda says Bradley, how can we get a one-on-one call with you? So this is for helium 10 elite member. So I do one-on-one calls Once a month with any helium 10 member who wants it, and there's also group calls we have. So if you're part of helium 10 elite program, yes, you can have one-on-one calls with myself and also carry. Alright, daniel says my product is a two-piece set One main product and one complimentary product. I made sure that both are purchased together and I'm using 80% keywords for the main product and 20% for the complimentary. So wait, daniel, is your ace in just one ace in, or are you having people or do you have some kind of deal where it's like buy one and then Get this one for X percent off or something? If both of you, if this is just one ace in, daniel, what you want to do is Exactly what I said about 10 minutes ago. I don't know if you caught that, just rewind on this, but you want to make sure that that you're focusing on the Combo keywords, where people might be searching for both together, and then, yeah, going For the individual keywords as well, because sometimes this is differentiation. Maybe you, maybe there are no combo keywords out there and you just put this bundle together because you know that people will probably buy it, even if they search for just one, then yeah, then all you have to worry about is the individual Keywords. I'm not sure about 80% keywords for the main product and 20% for the complimentary. It depends on what you think has the most search volume for somebody who would buy that product, because maybe the people who buy the complimentary product are more likely to buy the combo and in that sense, you shouldn't just be Giving it 20% of the keyword keyword juice. Right there.
Bradley Sutton:
Kassar says when a good selling product, people start the price war, how to survive to maintain your organic rank in the product. Yeah, well, first of all, sometimes you just can't. Let me just say that right now. I know that's bad news for some of you. Sometimes it just gets so crazy that you just can't make money. You're just gonna have to cut that product after you sell out, all right. That being said, you know, like the coffin shelf right now for Project X, we've got tons and tons of competition and they're just doing some ridiculous pricing. You know, like we're, there's no way they're making money on it due to I know what shipping costs, right? So what I decided to do? I'm doing the opposite. I'm going up in price. I'm raising the price by like three or four or five dollars and I added about three or four or five dollars of cost To my product because I'm expanding out, like I'm doing some like really cool box that I'm going to use and I'm adding some trinkets to the coffin shelf to, and so my theory is that, hey, I'm gonna catch the customers who are looking for a more premium style of product and if this doesn't work, you know what? There might come to be a day where I have to stop selling the coffin shelf, and right now I can still sell it for a higher price. But if sales ever go down to zero, I am not gonna get in a price war. You know where. I'm not gonna put the coffin shelf for 19 dollars when I used to sell it for 32 dollars. No, so sometimes you just can't Compete. At that you you'll have to cut the courts. But Enhance your product with different, with different things, and go for that more premium look, and you know you could have some some action there.
Bradley Sutton:
Mario says Quick question Should I negate an important keyword for my product after having spent 25 dollars on it and zero sales, when the product itself is 40 dollars? This is a good question. Now, if you, if it's one of the main keywords like this is what people would search, before just blindly negating it, you've got to figure out why people are not converting. All right, so I would look in search query performance for that keyword and look at the Competitors who are getting high clicks. You don't know who's getting high purchases, so you know you could do that. You could look in brand analytics and see who is the top three Clicked and then is there one of them who is getting a lot of sales. And then I'll just take a look at that listing and ask yourself why is somebody clicking on my competitors listing after searching for the same keyword and they're buying my competitor product but not mine. So you've got to ask yourself what is the reason why they're not.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, if it's a keyword that you just think is relevant to your product, are you were hoping is relevant to your product? Well, in that case you might have been wrong. So, where that cutoff is for you $25, you know if that, if you got, for me it's almost more important the number of clicks. Now, of course it's important how much you spend, but if I only got 10 clicks and that was what cost $25. That might not be enough data to say, hey, I need to negate it. So it should be like 2025 clicks, 30 clicks even, or yeah, if you get 30 clicks and you don't get a sale, you're probably not gonna get a sale. And again, all of this can be done right there in atomic, so you don't have to. You know, look at this manual. Amazon is regularly increasing different types of fees and squeezing the profits. Please guide on pricing strategy while remaining in Competition. So so, yeah, this is why you have to have your helium 10 profits Active and connected to your account and be monitoring that, because you've got to really keep an eye on the PPC cost. You know the other fees no, amazon is not charging that much. You know Amazon increases fees, but it's it's pennies that that Amazon increases.
Bradley Sutton:
If that affects you, you've got bigger problems. All right. If Amazon increasing the fulfillment on something from 73 cents to 81 cents and that kills your bottom line, you've got some other problems. That's different than just Amazon, all right. The one that really affected some people, which I can empathize with, is Amazon doing away with the small and light program that really affected me. That wasn't just a matter of pennies. You know that's like a dollar worth of profit off of our bottom lines a lot of us, you know, if we didn't do anything. So it's very important to make sure that that is. That is a setup. All right, we got one more. Ali is in the green room. We'll bring up Ali to the stage. Ali, how's it going? Hey Brad, how are you Pretty good on yourself? Excellent, yep, go ahead.
Ali:
So I'm just launching my new product. I just wanted to know that, is it better to launch in the fourth quarter or should I wait till January and then launch it? Because you know, right now the competition is really high and the sales are high, but my budget is not that much. Initially I have the budget, but I'm trying not to spend too much so that I can, you know, learn the game first and then go big.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, it depends. It depends on on on the market. You know like if you've got a product that is still gonna, you know like if you're selling a Christmas tree ornament, well you better launch it now because you know you're not gonna do very well in January. But if it's something that is too expensive to launch now, because the traffic is so high that the amount of sales it's gonna take to get to you to page one is is going to be too much, that's a personal decision. You know you might have to wait.
Ali:
Yeah, page one, you know there's not a lot of reviews on. The maximum number of reviews are like 100 or 150 or something, but the search volume is a lot and it says not a seasonal product. So I think it would do well in any season. That is the thing.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, so those. That's the thing. You have to wait because the other thing is, like you said, maybe the search volume is very high right now, meaning it'll be very expensive to launch, but if this is the window where People have 50 and 75 and 100 reviews, but if you wait until February, everybody now all of a sudden has 400 views, yeah well, it's still gonna be expensive now because it's gonna. It's gonna cost you more to get you know, to get the velocity. So so there's, there's almost no right or wrong answer per se.
Ali:
Yeah, I mean personally.
Bradley Sutton:
I have never, ever, waited until Q1 to launch something. If I have something, I have the product in here and it's October, November, I'll go ahead, and I'll go ahead and launch it.
Ali:
Okay, so can I ask one more question? Okay, I decided to go through the PA 3PL route. You know I'm not I'm not delivering the product directly to Amazon. So I was looking into it and I really can't find some reliable website or somewhere to find 3PL. So do you have any ideas about that? Although that's a very immature question, but I did just try out hubhealyum10.com.
Bradley Sutton:
So there are some 3PLs there, hub.helium10.com and the Helium 10 users have like reviewed some of them, so I would take a look at the ones, look at the reviews and then go from there.
Ali:
Okay yeah, okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. Dan says this listing builder have all the features of screw, but you shouldn't be using. No, nobody, guys should be using scribbles anymore. I don't even know why we have that tool still active, like, like listing builder 100% took it over and it's way better than scribbles, all right. So, yeah, you should only use a listing builder. And if you have trouble syncing the listing Check with support, you know, make sure that you the the SKU that you're editing. All right, make sure that it is the original contribution skew. All right, make sure it's the original contribution skew, otherwise it's not gonna sink. But yeah, when, whenever I have trouble getting a listing updated, usually actually in listing builder, it actually updates better than if I try and do it myself.
Bradley Sutton:
A real estate Emporium says if our product is selling good, you recommend adding new variations or more products in the same niche. No right or wrong answer here. It's different for everything you got to choose. I've done both ways Before. Where I've added new variations, like a new colors, because I see the demand Sometimes, I'll just, instead of that, I'll launch a new product like, instead of a regular egg tree, a stackable egg shelf. So you can go both ways. That's a beauty about Amazon. All right, guys, that's all the time we have today. I was glad I was able to get to a lot of questions. Sometimes it takes you guys just a little bit to get Loosened up to be able to ask questions. So thank you guys, very much for joining us again. This is something we do every single week for our Serious Sellers Club and Helium 10 Elite members, but once a month we open it up and we repurpose this as a podcast episode. So thank you guys for joining us and we'll see you again next month when we open up this. Ask me anything. Thanks a lot, guys. Have a good rest of your day.
Join us for a fascinating discussion as we unpack Amazon unBoxed 2023, exploring the most exciting releases such as generative AI and more that can level up your advertising game. Our co-host from Pacvue, Anne Harrell provides us with a unique perspective on the advertising industry. Let’s start with our chat with Jeff Cohen, Principal Evangelist, Advertising API at Amazon, as he shares his transition journey and the biggest differences he's noticed. Listen in as we dive into the role of ad tech in digital transformation and its implications for brands. We examine Amazon Ads' new offerings like generative AI and sponsored TV, which promise to revolutionize brand imagery and audience engagement. Get the inside scoop on Amazon PPC and new-to-brand metrics that could redefine your brand's success measurement. We also explore Amazon Publisher Cloud, a game-changing technology for publishers that promises unique and differentiated opportunities for advertisers.
Get to know Miranda Chen, the director of growth and modernization for Amazon Marketing Cloud, as she walks us through its potential. Learn how lookalike audiences can help your brand reach new customers and how templatized analytics can make AMC more accessible. We also examine Amazon Marketing Stream and Rapid Retail Analytics, which provide valuable data on retail signals. Discover how sponsored products can appear on platforms like Pinterest and the features that make Amazon's new Sponsored TV offering a game-changer. All this and more, right here on our podcast!
In episode 504 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Anne, and our special guests discuss:
- 00:00 - Amazon unBoxed 2023
- 04:31 - Insights on Amazon and Advertising Growth
- 08:29 - Sponsored TV and Ad Tech Announcements
- 12:29 - Embracing Change in Amazon Advertising
- 20:40 - Amazon Advertising Full Funnel Solutions
- 23:39 - Benefits and Capabilities of Demandside Platforms
- 28:25 - Lookalike Audiences for Reaching New Customers
- 34:59 - Amazon Marketing and Rapid Retail Analytics
- 41:15 - Amazon's Sponsored TV Announcement
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got a special episode here at Amazon Unbox 2023 where we're going to talk about all of their releases, like generative AI and sponsored brand hats, and also a lot of cool things like sponsored TV. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me/adtomic. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10 I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We're here at Amazon Unboxed in New York. I've been on the road for like three weeks and there's a second there where I wasn't quite sure where. I was. I've been in so many countries lately, but we've got a co-host today and from Pacvue, and how's it going?
Anne:
Great. How are you doing?
Bradley Sutton:
I'm just delightful. Now, what is your background? What do you do at Pacvue?
Anne:
Yeah, so I'm a product solutions director for DSP at Pacvue, so I do basically anything related to DSP and AMC help with our product road mapping, help with strategy for some of our enterprise level clients doing customer within AMC marketing you name it, I probably do it.
Bradley Sutton:
How long have you been at Pacvue?
Anne:
I've been at Pacvue for coming up on four years now, so about three and a half years total. A lot has changed since I joined. I started at Pacvue focusing on our managed services team, so I was primarily working with some of our strategic accounts, helping to build out their capabilities, doing strategy not just for DSP but across kind of omni-channel focuses, so for search as well. Prior to working at Pacvue, I actually worked in an agency in Austin, Texas, where I'm normally based, where I again did omni-channel strategy for enterprise level accounts. So my background is not just with programmatic and DSP, but I really gravitated to it. It's just one of those types of advertising channels that really allows you to have a lot of flexibility and creativity and really is conducive to innovation. So I really enjoy working on the DSP side of things.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Now what did you go to school for?
Anne:
I went to school for advertising, so I think I'm in the right place.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so you're right. Where did you go to school at?
Anne:
It's called St Edward's University. It's in Austin, Texas. So I've been in Austin since I went to school and I just never left about a decade.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, I was about to say, because you don't sound like you were born and raised in Austin.
Anne:
I was not Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
What were you born and raised?
Anne:
Well, where I was born was Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but raised is a harder question. I moved about 10 times before I graduated high school. So you pick a state, I probably was raised there.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool, yeah, because I was like wait a minute, she doesn't sound like a native Texan here.
Anne:
I know no accent yet.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, maybe 15, 20 years from now you might have a little twang in here.
Anne:
Right, right, I actually have a little bit of a Southern accent, I think I kind of got rid of it as I moved around.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Now what are you? We're going to be talking to some people that probably people have never heard of podcasts, right? You know there are exactly executives here at Amazon who are you most excited to talk to today.
Anne:
If I were to have to say, my favorite subject matter is definitely the DSP AMC side of things, and I know that we're speaking to Kelly, who's the VP of DSP, so that's obviously a great place to start. We're also going to speak to Miranda, who is a director for AMC at Amazon, so I think there's going to be a lot of really great content around that. But in general, we're also talking to a lot of people who are very broadly focused across all of ads, and so I think we'll have something for everyone in this one.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, so you guys might be. There might be some newbies out there, don't tune out. This is stuff that you're going to need to know If you're an advanced seller. We're going to talk about some stuff that you guys might be able to use right away. That was just announced this week at Amazon Unbox, so let's go ahead and hop right into the interviews, all right. First up, we've got my brother from another mother here, jeff Cohen. Jeff, how's it going?
Jeff:
Everything is great. So great to see you, so great to see the whole Helium 10 Pack View team at this conference. It's great to catch up with everybody.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, Now you've been in the game longer than me. I remember the very first conference I spoke at. You were a speaker and you were already a veteran speaker at that time. You know side note that that conference there probably had the best food I've ever had at the conference. This is probably the second best Like.
Jeff:
I'm really impressed with the offerings here. Yeah, I'm curious what conference that is, but we don't have to go into that now.
Bradley Sutton:
But it was right here in New York. But you were on the SaaS side. You know, like I am now. Now you're at Amazon, like what's been the biggest you know kind of eye-opening thing or difference, now that you're on the other side of the aisle.
Jeff:
Yeah, interesting because I always like to joke that you know I drink the Amazon Kool-Aid before I ever like came here. I've been an Amazon like fanboy since like 2005 when I started textbookscom and it's been interesting because I'm in a unique position where I can bring the outside in and the inside out, and I think that you know, one of the many things that I've learned is maybe like the patience that you have to have with Amazon Maybe I didn't have as much patience when I was on the outside and the amount of time that it takes for some of the things to develop at Amazon. But when they like grow and they go to scale, it then moves at like this rocket ship pace. And so I think you're starting to see that with some of the tools, like AMC or even like you know what's happening with, like Amazon Studios and some of the new, you know productions that are coming out, you have this like rocket ship pace of what's happening in terms of the development and the new opportunities and how advertisers are using the technology, and so you have to kind of be patient when new things come out. So when you have a totally new product like Sponsored TV, you got to realize that it takes a little bit of time to kind of figure out how does it work into the individual advertisers media mix, and so that's the measurement work for each brand along the way. But then once it kind of gets up to full speed, you get to see like how it all works and you know and how it's really excelling brand growth.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, now we're going to be interviewing a lot of your colleagues here about some very specific announcements that happened here at Unboxed and before I ask you to give a rundown, you know, one of the things that was announced today it's on the website too is about the new generative AI that can help people doing Sponsored Brand Ads to generate some new creatives. Can you talk about that just a little bit?
Jeff:
Yeah, I think there were like three themes to the keynote today that I kind of jotted down. One was this idea of, like digital transformation and one was this idea of like how ad tech plays in in a responsible way. And then the third one was like how we reinvent, right, how we have reinvent what's possible. That was said numerous times, and I think Gen AI kind of fits into almost all three of those categories. And you know, we saw a lot of opportunity, a lot of new changes with Gen AI that have come out of AWS. We saw a lot of changes with Gen AI that came out of Amazon Accelerate, and now we're starting to see some come out of Amazon ads and I'll you know it's cool, right, we can take a product and we can turn that product into a full lifestyle image. And I think it's if you can just start to kind of think about where the possibilities go from there and what else brands can do and how we can enable that, either with what Amazon ads is doing or with what our partners are doing right, because it doesn't always have to be invented by us at Amazon it's really making it easier for brands to be able to take advantage of this technology that maybe was a little expensive or time consuming or difficult to use, and now it's all done with prompts and it's really simple and easy and that's really cool yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, what about some of the other announcements? Say you have any. You know things that stick out that you're especially excited for.
Jeff:
Yeah, I think that what we're doing I mentioned it during our opening segment but Sponsored TV, I think is a really cool one and you know, in short, it's democratizing the ability for brands to be able to place ads into our streaming portfolio right so across Prime Video, free V and all the other channels that we have that I can't even remember them all because I'm supposed to think so quickly and I think that's really cool. And again, like there's no budget for that, you do have to have the creative, but Amazon has services that can help you make that creative or there's third parties that can help you make that creative. And I thought that was a really exciting announcement that was made, you know, on the heels of the announcement that was made a month ago. It was kind of reinforced about like what's happening with Prime Video and it moving to an ad supported network, creating a ton of, you know, new inventory for brands to begin to explore, and that's really super exciting as we start to go into it. And then there was like a bunch around ad tech and like what's happening around measurement and I know, like from you know, we're all near and dear to this idea that measurement is critical to our overall success and new metrics that are being released, making it available to understand how new to brand customers are impacting the business, and I think those are all really important for us to be thinking about because we have to close the loop. As advertisers and as we move to this cookie-less world right, it's signs point to it happening in 2024, we have to find ways to be able to close the funnel and understand how our ads are working, and Amazon's working really hard to help brands be able to do that, both within our suite and also when you're outside of our suite.
Anne:
Yeah, you mentioned the new. New to brand metrics, new to brand consideration metrics, I think is what we're calling them. Can you walk our listeners through what those really are?
Jeff:
Well, when you're looking at new to brand, right from like a super high level, new to brand is starting to give you this metric that's beyond ROAS, and it's starting to allow brands to look at who was not buying their brand within the last 12 months. Who's now buying their brand, and there's a suite of metrics now that are available for you to be looking at so that, as you're looking at different inflection points of your advertising, you can start to actually dial down into what action you're looking for people to take. And I think that's what's really cool. And it's like this evolution and brands have to think through this evolution like one of the simplest ways to think of this, right for people who maybe, like this concept's a little far for them. One of the simplest ways to think of this is around this idea that, like, if you're trying to get more awareness of your product, when you're looking at a video, you don't want to just see video views, you want to see how long they've been watching the video, and so you might start optimizing your campaign based on video length, how many people get to a half the video or three quarters of the video. And so, when you start to get into the new to brand type of metrics, you're actually saying, okay, I want incremental growth and by definition is, you know, sales you wouldn't have had before. One of the best ways to measure that is by people who are new to your brand, and so by having multiple metrics now to be able to understand how those are being impacted, you can now go back into tools like AMC and see how that funnel is working and which ones are driving the actual you know points that you want to drive and that that's really cool, right, it's, it's very excited about.
Anne:
I'm very excited too, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, all right. Last question for you know maybe not something that was released here at Unbox, but you know you're very active on LinkedIn. You see what people are posting about. You know I'm sure you look at metrics about what advertisers are using. Is there something in Amazon advertising that you feel is is kind of being slept on or not enough people are talking about it, that you think more people should be using it?
Jeff:
I mean more people should be using Helium 10 and Pacvue.
Bradley Sutton:
That goes without saying.
Jeff:
Okay, besides that, I think that you know, bradley, you and I get asked this question a lot, right? And? And our answer is always it depends. And I think that, instead of like saying, like this is a tool that you should be using or this is a a, an advertising function, you should be trying, I think that advertisers need to be open to the idea of test and learn, and I think the more you can train your mental model to work in a test and learn type of environment, the more open you are to change, because the only thing that's constant is going to be change. Right, and you started by saying like, where this industry was years ago when we both started, think about all the change that's happened and all the change that's occurred, and the brands that have not just survived but thrived through that are brands that have taken advantage of new opportunities, have invested by testing and learning and have then double down on the things that we're working. And I don't mean to oversimplify it, right, but it's not a very specific answer of like, use helium tens tool for keyword, blah, blah, blah, but it's like that's just one piece that you then use to implement the strategy. So work backwards. What's your goal. How are you gonna get there? And then figure out what tools you need to help you scale.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. All right, well, jeff. Thank you so much for joining us. We've been trying to get you on the podcast for like two years. I'm happy it finally happened and we'll definitely be keeping in touch. Appreciate it. Thanks, guys. All right, next up, we've got Kelly here. Now, Kelly, can you go ahead and introduce yourself? Tell us what you do at Amazon.
Kelly:
Absolutely so, Kelly McClain. I lead our demand side platform at Amazon, so we call it ADSP, and excited to be here.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you for the time. Awesome, Awesome. Now you were, you know. Just saw you on stage a few minutes ago. What were your big reveals of the day?
Kelly:
Yeah, really good question. So I think if, if you think about Amazon ads and kind of where we've, where we've been and where we're going, we've really continued to make a lot of progress on on how, what we've been building a lot of our goals. We're focused a lot on interoperability with our ad tech solutions, so making it easier to use. We're focused a lot on performance improvements and then again, all of this is underpinned by making sure that we're putting privacy at the core of everything that we're doing, and so, with that in mind, we've been kind of launching this week in particular, a lot of different updates around, as you think about planning, activating and measuring, right. So within planning, we were launching Cross Channel Planner, which is a new way for you to really think about full, full funnel planning. We announced Amazon Publisher Cloud, which is the new clean room technology for publishers, which we're really excited about. We've been making a lot of performance improvements to the demand side platform, both with the user interface as well as the backend performance, and then we've also been been launching a lot more on our measurement capabilities, right, so making sure that marketers are getting the insights real time, making it a lot easier for them to kind of understand. You know how they should be looking at performance and where they should be making future investments. So we're excited about it. It's going to be a really fun week.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. We have our resident DSP nerd here, Ann, so she's going to go ahead and ask have some follow up.
Anne:
Definitely. Amazon Publisher Cloud was announced today, which is a big step for your publishing partners, obviously. Do you see any benefit for advertisers with this release?
Kelly:
Yes, definitely, and you know, I think to your point. I mean we've had, if you think about kind of clean room technology, right, really starting with cloud solutions. Then Amazon marketers cloud right thinking for marketers on how we can help support them. And Amazon publisher cloud it's going to be a mouthful after I'm speaking all morning. So excuse me, but you know that's really about a solution for publishers, right, giving them much more of the ability to pair any unique insights that they have right Demographics that they might know, of course, with folks who are coming to their site and then pairing that with Amazon Ads data. But the real core of that is, of course, providing opportunities for publishers but making it easier for them to connect with advertisers, right, advertisers. Often that you know there's so many different deal opportunities out there. A lot of the kind of deal process is very manual today and it's hard to discover the right deal and knowing which deal is right for you to reach your audience and so you know. A simple example, right is, if you're, let's say, you're a common website and you know the different demographics that are coming to your site every day, but by layering on Amazon audiences, you might realize, oh, I actually have pet food lovers who or sorry, pet food lovers- I have pet lovers who are coming to my site that I didn't realize, and so then that offers publishers the ability to maybe customize some unique deal opportunities to advertisers who might be trying to target pet lovers right, or specific brands who might be selling pet food, and it provides much more unique, differentiated opportunities, and we actually had a recent test with NBC Universal and they were able to offer three and a half times more reach than what they'd seen in the past, which is really exciting. So we see this as beneficial to both marketers and to publishers by really making it a lot more simple to connect with audiences.
Bradley Sutton:
At the end of the day, you know, pet food lovers are pets in about 10 years at Unbox. I predict like there's going to be some DSP where pets can actually base, you know, based on what they see on TV.
Anne:
They've already made more of the food, Exactly exactly, so we just launched something.
Kelly:
And if that's possible, maybe pets will be transformed into some sort of language that they can then activate.
Anne:
I think so, I think so. I don't even want to think about that.
Kelly:
I know, I never really thought about that?
Anne:
Yeah, that's very exciting. So, essentially for the advertisers listening, it's going to make your reach potentially broader but also more relevant, right? So the publishers have the ability to make targeting more relevant Absolutely Great. Another big announcement was the cross-channel planner. Yes, so can you walk us through how you think the ability to forecast reach will change how advertisers perform through their DSP program? Yeah, absolutely.
Kelly:
I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges today, as you all know right, is the fragmentation of channels and information and the overload of signals, right, and so that's where we're excited with Cross Channel Planner providing more of the ability to help marketers understand who they should be reaching right across the funnel and get much more information on how to kind of more efficiently drive their spend. In the past, we've launched Channel Planner, so that was our first product for mostly catered towards streaming TV, right, and how do you think about reach curves and how do you make sure that you're delivering against that for upfront pitches and so forth, and this is really kind of the next iteration to driving more efficient spend. So, ultimately, we think this is going to be kind of the next step of just providing much more granularity across all of the Amazon ads products on Amazon beyond Amazon, to make it easier to figure out. Okay, where should I be allocating my budget in the best way possible? We had a baby brand who actually was reaching audiences and they activated. So they leveraged Cross Channel Planner, activated via the DSP, and then they used custom advertising to direct customers to their online store and actually had four and a half times click through rate and 11% increase in impurchase rate, which was pretty cool to see. So again, I think the ability to plan and then easily activate is something that we're really committed to and excited about.
Anne:
Do you think this will be applicable for advertisers who are advertising both on Amazon and off, so more so that third party placement this will help plan for that as well. Absolutely.
Kelly:
So Amazon is known for retail media and driving conversions in the Amazon store, and we've been making so many investments over the past several years to really drive much more full funnel solutions and making all of our solutions work for all types of advertisers whether you're an advertiser that sells on Amazon or not because we're really excited about the power of again combining Amazon signals with marketers, third party and third party signals in a way that you can actually drive conversions, drive reach and have more of a full funnel experience and conversation. And that's where our Amazon publisher direct team comes into play, where we have a lot of these relationships and can reach anyone across the internet. But we've also been investing in modeled audiences and the performance through the DSP, and so a lot of people are kind of thinking about the loss of cookies in a negative way. We actually see this as an opportunity. We see this as a way to really innovate and rethink how marketers can potentially reach people in a privacy, safe way. That also drives performance, and so this is why we've also been investing in our modeled audience solutions right so, especially as we think about driving sales or reach off of Amazon, and we've been seeing over 25% increase delivery with a lot of the solutions, as well as 12% less cost per click per impression, which I'm barely able to talk. I'm going to lose my voice by the end of this day. But so, yeah, I think all of these from again, the planning, how you can activate all of the performance improvements we've been doing within our DSP we're excited. We'll continue to help accelerate marketers across full funnel wherever they want to reach people, which we're thrilled about.
Anne:
Definitely the ever looming third party cookie deprecation. Yes, exactly.
Kelly:
Yeah, a lot of energy, but understandably, and I think it's the right thing for us to rethink how we can really connect marketers and people in the right way, moving forward.
Anne:
Agreed, agreed. Another thing that was mentioned was the bidding enhancements that are now going to be available through the DSP program. So, essentially, you pick a KPI and you let Amazon do all the bid optimization in order to get to that KPI. Do you think this is going to change costs for advertisers, like, will CPMs go down in highly competitive categories or go up because of this automation?
Kelly:
Good question and, being a DSP enthusiast, I'm sure you know that our system has been really hard to use in the past. We've heard feedback from customers and partners that it was very complex, and so we've really been. So this goal seeking bidder, as well as re-augmenting our interface so that it's much more anchored on goals, has been paramount. We want to make it easier to use the DSP. We want to understand what is your goal, what are you trying to do? What outcome are you trying to drive for your business? And we've been making a lot of user interface improvements. And then the goal seeking bidder, on the back end to your point, I'm not sure what it will do in terms of you know, I can't talk to overall pricing in the system, right, but what I can say is that we're already seeing, you know, up to 40% reduction in CPAs, where we're able to better optimize against a goal, and we're seeing marketers just really gravitate towards the ability to kind of have much more of a simple experience. But we also believe in control, and so I think that's one of the powers that we think the Demand side platform has is, if you want all of the customization, if you want the complexity, we have that right. You can really adjust whatever types of bids that you want. You can layer on various different types of audiences. You can play around with different creatives. You can, you know, make a ton of different ads to try and test and at the same time, if you want a more simple, easy experience, you know what your goal is. We're able to help optimize and provide recommendations on the best way to do that. So we see it as kind of a nice balance in providing marketers kind of that wide range of capabilities, because we think there's a lot of different discussions in the industry right now on what way folks are going to be going.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time and thank you for all you do at Amazon. We appreciate it.
Kelly:
Thank you for the partnership. Appreciate it, of course.
Bradley Sutton:
Thanks, thank you All right Now we've got Miranda. Miranda, this is our first time meeting you, so can you introduce yourself and tell us what your position is at Amazon?
Miranda:
Absolutely. I'm Miranda Chen. I'm the director of growth and modernization for Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC for short. I've been at Amazon for 11 and a half years now, live in the Bay Area and at AMC I lead several teams responsible for product and engineering, developing our audience activation capabilities, making AMC easier to use for more and more customers, as well as our go to market and customer enablement activities.
Bradley Sutton:
All right Now. We have a wide variety of listeners, anywhere from brand new people selling on Amazon to humongous billion dollar brands. Now, the billion dollar brands probably know all about AMC, but some of our newer ones might not understand that. Maybe there can feel like wait, marketing, stream, marketing, AMC, there's all these acronyms. So can you just give a quick, maybe 30 second, one minute introduction about what is AMC?
Miranda:
Yeah for sure. So Amazon Marketing Cloud, or AMC, is Amazon ads as clean room, so it's private and secure by design. Each advertiser has their own campaign signals of all their various Amazon ad spend within their particular instance. So we have signals from sponsored products, sponsored brands, streaming TV effectively like all of the actual campaign events and enables custom flexible analytics on those signals. And then it also enables advertisers to be able to upload their own first party signals or third party signals so you can think of, like product catalog, retail conversions, things like that, and so then you can generate really really flexible insights, typically using SQL, such as path to conversion, reach and frequency, overlap analysis and then actually take actions on them.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool, so most of our listeners probably weren't able to attend here at Unbox. What's the big release for your department here at Unbox?
Miranda:
Yeah, so we had a couple different releases specifically related to AMC that I can touch on. The first was AMC template analytics. So it takes some of our most popular queries, such as path to conversion, reach and frequency, and then allows users to be able to generate those insights without needing to touch any codes. So that's a pretty exciting development, particularly since we know that not everybody no SQL has taught themselves SQL overnight. And then the second one was AMC lookalike audiences. So we already have the capability where one can generate a custom audience based on specific parameters. So let's just say, an advertiser saw, wanted to create an audience of folks that had seen their detail page view or even added to cart but didn't actually activate and then wanted to drive better performance. They could create a particular, they could run a query, generate that insight and push that directly to the DSP. So that's one way. That's AMC rule based audiences. And then now we launched this enhanced capability for lookalike audiences. So it enables effectively exactly what it sounds like. So finding alike audiences based on that same seed, leveraging machine learning in a clean room capacity trained on Amazon, shopper and customer signals, but all still in a private and secure place.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, you're already starting talking technical terms that are over my head, so let me bring in the smart one of us. And to clean rooms. My room's not clean, I don't know. That's not what we're talking about here, but go ahead and please follow up and make me sound smart here.
Anne:
Yeah, of course. So I'd like to talk about lookalike audiences more specifically, because this is a way for brands to reach highly relevant, essentially new customers. So do you think this will change the way people are targeting that new to brand customer targeting incrementality?
Miranda:
Yeah, I mean we think it's going to be a great way for brands to be able to reach more and more shoppers. So, as I mentioned, the lookalike audiences are trained on based on deep, deep ML, based on lots of very, very, very good signals, and then the advertiser can actually leverage, can get to choose what's their specific seed for the audience, like what's the general size of the audience, based on their objective and then also the relevance. So I think it'll be a really key tool as a part of the marketer toolkit.
Anne:
Yeah, definitely. Do you think lookalike audiences are scalable for brands that maybe have lower purchase data or lower engagement data that are using AMC?
Miranda:
I think so. I think they're precisely like the brands that actually could benefit from it, right Because they have a small bit of deterministic signals that they actually want to be able to enhance. And then also because AMC is private and secure by design, as I mentioned, they can also choose to upload their own first party or third party signals and then create a seed based on that and then continue to go find additional customers that seem similar to that seed.
Anne:
Right, I love that you call it a seed, because it sounds like it will grow over time if you're utilizing these tactics, so that's a great way to phrase it.
Miranda:
Thanks, it didn't come up with it.
Anne:
Well, we'll give you credit anyways. So you talked about the AMC templatized analytics, right? Is this a way to make AMC more accessible and, if so, are the queries that are available through those templatized analytics? Will it grow over time? What's available through that?
Miranda:
Yeah, so we think it's a first step towards making AMC easier for more and more customers. So we don't have a specific timeline yet on additional templates, but it is something we'll be continuing to evaluate. We have been talking to different customers and internal teams about how we can also make AMC easier to use through point and click applications as well. We also work with dozens of partners that are making AMC easier to use, either through visualizations or through their own innovative dashboard. So I think through the combination of either homegrown or partner built capabilities, we'll be able to continue to bring AMC insights to more and more customers.
Anne:
Yeah, pacview is one of those partners. We do have an AMC dashboard Great, I think. Another question that's kind of just in general about AMC do you think there are any verticals or categories that benefit the most from this data, or that you've seen a lot of growth and success with using AMC?
Miranda:
Yeah, we think of AMC as equal opportunities. So we look at the data a lot. We're very, very data driven surprise, surprise at Amazon and what we've seen is that there's penetration for AMC across brands and partners and agencies as well as across all verticals. So we've seen, certainly, strength from brands that sell on the Amazon store, but also pretty strong results with entertainment, with automotive, financial services. So you can think of someone who's like automotive who might have a bunch of local dealerships. They want to be able to do more fine event grained analyses based on specific geos, and so something like AMC is perfect for that be able to do more precise measurements. So, yeah, certainly we think it's a great product for all, but it really depends on that particular advertiser's objective and then what are the types of signals that they want to bring in and what kind of insights they can generate.
Anne:
Definitely, it is flexible.
Miranda:
Exactly Infinite and flexible. Yes, Great.
Anne:
My last question is just a kind of a fun one. Do you have any specific query or an example of a query that you think was really innovative that's been pulled through AMC that you can recall?
Miranda:
I think it's probably a generic answer, but I think the Path to Conversion one is probably one of my favorites, just because it's the simplest. I think AMC was actually the first place where an advertiser could see all of their signals across all of the Amazon ad products, and so someone who was buying sponsored products and DSP might not have realized before that they actually were driving better results together, and so Path to Conversion, and actually be able to understand how those two products were interacting, for example, really brought a lot more power and insight, I think, to advertisers.
Anne:
So I don't think that's generic at all. I love that one too.
Miranda:
There's a reason. That's core kind of at the top of the instructional query library.
Anne:
Right.
Miranda:
Agreed, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
I have another question for you. I like asking stuff that maybe nobody else is going to ask. When you want to take off your Amazon hat and kick back with a hobby to kind of like balance work life, what's your go-to hobby?
Miranda:
Well, I have an almost four-year-old so she is probably my hobby in most of the time. I'm going to try and go do fun things on the weekend, whether it's exploring new coffee shops or going to find music.
Bradley Sutton:
The four-year-old is a coffee drinker, is she?
Miranda:
No, she's not, but she's an avid consumer of chocolate croissants, and so we sample baked goods in lots of different places. Then mom gets her coffee. I think that's probably it, but in my prior pre-kid years I did a lot more yoga and hiking and things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
So enjoy those years. You know, my kids are over 20 already, so I wish I had a four-year-old. I remember those days All right. Thank you so much for joining us and you educated me a lot. It sounds like Ann knows all about what you're talking about. It was like a different language to me, so I appreciate you educating us on IMC. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much.
Miranda:
Thank you so much.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, we've got Teresa here. Teresa, could you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Teresa:
Sure, I'm Teresa Uthralton. I'm the Director of Partner Development here at Amazon Ads.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. How long have you been here at Amazon?
Teresa:
I've been at Amazon for almost 10 years, so I'm approaching that red badge. For those of you that know our badging conventions, Nice, nice.
Bradley Sutton:
Now you're from here in New York. I've always been in New York, yep. So I'm going to start off with maybe the most important question of the day Julianne's Pizza in Brooklyn. Is that the best representation of New York pizza, or not?
Teresa:
Oh, that's tough. There's so many really good pizza places now I can't even keep up with them. There's so many.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright. Well, we're going to have to connect right after this, because I have two days left and I need to maximize my time here.
Teresa:
Yes, Alright now.
Bradley Sutton:
We're not here to talk about food here.
Teresa:
I recommend checking out Roberta's in Bushwick though.
Bradley Sutton:
Roberta's in Bushwick. I have not been there.
Anne:
Yes, I think you'll really enjoy that.
Bradley Sutton:
We're going to that one.
Anne:
Right now. Yeah, actually, cancel the interview. Let's go there, we go. Yes, of course.
Bradley Sutton:
Now Anne here is going to ask a lot of the more technical questions, especially those that have to do with enterprise. Now I'm here to represent, kind of like, the voice of the average Amazon seller, and you know, there's some people out there who might not fully know what Amazon marketing stream is first of all. So could you just go ahead and just kind of give a quick elevator pitch for what that is?
Teresa:
Sure. So Amazon marketing stream is a partner-facing product, and what it does is it provides really granular hourly signals on all our advertising metrics through the Amazon API, and what that means to a seller is that they will be able to get all sorts of insights about their business that normally they would not have known.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right, I love that. Did you practice this? I didn't even tell you I was going to ask that. All right, cool, cool. How about rapid retail analytics, your other specialty?
Teresa:
I know I love rapid retail analytics, so Amazon marketing stream obviously totally focused on advertising signals. As we know, so much of what's exciting about Amazon ads is that you got online retail and digital advertising Right, and so rapid retail analytics provides that level of granularity on retail signals, and one of the reasons that's so exciting is that that data used to be available at a daily cadence with a 72-hour lag, so we literally it's almost near real time now, which is a really, really exciting development.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. Well, now that I got that out of the way, let me turn it over to the smart one of us too, and for some follow up questions.
Anne:
Yeah, so I kind of want to double click into Amazon marketing stream, specifically the fact that it was recently released for DSP or it's being extended to DSP. How do you think this will change the way advertisers manage their DSP campaigns now that they have that real time data that we were talking about?
Teresa:
Well, it's interesting. I think one of the things that I've learned is I've been humbled by our partner's creativity. Right, you know, I was just. I was just telling someone. I joined this team three weeks before Can last year and so I showed up at Can meeting all my partners for the first time, and we had just launched the first version of Amazon marketing stream and I was like this is the coolest product. But what really got me excited was it's a product that we developed based on the feedback we got from partners Like they, they have a seat at the table, they participate in all our betas and our product teams love them, right, because they get like this incredible, you know, they get their hands dirty and they come back and they're like these are the 27 things that are wrong and you need to fix right, which is if you're a product team, that's actually like really helpful, right, so, and what? The thing that's so interesting is like it launched and everyone loved it, but then people are like well, but it only has sponsored products. Right, like, I want more, I want more, I might want more. So I think what's exciting about having ADSP signals in there is that's going to unlock a whole bunch of opportunity around partners that are deep on ADSP Right. Definitely and I think you know, probably a few months from now, we'll have some really interesting case studies, success stories. There's really like almost no end to the creativity of our partners, which is really great because they're such awesome builders.
Anne:
I agree. I'm curious AMC they not AMS? AMC? I know they get our accurate, our Amazon accurate. I know, there's so many of them Also provides hour by hour data for both DSP and for sponsored ads. Prior to this, especially prior to AMC, but also prior to AMS, this wasn't available for advertisers, so you kind of had to guess when you were running, like day parting or anything along those lines. Do you think the release of the stream data for DSP will eliminate the need for the AMC hourly data?
Teresa:
Well, I think you got to go back to like what are the use cases that people use other product, right? I think, like what is great about Amazon marketing stream? Right, it's an aggregate, aggregate data pipe, if you think about it, right, and so ultimately that's going to help people build solutions that are evergreen. It's going to help people train AI models right, because how do you train AI models? You need, like, lots of granular signals, right? And whereas the Amazon marketing stream is really about very specific use cases around, like understanding the customer purchase path, understanding incrementality, understanding attribution, so I don't think it's like one or the other, I think it's very like use case specific.
Anne:
Right. That actually leads perfectly into my next question, which is how you see these two datasets working together with advertisers currently, or how you see in the future that they can work together.
Teresa:
Yeah.
So I think, like what I think is really exciting about partner innovation is, ultimately, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a marketer, right, like there's that whole age old question about, like I know half my advertising is working, but I don't know which half, and I think we're getting about as close as we're going to get probably in our lifetime, but we're on the cusp of that with a lot of these tools, and so I think the the part about Amazon marketing stream that I think is so exciting is that it will allow the kind of automation that makes brands so much smarter and helps them do more with less. Right, and we're seeing like especially like this year has been an uncertain economic climate for a lot of folks, right, and a lot of a lot of folks are trying to figure out like my budget has been cut or my budget is capped, but I'm being asked to drive more growth Right, and I think, like partners have been able to deliver solutions based on Amazon marketing stream and rapid retail analytics that have really enabled that Awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
And you had a last question.
Anne:
I did. It's a fun one. What's your favorite thing about being at conferences like unboxed?
Teresa:
Oh, it's meeting my partners. You know, I learn so much from from meeting with partners, right, like I said, it's very humbling. The innovation, the creativity, what they teach us about our customers, what they teach us about our products and it's such an incredible learning experience is so energizing. Were you at our our cocktail party last night?
Anne:
No.
Bradley Sutton:
I was not.
Anne:
We had a lot of cocktail parties. I'm sure it was very.
Teresa:
That was like such a fun buzzing party and I got to meet partners from all over the world. At our award ceremony on Monday we met partners that came from Delhi and it was just really, really exciting.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, all right, well, thank you so much for coming on the show and we appreciate all that you do at Amazon.
Teresa:
Thank you, thanks guys.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, we've got Ruslana here. Ruslana, welcome to the show.
Ruslana:
Thank you, Bradley and Anne, for having me.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you based here in?
Ruslana:
New York no, I'm based in Seattle.
Bradley Sutton:
Seattle. Okay, Seattle was just there for accelerate, lots of rain, but I like. I like Seattle weather a lot. Quick question for you, first of all just how long have you been at Amazon and what is your title there?
Ruslana:
I'm a vice president of sponsored brands display in TV advertising and I just celebrated my 10 year anniversary Last week awesome, congrats, congrats.
Bradley Sutton:
now we're gonna go into like what you announced today, but you know something while you were on stage, you also referred to something that was, you know, launched a little bit ago. We're how, now you know, sponsored products can show up on websites like Pinterest and things like that, and one thing that was I have a bad memory, but it was new to me, maybe I knew about it, I guess, didn't know was like it's not just a product that's gonna display, but it'll also show, I believe, like the reviews count and even the shipping time did I, did I hear that right.
Ruslana:
Well, with sponsor products, our goal is to deliver the same value that Advertisers are getting today by having sponsored products was an Amazon store and some of the critical sort of trusted Amazon attributes, such as reviews, pricing information, as well as Prime delivery promise, are essential elements To helping customers make decisions and actually purchase. So yes you are, you got it right at that. Sponsor products will be containing Kind of product level or Amazon key, amazon trusted information Within these new and exclusive placements across some of these sides to help our advertisers to really go quickly and with ease from discovering something or exploring something to actually purchasing awesome, awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
That's been. That's been out for a while, but today, when you're on stage, you announce something brand new, and that was sponsored TV. So just give us maybe a quick 30 second, one minute overview of what that is, and Anne has some follow-up questions on that.
Ruslana:
Well, we see a sponsored TV, tv advertising as a whole, as a critical element of brand-building strategy. That should not be something that Brand cannot do. Any brand of any science should be able to tap into this opportunity and reach these engaged audiences on a big screen In the living room, and so sponsored TV is aiming to accomplish just that. We have worked very closely with our brands and our customers and Backwards from them, to understand what their key pain points have been and why they have not potentially used TV more actively Was in their overall brand-building strategy and, as a result, launch sponsored TV. I'm trying to eliminate three main pain points no guarantee commitments, no spend, minimum creative support and, lastly, access to first-party Amazon, first-party signals. Even when you advertise in TV, powered my machine learning and Right measurement so that advertise and send value, because what we've learned is spend is intimidating, a Lack of the right creative or ability to create the right credit. Just knowing what resonates on such a screen is Hard and intimidating and, lastly, just understanding the value that TV delivers for these brands was difficult. And so, given those three main pain points, that's there. That's why we're sponsored TV. I think to wrap like there is another element right. We at Amazon, we very custom obsessed and in this instance, we have two customers right. We have brands, and we just talked about the value we deliver for the brands, but there's also another key customer, which is the viewers, and for viewers, this is an opportunity to discover diverse collection of brands and products in places where they choose to spend their time.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now I'm just wondering where, like? What kind of placements are these? Are these like, like, like trailers that come up, or are there just actual, you know, banner ads that might pop up while you're watching a TV show?
Ruslana:
Oh, this is a TV advertising we're talking about, so they are video, so this is not this not sponsored display.
Jeff:
Yeah.
Ruslana:
This is video ads and they sponsor TV. Today service was in freebie content. Like I don't know if any of you watch freebie, I do. I love certain shows there, so big fan. So there is freebie content. There is streaming. Do you stream? Do you twitch?
Bradley Sutton:
Yes.
Ruslana:
Okay. Well, when you twitch during live streams, that could be. Another opportunity was in.
Bradley Sutton:
There might be people watch watching this right now on our rebroadcasts of this.
Ruslana:
People that twitch. This is where the ads would show. And then, lastly, was in a fire TV apps.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, excellent yeah.
Anne:
So it was mentioned that the goal of this campaign, or at least one of the goals, is to make it more accessible to Advertisers who have lower budgets, don't necessarily want to deal with spend minimums etc. Do you feel like there's a lower level of budget sufficiency for running these campaigns, or can it be tested with a small amount of money?
Ruslana:
Well, we, as I said earlier, right customer obsessed, working back, working backwards from our brands and working backwards for them. I'm really observed that they do want to be able to engage with this audience. Why wouldn't you like if you launched a product that is net new, delightful, on the market? Why wouldn't you want to tell? Like you know, I talked on my keynote about hex glad. I don't know if you don't know, if you have it in your kitchen, but if you don't, I highly recommend. I discovered through our sponsor TV offering the brand and I love the non-stick and also non scratch.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh no, you had me out when you showed part of the video where it flipped over and nothing Was coming on.
Anne:
I like that.
Ruslana:
Very impressive and so at the end of the day, like that is the brand that I'm delighted to cook with every day, and I like my eggs for breakfast. Doesn't matter if it's Monday or Tuesday, Wednesday or Sunday, so in at the end of the day, I think these are the type of brands. They want to engage with the right audience at the right time, and I think this is the right time.
Anne:
Great. Can you walk us through some of the targeting that will be available with this type of advertising? Most of sponsored ads is keyword basis. That going to be the truth for Sponsored TV, or is it going to be more signal-based behavioral audiences?
Ruslana:
Well, we always try to help our brands reach the right audiences. So let me Maybe adjust one statement here Most of sponsor brands is not keyword based sponsored products. Keyword based sponsored Products is keywords based. Sponsor brands has keywords Elements in their way and how you express intent. Sponsored display doesn't have that way to express intent. But our aim is to always work with our brands and help them, give them the right tools to express the intent in the best possible way so we can deliver their message and their story in the right place at the right time. So in the case of sponsored TV, the advertisers could use both sort of category based interests and as well as Genre based interest.
Bradley Sutton:
I've got a spooky brand on Amazon, so like come Halloween season gonna be Maybe throwing some ads on some spooky Halloween shows or horror show.
Anne:
Perfect, I think we have time for one more question. So I'm curious how do you recommend brands measure success with these campaigns? Do you have specific KPIs that you think you know appropriately measure the success for sponsored TV or anything along those lines?
Ruslana:
So they reach. Traditional metrics are available similarly how they would be available for any other TV offerings, but in addition, we are sharing branded searches as well as detail page and store page Traffic, and so that is a starting point for the offering. We will continue evolving our metrics and help brands understand the value they're getting out of their sponsored TV offering Wonderful.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Ruslana:
Thank you for having me and in Bradley.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week. Amazon rolls out AI-powered image generation to help advertisers deliver a better ad experience for customers https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/amazon-ads-ai-powered-image-generator Walmart beefs up its third-party marketplace as it challenges bigger online rival Amazon https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/18/walmart-beefs-up-online-marketplace-in-amazon-challenge.html Amazon introduces Consult-a-Friend, a new mobile experience that lets you ask your friends for advice while you shop https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-introduces-consult-a-friend-mobile-shopping-experience Amazon will now let you access Crunchyroll’s anime library right from Prime Video https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23929990/amazon-prime-video-crunchyroll-channel-now-available We round up with a focus on the importance of researching historical search volume and keywords for the upcoming holiday season. Stay tuned for all this and more!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley talks about:
- 00:55 - New Amazon Image AI Tool
- 03:24 - Walmart Incentivized Reviews
- 04:13 - Amazon Seller Export
- 05:30 - Small Business Search
- 06:12 - Walmart Stats
- 08:23 - Amazon Call A Friend
- 10:29 - Anime on Amazon
- 12:22 - $1 Million TikTok Shop Month
- 13:25 - Join Helium 10 Elite
- 14:15 - Pro Training Tip: Historical Trend Keywords Q4
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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon releases a new tool that allows you to make customized images with AI. Walmart is actually encouraging incentivized reviews. Amazon buyers now have a chance to phone a friend, as it were. This and many more news stories on today's edition of the weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown on all of the news stories in the Amazon, Walmart and E-commerce world and we give you training tips the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. Let's go ahead and hop right into the news. If my screen looks a little bit different, I'm actually recording this from a hotel room because I'm in Amazon unboxed in New York, and that's actually the first news story of the day. Amazon has actually announced today that there is a new generative AI image generator. Now it's especially designed for sponsor brand ads, but, as you can see from this article here, you're going to be able to use your main image from your listings and then you can write like a prompt, like put this water bottle on a Maldives beach or make this water bottle seem like it's underwater, and then what it's going to do, what Amazon is going to do, it's going to take that image and then it's going to go ahead and like overlay it on this computer generated with AI background. So, basically, what Amazon sellers have been wanting to do, you're going to be able to make lifestyle images with this generative AI. Now, as I said, it's mainly for sponsor brand ads. So you know how, in a sponsor brand ad, you can use a custom image now which convert a lot better.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, for a lot of you sellers out there, you might not have had a means to make a custom image, like maybe you don't have a studio where you can just get new images made. You know, maybe you're not wanting to rent an Airbnb to take a photo shoot in a certain you know room setting that you that you need. Maybe you don't have the means to do something in Photoshop for this image because you don't know how to use Photoshop. Well, now, this is where this generative AI is going to come in, because you can take your image from your listing or another image you have and then overlay it on any kind of background. Now I did a step by step tutorial on how to do this, because there's actually other kind of applications. Like you could just generate some images in this tool and use it as a lifestyle image, you know, for you you can generate multiple images and use it in Amazon post. So if you'd like to know how to use this and it's completely free for brand registered store owners go to the Helium 10 blog, h10.me forward slash blog, and then this should probably be one of the first blogs that comes up on the page. There will be a step by step with images on exactly how to use this new tool. I'm curious, if you've tried it yet, let me know in the comments below what kind of results you get. It's not always perfect, you know. Sometimes there's some funky images that come up, but this is super cool that Amazon announced this at Unboxed today and if you tune in this Saturday for the regular episode of the podcast, there's going to be interviews with a few vice presidents and other executives at Amazon about all the other advanced Amazon advertising releases that they announced this week here in New York. So make sure to tune into Saturday's episode. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Next up, it was an email actually that I got from Walmart and part of the email says as you can see here, the review accelerator program now lets you get double the number of drumroll, please incentivize review. So it's hilarious. You know like we talk about Walmart. You know, following the path of Amazon from before. Remember, it was okay to do incentivize reviews back in the day on Amazon. Right now it's okay to do incentivize reviews, you know, using Walmart on the Walmart platform. So now they have this review accelerator program and it offers twice the number of incentivize reviews. I think this is more like kind of like. I haven't used it, so I think it's kind of like the Amazon Vine program, but if you're interested in finding out more information, if you're a Walmart seller, make sure to go to your email and you probably got this email this week and then click on that link and I'll give you more information on how to do these Walmart incentivize reviews.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, the next news article here is just from your seller central dashboard. It's entitled ship FBA inventory from China at a lower cost. This is something that you talked about at Amazon Accelerate a little bit, and some sellers have been using this already, but it says hey, now you can ship your FBA inventory from China to our US fulfillment centers at a lower cost with seller export and delivery. I've always used my own, you know carrier, so I'm not sure if this is completely new or if this is something that has been existing. They're just expanding it. But it basically says hey, seller export and deliveries and Amazon partner carrier program that handles your FBA shipping, including customs clearance and door to door pickup and delivery. This program is integrated into seller central and offers a simplified FBA experience with Amazon negotiated shipment rates, seamless payments and end to end tracking.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So if you'd like more information on this, go ahead and go to your seller central dashboard and you'll be able to hit get that news story. Is that something that you'd be interested in trying? You know there's always been people out there who say, oh no, you know like I don't want to Amazon to know where my suppliers, because they're going to copy my products. Amazon doesn't need to like know who our suppliers is going to copy our product. So I don't think that's the issue. But I know that's maybe holding some of you guys back. So what about you? You going to use that. You know, check out Amazon's rates here, All right. The next article here is also from your seller central dashboard and it's entitled find small businesses using a small business search filter. So this is going to be on the buyer side, where they're you know. You know how. If you have a small business badge, well now, buyers who are interested in this kind of thing, they're going to have this filter, and I think in a lot of websites it's already active, Like if you search coffin shelf. So if you scroll down the page in the coffin shelf, you can actually see here there's a business type. All right, business type filter and then small business. So just another reason why you should make sure that your small business certification is still active on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is from CNBC and it's entitled Walmart beefs off its third party marketplace as a challenges bigger online rival, Amazon, and there's a lot of interesting things, facts and figures from this article that might encourage you about selling on the Walmart platform. It talks about the older or the Walmart seller conference that they had earlier this year, but it's talking about what their plans are for this this Q4 and also some of the numbers that are encouraging. You know how Walmart had, kind of like a another prime day ish event. Well, if you notice here, it says more than half the items included in Walmart sales event that week they were from third party marketplace sellers. You know, you could have said that maybe two years ago, as most items were actually from Walmart itself. There's a increase in year over year sales, as you can see from this graph those of you watching this on YouTube and sales, and it says about 70% of items, including in Walmart plus week, were marketplace items. So way more than than half actually. Now this article quoted the outside source saying that you know, while Amazon has about 1 million active sellers, Walmart has only about 100,000 right now. So obviously still way, way, way, you know, below Amazon and as far as the share in 2023 of e-commerce sales, Amazon has 37% and Walmart has about 6%. But that 6% is is it's all time high. Just in 2016, it was at 2%. Now, remember another way that Walmart has an advantage over Amazon, as you can see from this article. It says they've got 4,600 stores across the country and those act as kind of like mini warehouses, with more than 50% of online orders fulfilled from the stores. All right, so you know. You might think, hey, well, Amazon has all those warehouses. Walmart has way more stores than Amazon has warehouses. So as Walmart expands the kind of delivery and storage at their stores, it could be a way for them to get even wider footprint than Amazon for delivery. But anyways, check out that article from CNBC. It's kind of interesting, very encouraging. I have always recommended you guys, you know, if you're into selling on Amazon, the USA, you should be selling on Walmart as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, next story here is actually from Amazon itself. But how many of you remember back in the day what was that show called? Who Wants to be a Millionaire? And it was like a quiz show, right? And then do you remember what would happen if you like didn't know the answer? You had the opportunity to phone a friend. I think it was called, right. It was like with Regis Philbin, who was the host of that show. Anyways, Amazon now has something like that for buyers. So take a look at this article. It's entitled. It's not called phone a friend, but it's an. It's entitled Amazon introduces consult a friend a new mobile experience that lets you ask your friends for advice while you shop. So this hasn't been live across the board. I'm curious if any of you have it. But basically what's going on is you could be on a you know mobile listing and, instead of just having the button where you can just share a link with your friends, it actually opens up like a chat window where you could use your text message or other messaging apps and Collaborate live with you know, your selected friends about a product and get feedback. What do you think? Do you think this is going to help sales or do you think it could hurt it, like maybe you know one? One kind of logic could be that, well, Maybe something that somebody would just bought, no matter what, Maybe now they might not buy it because they're gonna go ask their friends and maybe their friends don't don't reply right away. I'm not sure, but it's kind of an interesting you know interesting thing and there's gonna be buttons that that have to do with it and, like your friends are gonna be able to like vote if they like it.
Bradley Sutton:
You know multiple friends, so later this could be something that Drives more data points as far as what Amazon shows for keywords. So imagine somebody searched an Amazon for a certain keyword. They click this item. They have console friends. If somebody has a product where all their friends liked it, I would imagine that the Amazon algorithm is gonna work to maybe push that one up, as opposed to one where everybody all of your friends gave it a thumbs down. You know this is all still kind of speculation right now, but again, very interesting. Amazon is always trying to innovate on the buyer side and the things that it does on the buyer side Obviously affects us sellers. To what? What are your thoughts on this? One? Another article today coming from the verge, and it's entitled Amazon Will now let you access crunchy rolls anime library right from prime video. So I'm not sure how many anime fans Japanese animation out there are like me. I have a crunchy roll account and this is not gonna be free, but you still pay, like the 799. But now you can do it from prime video. All right, so you can like cancel your crunchy roll account now.
Bradley Sutton:
There's a couple reasons why I brought this up as an article. Number one it's just another benefit of Amazon Prime, you know, and the more Amazon Prime customers there are, the or, the more sticky, the more tools that there are, you know, the more sticky they're gonna be, you know, the better it is for us sellers. And I'm literally gonna do this because I can't stand the crunchy roll app. You know I need to watch my spy family and demons layer and all my other animus that I watch. Crunchyroll sucks as a platform. Prime video it's cool, like I don't have a problem with prime video, so I'm definitely gonna be switching this.
Bradley Sutton:
But then also announced today at Amazon unboxed is and I don't want to spoil it too much. Like I said, it's gonna be talked about in Saturday's episode, but we're we're gonna talk about how they're. They're putting advertising now out for like prime video. Now, does this count as prime video? It's an outside service. I'm not sure you know how that's gonna work, because I think the Amazon sponsored TV is is mainly gonna be for like Amazon shows and and things like that. But who knows, maybe now all of a sudden, you know, you might have some kind of like. You know trinket that weeps like, or people who like anime, and, and you could potentially target people who watch in the future Crunchyroll anime from Prime video. I'm not sure how that's going to work, but again, this is cool to speculate on and cool to think about. Amazon is always adding things that eventually is going to trickle down to us Amazon sellers here. Last thing I want to bring up is you know, a couple of days ago here in New York we had our quarterly workshop for helium 10 elite members and it was a doozy, guys. We had a Leeron who gave you know, crate input on a lot of features in sellers central if you're not using, and then we actually had an Amazon or a Helium 10 Elite member. She's been on this podcast before.
Bradley Sutton:
Elizabeth. You know she sold over $20 million on Amazon. Now she is up to guys after her only third month on TikTok shop. She is doing a million dollars a month on TikTok shop and she, like, opened up her TikTok shop seller center account, broke down exactly how she does her sales and showed you know the group. They're everything that they can do. We're going to have that recording up. So I think elite might be open guys. It's 3.99 a month. It would be worth. I'll tell you right now. It would be worth it to like, sign up just for two months or one month just to be able to get the recording, this video. You're like, I don't I've never said that before. You know, we have quarterly workshops all the time. They're all great, but this one literally could pay for itself just with you learning how to do TikTok shop. I mean, do you think you want to sell a million dollars a month on TikTok shop? I'm not saying that's going to happen, guaranteed, but, um, it's definitely possible because she's doing it.
Bradley Sutton:
So, guys, go to H 10.me forward, slash elite or upgrade your account, just temporary, to elite. I'm not sure you still can. They might have closed it already. It was open for a couple of weeks. They might have closed it. If so, if you have no way to upgrade to elite, send a message to customer services. Hey, I heard Bradley in the weekly buzz says to sign up for elite and he said that you guys can help me push it through, even though it might be closed. But but find a way to sign up for elite. We're going to have that recording up in about two or three weeks and, guys, it is a game changer to be selling on TikTok shop and she shows you exactly how to do it. All right, that's it for the news today. Now, next up, you know we're right in Q4. We have some really cool new ways in healing Tensa rebro, to do keyword research, looking at what your competitors are. You were ranking for maybe last Q4. You can do that now with just a couple of clicks. Carrie, show us how.
Carrie:
Today I want to show you a quick and easy way that you can find keywords that are going to be great for key 4, that maybe your competitors are Capitalizing on, that you have not really focused on at all yet. So I'm going to go ahead and just get into it and the first thing that you want to do is you want to log into your helium 10 account and you're going to go to cerebro. So it's under the tools bar. You're going to go to cerebro here and this is what cerebro looks like and I've already pulled it up for us and this is our competitors ascent. Right here I want to take a look at the keywords that maybe they were capitalizing on during Q4 of last year and that maybe we were not taking a look at. The way that we do that is. We're going to do that reverse ascent search and then I'm going to click on show historical trend and it's going to show us the past 24 months of data. So this is all bar graphs of sponsored and organic keywords. Now I'm going to click on December of 2022, because I want to see what they were doing in December of 2022, and I'm going to click apply filters. This is going to show all of the keywords that they were ranking for, organic and sponsored during that time. So you can see there's quite a big list here and I want to take a look at first maybe where they were in spots between ranking one and Maybe spot 20. Then I'm going to hit apply filters. This is going to show kind of the top keywords that they were potentially focused on, and so there's still about 209 which I'm sure there's a lot of great keywords that we're missing in here that we can take advantage of.
Carrie:
But I want to see some kind of Q4 specific things for the holiday season. I'm going to look at gifts, gift Christmas. That's what I'm going to kind of take a look at and see if we have some great keywords in here. It looks like we've got some great keywords, so goth gifts for home, goth that gives for women, goth gifts for women. So I'm going to take a look and see if we have any of these that we are indexing for. So I'm going to go to check index checker and it's under tools and you're going to click on index checker here and on index checker. I've already put our ASIN in here and I'm going to put in. I think it was. Let's see here we have goth gifts for women and goth gift. Okay so goth gifts for women, goth Gift, let's do another one. Let's see here what else we have that has a good search volume. Let's say, spooky gifts for women. Let's see if we're indexed for spooky gifts for women.
Carrie:
Okay so let's go ahead and click index checker and we're going to see if we're even showing up in as Relevant for these keywords in Amazon. And it looks like we're not showing for any of those. So that's kind of not so great. We want to make sure that we have these keywords, you know, indexed so that we can start advertising on these keywords and we can start ranking organically for these keywords. So there's probably quite a few keywords that we haven't capitalized on During the holiday season that we need to focus on right now, and I think those are some of the greatest. I looked, I took a look at the historical search volume and some of those they might be, you know, a few hundred right now, but a lot of them go up to, you know, 15,000, 20,000 during the month of December. So there's a lot of opportunity here to really capitalize on these keywords that maybe no one else is focusing on. So go ahead and check it out and let us know what you think.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, thank you very much for that, Carrie. So, guys, I'm not sure if that's for platinum members, but at least for diamond members, maybe platinum members to you guys might have access to what she was showing you, so make sure to use that right away. Really important to be looking at the keywords here in Q4 from last year as opposed to just Looking at what's going on right now. All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us. I've been away from the weekly buzz for a couple weeks, but it's good to be back. I'll be back next time to see what's buzzing.
Get set to sail through the bustling holiday season sales with ease and finesse as we bring you this month’s TACoS Tuesday PPC expert, Mina Elias, Founder of Trivium Group. Ready to divulge his invaluable strategies tailored for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the entire holiday season, Mina introduces us to the art of optimizing ads. Listen closely as Mina recounts his own experiences and shares the lessons learned from past mistakes to ensure you make the most of your holiday sales.
Whether your product is a Black Friday hit or not, we've got the perfect strategies to maximize your sales and click-through rates. Discover the clever technique of adjusting your bids to your benefit and the smart way to maintain your spending within limits. We reveal some hidden gems on best utilizing the holiday season with budget recommendations and crafting holiday-specific ad campaigns.
Finally, we get into the world of Amazon DSP, providing insights on increasing conversion rates. Uncover the secrets of the optimal spend and timeframe for DSP, learn about bidding strategies for supplements, and also evaluate the effectiveness of Google ads. As we wrap up, we share some valuable tips on targeting long-tail keywords, setting and increasing bids, and making the tough choice between what ad types are top priorities. Tune in for these expert insights and make the most of your holiday season Amazon sales!
In episode 503 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Mina discuss:
- 00:00 - Black Friday, Cyber Monday, & Holiday Amazon PPC Strategies
- 00:13 - Amazon Prime Day Feedback
- 04:01 - Sales And Advertising Strategies for Seasonal Products
- 04:52 - Bidding Strategy for Holiday Shopping Events
- 10:53 - Split Testing for Main Images
- 13:57 - Holiday PPC Budget and Sponsored Campaigns
- 15:14 - Adjusting PPC Budget for Holiday Season
- 23:07 - Custom Images in Sponsored Brand Ads
- 26:53 - Running Amazon DSP
- 31:42 - Amazon Rank and Bidding Strategy
- 34:08 - PPC Strategy for TACoS and Keywords
- 35:09 - PPC Strategy for Improving Conversion Rates
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Transcript
Carrie Miller:
Today we're talking with Mina Elias from the Trivium Group and he's going to give PPC strategies for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday season in general. This and so much more on today's episode.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Not sure on what main image you should choose from, or maybe you don't know whether buyers would be interested in your product at a certain price point. Perhaps you want feedback on your new brand or company logo. Get instant and detailed market feedback from actual Amazon Prime members by using Helium 10 Audience Just entering your poll or questions and, within a short period of time, 50 to 100 or even more Amazon buyers will give you detailed feedback on what resonates with them the most. For more information, go to h10.me forward. Slash audience.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of this Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Carrie Miller, and this is our TACoS Tuesday, where we answer all of your PPC questions. We have an expert guest who's going to help answer all of your burning questions, especially for the holidays. Today on our show, we have Mina Elias, and I'm so excited to have him on. He's an expert in PPC and so I'm going to go ahead and bring him on.
Mina:
What's up? What's up, guys.
Carrie Miller:
Thanks again for coming on live with me. I'm so excited you're here.
Mina:
I know. Thank you for having me. It's been a minute since I've done a TACoS Tuesday.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, do you want to just introduce yourself a little bit, so everyone knows who you are, and a little bit about you and your agency.
Mina:
Yeah, my name is Mina Elias. I'm the founder of Trivium Group, which is an Amazon agency, amazon marketing agency. We handle pretty much everything on Amazon for brands. I started as a supplement brand in 2018, using Helium 10 religiously, of course. I grew and scaled that brand to over a million dollars. It's called MMA Nutrition In 2021, there was a very large demand for people coming to me saying please run my PPC and stuff like that. I ended up starting an Amazon ads agency. Initially it was just Amazon PPC. Now we do PPC, DSP, SEO, creatives, helping brands launch on Amazon all that kind of stuff. I actually worked with Helium 10 on their PPC course. If you are a member of Helium 10, if you haven't checked it out yet, you should definitely check it out. It is a full, thorough course. Me and Vince Montero did it together. It's like beginner all the way to advanced. It's everything that I do in our business for managing ads. I love sharing everything that we are doing and learning. We have about 150 brands under management, 80 people on the team. We're learning a lot every day and Amazon is changing. I know that it's hard. When I started out, it was very hard for me to know what's good and what's not good. I'm here to share my experience and then hopefully it benefits everyone.
Carrie Miller:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much. I have some questions prepared here for Meena that are more holiday oriented. This should be a really good episode. Here's the first question what is your Black Friday, Cyber Monday strategy?
Mina:
Cool. I love talking about this because on prime days and Black Friday, cyber Monday, I mean one wrong move and you could end up losing all of your profits. The reason I say this is because that happened to me multiple years in a row, at least two years in a row, where I was following the strategy of spend a lot of money on ads, do deep discounts and then you're going to sell four times more on Black Friday, cyber Monday or Prime Day. I did sell four times more, but I also spend way more and it resulted in me losing money or not making profits those days. There's two categories in which products fall. One category is they do very well in Black Friday, cyber Monday and Prime Day. I'm talking like expensive products, giftable products. You should know your product. If you don't, I suggest that you go into Helium 10 and you can see the performance historically of product sales over time, and I think Bradley did a video on this. It's on my YouTube channel, just Meena Elias. You'll find a video of me and Bradley and he uses X-ray and cerebro to show you historically how has this product sold and if you notice that certain products or you don't know if your product is going to sell a lot and you notice that there's a spike, then you're like, okay, my product might fall into that category of it's going to do really well Black Friday, cyber Monday. So if you're in that category, I'm going to give you the strategy which is leading up to Black Friday, cyber Monday or any Prime Day. You basically want to increase your bids. You know that you're going to do a deal, so you want to increase your bids and get as much rank as you can, because during Black Friday, cyber Monday, you're probably going to have to decrease it a little bit because you might not be able to handle the volume of the spend that's going to happen from all of the additional people coming in onto the platform. So you're initially increASINg your bids 30 days before you know you have a deal coming. The day of, you know the day before, I would say, and then the day of and then day after, you're going to lower your bids a little bit, probably I would say by 10%, nothing crazy and you want to check frequently that you're you know how much your spend is and you want to make sure that it's not out of control. There's also guardrails. I wouldn't do account level budgets, but if you have a software, you know you could do some sort of automation where it's like if you hit a certain spend in that day, then you know, lower your bids or your budgets by certain amounts so you're not overspending Again.
Mina:
The thing that I learned the hard way was, you know, I would, on average, sell $2,000 a day. The Prime Day came, black Friday, the 7th of Monday came, I sold $4,000, but instead of spending an average of, like you know, 400 to 500, I spent 1,500. And that extra 1,000 or whatever in profit that I was going to make because of the sales, it all went to ads and I ended up not making as much money or losing money. And you know why would I do that? When I'm just like selling more units and now I have to order, you know, more units faster. Now, if you're not in that category, what I would do is you need to have a very focused strategy on organic only. So 30 days prior to Black Friday, cyber Monday, you're going to increase your bids again, but the day before like, or maybe even two days before leading up to the day after those days, I cut my bids by 30%, and we do this across all the brands, so it's a significant cut, which essentially means you know if someone is clicking on your ads, you know they're probably like deep, they're not like window shopping or anything like that. They're probably on page three or something like that. And it's cool because you know people are going to, who are scrolling that much, might be interested in buying. And what I've noticed is, even by cutting our ads by 30%, they will probably our PBC spend will probably be more, like 10% more than what it usually is, but as a result we do get an increased amount of sales. It's not the same as if our bids were high. So we'll maybe sell 50%, 70%, 100% more than what we usually would sell in a day, but you know we'll have our ads spend the same and so all of that difference is net profit.
Mina:
And so you know, if your strategy is, if you're not the seasonal product, black Friday, cyber Monday type of product, you want to cut down by 30%. But if you are, then you're going to have a deal and you're going to probably only cut by 10%. Those perform exceptionally well for products like that. So we've had giftable products that were 45 and we brought them down to $35. We've had coffee makers that were $300 and we brought them down to like 260 or something like that, to 59. And that coffee maker, I think, did $70,000 in one day, wow, yeah, we had a card brand, a card holder, that did like a million dollars between both prime days. So when you have a giftable product, when you have an expensive product, something that people wait for deals to buy, you can make a lot of money and definitely utilize the deals that you know prime day deals or Black Friday, cyber Monday deals.And then one more thing that I didn't mention for both of those is if you do plan on like showing that you have a lower price 30 to 45 days before Black Friday, cyber Monday or Prime Day, increase your cost, your sale price and let's say you're a $30 product, bring it up to 35 and then, right before you can drop your price back to 30 and it will show that you have had the lowest price in the last 30 days. So, on top of like a deal, it'll show that you have the lowest price, or, if you don't have a deal, it'll show that you have the lowest price, which some people might think that it's a deal. That's essentially what we've been doing. And then another thing to consider is what are the things that you can do to improve your click-through rate during those periods which are going to be your sale price, your main image and your reviews? Those are the top three things that can influence your click-through rate. The higher the click-through rate, the more you're taking advantage of all that traffic that's coming in.
Mina:
And so, main image, the time to split test this probably now, because you have about a month until Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You know, with price testing, see how far you can go up right now before actually having a significant impact, because then when you go down you can have a deal and you don't have to go down as much. If you raise your price by 20% now and you notice that your sales and your profits are pretty much the same, when you do a 20% off in Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you're going to get all that much more profit because you're having more sales at the same price. And then, if you're at a 4.2 stars, do whatever it takes between now and Black Friday, cyber Monday to hit a 4.3, because once you hit the 4.3 and you have 4.5 stars, I've seen click-through rates go way up and traffic you know, paid and organic significantly improve. And just a note for everyone, higher click-through rates means lower cost per click, that's. I mean, I don't know why that's the case. My theory is that Amazon views higher click-through rates as better experience for shoppers and, as a result, they want to reward you and allow you to spend more money. So if you're looking for one way to get more free sales through organic traffic or more sales at a lower cost, through a lower cost per click, work on click-through rate.
Carrie Miller:
So would you say, to do the manage my experiments, to do split testing for those main images, or how do you usually split test?
Mina:
You know, manage my experiments has not been that reliable recently and I updated my main image and I did manage my experiments and I noticed that for one variation it said that the old one is better and then for one variation said the new one is better. So I said you know what? I'm just going to test putting the new one up and I know what my click-through rate has been the last month. Let's see what's going to happen the next two weeks. So I added the new image and click-through rate went up by a lot. Oh wow, yeah, I mean, and it was against kind of what manage my experiments said. So I think the ultimate way to split test is just, you know, use something like you guys have a poll feature right, yeah, yeah, audiences. So use Helium 10 audiences, get some preliminary data and then you know, if you feel a little bit more confident and you're like, okay, cool, like this image is definitely better than my old image, then go ahead and just like test it. Worst case your click-through rate goes down for a couple of weeks. No big deal, you can catch it pretty quick. I would not make any decisions until at least seven days because you need like one full week cycle so you can look at the average of the click-through rates before, average of the click-through rates after and then say, okay, you know, after it's definitely worse, because for me, Monday the click-through rate could be 0.4. Tuesday could be 0.28. Wednesday could be 0.43. You know what I mean. So that's how it just fluctuates. No one knows why. It's human behavior, you know. None of us you know behave in a predictable way Like you know, at least that predictable. So it's okay, like just let a full week cycle go by.
Carrie Miller:
Do you have some tips Like are there certain things like maybe if you have multiples in a package should you show all of them, or what are some kind of tips you have for those main images that you've seen, kind of better performance on the click-through?
Mina:
Yeah, great, great question. So for me, I think what I've seen is the sale, the selling points, like the, the USB, the selling point being visible and you showing that you're better than everyone else just from the main image. And so when I, when I put a bunch of you know like products next to each other, my competitors versus me, like I know that I'm looking for a product, not a lot of people take advantage of the text on their, on their boxes or on their products. So, for example, let's say you know you're selling like flip flops, the cloud flip flops, so you can have the flip flops and, and you know, in an angle whatever. Or you can have the flip flops put on top of a box, a fake box, and on that box you have two sides where you can write text and it says, like you know, the softest material on the market or whatever a hundred percent recyclable stuff like that, right, because you can have that text on the box that you couldn't have actually have on your package, and that box probably doesn't exist. You know you're probably shipping it in a, in a clear bag, but no one is going to pay attention to that detail and and you know, at the end of the day, they're going to get your your slippers. They're going to look this, you know they're going to look like slippers.
Mina:
So for me, my, my product, my electrolytes if you go look at it on Amazon, it's like shinier. There's text on the cap, there's like some different logos that show that actually don't exist on the bottle and when they do get the bottle it looks very, very similar. There's just a few things, and those few things those are the differences that when someone types in a keyword and they're looking, you know they're browsing, I catch their eye because I have, like some elements outside of the product that are eye catching and I have some text on the product that, like they're looking at all like this is an electrolyte powder, so this is an electrolyte powder with no sugar, with no carbs, and it has this and it's made in America and it's all of these things on the label and so they're like they're convinced to click on me without having to read like title or anything like that.
Carrie Miller:
Wow, that's amazing.
Mina:
Yeah, they're just心 restoring, etc. You have to get creative in that one, and so just think about what your product is and what are some elements that you can add around the product to make it pop. And then you utilize packaging with text to make your main image an infographic instead of a main. You know, like if you could make your main image an infographic? That's what I'm getting at.
Carrie Miller:
Very interesting. Okay, thank you for sharing that. That's a really good info. Okay, let's go on to the next question here. Let's see, I think you kind of asked well, this is for holiday season, so how should I adjust my PPC budget for the holiday season? So, in general, like you know Q4, there's more spend. What budget recommendations do you have?
Mina:
Yeah. So again like if, if, if you don't know historically how much your budget goes up by, what I would do is I would go, I would go into helium 10 and I find the increase in sales you know from my competitors and I would probably budget 50 to 100% like growth in my ad spend based on what I'm seeing. So let's say my competitor goes from selling 100 units a day to 200 units a day during during that season. Then I'm going to take, you know I'm spending $1,000 a day on ads. I'm going to go to 1500 or max 2000. That's kind of my range of of increase in ad spend and I'm obviously going to do it slowly and make sure that my revenue is growing, you know more, so that I'm left with net profits. So that's another point is to make sure that you are tracking your net profits. So net profits is your sale price minus your Amazon fees, minus your cost of goods sold, minus your advertising you know advertising spend and then obviously refunds and reimbursements take that into account and that's your net profit. You know, on Amazon, excluding, like your own, like cost, you know VA's, whatever, that kind of stuff. So make sure that you're measuring that because that's the, the like, the true number of, like how much you're taking home. And as that number, you know, is increASINg, you can increase your, your ad spend. And you know, hopefully, because at the end of the day, like I don't care about selling three times more in Q4. And then you know, my net profits the same.
Mina:
I'd rather sell four times less and have the same net profit because it's easier on my cash flow. So that's how I would. I would adjust my budgets Now. If you have historic data and you understand how your sales perform, then you can do it based off of your, your sales growth. Again, if, if you're like, not your spend growth but your sales growth, so if your sales have historically gone up by 80%, then I'm I'm, you know, going up by 40 to 80% on my ad spend. I'll start by going up 40% and then notice how much my sales went up, cause if I start going up by 80% and my sales are on the by 60, I'll scale it back down to 40. Because, again, I want to keep that gap big enough so that I'm making more profit, taking more money home.
Carrie Miller:
That's a really good point. Yeah, profitability is the most important thing at the end of the day. Yeah, another holiday specific one. What are some strategies for creating holiday specific ad campaigns and promotions?
Mina:
Yeah, so this is. I mean people are not going to like this answer, but every single time I've tried to create anything that's holiday specific has not turned out well. So sponsor products ads work amazing. Every time I start, I try doing a holiday sponsored brand, which is you know the Christmas tree with the products surrounded and you know that kind of stuff like Christmas vibes, I don't know what it is. My theory is that people on Amazon see that as an ad and they're like I don't want to click on an ad but they see sponsor products as like a very like organic thing and they're like oh, I didn't even know that it was an ad so. And then I've tried it with DSP too, and that one was painful because we have to come up with like 16 different sizes for each creator.
Carrie Miller:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Mina:
And so we tried a lot of it and it did not outperform regular you know our regular standard ads so I wouldn't worry too much about you know. Creatives for holidays, okay.
Carrie Miller:
I've. We've got a lot of questions in here, so I'm going to start pulling up some of these questions from the audience. Um, rick, I hope you said your name right. What is, or what are your rules to stop sponsored campaigns when a keyword does not perform as desired?
Mina:
Okay, so usually, if I'm, if I'm trying to be aggressive and grow, it is about the same price as my product and no sales. So if I have a $30 product, if I spend $30 in no sales, if it's an auto broad phrase or expanded ASIN, I'm adding it as a negative. If it's an exact, I'm lowering the bids and I'm going to lower the bids consistently until they either stop spending money or they're profitable. But more than likely, you know, they're just going to stop spending money. But I'm just giving it a chance to be on page four and if someone finds it and clicks on it, they're likely to convert. So that's, that's my strategy. If I'm going aggressive, if I'm trying to be conservative, it'll be 30 to 50% of my sale price. So if I have a $30 product, anywhere between 10 to $15 and spend and no sales, then I'm going to add it as a negative or positive. Now, if you notice that there's a lot of those and if you notice that you you know you went in and you're like, okay, cool, $15 and spend in no sales, I'm going to add it as a negative or lower the bids and you do that and you're left with very little and you feel like you know, like it's not your sales, your sales are not there. You probably have a conversion rate problem. So your problem is more yes, kill the bleeding. So $15 and spend no sales added as negative. Stop spending money on it.
Mina:
You know you can't help it, but focus on your. You know, with your current ads being the same, that your TACoS like gets cut in half by you doubling your conversion rate, because then from there you can start removing some of the negatives and retesting them, or just taking the negatives and relaunching them in newer campaigns and seeing if they're going to be able to get it, and then you're going to perform Cause. A lot of times it's like a balance between conversion rate and ad spend. So here at this ad spend, you know, and this conversion rate, I'm fine. Now, like you know, this conversion rate, now I'm not profitable. So when my conversion rate goes up, I can spend a little bit more. Conversion rate goes up, I can spend a little bit more. It's like a balancing app.
Carrie Miller:
That's a really good point. You know that. You know you got to look at your listing too. Is it the most optimized, or your images the best they could be? I mean even just your main image, the way you were talking about. You know adding those different things on the packaging, that's um. You know little touches that make a huge difference. So that is really good. You know not all. You know you can negative the keywords, but then you know they might not be bad forever. So it's really good. Mr techie says, PPC strategy help required. Selling a product in Indian market and then I launched it in the US Market. Have 60 plus feedbacks. My ACoS is 150%. I was running exact match, but conversion rate is negative 7%.
Mina:
So not sure what the question is, but yeah, yeah, can you, can you clarify the question? And then I mean, if your conversion rate is 7%, I mean ACoS really doesn't matter to me Tell me what your TACoS is. That's like maybe gonna be a little bit more indicative. Tell me what your, you know your margin is and what your TACoS is and what your conversion rate is like overall on the listing and I can maybe help you a little bit better. But I mean, if you're, if you just launched, it's more than likely your conversion rate is low. Having 60 plus Feedbacks or reviews, I'm assuming, is not enough. Also, running exact match alone isn't great. You can run broad phrase and exact and auto and expanded ASIN and whatever is working. You know you can keep that and whatever is not working you can pause it or add it as a negative.
Mina:
And the goal is to you know, across all the different Add types that you have match types and all that kind of stuff, to find just a bunch of winning keywords. You start off, let's say, with a hundred dollars a day in budget and you know you launch a hundred dollars a day worth of ads and maybe ten dollars of those ads are profitable. So the other 90 you're gonna kill and then launch a new 90, and out of that 90 there's 10, and so now you have 20, that's working, 80. That's not working, you know. Kill that 80, launch another new 80, now you have maybe 30, and you know, and so on, and so you're just trying to stack up like More keywords that are profitable and they're working, and then kill the ones that you tested but didn't work out, and again, all of them will work better if your conversion rate is higher.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, that's a good point. I think he said something else a little bit. I've already spent over 3,000. My sales are around 1800 through profitability, though Profitability is very low. So I think you kind of gave some good advice there. So so let's see. Bradley has a question. He says are you 100% of the time doing custom images for sponsored brand ads and if so, what kind of images are working well?
Mina:
Okay. So the one, the one image that I've seen perform really well and yes, I am doing custom images for sponsored brand 100% of the time the one image that I'm seeing work really, really well is Like something like social proof. So people that are on Shark Tank, people that you know, were like featured on, like there was a creative one where it was like the product and then like put on the cover of Forbes, you know, like with a magazine of Forbes, like next to it. We've seen like stuff done with an influencer, like really big influencers Hillary, dove, Halle Berry, you know who are like celebrities. So social proof is what I've seen Works incredibly well and you have to do it in a way where, like it's, there's no like text, so you can't just do like a bunch of like logos and stuff like that. I don't think they're gonna allow that, but that is what I've seen works best. Everything else has worked kind of Okay, you know, like similar sponsor brands in general and you know I hate to say this, but sponsor brands in general, they seem to not perform that well. They seem to just spend more money and not generate sales. So I'm a hundred percent an advocate for sponsor brands for your own branded search terms. But the second that I start going into like sponsor brand for other keywords. What I notice is it's like the people are clicking on sponsor brand and sponsor products, spending money and not and it's not generating any more sales. And we've tried it where our organic and sponsored is low. So there's. You know there's no chance they're coming into our listing and we try and run a sponsored brand and They've. They've done Okay, they haven't done great.
Carrie Miller:
That's interesting. Okay, the next question how you mentioned in one of your videos that you use same keyword in multiple campaigns, does not, does that not cannibalize the keyword?
Mina:
Yeah, so the only time I'm using the same keyword in multiple campaigns if they're if the match types are different and it does not cannibalize, and I'll explain why. So when you have a keyword in broad, that keyword triggers 50 different searches, 50 different search terms, right, if it's in phrase, it triggers 20 and if it's an exact it triggers one, and then these are, just, like you know, rough numbers. So it let's say that you know you have the same keyword in broad phrase and exact, this keyword in broad is gonna show one of 50 times. Now, if you have a hundred dollars a day budget in that campaign and a one dollar cost per click, that that means that it's gonna show across those 50 keywords twice per keyword. You know you're gonna. It's gonna, you know, be two times per keyword in 24 hours. And then you know for for the, the like phrase, it's gonna be five times per keyword and then for the exact, it's gonna be whatever, however many times, you know a hundred times for that keyword. That's, if you reach a hundred dollars, they and spend, and so you add that up, right, two times, five times. You know, and let's say, 20 times in 24 hours. They're not gonna compete with each other like there's there's so much time in the day. An ad could be showing up, you know, every minute. So it's like there is. They're usually in different match types, not gonna compete, and if they do happen to show in different times, from my understanding the the one that has the highest bid is the one that's gonna show up. So it's not a big deal. I don't think they compete. I just think like, statistically, you have something that shows up twice in 24 hours, five times in 24 hours, 20 times in 24 hours. What is the chance of them running into each other?
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, that's true. Okay, so Jeffrey asked what's the minimum amount of Spend needed and the minimum time frame you recommend for running DSP? That's a really good question. I've had this question a lot recently.
Mina:
Yeah. So I would say 2000 a month is would be the bare minimum and that's just kind of enough to cover like some loyalty or retargeting campaigns. And the minimum like in the first 30 days, that's when you're still getting data, and then in the second 30 days, that's when you're starting to optimize. So within 60 days you should start seeing like the true results. So I would say the minimum at spend would be 2000 and then the minimum you know amount of time should be 60 days, and then 60 days that's if you're like running it with someone, that's like experienced and they know what they're doing. If you're doing it yourself, it's probably it's gonna be longer. You know more, like 120 days because there's a lot of things that you have to tweak to get it Right. But yeah, I mean it doesn't have to be a lot of ad spend. I think you can get retargeting down with 2000. You just have to figure out which Placements work the best. So for me it's been usually Amazoncom, desktop, mobile web and mobile app. Creatives has been responsive, e-commerce has performed the best, and then audiences are Like sometimes 30 days is enough, 30 days retargeting. Sometimes you have to go with like 60 days retargeting. So it just depends on how many people are coming into your listing. For an audience to be created on DSP, you need at least a thousand Unique visitors a month to create an audience awesome.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, the next one is how are you using the bidding strategy for supplements and are you getting good results?
Mina:
First for supplements, the way that, like I work, from long to long, tail up, like from from long, like long term, like um, low, low search volume, all the way up because lower search volume are easier to win. And so my strategy is, you know, going to helium 10, I put in my, or I go into, like you know, the search results on on Amazon type in my main keyword, open up X-ray. I pull up the top 10 competitors, launch them in cerebro. Then I set up some settings, so I would say like a minimum of 500 searches a month, minimum ranking competitors seven or eight out of the 10. Um, and then maximum position, 60. Um, and so now it's showing me keywords that are relevant to most of these competitors with decent search volume and they're not ranked a super low. And then from there I have my core list and I take that core list and I start launching.
Mina:
I launched the big ones initially just to get relevancy and to get a lot of indexing for for a lot of different keywords. I'll watch this broad phrase and exact, but I start with the lower search volume keywords and I put them five in a campaign, one in broad, one in phrase, one in exact, and I'm gradually launching them and I start with a bid that's lower or around the suggested bid. Sometimes the suggested bid is $5. So I'll just start at you know, a dollar or $2. Anyways, and then I can always inch my way up, and so from there I wait and I, you know, I spend and I see what's going on. And then I start inching data up based on like, what's getting um, impressions, um, and obviously, if there's anything that's performing well, I'm spending a little bit more money on it. And I'm basically trying to start like I'm casting a net at the bottom and then coming up, up, up, up, up, until it starts like catching some people and instead of like spending up here, and then I'm like, damn, like this, spending too much money, it's not profitable, and lowering the bids.
Mina:
I started the bottom and work my way up and then, as I stack the, the long tail ones, it's easier to launch the bigger ones Because they're going to be more costly, but they'll balance out because they they will drive a lot of traffic, but you should have like a decent amount of sales that are profitable coming in first and then then it will work a lot better than if you just start with the broad keywords Um and yeah, and that gets me pretty good results. We're like looking for negative keywords very frequently, making sure that any keyword that spends a certain amount of money with no sales, is added as negative, like if it's an auto broad phrase or expanded ASIN, um, and then all any keyword that's like underperforming bids are lowered. And we're constantly launching new keywords and testing new keywords out. So, going through the search term report, um, you know, twice a week identifying any search term that converted profitably that we're not currently running. I'm not negating it or anything, I'm just taking it out, putting it in its own campaign in different match types to try and double down on those keywords.
Carrie Miller:
Awesome, all right. Next question Are Google ads still effective?
Mina:
Yeah, I would say Google ads are still effective. Definitely. I think you're trying to drive cold Google ads to Amazon because you have a lack of attribution. It's very hard to optimize. I wouldn't necessarily put my money there before maximizing uh, PPC and DSP.
Carrie Miller:
Can you elaborate a little bit more on this strategy for a rank? Do you have to put in specific keywords on your Google ads in order to rank on Amazon for those, or does it just sending Google traffic allow all your keywords to increase an organic rank, Like what? What is the strategy for that?
Mina:
The strategy is individual keywords. So it's like we'll set up a keyword, uh, in its own campaign and we'll drive traffic to Amazon and we're noticing that the rank of that keyword for us organically goes up and we're tracking it in the search query performance report, um, in terms of like all of everything ranking higher. That works well when we're using influencers. So we've done a strategy where we've hit up a bunch of influencers, like I'm actually going to do this for my new product that I'm launching, um on Amazon. It's like a new, it's like a packets version of my electrolytes, but basically I'm giving it away to a hundred different influencers and what we've seen is like brands that have done that that they've given it away to influencers on Tik Tok and they've like posted about it and made good content. And then people are like looking up the brand name and looking at it on Amazon, like that's really helped improve organic rank across the board.
Carrie Miller:
That's amazing, thank you, okay, so what's the best way to choose initial bids?
Mina:
Yeah, so start with suggested bid, you know, and if the suggested bits too high, just start lower and then work your way up. There's like no science behind this. Um, you're never going to nail it. You're just going to start somewhere and then you're going to have to optimize it. You're going to have to optimize over time until you hit the you know, the sweet spot. But I would rather you start lower and work your way up, because if you start higher you're just spending a lot more money faster.
Carrie Miller:
All right. Next one should broad and phrase match be used in campaigns throughout the product lifetime? I think is what that is.
Mina:
Product. Okay, so should broad and phrase match type? Yeah, broad and phrase match types should be used forever. They're like different types of keywords. So you have one keyword and you have different match types and those different match types perform differently. So you know, it's like. That's just how it is. Like you can have a electrolyte powder broad, electrolyte powder exact and electrolyte powder broad could do amazing, because inside of electrolyte powder broad there's 40 keywords. You've negative 10 of them that are not doing well, and then there's 30 of them that are doing good, you know. And then electrolyte powder exact is just that one keyword and you know you've optimized the bid as much as you can and it's doing okay, but you know it's spending too much money and not an ecosystem is high, etc. Etc. So you should always use phrase and broad. Yeah.
Carrie Miller:
Awesome. Okay, and we have some continuation from the one earlier who had 150% ACoS negative 7% conversion rate. He said TACoS are 125%. Current sales two orders a day. Category gift bags. I need PPC strategy for the current situation in helium 10. I see my rank is poor for major keywords. I am tracking.
Mina:
Yeah, I mean this is. It looks like to me it's more likely a conversion rate problem. When I see TACoS that high, I mean it's not going to be your, because if your TACoS is that high, then great like, pause all your keywords and only keep the ones that are profitable. And if there's like, if the ones that are profitable aren't even making you two sales a day, then yeah, I mean you have a conversion problem. So it because if you fix your conversion rate, then your 125 TACoS could become 50% TACoS and then you'll have more opportunity to get you know, launch more keywords and some of them be more profitable, which will drop your TACoS even further. But it seems, as of right now you're, it's probably a conversion rate problem.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah.
Mina:
Sorry, let me just say okay, while you fix your conversion rate, what should you do for PPC? I would say go after a bunch of long tail keywords, start with a very low bid and work your way up slowly and try and catch some profitable keywords. That's, that's all you can do. There's not much else that you can do, right? It's because then, the day you're launching different keywords, you're testing different keywords, some of them need to convert and it's, you know, it's up to your conversion rate.
Carrie Miller:
Awesome. I think that's actually the last of the questions here, so and we're about, you know, almost at 40 minutes, so we've definitely had a pretty good episode here. So thank you so much for joining us on this live. We really appreciate you coming and giving all this expert advice. I think you just dropped so much information here, so many good tactics that people can start taking into, especially these holiday season times, to help, you know, maybe not overspend and to be more profitable. So thank you so much again for joining and we'll see you again, hopefully another time on TACoS Tuesday, and we'll see you again.
Mina:
See you later, see you soon, thanks guys.
Carrie Miller:
Bye everyone.
In episode 502 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Swapneel discuss:
- 00:00 - Selling on Amazon And Scaling Rapidly
- 14:18 - Product Launch Strategies and International Market Approaches
- 12:47 - Scaling a Multimillion-Dollar Business Solo
- 17:52 - Product Research and Potential Products
- 20:39 - Issues With Suppliers and Product Lifespan
- 23:42 - Product Launch and Maintenance Strategies
- 34:40 - What's Next For Swapneel?
- 38:52 - Swapneel's 60-Second Tip
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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got a very unique seller. He sold over $10 million over the last couple of years, has 60 products in over 10 marketplaces and launches a new product every month. Guess how many employees he has? Zero. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Black Box by Helium 10 houses the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world. Outside of Amazon itself. We have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces, from USA to Australia to Germany and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might want to get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash black box. Don't forget you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world and from the other side of the world. We've got a serious seller here that is joining us for the first time in the show. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself, since it's your first time on the show.
Swapneel:
Hi, my name is Swapneel and I'm from India. Been selling on Amazon from the year 2014 and, as a full term, from last four years.
Bradley Sutton:
So yeah, were you born and raised in India?
Swapneel:
Yeah. What part Rajasthan, Jodhpur.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. And have you lived all your life there or have you moved around at all?
Swapneel:
Yeah, so when I was like 19 years old I went to New Delhi like for my university for five years and then right now I'm like kind of digital nominate, so I don't really live here anymore, but just maybe like two, three months a year just to visit my family, because my family still live here.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Well, what did you go to a university for?
Swapneel:
I did law so.
Bradley Sutton:
I wanted to be a lawyer.
Swapneel:
Yeah, so I did law for five years and I specialized in intellectual property rights.
Bradley Sutton:
How does one go from five years studying law and then all of a sudden, e-commerce? Not a natural transition there?
Swapneel:
No, I was doing part time, like other than focusing at university. I was working as well All my university years. Any commerce yes, I was selling on Amazon from 2014. And yeah, so, and I did. Well, how did that?
Bradley Sutton:
happen, though, because that's still not typical. It's not like okay, yeah, during the day I'm going to study law, during the night I'm going to sell on Amazon. I mean like especially in 2014, when hardly anybody was doing it, so how did Amazon even get on your radar?
Swapneel:
So, even before Amazon, I was doing a lot of other platforms like eBay, and there are some other local marketplaces like traders shop clothes, so, and you know, in 2013, amazon entered in India, but in 2014, they opened for everyone, and I knew that Amazon is a really big e-commerce company and I should be there and yeah. So, but, like, even before I went to university, I was making, you know, some money like some, doing some other stuff like flipping goods from online to offline.
Bradley Sutton:
So, like you've always been like kind of like I had an entrepreneurial mindset in one of those early age. You trying to make some action, okay, now it's making a little bit more, a little bit more sense, okay. And then things started getting bigger so that when you graduated from university, did you just go full time into into e-commerce then yeah.
Swapneel:
So that that time, like for me the money was pretty big motivation thing. So in my first year of the university I wasn't sure how much I would be making as a lawyer. But on the second and third year I got to know from my seniors like what is the actual situation and I realized that man like I need to put like at least 10 years in law if I really want to make some serious money in this field.
Bradley Sutton:
Now back in 2014,. I'm assuming you were selling an Amazon USA.
Swapneel:
No, I just did in India. That's where Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
India was active in 2014. Yes, yes, I didn't even know that. Okay.
Swapneel:
Interesting, yeah, but it was very new. It was really new they didn't do reselling or private label. Yeah, so I was just doing reselling. I used to buy a lot of stuff from USA, mainly from Amazon.com, and then selling in Amazon India. Yeah, Interesting.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, yeah, at what year did you first hit the seven figures?
Swapneel:
The 2021, yes.
Bradley Sutton:
2021 okay, and at that point were you one hundred percent private label or were you still doing like some reselling and things?
Swapneel:
I was doing both and like I feel like so, in 2020 I launched a lot of private label products. During all the, like you know, doing the first lockdown, I was just focusing on all the products launches I will be making, doing product research and my first product has really contributed a lot for my private label journey, like I started with one product and then just my.
Bradley Sutton:
You're still selling that product now.
Swapneel:
Not anymore, because the demand is okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Can you tell us?
Swapneel:
what it is, then, yeah, sure.
Bradley Sutton:
I can show. Go ahead and send me the link over in the chat and let me pull it up on my screen. Let's see here. Okay, I see what this is, so let's pull it up here so everybody else can see. There we go, all right. So this is like a, like a USB capture card I'm looking at here. And how did you find this Like? How did you even decide that this was going to be your product? You just got it randomly, or?
Swapneel:
what. So for me, like one of the criteria to search the product is checking the new launches of my competitor or and see like if I can have that same product in a very less turn around and can enjoy the party. So that's what's my like, I mainly do. And during that time I saw like a lot of people were seeing selling this product but they were doing MFF, like they were not doing full fill by Amazon and like, even though the product demand was there, but they were, I don't know why they didn't did FPA. And I knew one thing like as soon as I will do this FPA, the product doesn't have any. Like you know, any of my computer doesn't have a lot of reviews and if I will do full fill by Amazon, then I can, you know, sell a lot of goods as well. So how many?
Bradley Sutton:
how many at the peak? Like? How many units of this were you selling a month or a day?
Swapneel:
I was selling like I was selling like a month I was selling more than 1500 units in India.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow, wow In Amazon India. And yeah, okay. All right so then you're like, okay, wow, yeah, this is definitely better than reselling, or I have to get a little bit and stuff you could just Well. Did you manufi, did you get it from China, or did you get it from there in India?
Swapneel:
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, I got through some of the suppliers in China. Yeah, but the best thing about this product is not just selling, but the margin I had. So I was buying this product like for $5 and was selling for like this product for around $40.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow, very nice. Yeah especially in India you're still living in India that the money goes even farther.
Swapneel:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
How long until you bought your parents a house?
Swapneel:
So I bought the like. You know, as soon as my business started picking up in doing COVID, my family was already super excited. So they already finalized, you know, like don't worry about being a lawyer anymore.
Bradley Sutton:
No, forget that you know like, hey, this Amazon is good, huh, okay.
Swapneel:
Yeah, but that you know definitely I was in a bit of stress situation. It's a really big thing, you know so, but that stress really motivated me to push myself further and focusing every small details of my finance, my product. So, yeah, I was a stress, but at the same time I was able to, you know, do better in those situations.
Bradley Sutton:
So 2021 hit that $1 million mark. How much did you sell last year in 2022?
Swapneel:
I did $5.4 million.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean, getting to $1 million is impressive enough. How did you go from $1 million to $5 million just in one year? We're just launching tons of products, or you had some products go viral Were you launching to other marketplaces. How did you increase so fast?
Swapneel:
So, like I was doing some international markets before in and out, like you know, kind of drop shipping back in 2018 in UK and some EU market also in USA but it was not, like you know, full time or doing throughout the year. Sometimes my accounts were also suspended because of drop shipping. But back in 2021, I started again focusing on the international markets, but still was not doing like a full-fledged business. And back in like 2022, I expanded my business in a very serious manner, like in whole of EU UK, Canada, USA. I know everything how to do an average because I had a lot of experience. And also in 2020, I did my business in Austria as well. So that has really helped me a lot. You know, like provided me enough money to expand in those other markets. Yeah, so that was one of the things like really helped me. And like I was just using my suppliers, which I'm already using in India, and I know that, whatever I would be selling the same product in USA, I would be doing 10X more at least. So that has changed a lot. And also my negotiation skills really helped me because a lot of my suppliers started giving me credit and I utilized those that credit in a very efficient manner like, yeah, you get loan and if you just spend on yourself, then it's not a good idea, but if you utilize pretty well in the business, then definitely it helps. So that's what helped me in 2022. Okay, All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Now it's coming up. We're now here in Q4 in 2023. Are you going to do better than last year? Same Worse. What do you think you're going to end up with this year?
Swapneel:
So this year it would be exactly the same what I did last year, because the situation has changed a lot this year. Firstly, I'm traveling whole of this year and it's just maybe like 40-50 days. That was in India. Other than that, I was traveling full time. I was just came, like three, four days ago, from like a four month of trip. I was in North and South America. So this year I was like pretty relaxed and also a lot of things happened at Amazon as well. So Amazon is, I think, are really not smooth at Amazon, so trying to fix those things as well, all right, so now you've got this five months, you've got this five, six million dollar business.
Bradley Sutton:
You're traveling, enjoying yourself, not working like 100 hours a week, so you must have 20 employees supporting you, huh.
Swapneel:
Oh, not at all.
Bradley Sutton:
How many total employees have you had the last few years?
Swapneel:
So in India I just had one accountant and one person who manages, and then there is one guy from at Veros. That's it in India. But I never had any employee anywhere else, even though my Indian business is not even like 7%. If I compare to my last year's sales revenue, my Indian business was just 7%, but for the rest 93% revenue, I never had any employee. So for your Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
USA business and in Europe you have zero employees, just you.
Swapneel:
Yes, yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Well. So I mean, people listening to this might ask a question well, like, maybe that makes sense. You know, like if you're working like 90 hours a week and have no life and just stay in your basement and work all day, but how in the world do you scale a business so much? And you're the one who has to answer the customer service, you're the one who has to find a line of their products, you're the one who has to do the keyword research, you're the one who has to make the listing, you're the one who has to fight with Amazon if customer support, if something happens, how in the world can you run a five, six million dollar business just by yourself and not even working really full time?
Swapneel:
So the one of the best thing with Amazon is their FPModels. So a lot of customers, don't you know, reach out to you if they have any issues with the delivery and all the stuff, and that is one of the reasons why customers, you know, contact to the seller at first place, other than the warranty and all the stuff. And also I was doing a lot of reselling as well in US market, so the brand has to take care of those stuff. So a lot of time was saved for sure, yeah, so, and I had really good partners, for example, with the Logistic thing. I have a really nice shipping agent and that really, like you know, eases my work a lot, just sending the details of the labels and everything and just telling you where to ship which market. They take care of everything. So for me, the main goal was just to, like you know what I can do to improve my revenue, and also sometimes I used to use some freelancers if I was not really good with something. So, yeah, that's it.
Bradley Sutton:
So how many marketplaces now are you in? So right now I'm in USA, Canada, UK, whole of the EU, UAE, Japan, Australia, India, but more than 10 marketplaces, probably, and are you selling the same products across the board, or, like, some products are only sold in EU, or some products only in USA?
Swapneel:
Each market is different. For example, in India I can sell mostly a lot of products, but not very high end products and which are technical. Each country the situation is really different. Sometimes there is a really low like maybe a local company who is doing really good and have a lot of reviews, and maybe you don't have any kind of competitive advantage, even though I will try or push, try to push. So for me it's more like market specific strategies, because not all markets are same and every market is completely different.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now what's your, what's your process? Like, how many products are you launching or actually until now active? Approximately how many skews, different skews, you know, like if you're selling the same one product in USA and Canada and Europe, just count that as one. But just roughly, like you know, 20 skews in all marketplaces, 100, 300, like roughly. What do you think?
Swapneel:
So, like beginning of this year, I was also doing a lot of reselling, but now I'm not doing business with one of the company I used to do and that has definitely contributed a lot to my last year's venue. But things have changed.
Bradley Sutton:
So private label. Then how, yeah, how many skews are you doing?
Swapneel:
So currently I'm launching like every month at least one new product in private label and so and some I also take off the old you know, which are not really performing really nice and not what my efforts or the you know margin is shrinking a lot, so I just cut off, you know, those products. So right now maybe like 60, 70 products 60 or 70 products.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, walk me through. Have in mind your last product you launched. Like, when was the last product you launched this month? Last month? So have one product in mind. You have it in mind? Mm? Hmm, you got it in mind. Ready, yeah, yeah.
Swapneel:
Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, Now was it July that you launched it.
Swapneel:
Yeah, oh.
Bradley Sutton:
I guess that one product you have in mind. What month did you discover it, or what month are you like? All right, this is what I'm going to plan to launch. You know we talking January last year. You know what was it? Spring when was it?
Swapneel:
So in April and May I was in China and I was looking around some products and then I found some product which is doing good in the US market and I contacted some suppliers. When I was in China I visited the factory. So it was in May, in the month of May.
Bradley Sutton:
But which came first. You found the product, or, like you found the idea in China, or you had done some research when you were still in the USA and then went to China. Which one was first?
Swapneel:
Sometimes, you know, because of some advertisement or anything if I find I just keep on. Like you know, at least every day when I'm doing product research I spend at least one hour on Amazon just browsing and doing really nothing, checking what's going on and if I can add something value on that product. So then I just found one product and I was doing more and more research and then seeing like I do check, like you know, if any product is launched recently and the rank is going crazy, it means this product could be a potential. So this is one of the reasons. And then to validate, I check the data how much volume it says in a month and other than that.
Bradley Sutton:
What are you looking for? Like are you checking how many do you have, like a limit? Like oh no, there's already 30 people selling this, so it's too late. Or like what's your what are some criteria? Is that you're looking for when you're doing your validation?
Swapneel:
So I check if this product is a really advanced, then how the product you know like before generation did, for example, like which was not that innovative enough. It was a basic product, but how much that product was doing, how much is the reviews for that product. Is a really really established and do I have chances of getting success or not? So I do check all these things and I also do the search result how much is a search volume for this particular product? And to check whether this product is seasonal or not.
Bradley Sutton:
So okay, so, so then you did all that with this product, and then your next step was you actually went to China to like check some suppliers for it, or what was the next step after you're like you know what, this looks really good, it passes my test. What was the next step for you?
Swapneel:
So I was already in China during those time in April and May and I felt like visiting the factories and you know it's a really good idea rather than just chatting them. I visited factory and I did all the customization with them and, yeah, so ordered like I can also negotiate better. For example, they gave me a price for 10,000 units but I said, hey, it's a new launch and you know, then I try to get the same price for like maybe four, five thousand units and at the same time I make sure that if this product is not really doing good or it's very new in already UK or the U market, then I make sure that I launch the same product in all across the market places all at once.
Bradley Sutton:
So this one product that you launched in July, the one that you have in mind was that only for USA, or was that one that you had launched in other places?
Swapneel:
Yeah, at the same time I was launching UK and U for that product it was Enslafrom.
Bradley Sutton:
On the subject of suppliers, have you ever had issue with your suppliers where they sell your product to other people?
Swapneel:
Oh, A lot of suppliers do that a lot of if not that, then how do you handle that?
That is one of the reason, like why a lot of my products don't have a long life long life in case. Like you know, like people do a lot of drop shipping like tick tock products and Instagram, really, you may see so most of my products are also related to that as well. Not all, but at least 30% of the product. So I sell it. The trend is going on and, yes, then eventually the trend dies, or so it's not like I can sell the same product for another 10 years as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Yeah, so you. So you don't get really emotionally attached to the product because you know that. You know, like now are all these products you're launching similar brands, or or you always starting just different, random brands.
Swapneel:
So I have some products, specific brands, and some brands are just used for any miscellaneous products.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. So then, this product. You were there in April and May. You happen to be in China. You were browsing Amazon. You found it. You found a new supplier for it, got it ready, 4,000, 5,000 units, shipped to Europe and to US. What's your, what's your launch strategy? Like, like, like, how do you, how do you what some techniques use? Like, how are you getting to page one? Are you just using, you know, ppc? You have any special techniques that you can share? I?
Swapneel:
Use very basic first of all. Obviously, your product should have really nice photos, should classify why your product is better than any other product in the market.
Bradley Sutton:
How do you get nice photos? Do you have like a studio?
Swapneel:
You do business with or what. So I first will try to work directly with the supplier so that I don't have to spend a lot of money upfront For these photos, even because I'm not sure whether how the product will gonna do. And then, if I cannot get anything, then I try to look at fiber to find some people who can do for me, and Then also do the nice a plus content, make sure the bullet points are really good, everything this is a really basic thing to start with, and then, since I launch a lot of products and a lot of market, I Utilize one of the best tool of Amazon, that is, amazon wine, because that really help you. And If you will launch a product in a lot of market, then you get a lot of reviews as well, for example, in the US.
Bradley Sutton:
My view just oh and all the reviews are stacked together, then you be Like you get 20 vine reviews in USA, 20 vine reviews in UK in the same ascent. Now you've got 40 reviews instead of I mean, I'm sure many people do that, but you know, it's just kind of just dawned on me like that's a good, that's a good strategy to have and another reason why you should launch on the the same ascent, okay. And then you find the keywords from helium 10, like you use Cerebro or what tool are using.
Swapneel:
So for me, because some of the products are really new in the market, there are no competitors as well, so it's really difficult to focus. You know which would be the keyword. So I just use Amazon automatic ads to check all the keywords which are performing and by or but. Maybe every week I try to optimize and seeing if some of the keywords are element, trying to put in the negative list, so, and trying to make sure that those keywords are on the product title bullet points. Yeah, yeah, to improve, to improve, so like just very basic, to like no things I use. And Once, like initially, you always get very good reviews because of the wine, because normally people don't put a lot of negative reviews, they leave mostly positive reviews. So you already got initial pull, you know, for your product. Yeah and Then it is totally depends upon the actual customers reviews. If the actual customers are Giving me good reviews, then I can be sure that this product is really doing good and Then I can have that as a long-term product as long as there is a sale for this product. And then I started improving more of my ASIN by putting videos, doing, you know, whatever things I can improve for this product, then putting some Warranty-related things, making sure the customer is always happy. Yeah, I feel like if you sit on Amazon, you should always align your values with what the values of Amazon are. Yeah, so I just make sure that and I take every detail of the customer to further improve the product as well, like checking voice, you know, a voice of customers.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, so now you know, thinking back then, from April, your product research phase to Negotiating, negotiating with suppliers, you know, getting samples and doing your customization, like you said, sending it to the marketplaces, creating the listing in the different marketplaces, managing those PPC campaigns in the first few weeks to launch that product that you launch in July, up until, let's just say, august. You know, so one month into the launch Approximately, how many hours do you think that you spent doing all those things?
Swapneel:
Oh, one of the so one of the most interesting time for me when I launch the product is the first sale. I look at the velocity of then another cell, how fast I can. I'm getting another cell. Then you know, checking the performance each day and whether it's improving or not. And, yeah, I closely check every detail during those time and for me, whenever it's my first launch, my goal is not to make profit at all and I will focus on that. Yeah, for me, the main focus is just to see how good is the product and how is the demand actually, because if your product reviews are good and you are early, more Than you can make money for years for sure for this just one product.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay so, but then how? Same question like the how long do you think you spent up until you know, after those first few weeks of spending a lot of time checking the sales? You know like, do you think it took you 50 hours from April to July or to August for that product? Was it 10 only, or or approximately? How long did, uh, did you actually put actual work into that product? I must say like maybe, yeah, for 30 hours at least okay, so about 30 hours of work for the one product, and then now, like, let's say, a product gets mature. You know, now you are making profit. Now it's kind of taking care of itself. Like how much time in a month do you spend on that product, would you say you know because I'm you know, you're probably having to do your ppc and, and you know, check reviews, customer service. Is it like one hour a month because you almost have nothing to do? Is it five hours a month for that one product? What would you say?
Swapneel:
so if the product is really doing good, then the first important thing is to make sure that I have stock for this product, sure? So I negotiate with the supplier and, you know, try to to make sure that I have stock, and then I'll look at the competitors if there is something innovating they are trying to do and if I can implement the same as well, you know, as soon as possible, maybe one of my suppliers putting some new product as a free or, you know, trying to value add, then I also make sure that I do some value addition as well, because, just because of this stuff, I don't want my product rank to go down yeah, so how long does it take?
Bradley Sutton:
you know, like, what is your maintenance phase for a product? For that, for that? We're talking about that same product, you know. Now you know it's October, that product you launch in July. Thank you, how much time are you spending on that product?
Swapneel:
so right now I felt that this product reviews are not really doing great and I'm not motivated enough right now to do further, even though even without advertisement right now I'm getting sales for those products. But if I'm trying, this is a low value product. So if I'm trying to invest a lot in the advertisement it's not really giving me a lot of fruitful results. So right now I'm like, okay, once this product is sold I will not start again, but then, but, but still.
Bradley Sutton:
How much time is it are you spending on so?
Swapneel:
every day. I always wait for the helium, then emailed about my performance, and it gives me all the units I sold in each of the market and that really give me a lot of idea. If something is going interesting, then I try to figure out why it's going like that. And, for example, yesterday I definitely checked on that product and I was saying like, okay, I'm getting sales, not doing anything. And then I checked the reviews are there any improvement in the reviews or is there a possibility of me I take that as a possibility if I can, you know, sell this product for a long time. But yeah, I see that I still have some stock left and the other variation is that really go good, I didn't have that, but I'm still wait and watch. Right now I'm not trying to buy something. You know more from us at first yeah, let's see.
Bradley Sutton:
So you think maybe less than one hour a month you spend on it now yeah, maybe two hours yeah, so so now we can, we're getting a little bit clearer picture of how you, you know scaled up and still can be by yourself. Is, you know, like, hey, maybe to find and and vet the product and and all the work to launch it only took you 30 or 40 hours, and now that it's in maintenance mode maybe you're only spending one or two hours, you know, per per product a month but, I remember you telling me you know that you're leaving money on the table, probably because you're not using, like, all of the tools, or you're not doing all of that, the analytics, since you're by yourself. But still, even with not doing everything that you could be doing, you're, you're, you're doing millions of dollars. And then what? What is your like profit margin, would you say, after your expenses for for your business? At least 15, 15, 20 percent so always want to make 15, 20 percent. If it dips lower then then you go ahead and cancel that product.
Swapneel:
If it goes less than 8%, then definitely not worth it at all.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. So what's the future hold for you? Are you just going to keep doing what you're doing, like this, and just do stuff by yourself, launch a product once a month and things like that and then put on maintenance mode, or are you going to like you know what? It's time that I need to start delegating some of my tasks and maybe take some employees on? What are you going to do next year, in 2024?
Swapneel:
So ever since I was at our BDSS event, that has completely transformed how I see things and how better I can do, and from that time on was obviously I was struggling, so not focusing a lot during all those months, but right now I'm just thinking like every day. Once in a while I have thought about the delegation and what all things I expect from someone, and I'm right now in phase of hiring people, because I know one thing that I can do a lot better what I'm doing right now If I have people. For example, I have a lot of products in Australia. They do really good for me, but I feel I'm so stupid that I'm not sending the inventory on time there. A lot of my products are mostly on outdoor stock and if some market is doing really good, then I don't focus a lot on the market which don't perform well. For example, my USA and UK and EU market do such so better especially Germany, UK and USA that I don't put a lot of efforts in Canada, Australia, Japan, India and also I feel it's really bad because I have all the resources, all the infrastructure. All I need to make sure is ordering the right quantity and making sure that I have stock for those products. That's it. Yeah, so I'm losing just that.
Bradley Sutton:
That's the first thing that you're probably going to want to hire for is like, hey, I need somebody just 100% managing my supply chain, making sure that I'm not running out of stock anywhere. Okay, All right. So what would you say is your I mean, I'm assuming USA is your number one marketplace what would you say is your number two, three and four marketplaces out of all those that are going on UK?
Swapneel:
UK, I feel, can do a lot better as well. I really I'm very happy with UK market, a lot better than US market, because I feel the competition is less, the margin is a lot better than US, but overall sales it's number two.
Bradley Sutton:
You're saying next to USA.
Swapneel:
Yeah, yeah, right, okay, so far. Yes, so UK would do better than US maybe for me.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh really, wow, that's pretty impressive. Okay, interesting, all right. So, yeah, you got inspired by going to Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You can see all the strategies that people are using, and these are strategies probably your competitors are using and you're not you know. So, yeah, it's like when you go to events like this, it can open your mind as far as as you know, seeing what, what is possible out there. Okay, so, other than hiring, finally, some help. What are some other goals for you for next year?
Swapneel:
Focusing on external traffic, because this is a huge thing, really really huge thing, because I see a lot of products on Amazon having 30, 40 reviews and then there's a competitor having 20,000 reviews and they are on the top five products. Why? Because they're getting external traffic. So external traffic is a really huge thing and I think I should have some strategies to work on that thing. Maybe TikTok release, Instagram release, and I'm really like focusing a lot to get some people on board related to marketing, because that's where I feel I'm really not good at all. So, trying to work on that and, yeah, I think that can be really big thing for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. Well, I wish you all the best of success. You know I've seen you already at a couple events this past year and hope to see you again at some other local events. And yes, please definitely start hiring people and get some help that you need, and then you'll be able to travel even more, you'll have some more time on your hand and you can enjoy what's your favorite place that you or craziest thing that you have done living as a digital nomad the last couple of years.
Swapneel:
So I'm kind of and really in juggy right now. So I do skydiving, mostly a lot of sports, mostly a lot of sports related to air, you know. So when I was in like just a few weeks ago, I was in north of Washington and I did some being walking on a plane, like almost eight years old plane. I was walking on that plane and that was one of the craziest thing.
Bradley Sutton:
Like on the wings and stuff.
Swapneel:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was really a show.
Bradley Sutton:
No, thank you, thank you.
Swapneel:
For me, like selling on Amazon is just giving me freedom to do what I love the most. I just need financial freedom. That's it, Because that's it Like it. And such a beautiful thing like selling on Amazon you can work and travel at the same time.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah
Swapneel:
Whenever I'm traveling still not many people very rarely meet someone who is selling on Amazon, to be honest, especially of my age group and they're traveling because either they quit the job or they just got two weeks off from office.
Bradley Sutton:
That's yeah, yeah. And they have to go back to work but not you yeah.
Swapneel:
So, yeah, this is a really like, really nice life, you know as a digital moment. But only bad thing is that when I'm traveling, I cannot focus a lot on my work. So I feel like, from going forward, maybe next few months or years, I would like to live at one place a lot more so that my work doesn't hinder. And obviously, if you will, if I want to approach eight or nine figure in coming years, then I cannot do by just one or two hours a day. I need to put more efforts and really need to be very cease at work, because big money comes with big responsibilities as well, I guess.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, all right. So why don't you leave us with a 30 second tip or 60 second tip? It could be either like an Amazon strategy, or maybe it's a strategy for traveling, for how to live as a digital nomad, a strategy for Amazon India. It could be about anything, so go ahead and give us your strategy.
Swapneel:
So I feel like there would be always a stress when you are selling on Amazon and you always need to have a patience, because Amazon will not fix your stuff in five minutes, even if your listing is gone, your account is gone or whatever. So the most important thing you can focus is on your mental health and you should prioritize that thing, because in life you may make a lot of money you can on the other day, if your account is suspended, you are bringing your nothing. So, but one thing can always help you is your mental health, and I think exercising is one of the best things, because that has changed completely me. I still remember how I was doing the first lockdown and how the journey from last three was not at all smooth at all, but not at all, like you know, not very smooth at all, but going workout and not stressing that helped me to not to stress. So I think, yeah, everyone should do this if you are especially selling on Amazon, because you don't have a lot of social life as well when you're selling on Amazon, except traveling, Okay, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, that's good for everybody to follow. I wouldn't follow the having zero employees for $6 million business, but everything else is kind of you know, something that I think a lot of people can do Well. Again, thank you so much for joining us and I hope to see you in person sometime next year.
Swapneel:
Absolutely Can't wait to see you again. Thank you so much, Bradley.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Sr. Brand Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week. Amazon announces the launch of Amazon.co.za in South Africa in 2024 https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-south-africa-store-launch Amazon makes it easier for brands to join Amazon Transparency through new interoperability features https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-makes-it-easier-for-brands-to-join-amazon-transparency-through-new-interoperability-features The internet is littered with fake reviews. Amazon, Glassdoor and others are trying to fight back https://apnews.com/article/fake-reviews-amazon-glassdoor-expedia-trustpilot-43a478ac0b27d6bb773a3bbdba1858b1 Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days Was the Company’s Largest Two-Day October Holiday Kick-off Event Ever https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/10/amazons-prime-big-deal-days-was-the-companys-largest-two-day-october-holiday-kick-off-event-ever We'll also introduce you to the game-changing tool, Market Tracker 360 - your trustworthy guide in navigating a rapidly changing market. Get a demo of the MT360 tool here. Lastly, maximize your holiday profits with Helium 10's Q4 Strategy Guide – a step-by-step roadmap to unlocking the full potential of Amazon’s peak sales season. h10.me/q4guide
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Carrie covers:
- 00:47 - New Amazon Marketplace
- 01:52 - Amazon Transparency Update
- 04:30 - Fake Reviews
- 06:26 - Prime Big Deal Days
- 07:39 - Walmart Listing Update
- 09:18- Return Policy Change
- 10:16 - ProTraining Tip: Market Tracker 360 Demo
- 16:30 - Download The Q4 Strategy Guide
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► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Carrie Miller:
Amazon is opening up a brand new marketplace. The Walmart marketplace has created a brand new program to help sellers save on their referral fees, and Amazon is making it easier for brands to join Amazon transparency this and so much more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Welcome back to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Keri Miller and I will be your host, and this is our weekly buzz episode, where we bring you the latest and greatest news related to Amazon, Walmart and the e-commerce space. We'll also give you a tip or strategy for serious sellers at any level. Let's go ahead and see what's buzzing. Okay, so let's start off with one of the most exciting stories of the day today, and that is that Amazon is opening up a brand new marketplace. This marketplace is going to be in South Africa. So if you are a seller in South Africa, this marketplace is going to be opening in 2024 and it's open to currently local South Africans. So they basically announced that you can start applying for this marketplace now at seller.amazon.com/southafrica and that's going to be where you're going to apply, and it's already set up and ready to go for you to do that. It's a very, very exciting opportunity for anyone who lives in South Africa, because a lot of sellers are in that area and you're selling in Europe and you're selling in the U? S and other parts of the world, but now you can sell locally to your neighbors, and so it's a very, very cool time to be able to bring your brand to Amazon with that fast shipping in South Africa. So let us know below if you're a South African seller and you are planning on applying and selling in this marketplace.
Carrie Miller:
All right, next up, we have another amazing announcement by Amazon, and that is that they are making Amazon transparency a lot easier for brands to join. Before, they had a basically a 2D data matrix barcode that they would put on products and you had to label your products physically with this with your packaging. So this meant that if you wanted to join the Amazon transparency, it would take quite a bit of time to get that all set up and going, because you have to wait till the next run of your packaging and get it on your packaging, or you would basically have to repackage all of your products if you wanted it on your current inventory, which would be very expensive. What's really exciting about this is that they are making it easier for brands through new interoperability features. So, again, you know they had it available to a lot of brands, but they had to do their packaging with that special barcode on it and as of 2020, I believe they said as of 2020, there were more than 10,000 brands that did Amazon transparency, and now 33,000 brands are actually enrolled. So I think that that number is going to jump up dramatically and this is really good for sellers and for consumers because of the fact that you know, when you have that assurance that you're not going to get counterfeit products, it makes the whole process better for sellers, for their account, health and for consumers. They're getting the product that they paid for.
Carrie Miller:
So you know, I can imagine that it's going to be very, very easy, and so what's going to, what's going to happen is you can take codes that are already on your packaging and they can use those codes to verify whether or not your product is not a counterfeit. So, if we take a look, there's an example down here and Logitech actually has done this. So Logitech started out with this kind of using their own codes and what they did is they used the serial numbers that were used for warranty purposes, so those were the codes that they were able to use for this transparency and able to validate these. And so what they do when they, when Amazon's shipping is out, they scan these codes before shipping it out to verify that this particular product is the original and not a counterfeit, and then they can send it out. If it's not, if it's not anywhere to scan, or they're you know something is wrong, then they'll put it to the site because it's counterfeit, and that saves you a lot of hassle. Now this is going to be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US, so that's pretty exciting that they're really trying to roll this out worldwide. I think it's going to be an amazing thing to be able to roll this out quickly. I know I'm very interested in getting this going on my, you know, on my brand as well, because I don't have to go back and repackage everything. Are you going to start enrolling in brand transparency and do you think this is a good thing, or do you think it's going to be a hassle? Let us know. Whatever it is that you think below. Okay, going into our next article.
Carrie Miller:
The next thing is about reviews. Now, this goes to you know kind of with the theme of counterfeit and whether or not they're real, and, as you can see here that you know, this article is saying that the internet is littered with fake reviews, and we do know that this is true on Amazon, on Glassdoor, on TripAdvisor. I know for myself, I went and looked at reviews for a restaurant that I just opened and it had so many great reviews and I was like, oh my gosh, this place is going to be so amazing. And I went there and it was absolutely terrible. And what I realized, it was a lot of friends and family that were making, you know, these reviews go, you know, to five stars and they were putting these glowing reviews for it. And it was literally not the customers, because later on the actual reviews started rolling in and I could see that it wasn't the truth. So there is a lot of that that's going on, and so I think that this could be potentially a really good thing.
Carrie Miller:
It says in this article that they are, these big companies are actually teaming up now. So we've got Glassdoor, trustpilot, expedia, bookingcom and TripAdvisor. They're saying they're all launching a coalition to protect, you know, the consumer reviews, and so what they're going to do is they said that they are going to be sharing methods on how to detect fake reviews. This, I think, is going to be great, you know, for all of us to make sure that you know, when we're buying something, that we're seeing the actual reviews of actual customers, and then also just for those brands, because it's going to help consumers to know exactly what they're getting. So I think this is going to be good on all friends, for everyone. They're probably going to come up with some really great technology to really, you know, detect those fake reviews. So those competitors that you have that you know that are putting up those fake reviews. We're going to hopefully stop that, and so we'll see what happens with that. And let us know if you've had any issues with reviews. I know I've had some issues with fake reviews from competitors on my own listing. I'm curious to know if you've had any issues with fake reviews, so let us know in the comments below.
Carrie Miller:
All right, this next article is actually something that I was a little bit surprised by, and the reason for that is it's talking about Amazon Prime Day, big deal days, and I you know the economy is kind of struggling right now and I didn't feel as much momentum going into this day as I think a lot of other people probably did. And so it shows, because Amazon's big Prime Day deal day was the company's largest two day October holiday kickoff event ever. So that definitely tells me that I was wrong in my thinking. I thought it was kind of, you know, not that much excitement going on, but there clearly was. They had a billion dollars across in savings across all the Prime members. They also had 25 million items that were delivered either same day or next day delivery, which is incredible. They were busy delivering packages. Let me tell you, one package was even delivered within 54 minutes. So really, really interesting that this is, you know, kicking off so strong, especially with the economy the way that is. I think that this is a really good indication that we're going to have a really big Q4. I'm very excited for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and just the whole holiday season. This is always my biggest time of year. So really, really great exciting news to see that it's still going strong in sales on Amazon.
Carrie Miller:
All right, the next piece of news is from Walmart. So if you're a Walmart seller, I wanna see if you are seeing the same thing that I see in my dashboard. So I basically kind of logged in today and saw this in my dashboard it's the pro listing savings. Now it looks like what happened. Is I qualified for a pro listing savings? I think you'll have to be a pro seller in order to be eligible for this, but what I'm gathering is they choose listings that are doing very, very well, selling quite a bit, and you actually get refunds on your referral fees. So I have, as of today, this just starting about $3.12 in savings. So that's pretty cool. I know it says over the last 90 days, but I know this just started, so it's definitely not over the last 90 days. I think this is gonna be bigger and bigger as time goes on, and it's very, very cool to see this kind of thing because Walmart's really incentivizing sellers to join the Walmart marketplace and I think this is another incentive. As fees go up on other marketplaces, Walmart’s giving discounts and you can see on the next screen here this is.
Carrie Miller:
I kind of looked more into it and it's based on competitive pricing and fast and free shipping. So I use WFS and I also have, you know, the same pricing that I do on Amazon. So I think that's what helps me with that, and so you get 10% commission savings. That's pretty amazing. So I'm curious to know if any of you have seen this in your dashboard. Let me know in the comments. Let me know if you have any other additional things to add about that. I think it's a very, very exciting thing for Walmart sellers to just save money. You can put that money either towards more ads or just it'll add up over time. So we'll see how long they keep this going for, and I wanna make sure I can get all of my products eligible for it.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, last piece of news, but not the least for sure, this is just an announcement about the return timeframe, and this happens every single year on Amazon.
This is really nothing new, and so they're basically extending the holiday returns policy for consumers that purchase items between November 1st and December 31st, so they're returnable all the way through January 31st of 2024, except for Apple branded products, which are returnable only through January 15th. Now this policy applies to seller fulfilled FBM, fba and Amazon retail orders, and basically this happens every year. So it's something that I know a lot of us are very used to, and it's just another kind of added benefit for people to buy products during the holiday season on Amazon, and I think it does help us all in the long run. So just so that you're aware that's what's going on with returns. If you get some returns from November all the way into January, you'll know exactly why. Okay, so up next we have an amazing demo by Shevali. She's gonna be talking about Market Tracker 360 and how it can benefit you. So take a look at this demo.
Shivali Patel:
The tool I'm about to share with you is a great way for you to gain insights into niches, regardless of if you are a scaling seller, large brand or business that has been in the industry for years. When it comes to dominating sales, monitoring, tracking and staying on top of any rapidly changing market is important, and so, yes, you could go into Amazon and try to keep up with all the new competitors flowing in and out of your market, but wouldn't it be easier if you just had a tool that allows you to market create, curate and understand dynamic markets in one place? Well, that, my friends, is exactly what I'm about to share with you. Let's jump into market tracker 360. So, with market tracker 360, we do have logic in place. If it's your first time inside of this tool, you will be taken directly to market creation. However, once you've created markets, you'll be funneled directly to market list, which is this page right here. But what exactly is market create? Well, let's talk about it. When you click create market in the top right hand corner, you have access to four choices. We'll talk about these three in this video. For the custom market that is based on products, the system will pull in products that are adjacent to the ASINs you select. You can add in products from your list that you build inside of helium 10, type or paste them in directly into the search field box. Or, if you are a token connected user and your account is connected to your seller central, just click select my products to add and checkmark any of the ones that you want before clicking add. The only thing to note for ASIN markets is there is no filtering step. Let's click back and going back. As you can see, you can also define your market based on up to 15 keywords, either from your curated keywords list inside of helium 10, just by typing them in, or using our integrated Cerebro and magnet tools for relevant keywords without having to leave the tool. So if I were to type in matcha kit, I could click this auto complete, which, by the way, is simply what people are typing in on Cerebro, magnet and black box inside of helium 10. Click analyze keywords to receive this output of additional keywords. Use the information given to figure out which keywords you want as part of your market. You can also use this option to create hybrid markets of keywords and ASINs, though you don't see any ASIN additions.
Shivali Patel:
On the second stage of this process. You will see it in the third where it says optional set custom rules. Let's go ahead and jump into the next example for a full walkthrough. Now, if you do have your token connected, we are also offering what we're calling the auto magic creation, which simply means we will create your market. For you to do this, you just need to select up to five of your product lists based on their category, and we will find associated keywords to base your market on, though you can still enhance the market with keywords of your own choosing after the fact. You'll notice in the first step of this particular choice, our product pool is already grouped based on the lowest shared subcategory node, so we want to create one based on, let's say, coffin shelves. I'm going to select these two product pools. Select next to receive a prompt that asks if we want to set any custom rules for our market or simply go ahead and review and create our market. I'm going to click yes. Take me to custom rules.
Shivali Patel:
The third step we're looking at is the filtering step I mentioned before. You'll see this step on three of the four choices of market creation, with the exception being ASIN only creations. Now, if you wish to have a very granular view of your product markets. Setting custom rules is a good idea, as it allows you to generate a default viewing criteria. This is a feature for every market creation option, except for product only or ASIN only markets, as I mentioned, and just think of it as a top level filter. So when we do automatic market updates, only the selections that apply to these filter sets will show. You will always have the capability to add individual ASINs to your market at this level. So if there are any specific ASINs you want in your market view, go ahead and add them here, be it from your list or from your own products, we'll click next. That brings us to review and create, which is the fourth step in this process. Give your market a name. I'm going to call this auto magic coffin shelf market. We can set a default date range. Perhaps I'm only interested in seeing the last 12 months. Give it a default currency. I'm going to select USD. Choose your method of market updates. If you want products to be directly injected into the market without needing any approval, then you could select automatic how we relay the keywords to the products after.
Shivali Patel:
Market creation is typically modeled based on a fusion of the best seller rank, sales volume and search volume Controlled is similar to our original market tracker. It will give you the opportunity to refine by showing you new products under the suggested products tab to add or remove from your market, and the disabled option is just a static market, which would direct all the products that we receive to the removed products and suggestions section within market settings. From here, you can then review all the information that we just discussed, be it adjusting your product list, fine tuning your category, subcategory information or your additional filters. I'm going to click create market. That's going to take us back into our market view. We'll see the new market reflected on our market list page in about 10 to 15 minutes. Hopefully now you know how to create markets inside of market tracker 360 using keywords, keywords and asins, asins only, or even auto creating that market, as long as you have that token connected. Of course, you can gain a lot of insights and analytics with market tracker 360, but it all starts with this first step, so make sure you go and do that first step.
Carrie Miller:
Thank you so much, Shivali. That was amazing. I know that this is such an incredible tool, especially for larger sellers, to really help view the market overall. So check it out. If you haven't already, we'll put a link below to where you can schedule a demo in the market tracker 360 arena so you can get more information about it if you're really interested in it. And the final thing I want to leave you with is we've actually made a queue for checklists for sellers to get ready and prepare their listings and their business for hopefully the biggest queue for ever.
Carrie Miller:
And I basically put this together along with a bunch of resources that we have and it's things that you can use. You know Helium 10 for, and then also just tools on Amazon that are going to help boost your business during the holidays. So it's, it's in a checklist. There are videos to go with a lot of these particular items to show you how to do them, and I think it's a very, very beneficial thing for you to. You know, implement a lot of these strategies. It's still not too late to implement them.
Carrie Miller:
So take a look at the checklist. You can download it, you can print it out, look at some of those videos and I promise you, if you implement some of those, you'll see some positive results from this checklist. I think it'll be a great, great resource for you that you can use this year and in the years to come. So we'll put the link below and so that you can check that out too. Thanks again for joining me this week on the weekly buzz. I think Bradley will be back again next week, but thank you for letting me kind of step in for him this week. I hope you all enjoyed the news articles that we have. I think we have some great exciting stuff going on in e-commerce, and so we'll see you again next week to see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.
Listen in as we tackle all your burning questions about selling on the Walmart marketplace, from gaining access to coupons and utilizing brand stores to handling comp errors and deactivations. Discover why it's critical to get your inventory to Walmart as soon as possible before the end of October and learn the ropes on what metrics you need to focus on when aiming for the Pro Seller badge. We also tackle your questions straight from our Winning with Walmart Facebook group, so tune in for those insights. Interested in the Walmart Influencer Program? We've got you covered! This episode also explores the ins and outs of the Walmart Influencer Program and provides key updates on when brand stores and video ads will be available to sellers. Listen in as we discuss the approval process for pesticide products on Walmart, the steps to register your trademarks on the platform to get the Walmart brand registry, and whether there is a request a review button in Walmart. Did you know that Helium 10 has tools for the Walmart marketplace? We explore the nitty-gritty of product listings, coupon availability, and how to compete against first-party brands on Walmart. Plus, how to join the Helium 10 Winning with Walmart Facebook Group. Don't miss out on this Serious Sellers Podcast episode to make the most out of your Walmart selling experience!
In episode 501 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie talks about:
- 02:13 - Access to Coupons for Walmart Sellers
- 06:24 - Walmart's Review Programs and Opportunities
- 09:48 - Prohibited Items Approval
- 12:58 - Walmart Image Guidelines and External Traffic
- 17:39 - Solving Comp Errors on Walmart.com
- 19:27 - Seller Badge and Rich Media Guide
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Transcript
Carrie Miller:
Today, we're going to be answering all of your burning Walmart questions. In this Ask Me Anything episode. We're going to be answering things such as when are coupons going to be available for everyone? When can I start utilizing brand stores, how can I deal with comp errors and deactivations? This and so much more.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure to join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook or you can actually go to h10.me forward slash Walmart group and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join. You can tag me and carry with questions and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of this Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Carrie Miller, and this is our Winning with Walmart Wednesday episode, where we answer all of your Walmart questions and we give you all of the latest and greatest information about selling on a Walmart. In this episode I'm going to answer quite a few questions that we've had in the Facebook groups. I asked quite a while ago if you had any burning Walmart questions, so I'm going to go over those questions for everyone today and give you some great answers. In addition to that, I wanted to remind everyone that we are in Q4 already, which is kind of crazy that we're already in the last quarter of the year. But start sending in your inventory now to Walmart, because WFS is already starting to take kind of a longer time to check in products and it's going to just get worse and worse as the holidays keep coming closer. So, just like Amazon, try to get your inventory in by the end of this October and just kind of do more than you're used to sending in. I know last year I actually ran out during the peak season of inventory to forever to get checked in and so I missed like three weeks of December, so it was kind of a bummer. So if you haven't done that, make sure to send in that inventory.
Carrie Miller:
I want to start answering some of these Walmart questions that everyone had and I think they're really good questions. I think they're going to be very helpful for just looking at these answers for all of you. So the first one is that I had on my list is that someone in the groups asked because they really wanted to know this from Walmart, and these are not official Walmart answers. By the way, this is just some research that I've done. It's no way connected to Walmart, but I did do the best that I could to find answers for all of you that had really important questions for Walmart. So the first question was Amazon allows access to all deals and coupons to every seller, regardless of their sales volume.
Carrie Miller:
When will Walmart give equal access to things like flash picks to Walmart sellers, equivalent to best deals seven days, and what they said is that deal parity right now does not exist on the Walmart marketplace. However, if you do have an account manager, then they actually can submit those coupons for you. So for those of you who are lucky enough to have an account manager and usually you have to have a certain number, a volume of sales per month in order to get one of these account managers. They actually can help you and they'll be able to submit based on the fact that if you have a you know good seller response rate, if you have good WFS metrics and you know a low number of refunds kind of use it basically in the pro seller range they'll be able to help you with coupons if you're not a one piece seller. So that is something to kind of keep a thought in the back of your mind If you, you know, do have an account manager, ask them about coupons, if you can get into those flash picks and they potentially could help you with that. So sorry, I don't have a better answer, unfortunately, but I think that is a good way, you know, at least for some of you, to get access to some of those coupons. All right, so I'll go to the next question.
Carrie Miller:
Let's see here when can you tell us more about the Walmart influencer program? So the Walmart influencer program is called the Walmart creator program and they are actually trying to do similar to what Amazon has done and they're recruiting a lot of influencers and I don't know if you've seen this, but I know I've seen this on Instagram because I follow a lot of the fashion deals pages, and they are promoting Walmart products in terms of clothing. Right now. There's a lot of cute stuff that you know Amazon sellers are now putting on Walmart, so these influencers are also promoting it on Walmart and they're getting commissions for it. They get a specific commission based on the category, just like Amazon, and so that is something that's really up and coming and something to keep an eye on. If you are in certain categories like home decor, fashion I think those are really good. You know areas to really utilize those influencers because they already have kind of the right audience for you, and so I would highly recommend kind of checking out. Go on to Instagram and search hashtag Walmart influencer or hashtag Walmart partner and you'll see a bunch of videos come up and you'll see you know whose accounts are really Walmart partners so that you can partner with them.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, so the next question is I saw that brand stores and video ads are in beta. When will these be available to sellers? Now? This is a question a while ago. Video ads are actually available now to brand registered sellers, which is really, really exciting. So if you have your brand registry all set up in the brand portal on Walmart, you have access, so you should be able to see on Walmart connect the video ads so you can do that. In terms of brand stores, they there isn't an ETA for brand stores, but I do know I've seen some sellers who are in the beta and they are testing it out. So I imagine it's the same as what happened with the videos. The videos were in beta not too long ago and they're going to start rolling out. You know the brand stores probably in a similar way. So that's pretty exciting and I hope it's soon.
Carrie Miller:
But they encouraged everyone in the meantime to take advantage of rich media. Rich media is like A plus content on Amazon and you can go on to the into the help section for rich media and you can actually get free hosting of videos and 360 images currently. So I would check that out. Otherwise, there are a bunch of agencies that do host rich media and you can get different modules that are really I think they're really great modules that you can utilize on Walmart. You just have to pay per skew, so it's a little expensive but worth it if you can see that conversion All right.
Carrie Miller:
The next question was Amazon has a request to review button that allows Amazon sellers to press a button on an order and Amazon sends a review request email to the to the customer on the seller's behalf. Will Walmart do something similar to help us get more reviews? So the answer of this is that there isn't something that's currently available but and there isn't a timeline for it to be able to get it to be available. However, Walmart actually does send a review request automatically after seven days to the customers on Walmart to request a review, so that's kind of an automatic thing that they already do. They wanted to also encourage all of the you know Walmart sellers to utilize the review accelerator program. So the review accelerator program if you have on your product five reviews or less, then you can pay $10 to ask your current customers for review. So it's actually, I think, different than Vine, because what it what it happens is that people are already buying your product and they'll send them an email and say, hey, we'll pay you $3 if you'll send in a review and then we pay. We pay Walmart $10 for this service, so it's actually really worth it. Up to five reviews, you can get verified reviews from your actual customers. So review accelerator it's in the growth opportunities tab, so check it out there If you have less than five reviews. There's also a review syndication where you can get your reviews copied and pasted, basically over from your website. So a lot of really cool opportunities for reviews, but they don't have any kind of timeframe for that request review button like Amazon has. However, I do think it's pretty encouraging that they're already sending those emails for us, so that's something that's that's great to see.
Carrie Miller:
So someone just asked how do you register a trademark on Walmart? So basically, you would take the same trademark that you have as an Amazon seller and you're going to go to the Walmart brand registry portal. It's a whole different website, so you can just Google Walmart brand registry portal and then you're going to apply there. It's very simple. You just put in your information there and you can. You can get accepted pretty quickly. So I would recommend go ahead and Google that and it should be pretty straightforward.
Carrie Miller:
What is the approval process for pesticide products on Walmart? We have 10 bestselling products on Amazon that we are simply not allowed to list on Walmart. The products have all the required government approvals with the EPA, et cetera. So the answer that I found on this is that there's an item report in Seller's Center and it's gonna have the reason code for why an item isn't published and so you can actually open up a partner support case, for all you know, for the web with whatever the reason code is. And then also, if the item status is on says item on hold, then the seller needs to either submit the required documents or provide the missing attributes to complete the submission. So it'll say what attributes are missing or what documents are missing, and you should be able to submit those. I will say I did kind of a case today you can find it on YouTube and we were uploading a hemp product onto Walmart and it has been quite a challenging process and you can actually see part of the process on YouTube. But I'm gonna give an update soon. But the update really is that they really don't want hemp products in WFS right now and I was able to get it approved to sell on Walmart. But it's been quite a challenging process so I'll go more into details about it. But the good news is we can sell seller fulfilled, just not WFS. So there is hope for any of you who are having an issue to get around that and do seller fulfilled if possible.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, so the next question is some of my products are not approved to sell via Walmart WFS but they are approved for seller fulfilled. So this is kind of similar to what I was just talking about in regards to the hemp. Is there any special program that I can apply for to get these hazmat products approved for WFS? And it says Amazon has something similar and we are part of the Amazon hazmat program. So the answer was that internally, wfs has recently actually launched an updated prohibited items handling solution across their fulfillment network, which this is actually very new. So, depending on the category, prohibited items are handled in three different teams under the specialty compliance organization hazmat, food safety and non-chemical hazmat. So this is going to hopefully help reduce the time where these products are actually just stuck and unable to be fulfilled with WFS. So definitely inquire about those if you're writing a ticket to kind of be directed to those teams and hopefully we can get some progress on some of those Cause. I know I've seen quite a few questions about this, so I would definitely want to continue to try to get you all more answers about this. So that's the amount of information I have right now. So keep messaging me on Facebook or sending those questions in on the Facebook group winning with Walmart, so that we can help you get those questions answered.
Carrie Miller:
The next one is my account was denied. What can I do to get approved after I was initially denied? So sometimes well, actually most of the time they don't provide a reason, but there's soft denials and then you can do an appeals process and then there's like termination, which is much harder. So you'll have to kind of usually I think sellcord.co. They are an agency. They have helped a lot of people who have been kind of denied. You can reach out to them. That's kind of the best answer I have. Or you can kind of reach out yourself, but I would kind of suggest contacting somebody who's really good at this, and I do believe SellCord does do a good job of helping people get their accounts. You know out of that status. So if you have had that issue, I would say contact sellcord.co. And that also includes you know if your account is suspended or termination is very hard. So you will definitely need you know, inside access. So I would definitely recommend contacting SellCord for that as well.
Carrie Miller:
What is Walmart doing to attract more customers to their online marketplace? And so this is a great question and I can definitely answer that they are doing quite a bit. So they have Walmart Plus, which is kind of like Prime, and if you go into the stores they have it advertised everywhere. They're giving discounts on gas, they're giving discounts on just all a bunch of different things within the Walmart programs, like just in store discounts and also delivery and groceries. You get those for free. So they're really pushing for, you know, just getting more customers into Walmart Plus. Now I also saw when I was looking at applying for an American Express Platinum card, that they have a free opportunity for free Walmart Plus If you have that card. So if any of you have that American Express Platinum card, you get free Walmart Plus. So something else to it's basically like a free Prime membership. So I definitely recommend taking advantage of it. But they're doing things like that to really increase the customer reach. Also, if you notice and I've talked about this in other presentations I've done they are doing a lot of external traffic through Google Shopping and they're also doing Bing Shopping. So you'll see your Walmart products show up in Google Shopping and Bing Shopping without even doing any ads. So they are really doing a lot of work to try to drive traffic that way. So hopefully that answers that question. So this might be college.
Carrie Miller:
This is another question from somebody. This might be common knowledge. But what are the best performing aspect ratios for images on Walmart? Should mean image and secondary images be the same aspect ratios? Is the answer category dependent, and there is definitely some. There are some differences on the different categories. So I would recommend that you go into the Walmart guides and you can look for image guidelines and you're going to be able to find exactly what the image guidelines are for your category. So go ahead and check those out.
Carrie Miller:
The next question I would like to know why the payment schedule for reporting is every two weeks and then why it sometimes I have to wait a third or fourth week. Now I've seen this question quite a bit in the groups and I don't know exactly what's happening, but it's just a common thread, like I've seen it quite a bit. So if you, if you've had this, you can put it in the in the chat or the comments, because I'd love to know. But basically, the payment should be every two weeks, but something if you're not getting it every two weeks, it should. It's probably an error and I think you should open up a support ticket to see what's going on with that, because that shouldn't be happening. So make sure you kind of figure out what the problem is so that it doesn't continue on. So that's what I would recommend. I don't think that that's part of the process. So it is supposed to be every two weeks. I have confirmed that. So take a look at that. And, yeah, just go into the support and ask what's going on with your particular account. And personally, I did see this actually happen, so it did get fixed. Additionally, when see when removing, when doing removal orders, when it shows on the payment summary, can we get a detail of what the removal order consisted of? So if you want to understand what the removal order maybe consisted of, you can go to the WFS dashboard and that will give you a breakdown and it's going to highlight what was in the removal order.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, so next one is it possible to allow for multiple SKUs to the same UPC code? Amazon allows this, albeit in one UPC code to one ASIN. So no, this is definitely no. Walmart uses UPCs as their unique identifiers for products. So you cannot have multiple SKUs associated with the same UPC, otherwise you're going to get a lot of errors. So this is really important to make sure you have you own your UPCs and then also that you have an individual UPC for each product. I know back in the day in Amazon you were buying second. You know basically barcodes from other you know third parties because they were more expensive but you can buy individual barcodes from GS1. And I highly recommend doing that to show that you own the UPC codes. Because if you do have somebody hijacking your listing or taking over the content, you can prove with owning UPC code as well as your trademark, that you own that product and the listing so you can get it back. I had a problem with this because one of our products for our Project X did not have a UPC code that was GS1 registered. It was kind of a bot as a third party thing a long time ago and I was unable to get that content back. So it was really kind of frustrating. So I know this from firsthand experience my own business.
Carrie Miller:
I've always had UPCs for each product because you want to kind of think when you're starting out with these products with the end in mind and growing your brand and business. Each product should have a UPC. We've always been wanting to know if Walmart has a honeymoon period similar to Amazon. Now I haven't had an answer to this. I do not think that it's as intense as it is on Amazon. So what I would recommend is to do your best to optimize start ads. Do whatever you do for Amazon on Walmart and I think that you will be successful.
Carrie Miller:
The thing about all of this is I noticed people. What they do is they'll open up and start a listing on Walmart and literally just copy and paste what they have on Amazon and they're not doing Walmart PPC or anything like that to help promote their product and they're like why am I not making any sales? Well, you would never launch on Amazon without doing PPC or optimizing for Amazon. Walmart has different guidelines to optimize their listings. So you know, make sure to follow those guidelines and I think that you'll be pleasantly surprised. The next one is what advice do you have to third party sellers to help them compete against first party brands on Walmart? So the answer to this is Walmart really isn't viewing the two as competitive against each other, but they recommend that you find kind of holes where first party sellers are not really, you know, filling in the gap and finding opportunities on Walmart where you can provide products that are not available via 1P.
Carrie Miller:
When I've gotten a comp error, it feels impossible to get help for this. What is the best way to solve issues dealing with comp errors and how can we find out what the error is so that we can fix it? So then the comp errors are very difficult, I will say, and sometimes what they're saying is that you can actually go into the item report and check the columns. When you upload via flat file or anything like that, you can check the columns, the life cycle status, and then it's going to say published, unpublished or system error, and then on the adjacent column for the, it's going to have an error code and it's going to say things like enhanced vetting, IP infringement, shipping or etc. And you can open up a ticket to get help with this. But in my experience I've noticed that it's usually a pesticide word like antibacterial, antimicrobial. So if you make sure that you don't use any of those illegal words that are, you know, banned on Amazon, then you should be fine, and usually if you kind of delete your listing and rewrite it again. Without those words it'll come up within 15 minutes. So that's been my experience with that.
Carrie Miller:
So another question here is when some someone first starts selling on Walmart, what can they do to get their products ranked? Is it all based on clicks and sales or is there a lot more weight given to the listing quality score? So they did. You know Walmart doesn't really give me a lot of information about ranking, but I do know, for example, if you get a high listing quality score, that does help with your ranking. So make sure you fill in all those attributes in the back end. You know you enroll in WFS, you have reviews to start out with, get your listing quality score 90% or above, and I think that that will definitely help you. You also want to start running pay-per-click advertising to get some sales and I think you'll start to see yourself ranking as that goes. But in terms of like you know state, you know something that they actually say. It's really quite challenging to really say.
Carrie Miller:
And then the pro seller was another question. How can a seller become a pro seller and get the pro seller tag on their listing? So you want to make sure that your products are delivered on time. So I recommend using WFS because it takes care of most of the categories that are required for a pro seller. The thing about pro seller badges is you can actually filter on Walmart for pro seller so customers can say I want to only buy from a pro seller. And I noticed when I got the pro seller badge that I was starting to get more and more sales.
Carrie Miller:
So I will say it isn't an important thing. So you've got. You know, at least you've got an on time delivery rate of 95% or above in the last 90 days. You have less than 1.5% cancellation in the last 90 days. You have a really good seller response rate, higher than 95% in the last 30 days. And then basically it's, you know, fast delivery. And you also have to have over 250 orders in the last 90 days and you have to have at least been active for 90 days. So when you launch your products, you know, do your best to get those 250 orders and get those fast delivery times in and you can get the pro seller badge within 90 days. I think it's really, you know, worth it.
Carrie Miller:
So I would say WFS is probably the most important thing to make sure that you get that and yeah, so, and then the next thing is what? Will rich media eventually be free to Walmart sellers, like it is on Amazon? So there are some modules that are free, and that is the video and also the 360 image views. You can go into the help center and click on rich media. You can find it there. So otherwise, if you wanted to pay for some in the meantime, you can contact an agency and they can help you with that.
Carrie Miller:
So let's see if I have any questions. All right, Nelson, hello. Nelson says I'm a new to Walmart, in the process of onboarding and we already established our stores at Amazon. Is the procedures from Amazon to Walmart going to be similar when it comes to brand name products? If we are able to get wholesalers offline in our city to sell as branded products so we can sell online, are we still allowed to sell them? Yes, you are allowed to sell wholesale products on Walmart and I actually met at the Walmart conference quite a few sellers who have done very well selling wholesale products on Walmart. I think it's a lot less competitive right now in Walmart. So I highly recommend you get in there and start going for those, those products and, you know, make sure that you get in the game now? Great question. All right, let's see.
Carrie Miller:
It looks like I think someone was asking about tools for Walmart. Helium 10 has some incredible tools and I would recommend that you check those out. We have cerebral, which is our keyword research tool for Walmart. Another tool for Walmart called magnet it's another keyword research tool. We have x ray, which shows you sales volumes for Walmart it's our Chrome extension. We also have profits for one, one to help you, Walmart, to help you manage your profits. And we have our ranked tracker. And for pay per click advertising, we have add atomic for Walmart to help you manage your pay per click advertising. So we have all those great tools to help you and support you on your way to selling on Walmart.
Carrie Miller:
Also, if you're a helium 10 member, we have freedom to get Walmart where we should. We walk you through a to z on how to sell on Walmart, so that's available to you free if you are a helium 10 member. So check it out. If you haven't yet checked it out, alright, so it looks like I don't have any more questions, so hopefully, if that was very helpful, thank you to everyone who submitted their questions.
Carrie Miller:
For me to answer it was really, you know took a little while to get the answers to some of those questions and maybe some of them. I still need to do a little more research and hopefully maybe digging to get some more details on some of those answers, but hopefully that helps you in the meantime, and if you have any questions, join our group. Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. All you have to really do is search in the Facebook groups Helium 10 Winning with Walmart and you can join our Facebook group and ask questions there. You can tag me, you have questions, or other sellers are in there answering questions as well, so love to see you there and we will see you then. Have a great rest of the day.
Ever wondered how to make the most of the 'Honeymoon' period when you first start selling on Amazon? Or how to get people to organically search, find, and buy a product without breaking Amazon's terms of service? Tune in to the latest episode of Serious Sellers Podcast, as our host, Bradley Sutton, unveils the intricacies and updates to the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy, along with his prelaunch plan, the Bali Blast Strategy.
He shares effective ways to use PPC to catapult your product to the top of the search, and how to utilize Helium 10’s Keyword Tracker tool and boost to gauge your bid's success. We'll discuss strategies for attracting customers to a product with no reviews, and you'll discover how to use tools like Helium 10 Audience and the CPR number to monitor and increase your orders.
The episode also sheds light on SEO and its relationship with Amazon listings. You'll find out why a simple listing score formula isn't sufficient to rank on Amazon, and why optimizing your listing for Amazon customers, as well as its algorithm, is pivotal. Let’s dive into the evolution of Amazon's algorithm over the years, and why sprinkling specific keywords a certain number of times isn't as effective as it once was. To top it all off, we'll explore how developing a tool with a potent listing score creator, like a “Surfer SEO for Amazon listings” can guide you in optimizing your listing and the importance of testing your strategies. Buckle up for an episode packed with valuable insights!
In episode 500 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:
- 00:00 - Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy and Results
- 03:35 - The Maldives Honeymoon Effect
- 06:50 - Amazon Keyword Research and Competition Analysis
- 10:53 - Getting Ranked for Keywords With PPC
- 15:30 - Improve Amazon Ranking With PPC and CPR
- 18:49 - Amazon Algorithm Changes and New Strategies
- 25:20 - The Significance of Amazon Recommended Rank
- 28:23 - Analysis Of The Project X Coffin Bath Tray Keywords
- 34:40 - Relevance of Keywords in Amazon Ranking
- 42:44 - Listing Optimization and Test Launches
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today's episode 500 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, and we're doing it live right here from the Maldives, as usual, because we're gonna go into the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy and some of the new twists and turns that have come up because of the test I've been doing. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Two, three, four, music you want to know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for, maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10's Keyword Research tool, Cerebro. Now, that's just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it's the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. H10.me/cerebro. Don't forget to use the Serious Delors podcast discount coupon, SSP10.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world and, as you guys can see here. I am back here in the Maldives, Waldorf Astoria. The place that started all the way back in episode 200 was when I first started filming out here the Maldives Honeymoon launch strategies, and then every 50 episodes we'd come out here 250, 300, 350, 400. I actually skipped 450, but so this is the first time back in the Maldives since episode 400. But the Maldives Honeymoon strategy is just a strategy. I just made a funny name to it so that we can try and get the most out of what we call the Honeymoon period, when we just get started selling on Amazon for a certain product, and so we're going to dive into it and what's the latest here on this strategy. So make sure to stay to the end, because we've got some new things I'm going to be talking about today. But just some background again.
Bradley Sutton:
Honeymoon period what is it? Well, the Honeymoon period is that's not a term that I came up with. That's a term that relates to the first few weeks, the first couple months sometimes, of a listing where you get more bang for the buck. It basically refers to how, if you have a four or five year old listing and you do a couple PPC sales for a keyword, not much is going to happen, right, but if you have a brand new listing sometimes just changing the title, sometimes just changing a keyword here or there, sometimes just getting one sale on a keyword, sometimes just getting a few sales on a high volume keyword It'll start moving you around on the organic side. Big fluctuations might happen on your PPC on a positive way. And we call this the Honeymoon period. This is not an official Amazon term, but it refers to the fact that when you are selling a new item, especially one that doesn't have much history, what happens sometimes is that Amazon doesn't have enough data to kind of know what you're relevant for, and so any little micro actions where on a more mature listing is not going to have much of an effect because Amazon's got so much data and so many clicks and so many things to kind of measure and understand what it's relevant for. Those micro actions on a newer listing where Amazon's just trying to figure out what is this product going to be good for, it has a lot bigger effect on it. So we call that the Honeymoon period.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, now what I started doing, like five, six years ago, is I launched a lot of product. By the way, I've launched over 500 products now, but even more than four years ago I had launched over 400 products and what I found was I always was experimenting. I found, like these, certain micro actions as I just made up that term now for myself I guess, these micro actions that could help me get even more out of the Honeymoon period, that would help me get off on the right foot. You know, just like you know, honeymoon is for a wedding, right? You want to get off on the right foot, and so then I was like, okay, what am I going to call this? I'm like I'm going to call this the Maldives Honeymoon effect, because these actions have a lot bigger impact, even more than just, you know, what we normally would see on the Honeymoon period. And so that's why I just went ahead and named it this thing, and I came here to the Maldives here to record it. So what is the latest with the Maldives Honeymoon method?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, we're going to go into some different strategies here, but let's do a recap. A lot of these methods is actually in prelaunch, and in prelaunch I made a new name for it. You know we call it the Bolly Blast. So I'm not going to go too, too in depth. But if you want to have a Bolly Blast, you know prelaunch these are the steps that leads the Maldives Honeymoon launch. Check out episodes 466 and 467. If I'm not mistaken, it's a part one and part two about all the things you need to do to get your listing ready. So h10.me forward, slash 466 or 467. You can also search that up on YouTube on our Helium 10 channel and in there I think I have like a 47 step process that happens before you even launch the product. Let's just review some of those you know. Again, those are two hours of episodes you need to go back and like listen to to get the full details.
Bradley Sutton:
But in a nutshell, you know it starts at the product research stage, right, picking products that potentially have lower title density. Title density is something that we have exclusively at Helium 10, which measures the number of listings on page one that have a certain keyword in phrase form in the title. So when I say certain keywords, the searched keyword. So, for example, if the keyword is coffin shelf and you see in Helium 10 that the title density is seven, that means that the last time Helium 10 check, there are seven listings on page one that have that keyword in exact phrase match in the title. All right, if you have a listing or a keyword that has title density of 40, that means there's 40 listings that have that exact keyword in the title and that means it's going to be a little bit harder to rank on that page because Amazon algorithm, you know, heavies or favors heavily the title as far as what a listing is relevant for. So it doesn't mean, you know, you can't launch against a keyword that were a title entity it's 40. It just means that, hey, it's going to be a little bit more of an uphill battle where sometimes you have a lower title density and Amazon thinks you're relevant. And, by the way, guys, I'm going to drop some bombs here about how you can know what Amazon is relevant or what's relevant to Amazon. But anyways, if you have a lower title density sometimes it's going to be a lot easier to rank. Sometimes even from day one you can be on page one potentially.
Bradley Sutton:
So that's one of the things we talk about in the Bali Blast method and then other things is about. That has to do with the keyword research, understanding where Amazon puts relevance as far as things that are in your listing, as far as keywords go from the title to the bullet points, and so we talked about getting all of the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, your direct competitors or the keywords that they're ranking highly for. We talk about getting opportunity keywords finding the keywords that maybe only one of your competitors ranking for, and that means you're going to be able to potentially rank for that keyword when you're only competing with one of your competitors, as opposed to five or six of your competitors. There are other keyword research strategies we talked about, such as trying to find complementary products. So these are all. Again, we're talking about pre-launch right now.
Bradley Sutton:
How do you put the right keywords in your listing Complementary products? But basically that means maybe you see your competitors have a frequently bought together type of product. For example, if you're selling a coffin shelf or your competitors are selling a coffin shelf, maybe you see in frequently bought together, which you can find in Helium 10 Blackbox, a history of other coffin shelves being bought with a coffin letterboard Right. Well, part of the Maldives Honeymoon strategy is that you want to get index for some of the main keywords from those coffin letterboards if you have a coffin shelf. So if you see that for these coffin letterboards, these five coffin letterboards. One of the top keywords is coffin letterboard and another one is Halloween display or something like that. So those top keywords from those coffin letterboards, even though they might not be directly relevant to your coffin shelf, you're going to want to get index for those listings and then from day one, you're going to be able to target those in product targeting, ppc, and then also you'll get a little bit more breadth, some width to what you're going to be showing up for, especially in broad campaigns and auto campaigns. So that's another strategy to use too. It's also a strategy to get index for forbidden keywords. Like, maybe you're related to an adult product or a drug related product. You can't put adult related products or keywords in your listing or drug related or other forbidden keywords. Well, if you make yourself relevant to the non-forbidden keywords and you're listening by sticking them in there, you potentially could get index for those forbidden keywords just because Amazon deems you as relevant. So that was another strategy we talked about in the Bali BLAST method.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, originally in the original Maldives Honeymoon strategy, when you're launched, we talked about using search, find by and two step URLs and things of that nature. Now that's no longer something that Amazon really wants you to start doing. And it's actually interesting. I was looking at the terms of service and it doesn't mention anymore the two step URLs. But it does talk about trying to manipulate your keyword search rank in the code of conduct. And that was a different change a couple of years ago where Amazon started specifying that they don't want you trying to do those kind of URLs and things to manipulate what it says the search rank, keyword rank. Before then we always would talk about, hey, doing search find by doing two step URLs, things like that, because in the Amazon terms of service it only talked about manipulating your sales rank, like your BSR. So then Amazon kind of cracked down on the keywords too. So that really changed the Maldives Honeymoon method. We do not suggest anymore getting friends and family or using services that are going to go out and get 40 people to search, find and buy your product with a keyword. That's pretty explicitly against Amazon terms of service. Now it wasn't before. People are trying to say, oh, it's always been against service. No, it hasn't, which is why Amazon changed it to make it against terms of service later.
Bradley Sutton:
So how did we change the Maldives Honeymoon launch strategy then when we couldn't use services like AZ rank or rank bell back in the day. So how can you get ranked for keywords right away? Well, we changed the Maldives Honeymoon method to be strictly PPC, so the whole theory is still the same. You need people to search, find and buy your products after searching for a certain keyword, and the more people that do that, that's what's going to get you ranked on page one. But when you have a brand new listing, how do you get on page one? How do you get people to even see your listing? You know, the old way was just doing search, find, buy, right, you know, getting two-step URLs, having a service send people to an exact keyword and they find you're listing on page six or seven and then they'll go ahead and buy it and then they'll move you up. But you can't do that anymore. So what we talked about, I think starting in like episode 300 or 350, was do the same thing with PPC.
Bradley Sutton:
So how do you get people to organically search, find, buy without breaking Amazon terms of service, you know, without using an outside service, without using friends and family, et cetera? Well, you got to think what is going to make somebody, if they happen to see your product, buy it, no matter what. Well, the first thing is what's going to make somebody see your product if you're not using outside service? The answer is easy it's PPC. So you've got to find the PPC bid that is going to get you to the top of search. You could do a top of search modifier in your PPC or you can just up your bid, you know, and do a fixed bid or down only bid, that's at a high, what you think is going to get you top of search, naturally, and then just make that the bid. Now how you know if you're getting that is you put your keyword to keyword tracker. After you put a bid of like $3, just say $3 on the keyword coffin shelf, I put coffin shelf into my keyword tracker and then what I do is put my keyword tracker on boost. Boost is something that checks it 24 times a day and now within an hour or two, I'm going to see a couple different spots on where I'm showing up randomly in the search results and different browsing scenarios and different locations. And then if I'm like ranked one, two or three, I'm good to go. If I'm ranked like eight or nine or below or something that probably I'm going to need to raise my bid to try and get my rank high. So, anyways, that's step one.
Bradley Sutton:
But if you have a brand new product and has zero reviews, obviously you know how do you get people to buy your product. Right, with the old old days again, search, find, buy you're using these outside services. They were getting incentivized to buy the products like, hey, you get the product for free, basically, all right. Now, now we can't do that anymore. So what is the incentive, I guess you could say, for somebody to buy a product that has no reviews, that they've never maybe heard of the brand? How do you get them to go ahead and purchase your product?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, the answer is by choosing a price point that makes them buy the product you know like no matter what. So that price point is different for every product. For example, if coffin shelves are all costing, or retail price, $25. So what you want to do is think what price point is somebody going to see this with? Like man, this is an incredible deal. You know, here's this other listing that has a thousand reviews, a lot of social proof. But I'm going to go ahead and get this other one. Well, maybe that price is $13, you know, 50% off? Are you going to make money at 50% off? No, you're not. But the whole point is, you know like you used to have to pay to get orders in the beginning to get that momentum and to get that sales velocity and search velocity, so you were paying money anyway. So to me this is a good investment. So you know you choose whatever that price is of where, when your competitors will buy that product.
Bradley Sutton:
And one way that you can, you know, do some product research. If you don't have, like Facebook groups where there's a community that's around coffin shelves and you could like do a quick free poll and they're asking them what price, or something like. Let's say, you don't have access to anything like that, use Helium 10 audience. All right, helium 10 audience it's a pay-per-use service inside of Helium 10, powered by Pikfu, where you can go and choose your target market. Like, let's say, your target demographic is females from the age of 18 to 30, who are prime members. You can actually choose that target market in Helium 10 audience and then just find 50 of them and within like three hours you'll have the answer to questions like hey, at what price point would you go ahead and buy this product even though it had zero reviews, and compared to and you can even have the other products there, even though the other products had a thousand reviews, and you would have pictures of it. So then you're able to see, you know, maybe, what price point somebody would buy that from your target market.
Bradley Sutton:
Or you can just guess. You know, I don't like guessing, you know all the time. So I like to go ahead and, you know, actually get some information. So once you've got that, then you go ahead and launch with that PPC and then in Helium 10, there's something called the CPR number. All right, the CPR number in Helium 10 tells you approximately how many orders over eight days eight to 10 days, I should say where it gives you. If you, if people, if that number of people search, find and buy your product, it gives you the best chance. Doesn't give you a guaranteed chance, but it gives you the best chance to get to page one of a certain keyword. All right, and so that's basically what I've been doing for the last two years. A lot of people have been doing this as well. You know, literally thousands of people are using this technique in order to to get to page one.
Bradley Sutton:
You monitor how many orders you're getting each day with the CPR number. So, like, let's say, the CPR number is 100. I like ramping up my order. So if the CPR is 100, I don't want to just divide that by eight or 10 and say, all right, I need 10 per day or 11 per day. No, what I like to do is I like to make it look organic. I like to start off slow, maybe day one, and get two or three. So the way I know is that, you know, I'm checking my, my PPC reports in real time and if I get two clicks and purchases on a certain keyword, I actually pause that target so that I don't get more. All right, I kind of want to like make it look a little bit more or organic and then the next day I started again and try and get maybe six or seven orders. Next day I try and get 11 or 12 orders until I can, you know, hit that CPR number and then go back and I'm going to check where am I ranking? Did it help my organic ranking?
Bradley Sutton:
Now it's important that again, when I said that you're you're choosing a, a cheaper price point, you don't put your list price or your regular price at this cheap price. No, because the problem is, if you do that, you might end up not being able to raise your price in the future. So when you choose, like, let's say you choose a $15 price point for your $25 coffin shelf, well, I'm going to make that a sale price or I'm going to make it a coupon discount, like, so maybe I'll put the price at $25, but then I'll put a, you know, 40% off coupon in order to hit that, that price point. All right. So again, don't put your regular price at that. And again, back in the Bali blast method, I had other tricks and tips about how to get, like, strike through pricing. So again, 466 and 467, make sure to check those episodes to see how to get you know, special strike through pricing and things like that. But but that's.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, in a nutshell, what the Maldives honeymoon strategy has always been, you know is is launching on five to 10 keywords. One other trick we usually do is hey, in the Maldives honeymoon strategy, don't just choose five or 10 completely different keywords like coffin shelf, gothic decor, spooky bedroom, mysterious oddities and Halloween, scary things Like. Do you notice the difference in those keywords? They're all completely different. They don't share keywords. What you try and do is find the embedded keywords that you can launch in groups, all right. So when you're doing your research in helium 10, you're going to find groups of keywords that have very similar roots. You know, like coffin shelf, gothic coffin shelf, gothic coffin shelf for bedroom. You know there's like six, seven keywords in there. You know coffin shelf for bedroom is also a keyword. So what you do is you try and launch all of those keywords at the same time, so they're all sending those relevancy signals for that root keyword to Amazon. All right. So there's another strategy that we use in choosing the keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Again, that's mentioned in the Bolly Blast Now. Here's the thing here. Now let's talk about some new stuff. All right, that's just kind of like a recap of the OG Maldives honeymoon strategy and Bolly Blast strategy. What is new for 2023, 2024? And I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to say something controversial, and that is I almost recommend doing a test listing if you're in any kind of a newer niche. All right, literally doing a test listing first, and you could potentially even do this for more established niche, all right. So that's the end game of what I'm about. That's the controversial thing that I'm launching now with this Maldives Honeymoon Strategy. Let's take a few steps back to explain why I'm suggesting this and what has changed on Amazon in the algorithm. Let's take even three steps back before there.
Bradley Sutton:
Listing optimization is important. All right, how you have the keywords, how many times you have it in your listing, where you have it. It's important, you know, to really send those relevancy signals. However, it is not as important as it was in the older days. Let me just tell you right that right now and it's also not a foolproof way to get ranking All right, do not use some kind of like formula where I'm going to use this keyword this many times and here and here and then, that's equal success. No, all right, if anybody tells you that that is incorrect.
Bradley Sutton:
People like using, like listing scores you know, like people have been, who have been using Helium 10 for years, have done something kind of like rudimentary, where you know they take what we teach them and say, all right, hey, I know I have to have. This keyword is my most important keyword and it needs to be in my title and in one bullet point and in one search terms. And I'm going to give myself three points to have that. And and then I'm going to give myself one point for this. You know, people I kind of do that myself. Like it helps me to kind of like know where my, my keywords are.
Bradley Sutton:
And people have asked, you know, helium 10 for probably like three or four years now to do some kind of like listing score, where we take an algorithm and assign points to it, right, and in the past we've always said nah, like I'm not sure how valuable that will be. But, but recently, you know, I started writing blogs again. Maybe you guys are watching seeing some of my blogs at Helium 10.com forward slash blog. But you know, seo is an important part of a company like Helium 10 and any company like that. So when we write SEO blogs, we're trying to rank for keywords in Google and Bing, right, it's kind of similar to making a listing for Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
It's not just let's randomly put together some words and make some something interesting. It could be the most interesting blog in the world, but if it doesn't have the right keywords in the right places and the right number of times, you're not going to get seen. So we we've been using, you know, for the last like year, this tool called things like surfer SEO or something like that it's called and like it gives you all the important keywords and then it tells you how many times you need to write it and like where, and then it gives you a score based on if you've optimized your listing around those keywords. I'm like, hey, this is kind of like a cool idea. You know, maybe we can do this for Amazon. You know sellers because you know people have kind of like been asking for something similar to this, and so you know this might be a way to help guide people to, to kind of know how strong their listing is as far as best practices. But here's the key Again, even though Helium 10 is working on something like that, once that comes out, don't just think that's all you need, that you know what.
Bradley Sutton:
All you need in order to rank is to know how many which keywords there are, how many times you put it in your listing and in what places, and try and get some high score Is a high score. You know, using this algorithm important to send relevancy signals to Amazon. Of course it's important, otherwise you wouldn't even be working on it. You know it's just a general truth in SEO, but the Amazon algorithm is so advanced these days, it is not enough just to have some kind of mathematical formula. And of course, it goes without saying you have to optimize your listing for an Amazon buyer, all right, which no algorithm can measure, all right. So I'm not even going to talk about the strategies there. But obviously you need to make sure your listing is attractive to a human being, right? All right, so that's a separate conversation about. You know how to do that. We've done podcasts about, about how to do that and really be able to connect on an emotional level to sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
But what about the algorithm? Like, why am I saying that just having a score is not going to be enough? Well, first of all, amazon algorithm does not work on a certain score. It's not like Amazon is scoring your listing as far as all right, it has this keyword four times, it's got to this root word three times and they've got this in the bullet point here in the title, and so it's always going to, you know, have some kind of formula that Amazon scores it and then that's how it deems you as fully relevant for all time. No, that's not the way Amazon works. Back in the old days, in the beginning, amazon did work a little bit more like that, you really could control how you know relevant you were to Amazon. You know, because the Amazon algorithm was not as as developed and I say this not, trust me, guys, I am. I do not have any secret access to the Amazon. I have contacts at Amazon who developed the algorithm and and develop tools like brand analytics and things like that. That does not make me some kind of special. You know, savant as to what the Amazon algorithm, helium 10, no other tool out there, no other guru out there knows what is going on with the Amazon algorithm.
Bradley Sutton:
People speculate, you know. They'll say, oh, I read this scientific paper. You know we've read all the scientific papers. You probably heard a couple episodes ago or you know we went deep into that. But at the end of the day, nobody really knows. Everybody's just speculating, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with speculating.
Bradley Sutton:
I speculate too, but what I like to do is I like to speculate based on tests and that's all I do. That's why I run Amazon accounts. I'm not trying to make money Nowadays. I'm trying to make a little bit more money in my Amazon accounts because that's what I do to to to support my, my kids, who are employees of my, my Amazon company. So now I have to make a little bit more money than I did. But my main point in running Amazon businesses is I use them as like my playgrounds to like test what is and isn't working with the algorithm.
Bradley Sutton:
Because, again, amazon doesn't make its algorithm public. The only way we kind of know how it works is by seeing what happens when we do things on Amazon and then just like measuring the results. But no matter what we do, again get it in your mind, guys there is no exact formula, and anybody who says there's an exact formula to rank on Amazon like an exact keyword the same time, every other time they're full of nonsense. All right, you know, even the helium 10 CPR numbers. Like we've always said, it gives you the best chance, but it doesn't give you a guaranteed chance. You know, every time it's based on a lot of trial and error. You know, I did a one and a half year case study to come up with that CPR number, all right. So what have I found that is working with the Amazon algorithm now and why is it different?
Bradley Sutton:
All right, well, number one is that a kind of important metric in helium 10 that people overlook is now a super important metric. All right, and what metric is that? It is Amazon recommended rank. All right, that is a name that we kind of made up, but it actually comes from an actual data point in Amazon. It's one of the things I'm very proud about. You know, I've made up the Maldives honeymoon strategy and you know I don't invent a lot of things, but this is one of the things that I discovered about five years ago and back then, like five years ago, I was like, oh man, everybody's going to copy us and start showing this. Nobody ever came up with this. I'm sure somebody's going to show it now. You know somebody's going to try and figure out where this data point is and show it to people because it is super, super important. I'm just shocked nobody's copied us in the last five years since we had this.
Bradley Sutton:
But again, Amazon recommended rank is coming from Amazon, where it kind of like says hey for X product and Y keyword. We think Y keyword is kind of very relevant to this product, or not so relevant, or medium relevant, etc. Amazon has a scoring system for every single product and almost every single keyword, where at least the top 1000 keywords if the product has a lot of history, it will go ahead and say, score it as far as how relevant it thinks for advertising. And in the past it was never something I really talked about too much that everybody should have to do because it was mainly about advertising. But it was a great metric to have because it kind of gave you insight into at least how the Amazon advertising algorithm thought that you were relevant for a certain keyword, right, or in relation to a certain product. But now, guys, in the last six months and all the tests I've been doing with launching everything else, it is all of a sudden a super indicative Metric on how just Amazon search algorithm thinks you are relevant. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
So I did a couple of tests with, like this, coffin Bath tray. I use the helium 10 project X account. I use a couple you know friends accounts because I wanted to have like Different accounts and different products, different ASINs, to kind of like test my, my theories right. And so I chose coffin bath tray because this was something that didn't have a lot of history on Amazon. So this is especially geared towards you people who are are getting in these niches where they're not completely saturated, all right. So because of that.
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon doesn't have that much data in order to know from day one what you might be relevant for. You know it's different, like if you're gonna launch some collagen peptides. There is hundred collagen peptides who've been selling millions of dollars a month and you know hundreds of thousands of customers have bought collagen peptides and Amazon has tracked every click and how they interact with the listings. They've got so much data on exactly what is relevant to collagen peptides that from day one of a brand new collagen peptides listening, you're probably going to be able to, you know, to get relevant for the right keywords but in a newer niche is a little bit different. So, sure enough, when I first launched these two coffin bath trays, I did on separate accounts. I did it with separate kinds of listings, one like a more in-depth listing and and I use the best practices again, you know I use that, my own scoring system, even on how to get you know Like I put coffin bath tray, like you know, like four times in the listing and long tail versions of I did all the right things and and get this.
Bradley Sutton:
The key words that I was relevant for from day one Was not coffin bath tray. Alright, if I was looking at the Amazon recommended rank from day one on one of the products. Or again, I launched pretty much the same exact kind of product. It was just different kinds of listings in different accounts at the same time. So I could, you know cross cross, see the number one. There was only one keyword on one of them that it was relevant for. Like Amazon only recommended one keyword. It was bath. Bath tray was kind of crazy, right. One keyword, bath tray. No other keyword had it on Amazon recommended rank. By the way, when you use that in cerebro in helium 10 to get the Amazon recommended rank, you have a listing up for five minutes. We'll already have Amazon recommended rank. This is something we pull from Amazon in Real time.
Bradley Sutton:
And the other product that I launched it was actually relevant for like 40 keywords from day one and the top three was interesting was bathroom decor, wineglass and candle holder. Very interesting. Alright, bathroom decor was super generic Word wine glass, what you might be like. Why does it have wine glass? Well, this, this, this coffin bath tray. I had in the. I think I put in the title and you know I had in the description that it has a slot for a wine glass. Alright. And then I also put that I had a slot for a candle holder but Amazon thought that this was a wine glass in candle holder. So from day one I was not.
Bradley Sutton:
I couldn't really do the Maldives honeymoon launch because for coffin bath tray, I was indexed for it but Amazon didn't think I was relevant. It would not even show me in PPC for coffin bath tray when those was the number one, most important keyword. I was optimized everywhere for it. It had a low title density. There was hardly any competition for coffin bath tray two years ago. I would have been on page one instantly for this, but because Amazon couldn't figure out that this was a coffin bath tray, it would not give me any PPC impressions. Alright, that's crazy.
Bradley Sutton:
So then, what are some of the things I started doing? I started changing up the listing. I had it coffin tray and other keywords. I wasn't even indexing for more times. I had to special features. I was trying doing search terms. Things were not working. I would see little bits of movement, but it was not moving like it would in the old days.
Bradley Sutton:
And this is a listing again. I just barely started. I started it like so definitely in the honeymoon period. So what got me to get coffin bath tray to Amazon recommended rank number two on one and Amazon recommended rank number one. What it was was I did an old-school two-step URL alright, I did an old-school two-step URL. It was the field ASIN URL. Alright, I did a field ASIN two-step URL and then I got somebody to buy it. I think one of them I might have got you know, chevali to buy it, and then the other one. I went to AZ rank and I paid AZ rank to get somebody by it.
Bradley Sutton:
Now I know what you're saying. Wait, bradley, didn't you just talk about how that kind of stuff is is against Amazon terms of service. Now, I think there's gonna be different opinions on this, but I could not care less in this instant about Keyword ranking. I was not trying to increase the keyword rank at all. Alright, I didn't even look at what the keyword rank was. My point was I knew I was not relevant for it to Amazon and so I was trying to send a relevancy signal to Amazon. So it knows that, hey, this is something important and this is something that you can give me impressions for in PBC and I'll gladly pay for clicks. So, in my mind, my interpretation of Amazon terms of service. This is not against the terms of service, because I'm not trying to manipulate or affect Amazon keyword ranks. I'm just trying to get, I'm just trying to pay Amazon some money in PBC and and make sure that they know that I am Relevant for it. So what I did was I just I just did one order, one field ASIN, where somebody added it to the car and they they bought the product for with the keyword coffin bath tray in it and, guys, less than 12 hours later it not only was it not Amazon recommended rank at all, it went to number one. Amazon recommended rank on one of the products and number two on the other product. For the top, amazon recommended rank just with one.
Bradley Sutton:
Feel ASIN now, because Amazon said two-step URLs for ranking is not good anymore. We took those off of our helium 10 gems page. So you guys want to know a trick to do a two-step URL still with a keyword. Right, go to index checker in Helium 10, put your ASIN, put that keyword in there and, whether it says is index or not index, you'll see it has check marks and dashes or whatever. Right click on the dash or the check mark, alright, and then do copy URL. Alright, so that URL is a feel on the field ASIN one there's a, there's a, there's a field ASIN check, copy that URL, replace the keyword and the ASIN with yours. Or if that's exactly the keyword in the ASIN and that's the exact URL you can use in order to get somebody to buy your product with the field ASIN two-step URL, and then that should get you the impressions and it should send that relevancy.
Bradley Sutton:
So again, this might be a controversial thing. You know, I'm definitely. You know I have a good relationship with Amazon. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna suggest something that is blatantly against Amazon terms of service. That's not how I roll, but you know, anything can change. I am like 99% sure this is not against Amazon terms of service Because, again, I am not trying to manipulate sales rank, I'm not trying to manipulate search rank. I'm just trying to let Amazon know that I am relevant for this keyword when on this new product.
Bradley Sutton:
So again, once that happened, once I did that one boom, I got to the very top of the search results in sponsored alright, I'm not talking to, you know, search rank and then I got some organic orders from sponsored and then that brought my organic rank up after just like two or three orders more that I got it got me to like the top of Page one for that keyword, just like the regular Maldives honeymoon strategy. It was very interesting to see because on August 2nd this is months ago this is one of the I do tests constantly, guys. So this one coffin tray you know this is just one. I'm just giving you, guys, one of the examples I've done. I'm looking here at my notes. On August 2nd, you know, the top 10 were keywords like bath tray, tray, decor, very generic keywords. It like he obvious Amazon couldn't figure it out. And then on 8, 4, 2 days later, every single one of the top 10 keywords on one of them was all had coffin in it. So finally I got Amazon, just without one order, to understand that, hey, I am relevant for coffin related keywords and in the other product it didn't show all coffins, that I didn't have coffin as many times. In listening again, listing optimization is still important for the, for the algorithm, but at least the number two keyword was coffin bath tray, and then a lot of the other keywords were were just generic. Now here's the thing, though. Here's a Again, I can do a podcast episode of just about the test. I mean I literally did like 75 tests and tweaks just in this case study alone for these two products.
Bradley Sutton:
Interestingly enough, before I started getting relevant for with the Amazon recommended rank for coffin bath tray, my number one Keyword on one of the products, like I said before, was bathroom decor. All right, very generic keyword, very high search volume, way higher than coffin bath tray. But because Amazon gave me a recommended rank of one which is not really from Amazon, amazon gives a score and then we translate the number one score into Amazon recommended rank one, because for bath bathroom decor, I Could actually target it in PPC and I was already ranking like on page five for this keyword. I didn't even get one sale for one at the cart one, nothing. And I was on page five for the super high volume search term, just because Amazon gave me a high recommended rank.
Bradley Sutton:
Now you might think, well, why didn't you double down on that? You know, Bradley white, you know, to me I couldn't care less about the word bathroom decor. You know, like I don't think that people who purchase or who search bathroom decor we're really going to buy, you know, a coffin shaped bath tray. But that just shows you again how today, in 2023 and 2024, this data point is super important and has wide reaching effects as far as how you or how Amazon thinks that you are relevant. So, at the end of the day, I had this product running for three months now and what I did was after the three months, and you know one.
Bradley Sutton:
My theory I wanted to test was well, is the Amazon algorithm trained All right now that I've been selling this coffin bath tray when nobody else was on these two accounts for three months? You know what, if I launch a new coffin bath tray, is Amazon, from day one, going to go ahead and understand now what this kind of product is? Because it has got this history and the answer is interesting. The answer is still no, not really. So I launched two products on two different accounts today. One of them I just made with the listing builder AI that we have that uses ChatGPT made a great listing, but it was optimized for the keywords that I knew were relevant. And the other one, I use the exact same 100% listing that I've had up for three months, thinking that, hey, now that Amazon recommended rank is very high for these products or for these keywords, well, it should know right away and copy that Amazon recommended rank. So here's what I found out on the very first one, the top three or four keywords that are Amazon recommended rank. On this brand new listing that I had really optimized for coffin bath tray, wine glass, charcuterie board, bathroom tray, wooden tray and bathroom caddy. So a little bit different than when I started off. On the other one, but again no coffin related keywords. So, even though it's you, I did everything right and optimizing my listings to make it somewhat relevant. At the end of the day that ASIN is still going to need me to run a field ASIN two step URL in order to let Amazon know that I am relevant for coffin tray.
Bradley Sutton:
On the other listing that was in Project X, where I copied the 100% same listing that's been up for three months, word for word. I changed like a couple, like just one or two words just to make sure it wasn't the exact same listing, so I should say 99%. Here is the top three keywords from Amazon recommended rank bathroom decor, wine glass and candle holder. Does that sound familiar to you? Exact top three keywords of when I started with that other product, even though now that same product has the number one keyword is coffin bath tray, which it should. So again, it shows listing optimization, guys, is not the end all be all. Having a perfectly optimized listing at times is not enough. It's more. It's probably going to help you more in established categories. But even though I've had this product selling for three months, amazon still needs more, a bigger bump in order to make sure that some of these niche keywords it knows that it's relevant for it. So the Amazon algorithm is not perfect. It was perfect. It would have known from day one that hey, this is a coffin bath tray. This other coffin bath tray has been getting sales from coffin bath tray, coffin bath caddy, you know coffin decor and all these keywords. This product is very similar. We're going to put it number one. All right, that's actually how I noted the Amazon algorithm work back in the day.
Bradley Sutton:
But this is a new year, a new Amazon algorithmic shift. I guess you could say where this is not. You know this strategy is not necessarily working anymore. You've got to send those relevancy signals to Amazon. So for now, you know my way of sending those relevancy signals is, and you shouldn't need this for every single keyword. Guys, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying go, go and every single one of your 10 launch keywords you're going to have to do a field as in two step URL. No, like, I think that Amazon probably wouldn't, you know, like that, because that almost would be considered manipulating sales rank, because you're getting all these sales that are not necessarily real orders. But if you find yourself having trouble getting relevant for a keyword because Amazon recommended a rank is off, try that out, get one or two orders, just try one at first for a field as in two step URL in order to send those relevancy signals and then the next day, wait 24 hours, run it again.
Bradley Sutton:
And this is why I said that kind of like off the wall thing earlier where I'm now suggesting that you might want to always do a test listing. Now, all right, I didn't say that before you know. I said do kind of test listing so you can, so that you can know what kind of exposure you're going to get on PPC to validate some, some theories you have. When there's not enough information from existing competitors, you know you might want to make sure that you validate your idea with a test listing. But now, guys, I'm saying, if you're selling in a newer niche, especially and maybe sometimes, even if you're an established niche, it might be worth it to spend you know 50 bucks and get another UPC code and just do a fulfill by merchant listing, send a couple of or have a couple of units available and have your listing that you want to go with and then see immediately what does Amazon think that you're relevant for right. And then if you're completely fine with this listing and you have the right keywords for Amazon recommended rank from day one, all right, well, you're good to go. That means go ahead and launch your regular product once you're ready and you can have that exact listing, knowing that from day one you might have that.
Bradley Sutton:
But if you're like me and you have to do like 40 tests or something to try and figure out, how do I make Amazon think I'm relevant for this important keyword? Well, you don't want to be doing that on a live listing when you're trying to like get you know, make advantage of your honeymoon period. So what the best thing to do might be to spend a few bucks and try a field ASIN, two step URL to see if that helps your Amazon recommended rank, to see if that helps you get those PPC impressions that you're going to need to do the Maldives honeymoon strategy from day one and then, once you figure out what works on this test listing, now you can start over again once your inventory comes in, or you can, you know, maybe your inventory is already there and now you can start off on the right foot so that you know from day one I'm going to send this field two step URL, you know, to go ahead and get this order or to get to get relevant for this keyword or maybe something you maybe have to optimize your listing in a different way. Again, like I said, listing optimization is important. Sometimes it can help. It can definitely help you by by doing things differently. But instead of trying to do all this trial and error on a live listing, when you're trying to you know, get your, you know, get your sales and everything do it like on a test listing first. That's what I did for this coffin tray and that's what I'm going to do for any probably the next few of my launches, or I've been doing it on some of my launches and it's going to be doing what I'm going to be doing, going forward on some of my launches. So, guys, let me know what you think, but this is the Maldives honeymoon strategy, like version four, 4.0, a lot of it's the same, but there's some new things that are different here.
Bradley Sutton:
But the very important that you guys know your Amazon recommended rank and especially if any of you guys have issues ranking for keywords or getting sales or getting impressions in PPC, just run your listing through Cerebro and check what that Amazon recommended rank is All right. So, number one again that means that's the keyword that Amazon thinks you're most relevant for, all right. Number 20, that means Amazon thinks you're 20th relevant, all right. The coffin shelf is a great example. The old coffin shelf seems to be completely locked in at a low Amazon recommended rank. Our Project X coffin shelf is like rank 25. For that you guys can see that yourself. Anybody can run the Helium 10 coffin shelf in Cerebro and you can see what the Amazon recommended rank is Right and it's not high. And that's why we're not ranking high organically. I don't know what happens, you know, like a shadow ban or whatever. I don't want to try and speculate on that, but in even in that case, this Amazon recommended rank is highly indicative of what's happening on the organic side. So, guys, I hope this helps. Let me know how it works when you guys try these strategies out, and especially, even if you have a more mature listening, let me know in the comments below what does it say for your Amazon recommended rank, the one that you've been struggling with? Let me know, and let me know how you fix it.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm not sure when I'm going to come to the Maldives next. You know, 500 was kind of like all right, I'm going to keep going until 500. So maybe if there's going to be a new strategy I need to come up with, I'll have another reason to come out, to come out here. This is my favorite place in the world the Waldorf Astoria. They always take care of me really well. If you guys make sure to you know, if you want to know how I afford this place, it's like $2,500 a night. Check out my travel hacking episode. Just look at up. You know Sirius Sellers podcast, travel Hacking. You'll find that episode and then you can see how I am able to get to this place without having to pay money or ask helium 10 for money for it. But anyways, guys, hope you enjoyed this episode and here's to another 500 episodes. Bye-bye now.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week. Prime Big Deal Days: Everything you need to know about Amazon's 48-hour shopping event https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-prime-big-deal-days-faq Amazon has reportedly tested a “Buy Again” feature to entice shoppers into repeat purchases. The company has placed the new feature in a tab on the “most prized real estate” on its app home page. https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2023/amazon-wants-to-get-cautious-consumers-to-buy-again/ American consumers are taking their foot off the spending pedal as bargain prices become rarer, former Walmart U.S. CEO says https://finance.yahoo.com/news/american-consumers-taking-foot-off-102620170.html In the second part of our episode, we turn our attention to the world of competitor monitoring. Carrie Miller shows us how to stay ahead of the competition with Helium10's Insights Dashboard Competitors Tab feature, which allows you to easily monitor your competitors in seconds. Get ready to pocket some incredible news stories, strategies, and insights that are going to keep you ahead in the E-commerce game!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Shivali covers:
- 00:49 - Big Deal Days
- 02:09 - New CPF Certifications
- 03:32 - A/B Testing
- 04:11 - Controlled Generic Listings
- 04:58 - Buy Again Button
- 05:46 - Bargains Gone Forever?
- 06:50 - Follow Helium 10 In Twitter
- 07:35 - Pro Training Tip: Insights Dashboard Competitor Tab
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► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Shivali Patel:
New certifications for the Climate Pledge-Friendling program, brand protection with generic product listings, a buy again button for your consumers and an incoming shift in consumer habits. This and more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Shivali Patel:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you all the latest news in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce space and we also provide you with a training tip of the week that will give you insight into serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. The first article that we'll be covering today is from Amazon itself. First, I want to preface this by saying I was just looking at some Prime Day 2022-2023 stats earlier today with some of our Helium 10 team, and we were seeing conversion rates hold study or even increase, resulting in more sales year over year, as well as impressions remaining consistent leading up to Prime Day, but then soaring a whopping 25% year over year on the big day. You can check out our LinkedIn for more details. But, with that said, let's talk about Amazon Prime's Big Deals Day. So what exactly is Amazon Prime's Big Deal Days? Well, it was a 48-hour shopping event that happened in 19 countries and, just like Prime Day, it was a significant sales opportunity for many businesses. I've already seen a lot of buzz on LinkedIn and on our Facebook groups saying that Big Deals Days was going great for them. That is such a tongue twister, guys. I'm not quite saying that five times fast. Our Project X and Project 5K accounts both had more than double the normal average in sales. But I want to hear from you guys how were your sales? Were you up, Were you down? By how much and in what category? Let us know in the comments below.
Shivali Patel:
Next up Amazon has added three new certifications that recognize materials innovation to their Climate Pledge Friendly program. This is really helpful for customers in discovering more sustainable products at scale. Oftentimes, as a buyer, when we're scrolling search results pages and we're just on the prowl for a particular item, Badges can be a really great way to have a listing catch our eye, and perhaps that is part of the reason on why sellers have noted slight increases in conversion with these badges. Maybe it's the increased traffic or the feeling of leaning into a morally sound, feel-good purchase for your prospective consumers. But listen, whatever the case may be, if any of your products are eligible for one of these new certifications or the Climate Pledge Friendly badge in general, it may be worth enrolling into this program. To enroll, you must either have an approved third-party certification or be eligible via compact by design or pre-owned certified. Of course, this validation process is really going to vary based off of your product type, and therefore you should do your due diligence. The badge will then appear on product details pages, search results pages and give you access to different things like advertising packages, Amazon business features and much, much more. All right.
Shivali Patel:
Another segment of news coming from Seller Central is brands can now run AB tests on supporting images in the Manager Experiments Image Gallery. This is great news for those of you who haven't yet launched your product or you just want to optimize your listing images. After all, as it says here, 62% of customers are more likely to buy a product if they can first view its images and video. Yes, it's still best to do split testing via Helium 10 audiences, but to start split testing your supporting images and potentially hike your conversion rate, you can head over to Manager Experiments dashboard switching gears.
Shivali Patel:
Seller Central also recently announced that they've extended product detail page protection to generic product listings. So if you don't know what this means, if you are a seller who does not have brand registry just yet, this could be helpful for you. You can start off listing your product as generic and then Amazon will still protect you by keeping any changes that occur solely under your control. Basically, what Amazon is saying is they won't let other people go in and change out your listing. Even though you're not brand registered, we do still suggest that you get brand registry for most sellers. This is a really nice update, and it does come with a lot of different things, so just bear that in mind. But you do have access to this exclusive control with the generic listing product detail pages now.
Shivali Patel:
Then we have a new buy again button. I'm reporting this to you from payments.com. We all have purchase history with Amazon. That's really useful, but sometimes we forget that it's not just those subscription products like supplements and maybe the skincare items that can appeal to people and they'll reorder over and over again. If you can establish brand authority or deliver a really great product or experience, a simple button can be enough to bring back customers and increase your return on investment. Look, I'm a repeat purchaser in general, so I'm the perfect target market for this feature. Have you seen this button on the Amazon app's homepage to entice shoppers into repeat purchases? Let me know in the comment section.
Shivali Patel:
Last but certainly not least, the last article I'll be covering today is from Yahoo Finance, and that is Bill Simon. This guy is the former Walmart CEO, and he's raised some concerns about the impact of lingering inflation and various macroeconomic factors on the American consumers, suggesting that the era of big bargains might be coming to an end, you guys. He pointed to the evidence of changing consumer habits, such as shifting towards smaller purchases at the end of the month due to financial constraints, and retailers are feeling the effects of inflation, which could really affect consumer acceptance of prices and buying patterns. I know I've already experienced this inside of my retail stores that when I'm going grocery shopping, the prices are insane, as are gas prices and whatnot. So are you seeing a change in spending habits? Has this been reflected in your own sales? Let us know. We would love to absolutely hear from you. So that does conclude our news pieces for this week.
Shivali Patel:
Before I jump to our training tip of the week, I want to quickly encourage you to follow our Twitter account at Helium10 Software, that's @H10Software okay, @H10Software If you don't already follow us. We post announcements, slides, workshops, Q&As and so much more, and it's a really easy way to stay in touch. I don't want you to miss out. Let me go ahead and give you a second. Go ahead and pause this podcast or video, whatever it may be that you're watching this, and go give us a follow Done, All right, awesome. Before I sign off, let me pass it over to Kerry Miller, our brand evangelist here at Helium10. And, as a seller, being able to stay at the forefront of your market can also depend on what your competitors are doing. Perhaps they're adjusting their price points or offering a promotional coupon, and you will want to know when they do that as soon as they do. If you want to know an easy way, just keep watching.
Carrie Miller:
Q4 is here and I know a lot of us like to keep close tabs on our competitors, but it's often a lot of tedious work where you have to literally go to their listings to kind of see and try to figure out what they're doing in this Q4 season. A lot of times we want to see did they change their price, are they adding coupons, things like that. So I want to show you a very easy way that you can actually monitor your competitors using Helium10. The first thing that you want to do is you want to log into your Helium10 account. Okay, so this is actually all going to be on this dashboard that you see right here, and we're actually going to scroll down just a little bit and we're going to take a look at this product section where it says my Products, and what we're going to do is we're going to expand this down, and you can see there's a lot of different tabs here. I'm going to actually focus on competitors here. So these competitors, you can actually choose them or sometimes they're already populated for you. So if you don't like the ones that are already populated in here for you, just click on Edit Competitors and you can just add in whatever ASINs you want or you can choose them from this list down here. I usually put my own five that I want and it's the top five competitors that you have. Once you've done that, you can actually see them listed here. You can see if they have a coupon here. You can see if they have done anything in terms of revenue, if they're doing really well, if their price is a little bit different. But this is actually going to get in more detail in this Competitors tab. So on this sidebar here where there's these little swords, you're going to click on the Competitors tab and you're going to be able to see more in detail about your competitors. And so this is not just those five for that one product. This is going to be all of your competitors that you've chosen.
Carrie Miller:
So each product on that main dashboard you're going to see five, but this is where they're all going to be put together in one page and you're going to be able to see price changes and all kinds of different things like BSR. And if you wanted to customize and get alerts, you can actually get alerts for your competitors so you can see if their BSR has increased by a certain amount. If it's decreased, you can see if their review count has increased by a certain percentage or if it's decreased, or if their sales have increased or decreased. So that way you can see, hey, their sales are soaring, what are they doing, or maybe they're decreasing, and you can capitalize on that. There's a lot of different ways that you can utilize this and these are the different default or different settings that you can use. Now you can just uncheck it if you don't want to see it, or check it if you do want to see it, and you can add in whatever percentage number that you want to. So that is how you kind of edit these, but it'll show you. You know in general, if you know, there's some changes in price and things like that. But if you go down here to insights as well, we have some more information here. You can add in insights, for you know if their competitor changed the price or a coupon, you can actually get an alert for that. You can also see if they've changed their listing and you can see if they've changed any performance. So, right here, for a coupon, you can say you know if it's a price increase or decrease, or a coupon offered or a coupon no longer offered. You can edit this, however you'd like to get those alerts.
Carrie Miller:
If you uncheck it, you won't get any. For listing change you can change, you can check off which ones of these that you want. So do you want to see if they've changed their title, their main image, their category and subcategory? And then, finally, you can see about their BSR and their review count, just like I kind of showed you this a little bit before. So this is where you can really control all of the Competitor Insights. There's a lot more different insights and I'll go over there those in other videos, but this is just focus on competitors. So this makes it very, very easy for you to go into that dashboard every day. That dashboard is going to show you a little an alert button or it'll say insight ready, and it's going to show you those things in the way that you set them up. So if you wanted to see if they've increased, you know, by a certain percentage of sales, you're going to be able to see that in that insights dashboard. You're going to see if they've added a coupon or if you wanted to see if their title changed, you're going to be able to see all of that in the dashboard and it's going to be so easy for you to monitor just in seconds, where all of this stuff would take you hours actually to do, to monitor every day. Where we have it ready for you every single day in the dashboard, easy to see, and you're going to get a great overview of what your competitors are doing so that you can stay competitive and you can capitalize on anything that they are slacking on. So go ahead and check out the insights dashboard competitors section and let us know what you think. Bye.
Shivali Patel:
Awesome. Thank you for that, Carrie. I know the ability to monitor competitors with set thresholds was something that I was looking forward to for a while, and it's incredible to finally have it up as part of our tool set. Other than that, that is it for this week. I hope you learned something from this week's Weekly Buzz. We will see you next week to talk about what is buzzing.
Want to crack the code of Amazon's algorithm? Join us in this riveting episode as we sit down with Kevin Dolan, Principal Engineer of the AI Labs program at Pacvue x Helium 10, a mastermind who has scrutinized over 100 Amazon Science papers and run millions of tests to decode the intricate workings of Amazon's search framework. From semantics to lexical search and all the fine details in between, be prepared to gain invaluable knowledge and insights that will transform how you see Amazon's ecosystem.
Pressing on, we dive deep into the expansive landscape of AI with Kevin. We break down the complexities of Amazon Science's information retrieval papers, shedding light on the motivations, implications, and limitations. With a heavy focus on both the relevancy ranking system and the behavioral indicators, such as previous purchases and time spent on a page, we reveal the intricacies of how this system functions and the challenges faced by new products. You'll gain a comprehensive understanding of the balance between query intent and query volume, as well as the impact of micro-actions on a product's early life.
We wrap up our conversation by evaluating the role of Artificial Intelligence in selling success, discussing how semantic search differs from lexical matching, and lastly, looking at the promising future of the Amazon algorithm's evolution. This episode is a gold mine of knowledge and insights that will guide you in navigating Amazon's complex systems. With the help of Kevin's expertise and insights, you'll be better equipped to harness the power of Amazon's algorithm for your own Amazon FBA business’ success. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to gain insights from an expert who has spent countless hours demystifying the workings of Amazon. Enjoy the episode!
In episode 499 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Kevin discuss:
- 00:00 - Check Keyword Indexing With Helium 10
- 06:21 - Impressive AI Amazon Listing Builder
- 10:49 - Investigating the Amazon Algorithm
- 21:10 - How Amazon Search Works in Phases
- 25:43 - How Amazon Chooses Search Results
- 31:17 - Analyzing Product Metrics and Rankings
- 35:05 - Amazon Keyword Relevance and Product Ranking
- 38:44 - Amazon's Trend in Personalized Search
- 42:48 - Keyword-Based Search vs. Meaning-Based Search
- 50:53 - Advancements in Semantic Search Techniques
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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we’re going to talk to somebody who might be the most knowledgeable person in the entire world about how the Amazon algorithm works. He studied over 100 Amazon science papers and runs tests on millions of data points, and he’s going to be educating us on his findings, about what he’s found on things such as semantic search, lexical search and more, including showing a shocking example of proof of how search on Amazon is evolving drastically even now. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10’s Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker.
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got for the first time, somebody on the show a fellow worker here at Helium 10, but one of the more unique ones. He’s not like we’ve had product managers here, we’ve had, like, some of our executives, like Boyan has been on the show before, Adam has been on the show, but he’s got a very unique and one of the coolest roles here and we’re just going to get to know him and you guys are going to be blown away by some of his insights into how the Amazon algorithm works, because he, probably more than anybody else in the entire industry, has done the most research on the subject. So, before we get into the details, first of all, Kevin, welcome to the show. How’s it going?
Kevin:
That’s going pretty good. That’s a lot to live up to, I got to tell you.
Bradley Sutton:
There we go, no pressure, no pressure.
Kevin:
Where are you located? Yeah, I’m out in Los Angeles so I do live near a lot of the other Helium 10 people, a lot of the back view people. We go sailing from time to time.
Bradley Sutton:
Is this where you’re going to be taking me sailing for my first?
Kevin:
time in a couple weeks. Yeah, we’re taking you sailing next week actually.
Bradley Sutton:
Where did you go to school at?
Kevin:
Cornell.
Bradley Sutton:
Cornell, that’s.
Kevin:
Ivy League. It is technically an Ivy League. We get made friend of a lot for being the worst one, but you know.
Bradley Sutton:
Isn’t that where the guy from the office yeah, he went, or something.
Kevin:
Okay, now I was like wait, how do I know he? Classically.
Bradley Sutton:
Andy for them.
Kevin:
Yeah, he brags about it a lot. That’s the kind of reputation that we try to avoid.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, all right. What did you study there?
Kevin:
I studied computer science Originally physics, but ended up using computers a lot to do physics. Things ended up liking that more, so went down the direction of computer science. My focus was on artificial intelligence, which is why all this new stuff that’s been happening has been so exciting.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, so I mean you were into it before. It was actually, you know, hip to be into it Before.
Kevin:
It was cool. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Bradley Sutton:
And so now, what is your position here at Helium 10?
Kevin:
So I’ve actually been with Helium 10 since 2020. I’ve served like a bunch of different roles, jumping in, you know, helping with individual products, with higher level stuff. Right now I’m serving as the principal architect for the AI labs and this is the AI labs between both back view and Helium 10.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. So AI labs is like a like, almost like a secret organization inside of Helium 10. What is AI labs?
Kevin:
Yeah well, we try not to be a secret. We try to make sure everybody in the organization knows what we’re doing all the time. But basically you know, even if you’re not in technology right now, you’re hearing about AI. You’re hearing about chat, gpt. You’re trying to figure out ways to use it. You’re worried it’s going to take your job. You know, outside of technology, a lot of people don’t become aware of these technological shifts, but sometimes you get these breakout technologies, and AI is one of them.
This whole stream of research really began in 2017 with the release of the first Transformers paper. It started to take off really, really hard in 2020, when some of these new techniques started to get better results than any other techniques. But when last year, openai released chat, gpt, there was this sudden explosion and suddenly we’re seeing AI models that can do things that, say, 10 years ago, people would have never expected computers to be able to do, and so you’re seeing a lot of new products come out, a lot of new features. People are excited, people are scared.
I tend to be more on the conservative side when it comes to AI. There’s, I’m excited about it, it can do a lot of really cool things, but I think it can’t do a lot of the stuff that people say that it can. Right now, the goal of the AI labs is basically to figure out what’s hype and what’s real. We’re trying to figure out what of these AI technologies we can use within Helium 10 and PacView products to make our tools better, to make our sellers have a better life, and we’re also trying to figure out ways that these AI technologies can change the ecosystem. So what’s going on at Amazon right now that might affect the way sellers sell on Amazon, that people buy things on Amazon, and that’s actually the part of the job that’s really really exciting to me, because it forces you to predict the future and that’s just really fun.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, it’s really cool how Helium 10 and PacFu is embracing AI. We have a whole department here dedicated to it. We just hired another executive who was leading up AI at Microsoft of all places. Obviously we have dedication, but somebody might say, wait a minute, like I barely have seen Helium 10 come out with anything AI. This is what I think is cool, because I remember back in the day I obviously have worked here at Helium 10 longer than you but five years ago when we were a tiny team we weren’t number one, we probably weren’t even number two.
It was like Jungle Scout was number one, maybe Viral Launch was number two, and then Helium 10 was kind of a newer kid on the block and because of that we had to be cutting edge like nonstop and try and be the first, and it was like a space wars, like who’s going to launch this reverse ace in first and who’s going to launch an auto responder email, and then sometimes we just rushed to get something out and it wasn’t maybe the best, but in those days, like being the first at something was super important in this growing industry. Now for a few years, since you’ve been here no coincidence there but since you’ve been here we’re number one in the game. So it’s like you know what. We don’t need to be first at anything. Like let’s be. When we launch something, let’s get it right. So we were definitely not the first to launch AI for listing building. But, man, it’s really amazing Like our listing builder tool now can do multiple languages and multiple marketplaces. I threw in words into a Spanish listing but then my inputs were like in English and even through some Portuguese in there, but then the AI knew that this is for Amazon Mexico and then took my keywords and it made a complete Spanish listing. I mean, it’s just like it even blows the Amazon AI listing builder like completely out of the water, let alone anybody else in our space here.
But we had long story short. We’ve got this whole team that’s working hard and making sure that we’re gonna do that. We’re doing the right things. But at the end of the day, you were talking about the. You know how AI is integrated into the search algorithm. We’re definitely gonna go deep into that, but just a preview, guys, like I don’t know.
You can tell me what you think, kevin, but in my opinion, we can read all the scientific documents we want, like you have, but at the end of the day, there is nobody on this earth not even Amazon workers, or not just one Amazon worker who could just tell you the exact formula of exactly how the Amazon search algorithm works, because that’s not the way it works. It’s not something that you can just turn into a mathematical formula. So just guys, you know what we talk about today is gonna be based on, you know, a lot of research and things, but you gotta remember that, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if we’re coming up with something, or somebody else out there who read some scientific documents is coming out with something. It’s speculation, you know, and we can you know. I think what we’re gonna show today is is that Kevin’s speculation probably is better than anybody else’s, since he’s read more. But are you with me there on that kind of like postulation?
Kevin:
Yeah, I mean exactly like you know. I think whenever a new technology like this comes out, people get excited about it. They wanna use it. They wanna release products that you know claim to use AI, even if it’s not really that big of an important component to it. You know, I recently heard from one of my friends who’s in venture capital that he’s, at this point, tired of hearing AI pitches. When somebody comes to him and says, all right, our company is, we’re doing X, but we’re using AI, basically everybody just rolls their eyes and I think the reason is because AI, at the end of the day, is a tool, it’s a technology, it’s not even a feature and it’s definitely not a whole product.
I think when the dust settles, the hype dies down and this becomes integrated into day-to-day life, you’re not gonna hear about it as much. It’s just gonna naturally be a part of so many systems that you don’t think about it. Just the same way that you know, when you’re using Amazon as a buyer or as a seller, you’re not thinking about what databases they use on the backend or what fraud detection techniques they’re using. You don’t have to think about those low-level details because they’re just part of the system we’re about to get to a place, hopefully in the next couple of years, where these things just become more commonplace, and that’s a lot of the approach that I take when I develop technology is that I look at all of these things as tools that can be used to accomplish things, but at the end of the day, we still need to accomplish things that our users want to accomplish.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, now you know we’re about to talk about the extent of your research and how ridiculous, how many hours you’ve spent, you know, investigating the Amazon algorithm and stuff. But you know, just like we said, nobody, not even in Amazon, can, just you know, know instantly what the, how the Amazon algorithm works, how search works. So let me just ask you, like, why did you even do all this work in the first place?
Kevin:
If you knew that there’s.
Bradley Sutton:
you know, the ceiling is not even a full knowledge of what’s going on Like, so why even put all this work into it?
Kevin:
Yeah, I mean, you know we are, at the end of the day, building products that help sellers sell things on Amazon. So the more that we understand about how Amazon search works, the better we’re able to do that. Yes, we’re never gonna be able to understand the whole thing, I would say. Within Amazon, it’s a large functional engineering organization, so the entire system is broken down into subcomponents. Some people are going to be experts on individual subcomponents. Some people are going to be experts on how all of the different subcomponents connect to one another. But, like you said, no one person really knows everything. And even if there are people at Amazon who can really say that they understand all the subcomponents at a deep level, they’re still not going to understand all of the emergent properties that come from the system.
Whenever you have a system that’s so complex that so many different people are using for so many different purposes, a lot of new behaviors start to come about. You get behaviors that come from the fact that people want to list on Amazon so that they rank more highly. You might not be able to predict ahead of time what that’s gonna look like. You might not be able to predict how buyers are going to change what they type into the search box as you change, how different search results come back, and so I think it’s something that, whether you work for Amazon, whether you build tools for Amazon, whether you’re an Amazon seller, or even if you’re an Amazon buyer, I think it’s important for you to understand what kinds of things are happening, because they give you hints to better understand how to interact with the ecosystem.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay now, what did your research entail? To what extent have you done that leads up to you giving us this information that you’re about to in this episode?
Kevin:
A little bit, a little bit. So the first place I went was the blogs, which I think was probably a mistake. They’re written for a different audience. I understand that they’re gonna be non-technical.
Like blogs from Amazon or just like blogs from people in the industry, industry blogs and blogs from Amazon as well, but in general they’re written for non-technical audiences, and so I understand there’s gonna be some loss in translation when you get there. What I was astounded by was just how wrong they absolutely are. A lot of the articles make things up. A lot of the things point to research that isn’t likely to be part of a production system. A lot of them talk about search techniques that were popular 20 years ago and we’ve moved well past those technologies, and so I think it is generally safe to assume that if you’re reading it on a blog, you can take it with a grain of salt. There might still be some useful information there. It might still be relevant when you are writing your listings, but at the end of the day, it’s not canon.
Amazon operates a publication that they call Amazon Science. They have a number of programs internally that lead to this, but this is basically where they release a lot of their public facing academic research, and there’s a section within Amazon Science that’s on the subject of information retrieval. It’s one of the biggest sections. That’s the academic term for search, and I went through and basically looked through the hundreds of papers that they had listed for publication there. I selected about a hundred of them that were gonna be relevant towards giving us hints about how Amazon how many pages does each of these have?
Bradley Sutton:
It depends. It depends these hundred that you read.
Kevin:
Yeah, I mean. Some papers will be as short as just a couple of pages, like two or three. Some will be 20 pages long. Some have a lot of appendices, a lot of formulas. When you do academic research, you get really good at skimming papers for the important parts and making sure that you’re not wasting time reading stuff you don’t need to read. But it’s a skill in and into itself for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
Now the first time. I haven’t read many and I think you by far have read more than anybody else in the world. These aren’t written by the same people, so probably even county Amazon employees, you’ve read more of these than anybody else. The first time it came on my radar I was looking up. I found a patent that Amazon had filed for something about search, and that was the first time I was diving in. I was like my goodness, this is interesting stuff.
Like a lot of it was way over my head, since I’m not a data scientist and using language, but then it allowed me to understand like even parts of, like what we call the honeymoon period. They call it like cold start and stuff like this. It was just fascinating to read. But then I found out later that Amazon is just publishing left and right all these papers, like you said. But like, first of all, why are they doing this? And then, second of all, correct me if I’m wrong but just because they publish a paper on something, it doesn’t mean, like you said, that they actually have what’s in that paper in production in Amazon or is even imminent to hit production. Yeah, exactly.
Kevin:
Yeah, I would say that there’s a lot of different reasons why companies release academic papers and actually up until about 2020, amazon was very careful about the information relating to their system that they released to the public. They might release a patent, but patents are incredibly vague and the reason you release a patent is specifically to prevent other people from being able to do that or, at the very least, prevent other people from suing you for doing something similar. But when you release academic research, you’ve definitely got a different set of motivations. There. You run the risk of, say, a competitor adopting the same techniques something that’s part of your secret sauce becoming commonplace, and so you do have to weigh that against the benefits. But there are a lot of benefits to doing this. If you look at other companies like Google, google, unlike Amazon, came from academic research. The founders of Google created the PageRank algorithm, which was originally called the Backrub algorithm.
Bradley Sutton:
I bet you there’s a great story behind that there.
Kevin:
So you know, like Google’s approach was academic driven from the beginning and as a result of that, the academic research that goes into web search is probably a decade ahead of what you see in e-commerce search. When you release these papers as part of your company, when you get them out there, at the end of the day, what you’re doing is you’re sparking innovation on the subject. You’re sparking innovation within your own company because you’re able to recruit the best talent. If I’m an engineer or I’m a data scientist or I’m a researcher, I might now want to work at Amazon because I know that there’s a chance that I can release a paper that’s gonna be really important, that’s gonna be really great for my career. I know I’m gonna be working with the state of the art technologies and like that’s really exciting, so you’re able to get better talent that way. It also allows you to work with people who are in academia.
So one of the challenges that e-commerce search has faced in academic research on information retrieval is the availability of data, because Amazon doesn’t want to release to just anybody their search volumes, their search history, what products people are clicking on, and so it’s a lot harder for somebody who works at Cornell University to do research on that subject. Amazon started a program called the Amazon Scholars Program, where somebody who is perhaps a PhD candidate or a university professor can kind of be embedded in a team at Amazon to help them develop something, and in many cases conditions of that would be that they get access to data and they’re able to release important papers, and so at the end of the day you get these papers out there. They help you develop new technologies and new techniques, but it also sort of fosters this broader ecosystem of research. That happens so that just in general in the world there’s better knowledge about how to do things. It’s worked really well for web search. E-commerce search has been a little bit slower to do this kind of thing, but they’re catching up.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, All right. So, guys, first takeaway here is we could have the person who’s read the most scientific documents here in the world. We could have somebody who just reads one scientific document, but what you can’t do is just take one of these and say, okay, because of what I read here, this is proof of what’s going on in Amazon. You know I mean, otherwise we’d be releasing blogs every week with Kevin as a byline talking about what he’s learned from there. So, again, just keep in mind that not any one of us can just take one of these documents and explain what is happening on Amazon. But, that being said, there’s a lot that we can take away, both from what you’ve researched in these documents and what you. Obviously, being at Healing 10, you have access to more data points than almost anybody outside of Amazon, and so you can actually study behaviors and trends and things like that. So let’s just start at a very basic level. How does Amazon search work today?
Kevin:
Yeah, I mean there’s some things that we can tell from the papers that are kind of like canon knowledge. One section of almost every paper is usually like a introduction discussion session where they talk about why this problem exists, what they’re trying to solve and sort of what the context of the problem is. In these it seems to be pretty well accepted that search happens in three high-level phases. The first phase is query understanding. So Amazon is gonna be looking at the query that was searched. They’re possibly gonna be looking at your past queries, your past purchase history, to try and better understand what it is you’re looking for. There’s a matching phase, phase two which is basically looking at Amazon’s catalog of billions of products to try and find a smaller set of products that are likely related to that search. So now we’ve whittled it down from, say, a few billion potential products down to a thousand products. And then the final phase, which is really the most important, is the ranking phase. The ranking phase is where it determines what order to show those thousand matching products in. This is, I think, where Amazon has the best opportunity to use the more advanced technologies to really precisely understand what somebody’s looking for and what somebody’s offering and to match the absolute most likely things that somebody’s gonna buy into the top of the search results. But even as you go further down the list, ranking is still important.
Amazon talks about a lot of situations where the priorities and goals that Amazon has for ranking are actually different than what you might think. You might think that when you’re making a search that you want to show in the number one search result the product that the person’s most likely gonna buy, but that’s not always the case. They use this example a lot in their research engagement rings. So I don’t know about you. I don’t know many people who are buying diamond engagement rings on Amazon. If you’re going to Amazon, you’re typing an engagement ring, you’re most likely gonna be looking for something like cubic zirconium, something a little more affordable, and so you would think that when you search this, the top results should all be affordable diamond rings. The reality is that if people see that, they think something is wrong with Amazon because they expect to see diamond rings at the top, and so in certain cases, amazon has goals that are more related to user expectations than quantitative optimizable goals, and so it’s a really complex system. But ranking is really where a lot of the secret sauce is.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now how does AI play a role like, for example, in misspellings? Or is this just something that has existed, where machine learning is used and it just learns to try and predict buyer intent based on most common misspellings? And then, how does Amazon work in that regard?
Kevin:
I mean misspellings is an interesting case, so that usually falls into the query understanding bucket. So somebody types in a query. There are a lot of existing techniques that you might call AI, you might call machine learning, but they definitely aren’t the same thing that’s being referred to as AI that everybody’s excited about right now to do a spell correction. It’s a pretty well researched area and so when you type a query into Amazon, one of the first things that they’re gonna do is run it through a spell check algorithm to try and figure out if there’s some obviously misspelled word that they can correct. And that’s usually gonna be like one of the first steps in query understanding.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now you know the holy grail or goal of any Amazon seller when they’re launching products or when they’re trying to get sales is hey, I need to get on, quote unquote page one of Amazon search results. You know, this is nothing new, you know, you’re a blogger, you’re an SEO person, you want to get. You know, page one on Google results. You know, but on Amazon, how? In general? You know we’re going to simplify this down before we go deep into the weeds here, but how does Amazon choose what to show? You know, first in search results?
Kevin:
Yeah, I mean this. This is a really complicated question. Like, like we said earlier, amazon is a modular system. You know, there are going to be a lot of different teams working on a lot of different subsystems. These subsystems are going to be interacting in different ways, but in general, there’s a broad category of algorithms that work really well with these types of modular systems, and these are called learning to rank algorithms, and basically the idea is that you set some set of goals that you want.
You know a goal might be I want the product that the user is most likely to buy to be at the top. A goal might be I care about my long term relationship with the user, so I’d make sure not to show them things that they’re going to return. You know I care about my long term relationship with sellers, so I want to give new products a chance, and so the system’s going to have a lot of different goals that it’s able to juggle, and a learning to rank algorithm will take a series of signals and try to put things in the best order so that they can achieve those goals, and this also allows for engineers at Amazon to be modular in how they define those signals, so I might define relevant signals in terms of like okay, you’ve searched for a query with these particular words in it. I know that those words are in the title, so you should probably rank that a little bit higher. However, another signal might be everybody who buys this product seems to return it, so that’s a bad thing, and these different signals can go together to they can be.
These signals can be mixed together to basically come up with a ranking that best accomplishes those goals, and it’s really important to stress that these signals can be defined by, like a lot of different engineers. You might have data scientists who are working in relevance factors as to like whether or not a particular listing means the same thing that somebody is expressing in a query. You might have somebody who’s focused more on behavioral signals. We see that things that people have bought in the past is a really important signal for Amazon. If you search for a common query, something as simple as like pressure cooker, amazon knows which things people have bought when they’ve typed in pressure cooker, so that might actually end up being the dominant signal. But the learning to rank algorithms basically allow you to, instead of sit there and like manually tune all the rules that land at some particular ranking. You get to let the system sort of figure out how to do it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, what about when we’re talking new products? All right, you know that’s just general, general how the search works. But then you know, especially when it, when it comes to to you know a history of interactions. You know, like, what happens on a mature product. You know Amazon can easily know what to prioritize because you know they have how people have clicked, how long people have stayed on a page or how they scroll. I mean, there’s like billions of data points. They have, after listings, been out there for six months. But going back to, you know, like what I saw in that one document about, like, you know what was called cold start. You know problem how does Amazon determine relevancy in things for a brand new listing? You know that doesn’t have this history.
Kevin:
Yeah, so it’s a problem. It’s a very active area of research. Of the hundred papers I read, at least a dozen were about the cold start problem. So I would say this is definitely something that is a focus for Amazon. It’s something that they care about really deeply and want to solve, and it’s also something that they haven’t entirely solved.
The cold start problem basically says that because for common queries, behavioral signals dominate and are so predictive of what somebody is likely to buy, the rankers are typically going to show products with deep history above products with, you know, a shallow history, like a new product. If I’m searching for a pressure cooker, it’s going to show me the pressure cooker that people usually buy. If some company comes and makes a better pressure cooker something that really just you know completely blows this the existing ones out of the water, amazon’s not necessarily going to show that to users because it’s got no behavioral priors. So solving the cold start problem is really important and there’s a bunch of different ways to do that. There’s a bunch of different techniques. Some of the techniques you’ll see in the literature are called bandit optimization, which uses like a gambling game as a sort of analogy for how you learn about you know whether you should continue exploring new options or exploit the options you have, but I would say most of the research and the papers that seem the most important lead to this idea of using details about the listing to predict behavioral priors. The idea is basically that you look at things like the quality of the listing, the seller, the image, the title, and you try to analyze them to a degree to where you can estimate what you think somebody might be likely to click the product.
At that point. You start to use those to intermix new products with the existing products and then you can measure that behavior against them. So you could say all right, I’ve started to rank this new pressure cooker high, even though I don’t have much priors for it, and it seems like people are really excited about this thing. It seems like people are buying this. So now I’m going to update my estimate and say like, okay, your optimistic estimate is really good. If I start to show it to people and nobody wants it, or people buy it and they start to return it, then I’m going to start to rank that item lower.
I think this is what leads to what you and the industry refers to as the honeymoon period. It’s this idea that there is a brief window of time when you launch a new product where Amazon is going to be ranking it more favorably than if it had a long sales history of poor performing sales, and so I think this is something that’s definitely an emergent property of the system. It’s not necessarily something that Amazon sits there and says, okay, the honeymoon period is two weeks, it’s definitely not something like that, but it is something that may emerge from the system as designed.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, so, like you know, there’s in the industry. You know people talk about query intent versus query volume. You know, query volume, search query volume. You know don’t always just go for hey kitchen utensil has, you know, 50,000 search volume. And that’s what I need to be focusing on when I launch my product or when I’m making my listing optimization, as opposed to something with only 600 searches. But that’s super hyper relevant, like aluminum spoon for boho decor or something like that, you know.
And so I found that in early listings and I’m going to talk about this more in episode 500 of the podcast, where I talk about the Maldives honeymoon method, about how micro actions mean exponentially more in the, you know, honeymoon period, or whatever you want to call it first few weeks, cold start, whatever of a product, like you can drastically change how Amazon views your product. Now the first part is you guys obviously have to have your listing optimization down. You know, like I can’t have a water bottle, but then the copy of the listing just talks about kitchen utensils. It talks about, you know, I don’t know podcasting equipment and just random stuff, and then Amazon just miraculously is going to figure out that I’m talking about a water bottle. No, you’ve got to be super, make sure your listing has all the potential keywords so that you give Amazon something to start with. And the thing is, you could do all of the right things. I’m talking about this in the next episode, how we’re working on something so that when people are using listening builder, that they have like a scoring system that’s kind of based on best practices, like how many times do you have the right? Do you have all the right keywords, are you indexed for them? How many times do you have it and do you have it in the right parts of your listening? But at the end of the day, you could have a perfect score, if there ever was one, and still Amazon might not 100% know about what the product is, especially if it’s like a newer niche, like if it was water bottle, probably from day one. Amazon has everything ready. As long as you have a great listening, amazon knows exactly what your product is.
I’m gonna talk about how I launched or I did some dual testings on this coffin shaped coffin shaped bath tray, which maybe only one or two people has ever sold this on Amazon and not many units. And when I check in Helium 10, there’s a way to check how Amazon views your, which keywords Amazon views as relevant. It was obviously confused Like coffin is probably one of the most main words because that’s how it’s shaped, and it was like way, way, way down the list as far as what Amazon thought was relevant and it had like these generic terms that had great search volume. It was funny because I could rank easily for it on a keyword that another product probably wishes they could rank for. It was something like bathroom decor or something that had like 200,000 searches.
And just because Amazon rated that as the most important keyword to my listing, I was already ranking in the first six pages, even though there’s 30,000 other products that are indexed for that keyword. I was on page six and, you know, temporarily I was even on page one without doing anything, while other people are getting purchases for this product and they can’t get on page one. But does that really do me any good? No, it doesn’t do me any good, because that’s not necessarily what my product is and nobody’s gonna search that keyword and then buy my product. And so you know, sure enough, you know the keyword dropped down, but it shows you guys that you know you’ve gotta be thinking about the quality of the keyword and how relevant it is, especially in the beginning. So that’s kind of like your training Amazon to understand how to interact with that. Now, how does like advertising, you know, play a role in all of this in your opinion?
Kevin:
Yeah, I mean. Well, I think what you just said is really kind of key across the board when it comes to writing your listings or using advertising. The optimization effort that you put into your listing to basically describe your product accurately, to target keywords that are more intent focused, that people are more likely to use to purchase your product. I think that that’s really good advice. I think that that’s gonna apply across the board. We do know that when somebody performs a search and ultimately buys a product through a sponsored listing, that behavioral signal still counts. It’s a technique that I know a lot of people recommend for how to sort of seed your behavioral signals.
At the end of the day, if people are buying your product, if they’re not returning it, if they’re leaving good reviews, those are all gonna be things that lead to better organic rankings.
We do see some evidence that the paid signals count a little bit less than the organic signals, but they still count, and so I think that advertising is definitely a critical part of any product launch. But I think, just like you were talking about with organic optimization and search engine optimization in general, your focus in the beginning really needs to be on high intent queries rather than high volume queries. If you are showing up on page one for a search query that has a lot of volume and people are not likely to buy your product, that’s actually likely going to damage your organic search rankings way worse than if you had ranked highly for keywords that are very relevant to your product. Because what’s gonna happen is Amazon has now shown your product to people and people have rejected it, which Amazon is gonna be considering a negative signal, and that could start to affect you on other keywords as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay now, a lot of the documents that you read might have been two, two, three years, or some of them might be two, three years old already, but the ones that you’ve read that are maybe published this year. Have you seen any trend that makes it kind of obvious that Amazon might be moving in a certain direction?
Kevin:
Yeah, I mean there’s a lot of stuff on the cold start problem and I think that there seems to be a narrowing focus on this approach of estimating behavioral signals based on the listings and I think you’re seeing some sort of corolling of resources into that direction. There are a few papers on personalized search and it’s kind of always been in the background. I think there’s some evidence that Amazon might be re-ranking products based on individual preferences. If you’re a bargain hunter, I might be showing you different products than if you’re the type of person who likes to buy the more expensive, more luxury products. There’s definitely some query rewriting that might be happening based on recent search history. So if you’re looking for a lot of kitchen utensils versus if you’re looking for a bunch of hunting and camping equipment and then you search for something generic like knife, amazon’s gonna be thinking about what you’ve recently searched for to try and understand what types of products to show you. So there’s definitely some stuff going on there. There are always papers about UX improvements, little things that they can change in the site or big things that they could change in the site and how people search. I don’t think that the general UI of searching for something in a text box and then seeing either a grid or list of listings. I don’t think that goes away anytime soon. I think that’s a great way to look for products. You’ll see a lot of people who are pumped about large language models and AI talk about like conversational search or shopping assistance and things like that. I’m not too excited about those. I don’t think that those are gonna really really change how people do look for products.
But one area where Amazon may start to invest in is result explicability explaining to you why a particular listing might be relevant. They already do this to some degree. Like when you type in a search, they’ll highlight any of the words that are from your search that are in the listings to help you better understand it. With LLMs and other generative models, you can start to explain in more natural English like hey, this one might be really good for you because X, y and Z, so you might see some UX changes there.
There’s a lot of work on neural rankers, so this is sort of a technological detail of how they choose which products to rank higher than others, rather than fundamentally changing the way learning to rank works. So it’s not super relevant but I think probably the most important and most impactful area of research is this space called semantic search. Semantic search is basically looking through the listings and trying to find listings that are most relevant to a particular query, based on the meaning of the words rather than the literal words that are in both the listing and the search.
Bradley Sutton:
So give an example of like the counter to that would be lexical matching. How is semantic matching different?
Kevin:
Yeah, so within, I would say that today Amazon is still probably dominated by lexical matching. Lexical matching is the historical winner for search. It’s become less important in web search but it’s still a major factor there, and e-commerce has sort of fought this battle between lexical and semantic search for the past six years. In a universe of lexical search, you are trying, as a person who is searching, I’m trying to guess which words would likely be in a listing for a product that I’m looking for, and it requires you, as the searcher, to have a skill set for searching. The ideal in infamoration retrieval is that you don’t have to have a skill set in order to find things. You just type in here’s what a situation is, here’s what I want, and the search engine brings you back exactly what you’re looking for. If you really wanna get that, if you really wanna solve that you can’t use a keyword-based approach that as your only solution you need to really start thinking about the meaning of those words you’re typing.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, what are some things that you’ve dive a little bit deeper into to what you’ve found in the documents, as far as if you can kind of say where Amazon might be going with the search, because, like you said, this is something that’s already been kind of existing in the Google and regular search engine world, but it’s a little bit been slower for e-commerce places like Amazon to adopt. But where do you think we’re going with this?
Kevin:
Yeah, I mean I think that it generally seems to be accepted as true that using new advanced AI-based technologies to match products would give people better listings. It would give better rankings to it would produce better rankings in the matching the user’s intent. I think we have really really strong evidence that that’s the case. The problem is that they tend to be slow and expensive, and so a lot of the research today has focused on using AI during ranking. So, instead of processing a advanced AI model across all the billions of products on Amazon, I could process it across just the top 1000 that match your query and then I could find the exact product that you’re most likely looking for.
And I think it’s pretty safe to assume that Amazon is using some type of semantic analysis at the ranking stage. What’s a little bit less clear is what they’re doing at the matching stage. I have some examples to suggest that, most likely a technique that Amazon discussed in a 2019 paper called DSSM. I have some evidence to suggest that they are at least using that for matching. In cases where there aren’t a lot of lexical matches for a particular search, they may be using different techniques, but I have some evidence of this and I think that it’s definitely safe to say that they’re using semantic search at the ranking level to make sure that the top results you see are exactly the thing you’re looking for.
Bradley Sutton:
Now is, that is what that one. Was it you who found that, or was it Adam Shabazz? About the the noodle camera.
Kevin:
Noodle camera, yeah yeah, the noodle camera I think this is. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence I have for Amazon using semantic search string matching. So I wrote an algorithm that I called a Adversarial search generation. So basically the idea was generate searches that are Are phrases that somebody might use, that kind of like make sense from a language perspective but don’t have a lot of lexical matches. And one of the search terms that the algorithm came back with was noodle camera.
Noodle camera is not a thing. Yeah, I thought perhaps you know it was a thing, but I Googled it. Nobody calls this a noodle camera. Most of the results that come back are endoscopes. Endoscopes are also called snake cameras, and I have two main Explanations for how this result is coming back for noodle camera. The first is a query rewriting explanation. It is possible that somebody who didn’t know the name of an endoscope might call it a noodle camera and they would search for that, not get any results, and then later search for snake camera, later search endoscope and end up buying that. So Amazon might be behind the scenes doing some kind of query rewriting.
Another explanation is semantic. A snake and a noodle are similarly shaped they’re long, cylindrical objects and so, going down that direction. That would seem to suggest that they may be doing some kind of semantic analysis of the words that you’re searching to try and find something that At least Resembles the user’s intent. We tried a couple variations of that that were also interesting. So when I searched for eel camera Figuring eel and snake they’re similar enough it came back with an entirely different set of results. It came back with underwater cameras, and I think that’s really interesting, because underwater cameras and Again, in this case, when you look at the listings, none of them talk about eels, but eels are similar to fish. They do talk about fish, and an underwater camera is exactly the type of camera that you would use To take a picture of an eel. And so I think that, at the very least for cases where a Search doesn’t burn back a lot of lexical matches, there’s a good chance that Amazon is augmenting those matches with some kind of semantic techniques.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, guys, you know I dug into this too and anybody can do this Everybody, you know, if you’re not in your car but if you’re at home, you know, just type in Noodle camera and then you’ll see what he was talking about. Like, like, there’s one brand here that that is kind of like could be a Misspelling of noodle called new e. Like it has a camera, and it’s actually interesting, when I, when I entered that into chat GPT, that was one of the first things that came up. He’s like oh, some people miss misspell noodle camera for this new e brand. It was really weird. And so, you know, amazon picked up on that. But then most of these are these kind of like endoscope cameras and so I took one of these. You know, just alright, I didn’t take just one of them, I took, like most of these endoscope cameras, and then I first threw it into index checker inside of helium 10 and it’s interesting to know the.
You know it says that noodle camera is indexed, and that rightfully so, because it obviously shows up in the search results. But usually when you have a phrase that is indexed, the individual words are indexed as well. But then I broke out the word noodle, and noodle is not indexed while noodle camera is. And then I went to the Ajax page a lot of you guys know what, that Ajax page where I can look at the whole back end of a Listing and then if I type in here, there is no noodle written in the front end, in the back end, in Amazon’s you know features. Nowhere is noodle in this listing or any of these other listings that are on this page. And yet clearly it is indexed. For noodle camera. Amazon is showing it in the not only is it index, is ranking you know for it. And so that you know, I don’t want to like scare people you know, or people you know start to think.
Wait a minute. You know, if Amazon goes full semantic search, you know, then tools like cerebro and helium 10 or listening builder and optimizing your listening are not Important and it’s gonna be out of date. No, there is always gonna be a need to To have to understand the right keywords and to build your listening. Otherwise Amazon won’t even know how to do a semantic you know match to your product if it doesn’t have a baseline. And so you’ve got to be all you know, you’ve got to be traditionally indexed, lexically indexed. That’s a thing you know for the right keywords for this. You know Semantic to take the the next step. But what? What you know? What should sellers do you think keep in mind over the next couple years? You know what is this move towards semantic searching mean for Amazon sellers and how they optimize our listening.
Kevin:
Yeah, the technique that I was just talking about, dssm. It’s a fairly old technique. The paper Amazon released was in 2019, but the technique itself goes back a few years before that. There are newer techniques that are closer to these families of exciting large language models.
In particular, this past May, in May 2023, they released a paper where they created a small Burt model, which is a much more advanced type of semantic search, and the challenge generally would be when running with one of these birds sand for anything and it stands for my names are bi-directional encoder, something transformers, yeah okay, so not just the dude who discovered it is an acronym I can’t remember the, the whole name, but anyways, they use this Burt model to basically Create a set of what they call embeddings to index listings in a semantic way and then perform search over that. This was something that we knew we could do for a long time, but they found a clever way to do it very fast, and this is going to be the difference between whether or not they use these technologies in production, because speed really matters when it comes to searching. You know the difference between Amazon getting you your search results back at a hundred milliseconds and ten seconds would be. You go and shop somewhere else, and so, even if you’re getting better results back, you need to get the results back fast, and so as we start to see new techniques that can do this deep level, deep level of query analysis, deep level of product analysis as we start to see these techniques that can be run more quickly, we’re going to start seeing them more In actual Amazon search results. I think that within three years, you’re probably going to be in a world where semantic based search actually starts to dominate Lexical search results. You know, that’s that’s my personal guess. You know who knows what it really looks like in the future. But I think at the end of the day, it is when things are heading and I think that does change the way people need to write their listings. But I also think that’s a win for pretty much everybody involved.
I think that buyers don’t like keyword stuffing because in order to get to the information they want about a listing, they’ve got to go through a bunch of random words. I don’t think sellers like it because it’s tedious. It’s a lot of work. I’ve talked to a lot of sellers who, you know, describe this as a major pain point in their jobs is trying to make sure their listings contain all the literal keywords that somebody might be searching for, and I don’t think Amazon likes it either because it makes Amazon look sketchy.
You see all throughout the literature how Amazon really tries very hard to make sure it doesn’t look like a flea market. You know they don’t want the search results to look like the results that you get on a site like Alibaba, and so Everybody’s incentivized to get rid of keyword stuffing. But because of the limitations of the way a search is done today, it’s basically an inevitable emergent property, and so I think as we start to see semantic search become more viable. As we start to see it get faster, as we start to see Amazon upgrade the hardware that runs their searches, there’s a good chance that semantic search is going to start dominating over traditional lexical search, and so I think that leads to a world where sellers, instead of trying to play these different keyword games, should just be describing their products as accurately and compellingly as possible, and I think that’s just a win for everybody.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, all right, guys. So you know we’ve. You know if your head doesn’t hurt right now that then you probably weren’t paying attention, but but a lot to take in. You guys might need to Re-listen to this. There’s a lot of exciting things happening on Amazon.
That’s one of the cool things about being in this industry. It’s. It’s not. It’s not something that stale or or something that you know you can master, and then you know you never have to learn another thing ever again because you’re your master at it. No, you got to keep you know studying and and keep you know seeing what’s going on, and that’s that’s what sets you guys apart.
You know the good Amazon sellers from the the ones that might fall off, is you know they just make their listening and then you set it and forget it and then never try and figure out how to, how to optimize or, you know, remain at the top. And so you know, those of you who listen here to the end of this episode, you’re probably one of those ones who’s like, nah, I got to make sure I’m at the top of the game and and continue to develop, because Amazon is is always on the cutting edge of different things. So you know. Thank you, thank you for joining us on here and any last words of wisdom you can share with Everybody out there, or something to you know, like things that we can expect from the cool AI lab, secret, secret Avengers team here at at Helium 10.
Kevin:
Yeah, I mean you’re you’re gonna see a lot of things come out. I mean we’re gonna be releasing features within Helium 10 with impact view, that use AI. These are gonna be things that you know, like I said, become commonplace. I Think the most important thing is that we’re paying attention to what’s happening in the industry. We’re aware of the trends, were aware of the new technologies and we’re gonna make sure that our sellers have the best chance of success.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome, well, kevin, thank you for joining us, and you know I wouldn’t suggest reading in a hundred more scientific Papers that I think that’s too much. Your brain’s gonna explode soon. But we appreciate all the work that that you’ve done so that we don’t, so that we don’t have to go out and read all that stuff, and and we’ll definitely invite you back next year and it’ll be interesting to see you know where we’re at as far as the Amazon algorithm goes. So we’ll see you, yeah.
Kevin:
I mean, at this pace it’s gonna be completely different. So thanks for having me, Bradley.
A warm welcome back to the Serious Sellers Podcast for our returning guest, the queen of TikTok and Amazon Live, Gracey Ryback of Deal Cheats. With her world-famous influence reaching almost 2 million followers across all platforms, Gracie has been making waves in the world of influencer marketing in social media. Over the past year, she's been a force on Amazon Live and Amazon affiliates, producing more content, and gearing up for Q4. While considering venturing into TikTok Shop – following the footsteps of other creators like Alex Earl, the "it girl" of TikTok, who's been able to leverage their massive following effectively.
The heart of our conversation explores the power influencers have in promoting products on platforms like TikTok - a goldmine for brand visibility. Gracey gives us a peek behind the curtain of her success promoting products on Amazon and shares insights on the higher commission rates offered on TikTok Shop. We also dive into the potential of using TikTok shop to build your Amazon FBA brand, drawing examples from creators who have successfully taken advantage of this feature.
As we round up our chat, Gracey shares a wealth of actionable tips for Amazon and Walmart brands and influencers to increase their visibility and appeal. Bradley also explains some cool Helium 10 strategies for tracking competitor listings and leveraging the Helium 10 Insights Dashboard to find deals, monitor price drops, and keep an eye on coupon codes. Lastly, we take a deep look at Amazon Affiliates - a platform that offers influencers a chance to gain popularity and make an impact, and how TikTok Shop can be a potent platform for boosting your sales. This episode is full of insights for anyone interested in the fast-paced, ever-evolving sphere of influencer marketing, Amazon affiliates, and TikTok Shop.
In episode 498 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Gracey discuss:
- 00:00 - Welcome Back Gracie on Podcast
- 08:42 - The Importance of Authenticity in E-Commerce
- 14:32 - TikTok Shop's Impact on Views/Sales
- 22:27 - Expanding Audience With Non-English Videos
- 27:02 - On-Site Videos and Community Growth
- 32:12 - Amazon Insights Dashboard
- 38:05 - Importance of Amazon in Boosting Sales
Bradley Sutton:
Today we're bringing back the queen of TikTok and Amazon Live, Gracey, who's going to be talking about how she now has almost 2 million followers across all channels, why she thinks everybody should be getting on TikTok Shop and some cool ways to have some side hustle as an Amazon influencer. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. One, two, three, four, I've used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS, free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And right now I've got a shirt. I actually have people make fun of me. I have a document that documents what shirt and what hat I wear each episode, just to make sure I'm not doing the same one. I'm wearing a shirt I haven't worn before. It's one of my old school shirts. It's called I'm Huge in Japan. I did that because we're bringing somebody on the show who's pretty much huge in the entire world. All right, Gracey, the world famous Gracey, How's it going? Welcome back.
Gracey
Hi Bradley. What an introduction. That's wild. I'm happy to be back, love this podcast, one of my favorites. Thank you, Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It's like it's hard to believe that it's been over, actually over a year since you were on the podcast last. So before we get into, you know, talking shop and stuff shop, Literally. We're going to be talking about TikTok. Shop is what I want to talk about. There's no pun intended there, but let's just talk about what's going on with Gracey the human being. What's been going on with you in the last year?
Gracey
Good question. So I mean, right now, no news is good news to me. So, still working on everything I've been working on, I'm still creating content still, but doing Amazon live, still doing my social media thing and still growing there and it's going really, really well. I'm excited for you know, q4 to come around. That's been a huge topic. I just spoke at a virtual summit about that and we're talking about TikTok shop now. That's what actually what I talked about there, but upcoming projects and, like my human being, life is hopefully getting on YouTube soon as a attempt to dwell into more like a long form content instead of just doing everything so short form. That's something I'm working on.
Bradley Sutton:
Wait, wait. You didn't have a YouTube channel before, Never. You were only Instagram and TikTok.
Gracey
Facebook and Twitter and everything else except YouTube pretty much.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, my goodness, I didn't realize that. Okay, what across all your platforms? Now, how many followers are you up to combined?
Gracey
Probably close to 1.4 million, majority of them being on TikTok. But yeah about 150K on Facebook now, which is my second leading one.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, okay, interesting. Is it a Facebook page group or what so?
Gracey
I have both about 50K in the page, 150k in the group. Yeah, yeah, both I guess.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, Cool, Cool. Now just taking a step back for anybody who maybe is new to the podcast. You know, people know how I usually try and get people's complete backstory, like where they were born and stuff. We're not doing that here because Gracey, as I said, has been on the podcast before. So if you guys want to get her backstory, go to h10.me forward slash 360. So she was on episode 360 of the podcast and you can find out her story, which I forgot most of it since I have. What was that movie? Is it 51st date? What's the movie where Adam Seller forgets his memory or not? Adam Seller? Drew Barrymore forgets her. It might have been. Is it 51st?
Gracey
date I don't know, but that movie sounds about right where.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, one of them, yeah. She forgets, she resets her memory like every few days, but that's pretty much me. Anyways, let's talk. You know you said most of your followers are on TikTok. So before I even get into, you know TikTok shop for other people. Is that ever something you would consider doing, or are you just happy doing the promotional side of it?
Gracey
Do you mean you like selling on TikTok shop?
Bradley Sutton:
Like actually selling on TikTok shop, Since you've got the followers like you know, like would you ever, you know, start your own store it has crossed my mind.
Gracey
Have I done it yet? No, but I think it would be a really great opportunity for other creators to like start dishing out their own product and start, you know, creating something in that world, because I think there is a shift. I have seen it just in the past couple of weeks that creators are like hey, I came out with my own clothing line, here it is, I'm making content about it, people are buying it, creators are making commission and, of course, the sellers making their, their earnings as well. So it's kind of like a win-win. And then I actually saw a guy he he created like a journal and it was totally based off his content, his contents like motivational, how to create the life you want. And he made a journal and I guess I was pretty cheap of him to do not cheap of him to do, but like cheap to create. And and then he actually talked about how Alex Earl who do you know who that is?
Bradley Sutton:
I do not.
Gracey
She's like the it girl of TikTok. She's like blonde and really pretty but also relatable, and whatever she talks about sells out. She has like millions of followers and like all the brands are going after her because she's like the TikTok it girl, so like everything she talks about is I thought you were the TikTok girl.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
Gracey
But she ended up promoting his journal just like organically and he was like I didn't pay her a dime and brands are paying her many dimes for her to promote their product. So it's just really cool how, like creators are just picking stuff up organically from TikTok shop because they have the incentive to do so, you know so and like.
Bradley Sutton:
Now is live selling happening on TikTok at all, either through the shop or just naturally, cause I know you know that's always been a topic. It's going on three years now is why you know people can't figure out why live shopping is not taking off in America, when it is everywhere, or at least in Asia. Yeah, we'll talk about Amazon a little bit, but is live selling a thing on TikTok?
Gracey
Absolutely. So, like we can talk about the official thing and we can talk about the cultural thing. So the official thing is absolutely TikTok shop. There's three ways to shop it. There is the live shopping, where you can link products to a live stream. You have the way you can link products directly in a TikTok video like a normal TikTok. And then there's the storefronts that are on people's profiles where you can like have products linked. So those are the three ways. So officially, absolutely live selling is a thing for TikTok shop. Shall we talk about the cultural aspect.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's talk about it.
Gracey
So this is really interesting and I think it's something I've seen a lot of platforms get into recently. It's like YouTube has a new affiliate monetization platform not platform, but like program for creators to directly link products into their YouTube videos. That's like a new thing they're rolling out. Pinterest is doing it. All these different social media platforms are trying to keep people on their own platform with their interest in buying a product. That's the new thing. So you can see this huge integration of shopping and social media. But not everyone is happy about it, because TikTok is normally an entertainment app. People wanna go there to escape the corporate grind, escape the rat race, like they wanna go there to like forget about work and forget about money and all that. So there have been a couple of videos I've seen that's like how to block TikTok shop videos from your free youth feed, cause I'm sick of it. I'm sick of TikTok now and TikTok shop. I see it every other video.
Bradley Sutton:
I think I did the weekly like have you ever seen my weekly buddy show? I do right, so what was I do Like? So when I do that once a week where I just like scour the internet for new stories and one of my keywords that I follow is TikTok shop, and boom, like I swear, there was 10 articles last night about what you just said, where people are like the four you feed is like ruined. Like I got all this TikTok shop stuff, so continue, but I definitely don't wanna talk about it.
Gracey
Like people are like sharing hacks on how to basically like not have that, like those TikTok shop videos in their feed, and I just think that, regardless that that is where the future of social media is going. It's like integrating shopping and integrating e-commerce into it. However, I wanted to just say that the importance of being authentic, the importance of being like real, like people wanna see a real review but they don't wanna be sold to, and I think that's also why you mentioned before that how like live shopping isn't taking off as it is in China or in other countries, it's because people don't like being sold to here, they don't like products pushed in their face. But if they see a product, they're like, okay, that's cool, I discovered it. And they wanna feel like, okay, like, I want the product organically. They don't wanna be like, oh, someone's trying to sell me something. So that just like highlights the importance of authenticity and being real when you're talking about a product and integrating it organically instead of like coming off like an ad.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting, interesting. Okay, now you mentioned Alex. Well, I can't believe I remember her name. Alex, you just randomly mentioned this guy's journal, right, but that was an organic thing. But as far as TikTok shop goes, what are influencers like yourself or others doing on a non-organic way? Cause, like the traditional way of promoting on TikTok is all right. Here's a link. Amazon affiliate link or hit the link in my bio or whatever the case is. But now if somebody has TikTok shop, are there like affiliate links that go directly to there that an influencer can get?
Gracey
Yeah, so basically the way that people shop is there's a little tag product in the lower left corner and it says eligible for commission on the bottom and then if I was interested in the product I could click that and it would take me to basically the shops page on the back end where I could check out and all that good stuff. Something I've noticed is that the shipping times are a bit longer. Like, I wanted to purchase something yesterday and I got influenced and I think it was like gonna deliver like mid-October, so that's like close to a month away. So there's that.
Bradley Sutton:
But in terms of like, that person had to have been out of the country then I would imagine, because unless they can sell stuff out of stock, because if you're shipping for America, why would it?
Gracey
take you Right, and it wasn't out of stock because if it was out of stock the little button of tagged product would disappear, so I wouldn't be able to click on it.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah so. Okay interesting.
Gracey
Yeah, I see there's that. And then there's also, of course, the marketplace, for both creators and shoppers. Like, you can search products, you can sort by category. There's different products and there's so many joining each and every day, like when I remember when it first came out earlier this year, it was like very few. There was like maybe 10, 20 brands up there, and now I'm starting to see a lot more mainstream products come along and like now, if I'm like, oh, like, I have this product, I wanna make a video about it. More likely than not, I can find it in TikTok shop now, which is great, and I can just kind of have a product I already have in my hands and like talk about it in a video, if I want to.
Bradley Sutton:
So then You've got like this portal, kind of like the Amazon associate or affiliate associates where, by the way, I became an Amazon influencer a couple weeks ago. I haven't done anything yet, but I got the account set up, I sent some links to some friends, but I'm trying to figure out what the next step is, because I want to get I have this channel that has like 30,000 followers On YouTube and I want to like go ahead and use that to to start my Amazon influencer career. Anyway, there's a side note like that, but I noticed, you know, I can just like find a product that's on Amazon in my portal and then it creates the link. So you're seeing, on TikTok you have something similar where it's not like the, the, the owner or the, the brand has to reach out to you and give you special links. You can just see something that you're like oh, I think this might pop off, let me go ahead and create a link, and then you're sending traffic.
Gracey
Yes, so it's not really a link. It basically is like on the page before you post the video there's an option to add a product tag and then you'd like click it, add product. You search product, add a video, blah blah, and that's how it shows up.
Bradley Sutton:
Mm-hmm. How are the percentages on there?
Gracey
commission percentages. Yes really good, really good, like for the better than Amazon, I guess 50%. Not all of them are 50%, not all majority, maybe like 10 wait, wait, wait.
Bradley Sutton:
50% higher than Amazon or 50% commission commission. How was that? Even real life? Yeah, how is that possible?
Gracey
I agree the journal that I'm talking about with Alex on the whole thing. The guy created it. He was like I made it 50% commission to incentivize creators to talk about it. So maybe he's like maybe selling At a very, very, very small margin right now, but the brand awareness like that, that could be something like a big brand one day. That he's just like doing the promotion right now but creating a brand in the long term. So like I'm not saying everything's 50%, that's not sure but upwards of 50%, and I see I think a lot of them are around like 10 to 20, 30% commission, which is pretty good. I mean absolutely More than what most affiliate platforms offer.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I'm just seeing her Dumbfounded because that's, that's crazy. Like I heard, tick tock is also kind of incentivizing both the sellers and and influencers and trying to like subsidize a little bit. So I, man, that this is pretty interesting stuff, have you? Do you have? Have you had any success yourself, like where something went off, or you know, you know, I know, back in the day, you know you've talked about how you've given some sellers like six figure weekends, you know, like over a year ago. But what if that was on Amazon? What about on tick tock shop? Any, any cool stories?
Gracey
I've Humbly sold out a couple products so far, but, admittedly, I'm still focusing on Amazon a lot. I I still I haven't, like you know, sold my soul to leaving that yet, or like I still doing Amazon mostly. However, I am delving more into tick tock shop without trying to be annoying and filling my feet with it, but yeah yeah, there was a bodysuit that I did a video of and it was so silly and and Dumb it was, it was like me try it on. It was like oh, look at my belly before and then like don't even look, okay, anyway. It was like oh, this body like Now I want to find this video. But it was like, oh, here's my stomach now. And then like, oh, here's how slim I look after and it was a really good bodysuit Like I liked it, I feel, as it was good quality. It did slim. You know, it was like kind of like a shape wear bodysuit, so it was really cool. It was like a really quick like before and after it got, I think, over a million, almost two million views, something like that, and it ended up selling out and it was a million views your video.
Yeah, but but here's the thing Ticktock is absolutely pushing videos that have tick tock shop product.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah thanks like the algorithm is favoring towards okay.
Gracey
Yeah. So what I have like organically gotten those views, who knows? But because it was a tick tock shop video, I think that definitely boosted in the algorithm and it boosted the sales and it ended up selling out the product, so that was great. I don't know how long they're gonna keep pushing the videos, but that's why it's like that. It's so time-sensitive right now. It's like joining the platform as a seller is time-sensitive. Making the videos as a crater is time time sensitive. Like don't wait until it's super saturated and everyone's in on, and like they don't do these promotions anymore.
Bradley Sutton:
I know of a somebody who's in this niche From Amazon and I think it's very similar products, I believe, and they've done on tick tock shop.
Gracey
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
I think something like one or two million in four, four months or five months.
Gracey
It's just that that's amazing.
Bradley Sutton:
It's just crazy, I mean.
I mean it's so new and and people are just like you know, just going viral, like like, yes, she had a few videos that you know, like like yours. Yeah, that one viral and that's all it takes. You know, you know like not everyone, and you're like I'm looking at your channel here. It took me a while to find it. The reason I could find it is because it's not like every single one of your videos has one million, so I can just ease your skin. I mean, you're in the 10,000s, 100,000s, but you know, it's just like sometimes, so that you'll get one that gets a. I saw another one you were doing like a treadmill that had like two million. Yes, or something like that amazing product.
Gracey
Yes, that one is great and super popular. I will absolutely make another video about it. It was like a deal for a walking pad, but, yeah, it is definitely, definitely something that People should be hopping on, like on that topic. It's like on the creator side of things, tick tock is also giving creators like product samples. They're giving us coupons like hey, like get this much product and like, as long as you make videos about it, like product samples, like they're so, so, so, pushing it, and I love that because they're very supportive of both sides of like the seller, the Creator, and like they're wanting it to be the best of both worlds, which is what I was all about forever.
Bradley Sutton:
So Now would you suggest to people I mean, obviously there's influencers like yourself and I. There's obviously clear benefit with with hopefully you know somebody like you with a 1.1 million followers, you know About po, you know linking to their product, but at the same time, would you suggest to anybody who does have or is starting with tick tock shop, they should be putting out their own content as well, because who knows, you know, even without the followers, something of theirs could go viral as well. Or do you think that they should just stick to the shop and and just let the professionals do these, these videos?
Gracey
100,000%. And this is a little bit of a contradiction from like what I said before, because before I was, you know, in the Amazon world, it's like what you could do as a seller, like one of those things being live streams. I always said like hey, like, if you don't have all the time in the world to like be doing Amazon live, maybe just like focus on the brand selling part and then like have like a Amazon live Influencer or creator, do the stream for you. But in this scenario, I would absolutely a hundred thousand million percent Recommend that the brand also has, you know, content based on their product. Specifically, there is a brand of Chamoy. You know the sauce, chamoy sauce. There's a brand that is going absolutely viral on tick tock shop right now with their Chamoy and they basically make their Chamoy without any like color and whatever, but the the lady behind it. She makes so much content. She answers questions from the comments she gets. She shows the process of Making the product. She's like we sold out today, like so sorry, like more coming.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you know what that channel is?
Gracey
Yes, it's like their brand is called. I love she's an amazing example of a brand. She made it, she has a story and she's this yes, she's Kelly.
Bradley Sutton:
Don't take. So this is a brand, yes, and then now wait, this is her like this, she's doing her own.
Gracey
It's just like insight, like just like backstory. It's like, oh, like there's a real human behind this brand. This isn't a huge corporation. This isn't like it's just this lady. And she's asking questions, she's being interacted, like that is such an amazing brand example and hopefully not gonna take too much time and effort, like look, you can just make the video. It's like-.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, one thing I don't like and now I'm having to do it here is, unless I'm doing something wrong, I can't see TikTok shop on web right Like. I have to see it on my phone Cause like when I was doing something like on somebody else's the other day and I couldn't see their TikTok shop. But then I opened up my phone and it was there. I'm looking here and I can definitely see her store, her shop, on mobile, but for some reason TikTok is not allowing you to see the shop Like. So how much money is being left on the table for the old school people who are on their desktop?
Gracey
They're watching TikToks on their computer.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, interesting, anyways, okay. So, guys, I love Chamois is an example of somebody who is a brand owner and who's doing her own content. Let me go back to your page. Here Is there a video that's a good representation of like hey, here's something simple that almost anybody can do without, you know, having to have fancy equipment and stuff. Do you remember anything that I can just like look for real quick here?
Gracey
Pretty much everything I do is very, very, very low maintenance, like it's nothing studio. It's like me with my phone up with like a ring light. It's like nothing that everyone doesn't have. So let me see if there is one that I have. The bodysuit one was probably the easiest and simplest one that I have ever made for TikTok shop. Here's one. So it's a plumping lip gloss. Can I show a video? That's not mine.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, it's not even, yeah, yeah.
Gracey
Okay, and her pinned video has 20, almost 24 million views.
Bradley Sutton:
That was like 20 seconds long.
Gracey
Yes, and she's in like a dimly lit room.
Bradley Sutton:
On mobile. Is this one actually going to like a TikTok shop or anything?
Gracey
It's been sold out.
Bradley Sutton:
It's been sold out, okay, but it did. It did at one time.
Gracey
Yes, it was a TikTok shop video. It says eligible for commission, but the product is no longer tagged cause it's sold out. There are alternatives because it's now viral and I think she made it viral. So there's other products on TikTok shop that are probably the same or similar, but this specific one been sold out. And like you could do that, I could do that, our dog could do that, like anybody could make a video.
Bradley Sutton:
I've looked at it five times in a row while you're talking and I'm just like in shock. Here that's something like this could go viral. It's not, it's not unique. It's not like you know, mic drop or anything. That's that, just. That should just show yes, so how does that happen then? Is it just?
Gracey
People love a before and after. People love it simple. And here's another really interesting hack tip. Okay, so you know the, the creator named Kobi Lame. Kobi Lame, so his whole thing is that he's amassed such a huge audience because he doesn't speak in his videos, so you're not like constrained to English speaking audience. You could. You could reach any country, anybody. They don't. There's no like necessarily any need to understand English to understand what's happening in the video. Similar to that, the mega viral videos millions and millions of you, not one or two million, like millions.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah.
Gracey
They're very like. They're usually no speak, no, no speak, no talking. So, yeah, that is kind of a hack. It's like if you want to reach more people Mr Beast is the same thing he like translate his videos to like other languages to reach more more people. And like, once you start going viral on TikTok, they start promoting your videos to different countries. So, like if I had a really mega viral video, people start commenting in French and German and Italian. Like people start commenting in different languages. So don't cut yourself off. If you do like a simple like showing the product, no words, or maybe just text on screen, super simple. You're not talking before and after done.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, where? Where can I go or anybody listening to sign up to be? What is it called? Is it called TikTok affiliates or TikTok partners?
Gracey
So yeah, there, if you're a creator, I think there's a requirement of a minimum of 5,000 followers and on TikTok it's not like Instagram, it's like on TikTok you could do that in two, three weeks. If you're like consistent and you try, you could get those followers. So that's the requirement If you are an affiliate or a TikTok shop creator. If you're a seller, I don't think there's any requirement to be able to you know, sell or Link to your own, let your own stuff, because you're not you're not getting like a commission on your own stuff, Okay that makes sense yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, yeah, I just had recently the Rainmaker family on and they were talking about the Amazon influencer program, how it's a great way for people who you know they have this big community of like stay at home moms that's what they focus on and a lot of them don't have a lot of startup capital to just start their own private label business. So one thing they've been doing in their community for those people is that they become Amazon influencers and then they just start making all the you know Videos of everything in their house you know that could be found on Amazon, start uploading it to all those listings and then, you know, some of them make, you know, $500 a month, can make up to $1,000 a month. That's just, you know, a little steady income to build up some capital. So I think that that it almost sounds like the. Probably there's probably a higher ceiling on TikTok for somebody to do that, but the caveat is they need to have the 5,000 Followers first correct, and also for the Amazon influence program.
Gracey
There there is like a small gateway to get into the program, but once you're in the program. I just wanted to add on to what you just said. Yes, people can make $500 a thousand dollars a month. I also know people making Unbelievable amounts of money from just on-site videos.
Bradley Sutton:
So let's go ahead and switch back to Amazon. Now, then. Like, what is taking up your time on Amazon? Like, how much are you spending Amazon lives? Are you doing what I just said, like just doing videos for, for random products you think might go viral, or you just doing collabs with brands? So what's your? What's your day-to-day like on Amazon?
Gracey
Yeah, so I'm still doing Amazon live. I've been doing that consistently since start of 2021. I still do that two to three times a week and that is something I plan to keep doing until the cows come home, I don't know, and yeah. And then a lot of what I do day to day is just social media posting of like promo code deals, helping people find the requests of products that they're looking for Deals on. Like a lot of times I'll ask my community, like what are you guys looking to buy today? And then I'll they'll be like oh, baby, products, treadmill, whatever, whatever long list of items. And I'll just do a lot of research, finding the best deals, promo codes, coupons. That's a lot of where my time goes and then posting them. But I post them knowing that there's somebody looking for that specific product. So I know that there's an audience for that and I can also just like cater to what they're looking for instead of just posting willy-nilly. And then there's also, of course, the video creation of like TikTok, instagram reels, the short form content that you see on my TikTok. There's that, that as well, and the on-site video, which is like another aspect of this whole thing. Now, I haven't focused as much time on on-site videos as I absolutely should have, or have already, and the reason what's on-site video? It's like the shoppable videos that people can post their storefront and the listings and they get okay, okay. When you mentioned. Yeah, so I haven't been focusing on that as much because I've been focusing so much on all the off-site aspect. But the reason for that is because On-site will forever and always be controlled by Amazon, like they have, you know, the ability to Rotate videos out, rotate videos in they they can change the video placements and there's all those different options that are kind of out of our control. So I want to focus more on growing what I can control my own audience, keeping up with that community, and you know, like when you have a community, you got to keep showing up for them. Yep to keep them, and so I think I want to dedicate more time to on-site videos, but I can't do so at the loss of my community, so I just thought I like time, manage it better and Do more on-site videos, of course, because that is super lucrative if you put a lot of time into it. And Amazon, I definitely see, is focusing more on quality over quantity and obviously doing more quality control for their inspire feed as well. You know so there's a million ways to make money in this program. It's almost overwhelming.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you on On Instagram? Are you sending all of your traffic to to Amazon still, or have you started funneling some to tick-tock Shop at all?
Gracey
Um, so I can't really do tick-tock shop Traffic directing on Instagram, so most of my Instagram is still geared towards Amazon, but I try to keep the tape.
Bradley Sutton:
How do you do that, by the way? Probably talk about this before. Are you doing like a Lincoln bio, or or? Okay, okay.
Gracey
Yeah, yeah, so I'll just have the Link under the product and then I'll have that page where in the profile where people can click on it if they want something. Yeah, that's what you can do. And another thing that I've seen a lot of people do is like using chatbots, so that there's like a double edge to benefit to that, actually, because whenever I say like you can see my description of my Instagram posts, it's like comment this keyword for the link and then Whatever people comment on your post, which boosts engagement, then they would get sent the link to the link page, basically Similar to the page in my bio, but they could then get the link to Amazon from there. So I've seen that a lot of people do that and it's going well.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, now, if I, if I'm a brand, you know, be it on tick-tock or be on Amazon, and I'm trying to, like you know, get somebody of your caliber and following to post my product, it's gonna probably cost me a decent amount of coin. But then, like you said, you sometimes just find stuff on your own, you know? Yeah, like that's probably most of what you do. How do I Make myself more Findable by you or become more attractive to you when you're searching the? You know the, you know whatever you're searching? How can we do that to get on your radar?
Gracey
So are you talking like Amazon or tick-tock or kind of just?
Bradley Sutton:
Both, both.
Gracey
Okay. So I Am specifically like a deal person, so I'm always looking for the best deals. If you have a good deal running and it's a good product for my audience, I'm more than likely post it. But I understand that not everyone can have these hefty promo codes and deals that they put on their products. So I Would say, if you have some sort of like buzz going around your product and that could literally just Be a micro influencer posting about it, and then it catches on and it goes viral and that will start a tidal wave of you know a trendy product, and there's that, of course. But it requires a little bit of luck and very dust. I'm trying to think there there is the structure of like increased commission. I've been getting a lot of inquiries about my brands on tick-tock shop. They're like hey, if you create a product with my tick-tock shop link, then I will give you 30, 40, 50 percent commission and that's like a deal that you can do. Instead of like 50 percent commission for everyone on tick-tock shop, it's like just for you working with the brand. So you could offer a very hefty increased commission with the offer of just including my product in your video. You could do that too, and I'm sure if you reached out to the right people they would be down to do it because again, like they're getting paid on performance and they're getting paid a good commission, a commission you probably. It's very hard to get on Amazon 50% unless you're working with yeah affiliate program.
Bradley Sutton:
But yeah, I'm gonna give you something that I probably shouldn't make public, but Okay, like I was gonna do this on my own, it's something new that helium-10 has, but maybe now you know you can get, you can definitely use this new feature of helium-10, but I don't know. I really should keep this myself. It's that, it's. I think it's pretty valuable, but I Like to give, so I'm gonna just so, and then you can tell me if that my concept is even correct. Again, I'm an I'm a newbie when it comes to being an Amazon associate or whatever it's called. So we have this new thing called Insights dashboard. It's been out for most of the year, but the new part is you're going to be able to track competitor listings. Now, how it's worked until now is like if I'm a seller on Amazon, I've got my coffin shelf. Well, I'm gonna track just five of the other coffin shelves and. I wanna know, like when they're running coupons or if they go out of stock or this or that happens. But how it's gonna be soon is you can add products to track that aren't even tied to competitors. So somebody like you is not selling on Amazon. You don't have competitors per se. So what I was planning to do and now everybody can just go ahead and copy this but what I was planning to do is like go in and grab, go to some top BSR list of some trending subcategories be it body suits or whatever that I think I could sell and then just add like the top 100 BSRs, and then I can set notifications like let me know if they lower their price by this percent, or let me know if they start running a coupon, or let me know if this one goes out of stock, because now I know this other one, but it'll just give notifications instead of me having to like refresh pages every day. Like that theoretically should work right, like it'd be cool for an influencer like you know me.
Gracey
Do you read what I think? So like the question. There is like the promo code or the deal would have to be public facing it would be like a price drop or a coupon.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes yes. Because you got me thinking about that too, and when you were talking about how you're looking for deals.
Gracey
I mean, that's the whole name of your and not all of them are public facing, which is like the whole. Like time to search? Yeah, okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, some just go to prime members, some just go to repeat buyers but then, like a lot of times they don't even do a coupon or something because they don't want to have to pay Amazon for every. You know, if they're running an Amazon coupon, they got to pay Amazon, you know, a certain amount. So they might just do a sale price and then we can detect that you know like where they guess. And actually most of the time I do that for my products because the badge that shows up. If you just do a sale price, like if it's the lowest price in 30 days, it's like, just as you know, stick outable yeah, if that's the word it sticks out just as much in the search results as like a coupon. So sometimes I'll do that. But, all right, there you go. Guys, there's a tip of the day If you want to become, or hack of the day, a cheat, a deal cheat of the day if you want to find some deals on Amazon, you know, once that feature comes out in Helium 10, just add a whole bunch of some trending stuff so that you can get a notification as soon as a coupon or a sale price goes on.
Gracey
I definitely think it's helpful because there are, just like in my head, a bunch of best sellers that have done well, regardless of the season, regardless of whatever I'm talking about. So like. I would be able to, you know, add those best seller products and then, whenever the deal happens yeah, I'm just thinking through my head, but absolutely I think it's super helpful.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So I mean, I know we haven't. We've been kind of jumping all over the place because that's the way my brain works, guys, but I hope you guys can see the potential here. I mean, we could probably have a three hour podcast where we just talk about all of the cool videos that we see and what she does, but we're just scratching the surface, guys. So there's two ways to look at this, in my opinion. Number one if you're a brand owner and you don't wanna dance or do anything, totally fine, there's influencers who might pick up your product. Or you can get them in front of influencers like Gracey, who might show your product and, who knows, they might even do it organically. So, but you gotta be on TikTok shop in the first place to even let that happen. And then, or number two you know, if you're a brand owner, you can be like that. I already forgot what it was. What's your-.
Gracey
Chamoy Chamoy.
Bradley Sutton:
I love Chamoy I love Chamoy. Right, I love Chamoy and she is bringing hundreds of thousands, millions of views and visibility. You know what? I'm gonna just check something real quick. I'm gonna do this live and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I'm on Amazon here. I was looking at your page, by the way, I love Cham. Oh my goodness, look at all of this. Look at this.
Gracey
I love this. This is.
Bradley Sutton:
Helium Tendetta 5,000 search volume for this brand that probably nobody had ever heard of on Amazon, but because of the TikTok All right, I love Chamoy. Sugar free is 3,000 search volume. So this is what happens, guys. You know you have something go viral. Yes, you're gonna start getting some action on TikTok shop, but then there's other people who are old like me and who are trying to look at TikTok on a desktop and couldn't even get to the shop. So if that happens, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna go to Amazon and look up I love Chamoy. Maybe I don't know what this old TikTok shop is, as dang whippersnappers doing this. I'm gonna go to Amazon because I trust Amazon. So, and two days ship or same day shipping. Oh my God, I can't imagine it. I live in the suburbs and I get same day shipping all the time. It just boggles my mind. I'm not even in the big city, but anyways, guys. So this is like this is gonna be the thing in. I mean, it might be the ready to thing right now, but I think in 2024, like TikTok shop might start giving Walmart a run for their money as far as number two next to Amazon. They don't have the distribution at work. Obviously, that's gonna be a big. Like you said, one month shipping time is nobody wants that, but the views are there. This is where people of all generations I'm making fun of my oldness here, but people way older than me are addicted to TikTok. It's not just for young people. But anyways, any last strategies on something that we haven't talked about or something that we have, but you can just say something a little bit different.
Gracey
I just wanna highlight the thing we just found out. It's like, while it might be viral on TikTok shop, those sales always translate to Amazon because their Amazon has the consumer trust, they have the easy checkout process, they have the fast shipping, the customer service. Even sometimes I am like I don't wanna wait even a week for shipping on TikTok shop, but I see it, it's viral, it's available on Amazon, I'll always buy it on Amazon. So it's like those sales, even if it has nothing to do with Amazon, it actually does and you just saw that with Chamoy.
Bradley Sutton:
Yep, I love it. I might buy it right now, as a matter of fact. All right, so people want to find you on the intro. We almost went through all of your socials already, but go ahead and repeat how people can reach out to you or find you out there.
Gracey
It is dealcheats on all platforms D-E-A-L-C-H-E-A-T-S, and my email is contact at dealcheats.com.
Bradley Sutton:
Gracey, thank you so much for bringing your very unique knowledge. I've been talking a lot of people about TikTok. I've been talking to Norm, who I know is your. Are you a Star Wars fan at all? A little bit you suck. But I was about to say Norm is kind of like your Padawan apprentice, you're like the Jedi master, because he was telling me you're training him to be an official Amazon influencer and he seems to be doing a good job. Like I saw I was looking at his channel. But anyways, like everybody knows a little bit about this stuff, but like you're the one, you're the go-to person in the industry. We just kind of cool when I think about it. You came out of nowhere, I did you know. Like all of a sudden I was like who's this person? I see popping up everywhere that's talking about influencers. I just love how Amazon, just like you know, things go viral on Amazon, things go viral in the Amazon influencer world like this. So it's awesome, I think.
Gracey
I'm out of nowhere it does and I love it, and I've discovered so much and learned so much from the brands and sellers as well. So a great team, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, all right, thank you, Gracey. I hope to see you at an upcoming event, if not this year, then maybe sometime next year.
Gracey
Sounds good, thank you.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week. Amazon planning major AI revamp that will change the search experience https://searchengineland.com/amazon-revamp-change-search-experience-432913 Walmart experiments with generative AI tools that can help you plan a party or decorate https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/04/walmart-experiments-with-new-generative-ai-tools-that-can-help-you-plan-a-party-or-decorate-a-space/ TikTok halts e-commerce service in Indonesia following ban https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/04/tiktok-halts-e-commerce-service-in-indonesia-following-ban.html Report: Amazon made $1B with secret algorithm for spiking prices Internet-wide https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/report-amazon-made-1b-with-secret-algorithm-for-spiking-prices-internet-wide/ Serious Sellers Podcast #497 – Amazon Vine 101 + Changes to the Vine Program! https://www.helium10.com/podcast/amazon-vine-101-changes-to-the-vine-program/ Etsy "experiments” lead to loss of income for many Sellers. Sellers noticed a significant decrease in sales without knowing why. After the issue began to be addressed in Etsy Forums, sellers did not know whether it was a technical problem or an "experiment". https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/letters/blog.pl?/pl/2023/10/1696187388.html Shopify CEO discouraging staff from side hustles that divert attention from company https://torontosun.com/business/money-news/shopify-ceo-discouraging-staff-from-side-hustles-that-divert-attention-from-company
Lastly, we delve into the ins and outs of Helium 10’s Keyword Tracker and it’s boost button which allows you to track your keywords 24 hours a day in various browsing scenarios, a tactic endorsed by none other than Manny Coats, the founder of Helium 10. We discover the direct impact of inventory levels, keyword ranks, and inventory heat maps on your page views and impressions. To top it all off, we'll teach you how to prepare for the unexpected by setting up alerts for sudden drops in keyword ranks and understanding how your inventory location might affect shipping times. This episode is packed full of insights, strategies, and revelations that every serious seller must know - so get ready and join us for the ride!
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley discussed:
- 01:12 - Amazon AI Search
- 04:02 - Walmart AI Search
- 07:11 - TikTok Shop Closes
- 07:45 - Secret Amazon Algorithm?
- 12:42 - Amazon Vine New Prices
- 13:34 - Etsy Testing Troubles
- 14:55 - Shopify Side Hustle
- 16:15 - Catch Helium 10 In Rumble
- 16:30 - ProTraining Tip: Boosted Keyword Tracking in Browsing Scenarios
- 28:52 - Keyword Fluctuation & Inventory Impact on Amazon Rankings
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► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon and Walmart are all in on generative AI search. TikTok shop in a certain country closes. Is there a secret Amazon algorithm that costs consumers a billion dollars, plus a special in-depth pro training on why you should be tracking keywords at different browsing scenarios. All of this and more on today's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that's going on in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce world and we give you training tips of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. We've got a lot of news articles that we're going to go over today. And make sure to stay to the end, because I'm going to go in-depth on a topic that I think might change the way you track your keywords. Nothing new, but it's something that you guys need to be doing, and I'm going to demonstrate exactly why it's important. So let's go ahead and hop into the news right now. The first article that we're going to go over is actually from searchengineland.com and it's entitled Amazon Planning Major AI Revamp that will change the search experience. This article says All right, now, this was a document that they're calling this project Nile or something like that, but basically they're talking about Amazon creating AI-powered conversational shopping agents. Now, I saw a lot of the documents that this was on and there's some like maybe some contradictory information. Like they did talk about how, like when, non-personalized search results actually perform better, but then, at the same time, they're talking about okay, this new initiative is going to really put an emphasis on personalized search results. So a little bit of contradiction. I'm not sure which side of the coin I'm on, but at this meeting that Amazon had, they said hey, before you commerce, the sales person in the store was your search engine and that individual knew everything about the products. They would look at you and know what you might want, because customers like you have been to that store before. So this is something that has been talked about for a while, about how Amazon is investing heavily in AI, and then the question is going to, of course, end up being well, how is that going to change the seller experience? We don't know.
Bradley Sutton:
They say this is going to come out sometime in 2024. I find it very, very hard to believe. It's just going to be like some chat GPT prompt. It's going to take over the search bar. I mean the search as it is now. It's hard to beat that. You test, type in two words like coffin shelf, and boom, you get pictures and prices of exactly what you're looking for. How do you beat that? Anything more is going to cost the customer more work. So I don't think this is going to be something that takes over all search, but some niche searches. Maybe somebody might want to go a little bit deeper and say I'm looking for a coffin shaped shelf that customers feel can be used for displaying shot glasses and has multiple color options. Now could there be somebody who might want to search like that? Sure, I'm not one of them. I'm not going to be sitting there typing all those words with my fingers on a phone, but hey, there's definitely going to be people out there who might want that level of detail, and so it's going to be interesting to see how you can do that, how Amazon's going to integrate this. Is this going to change the way Helium 10 works, or the necessity to optimize, or listening for the right keywords and looking at what has search problem? Of course, not, not at all. It might add stuff later on that you might have to optimize for, but the core functionality you guys have been doing probably is going to stay the same, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
The next article here is from TechCrunch and also about search and AI, this time about Walmart. This article is entitled Walmart experiments with generative AI tools that can help you plan a party or decorate. It's so funny, like these days, like Amazon news comes out with something, Walmart comes out with something similar. Like the next day, Walmart comes out with something and Amazon comes out with something. I love the arms race here. This is good stuff. It's good for sellers, good for consumers, that these giants are kind of like racing to integrate different tools and experiences. Now, Walmart didn't say in this article which AI models it's going to use to develop these features, but they're experimenting with generative AI and it's going to include a shopping assistant, you know, kind of similar to what Amazon was talking about, and it says here that it's going to allow customers to have a more interactive and conversational experience, as it can answer specific questions, provide personalized product suggestions and share detailed information, all right. So this is going to be something interesting, you know, like it gives an example. It says, for example, if a customer wants to plan for a unicorn themed birthday, the AI displays a wide array of products such as balloons, paper napkins, streamers and so on, instead of having to type in numerous separate searches. Walmart's new AI search tools designed to save customers time that wouldn't save me time, like when I'm about to buy something. I know what I want, you know. So, again, this is going to be something that some people are going to love. Some people are like nope, just give me the old search. You know I'm talking about. When I say some people, I mean consumers, you know. So it's going to be interesting how this goes on.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, if you're, if you guys are, new to AI and have never you know, have never really worked with it, you know, just real quick segue here inside of helium 10, if you want an experience about how this kind of works, it's not shopping, obviously. But inside of helium 10, guys, on the very top right, okay, on the top right of your screen, right next to like, there's a what's new tab. Hit the button that said that that looks like a magnifying glass. All right, looks like a magnifying glass. And if you do that, it actually opens up a chat window. All right. Now this is using, I believe, chat GPT, and you could say things like how do I track keyword ranks daily? I'm just going to give an example here and I enter it in and what this AI is doing is it's looking through, like our videos and our knowledge base and things like that, and then right here it gives an answer to track keyword ranks daily. You can use the keyword tracker feature in helium 10, simply enter the keyword, blah, blah, blah. So so, guys, I'm not sure how many of y'all know that. Let me know in the comments below how many of you guys knew that there's a full chat GPT AI assistant inside of helium-10 that can, like, answer questions on how to use the tools and stuff. So make sure to use that. And then now think about how that's going to look now inside of Amazon, something similar like that. You know something to think about?
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, let's switch from Amazon and Walmart and let's go to the next article. This is from CNBC and it's entitled TikTok halts E-commerce Service in Indonesia following ban. Alright, this is not new news. We talked about this last week, how in the Indonesian government gave TikTok an ultimatum of one week, say, hey, if you don't remove TikTok shop and make it separate, we're shutting your whole platform down. So what did TikTok do? Like, fine, we're gonna go ahead and and take away, you know, TikTok shop. So that's a huge blow to TikTok because Indonesia is a the largest market for them in that, in that region. So RIP TikTok shop in Indonesia.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is from arstechnia.com and it's entitled Report Amazon made one billion dollars with secret algorithm for spiking prices internet-wide. Now this, this is one of those, those articles that kind of made my blood boil. First I'm like, okay, this is interesting, like what this is? You know, this is new stuff that hasn't been talked about and and if this is true, you know, obviously that's an issue, you know. Finally, I was thinking, wow, finally is there a legitimate thing that Amazon is being investigated on by the FTC. But this thing was called they say, codename Project Nessie, and it says it allegedly works by manipulating rivals, weaker pricing algorithms and locking competitors into higher prices. The controversial algorithm was allegedly used for years, all right, and helped Amazon improve their profits. Now, first of all, it even says here that they stopped using it in 2019. So, first of all, guys, this has nothing to do with any of you sellers right now, because even the FTC, it seems like, admits that this was stopped in 2019, or somebody said it was stopped in 2019. But the weird thing is here is the FTC alleges says Amazon has successfully taught its rivals that lower prices are unlikely to result in increased sales. The opposite of what could happen in a well-functioned market. Like this doesn't make sense.
Bradley Sutton:
You know the Amazon price matching. Price matching, like, always helps everybody, you know, except a seller. Sometimes you guys remember how I mean those of you who you know. Four or five years ago even, you know you would shop at Best Buy and then you could like price match Amazon and vice versa. Where you could price, you know, if somebody else had a cheaper, amazon would give you, you know, like, a little rebate. Vice versa, if Target had a cheaper Walmart, you know it would make up the difference and things like that. Like that actually helps consumers, because when somebody's running a coupon, that means, like all the other major players would have to, you know, like, run a coupon or run a discount to try and match it. So like I'm not sure exactly what is the problem for for sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, you know, amazon right away responded and then they said hey, you know, this was a project. Yeah, there was a such thing as Project Nessie. Who named it? You know, they didn't say, but it says they were trying to stop price matching from resulting in an unusual outcomes where prices became so low that they were unsustainable. Okay, it's kind of kind of reasonable. You know, I'm not a little bit of a not sure what's going on there, but hey, that sounds reasonable, right, they didn't work as intended. They said, so we scrapped it several years ago and they kept saying, hey, this is not how competition works. The FTC has it backwards and if they were successful in this lawsuit, the result would be anti competitive, anti consumer, and that's what I've been saying to you. It's like the things that Amazon, that the FTC was complaining about I don't know about this Nessie thing, but was like hey, amazon is like making sellers match low prices on other websites I mean, that's like for the consumer. It's so weird how the FTC is talking out of both sides. Now, this is just what made my blood kind of boil here.
Bradley Sutton:
Later on they did a press release the FTC and get a load of this. All right. They said Amazon's far reaching schemes impact hundreds of billions of dollars retail sales over here. First of all, yes, I mean like now, you know, best buy Walmart, everybody's got a price match Amazon, you know. And if Amazon, you know, has these, you know that's why Amazon is doing big deal days. The entirety of Walmart now has a big deal day, or I don't know what they call it, holiday big day or something like that. You know, yes, amazon is is affecting a lot of sales, but in a bad way? I don't think so. It's in a good way. It's in a good way because now everybody has to try and keep up with Amazon. And then take a look at this. They say they touch hundreds of thousands of products sold by businesses, big and small, and affect over a hundred million shoppers. The FTC's press release said sell them.
Bradley Sutton:
In the history of US antitrust law, has one case had the potential to do so much good for so many people Said this dude from the FTC like bro, come on, are you serious around? Like, like we Amazon sellers are, are very scared of this even ever happen? I don't. I personally don't think this is gonna go through, just because it's so, so ridiculous, some of these, these things. But but I mean, you're not helping anybody now who knows? A lot of the FTC thing is still redacted. So who knows? There might be stuff in there that are legitimate complaints, because we know Amazon sellers have a million complaints About Amazon, right, you know there's a lot of things that we don't like. You know, I was just dealing with something today where a removal order was taking like 90 days or something. It's just a pain in the neck sometimes. But the weird thing is the stuff that has been released in this FTC thing, none of it is the stuff that Amazon sellers are mainly complaining about. Yet they're just coming up with this random, random stuff here. Anyways, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too much.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's go ahead and go to more positive news here, and the. The next one's coming from seller central, and it is about a new pricing tiers for Amazon Vine. So now, instead of having to pay $200 from one up to 30 reviews, you can get two reviews in Vine for free. All right, you or you can say hey, no, you know what, I only want to get up to 10 reviews and then that's only gonna be $75 or the existing tier up to 30 for $200. So if you guys want more information on this, we actually interviewed one of the leads At Amazon for the Amazon Vine program. Ah me, she was great. It's her first podcast. She did awesome, so make sure to check that out. Episode 497 you could get that episode h10.me forward slash 497 tons more information in that document or in that podcast about the new Vine program.
Bradley Sutton:
Switching marketplaces we're going to Etsy. This was from e-commerce bites. It says s e-test lead to lost income from sellers. So we think we got problems on Amazon. Etsy just like on their own, just start deciding to do some tests with the titles. Actually, amazon was doing that too for a while, but Etsy gave no notice for these changes. And then they were. They were just like taking random words out of the title and taking punctuation out of title and making it look like the sellers Can't even speak English because the titles didn't even make any sense. And so at you know Etsy sellers. It says they were trying to go back in and fix the listings and stuff. But it's kind of crazy. You know, like Etsy does so many things, like Etsy remove like a few of my products, saying it violates and, and, and you guys think that Amazon seller support is bad. Etsy is a billion times worse. Let me just say that right now, like there is no support, like like they completely suspend the listing and they say there is no way that you can, you know, follow up on this. It's a final you know, don't even ask us about it. Basically, they sent me a message. I'm like what in the world this is like. This is very you know, this is a legitimate Etsy product. So, guys, you know, like, where there's no marketplace out there, that's gonna be perfect, right? Amazon has mistakes, Esty has mistakes, Walmart has issues. We just got to, you know, figure out a deal with it and move on.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of different Marketplaces, Shopify CEO, is this next article from Toronto Sun? Says he's discouraging staff from side hustles that divert attention From the company. Now, this is just something that doesn't necessarily have to do with e-commerce, but I wanted to get your guys opinion on this because, basically, here he said hey, he doesn't want staff to take on side gigs that divert their attention away from the company, says I'm not talking about, like, yoga classes on the side and coaching a, a soccer team or something. You know my kid soccer team but he didn't want people like doing their own Shopify stores and then having it like go big. He's saying, hey, no, if you're a Shopify employee and you actually do, you know, do a Shopify store and it gets bigger, you know, higher staff, or give it away or something. That's kind of interesting. So the reason I brought this article up was I'm just curious about about you guys. If you have Employees in your Amazon business, are you okay with them having like side hustles on the side, you know, like having their own Amazon business on the side, or do you want them a hundred percent focus on your business? All right, that's it for the news today. We had tons of be interesting to see what happens with some of these things that are that are ongoing.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, before we move on to our really important pro training Wanted to, you know, let you guys know, we're launching new platforms every week. You know, last week we launched on Twitter where we're doing a live video, so make sure to follow us on on Twitter, on twitch as well, and then one platform that a lot of customers want us to get on was rumble. You know it's. I didn't even know what rumble was. It's kind of like YouTube, and then I started watching rumble because on YouTube my sumo wrestling that I always watch Got canceled on YouTube, you know, for some, whatever reason. Now they're on rumble. So I'm like, okay, now I know rumble for sumo wrestling, but now instead of just sumo wrestling, you can know it for helium 10. So, guys, go to h10.me Forward slash rumble, make your own account if you don't have one h10.me forward slash rumble, and then hit follow here and then you'll be able to see we're uploading like old helium 10 podcast Episodes and training videos and things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, guys, let's talk about keyword tracking. You know a lot of customers ask me what is that boost feature and why is it important. You know, like why? It's kind of annoying, I don't want to have to click it every 10 days, so I'm just gonna forget about it unless you tell me why it's important, all right. So for those who don't know, boost is the feature where, inside of keyword tracker, you hit this rocket ship Over here and then what it does is it starts checking keywords 24 hours a day, 24 times a day in different browsing scenarios. All right, so that's the key there, and so I'm gonna show you why helium pen has been doing this. Oh, I mean and this is, this is nothing new like 2017, when keyword tracker first came out 2018 as well, it had boost, all right, so so this is something that Manny coats, the founder of helium 10, is very important to him. But why is the question?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, why do we need to check different browsing scenarios? First of all, what is different browsing scenarios mean? Different browsing scenario is an edge browser, a chrome browser, edge in private mode, chrome incognito mode, safari browser, a mobile browser, a zip code in Minnesota, an address in Miami Florida. So it's like geo location, you know, like different addresses. It's also different browsing scenarios logged in, logged out. Basically, what happens is is Usually for like that. You know, the biggest selling products, a lot of their keyword ranks, stay kind of steady. You know, regardless of the browsing scenario, you know a lot of the keywords will stay pretty steady, but on the flip side, there might be just as many products and just as many keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
We're based on these browsing scenarios. You know whether I'm using a chrome browser, whether I'm signed in, whether I'm signed out, whether I'm using Safari, whether I'm in in Brooklyn, new York, whether I'm in San Diego, California, you might see different search results, right, and that's always been the case, like where people say, hey, how come you know my, my keyword tracker, my cerebral, looks different than what I'm looking at on Amazon? That's cause we're not using your Chrome browsers to actually go search for keyword ranks. You know, whatever your scene in keyword tracker is not necessarily the same as what the rank that we put, you know what browsing scenario that we chose. So I want to go in now and kind of like really illustrate just how much of an impact this potentially can have and why you should be using boosted, why you should care about different browsing scenarios. All right, let's hop right into it. Right now I am in an edge browser, right, Microsoft Edge. Like can't believe anybody uses that, huh. And I am here in the San Marcos zip code. All right, san Marcos is very near to me here in San Diego and I searched coffin shelf.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, now you take a look at the first line of search results. You see, you know three competitors. There's a makeup coffin shelf and then here's at one of our products. You know, one of our coffin bookshelf products is page one position for you know the second line of results, there's a bat shelf, three coffin shelves and a couple other coffin shelves and a makeup shelf. Now let's just compare. I am in the same exact browser, which is edge. All right, here I put a different address. I put my old address in Brooklyn, new York, one one, two, one Brooklyn Heights, right there. All right, this is the same search done at the same time. Now, if we look at the search results, the very first line, it looks like it's the same. But look at page one, position three, this is actually a completely different makeup shelf. That is here. All right, the other three products are actually the same. Like I said, you know a lot of times it is the same, but here this, this epic gifts coffin shelf, is completely different.
Bradley Sutton:
What has page one, position three from San Marcos, california, compared to Brooklyn, new York? As I scroll down to the next line of search results, it's even more different. You know, like like, this bat shelf is nowhere to be found. Here is that one. That's page one, position three, in one address, and now it's like page one, position 10 in another one. All right, so this is basically what we mean by, first of all, like the geo location or different address, different city. You know that you're putting in to Amazon. You could have different results in the same exact browser based on that and that, I think, kind of you know, makes sense to most people.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, one interesting thing it's not necessarily about the shipping time, all right. So, for example, remember that that that listing we said was different. The page one, position three, the coffin makeup shelf. Here, as you can see, for New York, it says it would be delivered on October 10th or October six is the fastest delivery. All right. Now that same exact product in San Diego. It's page one, like position 10,. You know it's way down the page. But look at the shipping time. It's either October 10th or October six, exactly the same. So the keyword rank here it wasn't that, oh, it can ship faster to New York. That's why it's going to be higher up there. Now, sometimes that might be the case, but it's. You can't always think that, oh, okay, this 100% ranking has to do with how fast Amazon can ship, because that's not the way that Amazon, uh, works across the board. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Now next thing let's, this was edge signed in. Let's now go to edge in private, all right, so this is now like edge in Cognito mode, I guess, if you were, I did the same exact addresses. All right, again, San Marcos, California, and then I did Brooklyn, New York. Now this is like literally the same address. So the difference is one is an edge browser and one is edge in private mode. All right, take a look at the first line. There's like two here for San Marcos. There are two coffin make, those two coffin makeup shelves that were at different places. On the other, uh, listening, or the other, uh, browsing scenario. These are all in the top row. Now let's again compare it to the same exact city. Right here, this is San Marcos. Right, look at the top line of search results Completely different. Where's our, our product? Our double coffin shelf is nowhere to be found on on the same exact one.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's go ahead and scroll down. It's not in the second line of products, it's not in the third line of products. It's all the way in the fourth line of products. All right. And again, was this necessarily about shipping? No, look, look at our product. It says delivery on the 12th or seventh. All right, in the same scenario delivery on the 12th or seventh. But one is ranked page one position for and just because of the different browser we're using, the other one was ranked halfway down, uh, page one, all right. Now take a look at this. If I scroll down page one in the in private, I see this crazy ugly looking grotesque, grotesque here, uh, like knife holder. That's a skull, right, it's gross. Looking Now in Brooklyn on the in private, let's see if I see that. Yep, there, it is right, there, it's all the way down the page.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, guys, this was not anywhere on page one, one in the same exact address, just a different browser, that that product was nowhere to be found. So you guys see, this is what we mean by different browsing scenarios. It's not just about address, it's not just about shipping time. You could have different search results. All right Doesn't mean one is right, one is wrong, just different results. It is what, it is, all right. What are some other examples? Let's go ahead and switch to a Google Chrome. All right, now I'm in Google Chrome. Now here's the thing Some people, you know, might think that, oh well, is the different locations? Is it only about, like, different states, or maybe it's different cities, or no, it's not cities, it's zip code. No answer is none of the above Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Sometimes, even within the same zip code, will have different rankings in the same exact browser. All right, watch this. This is Google Chrome, right here? Right, I put in look at this 92078 up here as a address and then in this other window 92078, I actually put a specific, a different, specific address that the other one. All right, so two different addresses, same exact zip code, same exact browser. Let's take a look at the search results. All right, line one, it goes uh, the, the Amazon's choice, and two coffin makeup shelves and then one other coffin shelf. Let's take a look at the other address Only one coffin makeup shelf and then another product that wasn't even in the top of the page. Okay, this is the same exact zip code, guys. Just two different addresses, same exact browser and we are getting different results. If I go further on this page, I found another listing that was on one on page one. It wasn't even on page one on the other one.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the other reason why you know it's not just about the address is, like you know, there's fulfilled by merchant. All right, so take a look over here. I just actually activate. This was a test product. I was doing some keyword testing on for episode 500 that's coming up on the podcast and it's a coffin bath tray, right, and I just threw it on here here I put Brooklyn, New York, all right, Brooklyn, New York address. And this is fulfilled by merchant. And I'm obviously in California. Amazon knows I'm in California, they know where I'm shipping from, I've got my shipping tiers and it's saying this is page one, position five, looks like five or six, right here, all right, and this is a fulfilled by merchant. Now, if I actually change this zip code, let me go ahead and change this zip code to let's go ahead and change it to something in San Marcos, really close to me, right, so that Amazon knows I, you know I'm shipping it, it's probably gonna deliver the next day, you know, because I'm shipping it right from here.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's take a look at the search results. You would think that it would go all the way up to page one, position like two or three. Let's take a look, nope, nope, it's in the exact same position and this time, page one, position six, Like. So again, if Amazon was like just strictly going on shipping time, you would see a little bit more consistency with the fluctuations. Now, that being said, the whole reason why we check different addresses and different browsing. Scenario again is that there is fluctuation, sometimes based on an address, sometimes based on a browser. And why is this important? All right, like why. Why should you care about this? Let me show you a great example of this.
Bradley Sutton:
Going back to that coffin shelf product all right, here is my keyword tracker that I had on boost sometime this summer, in May. All right Now, as you can see those of you watching on this look here like in the beginning of May, I had like pretty consistent rank. I had boost on and you could see it was only fluctuating my rank between like five and 10,. Right Now, look at what my impressions were for that day. Like the way you can see your impressions and page views is right on your insights dashboard of helium 10, your dashboard. You just set the dates. I set it right here to May six through May 13th and I scroll down here. I can see this at the parent level. I just wanna see all the impressions at the parent level and let's see what it was 1310 page views, 603 sessions. All right, it was doing pretty good here at the beginning of May.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, going back to that keyword, look what happened the second week of May. You guys see what's happening. All of a sudden now you start to see fluctuation in the different browsing scenarios. So you can see, instead of just going between five and 10, it's going back and forth between like five and like 15 and 16. Did this have an effect on the number of page views and impressions we were getting? Let's go to helium 10 insights dashboard.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's enter the next week 514 to 521, and take a look at the impressions it went from let me see, 1310 down to 881,. All right, it went down by a pretty big number here. All right, because of that keyword fluctuation. Let's go more on this keyword tracker graph. Take a look here the very following week. Look at some of this fluctuation at in one hour, in one browsing scenario it's position six, and the next hour it's position 25,. Even position what is this? 45, probably falling off of page one, all right. So what happened there? Let's go to the page views for that week 427, all right. So remember, just compare it. That first week where we were doing pretty good, it was pretty steady, your keyword ranks, right, you had 1310 page views. But because of this fluctuation on rank that probably was happening on multiple keywords it went down to 427.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, what is the reasons? Could it be inventory? Absolutely it could be inventory. Let's take a look. You guys probably didn't know this, but in helium 10, there's a tool called inventory levels inside of profits, and I can actually go to a certain date range. I'm gonna pick April to May here and see, hey, every day what was my inventory. And sure enough, here at the end of April I had some inbound inventory, all right, and at the beginning of May I had some pretty good numbers. So the number actually, you know, went up between the end of April and the beginning of May. And actually if you look I actually show the page impressions all the way back from the end of April. It was actually pretty bad when my inventory was low. And then as soon as my inventory got in stock, my impressions went up and my keyword ranking, you know, potentially got a little bit better. So absolutely your inventory levels plays a role. That's why we have this here.
Bradley Sutton:
But, as you recall, as May progressed, even though my inventory was not going down much at all, I was still at the mercy of Amazon. You know we call that like the search shuffle, where Amazon was not consistently keeping me at the top of page one. So now another thing that people ask about is inventory heat maps. All right, so you know, helium 10 has inventory heat maps and that allows you to kind of see where your inventory is stored at across the country. And like, for some strange reason, here in inventory heat maps I can see where Amazon is storing my products and it's only in two warehouses. All right, it's only in Kansas and Ohio. So right off the bat, that tells me like probably I need to send more inventory in.
Bradley Sutton:
But that being said, it doesn't always mean that your keyword ranks across the board are completely affected. Don't you remember that even when I was in the Brooklyn zip code and I was in San Diego, like, I was still ranking at the top of page one about? So what I did? I was just out of curiosity. I'm like if Amazon only awarded keyword rank based on where my you know product is being stored, well, let me go ahead and pick an address very close to this place where they has most of my inventory. So let's take a look at Kansas, all right. So here I picked a zip code and the address right here in Kansas, and if you look, I mean you would think, hey, my coffin shelf should be at the top of page one. It's not in the first line, not here at the sec, or it is here at the second line, all right. So here it's, page one, position five, all right. So not too bad.
Bradley Sutton:
But look at the shipping time, guys. It says Tuesday October 10th, friday October 6th. Does that sound familiar? Do you remember how it was when I was in San Diego, california fastest delivery October 10th or, I'm sorry, regular delivery October 10th, fastest delivery October 6th, the same exact shipping time, even though it has to go cross country just to get to me, all right. What about the other address which was Ohio, remember? So I put a Cleveland zip code in here. All right, not in the first line, not here in the second line, not in the? Oh, it is in the third line. But here, even though the inventory is stored right, like literally next door to this address that I picked, it is actually showing a later shipping time. It's saying the fastest delivery is Monday, october 9th for this. And it also has this, you know, a little bit toward down, towards the page.
Bradley Sutton:
So you know, again, part of the moral of the story is nobody, we, none of us know. Amazon probably doesn't even know the ins and outs of the Amazon algorithm. It's obviously, first of all, not consistent. All right, it's not based on one thing, you know. It's not just all hey, on this browser, you're always going to see these results. If you're signed in, you're always going to see this results. If you're in this address, you're always going to see these results. If you have inventory close by to a warehouse, you're always going to have this. That's not the way, unfortunately, as of now that Amazon works.
Bradley Sutton:
But at the same time, there's a reason why helium 10 made all these tools I just went in keyword tracker with boost, inventory levels, history, inventory heat maps is because you need visibility into what's going on, so you're not scratching your head wondering what you can do or why your your page views are gone, have gone down, or why your page views have gone up. You know, conversely. So again, the takeaways here, guys, is number one turn boost on on your main keywords, keep it on, all right. Go into your dashboard and set up the insights where you'll get an alert if, if your keyword, uh, if your keyword drops in in keyword rank, you know, uh, more than four times in a row. All right, uh, set up an alert for if your page impressions go down. You like that that actually we have. This product is underperforming insight on insights dashboard. It'll let you know. Hey, your page views are down by 30% or whatever. All right, and that should trigger you to like.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let me go check my keyword ranks. Which keyword is resulting in this? Is Amazon like all of a sudden shuffling me around? Uh, take a look at your inventory levels. Do you need to send more inventory in? Is Amazon distributing your inventory? Like to me? They're not distributing my inventory across the board, but it doesn't look like it's affecting me too much. On keyword ranks, my keyword ranks are pretty uh stable at the top of page one across the board. So even though you don't have too much control over what's going to go on, as far as the search shuffle goes, it's important you understand what is happening out there so that you know you can take action uh in your account. So I hope this uh special training deep dive here uh was able to help you and, uh, you know, let me know in the comments below if you guys have any questions and we'll see you guys in the next episode.
Get ready to learn more about Amazon's Vine program with our special guest Ami Pandya, Sr Manager of Product Development at Amazon and a leader from the heart of the program itself. We caught up with her at Amazon Accelerate to bring you an inside look at this game-changer for brands on the Amazon marketplace. From the importance of reviews and the program’s unique approach to maintaining authentic and balanced reviews to the timeline to generate a first review after enrolling an ASIN, Ami offers a comprehensive understanding of the Vine program plus new big updates that can impact your Amazon businesses. But it doesn't stop there! Ami lets us into the global reach of the Vine program, touching base in the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan. She also shares invaluable strategies for brands to maximize the benefits of the Amazon Vine program, demonstrating how to pick the perfect sample size for your units, timing your enrollment just right, and ensuring your product appeals to a mass audience. This candid conversation with Ami is a golden opportunity for any brand aiming to crush it on the Amazon marketplace, and a fascinating insight into the inner workings of the Vine program for all the curious minds out there. Buckle up and enjoy the enlightening ride!
In episode 497 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Ami discuss:
- 00:00 - Amazon Vine Program Q&A at Accelerate
- 06:02 - Amazon Vine Sellers Eligibility and Changes
- 09:53 - Authenticity of Balanced Vine Reviews
- 17:09 - Quality Reviews in the Vine Program
- 20:03 - Automatic ASIN Enrollment in Vine Explained
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/video
Are your competitors outranking you on Amazon? Discover how Helium 10's brand-new keyword automation feature is your secret weapon to gaining an edge in the Amazon marketplace. Our host, Bradley Sutton, will be your trustworthy guide to navigate you through the intricacies of this game-changing tool that can monitor your competitors' keyword rankings and advertising, saving you tons of time and exposing potential opportunities for your Amazon brand!
As we explore the ins and outs of the new feature, together, we'll dive into the comparisons with Cerebro and discuss the customization options that put you in control. Not only that, but I'll also be answering your burning questions, from setting up competitors and product tables on your Helium 10 Insights Dashboard to finding organic report keywords that have led to sales. And because we value your input, we’ll share how you can submit suggestions to Helium 10 to enhance your experience. Here's to bigger, better selling on Amazon!
In episode 496 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:
- 00:00 - Q&A And Keyword Tool Announcement
- 03:37 - Suggested Keywords And Insights Dashboard
- 08:56 - Keyword Tracking and Discovery for Products
- 12:34 - Upgrade To The Diamond Plan For More Features
- 17:56 - Setting Up Competitors And Ranking Keywords
- 21:12 - Replace Keyword Tracker With Insight Settings
- 25:13 - New Tool For Managing Amazon Refunds
- 29:05 - Submitting Suggestions To Helium 10
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we're answering all of your questions live with our monthly Ask Manny thing feature, plus debuting a brand new Helium 10 tool that's gonna save you hours of time every month by Automagically telling you what new keywords you or your competitors are ranking for that you didn't even know about. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you afraid of running out of inventory before your next shipment comes in? Or Maybe you're on the other side and you worry about having too much inventory, which could cap you out at the Amazon warehouses or even cost you storage fees? Stay on top of your inventory by using our robust inventory management tool. You can take advantage of our advanced forecasting algorithms, manage your 3PL inventory, create PO's for your suppliers, create replenishment shipments and more all from inside inventory management by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash inventory management. And don't forget you can sign up for a free Helium 10 account from there, or you can get 10% off for life by using our special podcast code, SSP.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly Ask me anything where I go over like a new tool release or a new feature that maybe you guys haven't had a lot of experience using. That's what I'm gonna be doing today. I think it's gonna be a new feature I'm gonna be showing and then we open up the rest of the show to live questions from the audience. That is about Helium 10 or some, something that maybe you need some help with learning how to use, or maybe you want to know a strategy question that relates to Helium 10. We are going to get to all of your questions today, so let me go ahead and show the Helium 10 project X dashboard. Now I want you guys to be on the child view. I mean you can actually be on any of the views parent, child or skew but just to keep everybody on the same page, everybody click on child for me down here on your table, your product table, okay, and let's go to Keywords here on the right hand side. Hit keywords Right and then, once you do that, actually, first of all we got to make sure you guys have enough Competitors here.
Bradley Sutton:
So one of the first things I need you guys to do is Open up and just make sure you have competitors, because if you don't have competitors, this is not even gonna work, all right. So, for example, I open, I hit the triangle. All right, a right under the the little icon in the inside stashboard. You're gonna hit that little upside-down triangle to open up the Expansion. And then you're gonna want to hit competitors. All right, and right here you should show your five main Competitors of who you're competing with. And if you see something here and you're not the one who did it, that means Helium 10 is the one who, kind of like, assign your competitors. But you guys know your competitors the best. You can change this if you want. So, like, for example, somebody else on the who's in this account put this bat shelf as my competitor. You know what? I don't think that's my competitor. So I'm gonna hit edit competitors and I'm gonna get rid of that bat shelf and let's add another, coffin shelf, which I know is a better competitor. We'll add this one Right there. Okay, add selected competitors. There we go. All right, so I've got five competitors. So does everybody have competitors? Five competitors once you do.
Bradley Sutton:
I want you now to hit this new thing that you guys probably didn't even see. It's kind of funny. We don't even have a new, a new little tag on here. I want you to hit suggested keywords, all right. So so Casey asks when are we at in Helium 10? This is your regular dashboard, all right, so this should be on your dashboard, all right. So now, again, just just to show Casey where we're at. I'm on the main dashboard, I scroll down to the my products table and I'm in child view and I am now on keywords, and then now I'm going to hit this button, suggested keywords, all right. So hit suggested keywords, and this is something you need to have a diamond account for to fully get the full access, the competitors you might be able to to actually set up. But, yeah, you need a diamond account to be able to to run this. All right now, take a look here. Now. These are keywords that I believe I'm not tracking yet and what it's doing. This is what's cool, guys. This is what I've always been kind of like. Teasing is going to be coming to. Insights Dashboard is now automatically. We are kind of like running Cerebro in the back end for you, like on a daily and weekly basis, comparing you versus those five competitors that you added, and we are now letting you know.
Bradley Sutton:
Maybe there's a keyword that your competitor is ranking for newly that you're not. Maybe there's a keyword that they're going to advertise for that you're not, or that we show. Maybe you're not even indexed for. So this is just the start. So the first thing that you have to do hopefully you've done that a long time ago, because I'll show you some other insights that come from having Competitors. But now, once you have the competitors, you've got this suggested Keywords here, all right, and then take a look. This is going to tell you what, where these keywords are coming from. So look at this Gothic wall decor. There's three competitors who are ranking for it, all right, and here's the search volume and then the competitor performance score. This is kind of like a score based on how many competitors are ranking for this keyword and how high they are ranking for it. So, let's say, out of five competitors, all five of them were ranked in the top five. This competitor performance score would be like a 10 out of 10.
Bradley Sutton:
This is this is nothing new. This is literally directly from a Cerebro. All right, this is directly from Cerebro. What's going on in there? So this is not a new metric or anything right. It's just new that we're automating it for you. Now everybody has their own preference as far as, maybe, what keywords you want automated, like, like, or what keywords you want to have suggested. So what I want everybody to do with me right now is go ahead and go into customized settings. I want everybody to hit customize settings and this is what is going to be the basis of your keyword harvesting, or automation on what you want Helium 10 to inform you about. So you can, for example, put it's gonna check once a week. You could say you want the search volume to be at least 500, or maybe you want to, for whatever reason, put a Mac search volume Like. I don't know why somebody would want to do that, but hey, there might be somebody out there who wants to do that and if you are, if you can, you will go ahead and put a Macs when there the position rank.
Bradley Sutton:
This is. There's something wrong here. We're gonna change that. This is supposed to be the competitor feature here, so this is gonna be where their rank. All right, so this position rank means your rank. Forget that. This really means the rank of at least one of your competitors. So we'll change the language on this in a little bit, so it's a little bit clearer. Advanced rank filter. These are directly from Cerebro. We're gonna change the language here so it's more easy for you guys to understand. Basically, this means where at least how many of your competitors is ranking for. Remember, you put five competitors there, hopefully, and so you can put a minimum of one and a maximum of five here, right? So maybe you want to see keywords where at least two competitors are ranking high for right this advanced rank filter two or two again, we're gonna change the wording on here so it's a little bit clear. Maybe by the time you're listening to this podcast it'll be ready to go those of you listening to the replay and basically you're putting the rank range.
Bradley Sutton:
So if I put right here two, advanced rank filter number one, I put a minimum of two and then advanced rank filter two, I put between one and let's just say 25. That means I am telling Helium 10 for automation. I want you to let me know if there is a competitor. At least two out of my five competitors are ranking between one and 25 on page one for the rank. Now I think if you do this position rank, this might be yours, where maybe you're like, hey, maybe I am not. We're gonna change the wording. I know this is very confusing here, because we're just taking the raw data from Cerebro Position rank. I believe this is probably gonna be we're gonna have it here where it's my own rank. Like, hey, maybe I want to know the keywords where I'm not on page one, right, but my competitor is right, it's gonna be very, very customizable what you're gonna be able to do here, and later you're gonna even have the sponsored ranks right here. Okay, like hey, show me where I am sponsored. I am not advertising for this X keyword, but my competitor all of a sudden is at top of search. All right, will automatically get those keywords for you.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, these keywords are also based on my products. Like you know, you might not have certain keywords that you're tracking, that you are actually ranking for and you didn't even realize it. Like that always happens to me, like when I run Cerebro on my own listing, and you guys probably do too. You're like, wait a minute, sometime this month I was ranked five for this keyword that I didn't even know was relevant to my listing, right? Oh, let me start tracking that. Well, if you wanna start doing that, we're gonna automatically harvest those keywords for you as well and let you know right here.
Bradley Sutton:
So again, keyword suggestions based on my products. What you wanna put here is your kind of like qualifications here for what keyword. That is going to be All right. Your search volume, where your organic rank is in a certain range, and if you want the word count, you're like, hey, you only wanna see keywords that have at least one word, or at least two words, or three words, or four words. You will be able to do that and then, now, going forward, you're gonna get these suggestions automatically without you having to run Cerebro anymore. And just remember, guys this is something that I hope is already part of your process the manual version of this you should be running Cerebro on your product, like once every two weeks, to find new keywords that you're ranking for. That you didn't realize. You should be running your Cerebro, you versus your top competitors, to see where they are ranking, that you're not or that you need to improve on right. But now, instead of you having to manually run Cerebro and compare reports from last week to this week, et cetera, et cetera, we are automatically doing that for you. And then you are eventually again, if you have the Diamond Plan, you're not only gonna see that down here in the suggestions. You are going to get insights when those triggers happen.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, let's say you wanted to delete some keywords from this list. You're like, no, I don't need to see this anymore. That's gonna come here under deleted suggestions, ones that you delete. We're gonna definitely kind of like play with this a little bit, based on the feedback, on do you want this just to be snoozed, maybe, or do you want it permanently deleted? We can definitely work, work on that with you guys, but you know we need more of you into this tool, now that it's brand new, and working on it to let us know what kind of view you can get. So this is like something that's super cool.
Bradley Sutton:
I've been kind of teasing this for a long time that we're going to have this level of of automation where we're doing the heavy lifting for you. And then this is just the beginning, guys. I mean anything that you are doing in Cerebro and magnet and and you know, black box, just imagine those things us doing the work for you and just delivering the results. It's like you, you know, using Helium 10 almost as your virtual assistant, where we just deliver the results to you and you don't have to do the manual labor yourself anymore. So I want everybody listening to this podcast or listening to this live feed to go in number one.
Bradley Sutton:
Those of you with a diamond plan, and I hope you can see this If you have a platinum plan, you need to upgrade already yesterday to diamond to be able to get some of these features, like the historical Cerebro and now this, where we're even doing the Cerebro for you. But, by the way, I should probably throw a coupon If you guys are interested to try out the diamond plan. I'm not sure if this coupon code is going to work, but the one that for sure works is SSP10. So SSP10 gives you 10% off the diamond plan If you want 20% off for six months. I almost don't want to give this coupon code out because I don't think it's a good deal. But you can do SSP20 and save 20% off for six months. The reason why I don't think is a good deal is because after that now you can't use a coupon for like a year, and so it's going to end up being more expensive anyway. So I suggest just using the SSP10 and then try out the diamond plan so you can give this a try.
Bradley Sutton:
But I want you guys all working on this and hopefully you can see the value Now. You're going to know, hey, where's your competitors getting sales from on keywords that maybe you didn't even have on your radar, where are your competitors focusing their PPC spend that you didn't even realize, and you're going to see which ones your index for. Like, I don't think the index checker is working yet. This is something that's completely in beta, but, as you can see, there's going to be a column here where maybe you're like, wait a minute, gothic wall decor, I am not index for this keyword, so it might give you an indication that, hey, I need to probably get my, you know, get my indexing fixed on this keyword in the in the first place. Alright, alright.
Bradley Sutton:
So now for the rest of the show. This is going to be your show, guys, where you can ask me any questions, and let me go ahead and go back up and see what kind of questions we have. Remember, it could be questions about this. It could be questions about any tool in Helium 10 or how to do something. That's why I'm here to help. Like once a month, we actually make this open to everybody, but this is something we do actually every week in our Serious Sellers Club group of the six, seven and eight figure sellers. But once a month we go ahead and open this up to everybody and put this on the podcast so you guys can all benefit.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, let's see. I saw an older video where you mentioned that subject matter would post in Seller Central. Even if you can post it, can't post it manually on the listing. Is that still the case? For very few categories now Amazon has taken it out of a lot of character. I actually announced and I was mistaken, I thought Amazon took it, took it out of every category, just because of all my listings, like in in the home and kitchen, had it taken away. But I was just on a call, like three days ago, with somebody who's selling in the jewelry category I believe jewelry or accessories, clothing and accessories category and they had subject matter right there and they were able to definitely update it with Helium 10 listing builders. So there might be some, some categories where you still have access to the subject matter, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Another question here from Rashid Dear Bradley, do you know how to find organic report words that made sales? Alright, so in Helium 10, what we have is that's exactly kind of like what this is for. Alright, what I would, I just demonstrate because you know in Cerebro. You know, first of all, you don't know the exact organic sales that come from keywords outside of about 30 to 40 percent that show up in search query performance. Okay, so the ones that show in search query performance, you usually about 30 percent of your search sales. That's because it's those sales that happen within 24 hours. So you can kind of see there and that's going to come to Helium 10 eventually once Amazon opens that up in the API.
Bradley Sutton:
But the more holistic way you can get it done right now I've seen more keywords is just looking at the keywords for somebody's like in the top 10 positions and the search volume is like more than five or six hundred, because it's usually you're. You didn't get to that position unless you had some, some sales that were coming from organic search, right, and so that's just one of the ways that you can find out which keywords are bringing sales to a competitor is by looking at their organic rank for the higher search volume Keywords, which is what you've historically been able to do in Cerebro and now you can do on the inside dashboard. All right, tomer says. Tomer says what does it mean based on my product? Does it mean that the keyword improved in ranking? No, so, for example, you're already tracking keywords, probably in keyword tracker, and if one of your keywords goes up or down, you know we'll let you know based on that insight, like like you've already had that. We've had that for like three months where if a keyword goes up by a certain percentage that you specify or goes down, we'll give you a message. But there's other keywords that you might not be tracking already in keyword tracker because you didn't realize they're important. And so what you do is you specify the insight to let you know when you are ranking highly for a keyword that you were not tracking already, and then you specify exactly what you wanna see, or when you wanna see that happen, like if it's a minimum X number of search volume, if it's within a certain rank range or it's just ranking at all, you wanna get a notification on. You set that and then we'll send that as an insight and then you can choose to either track it or ignore it in your keyword tracker.
Bradley Sutton:
Dennis says how do you set up competitors for your products? All right, let me just show that to you one more time here On your Insights Dashboard. You go down to your products page, Dennis, all right, and then you hit competitors okay, and then you either have to do edit competitors if there is none here, or add competitors if there's none, or edit competitors here and then you choose which ones you want to use right here and that'll give you the competitors. Dennis, all right. It says I have a listing that shows I am ranked on many keywords in the top five. By the way, everybody, whatever you're watching this on, help the algorithm out. Give it a like, give it a thumbs up or a like or a super like or something on Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn, whatever you're watching this, just to help the algorithms out. Anyways, Facebook user says I have a listing that shows I am ranked on many keywords in the top five.
Bradley Sutton:
When I click the arrow to show the search through Amazon, none of my listings really show up. Suggestions on why? Well, you've got to make sure that you are, first of all, like. If you're outside of the country, make sure that you have a zip code that is inside of the marketplace you are looking at Like. So, if you're tracking Amazon Germany, you've got to make sure that your regular Amazon, you know, shows Germany, just to make sure that you're indexed, all right, and also to make sure that you are looking at the right search results and, at the end of the day, what you see in Keyword Tracker, if you see it fluctuating a lot, you need to turn on boost, because boost checks different browsing scenarios.
Bradley Sutton:
It checks different addresses, it checks, you know, like if you're logged in, logged off. It checks a whole bunch of different browsing scenarios, cause, remember, you could be showing up differently based on where the person is searching, what kind of browser they're using, et cetera. So to turn on boost, we're checking 24 times a day all those different browsing scenarios and if on your computer it's showing that you're not ranked, I guarantee what you'll see on boost is some of those checks. It'll be a blank, meaning that, yeah, sometimes you're just not showing up in the search results. All right, we're gonna bring somebody up from the green room here with a question How's it going, Josh?
Josh:
had mentioned about being able to see how competitors are targeting it using PPC. Is there anything PPC specific in the tool that I missed when you were walking through it, or how can we?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, it's not that part is coming, so the first phase one is we're showing you the organic rank. Phase two, which will be coming soon, probably next week or the week after, is the same exact thing that I showed you guys on the organic rank. There will be a separate settings where you're gonna be like show me in the sponsored rank where I'm ranking or not ranking per se on this keyword in sponsored, but my competitor or X number of my competitors are all ranking for it.
Josh:
Because I was gonna say that being able to see sponsored next to organic is helpful for our own, but to be able to see that for other teams, yes, yeah, so it's gonna be yeah, we start with the organic and then we'll be doing the sponsored next.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool thanks.
Josh:
Thanks, Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, no problem. Edison from YouTube says will this function replace the keyword tracker tool? It doesn't necessarily replace it, but it kind of does the work for you. So instead of having to go I didn't show this function today because it's already been there, remember you know what I'll just go ahead and show it right now. So, Edison, what you can do for the keywords here. This is actually showing my keywords that I'm tracking in keyword tracker. All right, so it's actually right here on the dashboard, like I technically don't have to go into keyword tracker. So in that sense, I guess you can kind of consider it replaces a little bit, but I still like going into keyword tracker.
Bradley Sutton:
But the beauty about this is you set up the insights, all right, so that instead of having whether it's on keyword tracker or whether it's here in the Insights Dashboard, instead of having to go every day and check this, you set your insight to trigger when. Let me show you where that settings is here. Hold on insight settings. Let me show it here keyword types. All right, you're gonna hit insight settings, you're gonna hit keywords and then you're gonna hit the three insight types and then, when the organic keyword drops or your sponsored rank drops or your keyword suggestions based on competitors, and you can actually customize that by hitting the settings here for your competitors. All right, so you can actually get the information. And it looks like it's not customizable. Yeah, I thought it was. I'm pretty sure there's a way to customize it of when you get an insight that your organic keyword drops or raises, that's gonna be the new one that's gonna come up to when your organic rank increases, like maybe you were on page two, you wanna know when you get on page one, et cetera okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Hope the answer is your question, Edison, all right. Colby says will Helium 10 ever be accessible via API? Could be, again, pretty much, I think for some of our larger customers they have API access for, like enterprise customers. If it's something that will be available on the backend for just any platinum or diamond or elite member, that's to be determined if that's gonna be available. But just like I told people who are asking for the KSA marketplace, you gotta let your voice be heard. So make sure to submit a suggestion in Helium 10's dashboard of say, hey, we would love to have API access. All right, let's keep going here.
Bradley Sutton:
Miko Lodge says will Helium 10 have listing builder for UAE? I sell in the USA and UAE would make it awesome to be able to redo my UAE listings in the listing builder. Yes, that is coming. I actually have that available in my Helium 10, but I don't think it's available to everybody yet. So that's coming imminently where it's not gonna be too much. I mean you can technically do that, miko Lodge. Now, all right, listing builder Like build your listing for UAE because it's English. It's still English and you would just put your UAE keywords in there. But the real benefit is gonna be once we have it open for Japan, for example, like you maybe ran Cerebro for Japanese keywords, right, but you don't have the slightest sense on how to create a Japanese listing, even though you have the keywords, because you don't speak Japanese. Well, now, soon you'll be able to push a button and create a Spanish listing for Amazon Mexico, create a Japanese listing for Amazon Japan, et cetera. So that's definitely coming for you, and I would assume that would include UAE as well. But if, for some reason, uae is not showing up on the listing builder dropdown, just send that to customer support and maybe they haven't released it yet and just ask them when that's gonna be released.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let's say Rasha is asking a question about Amazon refunds. We'll have to check on that. We're gonna keep this to like the Helium 10 related questions here. Now we have a new refunds tool that actually is gonna go out and look Like if somebody is asking for a refund outside of the window I personally don't know what that window is, I thought it was 30 days that Amazon customers can do a refund and then, if Amazon refunds them outside of the 30 days, I believe we've got the new refunds tool that will go out and make a case. So if you guys are interested to get in on that service, let me show you. I don't have the exact link right here, but let me just show you guys how to find that. On our website you just go to the Helium 10 dashboard, go to tools and go to operations, and then you're gonna wanna hit managed refund service. All right, so that's different than refund genie, where you have to file everything. Go to manage refund service and get a free demo of it, and with this tool you're going to be able you're going to be able to stuff that has to do with Amazon logistics and all kinds of different scenarios where Amazon might owe you money, including what you were talking about, where Amazon might have refunded a customer when they weren't supposed to. We'll be able to go ahead and show that for you. All right, let's keep going here, all right. Facebook user another person who did not click the link so I can't see their name.
Bradley Sutton:
So, since we're talking keywords, one of my competitors is Amazon's Choice for 16 keywords with a total search volume of about 72,000. That seems like excessive favoritism. Will they ever level the playing field? Well, I mean, first of all, like Amazon's Choice is always changing. Like they're doing tests now where instead of Amazon's Choice it'll say overall pick. Like maybe you guys have seen that sometimes. I don't think it's favoritism at all. Like they, amazon definitely has a formula. How that formula works nobody can tell you because sometimes it makes zero sense, right. Like I've seen an Amazon's Choice in the coffin shelf be one that I know is not even getting sales for coffin shelf. Literally it's not getting sales for coffin shelf. Even the Amazon data will say it and somehow it gets Amazon's Choice. So I don't think anybody knows what the formula is, but they do have a formula and I don't think it's favoritism necessarily. That's actually why Amazon has been doing some of those changes they've been doing because they're trying to not show favoritism. They've been trying to show the reviews in a different way so that maybe some of the older sellers who have tens of thousands of reviews they don't have as much advantage. The older sellers, they hate that new way that reviews are showing sometimes because it takes away their advantage, right. So Amazon's trying different things but I don't think Amazon's showing favoritism per se.
Bradley Sutton:
Ryan says Helium 10 Sell and Scale was epic. Any plans for another? Oh, yeah, for sure. We wanna do something with Sell-In Scale. We couldn't do one this year or around this time because, as you saw, amazon did Amazon Accelerate this month and they've got Unboxed right after that and like there was like a million events around this time, which is when we had done Sell-In Scale last year massively successful, and we definitely wanna do something for Sell-In Scale soon, potentially maybe some different continent We'll have to see about that, you know might take the Sell-In Scale show on the road, as it were.
Bradley Sutton:
Another user says "'How can you submit suggestions to Helium 10?” Great question. Let me show you exactly how to do that. Go to the top, and where is it". I think it's right. Oh yeah, right up here. This button here. Okay, first of all, guys, this is something that you might not have seen before. This is powered by AI. Instead of always looking at the, instead of always opening up a chat down here, hit this button and you can ask questions like like, watch this. I don't even know if this is gonna work, because this is brand new. I'm gonna say how can I check what keywords my competitors are ranking for? Let's see if that even works. All right, and if I do that, what's gonna come up? Let's see. Watch this fail on me just because AI doesn't like me, cause I always bad mouth AI. Oh no, there, it is right there. Look at that. To check what keywords your competitors are ranking for.
Bradley Sutton:
Use Helium 10 Cerebro. Here are the steps. So, guys, yeah, this is pretty cool, but anyways, right here at the top, before you hit AI or before you ask AI a question, this comes up and one of the options says I have an idea I want to share with Healing10. That's what you guys click. And then, hey, I want to have the KSA marketplace. Hey, I want to have API, like you guys said. Hey, I wanna have sponsored ads faster and in Insights Dashboard, whatever you guys want, hit that button. So again, just to show you where it was, on the very top of your screen, right to the right of what's new, there is this like kind of like a magnifying glass, or I don't know. This is not a magnifying glass, it's kind of like it has stars on it, mixed with a magnifying glass.
Bradley Sutton:
Just hit that and then that's how you can find that button. All right, question from YouTube. I don't know why this is turning into an Amazon or a Helium 10 suggestion. It's not me. You guys should be doing this to you. You should be submitting it over there, but we'll discuss it here. Modar says I'm tracking competitors on X or in a daily basis for changes and reviews BSR active sellers and I have a dream that, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, Modar, you can do this. Modar says again let me read the question for the people listening to this and who can't see it I'm tracking competitors on a daily basis for changes and reviews BSR active sellers and I have a dream that one day, Helium 10 can do this for me. I'm gonna bring Josh back up to this stage. I'm gonna give him a quick quiz here. All right, Josh, you're a power of Helium 10 user. Did you or did you not know that Modar can actually do this already?
Josh:
You can do it using markets.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, Market Tracker is definitely one, but there's a easier way. Even Do you know about that one? But yeah, you mentioned something I didn't. I wasn't even thinking about it Like Modar, you should definitely do that. On Market Tracker, you add your competitors to your market. You can definitely see their BSR changes and things of that. Josh is thinking all right, all right, josh and Modar are gonna learn something right now. Here we go, guys. All right, let's go to the Insights Dashboard Once you're tracking your competitors, which is what I showed you, guys, how to do today. It's not just for the keywords. All right, guys, we are going to show you what is all of these things. If something changes, not only if their BSR changes, but if their monthly sales, like, drastically change, get this. If all of a sudden, they add a coupon like some of us like to check our competitors like oh man, my competitor added a 10% coupon, I better go ahead and add a 10% coupon too. We're gonna let you know. So if you are tracking competitors in your Insights Dashboard, Modar, all you have to do is set up your insight and you will know if any of those things have changed and you no longer have to track that next, right, like you're saying every day.
Bradley Sutton:
And then Jake here mentioned another tool. So Josh Menzin, Market Tracker. Jake mentioned Listing Analyzer. Yes, listening analyzer too. You can track that, but still you have to like click stuff right With Insights Dashboard. You just set it up. That's the beauty about Insights Dashboard. It's about automation right, instead of you having to click stuff and you do the heavy work. We live in 2023. So heavy work is considered three clicks of a mouse. That's heavy work for a lot of people. I understand. Time is money, but instead of you having to do that heavy work, we're doing that work for you. And look at this Modar says can you believe that I used to do this tracking for over 40 ASINs? This is a lifesaver. All right, I'm gonna bring back Josh for one more quiz or one more question. All right, Josh, instead of saying wow, can you believe that, I would say how cool is that? And then you would say
Josh:
I don't know where you went, but pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
There we go. Josh got that. I know he's a podcast listener. All right, so, Modar, instead of saying wow, can you believe that? The phrase goes how cool? Is that? Pretty cool, I think. All right, cool. Any last questions for the day, guys, again, just to recap, we went over adding competitors to your Insights Dashboard and setting up the setting so that you can get insights which are coming next week on the key actions that are happening on your keywords, so that you no longer have to run Cerebro once every week or once every two weeks. You no longer have to check Cerebro on your own product to see if you're ranking for new keywords that you didn't realize. We're doing all of that work for you, unparalleled in this industry where you have that kind of automation. So really great that the team added that and I hope you guys get a lot of benefit from that and all right. Well, guys, thank you so much for joining us.
Bradley Sutton:
Again, if you are a Serious Sellers Club member, look out for your email. You get invited every week. Or if you're an elite member, elite members and Serious Sellers Club members get access to this. If you're wondering how you become a Serious Sellers Club member, you are automatically a Serious Sellers Club member if you have had over $500,000 worth of sales in the last year and you are on a Helium 10 account that's connected to your Amazon account. If you're not getting these emails, make sure to reach out to support and they'll hook you up with the private Facebook group that we have for it and then get you in there right away. We do this every single week, usually on Mondays, and then once a month, like this time, we do an extra one that goes out on the podcast. So thank everybody for tuning in and we will see you, Serious Sellers Club members, next week and the rest of you guys at the end of October. Have a great rest of your week. Bye-bye now.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week. Five takeaways from America’s landmark lawsuit against Amazon https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/28/tech/amazon-ftc-lawsuit-takeaways/index.html The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon would lead to higher prices and slower deliveries for consumers—and hurt businesses https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ftc-antitrust-lawsuit-full-response Walmart Marketplace Increases Third-Party Seller Activity https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterloeb/2023/09/27/walmart-marketplace-increases-third-party-seller-activity/
Indonesia bans e-commerce transactions on social media in major blow to TikTok https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/27/tech/indonesia-tiktok-ecommerce-ban-hnk-intl/index.html Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/amazon-to-invest-up-to-4-billion-in-ai-startup-anthropic/ Walmart Deals Holiday Kickoff sales event will coincide with Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days https://www.wvtm13.com/article/walmart-deals-holiday-kickoff-october/45318835# An update on Prime Video https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/prime-video-update-announces-limited-ads Up to tenth of Amazon shoppers in Great Britain ‘bribed’ by sellers to offer good review, poll finds https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/28/up-to-tenth-of-amazon-shoppers-in-great-britain-bribed-by-sellers-to-offer-good-review-poll-finds Amazon’s biggest competitor gets bad grade from the BBB https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/amazons-biggest-competitor-gets-bad-grade-bbb/QAGKNI77WZDWTOXMEHSNEDGVUQ/ Shopify invests in wholesale platform Faire https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/shopify-invests-wholesale-platform-faire-2023-09-27/ Eligible Walmart Marketplace sellers can use Walmart’s Self-Serve Marketing portal in Seller Center to invest in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and promote their products in Google search results through Shopping Ads. https://sellerhelp.walmart.com/s/guide?language=en_US&article=000011195 We aren't stopping at that! Don't miss our spotlight discussion on how you can unlock more profits with Helium 10’s Managed Refund Service. This new service aims to recover funds for sellers from Amazon errors by identifying and submitting recovery claims on behalf of the sellers. Lastly, Carrie Miller gives us the training tip of the week about how to see which ASINs are the most clicked and bought from Amazon Brand Analytics data but inside Helium 10. It's a packed episode, so buckle up!
n this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley talks about:
- 00:51 - Amazon FTC Lawsuit
- 03:25 - Walmart Marketplace Increases
- 03:51 - Amazon Holiday Inventory
- 04:18 - Seller Fulfilled Prime
- 05:21 - TikTok Shop Trouble
- 06:20 - Manage Experiments Update
- 06:55 - Amazon AI Move
- 07:45 - Walmart Holiday Deals
- 08:27 - Prime Video Ads
- 09:45 - Incentivized Reviews Rampant
- 11:06 - Temu Trouble
- 11:45 - Shopify Wholesale
- 12:57 - Walmart Google Ads
- 14:15 - Try Helium 10's New Managed Refund Service
- 15:30 - ProTraining Tip: How To See Brand Analytics Data Inside Helium 10
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon replies to the FTC lawsuit. Walmart marketplaces on the rise. Tiktok shop is having trouble in Southeast Asia, manager experiments gets an update. Walmart holiday deals coming. Incentivize reviews are going crazy in the UK. These stories and much more on today's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, bradley Sutton, and this is a show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown on all the news stories that are going on in the Amazon, walmart, e-commerce world and we also give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. All right, tons of articles out today, so let's go ahead and hop right into it. The first article here is actually from CNN Business and it was a five entitled five takeaways from Amazon's landmark lawsuit, or America's landmark lawsuit against Amazon, and you know, they weren't too far off in this article.
Bradley Sutton:
I remember last week I talked about how ridiculous some of these articles were, like just people not understanding even what was going on in the Amazon. And basically it's you know. They're kind of summarizing and saying that, hey, this landmark case targets Amazon's retail platform, alleging that it's harm shoppers and sellers alike at a massive scale. All right Quote. It has a self-reinforcing cycle of dominance and harm. The plaintiffs claim oh, my goodness gracious, and it has. Amazon is running an illegal monopoly in ways that are paying off for Amazon, but at a great cost to tens of millions of Americans of households and hundreds of thousands of sellers. All right now Amazon, you know, check out the CNN article. It talks about the you know five takeaways you know from it. But Amazon replied in another article that we also have linked in the comments and entitled the FTC's lawsuit against Amazon would lead to higher prices, slower deliveries for consumers and hurt businesses. Hmm, if we only didn't say that, like weeks ago, like anybody who actually knows anything could have told you this that there's nothing good that's gonna come out of this for Amazon sellers nor Amazon buyers. And this article that Amazon releases, kind of like in reply to this FTC lawsuit kind of, you know, talks about that how, yeah, if this goes through, it's gonna make Prime more expensive, it's gonna have more shipping fees or more fees for sellers, et cetera. And it's kind of funny, like some of the things that you know I talked about was how Amazon kind of like I guess you can say, punishes sellers for having lower prices on other marketplaces. Some sellers don't like I mean to me, like it is what it is, you know, like we should be having, you know, same, similar prices, you know across the board. But even, let's say, an Amazon seller thought that was a bad thing. You know, if this FTC lawsuit is for the public, like Amazon is making sure that people, you know, don't gouge customers on the platform. You know, like sellers like like no, hey, if it's cheaper outs outside there, you should have a cheap price on Amazon. But how is that harming the consumers? You know, maybe, maybe could be considered harming the sellers, but you know the millions and millions of prime members now get the benefit of having low prices. So it's like Amazon, or the FTC, is like talking out of like two sides of its, of its mouth there. So it's kind of interesting.
Bradley Sutton:
So the next article actually switching to Walmart is from Forbes and says Walmart marketplace in increases third-party Seller activity. Not many stats and figures from here, just the writer here is talking about how there's a lot more investment in advertising in this Q4. He expects sellers to have a lot more sales on Walmart Compared to the past, as Walmart's really been expanding their focus on third-party marketplace. Next article here this is from seller central dashboard, just as a reminder to send in FBA and MCF inventory by October 26 before a holiday deal events. So there's less than five weeks left. So like, if you're trying to to have something you know, go for black Friday, cyber Monday deals you actually need to have your inventory in by October 26th. So that's. That's actually not that that far away, so well in advance.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is a reminder that seller fulfilled prime is coming back. All right, so seller fulfilled prime, it's gonna be without that 2% fee that we talked about earlier before. We're gonna have a blog later today or tomorrow You'll see at Helium 10 comm forward slash blog that talks about how to enroll in seller fulfilled prime. Me I'm not gonna roll it like I have. You know I don't ship too much stuff. So like there's no way. I'm not gonna use Amazon FBA you know like for to try and get the prime back. Remember to do prime badge for seller fulfilled prime. You've got to have a way to ship to like same day, next day or two-day delivery, including weekend delivery. Obviously, I can't. You know most of us can't, can't do that, but some of you bigger sellers out there who have, you know really good, you know shipping agreements with companies. You might want to take advantage of this and then for your fulfill by merchant you can actually get a prime badge now. So just look out for that announcement or that blog and it's actually gonna be officially announced by Amazon In a couple of days. You'll see some big comms coming out of Amazon about seller fulfilled prime, but you'll be able to get that blog before the Amazon announcement on our blog later today or tomorrow.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article today we're gonna talk about is actually coming out of Indonesia, all right, and it says Indonesia bans e-commerce transactions on social media in a major blow to tick tock. So Indonesia is actually the biggest you know platform for tick tock in Southeast Asia. I believe. It has something like a hundred and twenty, a hundred and twenty five million monthly active Users and tick tock shop has, you know, released worldwide. But now the government is saying no, you can't have e-commerce and social media together. So you're gonna have to, you know, within the next week or so I forgot when the deadline is you're gonna have to, like, take tick tock shop out and make it a separate app. So this will be interesting to follow, like if something like this happens in other marketplaces and that's gonna be obviously a big blow to tick tock shop. I don't foresee that happening here in in America, but you know kind of is gonna hurt tick tock shop for those who are trying to sell Products in Indonesia.
Bradley Sutton:
The next article here was also from seller central. It says expand single asin AB test to multiple stores. So now, with manage your experiments, you're gonna be able to run separate AB tests on your asins across multiple stores, all right. So, like to different marketplaces in different regions, you can kind of see how how imagery works, you know, between you know, like Amazon Canada, amazon USA, etc. And you can add, like, for example, it says a brand logo to your a plus content to see performs performs differently in different countries, to pay on how well Established your brand is.
Bradley Sutton:
A next article here is from tech crunch entitled Amazon to invest up to four billion in AI start startup and Anthropic all right, so this you know a anthropic is this startup who's kind of making waves in the industry. You know that I've heard about them a while back, but you know the interesting thing here. You know we've been talking for a long time that that it's gonna AI Generative AI is gonna definitely change the the shopping experience and that's gonna affect sellers. Andy Jassy, amazon's CEO, says Amazon believes this deal can improve many customers experiences short and long term through our deeper Collaboration with Anthropic. So, again, improve many customer experiences All right. So again, ais. That's gonna change the way people shop eventually on Amazon and that means it's eventually gonna change the way that you know we sell or sell on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is just from a local TV station, but we talked about this before. It's kind of funny that you know every time Amazon does something, you know Walmart might reply and do something similar or vice versa. You know we're in a competitive matchup here, so this article is entitled Walmart Deals Holiday Kickoff Sales Event Will Coincide with Amazon's Bing Prime Day deals All right. So it's not you know big or Amazon's big deal days, All right. It's Walmart deals holiday, all right. So this is actually happening a little bit earlier than big, big deal days. It's coming on the end from the ninth to the 12th and it's available even to non-Walmart Plus sellers or what non-Walmart Plus buyers? It'll be available to.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article from Amazon, an update on Prime Video. So you know, prime Video has a lot of like you know, tv shows and and and movies and different things, and so they they talked about some of their, their. You know what they've achieved lately with Amazon Prime Video. But the key is that in early 2024, amazon Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements. All right, and there's going to be a people are going to have to pay $2.99 a month if they don't want to see these ads. But again, you know, anytime we talk about you know advertisements coming on Amazon. You know properties, whether it's in store or other ways. It's eventually another way to get your products in front of of buyers. All right, it's new ways.
Bradley Sutton:
You know a lot of people are watching Amazon Prime Video. What was that? It's like a, not Game of Thrones, but it's like a Lord of the Rings prequel or something like that. I think was on Prime Video. But you know millions of people watch that. Imagine, you know, somehow for the people who aren't paying that $2.99, you know they're seeing an ad for a coffin shelf on there. I don't think you know we are big enough to advertise on Game of Thrones or or Lord of the Rings or anything like that, but just shows you an example of what could be possible in the future. You know, if you are a big enough seller you could start having your ads potentially on some of these big TV shows from Amazon Prime Video.
Bradley Sutton:
Now an interesting article from the Guardian in the UK. It says up to a 10th you know, 10% of Amazon shoppers in Great Britain were found to have been bribed by sellers to offer a good review. So they pulled 1500 adults who had bought from Amazon in the UK in the past 12 months and they all got like like gift card offers or free products or refunds in order to cheat the system. This article said all right. So you know Amazon obviously does not want anybody having, you know, any kind of incentivized reviews you know happening. So there's a lot of sellers who are breaking the rules. They're probably going to get caught. You know a lot of them. Some of them. Don't get caught. But don't don't try this, guys, all right. So it also said that 4% of those polls said that they were offered a reward for changing a negative review to a positive one. All right. So, like, how did they even get a hold of that that customer? It's kind of a interesting All right. So you know UK government is looking into how to tackle this a little bit more, but it'd be curious to see what you know how this is in the US. You know, I just ordered a ring light or something and I got like a little gift card saying, hey, you know, try to or not a gift card, but a little card, insert card offering a gift card to to like, have a positive review. So this kind of stuff still happens. But, guys, don't do it. Don't do it, not worth it, not worth it.
Bradley Sutton:
Our next article here is from Kiro7. It was just about a Temu, all right. So it says Amazon's biggest competitor gets bad grade from the BBB. Temu is not Amazon's biggest competitor, first of all, but not a thousand. You know it's the number one app on on Google and Apple, yeah, okay. So in that sense, maybe it's it's an Amazon competitor, but you know, Temu sales are very low compared to Amazon, but according to the Better Business Bureau, they've received a thousand recent you know complaints about the service. But you know, like what do you expect when you're getting like a $2 address or something like that? But it's probably one of the many reasons why nobody you know Amazon sellers. Amazon itself isn't really concerned with Temu being too much of a threat.
Bradley Sutton:
Switching platforms. Now Shopify invested this week into a wholesale platform called Fair. You know, a lot of people knew about Fair, a place where people can get wholesale products but now Shopify is investing there and it wants to see this startup adopt Shopify technology for its clients. All right, so. Fair was founded in 2017. It's valued at $12 billion. That's a pretty big company. It's now going to become the recommended wholesale marketplace for Shopify merchants. All right, so this is going to make it easy for Shopify merchants to find wholesale buyers and also enable retailers to source from Fair's network of brands. It's kind of interesting because, for example, fair said the most popular search filter on its platform is not on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
All right so you know hey if they're going to find some stuff for Shopify that's only on Shopify and not on Amazon. You know this. This kind of like a match seems to be made in heaven. It'll be interesting to see if you know how this changes, how Shopify sellers sell. You know, let me know in the comments below if you are selling on Shopify and you know this is good, if you're going to start, you know, perhaps maybe selling your products on the Fair platform. A last news article was from Walmart seller help. It's actually interesting. They have a. They're launching self-service search engine marketing. Say that three times fast. All right Now, basically, eligible Walmart marketplace sellers can use this portal in Seller Center to invest in search engine marketing.
Bradley Sutton:
So you're going to be able to do Google shopping ads. Now, I don't know too much about this stuff, but I could be wrong. But I believe that this is like. These are like those. You know, when you search a keyword in Amazon or in Google, at the very top right there would be those ads where you can like, click directly into the results and it'll go directly to the storefront you can buy the product. I don't believe Amazon is available for this. So this is another potential advantage you can have of, of doing Google ads, where it can go directly to your store, right there in the shop, the shopping ad section of Google. So you know, if you're a Walmart seller, go into a Seller Central, you can create campaigns right now. You can even bulk create it and then we have the article here linked in the comments below if you want to get more information on this.
Bradley Sutton:
So, whoo, a lot of articles today, a lot going on in the ecommerce world. Quick, quick note. You know, if you missed it, last week Helium 10 launched a reimbursement service. So a lot of you guys are ready to use refund genie where you can, you know, download reports for your loss and damage things from Amazon, things that Amazon might owe you money on, and you're able to go ahead and, and you know, file your own claims and get your money back. But now we have a service that is designed to where we're going to do the work for you, you know, for a percentage of it, and we'll also find other money that you know, refund genie, you know it's not looking for. So if you want to find out more information about this, the service is actually free, you know, to use. We only can get money if we get money for you, and some sellers are getting thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars back by using it. So if you'd like a free demo of it or to get more information, go to h10.me/mrs h10.me/mrs to be able to sign up for a free demo. Alright, now let's go into a quick training tip of the week from Kerry, talking about how you can see who's getting the most clicks and the most purchases from brand analytics. But right inside of Helium 10 Cerebeo, Carrie, take it away.
Carrie Miller:
Did you know that you can see click share and conversion share within Cerebro? That's right. If you have your Helium 10 account connected to seller central and you have a diamond and above, you can actually see this click share. So it's a really great tool when you're doing your keyword research. So the first thing you want to do is you want to log into Cerebro. So I've done a multi search here. It doesn't matter really the position for this particular strategy, but usually I always like to make sure my own, mason, is first, so I can compare it to all others. But if you scroll down here, you can actually see that we have a whole entire column for ABA, total click share and then conversion share. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually drill into this a little bit more and if you go to let's see here a wooden egg holder, we can click on this graph and get a little bit more details. Now I will say not all of these keywords have information. It really just depends on what is provided in brand analytics, and if it's in brand analytics, we can pull it in here. So it has to have, you know, a good amount of search volume in order to get this information. So let's take a look at wooden egg holder. So if we click on this, we can actually see the last few months or six months or so of click share and conversion share, and you can actually, you know see this this most recent month we're in September right now. We can actually go back to see August and you can click along on this graph and hover along this graph and you can actually see at the bottom there which were the top three Clicked and converted on. So when we take a look at this, you can actually see, okay, this one has an 18% click share and a 19% conversion share. So that's, they're doing something right. That means you know a lot of people are actually purchasing when they do actually click on their listing. This one is, you know, 8% and a conversion share of 6.5 you know they're doing pretty well as well and then 7% and 9.1. So now, if you see, you know a really large click share and pretty much no conversion share, that probably means people are clicking on it, thinking it's something, but they're not seeing what they actually want to buy. So one really cool thing that you can actually do if you want to, you know, see what maybe one of these competitors are doing that has the most click share and conversion share. You can see what they're actually doing by running listing analyzer. Now you can actually go ahead and see it in here and when you click on run listing analyzer or you can go straight to listing analyzer and add things in yourself.
Carrie Miller:
I'm just going to click on run listing analyzer. Let's see what we have here. Are these the top ones? Yes, these are the ones I want to look at. So I'm going to click on run listing analyzer and I'm going to be able to see all of the information for all three of these listings and includes price. It'll include the images and everything that we really need to know, kind of stacked on top of each other. All right, so all of this data is is now uploaded into listing analyzer from that click share, conversion share, so we can see, maybe, the difference. Okay, so this top one was the topped clicked and we can look at the price. Now it has a pretty good price. It's not the lowest price. This one is actually the lowest price, but you know, between these two especially that does have a lower price, so $20 might be the best. And then another thing you can do is you can take a look at the images and see if there's something that this Particular listing has done that this one didn't. Maybe they did. You know better close-up images here. These one, these have a little bit better lifestyle images.
Carrie Miller:
So it's kind of a mystery there as to why the first one would get the the most clicks. But usually what you can do is kind of drill down a little bit more into the details and you can see, you know, what people are looking for. Potentially it has to do with the actual structure of the product. This one has a little bit more sturdy look. This one looks a little bit more Shaky and it has a lot more eggs on it. So this one probably fits better into your, into your refrigerator. So there's a lot of different components that can go into that. But you can kind of see it a little bit better when you take a look at the media all stacked on top of each other and then also the pricing. So that is just basics click share and conversion share and ways you can kind of analyze that to see if there are ways that you can improve your listing to get some more click share and conversion share. So check it out and let us know what you think.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, thank you very much, Carrie, for that training tip. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We'll see you guys next week to see what's buzzing.
Get ready to unlock the secrets of Amazon-selling success as we welcome back, Stephen Diaz of the Rainmaker Family. Together with his wife, they have woven a thriving community of dedicated e-commerce sellers. Today's deep-dive episode is crammed with innovative strategies, specially designed for those venturing into Amazon's realm for the first time. Prepare to learn how to rake in thousands of dollars per month by creating videos for other people's products, and finding good products to promote with the help of tools such as the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer. We also walk you through the Amazon influencer program and how you can be a part of it without having to be the 'face' of video content.
Buckle up as we guide you through the entire process of recording, uploading, and creating eye-catching thumbnails for your videos. Be ready to learn how to craft compelling titles and get a handful of tips to produce successful video reviews. We also brainstorm creative ideas for video reviews that go beyond the confines of your home. Stephen sheds light on his experiences and the advantages of participating in high-ticket mastermind events, highlighting how investing in yourself can dramatically influence your success in the e-commerce world.
In our journey through this episode, Stephen imparts priceless insights into the keys to entrepreneurial success. We touch on the importance of focus, mindset, and budgeting in e-commerce. In the end, we delve into the strategies that work best for family-oriented businesses on Amazon, like how to utilize Amazon Associates and affiliate links to connect to other products in your shop. Whether you're a novice or a seasoned seller, this episode promises you strategies and insights to skyrocket your business to new heights. Tune in, and get ready to get some creative ideas on how you can build capital for Amazon FBA selling.
In episode 495 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Stephen discuss:
- 01:57 - The Maldives Honeymoon Strategy Helped The Rainmaker Community
- 03:51 - How To Build Capital For An Amazon FBA Business
- 07:14 - Making 6-Figures As An Amazon Affiliate
- 08:43 - Difference Between Amazon Associates And Affiliates
- 11:17 - Different Kinds Of Videos You Can Make
- 17:15 - Why Joining Masterminds Are Important
- 21:18 - Inspiring Stories From Stephen’s Community
- 31:18 - What Does It Take To Succeed In This Business?
- 36:49 - How To Get More Information Of Stephen’s Community
- 40:20 - Stephen’s 60-Second Tip
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► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/video
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got somebody back on the show who's got one of the most successful communities out there in the Amazon world and he's going to talk about what's been working for them, including how some can make thousands of dollars a month on doing videos for other people's products. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you browsing a Shopify Walmart, Etsy, alibaba or Pintu? Are you browsing a Shopify Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on? Well, while you're on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me forward slash extension.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we're bringing back somebody who, along with his wife, has helped more serious sellers than almost anybody else out there. Stephen, how's it going, man? Welcome back.
Stephen:
What's up, Bradley man? Anytime I get to hang out with you is awesome. I know Chelsea's usually sitting right by my side, but today she's 100% mom. So she's being 100% mom, today I'm being 100% podcaster Love it. And that's how we do it.
Bradley Sutton:
And in your honor, you know, I'm actually wearing the shirt that you guys gave me the Maldives shirt. I believe this came from Merch by Amazon, like what? Two, three years ago. I think, you guys, it might have been either during the pandemic or before the pandemic. That's how long.
Stephen:
I've had this shirt. Well, the Maldives strategy impacted our community so much that I was like we got to give back and I didn't know Bradley's T-shirt size, so I think I sent you like six Amazon merch shirts.
Bradley Sutton:
It was great. I gave one to each of my family who were all those sizes, and then I took the biggest one for myself.
Stephen:
Perfect man, that's good. Well, that's that that technique is still making ripples, man Like it's. It's very cool. And title density, all that stuff we love it in Rainmaker. So yeah, I'm excited.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of which, it is now two 10pm on Wednesday, in 28 hours I'm hopping on the plane to go to Maldives. To record episode 500. So the latest iteration of it.
Stephen:
There we go. Dang man, I need to get out to the Maldives now. Like I was every time they're out there. Yeah, they got a great kids club, you know so so you know, do you go to the same place every time?
Bradley Sutton:
I either go to the Waldorf Astoria or the Conrad. They're both Hillson properties, so I can use my points for it for either one, but I don't know if you're a Hilton or a Marriott person, but they got good Marriott properties out there too, okay, Anyways, let's get into some strategy. Let's just start. You know like we usually say this at the end, but we'll, we'll go and do some strategies at the end, but every time you've been on the show you've always, you know, come with some like kind of unique, uh, unique stuff. So like back in. By the way, guys, if you want to get their full backstory uh, I wrote down here or I didn't write down, I don't do much of work here. Mel, my assistant, is one who does the work here. He put in a episode of 198 guys. So episode all the way back in 198, we're about to film 500. That just shows you where, how far we've come. But 198 was their first time you can get their their backstory there. And then they came back in episode 318. So way back in episode 198, they were talking about uh doing sales on Facebook, uh market places, and then they gave some updates on that in episode uh 318 and talking about Facebook groups. And so I think the latest thing that you guys have been doing you know, especially for those who at the beginning might not be able to have enough money to to, to, to start private label, to invest, uh talk about what is one of the ways that people can can build some capital or what, what, what your community has been doing, yeah, I mean we see all different levels, you know, and and, and we really do specialize, you know, in the Rainmaker family, helping moms, and so a lot of moms like they are just like, uh, honestly, they've tried a lot of other stuff, you know, and so they're hesitant to go go big on Amazon at the first.
Stephen:
So so helping them create the money to do the thing is definitely something that's in our specialty. So I would say, lately, there's a handful of strategies. Right now we definitely have a subset of our community doing the influencer strategy on Amazon. Um, and when you hear that word, I think people think, like you know, I don't know, taking pictures of your coffee at the coffee shop and like having your face all over social media, um, but the Amazon influencer program, anyone can do and you can actually do it without putting your face in the videos, which is kind of nice. And so, honestly, like, uh, this opportunity was brought to me by a guy, john, he was doing it and he kind of came to our community. I was like, hey, I'll do this for you guys. Like he was just looking for more products to review. But if any of your listeners are unfamiliar with it, basically how it works is when you go to the Amazon listing right, you see the photos. There's always like these, like videos related to the item or sometimes there. If you have a video, it'll be like the second video that plays after your video, and those are like these Amazon influencer videos and if someone watches that video and then buys the product, that influencer will get a commission on the sale, which is really crazy. So, um, you know, you've probably heard of the Amazon associate program or affiliate program where I signed up for that.
Bradley Sutton:
Just, I was trying to let you just check if I can get some, um, you know, see some different data points. I was curious if, like Amazon, affiliates have different data points. So I signed up and I was just like I already shoot me or my family is going to get some of them. I might as well just make a link and and get some. You know, get some stuff. But yeah, I signed up for that one, but not the influencer. So what's the difference between the two?
Stephen:
So, yeah, you have to sign up as a Amazon associate or affiliate first, and then you can apply for the influencer program. So it is an application only, uh, to get into it. But, um, uh, it's fairly easy to get in. You just need to have an audience somewhere of some sort, and then you can use TikTok, instagram, facebook. I mean, we have people even just use a Facebook page and they'll they'll run ads to the page for a little bit to just gain some audience. Uh and then they'll apply right. And so the the Amazon influencer program. Once you're in, they basically allow you to like, upload videos of of products you're reviewing, but the catch is you don't have to have bought the product on Amazon, so, like it doesn't have to be your past purchases, it can be literally any product that's on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
So if they get approved for this, like, are they seeing something different on product pages or something that's like an extra button of of how they can upload or how they different?
Stephen:
just like seller central is its own thing, the influencer or the associate program has his own dashboard you can log into. Kind of KDP, like Amazon, keeps all these things separate, you think they just link them all. Yeah, um, it's like you log into your associates dashboard. You kind of click over to the influencer page and influencers. You may see people do this on Instagram where they actually have like a storefront where it's like my favorite Amazon things and it'll be like my house hacks my favorite clothes and those are like that's one way to do it. But this kind of video side of the Amazon influencer program is really the lucrative one. And the guy I heard it from, john, he was doing six figures with this. Like that was his full time business. He did have a YouTube channel. He was reviewing tech gear and things like that, but he would just like get reached out from brands at this point. He's kind of got a name for himself and I think he was doing like over 200,000 and just Amazon money.
Bradley Sutton:
Is it all on commission? Or also he'll get like a flat fee from some of the store owners to create videos.
Stephen:
Sometimes they are getting like a, like a bounty, like that, but a lot of it is just commission. Yeah, he's getting commissions through affiliates so he's doing super high volume. That's like I don't know a ton of people doing those types of numbers. Yeah, but that got us interested. You know, chelsea signed up for it and she was around the house shooting stuff. So basically, what you do is just go around your house and you just review every item in your house and like it doesn't have like again, you didn't have to buy it on Amazon, it just has to be on Amazon. Yeah, so you just be like you know, uh, hey, this, I have a Apple mouse on my desk. You're like, let me tell you about this Apple mouse and you just do a review of it. But the types of reviews that work really well are just authentic reviews. If you're super polished and like, let me tell you, it looks like too professional, people don't trust it, right. So you want to just like do it like a casual, like honestly, a lot of our reviews are cell phone, they're vertical and we're shooting away from us and just like pointing and like it's like voiceover, just like like you would like your unboxing something. Yeah, show your friend and so, yeah, you just go around your house and like review everything right and you have to submit the videos. They do have to get approved by Amazon, but once they're approved, they live on that page. You know of the Amazon listing and a percentage of people will click on them, watch them and you'll get commissions and sometimes they actually go up in the carousel too.
Bradley Sutton:
I think you know Norm Ferrari was showing you this.
Stephen:
Videos will go up in the carousel.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah.
Stephen:
Huh, it's crazy. So and then if?
Bradley Sutton:
they click it in the carousel and buy it, they still get credit then. Yep, of course.
Stephen:
Yeah, you get a commission. Yeah, yeah, all right, I'm a how I do that.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm going to have to look into that. I always like it's fun, man, it's fun.
Stephen:
It's fun thinking about like, okay, what's the most expensive thing in my house, because again, you're making such a small percentage, right? Yeah, you either want super high volume or you want expensive and helium 10 super helpful because you can go. Okay, how much volume is this product doing? Right, so if you have, like I remember we were reviewing stash your bags. They're like those ziploc bag alternatives, like they're like made of silicone oh, reusable ziploc bags basically. But there's like a thousand stash your bag listings, right, because it's like a wholesale product that'll up your wholesale. So I use helium 10 to figure out which one has the most sales because, like you can't tell which blue stash your bag I bought it could be on any of these listings, right? Yeah, I use helium 10 to figure out which listing has the highest volume, right, but also has the least amount of influencers hopping on there and making videos. So that increases the chances and that that one video would make it's like 10 to $15 a day. You know it's not like crazy, but imagine you have a hundred videos, a thousand videos, you know, that are that are doing those types of numbers Like it's. It's incredible.
Bradley Sutton:
So, yeah, and so you record it with your phone and then what you? You upload it with the or you send it to your computer and then you upload it in that.
Stephen:
Yeah you can upload it. Yeah, I always send to my computer, upload it. You can do a thumbnail. So if you're, you know you know anything about internet, you know you gotta have a catchy thumbnail sometimes. But I was super lazy about it because Chelsea would reshoot them and I would upload them. So I'd do the catchy title and the thumbnail. Oh, that was my specialty. So the key thing with the titles, you don't really want to tell people if you like the product or not. You want to be like five things. I wish I knew before I bought this. Right, there's like no idea.
Bradley Sutton:
You have no idea if, like, do you have any that that you could like tell me you'll look at right now, and then I could like show people how it looks, or just an example of one.
Stephen:
I'll shout out a friend's brand, kingsloo. Yeah, he sells a slim fit wallet and we did a video on that one and yeah, it's just a super simple video.
Bradley Sutton:
$109 for a wallet.
Stephen:
Good grief, I know Gucci. Yeah, he sells mostly off Amazon. He's more of a DTC but we've helped him get on Amazon and oh five videos here. I bet a bunch of our Rainmakers have done it now, and then I think you click on that like five videos underneath there and you should see like Heather's on there and Chelsea's on there. Yeah, there you go.
Bradley Sutton:
Wait, well, that's, that's their video. Yeah.
Stephen:
So click on, here we go, honest, awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
So so when you said the, the, the thumbnail like this is the thumbnail that they chose. They just chose a random part of it. Oh, I did that. So like oh, you did this.
Stephen:
Honestly like I was super lazy. So I would just screenshot and make an arrow, like I put an arrow and like it kind of like makes you think I'm talking about some specific thing, but it's just a catchy way to kind of. And then you just make it vertical, just like this. Wait, here's I didn't know it wasn't.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh yeah, hear your voice in this thing. There, there we go. Okay, wow, I think. Yeah, this is one of those. I was one of the good ones.
Stephen:
Heather did this one.
Bradley Sutton:
She's in our community.
Stephen:
She's really helped us pioneer this kind of influencer thing. She created a mini course on it. Yeah, super casual, right, like it's not like really polished. Of course, if you're doing like a DSLR camera or like the new iPhone, people want like the Marcus Brown. You know they want the Polish video, right, but we're just all the stuff around your house you can just pick, hey, you know, you can just go and get a bunch of stuff, all the stuff around your house, you can just pick. Hey, this is my honest opinion on this thing.
Bradley Sutton:
And you just don't know what account could be multiple people Like. Could I have my kids do videos on my account and stuff too?
Stephen:
Yeah, I'm just not like the kids, so like if you're going to have a kid, you got to have you in it as well.
Bradley Sutton:
like a minor or they have to be 18. My kids are over 18.
Stephen:
So yeah okay, then they could do it. Yeah, I mean one of the best side hustles, I feel like for a college kid like so so easy to do. You just need a cell phone, you just need time Maybe. I mean, we would batch like four or five videos a day and Chelsea would do some, I would do some, and we named our account like like family. So it was kind of like both of us, um and man, you can stack. I mean we, we did. Well, our goal was like to do 30, 30 videos. You know, just to get it started, I would say if someone's listening to this, they want to do this. I would commit to doing like 30 or a hundred videos to really see the effect of it. And then you can chill out and kind of just let that passive income come in and then just grow it as you want. And uh, I mentioned this before the call. But eventually you will run out of stuff to review right In your house and that's a good problem to have. Yeah, then you can start going to friends houses. You can start. You know, I mean you could even book an Airbnb and review everything in that house. I mean I've even this is really funny, but like I even reviewed something at a park one time, like that's someone else had like a stroller Cause like strollers are expensive and so like I just took a video of a stroller from far away. If someone else is trying, I wasn't showing their kids or anything like that, but I was like zooming in on my phone and I did a voiceover over it later, just talking through some of the benefits and things I was just reading on the listing, you know. So again it can get really creative with it. Um, of course we're not trying to manipulate sales or anything like that. Uh, like not trying to say something, that's not true. But I always go to the listing and I look at the reviews. Use helium 10 and you can analyze all the reviews and figure out what are the big questions people have. What are making what's, what are they loving about the product, what are they wanting to buy or what is what's drawing them to buying this product, that type of thing, and you can hit some of those things. Um, you can even throw all that into chat GPT and be like hey, write me a 30 second video review script and just literally read it.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm going to. I'm going to try this, but but not not to throw water on the fire here. But this is something that later on, I predict Amazon is going to change, because, just knowing the way Amazon operates because, yeah, somebody's going to do a lawsuit or something, because theoretically, nobody's going to do a video, that's going to talk bad about it because that.
Stephen:
You know, like the whole purpose.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, if you're an Amazon influence, you're trying to make money. You know, unless Amazon puts something in there where if you do a negative video but that's still real that somehow you still get some kickbacks, somebody's, somebody somewhere is going to do some kind of lawsuit just because this is such a country.
Stephen:
I do in a million videos or something like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, but either way, guys, that's why you got to get on this now. Yeah, what they are doing, which is nice, now you can include two products in the video.
Stephen:
I wouldn't recommend it when your first game started, but you can do comparison videos, which I do like where you're like. Hey, are you thinking about buying this?
Bradley Sutton:
or this.
Stephen:
That's good. Let me tell you about the pros and cons.
Bradley Sutton:
And in the video. Does the video show up on both listing? It shows up on both, yeah.
Stephen:
You can tag two products in the video. But if you do it right at the beginning, amazon typically won't approve it and they are getting stricter on who gets approved into the program and you have to submit three videos when you first start and they approve or deny those and so if they deny them you can try again, like I think it's three times. If you deny it three times, then it's kind of like you got to try open up a new account or something.
Bradley Sutton:
Basically, yeah, Now, are you also? Is this the only thing you're doing under your influencers account? Or are you also maintaining, like a YouTube or Instagram where you're sending deals to? We actually are doing that.
Stephen:
You know, like we've had an Amazon Associated Account for I mean since probably 20, probably before I was even an Amazon seller. So we, you know I'm always recommending stuff, even when we are back when we were wedding photographers. People are always like what camera are you using? So we have an Associated Account. And then Chelsea has, she uses the influencer page for her Instagram. So she has like her favorite things on there. You know, here's the kids toys we love, and you know that type of thing. So you definitely like Amazon wants you to be legit, like they don't want you just like do it just for the influence of videos. So and that's a better long-term strategy to is like, have a YouTube channel, have a Instagram, make a tick tock that's like you know Favorite mom finds or something like that and just like, post your videos cross, post them when you're I mean you already recorded, I'm right, yeah, post them on Facebook, post them on tick tock as well, and that's gonna not only drive more traffic to Amazon but it's gonna make you look more legit, you know. So, yeah, you could really make this a business model again. Amazon could change things. Sure, it is a new wear program, but you could definitely ride this thing for the next year or two, I bet, and it makes some good cash from it.
Bradley Sutton:
Nice, all right, let's switch gears a little bit, come something completely different. Um sure, I noticed that sometimes you go to like these, you know, like masterminds for, like entrepreneurs, and, and you know you met like Saddam and and come off from a yeah, that's right, he went up there and stuff yeah and and I, I I haven't been to one, but but a lot of these you know, if I'm not mistaken, you know Some of them cost thousands, some of them tens of thousands of dollars to go to. And then so somebody you know, like me, on the outside Looking in might be like, you know, like hey, we all know about, hey, invest in yourself and this and that, but what is it about events that that has people coming out of these things and say you know what? It was worth $1000, like, like. Are you really getting that kind of value out of like these, these, these mastermind kind of events that you go to?
Stephen:
Yeah, I mean, I'll use that example. You know, amz, one step. I met those guys through mastermind and I mean for us, like I would say, you want to get in a mastermind of people? Like there's different masterminds for different reasons, right? So oftentimes that mastermind was going to was probably less for the Amazon business and more for the coaching business, right? Yeah, so we teach people how to do Amazon and so meeting people at those masterminds, like those guys, that was awesome, because I was like, hey, we got a big launch coming up like what do you want to throw in, you know? And so they threw in like an awesome bonus for our people that, like people can only get through our work, like for being in Our world, and if that helps.
Bradley Sutton:
I use them, by the way, too, for a lot of my photography, and oh man.
Stephen:
Yeah, so like if that helps a handful more people come in our program, like that, that so the networking itself.
Bradley Sutton:
Like like that you know they weren't the organizers of the event. But the people you meet can give you invaluable thing.
Stephen:
Okay, yeah yeah, like we met another guy who does like LLC creation and all like the legal entity stuff which, like our people need all the time, you know. So not one relationship basically paid for the match.
Bradley Sutton:
And that's a good point, because now it's like you know, it's not like you couldn't Google to find companies that do this kind of stuff, but but you know, you don't know if how legit they are, but you know somebody who is Gonna invest in themselves and pay a huge money to actually be at that place. It's almost like pre vetting them. Yeah, yeah, a little bit in itself.
Stephen:
I'm gonna do a lot of conferences, right, and like conferences you get a lot of gold out of, but it's like usually a lot of time frame, right, like are there three, four days, and then there might be like one or two. Like man, that nugget Added six figures, added a million dollars on the business, like that. One thing I found in these higher ticket masterminds like we're in, we're in a 50k mastermind or 60k mastermind, like it's just like it's so much more compressed because of who's in the room and like who's paying to be in the room, that like you're in the lunch line, you know, like to get your like potato salad and someone drops an idea on you. That's like, oh my god, that's like that was a million dollar idea, you know. So, and I think it's the connections of like everyone who's paying there like to be in the room. They have a lot of awesome connections to you know. So that network effect. I think like, yeah, like sometimes masterminds are more teaching and training and like you know, but, but the best ones I've been in are more relational and it's just like how can we build partnerships? How can we leverage each other's resources? How can we work together? How to serve our people at a higher level. So that's where I found the value. And just there's something about getting in person with people. You know you do it all the time, you know. It's just like it's different than zoom, right yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah for sure, all right guys. So that's something you know. Regardless of what field you're in, you know there's always different masterminds that that can help you, you know, grow as a person, as a you know there's inspirational stuff and or or as a business, if you're entrepreneur, I mean even a helium tent as a mastermind. So so you know the helium 10 elite program. You know people can meet. You know can meet other high-level sellers. So if you think that some of you guys want to look into, look at h10.me forward slash elite. But on the other hand, I think there's a couple masterminds like non-amazon masterminds I was thinking of mainly for me might want to. You know, look into, maybe I can see if helium 10 can help me out with the With the bill because some of these are pretty expensive, but that's interesting. Always bet on yourself, always improve yourself and sometimes it takes takes money to do that. Going back to the your community now, any cool stories. You know, every year there's always cool stories coming out your community. I remember the one Person who I was doing some demo a couple years ago about it's right football product or something, and then I was just like making a joke, like man, if I this would probably be totally something that I would, I would sell and then she ended up selling it made you know thousands of dollars on it. But any other cool like rags to riches stories or just just something inspiring that you could share with audience man it's.
Stephen:
I love our community because we've really like Encourages, community of celebration. I think like it's really easy and like even the Amazon space or really any entrepreneur space, to get in a Competitive mode where it's like, oh, other people winning means like I'm not right and kind of like you think about yourself and you. You either try to like one up somebody you know or you try to like kind of Downgrade their success or like I don't know makes it. People can like oftentimes in the early days of their entrepreneurship journey, go to kind of like almost like I'm not enough, thinking Like I was, like oh, like dang, like it's like you can get in just lack mindset. So we've really tried to overcome that because really when we're helping people in our program, we're helping bring them out of poverty mindset right Into abundant thinking, and not just financially but in all the areas. So when they do have the money, when they are making the money, they don't just let those old mindsets hold them back still, you know. And so we found the way you celebrate other people really shows a lot about that mindset you developed. And so we just like kind of our community is just a thing, like when someone is winning big or small, they post it in the group and like everyone just goes crazy over it. You know, and it's just a really cool like contagious momentum and we had one the other day that I just I loved because she said, like she was posting, I think she had done like her first like $3,000 day on Amazon. She had, you know, was doing about $10,000 weeks at that point in her business. But she said, like you know, when she started the program she was in product research for like so long. You know, like you kind of get stuck in that analysis, paralysis, and she was just getting discouraged and she said she'd always come to the group and just look at the wins every night and she would just like when she was feeling discouraged she'd go look at everyone else's wins and she just be like this is gonna be me, this is gonna be me, this is gonna be me. So it's so cool to see her, like it was probably a year after she started posting the screenshot and being like now I get to be the person you know that like encourages you and like if you're in the dumps, right now and you're feeling discouraged, like here.
Bradley Sutton:
It is, you know, and like, which I think is the reason why, yeah, you should be part of a community. You know, sometimes like if that person was trying on their own, I would say odds are they might have just given up because they weren't getting that inspiration. You know from other people. You know nine out of 10 times that person who's stuck in the analysis paralysis they just go ahead and give up. You know perhaps, but being part of a community you could see, you know other people succeed and it inspires you to move on. So I think that's important.
Stephen:
Yeah, it's incredible man and I. That's what gets me fired up. I mean, yes, it's cool when we have a student make $40,000 in a day on it. Like we've had these crazy like people like crush huge numbers. Again, it's not the normal, sure. But what gets me more excited is the people that, like you know, we got flowers in the mail from someone who said, like I was depressed, I was suicidal, like I was, I had no hope in life, and then I found this, you know, and this community, plus the training, plus the mindset, like it gave me hope again. Like that, yeah, that's like beyond the money. So we kind of sometimes joke, we're kind of like you know, amazon's kind of the front, you know it's like, yes, we're teaching Amazon, but like entrepreneurship in general, I think is one of the biggest transformational, like vehicles that you can ever like go on. It's like it's like a roller coaster ride that like changes your life right, yeah, and I love it for that. That it's like who it makes you in the process. It's so powerful. So we love celebrating those. We call those the bubble over benefits. Like it's cool when people hit the numbers and make the money, but the bubble over benefits of like I retired my husband or you know, I was able to quit this job. That was soul sucking. Or I got hope again Like that is so crazy, so Right.
Bradley Sutton:
Now you know we can talk Amazon strategy all day long and stuff. But you know somebody like you who's dealt with so many sellers. You know and you help people, not just on the Amazon strategy but like you know mindset and you already handle a lot of that with a community and helping people. When we talked about the benefits of community, but what? are some other things that you see is is like the difference between those who succeed, and again, success doesn't mean a certain revenue figure. You know success is very subjective, but from those who succeed to those who you know end up, you know failing and giving up, because all the people in your community. They're given the same resources. You know they all have helium 10, you know they all, they all have you guys, they all have the same. You know training and stuff, but you know not. The fact of the matter is no program or no, anybody has a hundred percent success rate. So what are some of the things that that success or that not success? What are some of the things that differentiate the successes from the failures?
Stephen:
Totally. Yeah, we try to reverse engineer this because we basically have this thing called the 10K payday guarantee, and so to claim the 10K payday guarantee, which basically the short statement is, if you don't make $10,000, we'll pay you $10,000. But there's a ton of terms and conditions. So it's an action-based guarantee and we basically took our most successful students and we reverse engineer what they did and we put it in the guarantee. So, if you want to qualify for the guarantee, do this, this, this, this, and it's just like a checklist of all the stuff you got to do. And so I'd say the biggest thing is focus. Focus is a big one, especially for mom, especially for parents. Like you only have so many, so much time, right, and so we call this nutrients. Like you only have so much nutrients to put into your garden. If you're trying to do Amazon, you're also trying to day trade. You're also trying to, like, do this other Airbnb side, hustle over here. You're putting in just a tiny bit of nutrients. You're gonna grow like a lot of tiny pumpkins, right. But if you cut off a lot of pumpkins and you put all the nutrients into one, you're gonna grow like the award-winning pumpkin, right? There's a book called, I think, the Pumpkin, the Pumpkin I don't know something about pumpkins, where that came from and it's written by the guy who wrote profit first. But he talks about just like you just focus, right, and so that's a big one. We see, just I mean, they're like you know, bradley, like there's a thousand ways to make money on the internet, right, and so we really train people on like put blinders on for like nine months, like a year, like just give this thing your all for that amount of time. And whatever Facebook ad you see, don't click it. You know, just like do this thing. So I think that's a big one. We see people try to do too much and then they just go slower because of that or they get derailed into something else. The second thing I'd see we see a lot is really and we had a PhD neuropsychologist come into our group and really start training on this because she was talking about she works with like six and seven figure entrepreneurs on mindset and just the science behind like training your mind to go beyond where you're comfortable. And you know our body I'm gonna like not say this as sciencey as she would, but like you know, our body is like running a thousand automations at once, like I'm moving my hands, I'm breathing, I'm talking, I'm looking at you, I'm blinking. Like our body is designed, our brain is designed to automate those things because, like, if we had to think about all that, it would like destroy us, right? And so anytime you're doing something, really frequently your brain goes into really an automation and it's to keep you, come to us, keep you safe, just keep you. You know all these things. So when we stretch people into entrepreneurship or like hey, go spend $5,000 on inventory, right, like it's something that is like way beyond their current thinking sometimes. And so the brain will go whoa, chill, stop, slow down. Like hold on, I'm stuck. Like I'm stuck, I'm overwhelmed. These are actually, like we reframe them, as green flags that you're actually on the right track, cause we see people posting the group. I'm overwhelmed, I'm stuck. Right, we're like, oh, this is awesome. This means that we're stretching you this way, right, cause your brain is trying to keep you here, but that same thinking will keep you there. If you want to go here and have this amazing business, you gotta stretch and take this step here, you know. So we've kind of helped reframe the mindset thing. So when people are getting stuck. They know that it's a green flag and then they also know to reach out, cause we have a lot of different ways to support people. So that's the thing we see is people get stuck and then they don't reach out. They ghost us, you know, like we can't show up at their house and do that type of thing, yeah, and then I would say, so I said, focus getting stuck and not reaching out. And then I would say, like I would say PBC definitely has gotten way harder in this last season. And so I think, not having not going after, like I would say, either going after two low search volume products because they are on a kind of tight budget so they're going to have to really low search volume products, or going for, like way too high search volume products and not anticipating how much budget it takes to really rank and maintain rank on those search terms, you know. So it's like finding that middle ground, and so we've started to more train on that like kind of even budget training, of like hey, if you have this much devoted for your business, like spend this much on inventory, right, and leave this much for buffer room and leave this much for something you don't even know about yet, you know, because what we find is sometimes people stretch their budget on the first product so far, like you got 10,000, they spend all of it on inventory and then they have no buffer room to like keep it going, and then they got it, and then, if it is going, they got a reorder and then they're stuck right. So, training on that buffer. So just for people listening, if you're like I'm doing Amazon, I got this type of budget going in. I think, padding that budget right After you're not going all in on your inventory, you have budget room. I mean, you did this with that project. You launched a ton of products for like was it $5,000?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, so I don't know. 12 products for 5,000 project 5K. Do you have any?
Stephen:
budgeting rules. I'm just curious, selfishly, because we've been kind of developing it, but like even for that, did you have any budgeting rules, like how much of that budget you'd spend on one product?
Bradley Sutton:
No, like I just wanted to see how many. My budget was 5K total, like including, you know, launching and stuff. I was like, all right, what in the world can I do with? This was my challenge. And then I was like all right, a lot of them were like straws and then I launched a brand around that like stuff that had to even do with like straws and parties and stuff.
Stephen:
Is there just low cost to?
Bradley Sutton:
make. Was that what it was? Yeah, just low cost to make. It kind of sucks that now that there's no Amazon, small and light. So actually I started losing some money on those products in the last few weeks that Amazon took away that program, but I mean, my goodness, like I discontinued some of them. They weren't all home runs, you can't be 12 out of 12. But still, like there are some products. I think I started that thing like four, three, four, five years, no, four years ago, and I'm still selling, you know, some. Like you know, I'm even bringing back one I'm going to do a little case study on it that it was really popular around Christmas time and I haven't sold it in, like you know, two years and so it's been dead. And I just ordered, you know, some new ones to see if I can get some traction. But yeah, the budget is. It was definitely critical. But you know, I tell people like, just because, like you can do it, this is not advisable because you know nobody can make a living off of products that are retailing for like $7, $8, which is what you have to do when you're trying to get products that your cost is less than a dollar, which it was for unit, yeah, so, yeah, yeah.
Stephen:
So we're encouraging people, like we kind of we kind of ask them what their budget is and then we kind of encourage them to stretch it a little bit and whether you're leveraging financing or, honestly, like we've seen a handful of people do partnerships, where you just are getting an inventory investor and that sounds fancy, but I mean that means like a friend or a family member who has heard about Amazon but doesn't really want to do the work, and so we found a lot of people doing that and, honestly, I would, I would. One of the easiest things to do is go to go to someone who has an audience too, like, if you can go to someone like you know, you're listening to the show, you have that one friend who has like an Instagram following. Go to her and go hey, I'm learning about e-commerce, I'm launching this product. Would you ever have interest in launching a product for your audience, you know, and then like, develop it with them, and then, basically, you do all the work, you do all the sourcing and then you get a percentage of the sales you know and that that's a no risk way to get into it. Or someone else is fronting the money for the inventory. They already have the audience, not only the Amazon data of the traffic there, but they already are going to promote it and that audience loves them. Buy anything they shall, you know, talk about. So that's another way we've seen people do it, where they are basically making it rain for someone else and then they're making a percentage of that and that's making their own pot and now they have their own money. Actually, that that that wallet brand Kingsloo, one of our Rainmakers, went through our challenge and she got hired by that company, oh wow, and she built their Amazon brand. I mean, they were, they were doing about eight figures like 10 to 12 million on just Shopify with that product. You know, just Facebook had to Shopify and they weren't even on Amazon. But when we looked at the helium 10 data, it was like people searching their brand on Amazon right, yeah, you'll see the Facebook guy and come over, and so she built it out and like, built a I mean they did a million dollars on just like the Amazon channel. And then we recently worked with them because I'm a good good friends with Josh and we re-did his listing cause he was just ranked on his brand keywords, like you know, but he wasn't on slim wallet for men or any of these like big keywords, and so we reworked it. Maldives launched it again and it like basically I don't know exactly but it it almost doubled or tripled his Amazon sales Like he was doing. He was doing. I remember him saying me screenshots of like right after the launch and it was like he's doing. He was doing I think 8,000 or something like that a day and he went up to like 25,000, 30,000. And this was like Q4 last year. So I don't know what his numbers are now, but it's crazy Like there's so many Shopify owners should just like they're cranking on Shopify but they have no idea about Amazon or they have false beliefs about Amazon. That's a whole nother market. If you're trying to get into Amazon, be an Amazon account manager for people on Shopify. When you have those Shopify ads for, like those DTC products, go look on Amazon. If they're not on Amazon or they're on Amazon and their listing is terrible, like there's an opportunity there and it's hard to like work that type of deal sometimes, but if you can like, that's incredible.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah. So your program, you know, before we get to the last couple of strategies you might have, I was just looking at your website. It says you've had over 12,000 moms go through the program there. So if somebody is interested in it, is that like a prerequisite? They need to be a stay at home or working mom or what kind of a requirements do they have?
Stephen:
You know you just need to be motherly. No, that can be anybody. When we started, like you know, this is definitely a strategy for Amazon too. Like you want to have a niche, you know you want to, like, really focus on one person. So we, when we looked at our top case studies with our training, it was moms, and so we really made the program for moms when we first started. And when we first started was a lot of stay at home moms. Now it's a lot of working moms, a lot of corporate moms and it's a lot of non moms as well. So really we're just family first and so we're not going to tell you to just hustle your life away or going to tell you like, hey, build this business, but do in a way that protects your family, protects your marriage and all those things. So if you have a family mindset, you can definitely check us out. Yeah, and how can they do that? I'd say go to the. Go to rainmakerfamily.com. Rainmakerfamilycom that's like our, our branded website. You can find our social media there. We have a challenge, seven day challenge. You can get to there. That's what I was talking about. Like we've had people go through that and even just that launch, launch products, and you'll see, you'll see Bradley in there on a bonus day.
Bradley Sutton:
If you make it like this is one of the few. Actually no, this is the only community that almost every other week I do a, I do a call with them because you know your community is one of the best out there and so I wanted to make sure that you know I give back because you guys are doing some great stuff and really great community. Like I was just set the Amazon. Accelerate in Seattle and met some Rainmakers that came up took some pictures so that was. that was cool too, so all right so yeah, rainmakerfamily.com. Guys, if you want to, you know, check out the program Now. What's a couple of you know could be Amazon, anything else, e-commerce or some strategies you can leave us with today.
Stephen:
Man, I feel like I'm trying to remember the ones I said last time, you know. So, like, I think the one we've been geeking out on again we're still testing this but really is, how can we increase the average cart value on Amazon? Right On Shopify? Like you can have upsells, downsells, cross-sells, like you, you know you can have that funnel, but on Amazon it's just harder to do that. And I feel like I saw Amazon testing this for a season, like they had like a way you could like, oh, add this other thing on there, but I haven't seen it recently. And so what we've been doing is using inserts, basically upsell because, like again, not everyone's going to take an upsell on that, but if you make it really attractive and in alignment with your product, a percentage of people will click through on that thing and a percentage of those people will buy. And so the best way to do this with Amazon, honestly, is like doing a high ticket upsell of some sort. So imagine you're selling, like I don't know, a dog whistle for training, right? Like having an insert that says, like you know, get our free guide on blah, blah, blah, and that free guide leads to a dog training course that's $297. So, like I love pairing information products with physical products because you've already kind of like, spent money to acquire that customer, so to say, right, you pay the PVC, you got them, you know you, you sold them a $15 whistle. If you could Not even make money there, but then a percentage of people buy the $297 course right on the back end, then it increases your margins like crazy and you can spend more than anyone else on that product because you don't need to make money on the product. Actually, you know money in the back end from a percentage of the people that come through. So the tricky part is figuring out, like what's really in alignment with that product, that's that solves problems that that person is buying the product for, right. So yeah, every product Usually solves some sort of problem, right? It's like I, my kid is biting the rail on the crib. We, I, so like he, buy the crib rail bumper, right, like that was one of our, am our Rainmaker products. So like, what other problems does that parent? Half right as it with a two-year-old? So you just start thinking like how could I serve that person at the highest level? How could I? How could I give more value than anyone else in this industry? Right, and yet you could do other physical products, but those take time and and the best thing I would honestly do is give them something for free that you're gonna get, sir, contact information, and then you can ask more question about it, and then you can develop something for them that serves them at a high level, or you can develop future products for them, you know. So I know a lot of people take people from an insert to like a free download or something like that. But I'm kind of thinking through, like, how can we take them to Something that is actually an offer? Right, it's like it may be a free thing at first, it has to be catch it, don't? You can't just say, like, buy my thousand dollar course yeah, no, I mean her and have people click it. Like it has to be like something that truly is like oh wow, I'm gonna scan this QR code or click this link or whatever. And so, yeah, we, we another thing, our Rainmakers doing just like if you know, we're talking about Amazon Associates, as they will link to their other Products in their shop using affiliate links on the insert. So like, and they will even do this for other people's products in our community. So this is really cool. Like, oh, Rainmakers, if, like, they have a baby product, they'll go post in our group who else has baby products? And they'll find like three or four other products and they'll say basically, like, check out, check out our you know, check out our friends, and it's like three other products, but they're using affiliate links. So even if you're just making a couple dollars on that, it's increasing. I mean, you might spend a couple dollars to get the customer on PPC. So it's just this idea of like how could we steward those sales more? Um, Alex Hermosi said like if you could get one more sale ever and it had to lead to like every other sale in your business, like how would you change the customer experience you know, and like what, what does that delivery look like? Right, if you start thinking that way, like how could this one sale lead to every sale, it starts making you think a little differently of like how can you Serve someone out of Super High Level and invite them into kind of a deeper relationship with your business?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, you know so yeah, interesting, all right, well, that's, that's a. That's a good one. I'm I know my memories bad, but I'm almost 99% sure we did not talk about that before, so that's new stuff, all right, well, steven, thank you so much for joining us again. Again, congratulations on all the success and and look forward to you know, always, you know being around there for your, your community, more and and hopefully we get to a link up. It's been a while since we've seen each other in person, so hopefully we get to link up at one of these events coming up. You know you need to make your own like, like big, like kind of like get away or event.
Stephen:
We're gonna go to Cancun. You want to come? I'm down, I'm down. Yeah, I'll send you down. I'll send you to work.
Bradley Sutton:
Put me to work, I'll, I'll serve, I'll serve, I'll serve the meals there. I'll do whatever you want, I just want to hang out with your communities.
Stephen:
I love that. Thanks, thanks a lot.
Bradley Sutton:
Please get give my regards to the family, and we'll be seeing you soon, all right.
On this episode, we're excited to have Liran Hirschkorn from Incrementum Digital sharing his expertise on Amazon advertising. He helps us unpack the complex Amazon Marketing Cloud and how it anonymizes data for privacy reasons while still offering a comprehensive understanding of the customer's journey to conversion. We further examine how the platform aids brands in measuring incrementality, particularly those utilizing Amazon DSP ads. Don't miss out as we delve into the Amazon PPC techniques for reaching new customers through upper funnel-type marketing and showing ads to lifestyle markets and demographics.
We continue the conversation by discussing strategies to optimize Amazon ads campaigns. This includes the merits of creating separate campaigns for each target and employing auto campaigns for discovery. We also weigh the pros and cons of negating keywords in both auto and manual campaigns. Pay attention as we explain the potential benefits of lowering bids to secure better placements and possibly more conversions.
As we wrap up the episode, we shift our focus to optimizing sales and advertising on Amazon. Here, we discuss tactics such as increasing prices to slow sales and avoid running out of stock to boost keyword ranks. We look into managing auto campaigns differently and using modifiers to safeguard against broad and exact match keywords. Listen in as we discuss the importance of making incremental changes and evaluating clicks and actual spend data, instead of just impressions, when optimizing campaigns. Liran also offers valuable insights into sponsored display campaigns and other strategies to ensure high conversion rates for keyword ranking. Don't miss this vital conversation and Q&A on Amazon PPC and Marketing Cloud!
In episode 494 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Liran discuss:
- 00:50 - Catch Liran At The Helium 10 Elite Workshop In New York
- 01:49 - What Is The Amazon Marketing Cloud?
- 09:08 - An Advice If You’re Using Amazon DSP
- 11:29 - Auto Campaign Optimization
- 12:12 - ACoS Targets And Examples
- 15:03 - Optimizing For Target ACoS
- 23:53 - Keywords and Budget Per Campaign
- 25:22 - PPC Strategy When Running Out Of Stock
- 26:35 - Using Modifiers For Amazon PPC
- 27:23 - Best Time To Start Optimizing Campaigns
- 33:41 - Amazon Launch PPC Strategy
- 36:28 - More Effective PPC Strategies From Liran
- 41:43 - How To Reach Liran Hirschkorn And Incrementum Digital
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Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today is TACoS Tuesday, so we're bringing on another advertising expert to answer all of your Amazon PPC questions, including the latest on product launches and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Want to keep up to date with trending topics in the e-commerce world? Make sure to subscribe to our blog. We regularly release articles that talk about things such as shipping and logistics, e-commerce and other countries, the latest changes to Amazon Seller Central, how to get set up on new platforms like New Egg, how to write and publish a book on Amazon KDP and much, much more. Check these articles out at h10.me forward slash blog.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday program, where we bring a special guest every single month and we talk about anything and everything Amazon and Walmart PPC related. And so you guys hopefully you've been getting some of your questions ready. I've been getting some questions ready that I'm going to be giving to our guest, and let's get them all answered. So, without any further ado, let's go ahead and bring on our guest, loran Hirschkorn from Incrementum Digital. Liran in the house. How's it going, man?
Liran:
It's going great. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm excited to be here Awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, now you're still in New York. Is that where you're based on? I'm in New York, yes, okay, I was just there a few weeks ago, took the family out there, be going one or two times again in October, and one of the times is I'm going to be seeing you. You're going to be our guest speaker at our Helium 10 Elite workshop. Do you know yet what you're going to be talking about there? Can we give anybody a sneak peek?
Liran:
all Possibly Amazon Marketing Cloud is what's been on my mind, but we'll see, I guess, if that stays the topic or maybe we want to get some feedback from the audience. There's a lot of very interesting things happening with the Amazon Marketing Cloud. We could talk a little bit about that here as well, let's just start with that real quick.
Bradley Sutton:
I think there's a lot of people in our audience who don't even know what Amazon Marketing Cloud is. Can you explain that a little bit?
Liran:
Yes, so the Amazon Marketing Cloud is essentially what's called a clean data room. Essentially, it's just a think about it as a place that hosts a lot of data and through AWS, and what it allows brands to accomplish now that you couldn't do before is understand the. I would say two main things One, understand the full customer path to conversion and to create audiences that you couldn't before. Let's tackle each one of those. When we say understand the full customer path to conversion, today we think we understand how a customer buys your product, but you don't really understand it Meaning if a customer searches your brand, clicks on a sponsored brand ad, then comes back, clicks on a sponsored product ad and they buy, the only thing, the only area where you're going to see the attribution of the sale is to sponsored product, because that was the last click and advertising works on the last click attribution. What the Amazon Marketing Cloud does is it stores all that information and it anonymizes the data for privacy reasons. So you don't have the specific customer information, but what the Amazon Marketing Cloud will show you is that you had this month, for this particular product, you had 100 customers that their path to conversion was branded search click sponsored product ad click sponsored display buy or see a DSP ad awareness ad search to brand name click sponsored product purchase. Because of this, what's happened historically is especially for those people that have done DSP in trying to understand whether or not DSP has incremental benefit on the sales Incremental. I see what you did there. Yeah, somebody told me that it was a very smart name to create a few years ago because really that is kind of what's being measured here. Incrementality is being measured with the Amazon Marketing Cloud because in the past if you did a DSP ad and you would be hard to understand if you actually drove more sales as a result of DSP, this will help that a little bit because it will show you how many customers you had this month that purchased when they just saw both, let's say, dsp and sponsored products together and how many customers you had that only saw sponsored products, for example. So you'll get a better understanding.
Liran:
Even though the way attribution works is it only goes to the last click, I always thought Amazon should have an assist kind of metric where if you had an ad that assisted as part of the process, it should kind of get something. But that's just not how ads work and Amazon Marketing Cloud aims to solve that. And the more you do DSP, especially with upper funnel type marketing, the less you see the attribution there. So when I say upper funnel type marketing, that means upper funnel means not somebody that is immediately looking to buy. So bottom funnel. We have people that are searching for a keyword. They're ready to buy. People that you are retargeting, who have visited your listing they're at the bottom, they're ready to buy. As we move up the funnel you have people that have viewed competitors but not your product. And then you have what's called awareness. We can, as brands grow and they want to scale and they've already sort of maxed out based on, like, the amount of sales they can have, just based on people who are searching for a keyword. They want to look towards brand awareness.
Liran:
But now you're running ads to audiences on Amazon or lifestyle. You have different markets and demographics that you can show ads to. What happens is when you run an awareness ad, that person is not going to immediately see that ad and go by. They might need to see your ad over three, four months and then, when they are actually in the market for that product, they now remember your name and when they go search on Amazon, they see that sponsored product ad. They're going to click on it and buy it because they recognize the brand name and they've seen the ad before. The problem is that again, it'll usually end up being something else sponsored products or retargeting that is the last view they have. Or click before the sale. And you have been running these awareness ads but you don't know if they're being impactful. Well, now, with Amazon Marketing Cloud, you'll see that that person actually started out with the Amazon Marketing Cloud.
Liran:
And I would urge people if you're running DSP, have whoever's running DSP free, whether that's Amazon, whether that's an agency ask them to create an AMC instance for you. And the reason is because, whether or not you're going to use AMC now or not, once you create that instance, you can go back a year. You have a year's worth of data since you started creating it. So that means if in six months from now or nine months from now, you want to go back and you want to see the path to conversion, et cetera, you will have already created that instance. And then the other area where AMC is very helpful is you can now create audiences that you cannot create before because you are tracking this data. So in DSP, historically before we couldn't target people who we couldn't differentiate between people who have visited your listing or added your product to cart. Now you'll be able to retarget people who have added your product to cart. You'll be able to retarget people who have added your product to wishlist, who have searched your brand name. So lots of different audiences.
Liran:
There's something with AMC that is called Paid Insights, where you actually pay Amazon for additional information. With that you can see on average how many buys it takes somebody to become a subscribe and save customer. So you can learn that on average it's three purchases before somebody signs up. Because typically on our first purchase we don't typically sign up for subscribe and save unless we know we like the product. And sometimes it could take your second or third purchase where, like, why am I not just saving and just adding this to subscribe and save? So now you'll be able to understand that and you'll be able to actually create a custom creative and show and add to people after two purchases that says subscribe and save right, because you know that's the typical time where people do that and you're able to create those creatives. So there's a lot that you could do with this.
Liran:
It's very powerful, but I would say it's still early and people understanding it. I would say a year from now, like today, you're an early adopter If you use it. A year from now you won't be an early adopter if you use it. And also a year from now, I think it will apply more whether you're doing DSP or not doing DSP. More software tools will incorporate some data from it and you'll find that there is sort of this freemium model that if you're using software, certain tools will give you the certain templates of different audiences and different path to conversion. That is included with the software and certain tools will say okay, now if you wanna get crazy and customized because you can customize almost anything within this data you'll have fees around extracting that data. But I'm sure companies probably like Pacvue et cetera the Pacvue is, I'm sure, already incorporated AMC and are working on incorporating more and more of it and you'll see those tools continue to add those things and if you're using those software tools, you'll be able to access that data and it will become more prominent.
Liran:
So it is very exciting. Today it applies more so if you're using DSP, but I think that's going to change down the line. So it's. I think it's important that brands understand this and it will kind of change the way we look at our metrics from being focused just on ROAS to being more to having an understanding of also customer journey as well as ROAS , because again you're gonna have that sponsored brand ad that's not gonna show the ROAS attribution but you'll say, hey, I know, when I do this sponsored brand ad together with this sponsored product ad, the purchase rate is higher, and so now you're gonna be looking at these combinations and customer journey more so than just ROAS , and those that do will have an advantage because they'll be able to understand that sometimes that spending more without seeing the RoAS still equals ROAS actually on your ad spend. So it's pretty cool and I think you'll hear more and more about it over the next year or so.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. So we're gonna be talking about that, perhaps at our elite workshops, so elite members can go to that one. We'll have tickets for non-elite members, if anybody's gonna be there in town. The reason why we're having it in New York is it's Amazon Unbox, which is a cool conference. I haven't been to it. This could be my first one. It was my first Amazon Accelerate last week, so that was super cool. All right. Now, switching back to advertising, I wanna ask my questions first here. So I got a list of stuff I've been waiting for to ask Leeran. But one that I've been getting a lot in I thought it was a good thing to bring out is auto campaign optimization. So you know, with auto campaigns, obviously this, almost more than any other you know, can get super out of control if Amazon is showing you for a bunch of random stuff. But I'm wondering, how do you, how do you optimize for ACoS on Campaigns?
Bradley Sutton:
Because you can get to a point where I mean I mean obviously the no-brainer thing is alright. Hey, if you should have rules in place where they're using atomic or whatever software, using is, you know, if you get, like you know, 15, 20 clicks or whatever magic number you guys pick without a sale, you know, might start negative matching. That that's that. That goes without saying, right. But the other thing you know that people can do is maybe they see some of their, their targets Not performing well, like the loose match, the close match, and they could start, you know, adjusting on an individual basis those targets.
Bradley Sutton:
Right, but if you, even if you're doing that, I've seen sometimes you can get to the point where now you're almost all the way down to like a 10 cent. You know target and just, and now you know the quality of keywords at 10 cents. You're just not doing well, but you almost got to that point because, right, so so I, what, what do you do at that point? Should you just you know what I'm gonna go back from 10 cents to a dollar just so I can get some new keywords? But like, where do you draw that balance?
Liran:
Right. So the first thing is you can also create four separate campaigns where you literally turn off Three and keep one on, so you have a set budget. So your budget is not mixed together within those, within each of those areas, because, because you might have, you know, similar products that do very well, but you might have a loose match that doesn't do well, right. So that's something you could do is separate out those four, turn one off on each campaign and then you have a dedicated budget for each one and if something is working well, you can increase the budget. If something's not working well, you can also decrease the budget. And, yes, the first thing, first thing also to recognize, is that auto, mainly, should be there for discovery, discovery tool. So, number one, you may want to allow your auto campaigns to go add a little bit of a higher ACoS, what you want overall, because you want it to be there as a discovery tool. And, yes, you want to Ultimately add negative keywords and you also want to harvest. So that means the Search terms that are converting, the aces that are converting, whatever your rule is whether it's to converge one conversion to conversion, three conversions. You want to move them over into the manual campaign. Now you can also choose to another, like personal decision, if you're going to negate that keyword in the auto campaign or not.
Liran:
Negate their pros and cons to both. If you negate it in the auto, you have full control in the manual. What if in the manual it doesn't get as much traction as it did in the auto? Right, and you're already. Now you negated in the auto and it doesn't get traction in the manual. That would be a reason not to negate in the auto campaign, but still you would ultimately have a higher bid and a more targeted bid in your manual campaign, where it should be getting traction there and not so much in the auto. Anymore, I would say the point is, don't let auto be too much a percentage of your overall spent and Maybe allow it to be somewhat of a higher ACoS because you recognize that it's a broad discovery type of tool.
Bradley Sutton:
Another situation. Let's say I've got a target, ACoS for a campaign just you know Doesn't have to be auto but my target ACoS is 40%. So you know I want my targets For also, you know, at the target level to be 40%. But on one target let's go ahead and say it's a broad, it's a broad match target. I'm at 77% now my cost per click on it is. Or my target that I had, you know the current bid was 291. Let's just say $2.91. Let's just say close call, $3. I'm looking at an exact example now. Let's say it's $3. If my cost per click is 250, right. So I'm obviously not maxing out my target. If my target is $3, right. But at this this to at this 250, I'm still at 70%. I mean right, why my target was at $3 in the first place. Let's just forget about that. I don't know what I was doing there right, but, obviously I have to go down a lot, you know you have to go down to 250 to make a difference.
Bradley:
Yeah, definitely below, below 250. But but is there, like you know, if 250 already is 77%, you know, should I already try and get or put the target at whatever, whatever 40% is gonna be, or is there value in just going down incrementally, like if I just go 250, technically it still couldn't now I was already getting 250. Right, right, I'm still gonna be at 70% or 77% ACoS. Should I just go down more and say, hey, I'm gonna go down to $2 because that's gonna get me closer to 40%, or do I start? Is there any value in? All, right, I'm gonna go to 250 and then let me go to 240 and 230. What is your thoughts there?
Liran:
There can be value in going to 230, let's say and I'll tell you what the value is the value is that the placement that you get may be better than the placement that you get at $2 and that placement can influence the conversion. So, for example, at 230, you may be at the bottom of page one at $1.70, you may be only on product pages, for example, and your conversion rate may be much less on those product pages. So there is a benefit in going incrementally and not going too fast. I would say it depends on how much it's spending and how important it is for you to cut ACoS. I would also say it's important to understand the relevancy of the keyword. If it's not such a relevant keyword and my feeling is well, it may not work. Or it's not highly relevant, it may not work. My feeling is it's not gonna work so well, probably at 240 either. Then I may just bring it down further.
Liran:
But if it's an important keyword, if I'm maintaining ranking, I would try to understand what's happening. Is it ACoS per click issue or is it a conversion issue? It could be ACoS per click issue. It could be that, yeah, three bucks 250 is expensive and it's a $12 product and my conversion rate is good. It's just ACoS per click issue. If so, I would try to bring it down more incrementally and to see what I'm comfortable with. Maybe I'm okay allowing that keyword to be at 50% ACoS ultimately. So I think it depends on the keyword, the importance of the keyword and how much I'm focused around like TACoS versus growth in sales. But the benefit you have in the incrementality is the placement is that your conversion rate may be better at a. You may just end up being on like product pages at a certain point and if you are, your visibility or clicks your conversions are gonna be a lot less, maybe based on the product than in the search results.
Bradley Sutton:
And then when you say, when you end up on product pages, it's like somebody searched that target keyword, they clicked on another product and then now you're showing up on the product page, correct, exactly because placements even when you're targeting keywords, placements are happening on search results and product pages.
Liran:
So I would say, generally speaking, with PPC you're better off making smaller, faster incremental changes and looking at data than making vast, big changes quickly.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Next thing is the flip side. Let's say my target ACoS is 40%. With what I'm getting right now, though, it's only 10%. Would it be 10 out of 10, 100% of the situations? I should always and I'm maxing out my target Should I always increase my bid Because, theoretically, I could be leaving money on the table, depending on where my placement is? Or is there a situation where I would, hey, let's just keep that 10%?
Liran:
You know I wouldn't say no. I mean I wouldn't say all the time, I would just say Because, again, it could be just helping you be more profitable. One report that you could look at is the search term impression report, because that report would give you an idea of how you rank compared to other brands in terms of impressions for that particular keyword. So, for example, you could be getting the most impressions out of any other brand and getting 60 or 70% of all the impressions. Probably not in that case, because you're maxing out the cost per click, but you want to see kind of where you are and how much more room is there to get impressions. Now, generally, I would say yes. For me, most of the time I would want to increase the bid for that particular keyword and I would want to get more market share on that keyword. But if you're very focused on profitability and this is helping your TACoS be at the target then maybe not. But what I would say, though, in that case you may want to consider let's say you don't want to increase your budgets anymore you may want to consider shifting budget. Find the stuff that's not working as well, where you can reduce the bids, and then maybe allocate it to this keyword. Generally speaking, I would say I would be likely to increase the bids on that keyword.
Liran:
If I was under my overall, I would look at it on a kind of a campaign level, not on a particular keyword level. So if my goal for that campaign is a 40% ACOS and because of this keyword on my 30, then I would definitely increase. Now if I'm at 40 still because there's other keywords that are 50 or 60, I would see maybe I need to move budget from those keywords and I should give it to this one. So I'm not increased my budget, but I'm a lot more efficient and I'm getting better sales. I would also see where's my ranking for the keyword. If I'm ranked number one, maybe I don't increase. There's no sense to increase, right. Or if I'm ranked number one, two, three, right, maybe I don't increase because I might just be cannibalizing my organic sales. But again, if I'm number 17, I'm definitely pushing on this keyword and probably what I'm doing is, if it has enough volume, I'm moving into its own campaign. I'm adding a top of search multiplier on that keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
All right Question from Jonathan. Keywords per campaign. You go from one spectrum where there's people who do single keyword campaigns. You go to another spectrum. Some people have like 50 targets. Let's just start with that part of his question first.
Liran:
So I would say we're somewhere in between, meaning your highest search volume keywords, most important keywords, we isolate really into their own campaigns and then from there, based on search volume and performance, we'll group keywords together. I would say probably up to 30 to 50 keywords is max of what I would go per campaign. If you have a lot of long tail lower volume keywords, I think that's okay. But definitely the highest search volume keywords or keywords that have sort of medium volume, I might group into groups of five to 10, for example. As far as budget per campaign, that's very dependent on what is your overall budget? What is the performance like? Right, I'm generally going to be shifting my budgets. I'm not going to just put a budget. I'm going to be shifting my budget to the best performing budget campaigns and I'm going to be maybe taking budget away from my poorest performing campaigns. So I think the budget needs to be dynamic.
Liran:
I think when your question more budget or discovery or scaling, I think in the beginning you're going to probably have more budget on your broad and phrase than on your exact match. As you uncover those best performing search terms, you're going to move more into exact and have probably more budget there. But it's very common that we find phrase match be the best performing keyword type and you'll have most of our budget on that match type. It's sort of in between discovery and very narrow targeted. But I think over time you're going to put more budget on your scaling campaigns. In the beginning you're going to put more budget on your discovery campaigns Because your scaling really should be your best performing keywords. So that's where you're going to allocate more budget to and less so on discovery, because you've already discovered a lot of what's out there initially.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, Kind of a universal. This question has been around for years. People have different opinions on this. Hey, you're doing great on sales, about to run out of stock. Do you slow sales by raising price and turning off ads and then that hurts your potentially keyword ranks before? Or do you just go hard and heavy, run out of stock and then just get back in and hopefully you still have your keyword ranks when you come back in the stock in a couple of weeks?
Liran:
I think, from a ranking perspective, it's better to run out of stock at a better BSR. I agree. I think that's the better way to go. Sometimes you're going to make a decision that, hey, I just want the profits Right, because that's what's more important to me at this point in my business. I'm going to focus more on the profits now, I'm going to reduce, I'm going to raise the price. Or sometimes you may be able to raise the price and there's so much demand that you're still driving pretty good sales and you can still raise the price someone and there's a happy medium. But I would say, from a ranking perspective and coming back in stock at a better rank, it's better to go out of stock with great sales than to slow down your sales.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of auto campaigns, exact campaigns, it's in my opinion I don't know if Amazon announced anything, but just in my opinion I've seen other people say the same thing where what used to be broad and what used to be exact is not like three years ago, is not the same now, where now you have an exact campaign and sometimes you're even shown for what you would have thought would have been a phrase match or even broad matching in some situations. Because of this, are you managing things differently at all, like using modifiers or things like that?
Liran:
Yeah, I would say use modifiers. Modifiers will help protected because if you use a modifier then it forces it to be a true exact modifier before each word in your keyword. But even with that, sometimes there are certain synonyms that Amazon considers the same. You just need to manage it with search terms and negative keywords and bids. But yeah, amazon is definitely trying to find ways to increase their advertising revenue. As a result, they're being more generous in what they are considering your keyword and using synonyms. So use of modifiers will help protect against that Used to be. They started doing it just in sponsor brands and then we've seen this year Amazon doing it with sponsored products also.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Another question let's say I'm trying to optimize for my target A-cost and so I make a change, because I'm trying something similar to what we were talking about. Like I'm at 70%, I'm trying to get to 40%, so I lower my bid a little bit. Now how often are you going back to that and seeing all right now I need to further because you talk about doing some incrementality in order to further adjust that. Like, is it time-based because of that attribution window where you can kind of take a look at it, or is it like maybe I just get another? I can see that in one day I got 500 impressions just because this is maybe some super high search volume keyword? Is that enough data where even a day later I'm further making changes, or once you make a change? Basically, my question is what are you looking at as far as when it's time to go ahead and optimize further? Is it impression-based or time-based?
Liran:
It's based on the data and so I would say one it depends on your budget, right? Because the more budget you have, the more data you're going to have that's coming in faster. I still wouldn't make change from one day to the next because you don't have the full attribution coming in. Even if you see, ultimately, that maybe you didn't have any sales at all, like you know right, like you just know that you didn't have orders from it, I still wouldn't make change from one day to the next. I would wait a few days. So, generally speaking, I would say it's good to be in your account two or three max times, probably a couple times a week to optimize. I think is good, because the one thing you don't want to do is make changes too often where you're just messing yourself up, and this is something we see also with sellers. They're impatient, right, because you don't want to spend money you don't need to spend, and I think everyone gets emotional when it comes to your money. But I would say two days a week is good to go in and make those optimizations. So if you did it on a Tuesday, go back in on a Saturday, or find two days a week that you go in and you're making those changes Now. Again, if you have a ton of data, a lot of spend, maybe make those two days a little closer, like Monday and Friday, or a little closer to each other. But you want to give it enough time also to get the attribution, because there will be people that and impressions. I would look at clicks and actual data of spend, not just the impressions. But people do come back and buy also, right? So if somebody you could have gotten 10 clicks today and if one or two of those become sales, maybe the costs will be fine and you have people that come back three days later. So you do really want to give some time and the attribution window to be in place. I would say most products on Amazon people do buy the same day. They're not very high-priced products, but it does also happen.
Liran:
So give yourself a few days in between changes and even if you're using software that even has rule-based things, then you can give the software days like look on Monday, look on Saturday, look on Friday and also when we do give software rules, you want to make sure when you're decreasing bids one of the things you want to make sure that you're doing just like an example that you said. The rules that we give it is lower OK, if keyword is above target ACoS, lower cost per click by 5%, let's say right, because if you lower bid you may not be reaching the cost per click like you said. So you want to make sure that if you're using a rule-based tool, that you're looking at the cost per click when you're lowering and that you give it, because a lot of times softwares will have both the ability to lower your bid or your cost per click that you lower your cost per click and yeah, we like to do it incrementally. I wouldn't want to go in and say lower by 20%, just lower the bid too much, lower 5% below, then let's see. And then the software will be doing this twice a week.
Liran:
So over a couple of weeks you are going to be significantly lowering your bid where it should be enough of a change. But I would say it's better to go a little slower than make drastic changes. Usually drastic changes are emotional and in business you want to separate yourself from some of that, which is why rule-based is good. But even if you're not using rule-based software, set up rules for yourself on how you're going to manage this based on the different circumstances. It's not a bad idea to write down for yourself what are the rules that I'm going to use to manage, if I'm managing manually as if I'm software, and what days am I going in. How much am I lowering and maybe take some of the emotion out of the management.
Bradley Sutton:
Another question, now that you know, obviously for a couple of years now, you know things like two step URLs search, find by are explicitly against Amazon terms of service. Me personally, 100% of my launch strategy is, you know, ppc. You know, and it's almost I'm almost giving it the same thing as when it was searched fine by. It's still kind of search fine by right. It's just not. You're not. You're not just trying to tell people to randomly search and stuff, which is what Amazon frowns on. But you know, I lower my price by a lot in the beginning. You know big sale price or big coupon, and then I try and do a super high top of search and then it's basically I'm trying to get people to search fine, to buy it. You know, even though I have no reviews where they're like, hey, this is a this price. You know, like, just, you know, I can't you know I can't let this go. So that's my 100% launch strategy. Now, other people I hear you know sometimes they couple it with, maybe like press releases or or perhaps even Google advertising. Right, you know as well. What about you, for you and your clients, for launch, when you're trying to launch on a certain keyword, right, are you strictly doing Amazon PPC? Are you using other techniques? If so, what?
Liran:
we're strictly doing Amazon, and we do it exactly the way you do it, meaning, first of all, the keywords that were focused on ranking. We will give them their own campaign, we will utilize top of search placement, we will recommend to our client to come with an aggressive price coupon, and we do it exactly that. The one thing we really watch for is the conversion rate. Okay, because if the conversion rate is poor, we're not going to get the ranking, and so what we focus on, once we start getting the data in, is the keywords that we're not getting that conversion rate. If it's across the board, then something on the listing side, the price or you know, we need some more reviews to come in. But if we see some keywords performing very well with a conversion rate and some not, we will pull back on those, on those that are not getting the conversion rate, and that really should be. That should very much be your focus when you're launching with those keywords are you converting? If you're converting, then you should you know you should start seeing the rankings coming in. We had a call with a client today and he said, hey, I'm not seeing the ranking. And I said to him that's because we're, that's because your conversion rates are too low and he actually just lowered the price on a product today and we're going to see if that makes an improvement. But you should be very focused on conversion rate and we've seen the ability to be able to rank, especially when you have a new product and you have this honeymoon period, just with PBC. I don't. I don't think you you have to do Google or outside traffic or anything crazy. Amazon will reward you if you are getting sales velocity plus conversion rates on those keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now for the last, you know five minutes or something. Just you know some some quick hitting strategies either on Walmart advertising, Amazon advertising, some things that that you know people you think should be definitely doing out there.
Liran:
So I would say I would say a few things. Talk about two things. Number one one thing I see that is a problem we do a lot of audits is sponsored display, vcpm campaigns. I would encourage you to relook at how much money you're spending on those campaigns. Sometimes Amazon will encourage you to have more of those campaigns. So on account recently that you had, like I don't know, 30 or 40% of their sales coming from VCPM campaigns, and I could tell you without a doubt that probably the majority of that was cannibalized organic sales that are coming from those campaigns, I would say, if you're unsure, don't run those campaigns.
Liran:
The sponsored display campaigns that I like to run are cost per click campaigns and product targeting. You can run retargeting with sponsored display on ACoS per click basis. So that's what I would do. I would not run impression based and just the explanation is the reason is impression based campaigns. Somebody can just scroll by, view it, go back to the listing and buy from a retargeting ad and it gets attributed to the retargeting ad when we don't know, since they just pass by it. We don't know if that influenced them to buy or not, since they didn't click. So I would focus on your sponsored display campaigns with cost per click.
Liran:
The other thing I would say is to the more granular you can go, the better. Separate out your branded and unbranded campaigns, separate out your exact phrase broad campaigns. Take your high volume keywords and put them in their own campaigns. The more granular you go, the more control you have. And that's, I think, one of the keys. And I do think it's important today to also use software, because more and more things will be coming out with software. You see, like the Amazon marketing stream. So if you don't have that, you should be using software that has the Amazon marketing stream, because you can see hourly data on how you are getting sales. One thing we've seen with that is generally, if you're again, if you're unsure, if you have limited budget, I would encourage you to day part and stop targeting from 12 Pacific to 5am. That's usually when everyone's budgets reset and you're going to have a higher cost per click and not any better conversion rates usually worse conversion rates at night. So that's another strategy to help you save.
Liran:
And I would say, at the end of the day, if you're managing it and you pay close attention, it's not rocket science managing ads, it's taking a look at your search term reports, taking a look at your conversion rates, managing bids, adding negative keywords. It's complex because you need to give it time and you need to pull the right reports and data, and also that sometimes people think their product, their problem, is an advertising problem. When it's not an advertising problem, it's a product problem, and that's also something we see very often. I spoke to somebody today. They sell, like a shopping cart, one of those laundry things you carry around, and they said, hey, how come it's not selling as well? Their product has about 100 something reviews. It's selling okay, but there's competitors right next to you at same or lower price with 5,000 reviews, and so, again, it's not an advertising problem, it's going to be a product problem.
Liran:
How can you differentiate your listing more from the competitors? They do actually have a great listing and I think it's actually one of the reasons why I think they're selling. They are selling fairly well with a lower review count. But also, their problem is not an advertising problem, it's a product slash, competitor review problem, and that's why the ability to reverse engineer your competitors with tools like Helium can really help you understand where your competitors are getting sales from. Also, whenever people look at their competitors. They're assuming their competitors are, even though you may not be. The competitors are profitable and selling at great margin, and that's also not always the case. People are looking to get market shares. So I think just go very granular and give ads attention. If not, maybe consider outsourcing it. But if you give it the attention and the optimization, you learn to understand it. It's very much a data driven game.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. If people want to reach out to you to get some more help with PPC or to ask you some follow up questions, how can they find you on the interwebs out there?
Liran:
Sure, thank you. You can go to incrementumdigital.com. You can also sign up for a newsletter there. You'll get our weekly newsletter. We're sharing updates, we do webinars, so you can also just sign up for the email list there just to stay up to date. And obviously you can contact us through the website. You can also follow me and Incementum Digital and myself on social media LinkedIn, Facebook and you can DM me if you have any questions.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Well, Liran, thank you so much for joining us. It'll be nice to see you again in your home stomping grounds there in New York soon and wish you all the best of success with you and your team. Please say hi to Mansour. He's been on this show before.
Liran:
Yes, thank you and the rest of your team. Thank you so much.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.
Amazon Sales Trends / Sales Estimates New Feature https://www.helium10.com/blog/amazon-sales-trends-sales-estimates/
TikTok Shop to rival Amazon with early Black Friday deals https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/tiktok-shop-to-rival-amazon-with-early-black-friday-deals-2302091/ Amazon brings generative AI to Alexa https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/20/amazon-brings-generative-ai-to-alexa/ Amazon is hiring 250,000 employees for the holidays, and making its largest ever annual investment in U.S. hourly wages https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-hiring-seasonal-holiday-employees Amazon drops planned merchant fee as FTC lawsuit looms https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-drops-planned-merchant-fee-202022592.html Lastly, Carrie Miller shares the training tip of the week on how you can use the BlackBox Product Targeting tab to get new keywords and PPC. Listen in as we share these crucial news, updates, and training that will surely impact your Amazon-selling and E-commerce journey.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley talks about:
- 00:50 - Amazon Sales Trends Tool
- 02:48 - Prime Big Deal Days
- 03:48 - TikTok Shop Black Friday
- 04:32 - Alexa Generative AI
- 05:51 - Amazon Hiring 250K
- 07:00 - 2% Fee Cancelled
- 08:48 - Listing Attributes
- 09:30 - Helium 10 On Twitch And Twitter
- 10:10 - Pro Training Tip: BlackBox Product Targeting Tab
- 12:27 - Catch Bradley On These Conferences
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
New Amazon tool for sales estimates makes Helium 10 Chrome extension unnecessary. Prime big deal days is coming. Tiktok shop is starting Black Friday early. A 2% fee going away at Amazon. These new stories and much more on this edition of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. We give you a rundown of the new stories that are going on the Amazon, wall art and e-commerce world and we give you training tips the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. All right, we got a lot of new stories. Let's go ahead and hop right into it.
Bradley Sutton:
To the first one here that is actually from seller central. You might have seen it in your seller central news section and it's entitled. Customers will now see sales trend For your eligible listings, as product listings for certain categories, including health and personal care, home and sports, will display a sales trend and Basically it's kind of like in the format of 10k plus bought in the last month. In case you guys haven't seen it. You know it's been. They've been doing tests on this a lot. You'll see right here It'll say like 50 plus bought in the past month or a hundred plus. You know the bigger listings will say 10,000 plus and there's been different tests going on Amazon where you might have seen it was weekly. Sometimes it'll show views. But this is now official. This is no longer a test. Amazon is rolling this out. Does that make the helium-tent chrome extension unnecessary for sales estimates? No, it's interesting to note that this is not even a sales estimate. What it is the number of customers that have purchased this product in the last 30 days. So that's just interesting itself.
Bradley Sutton:
If you want a, if you're a mathematical person or you just want to dive a little bit more into All of the frequently asked questions like is it at a child level? Is it at a variation level? Is it the last 30 days? Is it the last calendar month? You know what does this mean for customers? How come my listing doesn't see it? I do a super deep dive. That's like six in the morning right now when I'm recording this.
Bradley Sutton:
I stayed up the whole night actually doing this blog. I haven't even slept yet, but if you guys please reward me for my hard work. The data science team did a good job. You know getting me some data and I put together this blog. Go to helium10.com/blog and it should be probably at the top of the search results there, helium10.com/blog. Click on the one about the search or sales trend data and You'll get everything you needed to know and a whole bunch of stuff. You didn't even want to know about this new thing, but it's actually very interesting. I think it could be cool for customers, could be cool for sellers as well.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, the next news article today is you know, we talked about this a little bit earlier this week, uh, on our Tuesday podcast. By the way, guys make sure to check out that Tuesday podcast. It was a breakdown of the entirety of Amazon Accelerate. Uh, you can catch that episode at h10.me forward slash 493, uh, where we talk about Amazon Accelerate. But anyways, in that podcast I said, hey, prime big deal days is coming. It's going to be October 10th to 11th. It's kind of like you know different kind of prime day. Amazon, you know, says here in the news that you know the, the, the FBA inventory date for prime big deal days has passed. So if you try and get some inventory and now it might not make it, but you can still participate in prime exclusive discounts, uh, coupons. Obviously you know sponsored ads. So I'm just curious what? What are you guys going to be doing for, uh, prime big deal days? Uh, are you doing any lightning deals? You just doing some coupons, heavy PPC. You know it's kind of something newish. You know it's not the regular prime day, so a little bit of uncharted territories, but probably similar to that second prime day that we had last year. All right, uh.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article up here is from dexterto.com, I don't think I've ever quoted this uh news source before, but their article was entitled tick tock shop to rival Amazon with early black Friday day deals, all right. So this is interesting because they're actually going to be starting a black Friday deals as early as October 27 and they're trying to move $20 billion. Uh, it said this holiday season. You know, the tick tock shop debuted in the U? S earlier this September. We kind of talked about that on this show and, uh, be interesting to see what's going to happen. You know how many, how many of you are selling on tick tock uh shop out there and are you guys doing anything special for Black Friday?
Bradley Sutton:
Another uh, there's a lot of Amazon announcements going on um, at some kind of like release event and, anyways, this news article is from tech crunch and it's entitled Amazon brings generative AI to Alexa. Now, this article has nothing to do with Amazon. You know FBA or prime or anything. So you might be wondering why in the world am I linking to this article? Well, this is something I've been talking about for I don't know maybe a year or so, where my, my theory has been that once. I mean that's not my theory, I mean it was Amazon said they're bringing generative AI to Alexa. The part that was my theory was that, hey, once that starts happening, as it starts developing, the shopping experience is going to become exponentially more robust on Alexa. Like, the shopping experience for me right now in my Lexus is like sucks, like it's impossible to buy stuff, and so I don't think a lot of Amazon sellers are optimizing enough for Alexa. Like you probably should, but if you're not, you're probably okay, all right Cause, not that many sales are coming from Alexa. But now, with generative AI perhaps giving Alexa a boost, I would say that you know, this year we are going to start seeing some, some, some more people shop on Alexa and you're going to have to start thinking about, you know, optimizing your listings a little bit more for the Alexa experience, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article up here is actually from Amazon and it says Amazon is hiring 250,000 employees for the holidays, making it the largest annual investment in US hourly wages. Now it's interesting this is not the most they've hired, right? They say the largest annual investment in hourly wages. That's because minimum wage is ridiculous these days. I think this article talks about how they are actually the average hourly pay for these seasonal workers $20.50. That's crazy. $20 used to be like you've got a really good job and can support your family, like 10 years ago. Now $20 is like the grunt work in a warehouse kind of insane. But anyways, I always like looking at how many employees Amazon hires for the winter because it kind of like shows what their projects and are going to be Like when they don't hire hardly anybody. It's like uh-oh, there might be seen some signals where sales aren't going to be that much during the holiday. $250,000 is a pretty robust, hefty number there, so it'd be a good sign. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Next article is from Yahoo Finance and it's like it's kind of like fake news If you can hear in my voice, guys, if you're listening to this on your car or something, if you're watching this, you obviously can see my face. This is ridiculous. This irritates me about news. It says Amazon drops planned merchant fee as FTC lawsuit looms. So right off the bat. The title is like trying to paint this as something like Amazon is running away with their tail between its legs because of this FTC thing. But it has, in my opinion, literally nothing to do with each other. Right, and it's not even that big of a deal, that whole FTC thing. But that's a side topic. We've already talked a lot about that. But in this article listen to this, guys it says effective October 1st, amazon was planning to impose a 2% fee on every sale by third party sellers that ship their products themselves. Guys, that is 100% incorrect. Yahoo, you know you're not some blogger. I mean, get your stuff together. This is not right. This 2% fee was only for those sellers opting into seller fulfilled prime. Seller fulfilled prime is where you get the prime badge on your listing. As long as you're able to deliver to a customer within a few hours or within a day, or within two days and hit the the certain metrics, all right. This was not for all people doing fulfilled by merchant, like this stupid article is saying. And the rest of the article goes in this tie in the FTC thing like it has anything to do with that. So it doesn't. But the bottom line is that if you were planning to enroll in seller fulfilled prime, you don't have to pay the 2% fee, as Amazon had announced. And Amazon did announce that the reason why they're taking away the fee had nothing to do with FTC. But they're like hey, you know, we want this program to succeed, so we want to go ahead and take away that fee to get some more people involved in the program. Our next article is from seller central, or actually the last article of the day, and this is just something simple. We've been talking about this for a couple of months now. How? October 3rd, there's going to be new listing attributes, so this, this go around, has a 213 product types are going to require it. So if you just if you want to check if this is going to affect you, just going to your seller central dashboard, there will be a link to this article in your seller central dashboard and then you'll be able to see which product types you might have to take care of. So that's it for the news today.
Bradley Sutton:
You guys have been asking for us to get on different platforms that we weren't on with some of our videos and lives and content. So one thing just keep in mind, guys we are now on Twitch, all right. So if you guys have Twitch, we're going to stream our first training next week on twitch.tv. But you know, you guys probably use Twitch on some kind of app. I just look for @helium10software on Twitch. @helium10software.
Bradley Sutton:
We're doing a live broadcast next week about a new tool, new features that that helium 10 is coming out with. And also, if you guys are on Twitter we're not doing too much on Twitter, but right now I'm going to start, you know, maybe tweeting a little bit more. Find us at @H10Software all right, @H10Software on Twitter. We're also going to be doing live broadcast from there as well. All right, now for our training tip of the week. If you're wondering how to do product line extensions or perhaps find new ASINs that you can target in your product targeting ads, there's a certain tool that you can use in Helium 10. Carrie's going to show you how to use it in 60 seconds.
Carrie Miller:
Today I want to share with you a little strategy on how to find some good products to target with your pay-per-click advertising. It's actually using our BlackBox tool, which is kind of the last tool that you probably would think about, but I'm going to show you how to do this. The first thing you want to do is you want to log into your Helium 10 account and go to black box and then, under black box, you're going to click on product targeting okay. So once you're in product targeting, then you're going to take whatever ascent it is that you are going to try to, you know, boost your PPC. So this is your product I'm putting in our coffin shelf right here, and what we're going to do is we're going to click on search, okay, and this is going to actually come up with a bunch of similar products, and the idea behind this is that once you find a lot of these similar products, kind of in the same niche, you could potentially advertise on these and they could be kind of compatible products.
Carrie Miller:
So, if we look, we've got, you know, like a web floating shelf, which would be a great way to, you know, advertise on that. We have a bat shelf, we've got some mirrors that you know could potentially be a good target audience. So there's a lot of options in here that you can utilize to test this out and, you know, see which one of these is a really good idea for product targeting. In addition, as you can see, there's a lot of really cool product ideas. So if you did actually want to take your ascent and put it into BlackBox, under Product Targeting you can actually see similar items so that you can actually expand your brand and, you know, reach your the same customers that you have within your own brand. So basically, for our coffin shelf, something like a you know 3D large school ice cubes is definitely the same target market. So it's in a really simple tool, the product targeting, but it's so great for optimizing your pay per click advertising when you're doing the ascent targeting and you can also find some new products that you could potentially start selling on Amazon. So check out product targeting in BlackBox and let us know what you think.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, thank you very much, Carrie, for that tip. How many of you guys out there are using the product targeting tab in black box? I hope you are and if you haven't been, hopefully you start using it today going forward. One last thing I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling. Probably, as this is airing, I'm about to take off to go to Istanbul for Friday. We might do a little mini meetup Friday night. So reply to this If you are in the Istanbul area.
Bradley Sutton:
I'll be in Maldives this weekend recording episode 500 of the podcast. On October 17th and 19th I'll be in Vietnam, both in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, at an Amazon conference. Just go to h10.me/vietnam If you're interested in tickets there, and then directly from there. On the 19th to the 23rd I'll be in Seoul, Korea, Amazon Seller Kingdom Conference. You can find more information on that h10.me/kconference for that one, and then I'm flying directly from there to New York, amazon unbox. It is now officially sold out for in person tickets, but if you just search for Amazon unboxed New York, you'll be able to get virtual tickets to that event. And if you're in the area on the 23rd we will be doing a Helium 10 Elite workshop for Elite members, but if there's not enough Elite members who go, I might open up some scholarship spots for some of you out there. Anyways, guys, that's it for this week. Hope you enjoyed the news. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.
In this episode, we've got all the inside scoop on Amazon Accelerate 2023 that you might have missed! Our host, Bradley Sutton, dives deep into the exciting announcements and their implications for Amazon FBA sellers. From the eagerly awaited dates for the next Prime Deal Days to cutting-edge AI features like Generative AI for building your listings inside Amazon and the AI-backed Seller Messaging Assistant, we've got you covered. Plus, we explore game-changing updates, new tools, and features like the Amazon Shipping ground package delivery service, Amazon Supply Chain updates with inventory management, customer loyalty analytics dashboard, and sustainability solutions that are set to reshape the Amazon seller landscape. We also talked about the Buy with Prime integration inside Shopify and shared relevant numbers on how D2C E-commerce businesses are crushing it with this new feature. Tune in to discover how these developments could impact your Amazon business and stay ahead of your competitors. It's a must-listen episode for anyone in the world of Amazon selling and don't forget to let us know what you think of these announcements!
Also, don't forget to catch Bradley, Helium 10, and Pacvue in the Amazon unBoxed Event in New York this October 24th to up-level and up-skill your Amazon advertising knowledge.
In episode 493 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:
- 02:05 - Dates For The Next Prime Deal Days Released!
- 02:40 - Featuring A Seller Success Story From A Helium 10 User
- 03:45 - Enterprise Solutions Integrated In Partner Seller App
- 04:09 - Emerald Notifications
- 05:23 - AI-backed Seller Messaging Assistant
- 06:35 - Generative AI For Listing Building
- 07:54 - Bradley’s Feedback On This AI Feature After Tests
- 13:22 - A New Seller Homepage
- 13:40 - One Page Listing Management Page
- 14:23 - Buyer Abuse Protection
- 16:05 - Veeqo Multi-Channel Shipping
- 17:01 - Amazon Shipping Ground Package Delivery Service
- 18:44 - Supply Chain By Amazon (More Than Amazon Global Logistics)
- 20:54 - Automatic Inventory Replenishment with FBA
- 23:48 - Let’s Get Into Day 2 Announcements
- 24:43 - Customer Loyalty Analytics Dashboard
- 26:26 - Fit Insights Tool
- 28:45 - Voice Of The Customer Dashboard
- 30:16 - Two-Tap Ratings
- 31:50 - New Seller Wallets
- 32:10 - Buy with Prime with Shopify
- 33:28 - Interesting Stats From Buy with Prime integration with Shopify
- 35:18 - Potential Sales Lift
- 37:16 - View In Your Room Feature Improvements
- 38:42 - Ships On Product Packaging Program
- 40:46 - Sustainability Solutions Hub
- 41:24 - What Do You Think Of All These Announcements?
- 42:29 - Catch Bradley, Helium 10, and Pacvue In The Amazon Unboxed Event
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Did you miss Amazon Accelerate? Don't worry. In this episode I'm giving you guys everything that you missed out on all the announcements and how it affects US sellers. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think. We know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash keyword tracker.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am Your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and I'm going to be going over everything that happened at Amazon Accelerate. Well, maybe not everything, but all the key points. There might be a couple things I missed, but there's a lot of interesting things that were announced at Amazon Accelerate. I'm going to keep it real. Like I say, this is BS free. No, there might be a couple things I think is not that exciting. I'm going to keep it real. Let you guys know, it's just my opinions here. So I wanted to give you guys kind of like a rundown of all the like I don't know Like 25 different announcements or 30, or even more than that. As you notice, I'm wearing my old school Helium 10 shirt here and the reason is because back when Helium 10 used to use this logo, you never would have gotten me to say, like in a million years, that Amazon would be announcing the kind of things that they have been at Amazon Accelerate the last couple years. I mean like the things that they're dropping, that I'm going to talk about today, and the things that they talked about last year. It was, you know, I would have bet a million dollars if I was a betting person that no, the Amazon would never give this kind of analytics or Amazon would never do this or that. But, man, you know, hats off to Amazon because they're really trying to come through for the sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
So before I get started here, real quick kind of breaking news. If you didn't, you know here last week it's not Amazon Prime Day, but what is it called like? Prime Deal, that Prime Deal days prime something or other? Anyways, the second Prime Day, what a lot of people are calling the second Prime Day. They dropped the dates, for it's actually going to be October 10th and 11th. So mark your calendars. If you guys were preparing for deals or things like that, October 10th and 11th is, I think it's called deal day, something like that. So you know, normally I drop that in the weekly buzz, but I'll give you guys that information a couple days early.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, let's go ahead and hop into Amazon Accelerate. I was there. It was my first time at Amazon Accelerate and it was actually cool. They actually started off with like the whole entire event was started off with a Helium 10 customer. Alright, so Hemlock Park is a customer that you know we've talked about. He's actually been on the podcast Mikey from there and they did this like full profile in front of everybody about how his business is and you know how he makes these candles and you know, really, really cool to see you know Helium 10 customer front and center, like that. But you know, let me know what do you guys think? Like what if Amazon would ask you to, like you know, show your brand, you know, would you be down to do that? You know, so many sellers, I think, are afraid of showing their brand to the whole entire world, literally like now, everybody knows what, what Mikey's products are, right. So just something to think about. You know what? Would you take the publicity that you know coming on full stage from Amazon, or would you be like now, I'm good, amazon, you go pick somebody else, alright?
Bradley Sutton:
First, couple of announcements you know wanted to talk about for Accelerate nothing that exciting. One of them is was Enterprise Solutions. They announced that they had 15 more software companies and solutions that are integrated into their seller partner App Store. That the seller partner App Store is like what Helium 10 and other tools like it are connected to you, but now they're connecting with like enterprise level, you know once, like QuickBooks even so, if you use QuickBooks for accounting, that's actually now integrated into the seller partner App Store. Another announcement was Emerald Notifications. Alright, so Emerald is this beta program that are doing, where some of these seller apps like you know Helium 10 can deliver notifications about things that are happening in our software in your seller central dashboard. Some of you guys might have gotten an email about that a little while ago and you guys thought it was spam or something like that. So it's real. You know Helium 10 is part of that program amongst many others.
Bradley Sutton:
That's what they announced at Amazon Accelerate, and basically the way that they described is they said hey, we're trying to make it easier for you to manage and act on key business updates from your third party apps. That was word for word, verbatim from their announcement. Now, if you're wondering how do you activate it in your account, let me just show you how. Go to your seller central account and then you are going to want to go to apps and services and then manage your apps. Alright, once you do that, you're going to get to the other page here and it'll have all your you know software that you're connected with, and you're going to have to find Helium 10 and hit reauthorize alright. So you're going to want to hit reauthorize after doing that or whatever other apps that you have that you can connect to, and then what's going to happen is you'll now start being eligible for those notifications, alright.
Bradley Sutton:
The next announcement was an AI back seller messaging assistant, and what this is is for customer service. Basically, you know how customers, if they have a question about their shipping or a question about the product you know those kind of questions go directly to Amazon. That's not anything new. That's always been the case, one of the advantages of Amazon. You don't have to take care of a lot of your customer service, like hey, where's my shipment? Like I don't know, amazon's one who shipped it right, you don't have to worry about those kind of things. But anyways, amazon is integrating AI into there in order to save even more of the questions and so, like now, it's going to be almost instantaneous, like somebody says, hey, where's my shipment? And AI is instantly answering them, saying, hey, here's the shipping and here's where it's going to go, or here's, you know, if you're eligible for a refund, all kinds of generic questions they are. Now have an AI that powers, instead of having to wait for a person you know might take some time to answer the questions and you know, theoretically speaking, this might help because you know, maybe in that time that a buyer is having to wait for the answer. Maybe they just decided to cancel their order or like it right. So hopefully, hopefully, this will, you know, kind of lessen those.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the first big announcement of the day that got, you know, people kind of excited was about AI and listing billing. It was kind of funny when they first were announcing that they were going to announce that they were bringing it on the stage. And I won't forget, like they had the like the product manager for there. It's like this Amazonian, like his 50s and 60s, and he's like running out there like he's you saying, bolt to the stage. And he was like super excited. Like I was sitting there in the front row, I thought he was going to do like a crowd dive or something he was running so fast, but hey, he was excited. The crowd got excited because they really hyped up this AI tool that you know we talked about on the weekly buzz a while back.
Bradley Sutton:
So what does this consist of? This announcement of their AI listing builder tool? Well, they announced a press release also. It says Amazon launches generative AI to help sellers write product descriptions. And so, basically, it's going to, you know, very similar to what, you know, helium 10 has has had for a while in listing builder. Basically, what they're saying is hey, right here, word for word, says to get started, sellers only need to provide a brief description of their product, in a few words or sentences, and then Amazon will generate high quality content for the review. Sellers can refine these if they want to, or they can directly submit the automatically generated content to the Amazon catalog.
Bradley Sutton:
Now you know, I'm going to raise my Bradley Sutton flag, my BS flag, a little bit here, especially when they say you know, really high quality. I don't think it's there yet. I'm not trying to throw Amazon under the bus. I have very strong faith that it's going to get there. You know, remember, this is not Amazon like creating their own. You know their own. You know magic system here they're probably using. You know AI tools out there, just like you know helium 10 uses. You know chat, gpt.
Bradley Sutton:
But they tried to make it seem like, you know, for example, they gave a, an example here where you can just enter mouse pad with gel wrist right and then you'd be able to get like this, full, full listing. No, that's not the case Now. I tested it like we had this custom or this, this kind of case study I'm doing where I've made at least coffin shaped bath tray and I actually just, you know, actually threw in, you know, a description that was not just like five or six words, you know, just about four or five sentences and the output that it gave me. It just copied the input that I said in the description and that was the product description and then it copied it again and that was the bullet point number one and there was only one more bullet point and then there was no more bullet points in the title. Let me see if I could show it to you guys here. In the title it called it 32 inch black plastic coffin bathtub tray. All right, now the cool thing is hey, it adds spooky decor. I actually know that that is one of the main keywords here, spooky decor, but it called it plastic. I didn't say it was plastic. And then, even though that was the title, when you go to the description, the second bullet point or the first bullet point somewhere here it says hey, this is made with wood, so you got it right once. But in the title.
Bradley Sutton:
So, guys, this is not, do not expect this yet yet to be. You know some all encompassing thing that's going to. You know, allow you to just snap your fingers and create listings. It obviously needs a lot of work If you're interested in using AI. For now I would stick with listing builder. You know that exact same listing of a test for the coffin tray. I actually created it in listing builder and I put that. You know, very similar, prompt. But obviously the difference is, you know, in listing builder I can add all of my keywords that I had found from Cerebro you know that are relevant to that niche, and then you know, listing builders try to incorporate those keywords, which is still very important. You know, for the Amazon algorithm that you, so you can get searchable. So I'm curious, you know, maybe the reason why it made such a terrible listing is because there's not that much data, you know, on coffin bath trays, and so it was kind of struggling. But maybe if I tried to do like collagen peptides, who knows, maybe I could just write collagen powder and it would make this amazing, amazing listing for me. Now, that being said, that tool might not be at its peak yet.
Bradley Sutton:
However, they were giving a sneak peek at some pretty exciting announcements. They said coming soon, sellers are going to be able to submit a URL or a photo of a product and then the AI can generate reviews somehow. So you know, in my mind they were kind of saying, without really saying it maybe you have a dot com business and you've got this Shopify listing or maybe even, who knows, maybe a listing on another website like Walmart. You enter that in and then it could create an actual Amazon listing. You know that'd be pretty cool If that happened, even just like an image of a product and it would create a listing. That is pretty cool. And another thing that they said is is it's going to be available for existing listings to edit it. You know, right now it's if you want to test this out. It's only available to be done with a brand new listing if you're going to start it. But they do say that it's going to come in the future.
Bradley Sutton:
Now this is something that had me a little bit worried. All right, let me read this next announcement that they said. They said hey, we'll also enrich your existing listings to ensure your products have all the details that customers want to help you drive more sales. We'll use AI to automatically generate missing attributes. First of all, that's excellent. I'm not worried about that at all. You know like that would be great for those attributes. You know, sometimes we don't know all the attributes that are needed in the back end and then we have the missing and we could be suppressed and stuff. So if Amazon AI can do that, beautiful, we'd love. We'd love to see that. But here, check this out.
Bradley Sutton:
The second part We'll also use AI to automatically generate and improve titles, bullet points and descriptions based on data in Amazon's catalog. You'll be able to review any changes and make edits if desired. Now, that part has me worried because we all know that. You know, sometimes when Amazon kind of changes your title, it's not always great and you got you know like what if, all of a sudden, for my product, amazon use that AI thing that I just showed you guys and it wants to call my coffin bath tray, which is made of wood, a plastic coffin tray? And just terrible listing. So hopefully these things are not going to happen until their AI is a little bit more robust, which I'm sure it is, you know. But the second part is I definitely want to be able to click a button that says no, I do not want to implement those changes because you know all you helium 10 users out there, 99% of you are going to be better at making the listing than any AI. I'll just tell you that right now, ai, as far as if you're talking about optimizing your listing, for you know the algorithm and things like that All right, like, like you know, you've got all the data. You know even more data than the AI is going to have. You know, I know that sounds kind of like a audacious thing to say, but you know, those of you guys who know, know, know what's up. You know, like you guys can, can, you know, look across different categories of different keywords? And I think the technology for AI to do that is still too far off yet. But anyways, hopefully they're not going to be automatically just changing our listings without letting us know. I don't think they're going to do that.
Bradley Sutton:
Another minor announcement that they did was about the seller homepage. You know most of you guys were opted into that new seller homepage and one of the benefits they said of this new homepage is that you can take away those widgets. You know, sometimes the seller central homepage had all kinds of like little things that you know just cluttered the screen. But now you can, you can hide those. So they talked about that in case you guys didn't know. Another thing that kind of teased it's not ready yet they talked about how you know we have all kinds of different listing dashboards in order to. You know, there's one for fixing inactive listings, there's one for managing listings. There's a dashboard to improve your listing. So what they're working on is a new one page, you know, catch all everything that has to do with your listings in seller central and it's going to have the actions that you need to take and everything's basically beyond that page. And I guess they have the beta program going right now and it said that, you know, with this beta group, sellers are being able to take actions 40% faster than the current way of having to go to all these different listing management pages.
Bradley Sutton:
Another announcement they made was buyer abuse protections. You know we definitely like that. We know, although we always know that there's there's some bad players out there on the customer side and so they're implementing AI and other things in order to help kind of detect that. They quote seller selling partners can leverage Amazon's machine learning based buyer risk evaluations and specialized abuse risk investigations to protect your business. All right, so that's a bunch of fancy. You know press release kind of words there. But in a nutshell, the way they explained it is this is gonna help protect you against fraudulent orders, fraudulent claims. It says it's gonna potentially save millions of dollars on refunds and actually probably the point that I think got some applause from people, that says they announced that to address the issue of reviews, amazon has worked to automate and sanitize the sanitize I love that word, that's literally their word, that they said on stage to sanitize the process of suppressing reviews for abusive accounts in real time. All right, so we don't know exactly in the past how the Amazon kind of policed reviews, but you could see it happening, like, if you're using the Helium 10 Chrome extension, you ever look at the review history of a product and then you'll notice that all of a sudden 3,000 reviews got lost and then 2,000 reviews got added back. You probably seen that and were thinking that was a Helium 10 mistake or something. No, what was happening was Amazon would just like quarantine thousands of reviews or hundreds of reviews at a time and I guess, like you know, do some kind of audit on it and then just put back the ones that were okay. So if this, if I'm understanding this correctly, that process in the future might be now in kind of like a real time.
Bradley Sutton:
Another announcement that you know may not affect a lot of you guys there's this Amazon company called I think it's called VCO, v-e-e-q-o and it's like a multi-channel shipping software. So kind of like you know me, I don't use that, I use like Snapscom, but it's very similar to that where it integrates with your seller central and then you could, you know, print shipping labels and things like that. And so they made an announcement that you know they've negotiated the cheapest shipping rates in the business and usually you can only get like the same price, no matter, you know, if I use Snapscom or if I'm using I don't know like ShipStation or something like that. Right, it's almost always the same exact price, like even my Snapscom price is the same as if I buy postage or UPS ground from Amazon. But if you use VCO, you can actually save an additional 5% off by getting credit. So that's like another announcement that they made. So if you use VCO or if you're interested in that, make sure to check that out.
Bradley Sutton:
Now the next big announcement was a launch of Amazon shipping. All right, so Amazon shipping is basically a new program where they're kind of gonna be be, you know, competing with FedEx and UPS. Now this I found very interesting because you know it's been, it's been rumored to happen for a long time and now it is happening. You know, in some cities there's only like 15 cities and basically this is gonna be just just what you think is a UPS and FedEx. You know like it's a package delivery service to to fulfill not only just your Amazon like fulfilled by merchant orders, but you can technically fulfill anything. You know like you've got a dot com website and you wanna have Amazon actually pick up the shipment and then deliver it in like two to five days, including Saturdays and Sundays, at a low cost and then no extra fees for residential or weekend delivery. You wanna be able to track the packages in real time, get photo on delivery when the order is delivered. This is now coming. You know you're gonna be able to do that. So again, you don't even have to like be a you know Amazon Prime seller, fba seller to take advantage of this.
Bradley Sutton:
Now a couple of things I'm wondering about is you know how you can't do like drop shipping or shipping from Amazon for Walmart? You know I used to. I used to make oh my goodness, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars drop shipping like Walmart to Amazon and vice versa. I mean it's curious, like would you be able to use Amazon shipping as a shipper and fulfill stuff you're selling Walmart? I would assume. No, I would assume Walmart would not want that. But anyways, you know if you sell on other platforms. You know this could be something that you can use.
Bradley Sutton:
Another big announcement was Amazon supply chain, or they called it supply chain by Amazon, and automated solution to help so it was quickly and reliably ship products around the world. So this is kind of like they were talked about this as being an end to end system of shipping where it goes all the way from your you know factory you know picking up at the factory, you know getting it out of the country wherever it's gonna be importing through customs, you know all the way to Amazon and it takes it to another level. This is like more. We're talking about more than just through what Amazon global logistics was. Some of the things that they talked about in their press release was that these new prices for this new system are gonna reflect this counts of up to 25% on cross-border transportation that it said. You're also gonna have a streamlined domestic inbound transportation to AWD. All right.
Bradley Sutton:
Awd is the Amazon warehousing they're through with their partnered carrier program. All right, so you can be able to save 25% on the already lower cost that you might have been having. So you're gonna have an expanded AWD offering with reduced prices. Those of you who are already using it, the AWD rates are gonna be now 80% lower than FBA storage fee, so that AWD is kind of like using Amazon as a 3PL, if I were to try and oversimplify it. But if you're doing AWD, compared to maybe you were just storing things in FBA and getting long-term fees, you're gonna save 80%, which is kind of a pretty impressive right.
Bradley Sutton:
They're gonna have new multi-channel distribution capability and what that means is that Amazon selling partners will sell across multiple who sell across multiple sales channels, including online and brick and mortar. Keeping everything in stock is a challenge, so this is going to be able to move your inventory in bulk from AWD Amazon's warehousing to any sales channel so that you can replenish across the board, not just Amazon. So that's gonna be something coming. And something that I found interesting was automatic inventory replenishment with FBA all right. So if you're using this whole supply chain system, they're gonna be like replenishing inventory into the fulfillment centers, like from AWD, without you having to forecast.
Bradley Sutton:
So, again, color me skeptical at first, just because I'm like, hey, I've seen some of Amazon's inventory forecasting recommendations and in the past it's been kind of trash in my opinion. Sorry, you know Amazon, but Amazon's definitely improving in that and so. But this would be interesting. Like I'd be curious as to what the algorithm that they're gonna use, how it's gonna work. But imagine a world where you don't even have to like worry about sending your inventory to Amazon Prime. You used to have like, hey, I'm ordering 10,000 units from my factory in China. It's going to Amazon's warehouses and I can just gonna trust Amazon to put them into FBA. You don't fulfill your orders from. You don't fulfill your orders directly from AWD to the customer. It has to go to FBA warehouses first. But imagine a world where you're not going to have to worry about that anymore. So that would be kind of interesting as well.
Bradley Sutton:
So there's another you know interesting announcement that happened on day one. I mean, I can't believe we're still on day one here. Couple other things from day one. There was escalate. My case was something that was in beta where you know there's gonna be like a button in seller essential where you can like escalate if you're having trouble with support. That's coming soon and that includes talking to a live support agent. It's something funny.
Bradley Sutton:
Seller poll you guys ever see those seller polls in your seller essential dashboard? Well, you know, they ask it. Hey, guys, please keep providing feedback. Now I'll keep it real here. Most of those polls have been pretty, pretty good lately, but sometimes we get a kick out of the ones Like I actually saved one of my all time favorites.
Bradley Sutton:
This was, you know, a while back. It says my account is safe from being suspended unexpectedly. Strongly agree, agree, neither agree or disagree. So, like you know, we all made fun of some of these polls like this that people would get back in a day because I don't think any of us thought that we were safe from being suspended. But you know, honestly, if I were to be honest, I have been suspended unexpectedly. That was like a good four or five years ago. I think was the last time that happened. You know, if I were to get my sentiment here, you know I put probably strongly disagree. You know three years ago when I took this screenshot, but maybe now I'd be like I neither agree or disagree, like I still see. You know horror stories out there, but you know I haven't been suspended in a while and now Amazon has new systems in place that actually, where they would call you before they suspend you. So that didn't exist three or four years ago. So you know they're getting better. But anyways, the point being, don't just laugh at these polls. These are important. Most of them are important for you to get some to give Amazon your feedback.
Bradley Sutton:
All right now, going to day two, a couple again minor announcements that I'm not sure affect much of you. One was called flexible customer financing, aka FCF program. You're gonna be able to enable your customers to purchase your eligible product's interest fee using installment options. So, like you know, maybe like you got a $200 product or $300 product, you can. It sounds like you're gonna be able to activate this like, hey, buy now, pay later, kind of thing sounds like. But the important part of this is that if customers opt into that, they don't have to pay right away. But guess what? You get the funds right away, if I understand this correctly. So that would be pretty cool, you know, because that would kind of suck if, yeah, let people buy this $1,000 thing and paid off over six months and you're getting, like, payments for it over six months. That would not fly right. So that would be kind of cool if this can help your sales.
Bradley Sutton:
Another announcement is that there's now a customer loyalty analytics, or there's going to be a customer loyalty analytics dashboard, so it allows you to segment customers based on loyalty and analyze, segment purchase patterns and perform targeted engagement to increase your overall lifetime customer value. So they put out a press release on this and it's pretty interesting because it says, hey, new features will give sellers a comprehensive understanding of the customer sentiment for existing products from reviews and also returns. And it gave an example like hey, there's an outdoor recreation brand, they're trying to design a new tent. They'll easily be able to understand what drives customer complaints and satisfaction with the tents today. Like so it might give you like a niche kind of analysis. And it says upcoming enhancement to the tool will provide the ability to select different time periods, analyze trends over time, benchmark customer sentiment against best sellers in the category. You know that benchmarking thing sounds pretty cool and so this is something to look out for that's going to be available later this year in the US, uk, germany, france, italy and Spain, and then Japan to follow, and, instead of localized insights, will also provide a deeper understanding of customer preferences in the country. So it's not just like looking at, you know a category across all of Amazon, but you're looking at a country basis. So again, something interesting, cool announcement to look forward to.
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing that Amazon release is something called fit insights tool. It's going to be backed by AI and this is for those of you who are mainly like in the apparel category, you know, which is historically one of the, you know, the one that has the most returns and issues and with reviews and things like that. But it's going to be analyzing the reviews and the size charts and kind of like how people identify themselves as what size they are and then compare it to like what size you're saying the product is, or, yeah, your shirt or socks or whatever, and then it's going to give you like suggestions, like you know what you know you probably should move your size tier up a little bit, because people who say that they're waist 38, you know they're complaining about your product because they say it's too big. So you might want to, you know, put it, call this a size 36 instead of a 38 or whatever the case may be. So you know I don't sell in the apparel, so this doesn't affect me at all. But what about you? You know you guys who are selling leggings or shirts or pants or things like that. You know, I'm sure you guys have all kinds of crazy horror stories about return. So if AI can help with that process you know it's called again, it's called fit insights. It's going to be available a beginning in October. Look out for more announcement on that. We'll probably have that in the weekly buzz.
Bradley Sutton:
Another minor announcement that has to do with Amazon warehouses, called computer vision based detection. All right, so they gave this demo where they're showing like vision technology where things are going on the conveyor belts, going to you know orders and stuff, and then this AI is going to like see if there's a problem with, like, an expiration date, somehow, like on the package, or maybe the box is damaged, right, and then it's going to stop it from going to the customer. So I have, you know, face value seems okay. I'm just not fully convinced this is going to make a huge impact. I think the thing that all of us are more concerned about is when products go back to Amazon. You know it's like can we please take a look at these boxes and obviously realize that the customer didn't put the pack back in the box or it's used or things like that. Please don't put it back in inventory. This is a start. This is a start, though, you know, because you know, sometimes maybe like a forklift runs over a package, but it's still somehow it gets on the conveyor belt and then gets to the customer and they get upset because they get a super damaged box and then they return it. So in that situation, this will probably kind of like help, help with that, with that kind of stuff, and then, starting in 2024, you'll actually get a report on all the packages that Amazon kind of like stopped, you know, thanks to this new robotic vision thing that it has.
Bradley Sutton:
Voice of the customer dashboard was their next announcement. That's actually something that exists now, but it talked about what is coming to this dashboard. Basically, they said they're going to launch three new, improved features that will give you more insights into what's going on to help you build customer loyalty, and these include key phrases from customer feedback. I'm not sure if that means reviews, because you know customer feedback is something different than reviews, so I'm not completely sure about that. Number two, category benchmarking and trend analysis to give you the tools to compare your performance against similar products. And then, number three, deeper key performance metrics broken down by customer feedback score. Quote unquote was part of their announcement for that. So if you're using that VOC, or voice of the customer dashboard. Look out for those three enhancements soon.
Bradley Sutton:
Add to cart seller profile pages. That was another announcement. You guys know what the seller profile page is. That's where you click on the storefront, you know from a listing, and then it takes you to the page where the feedback is and the address of the seller and stuff. Well, there's nothing that allow you to necessarily buy the product before, but now, as you can see, they have an add to cart button Now for the product that maybe they were clicking on. So that's something that's already new. And then they talked about potentially, you know, maybe even having some other cross-selling where it has other products right there on this page that somebody could add to cart.
Bradley Sutton:
Another announcement I really didn't understand. I wish I could have followed up on this, but it was called two tap ratings and in this session or not session, but in this announcement they were talking about how two tap ratings simplifies the seller rating process and customers have indicated that seller ratings are a critical data point in their shopping journey. So two tap ratings eliminates the written feedback requirement, simplifying the end to end review experience. So that's what the announcement was, but I'm like, wait a minute. Hasn't there just been this two tap rating for like a couple of years now, which is why the number of ratings is so much higher than the number of written reviews?
Bradley Sutton:
So I'm not exactly sure what this announcement was. Maybe it's about from the actual write a customer review button on orders, like if you were to open up your mobile app right now, your Amazon buyer app, and then you know, hit an order and says write a review, you kind of do there have to leave a written review, I think. So maybe that part is gonna be changed. But I know there's like a page where you can go where Amazon just gives you these messages like hey, rate this product, you don't have to write nothing, you just like click the rating right there and that's it. So I'm not exactly sure what this announcement is, but my speculation is that from the write a review button there, you can just start leaving ratings there, but this might increase the number of ratings you know you get, which is, you know, for some customers or for some of you guys. You guys would love that. Some others were like man, this kind of sucks, I barely get any written reviews now and I really want written reviews. So maybe some of you think that's a negative. Another day.
Bradley Sutton:
Two announcement was that a seller wallet where it's this is coming, where you can take your funds you know, your before you get, actually get dispersed and then you can use it to, like you know, make a wire transfer to your, to your vendors or your suppliers, things like that. You know we've had that with a group Alta, helium, 10, alta for a while, but now it's coming to a seller central. Next announcement was a little bit bigger, so it was kind of like there's a little bit of thunder being stolen because they announced it, the, you know, a couple of weeks ago about the Shopify and buy with Prime. But they talked a lot about buy with Prime. The thing that was like shock, shocking was they actually brought out the VP, or a VP of Shopify to the Amazon accelerate stage. So he actually came right on stage and even the, even the Amazonian who introduced him, was like hey, you know, a year ago I wouldn't probably not have imagined bringing this person on stage. And that was because, as we've talked about in the weekly buzz before, they had all kinds of beef. You know, in the old days, you know, shopify wanted all that smoke. They were. They were like saying, hey, if you use buy with prime on Shopify, you're against our terms of service and this and that. So, yeah, that's kind of like nobody would have ever guessed that a VP of Shopify would be on stage at Amazon accelerate, but they were talking about buy with prime. And so, in general, you know, regardless of it was Shopify or not, buy with prime has been out, you know, for a year now. They talked about how some of the stats for buy with prime, you know what kind of stats it's had for for sellers. For example, one brand said that nine out of every 10 buy with prime orders were from customers new to their brand. A newer feature was buy with prime cart is starting to see early success. So before it was kind of like if you had buy with prime, it was just for one product. But now they're rolling this out where you can, like you know, have multiple Amazon or, you know, fba supplied products and then you can actually add them to the cart and then the customer on Shopify or whatever, woocommerce or whatever, can go ahead and check out instead of just having to buy them one by one and the this, this, this feature the merchants who use it say that they increased a 15% increase in buy with prime units per order. Another announcement from the buy with prime is that they introduced you know, or they talked how they introduced reviews from Amazon so that you can display your Amazon reviews on your website at no additional costs, and they said that early results show that merchants who who added the Amazon reviews to their website have 38% increase in shopper conversion. So this is especially probably for those who are newer, have new websites and have zero reviews on there. And then another thing that they announced was buy with prime assist, which gives merchants the option to offer 24, seven cost post order customer service through Amazon at no additional costs, using a real time chat feature. So, yeah, this was definitely interesting to see.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, I've never used by with prime and never even had a my own. I mean like not in like 20 years I haven't had my own website as far as my Amazon, my Amazon products go. So what about the rest of you? Has anybody of you guys out there use by with primer ready for, like, maybe WooCommerce or another website? Be curious to see. You know what you guys, you know how that's worked out for you.
Bradley Sutton:
Another couple announcements, just really quick. Let me just speed through these last few ones here. There's the potential sales lift. You guys ever seen that from the dashboard? It's like where, where Amazon will tell you hey, you know, if you use a plus content, you know you can make a gazillion dollars. You know, I kind of like make light of that. But yeah, I think a lot of us were like this is such nonsense. You know, like I remember one time it was something yeah, put a plus content in your pink coffin shelf and you'll increase sales by $2,000 a month. I'm like, what are you talking about, bro? Like there's, there's not even $2,000 of pink coffin shelves sold in a year. That's like wrong. So that's probably why a lot of us wanted to even hide some of those widgets on the seller central dashboard back in the day, which is what they you know they we talked about earlier today.
Bradley Sutton:
But let me tell you guys it's improved. You know I'm not. I'm not again, I'm not trying to throw Amazon on the bus. I just want to show you guys that Amazon actually gets better. I actually haven't looked at those in a long time and I'm looking at it live right now where it says under growth opportunities. Hey, this coffin egg tray says if you increase improved conversion by create, creating a plus content, you could have an $88 sales lift over 90 days. That sounds reasonable. That's like four egg trays. You know, if I put a plus content could I increase sales by four, eight trays. That sounds very reasonable, but then again it's not fully completely working. That coffin bath tray test I said if I put a plus content I'm going to get an $8 and 66 cents sales lift. I'm like this is a $4 product. How am I going to get an $8 sales lift? It's not perfect, but, guys, it is getting better. Don't just overlook it. If you're like me, who are just like, oh, I'm just going to ignore all of those because they're so far off, I think their algorithms that they have working on it is definitely a lot better. So so make sure to check that out. And anyways, the announcement that they had was this potential sales lift is going to be available for a lot other kind of things like manager experiments and 20 other catalog attributes. So 20 other things they're going to be. They're going to give you a little thing that says, hey, if you do this to each of those 20 things, you could get this kind of sales lift.
Bradley Sutton:
Another cool feature they talked about was view in your room table top. So you guys ever seen the helium 10 coffin shelf or other products like furniture? And then it has a button where it says view in your room, but it puts it on the floor right, like it's mainly for like chairs and tables and stuff, and then you can kind of it's using augmented reality for your product and then you can just kind of like with your mobile app see how that product looks in the room. Well, now they said, hey, this is going to, we're rolling out the room table top feature. So instead of just looking how it would look on the floor, you're like who's going to put a coffin shelf on the floor? You know it's going to be like hey, put it on this countertop or this egg tray, how does it look in your kitchen island, and things like that. So this is coming soon.
Bradley Sutton:
So in the past it wasn't something you opted into or or could ask Amazon to give you, like the helium 10 coffin shelf. We didn't do anything special. It just all of a sudden started showing up with that augmented reality. So I have a feeling based on what they were saying at Accelerate that there's now going to be some kind of controllability you're going to have where you can potentially opt into the program or send them like 3D images or something and get into there. So we actually have some follow up meetings with that department to try and see, you know, how maybe helium 10 can can help in this. But that would be pretty cool for those of you who have products that go on table tops or counter tops or things like that, being able to integrate augmented reality for your customers who have the mobile app.
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing honestly I was not excited about it all, it's actually kind of scared a little bit was ships in product packaging program. All right, so it's allowing you the opportunity, it says, to ship customer orders in your own custom branded packaging without additional Amazon boxes. All right, now this could go both ways. Already, this happens sometimes and actually, you know, some of us are kind of upset when it might happen, like if you guys have like some super fancy gift box or like some nice, really nice packaging, you don't want Amazon just taking that and then slapping all their logos and and or their logos, but they're they're, you know, slapping their shipping labels and stuff on it and then having that really nice package getting all scuffed up and then it's like all torn up by the time it gets the customer. And so you know like right now I'm actually doing a brand new coffin shelf package where it's like a box, shape like a coffin and it's going to be like a super nice giftable thing. But if Amazon ships in that box, you know that kind of sucks. Now, where this is better is you know Amazon might be charging you extra shipping because it has to use extra packaging.
Bradley Sutton:
So this, this article or this announcement where they talk about how, because of the ability now to ship in your own packaging in the future, maybe it's going to save you in the fulfillment costs. But I don't know for me. I most of my products. I don't want that. There's a couple of products I have that that I don't really care about the packaging much, and you know they could go ahead and slap a shipping label on there. I don't care, especially if it's safe. Saves me some money. But I'm I'm curious what you, which boat are you guys in? You know would you say, yes, I want to save, you know, a few cents on packaging and you know it also saves the environment too, you know, because you're not having to to have all this cardboard you know around, or are you like, do you have fancy packaging and you and you want that put into an outside box? Anyways, this new feature is going to have enrollment in January of 2024. So you got a couple of months to think about which which boat you would be in. They also announced the sustainability solutions hub. You can look up there. You know, on seller central, if you want more news I'm running out of time here and the last one that they announced, again that you can check in seller central, was a climate some new climate pledge friendly badges that are coming, and it's interesting. Their data shows that if you have that climate pledge friendly badge, it actually drives 10% more page views than if you didn't have it. So it might be something you might want to get onto your listing, and they're going to have three new ways in order to, you know, to have that. So there you have it, guys.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm sure I missed a couple of things here, but but that was probably the majority of what they talked about that this year's Amazon Accelerate it was my first time there had a blast. I couldn't even go to all the parties because I was working in the nights. I had a whole bunch of like webinars I was doing in China and things like that. So I got I missed all the parties but I heard it was really great. There was like two, 3000 people, you know, really high quality. They had the DJ from the Beastie Boys was like the DJ for the events and and they had Tracy Ross there as a celebrity, you know speaker. Really really cool event, really well organized. You know what, what you would expect from Amazon. So, guys, next year I'm sure it's going to be back again Highly, highly, highly recommend going there because you know Amazon, there's nothing like it, you know where. I mean, I didn't even do all of it and I probably would drop 30 different news items there that they launched. So it's a one set, once a year event and definitely go.
Bradley Sutton:
It's not the only event that Amazon does. Amazon does a little bit higher end kind of more advertising. So it's really the event that's happening in October, october 20, I want to say 25th and 26th or 24th to 26th in New York City. It's called Amazon Unboxed. So you want a similar event but more focused maybe on on advertising and if you're you know bigger sellers, make sure to register for that one. Amazon Unboxed, ilium 10 and Pacview definitely will have teams there, so be great to to meet you guys in person at that one. I hope you enjoyed this recap. If you guys want follow-ups for me to talk about any of these announcements a little bit more in depth, make sure to reach out. Don't forget to follow on Instagram Sirius Sellers podcast. See you guys in the next episode.
Ready to catapult your Walmart selling journey to a whole new level of success? For today's special Walmart Wednesday episode, buckle up for an exciting chat where our host, Carrie Miller, sheds light on the latest developments that were revealed during the recent Walmart conference. You'll discover how the launch of new international marketplaces like Chile, same-day pickup, brand stores, and more, could potentially revolutionize your E-commerce business in Walmart.com. Additionally, we'll tackle the complexities of COMP errors, and most importantly, how to fix them - a game-changer for every Walmart seller! Shifting gears, we delve into the art of optimizing pay-per-click advertising on Walmart. Strategies revolve around using Helium 10's Cerebro for Walmart, listing optimization, grouping keywords into campaigns, and using attributes effectively. Can't wrap your head around it? Don't worry, we've got you covered!
Listen in as we break down these concepts and tips on finding the right keywords, and using Cerebro to save on advertising costs. These concepts are helpful if you're selling on Walmart.com and if you're brand is on Walmart WFS. Now is the time to sell on Walmart.com! Are you ready to take your selling journey to dizzying new heights? Let's get started!
In episode 492 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie talks about:
- 01:14 - Updates From The First-Ever Walmart Conference
- 01:57 - New International Walmart Marketplaces
- 02:08 - Walmart Brand Stores
- 02:42 - Same-Day Pick up
- 04:21 - Add Credit Or Debit Cards For Walmart Ads Payment
- 05:10 - Common Issues On Walmart.com Right Now
- 05:23 - Navigating Through Walmart’s COMP Errors
- 11:19 - Finding Keywords For Your Walmart PPC Campaigns
- 16:20 - PPC Ads In Walmart Is Important
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Carrie Miller:
Today we're going to be discussing all the updates that were given at the recent Walmart conference. We'll also be talking about a new payment method option that you have on the Walmart marketplace and I'll show you some techniques and strategies for your pay-per-click advertising on Walmart.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Want to enter in an Amazon keyword and then within seconds get up to thousands of potentially related keywords that you could research? Then you need Magnet by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/magnet. Magnet works in most Amazon marketplaces, including USA, Mexico, Australia, Germany, UK, India and much more.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm going to be your host today. My name is Carrie Miller and this is our Walmart Wednesday, where we talk about all things Walmart. I answer questions we have. Sometimes we have guests, we do demos about how to utilize Walmart and how to sell on Walmart. Let's go ahead and get into it. I'm going to go ahead and get into some interesting information.
Carrie Miller:
Today I actually went to the Walmart conference. I think it was about two weeks ago. There were some interesting updates there and I wanted to share them with you, just in case you weren't there. There were about 1,500 sellers there. It wasn't invite only, but hopefully in the future it'll be open to more sellers, because that would be, I think it's a really great opportunity not only to learn from Walmart, but also to meet other Walmart sellers and get encouraged and see how everyone else is doing.
Carrie Miller:
The first thing that I want to talk about is that they're actually opening another marketplace, which is really exciting, because that means more opportunity for sellers. The first marketplace is obviously the US. We also have Canada, Mexico and now Chile. If you ever had any interest in selling in South America, they are opening a marketplace up in Chile. That's a great opportunity there if you're able to do that. Another thing I wanted to share is that they actually mentioned that they are still rolling out brand stores. If you haven't gotten access to it, don't fret, because they should be giving access to everyone soon. They're slowly rolling it out, just like they did with WFS, and they slowly just added people to those. Just keep an eye on that so that you can start creating your store just like they have on Amazon. You can put all of your products in there and showcase your brand. All they have to do customer has to do is click on your brand name on your actual listings.
Carrie Miller:
The next thing that I have on my agenda here is that they also mentioned that they are going to allow same day pickup. The same day pickup basically means for anyone who is a local store owner, If you have a brick and mortar store, that means that you can actually offer your products for pickup and people can actually come to your store and pick it up. Or if somebody wants same day delivery, then Walmart has a last mile pickup service that you can utilize to get same day delivery. That's pretty cool for anyone who owns a brick and mortar store in any location. It would be mostly for wherever people are local to that brick and mortar, but a really good opportunity for anyone who is local with a brick and mortar.
Carrie Miller:
Another thing is that large items are now available to be fulfilled through WFS. Before it was only up to 150 pounds, but now you can actually ship big things like multi-boxes, like maybe a patio set or trampolines or canoes or anything like that. Very exciting, especially because you get a lot more visibility and it helps your ranking when you're utilizing WFS. Now you can use WFS if you have big products. Another thing is that and I actually posted this in our winning with Walmart group Side note, if you're not in our winning with Walmart group by helium 10, go ahead and join that so that you can get access to other sellers and ask questions and we can answer them for you. Video ads are now available if you're a brand registered owner. If you are brand registered on Walmart, go ahead and check it out. You should be able to get access on ads because you have brand registry, but if not, you would probably want to open up a ticket. If you can't find access to that, Then this is one of my favorite updates and I actually got an email about this, I think, two days ago and that is that you can actually put a credit card or a debit card on your ads now, before it.
Carrie Miller:
Just they basically Always take out the amount out of your total sales, but I like using a credit card because I like to use travel points and so. On Amazon, I use you know, you know those travel credit cards to get a bunch of points and by the end of the year I have, you know, tons of points. I know a lot of other sellers like to do that too, but it was such a bummer that you couldn't do it on. On Walmart, too, but now you can actually add a credit card on there or a debit card so you can pay for your ads that way, which is really awesome. So that's something, to you know, look forward to if you are one of those people who likes to take advantage of the opportunity for travel points, All right.
Carrie Miller:
So I'm gonna go and get some into some discussion about just some issues that people have had. I have been looking in the group and I noticed a lot of people talking about so different situations and one of the things is comp errors. So comp errors are Basically kind of like the pesticide errors that you get on that you get on on Amazon. So if you ever get those pesticide notices where you get your product taken down, Comp error is similar but they don't really actually tell you. Usually when you get a comp error it just says comp error and your listing is seen down. You've no idea how to fix it. But usually it's because you use a product, a word that is, you know, forbidden. So what I would recommend is kind of going through those words that you know you can't use on Amazon. If you used any of them, a Walmart, delete them from your listing. A lot of times your listing will literally just come Pop back up within 15 minutes. So I think that's a really good, you know, A good thing to just try if you have the comp errors, and so I mean I've been seeing a lot of these comp errors. So that is something to take a look at and you know kind of refine that if you really have to delete the whole thing and start from scratch, I would recommend doing that too.
Carrie Miller:
Another question that somebody had is that they wanted to know why they weren't, you know, seeing any spend their ads and they had budget in there and they've set it up. And I have a few thoughts about this. Number one is that you're probably not targeting the right keywords and maybe your bids aren't high enough because you need to get those impressions. So I'm gonna actually, towards the end, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about Cerebro and how you can do some exact campaigns for your PPC. But it's really important to make sure that you do keyword research and helium 10. We do have our Cerebro tool, which is literally the best keyword research tool. There's nothing else like it for Walmart and you can find, you know, all the best keywords by using Cerebro. So how they recommend doing that.
Carrie Miller:
And then another question that people have been asking is that if they Add an ace, if they should add an ace in on their product when they're actually uploading a product. So when you upload your product, you know it'll say you know what is your Amazon ace in? I don't recommend putting it there. I don't see why you would want to do it. I know there's one way to upload where you can literally just connect all of your Accounts, like you can just upload to Walmart via Amazon or Target or Etsy or eBay. I really don't recommend that method. My best suggestion for you to get your products and listings up properly is to use the flat file or bulk Uploads. Okay, it's a little bit harder, but once you learn the flat files, you have more control, the update faster, you can add variations in there, you just have a lot more control over your listing in there. So I highly recommend just uploading your listing with the flat file instead of these other ways, and you do not need to add an ace in there. There's really no reason for that. So I would suggest not doing that.
Carrie Miller:
I have a question. You said someone said I have nothing on Amazon. I still have comp errors. Okay, so somebody has saying they've compared. So what I would suggest doing is maybe kind of looking through your listing and seeing if there are any kind of Comp errors type errors maybe something like maybe you use antibacterial. There's lists on some forums about Amazon words. That's kind of what I have looked at is those words that are forbidden on Amazon and just kind of see if you have any of those. Or you could delete your listing completely and see if you can start over and just kind of slowly see if there are some trigger words in there. Another thing is I definitely recommend, you know, opening up a case for that If you still have issues. SellCord they've actually been on our podcast and Jake was on last month, sellcord.co if you contact them they always are able to help with. You know, account deactivations and compares. So if you really can't solve it on your own, I would just contacting them because they can help you expedite that whole scenario.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, and then another thing you know with all of that is it just has Matt in general. So I've kind of run into this issue. I was doing some, you know work on getting up a hemp cream and it was very difficult experience. You need to. You know, for any liquids you always have to submit a safety data sheet if you want to get your product in WFS. So if you're selling like a shampoo or a lotion or something like that, you always need to do that and submit that. When I first uploaded the hemp cream, it was denied, denied, denied, and then I got it approved. So I had, you know, the product up enlisted because there are other hemp products on Wal-Mart. However, apparently it's actually not. You're not really supposed to sell this product, even though there are some on Walmart and it's for sure forbidden from WFS. So some kind of has Matt type products you can sell on Walmart but you have to ship them yourself. So just keep that in mind. If you sell anything like hemp or you know any liquid issue products, you could have these kinds of issues and you might have to ship them yourself. It's kind of a stressful thing, but you know, I think it'll change in the future where you can send these things in, but for now you can still get on there for the most part and do F fulfilled by merchant. So that is what I recommend on that.
Carrie Miller:
So let's go ahead and get into what I wanted to talk about. To show you just I get a lot of PPC questions and so I wanted to share with you some strategies about just PPC in general. So we have a reverse product ID lookup on cerebral for Wal-Mart. So when you go into helium 10, you're going to want to go over to Cerebro and what you'll do is you will put in product ID. So the product ID is actually in the URL. So if you go to a product so I actually looked at men's genes as an example here and let's just go with the George. Okay. So George Sheens, and what you do is you basically find the product ID up in the URL or, if you have the X-ray extension, you actually can pull up the X-ray extension and then oh, I'm having issues there you can actually pull up the product ID there and just copy it straight from the extension. So that is one way to find it. So this is what we have here and we're just doing a reverse product ID and just to see what that product is ranking for.
Carrie Miller:
So this particular product is ranking for quite a few things sponsored and organic. You can sort by sponsored ranks so you can see, when you put these things in, if they are even advertising. It looks like this person isn't or this brand isn't even advertising. But you can also sort by search volume and look through things. So a lot of people like to go for these main keywords, but I recommend kind of looking for the lower search volume as well, and I don't necessarily think you should look at brand names. But you can find a lot of keywords in here. That would be very profitable, but maybe they're only 1,000.
Carrie Miller:
Let's see big and tall. If you have big and tall jeans that's a good one to kind of look for. Men's Baggy jeans is only 94. I have some literal keywords that have only 17, such as a month, and I've made multiple sales on those. The more relevant keywords, the better Work. Jeans for men it's only 200 search volume, but again, if you have really good work jeans, then you can use this and what you can do is find a bunch of these little search volume keywords and they actually add up to a lot. So what I would suggest doing is putting five to 10 keywords in campaign of the lower search volume. If you have higher search volume keywords, you really should put those in their own campaign. I recommend doing exact sponsored product ads because I've really had a hard time making sure that I'm staying profitable.
Carrie Miller:
Maybe some of you are different, but the broadened phrase I've not been able to get control of as much. So what I've been doing is I've been going to Cerebro often and I'm looking for keywords and what I do is I find those keywords and I kind of group them into the lower search volume together, the high search volume. They're gonna be in their own campaign and that's how you're gonna do this. Okay, so that is what I recommend for your PPC and because we have access to these keywords, you actually can sort through, like, if you wanted to find phrases containing genes, you can find anything that has something to do with genes. So all of these keywords are genes related, but they're just kind of iterations of the phrases that you can find all kinds of great potential keywords to target if you're selling something like that. So what I would say is kind of go around bigger keywords as well. Make sure that you're also capitalizing on those smaller keywords.
Carrie Miller:
Another thing is attributes. So in your actual listing there are places where you need to put color and size. Put the color and size into your actual title where they say it Usually, if it says men's jeans, is there a certain color? Are they black denim or regular denim? And put that in the actual title so that people can find you. Put it in the back end on the attributes. Put all the colors, all the sizing, everything that you can possibly do, so that you will show up in these searches. So that's what I would recommend Make sure that you have everything fully optimized and look for a bunch of these keywords to target. Now you can do the video ads. If you're brand registered, you can do the headline ads. So it's really, really a great time to utilize this feature.
Carrie Miller:
If you're not doing pay-per-click advertising, you're definitely leaving money on the table. So pay-per-click advertising is the best thing that you need to do to start on Walmart, other than optimizing your listings. I actually talked to a lot of people that they basically they say I'm not having much success on Walmart and I asked did you optimize your listing? Well, I just copied it over from Amazon. That's no, no, number one. You should definitely not just copy over from Amazon, because Walmart does not like that. They will suppress your listing and not put you in the search. And then also then I'll ask hey, have you started doing advertising? And people will say, no, I have not done any advertising. So if you haven't started advertising, that's really, really important to get some exposure for your products, get some ranking for your products. So if you haven't done that, I mean I don't actually don't know one seller who would say, oh, I launched a new product on Amazon, but I didn't optimize it and I didn't do any ads. It just unheard of.
Carrie Miller:
So think, keep the same energy that you have for Amazon from Walmart, so that you can, you know, just be successful. I talked to a lot of people at the Walmart conference and there were a lot of very successful Walmart sellers. I think the top was, you know they were doing about 700,000 a day in sales a day. So there is a lot of opportunity and a lot of possibility for Walmart. You just have to really push through and figure it out and just put that effort in to you know, making sure you optimize your listing and start the PPC campaigns. If you don't have, you know something to help you manage your campaigns. We do have Adtomic for Walmart. We also have a sister company, Pacvue. That is also has some Walmart advertising tools. So lots of great you know opportunities to find, you know software to help support you in the PPC journey.
Carrie Miller:
So I highly, you know, encourage you to go ahead. Make sure you start advertising. If you haven't started advertising, get your ads going. If you need help, you can always go into the Walmart winning with Walmart group and just get some assistance there. And also make sure you use Cerebro to find the keywords that I you're going to save so much money by finding these exact words. I did some auto campaigns at first and it was just out of control, not even helping me at all. So once I started using Cerebro I started becoming very profitable, so highly recommend doing that and good luck with everything. Let me know if you have any issues with anything and in the Walmart group, and I'd be happy to answer any questions. But hope you all have a great rest of the day and happy selling. Bye.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist, Shivali Patel. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week. Amazon Accelerate Releases https://event.amazonaccelerate.com/general-information/?page=marquee-announcements SmartKargo, a leader in providing technology and logistics solutions to airlines globally, announced it is teaming up with Walmart GoLocal, Walmart’s white-label, delivery-as-a-service platform, to expand next- and two-day delivery offerings for retailers and e-commerce companies. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230913979238/en/SmartKargo-Expands-Next--and-Two-Day-Delivery-Offerings-with-Walmart-GoLocal Etsy seeks to drive more organic traffic through “Share & Save” program https://www.modernretail.co/marketing/etsy-seeks-to-drive-more-organic-traffic-through-share-save-program/ Amazon Marketing Stream is expanding to include new Amazon DSP campaign datasets. This includes information on Amazon DSP campaigns, flights, ad groups, and ad group targets. https://advertising.amazon.com/API/docs/en-us/release-notes/index#original-video-download-is-now-available-on-sponsored-brands-media-api
Around the Clock Convenience: Walmart Now Offers Customers Late-Night Delivery https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2023/09/12/around-the-clock-convenience-walmart-now-offers-customers-late-night-delivery Flowspace, the software platform and distribution network powering independent fulfillment, announced today that it has partnered with TikTok to provide fulfillment services for TikTok Shop sellers in the U.S. https://www.retaildive.com/press-release/20230912-flowspace-powers-us-fulfillment-for-tiktok-shop/
We wrap up with a must-hear insight from our brand evangelist, Carrie Miller, on how to use Helium 10’s Audience tool to gather real data about your product. Join us for this engaging episode with crucial e-commerce updates and strategies.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Shivali covers:
- 00:41 - Amazon Accelerate Releases
- 03:30 - Walmart GoLocal
- 04:08 - Etsy Share & Save
- 05:23 - Stream For Amazon DSP
- 05:50 - Walmart Late Delivery
- 06:55 - TikTok Shop Fulfillment
- 08:11 - Look Out For This Saturday's SSP Episode!
- 08:25 - Follow Bradley And Helium 10 On LinkedIn
- 09:15 - Pro Training Tip: Split Testing Using Helium 10 Audience
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Shivali Patel
Amazon Accelerate announcements, TikTok shop fulfillment, Walmart shipping expansion and Etsy promotions for sellers. This and more on this week's Weekly Buzz.
Bradley Sutton
How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Shivali Patel
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our Weekly Buzz, where we give you all the latest news in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce space. We also provide you with a training tip of the week where you get insights into serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. So the first article we really have is from Amazon Accelerate. It's hot off the press and it's happening right now. So Bradley on Saturday is going to give you a full rundown of all the announcements that happen, but for now, let's just talk a little bit about what's happening on day one. So we have a little bit about some new enterprise solutions. We have emerald notifications, which makes it easier for you to just act on your business updates. In fact, helium 10 is one of those included notifications, so make sure that you have this on. We also have the AI backed seller messaging assistant, which is just telling you that basically any time a customer messages, you might end up having artificial intelligence responding to them on either that order status or shipping information, returns, refunds, that kind of thing, which is great because artificial intelligence is all the way right now. You also have quick list, and this is referencing the generative AI which can help you simplify your listing creation process. Now, if you are a Helium 10 user, then you know that we already have some of this incorporated into our listing builder. If you have access to a diamond plan, then maybe you're already utilizing a version of this, but now it's there for Amazon directly there as well. Then you have some regulatory compliance information, and we did also have an announcement about the Smarter Seller Central homepage for sellers worldwide. So this is talking about the dashboard itself. There was some announcements on the simplified listing management. And then you have enhanced buyer abuse protections, which actually got some applause at Amazon Accelerate.
Shivali Patel
You have Veeco, which, if you don't know, that's a company for printing shipping labels and they had some announcements for reducing rates. You have Amazon's shipping service. Now this is particularly cool because it's just telling you a little bit about what new changes are coming to the actual logistics side of things. Now, if you don't know about Veeco, Veeco is just a company for printing shipping labels, so they had some announcements. Then you have Amazon shipping services, so you can actually end up shipping non Amazon orders. With Amazon it's sort of a rival to UPS or FedEx you can kind of think of it like that but it's really helpful for the logistics side of things. And then you also have supply chain by Amazon integrated and that's really cool because it offers you the end to end fully automated, basically logistics for supply chain. So picking up your product from your actual manufacturing factories, getting it over through customs all the way to the warehouses. It just helps simplify the process. Of course, with FBA they were already kind of doing that with helping with picking, packing and shipping out that product. But now, when you really have to get out new orders or a new batch of inventory, now they can help you with actually picking up those products and then getting it all the way into the warehouses.
Shivali Patel
Let's jump into the next news article, which is smart cargo expands next and two day delivery offerings with Walmart go local. Now this comes hot from the business wire and as we go down you can end up seeing that this is sort of similar to what Amazon announced actually today. So if this is a coincidence or not, you let us know in the chat. But as you can see here, they're just working with some airlines to enable an alternative delivery network to establish carriers. So, again, you can end up shipping out non Walmart orders with Walmart.
Shivali Patel
Okay, let's jump over to Etsy. So, from modern retail, etsy seeks to drive more organic traffic through their share and save program. So if you are someone who sells on Etsy, then you might have been dealing with about a 6.5% transaction fee, but now you can kind of be your own affiliate and it's going to reward you for that work that you are already doing, ending up to a 4% of the order total off of that bill. So maybe you are one of those sellers who has been trying to hike your prices a little bit to kind of combat with the inflation and make up for any costs that you have, but this can be one of those things that might be something that will add value to your business. Now, something to be mindful of here is Etsy does have some rules, and one of those rules is you are prohibited from directly linking pay-per-click activities to Etsy. So this implies that you might need to actually end up investing and advertising in maybe creating a landing page and then driving those users to your product through that method. But again, if you are selling on Etsy, then this is something that you might want to consider utilizing in your own business.
Shivali Patel
Next up, we have Amazon DSP campaign signals now available on Amazon Marketing Stream. This is directly from advertising with Amazon, so Amazon Marketing Stream is something that helps us have hourly information for PPC, even with Atomic at Helium 10. And now it's expanding to DSP campaign data sets, so this is super cool. If you are somebody who does utilize DSP, then make sure that this is something you look into. Next up, we have around the clock convenience. Now, this is one of the things I'm really excited to share because I find that there's a little bit of a funny component to it, but Walmart does offer customers late night delivery. So, if you are, this is a little bit more on the consumer side of things, the storefront side of things, but I'm sure that this will end up, long-term, be something that can help the three P sellers as well. A couple of weeks ago, Bradley mentioned that you can now end up delivering into the garage for Amazon, while Walmart said let me raise you one, because they now end up having an option right here, but you can have items delivered directly to your fridge, you guys, or your countertop. So if you are someone who you feel like coming home to something from Walmart is gonna make you happy if it's directly on your countertop, you now have that option. So, just so you know, this is now something that Walmart Plus members have the capability of making use of.
Shivali Patel
Then you have FlowSpace. This comes from RetailDive, and FlowSpace is the software platform and distribution network which is actually partnering with TikTok Shop. Now TikTok Shop has had all the hype in recent weeks. A lot of Amazon sellers have expanded into TikTok Shop just to use the external traffic with Amazon attribution links to generate even more revenue. We've had conversations with some Helium 10 elite members as well who end up using fulfillment by TikTok and, though I'm not sure if they're using FlowSpace. Flowspace is something that is directly integrated with TikTok Shop. So if you are a TikTok user, maybe you've been going through and you've noticed that there's some videos coming up with content creators maybe pitching a product, and you'll have a little bit of a shopping cart that you can click on and directly purchase. So not only are they now picking up on trends and popularizing different items, you can also enable those sales directly from the platform itself, which is super, super cool.
Shivali Patel
So, with that, those are our news pieces for this week. If you want more information about any of these announcements, or you're super excited about some of them, make sure you tune into this Saturday's Serious Sellers podcast episode, where Bradley will discuss not only these updates, but also updates from day two of Amazon Accelerate, and, trust me, you don't want to miss out. So, after we've talked about news, what's next? Well, before I get to what's next, make sure that you are following our LinkedIn, because not only is Bradley gonna be sharing those details on our podcast episode, but if you are more of a reader or you are active on LinkedIn, you won't want to miss those updates there as well. So make sure you're following our LinkedIn page. Just go to Helium 10 and you'll be able to click, follow and get all of our updates that we post.
Shivali Patel
Next we have Carrie Miller, our brand evangelist, who is going to talk to you about audiences. Now, audience is great for just pulling real people about your product. So, as opposed to maybe split testing directly on your Amazon listings and having potential headaches of underperforming variance, you can now go directly to audience and get real data on understanding what will work better. But I'm not going to get too deep into it. I'm going to pass it over to Kerry and let her show you Today.
Carrie Miller
I want to talk with you a little bit about split testing. Now, most of the time when you're doing split testing, you're actually split testing things like your title or your images on Amazon. But we actually have a way that you can do some split testing with your target audience before you even listen to anything on Amazon, and there's actually a lot of other capabilities of this tool. So I want to go ahead and show you how to do this. So the first thing you're going to want to do is you want to log into Helium 10 and you're going to go up to the tools menu and you're going to click on this audience tool, and this is where you're going to be able to create a poll of your target audience. So you get feedback on a variety of different things. So the first thing you want to do is click on create poll, okay. So once you click on create poll, it's going to actually ask you what type of poll you want to do, okay, so in this situation, maybe I want to do, you know, a main image, but you can also do like a general idea of listing, title or really anything that you want. A lot of times I use kind of general idea for just kind of like product ideas and things like that, maybe different colors and things like that. So once you choose that I'm going to just choose main image and you go to the next step. You are going to be able to write a question. So you could either choose one of these questions like how does this image make you feel? Which product would you rather buy? Based on the image, which product would you rather buy? I'll probably choose something like that. Then you're going to go to the next step and this is where you're going to actually add your images. So if you have, for example, our coffin shelves, maybe we want to know what is the best coffin shelf main image. You can put upload up to eight options here, but I'm going to skip that just to show you all the rest.
Carrie Miller
Here you can choose a general audience or you can do a custom audience. Now, it is a little bit more of a charge to do one of these polls. It's about $50 because you're going to pull 50 different people. But you can actually choose an age range specifically. If your product is specific age range, you can do a different target audience in general. Are they a prime member? There's a lot of different options in here so you can really personalize this and hone down into your target audience and get the best feedback possible for your product. So highly recommend utilizing these. It's a really good investment to get that really targeted feedback from your exact target audience.
Carrie Miller
Then you're going to choose your audience size and I just I'm going to leave it at the 50 here, and then you can also, you know, know more about who is responding, so you can, you know, find out their personal or all this different information about them. You can check whatever it is that you want and then you can confirm your poll and that is what is going to generate your poll and within you know, 24 hours you should see all of your results. Now, this is what it looks like when you do have results. So you can see.
Carrie Miller
On our poll we were looking for a main image and so we asked you know we have a coffin shaped egg tray. If you saw this in the search results, which picture would you would make you want to click on the most? So the winner here was this B image and if you go down here, you can actually see an explanation of why that person chose this particular image. So it's really, really helpful feedback because it's not just you know a poll, but it's actually you know, qualitative information that really can help you in deciding which image to go with and why. And then it gives you some more insights into your actual audience, that is, you know that you're pulling.
Carrie Miller
You can also see their demographics here, their education level, their gender identity all this great information about who you polled so that you can make a better informed decision about whatever it is that you're testing on Amazon whether it's your main images copy, maybe you're testing a new product all those different options you have there. It is an incredible tool, a really good investment, especially during product research. I love using this to you know, decide colors and also just design in general. Like which design do you like best? If you are having a problem, you know asking your family members. This is actually a better way to do it because you can target your specific audience and get some really great feedback. So if you haven't checked out our audience's tool, go ahead and check it out and you will be happy that you did.
Shivali Patel
All right, thank you so much, Carrie. That was fantastic. So I hope you don't just listen to this. You also implement. So make sure you go check out audience. If you are somebody who needs to split test, who should be split testing, or you want to optimize that listing, then this is great for you. So that is it for this week. I hope you learned something and we'll catch you next time to see what's buzzing.
Today, we're privileged to have an enlightening and engaging conversation with the one and only Kevin King. Before Amazon FBA and E-commerce, Kevin takes us back to his early days as a collector of sports cards, which eventually transformed into a lucrative venture during his college years. In a unique twist to the collectibles market, Kevin began featuring pretty girls on baseball cards. A fascinating story that takes us back to that era and Kevin's unique business strategy ties into the Amazon-selling industry today. Get ready to take notes as Kevin King, opens his treasure trove of Amazon seller hacks and wisdom from his vast experience in the business world. From unveiling the concept of intuitive eating that helped him lose a remarkable 70 pounds without dieting, to sharing insightful hacks, strategies, and resources for Amazon sellers, Kevin covers it all. He even takes us behind the scenes of his recently launched an Amazon newsletter and its intriguing and engaging content. Gear up as we switch gears to advanced Amazon seller strategies and explore the unfair advantages and perks you can get by being a Helium 10 Elite member!
As we dive further into the conversation, you'll hear tales of success from Elite members and how their monthly training and networking calls help them gain insights from some of the top Amazon and Walmart in the space. Rounding off the episode, we anticipate the forthcoming Billion Dollar Seller Summit and the Level Up event. So, whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, an established business owner, or simply someone with a penchant for compelling stories, this episode is guaranteed to leave you inspired and filled with actionable advice. Don't miss out!
In episode 491 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Kevin discuss:
- 00:00 - Kevin King's Amazon Seller Hacks and Journey
- 03:59 - Collectible Baseball Cards and Strip Clubs
- 10:16 - Kevin’s Weight Loss Journey and Health Tips
- 24:05 - A Different Amazon Newsletter
- 27:40 - Increasing Engagement Through Opt-in System
- 40:00 - Benefits of Joining the Helium 10 Elite Program
- 42:52 - Catch The Next Billion Dollar Seller Summit
- 48:30 - 60-Second Tip: Automated Tool for Boosting Amazon Sales
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► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton
Kevin King is back on the podcast and, in addition to some cool seller hacks that he always has for us, he's gonna talk about a whole variety of topics like how he used to be a collectible card Manufacture and how he's lost 70 pounds in the last couple of years without even dieting. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you a six, seven or eight figure seller and want to network in a private mastermind group with other experienced sellers? Or Maybe you want to take advantage of monthly advanced training sessions with Kevin King, an expert guest? Do you want to come to our quarterly in-person all-day trainings at Helium 10 headquarters? Or do you want the widest access to the Helium 10 set of tools? For all of these things, the elite program might be for you.
For more information on Helium 10 elite, go to h10.me/elite. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic Conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we've got the most serious sellers of them all, Kevin King, back on the show. Kevin, how's it going?
Kevin King
It's going. I don't know if I'm serious, though I'm more a I'm a seller, but I'm, yes.
Bradley Sutton
Some people might say you know as like they read my news I would say what is serious, like how serious is this guy? Yeah, yeah, the newsletter. We're gonna talk about that you know. There's definitely been some some things that people are saying that this isn't, this can't be serious, but we'll get it. We'll get into that.
Kevin King
A little bit depends on the total point of view, what you see, what's coming, yeah, oh my goodness, I can't wait, I want to talk right off the bat though, before I forget.
Bradley Sutton
You know, I don't think we've talked about this on the podcast before, or maybe you've alluded to it. I've heard you talk about it, but I've never actually dug deep like right now. Hold on, let me just pull something from my back wall here. I just hit it behind. I was sorting some some baseball cards and I'm actually flying to Japan on my own time personal time off and I'm setting up at a card show over there because my dad's had a business there. But I've heard you mentioned before that that you've dabbled in in the old days, in the, in the like sports cards or comics or what was it exactly in that industry.
Kevin King
Yes, I as a child back in the 80s, 70s and 80s, I collected the basketball cards, back when the I think it was tops they were big, they're like four, four by six size or something like that very Huge, and I collect I don't know. So I don't know when I started second, third grade. So I'm like that and I collected those, collected baseball cards, collected football cards and I was big into them and then I just kind of I grew out of it. I guess maybe I don't know, sophomore year, high school or something, just that was a little kid stuff threw everything in a box or actually put everything in a. I think I was going to throw it away. My mom's like no, no, no, no, don't throw all that stuff away. So she's threw it into about my mom's a hoarder anyway, but she threw it into a box.
And then my senior year of high school, like seven years late, sorry, of college, like seven years later, yeah, I was like I damn, I need some money, man, I need a, I need a little extra cash. I was like what, how can I make some cash? I was like, wait a second. My mom, I think baseball cards now people are actually starting to pay real money for these things. I might actually have, you know, some crazy rookie card for Roger Clemens or something, I don't know. I called her up. You still got that box of stuff I was going to throw away. She's like, yeah, I was like I'm coming up to see you, um, you know, from mother's day or something, I'm gonna grab it from you. So I grabbed it and I went on and I sold to Sold a bunch of those. I had some rare stuff in there, made thousands of dollars just taking them into a hobby shop, you know, a comic book store or whatever, and trading them in. And you got some extra beer, money and cash that I needed when I was, you know, not doing so well, when I was 21, 22 and so that evolved, though into time and, uh, the earth was.
When was this? Like 92, 93, so about three years after college, um, I was doing stuff, mark and I, you know, mark, from billion dollar stars on, we were doing, um, I'd started a magazine, uh, that dealt with strip clubs, actually, and it wasn't. There's no nudity or anything. This is the business side of it. It was, you know the business side of it. And and doing that, these, for some reason baseball cards have become hot to put strippers on. So it was everything from you know the cabaret, royal and Dallas to the dollhouse in Orlando, to playboy magazine was doing it, penthouse, all the anybody you know bikini, hawaiian, tropic bikini girls were doing it. It became a thing to put Put pretty girls on on baseball cards and these were being sold through traditional comic stars. This wasn't like in the adult shops and like the on the other side of the internet. These were like.
Diamond comics was a big distributor back then in capital city comics Too, huge distributors that distributed all the comic book stores. You know they will have big boost at comic con in san diego. Um, they would put these things out and you will put them in packs. It became a huge, freaking business.
Bradley Sutton
We're selling cases of these and that's one of my first so you were the, you were the one who made them, or you were we made. I was one of the.
Kevin King
I was both. I was one of the companies, I was making them. Um, originally we had deals because I knew some of these club owners. So they're like yeah, do go ahead and do ours. You know that's good promotion for us and we'll do it. So I was doing them, I go to them. We would either shoot it or they give us stuff that we would. Actually I would design it. What's the back of the cards have?
you know, in baseball cars I would have the stats and he had had susie, susie smith, stage name, candy, candy dropper, whatever, uh, five, six, 34, 24, 34, um, originally from san diego, likes men with uh, a short hair or whatever, um, you know, it would be something like that and I was like I need a better way to actually sell these. So a lot of people it goes back to what we do today. They're putting insert, insert cards, you know, register your warranty or get on our, join our vip club or something as one of the like the 11th card in a pack of 10, and they were sending it into the company stew physical mail. There's no internet back then and these companies were not doing anything. They're like the, the business cards in a fishbowl at the gym. You know, they just accumulate.
And so I called up all these companies so what are you doing with your, with your, uh, your inserts? And I got there sitting there, said send it to me, I'll get them all typed in. I hired some company in Jamaica that would type these in for Four cents a piece or something, some crazy load number ended up building a mailing list of like 13 000 people off of this that had filled up for like a hundred different companies that were doing this and then as part of the deal I said well, I want to be able to you, I'll send you the list. I knew these guys wouldn't do anything with it most of them and I want to be able to have the right to mail it and I'm going to buy your cards from you wholesale and I'm going to create a catalog, a glossy color catalog that was sent in the mail, and Send these out and sell mine and yours.
That became a huge freaking business that blew up and, um that we were able to ride that wave, uh, for quite some time and we were doing all kinds of really cool. Sometimes I have to show you. If I would know and you're gonna talk about this, I could have showed you some here but we did 24 karat gold signatures, like an ink with 20 raised 24 karat gold. We did and put them in like those, those crystal cases with screws on all sides. I mean this was like Serious, serious stuff.
Bradley Sutton
I mean people ahead of the time, because that, that's like what the industry has moved to is like these, you know, like one of ones, and like, hey, this is a uh, you know there's only 10 that have this signature. And now there's these companies that have them, where they actually come out Like every single one, like national treasures and stuff, where every single you know card in the set it comes in like this case, and it's all encapsulated in these plastic or these, these hard holders, and You're like doing this stuff. Yeah, it's 25 years before we were doing stuff for puzzles.
Kevin King
So at the back of the card we might do a set of, a subset of nine, so maybe this sets a hundred, but nine of them on the back is a puzzle piece. So you had to collect all nine, flip the cards over and put them in the right order to get another picture as a, you know, as a puzzle piece, like like a tic-tac-toe board. But you put them on the right order it makes another picture. Uh, we, yeah, we're doing all kind and but because of the nature of the products we were, basically I was limited in my marketing, and so it's where I cut my teeth, because I had to get super creative and super innovative on marketing. Because you know, you weren't allowed to. You know, if there was a facebook back there wasn't facebook back then, but there was they would not allow you to advertise it. So it caused us to be very creative in the way we did marketing.
Um, we did a huge events. You talking about going to japan at the block blotch Blotch not beloggio, that's vegas, but the Belaj hotel in west hollywood on the sunset strip over there by the viper room and maybe some different name now, but there's a fancy hotel. In 1997 we brought in a bunch of the models Put out a thing and said you know, it's 500 bucks to come, and we had all these guys come like 300 guys, 400 guys, come to get, stand in line, get autographs from the girls on their cards, on 8 by 10s, and we did a party afterwards. It was it was different world.
Bradley Sutton
Interesting. Well, hey guys, you heard it first.
Kevin King
I never talked about it. It's not okay.
Bradley Sutton
I guess, heard, like you know Briefly, you're into collectible cards, you know, and I was like you know what? That's kind of up my alley. Let me ask him about that. So you heard it first here. Now, guys.
Kevin King
We had binders, you know, with the sleeves, and you put special, special binders. You would collect and, yeah, it was like it was full on full on Wow, interesting, interesting stuff.
Bradley Sutton
So, guys, we're doing this podcast a little bit differently. I'm doing everything backwards. You know, Kevin is known for his strategies and and Amazon. You know seller hacks and stuff like that. Well, we'll definitely get to that, but instead of doing at the beginning, we're gonna do that towards the end. If you guys have been listening to this podcast for a while, I've actually, you know, usually at the end of podcast, start asking people about their health regimen and diets and exercise and things like that, because 2023 is my year of health, where I'm asking, talking to guests. But we're gonna, we're gonna flip the script a little bit. Say to the end for the Amazon strategy. Now, Kevin, you yourself, wait, wait, can you look to your left really quick? Look to the side, Kevin. Where'd you go? Kevin? Where, oh? You disappear. You're so skinny now. You just disappeared when you, when you turn to the side there. How much weight have you lost this year?
Kevin King
I Don't know what the number is this year but in the last couple years about 70, 70, some odd pounds. I still got a ways. Still got a ways to go. But I'm probably another 50 or 60 and I'll be happy, but that'll probably take.
Bradley Sutton
That's impressive. Take me a few more years. Once you, I've noticed, you know, once you hit 40. It's like hard to lose weight, so you hit a number like that. That's pretty impressive. So let's talk about that a little bit. You know I Mean are. What are you doing? You're not, you know, starving yourself. You told me that before. It's not about, it's not about like starving yourself or necessarily counting calories or or working out seven hours a day or anything like that. But but how have you been able to, to steadily get to that when you're at now?
Kevin King
I've been. I've had an issue with my weight all my life. I've been up and down all my life and sometimes it's gotten a lot worse than what it what it is now. You know, right now about 260. I've been as high as like 360 in the past.
In high school I was right around 200 when I most of my weight gain started when I left the house to go to college, to start drinking beer, eating pizza and just kind of kind of put it on and Didn't really care Too much. But then it, you know, as you age and I've been lucky, knock on wood, that I haven't had a lot of issues, not other than a type 2 diabetes, but no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol, none of that kind of stuff that you would expect. I've been pretty good shape, even though been a bigger, bigger guy comparatively, and but I got to a point where it's actually my, my ex-wife, her. She always used to say if you can't take care of yourself, how can you take care of me? Which was a good little slogan and it's true, and so that kind of motivated me a little bit to To kind of in. So I tried every diet in the book. You know, everything from carnivore diet to Atkins diet, to Weight Watchers, to.
Bradley Sutton
Manny, get you on that carnivore at one point. Yeah, they're all stupid, he's, I know he's big on that.
Kevin King
Every one of those diets is stupid. I'm sorry if someone's out there's listening and thinks they're great. They're stupid. Every single one they do. They work, yes, they work short term. But how many times have you done the carnivore and you're right back to where you started it. But the key and I kind of learned this from my dad in a way, because he lost a lot of weight and kept it off for like 50 years he's skinny, I mean, he's like 130 pounds or something, but it's mindset, it's psychology.
Eating is psychology. It's the people that you look at, all the people that go when they work out. They go when they work out and work their ass off and what they do after that. They go get a Starbucks and they just undo the entire workout. They just did by getting Starbucks with all the cream and all the whatever in it. I'm not coffee drinkers, I don't know all the terminology, but and they just completely undo it. But they feel good about themselves. I worked out and I had a supposedly a good coffee. It you've got to be conscious of what's in your mouth.
So my, my ex-wife had found this woman. She's from Venezuela originally. She was listening to these, this podcast in Spanish, and she was a guest and she's talking about something called intuitive eating. You can look at, you can Google it. Google it intuitive eating. And she was talking about how this works. And so my wife At the time was like, let me, I want to do this. And so she called her up, started doing like launch. This woman lives in Miami doing long-distance consultations. And Then she said, Kevin, I think you'll really like her, she's really really good, you should try it. So, and to during COVID 20, was it? I'm into 2020 on Christmas time, 2020. I had my first call with her and started really in January 2021 and what she does is she doesn't believe in diets and she's like the head of the gastric that people of Miami I don't know what the damn thing is called, but something Uh, but she's like the top person of it, gmm. She's skinny, she's a Attractive you know, vince, a willing girl, but she's headed.
This whole thing and her whole thing is, is intuitive eating. It's the psychology of eating. It's not about, you know, weight losses is about 80% what you put in your mouth and 20% everything else, and being conscious of what you eat, and so it. She's like Kevin promised me, you'll never go on another diet in your life. It's like done check mark. She's like if and if you get bad. If you get bad, if you go off rails on something Like you know, you go out and you you eat a gallon of ice cream one night because you're depressed or something. Don't think, well, shoot, I just ruined everything. I'm working at Might as well, eat another one the next day and I'll start a diet on Monday. Everybody always starts a diet on Monday or the first of the month. Okay on, on September, on August 1st, I'm gonna start. She said that's absolutely the wrong way to do it. She's like eat what you want. If you want a freaking Pizza, eat the pizza, but it needs to be. You want the pizza needs not be a five or six out of habit, but like a nine or a ten and go get the pizza, but be conscious of what you're eating. Maybe get a small instead of a large or whatever.
And I had a habit. I had a bad habit like every night to relax, I would watch TV Just to, you know, unwind my brain and everything and spin an hour just watching mindless TV. You know, america's Got Talent or some stupid reality show or just whatever, just to kind of just wind down. And I would eat a box of milk guts. You know one of those, can those? I love milk guys because you could put three or four of them in your mouth, suck on them. You know, you put three or four in your mouth, they kind of meld together because they're caramel and so you're just sucking on it like you would a you know a butterscotch or something, and then, as it gets lower, you put a couple more in your mouth and they meld together so you can make a box last like an hour and a half. But that's 600 calories on a lot of sugar. I just I was in this habit of doing it every single night. She broke me of that. Now I have that maybe once a month.
But she got me the thinking about things and she finds substitutes. Why do you like those milk duds? Is it the texture? Is it the carmel? Is it the way it taste on your tongue? There's something about it. Why do you drink so much soda? Is because you like the carbonation, that is, a specific carbonation. How about switching to this drink, not a period, not this, but this specific one, and it works. So you're, you're tricking your mind psychologically to still, because you have those cravings in those desires or those habits, and as you break in those you swap it.
So she's told me, like Most dieticians would say, if you're drinking a coke, zero, you need to cut that out. You need to go to water. You know, hundred twenty eight gallons a day, or ounces a day I mean I got too much, that's a whale size. But a hundred twenty eight ounces a day, and and and, quit, cut, cut those out immediately. She's like no, if you're drinking six a day, just swap one of them out for a water In this, you know, and then have five and let's see where that goes.
And but over time you start consciously eating things differently. You start looking at stuff. Am I eating because I'm hungry or am I eating because it's a habit? And now I'm at the point now where I have a private chef that comes once a week and cooks for me, and he used to make my lunches and my dinners. Now I'm just telling me one meal a day because that's all I want.
So, and I'm not, I'm not eating half of it anyway. I eat, you know, a little bit of breakfast, protein shake, maybe a little cereal or piece of bread or something. But if I want a candy I buy. If I want an ice cream I get it, but I used to eat a lot of ice cream. Bluebell is my favorite to Texas company and you get across the south it's not everywhere but it's my favorite so I would have those little pints. I buy those little half gallon things or whatever they are last a couple days. I've had one right now in my fridge for two months and I haven't even opened it. It's a change in psychology or what I've done is like, okay, if I want that taste, I want that ice cream taste. I love that taste. It gets the hormones In me, it gets the things that satisfaction, those triggers that are in your body. I'll buy those small size cups. They're like for birthday parties for kids. You know there are 160 calories and I'll eat one of those and she's like, do you go back for a second, go back for a third? Like, no, I just, I just eat one. So it's it's some of its discipline, some of its mind over matter, just being conscious of everything that you eat. And that's the biggest thing in.
The second is sleep is so important in in health and a lot of people especially. I mean you're a perfect example. You're working your ass off and sleeping wherever you could grab a nap here or there's a couple hours at night at one point. I know you're better about it now, but but most people dismiss how important sleep is for your overall health. And what woke me up to it is is a few years ago I was going to get life insurance and I didn't have life insurance before. But I got Marius, I better get some life insurance. And talking to the agent, they're like OK, there's, there's a what's your sleep apnea score? And I'm like. I just did a test and it was like 19, I had 19. Mild things or whatever it was, in a, in a period of whatever the measuring period is, that's OK, that's mild and what? What this insurance company told me is that you're at 19 times, maybe it's 19 times per hour. You sub, get subconscious, you don't realize it, but if it messes with your body and they said, if you're you get to 20, you're uninsurable on life insurance. I'm like what? And so I went immediately.
I had my wife used to say I would snore. I would snore like a sound, like a Mack truck Coming down the street. So I went. I had a. There's a guy here in Austin that does a balloon, sonia plastic, so they go into your. I had a 70% blockage. I didn't know what, I just get used to it as you're living, you only realize it. But I had trouble in my nose. So you know, man, he just did it. I did a Marcus done a bunch of people done it. He has this technology is like these. One is doogie how's your guys that became an MD when he was 14 or something. So you know this technique. So it doesn't require the major surgery that and still get knocked out for like 15 minutes because and uses balloon and blows it up and opens all that up. That made a huge difference on my story.
In my sleep Plus, I started using a sleep mask and I changed. You know, sometimes in your bed If it's hot or cold, temperatures are right, you're tossing and turning, you're not getting as much sleep, you wake up in this little bit of sweats or whatever. But there's something called the eight sleep mattress. Is the number eight sleep. That's freaking amazing. It's a mattress topper and you it's about two grand.
It's not cheap, but you put it on top of your bed and then it you can set settings are you cold sleep or warm sleep? And you can do splits, so if your wife and you on one side, your partner new Can be off different. And then it measures you throughout the night and it ring and fit, that fits and stuff. Do this, but give you like your pulse rate and use some measurements during the night. But this like measures your whole body and like how often do you wake up, how, what kind of quality of sleep did you get? What was your heart rate, your hrv through the night, all this stuff and it Adjust after a week of testing. It figures out where what temperature is optimal for you. It's a way to just you can manually write it but adjust up and down either cold or hot, the temperature of the mattress.
And this thing is so thin, it's super thin. It goes on top of the bed, has a little pump that you hide behind your bed with a little bit of water in it and it's brilliant. I mean I have a. I have a sleep number bed that has Like seven thousand dollars sleep number bed that has something similar built in that sucks compared to this Eight sleep. It's awesome. So things like that plus you got. You got to watch as a man. You got to watch your testosterone. So, as men, the number one thing is sleep, sleep apnea or sleep To stop, strong level in your diabetes level. Those three things play more in your health Then anything else. If you get on top of those, your chances of Of Having a long fruitful life and being there for your kids and your wife and when To enjoy your retirement or much, much higher intriguing stuff.
Bradley Sutton
Alright, so let's let's give somebody a quick tease. We're gonna talk about your newsletter you just started, why you started it and some of the stuff, but what's one of the either one that's come out already or something that's coming one of the strategies that you can share with our listeners who maybe haven't gotten a chance to read the newsletter? What's something you brought out in one of your newsletters that can write off the bad help sellers listening.
Kevin King
Yeah, I mean I just started April, august 14th. It's twice a week, it's Mondays and Thursdays. When I say newsletter, a lot of people roll their eyes but and cause I'm like, oh yeah, I get a newsletter from Helium Town, I get a newsletter from this software, and every time I get my email I get the company newsletter. Those are not newsletters, those are promotional emails for the most part. Go read our blog, go read this. A newsletter to me is more like a. What I'm doing is more like a magazine in a newsletter format. So it's action packed. Yes, there's a couple of ads and stuff in there from people that are paying for those, but it's action packed, actionable stuff. It's totally free. So, like, we just did a big one that's really resilient. The one that came out on August 28th talked about the A9 algorithm and so you know, Danny McMillan over at Seller Sessions did a big, big like document on it and we analyzed that and like, while that's good, that's not really there's more to it than that. So we took a look at Amazon Science, a big paper that came out and a couple of other things analyzed that and we talked about that and I've gotten so many people saying this is like the most amazing. It was written in a way that we can understand it. Sometimes this stuff gets too technical, plus some of the tips and tools that we put in there. We had a really cool resource for like getting.
Sometimes, when you're trying to create your A plus content, your brand story, your brand pages, you're like what should I do? How should I tell my designer, a graphics person, to do and maybe you saw a couple here their ideas, or you give them some basic idea. But there's guys who listen. There's a guy in George. That's a similar library of 25,000 A plus pages and you can filter by it. I'm in the pet space, I'm in the space, I'm in the. It's got it all keyworded so you can search and get like, wow, that's a cool one, that's a cool one. I want my designer to do something like that or combine these two together. So I wish there were resources like that.
I have something called the Dream 100. As you know, there's a lot of BS not Bradley Sutton's, but BS in this industry that with fake gurus and stuff. So I have every Thursday I come up, I put someone in the Dream 100, and I announced this is a legit person, you should follow them, trust what they say. So that'll get up to 100 people. It's only three right now, but that'll get up to 100 people over time. We do.
I add a little bit of humor to it, so there's like I'll either call somebody out you know that's basically a fake guru or we'll put some crazy listing like hey, can you believe that this product is selling 100 grand a month on X-ray on Amazon? You look at it like holy cow. That's the craziest thing I ever saw. We do some of that, so it's a mix. And then I tell a personal story and each one's called a six second story. So when someone opens the news there, you gotta hook them right away and you gotta get them reading and engaged. And so I do. I personalize it and then I tie it to whatever we're talking about that day.
Bradley Sutton
So I'll personalize and reason. One kind of causes stir about some naked people, some balconies.
Kevin King
Yeah, but I do that. I want to. You know, I always say if you're not pissing someone off, you're not doing a good job. If you try to please everybody, you please nobody, and so I'm feeding my audience and so if that bothers you and it's gonna bother some people that might be religious or you know, depending that's okay. You can go find your information somewhere else. I'm fine with that.
But the overwhelming response to that has been like holy cow, this is the best thing ever. This is don't stop. Can you do this every day? I can't believe it. One guy who sent me a message today is like this is so good I can't even take it all in.
I just got three of my team members start reading this and we're dividing up sections of what to do, and so that's.
There's so much out there. You know we do the helium-10 elite every month and we've been doing that since 2017 at helium-10, which is advanced level stuff, and in that I do seven ninja hacks every month and share those with the audience, and then, once those have become a little bit older, sometimes I share those other places, but the helium-10 elite people always get them first. Right now, I write everything on the current newsletter, but it's going to get to. I'll hire a staff, but I need to get to set the tone, figure out what works, what people like, what they don't like, and then I can feed everything I've written. For if I do this for three months, let's say, I can feed that all into an AI and then say have the AI write in the style of Kevin of the newsletters they don't know the exact style, the exact everything. So these are not AI newsletters, these are. We use AI as a tool, but AI is not writing these.
Bradley Sutton
So if somebody wants to go ahead and sign up, it's free right now. How can they do that?
Kevin King
Well, it's always going to be free. It's billiondollarsellers.com with an S, billiondollarsellers.com with an S. It's growing pretty quickly. So I think hopefully by this time next year there'll be maybe 50 to 100,000 people getting that twice a week and actually reading it that one. So my email list from all the stuff I do is big not as big as helium-10s or something, but so I could just blast this out to everybody.
But I don't want to do that. I want people to actually want it and I have people now already saying I didn't get it, I didn't see it in my spam or what happened to it, and they're getting upset that they didn't get it. That's what I want. Is it to become habit-forming and become something people look forward to? When they see that Kevin King, BDSS, they're like, oh, this is something I got to read. If I can't read it right now, I'll save it until tonight or the plane ride tomorrow or whatever. That's where I want it to be.
So it doesn't have to be. It's not a blast on my whole email list. You've got to double opt in. You can't just sign up and get it. You actually sign up and you got to click something else to say you really want to sign up and then you're in and that's on purpose and it keeps the open rates high, the engagement high, it's good for the advertisers that come into it, that support it with a little bit of advertising, and it's just good for everybody. It's people that want it.
Bradley Sutton
All right. So guys, make sure to sign up. It's one of the. I personally don't even read newsletters. This is like the first one. I actually just sit there and read and, just like Kevin said, sometimes he starts with a funny story, but it works. It like hooks you up and like laughing, sitting there, laughing like all right, I want to read more. I'm hooked in and from start to finish. It's long, it's like you're doing a lot of scrolling. Sometimes people say, oh, when you write an email, you don't want them to scroll, and they're like I got no problem scrolling, but it's written short.
Kevin King
It's written in a format so that you can skim it, but you'll see that it's using every trick in the book. There's no paragraphs more than two or three sentences. There's no. It's not long, and usually when I write it I have to go back and cut half of what I've written wrote out and it's straight into the point and we use a sense of humor. It's not just that opening story, but it's like we did something about in a recent one. So there's no such thing as the A10 algorithm. It's always the A9. There is no such thing, and the A9 of all is just like you did during puberty, but it's still named the A9. So we'll do stuff like that. It's not necessarily business-like or corporate-like, but screw that, put a personality to it and people love that and then as a reading they have a little smile or like I get it, or that's relatable. It doesn't sound like corporate speak or boring stuff. That's all on purpose.
Bradley Sutton
All right. Now you referenced Elite and how you saved the best hacks for there. Do you have any? Just for a sample, you can give some of the cool one or two of the cool hacks that you've given out on your seven ninja hacks that you do monthly in the Elite group.
Kevin King
Yeah, sure, what's a good reason? We do this every single month. We talk about some of its tools, like CASPA AI, which is a really cool tool where you can shoot your product on your iPhone, just basic picture, upload it and then put it into any scene you want. So you're like, hey, I want my water bottle to be held by an Asian guy standing in the gym with some barbells behind him and he's holding it facing the logo out. It'll make a cool picture instantly using AI with that which you could use in your Amazon post or you could use in your maybe in your listing. You could use a lot of places. So we'll do cool tools like that. Or Melio payments, where you can use credit cards to actually finance your purchase, orders and stuff. We do things like.
A recent one was about how to Get that there's a newer version of this item available. You know we covered that there's a new version of this item available. Like people like see that, how do I get my? You know if I you got a calendar or you got you just updated your product, how can you Link that to the old inventory so that people see there's a newer version available? We showed people how to do that. We showed people how to do the back-end stuff before anybody knew how to do the back-end and get a complete dump of your competitors Listings like all their attributes and everything before. That was really public information. Well, I was like a couple years before yeah, main stream.
Yeah, we stuff like how to use a Hexa. Hexa, it's a beta program most people don't know about to create 360 degree pictures for Amazon listing. They'll do it for you for free and I think that's really really, really, really cool. We've done stuff like how to make money fall from the sky on your landing pages. You know you, someone hits on one your landing pages or one of your blog sites and they don't let's say they don't sign up. But you want to know who they are. There's tools out there that will actually Use IP and geo location to actually figure out, in about 50 to 60% of cases, who these people are, based on public data In the United States, Europe, you might have a few more issues with privacy, but yes, we don't care about privacy.
So, unless it's medical, and so we, we can figure out that. I just went to Bradley's blog talking about the honeymoon and he's a no, I went there. You know, as he got a hit or his metrics, that there's a visitor session, but he doesn't know who they are. If he puts this little bit of code, then we can we put, we can figure out that. Oh, this was Kevin King because he was using this IP address of this computer and there's reverse matching. That knows that, oh, Kevin King went to this gaming side or went to somewhere else in the past 10 years From that same place. It must be Kevin King. Let's match it up again to this other database. So his, his email address is blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Puts that into a database. Then you can either email those people which I don't always recommend if you're gonna do that, you should use something like zero bounce to make sure the emails are valid or you can put them into custom audiences if you're running Facebook ads or any kinds things like that and you can retarget these people.
You ever wonder how sometimes you went to a site and You're all of a sudden now I'm seeing this stuff all over my feed. Some of that's retargeting pixels, which is more private. But if you're wondering, how do they get me onto an email list? Or how did they get me from this this not a meta property into an X or Twitter property? Those two aren't the same company not sharing the same pixel. How do they do that? And this is some of the ways they're doing it. We also talked about you know, Howard. You've had Howard on the how tie on the on the podcast and he's got a little group called elites I'll forget the name of elites seller society or something like that and he's had every Thursday he has someone come on and talk about stuff and one of the things that just recently he had David, who's spoken at the billion dollar sauce on. You remember David from a, the ghost story.
Bradley Sutton
Back in 2019 he came on and he did some translating for him. One year at the billion dollars.
Kevin King
He came on and talked about you know what, what? How are things changing with the Chinese sellers? You know, Howard, he's like you know, ai is level the playing field as far as creating listings and stuff now for everybody. And If you someone's like a word that, how are they ranking? How are they getting reviews? What are they doing? He's like the number one way that Chinese sellers are getting Ranking. Right now they're using postcards, postcards through the mail and he's like, thanks to Kevin King, I'm like what he's like? Oh yeah, I did talk about that in 2019 when I did me and Brandon young went over there and spoke to a huge group in Shenzhen. Well, they took that and now he said that's the number one way that they're getting Review, ranking products and getting reviews. And and so I was like you know what? I think I actually did that In the US too. It wasn't. I just didn't give that to the Chinese sellers.
And so I look back and I share that to the helium-ten elite. First way back, and I don't remember exact time, in 2018, some point, I did a presentation on postcards and it was cutting edge. Virtually nobody did it, everybody, you know. They looked at like, yeah, Kevin, that's like I I never heard of. I don't even check my mailbox. I don't know. I'm a millennial Nah who reads the mail like dude, you're missing it. And so nobody in the hardly anybody in the US did it, but the Chinese like, oh, this, this looks good. They did it and look what it's doing for him four years later. So that's the kind of stuff we do in helium-ten elite.
If you freakin pay attention and implement Not only what I'm teaching but what we bring on Really good guests. You know I look for diversity, from PPC people to shipping people to you name it. You know sometimes you get a speaker. That's yeah, okay, but we get some really good people as three speakers, plus myself, on Every single one of the helium-ten elite, that's. You know, there's a lot of groups out there that that have trainings, but I think this might be the longest last, the oldest one period. It's continuous. There's others that have started and come and gone, but that and but I think since we started February at 2017, when it's called Illuminati, changed the name in 2019 to helium-ten elite, but it's been continuous, never missed a month since February 2017. So that's six and a half years. I don't know if there's any other Group. That has lasted that long at this point and guys.
Bradley Sutton
You know I told people this before. This is One of the secrets not the main secret to my success is Before I ever sold on Amazon, you know, before I even became a consultant. You know people thought I was crazy because it's mulling. I mean, like seven, eight, nine figure sellers going and paying 400 bucks to get in this Illuminati mastermind. I, I could see the value in it. I saw a webinar for something first of you and Manny, you know, way before I worked at helium-ten Year, more than a year probably before and and I actually joined Illuminati Just as a regular person who wasn't even selling yet and within like three, four months I had enough knowledge just from the Illuminati stuff and you know a couple other. You know courses I was taking, but mainly from the Illuminati, where I became like a pretty top-level consultant and and was, you know, launched my Amazon consulting career. You know which was my career before helium-ten, without even selling on Amazon, just because I was able to ramp up my knowledge super fast by being part of that Illuminati mastermind.
Kevin King
So and it's not just the guys exactly training- that's what we had, but more recently Helium 10’s added a weekly call with all the people that want to participate. So I do one a month. I jump on once a month and then the other three weeks Bradley and Carrie and Shivali host them and we'll have anywhere from 20 to 40 50 people in there that are members of helium-10 elite. There's a lot more members in that, but you know some people are busy and for a couple hours Typically an hour or two hours everybody's on there on a zoom call, all on the screen. There's no agenda, no presentations Like what do you got a problem with?
Oh, you know Amazon's blocking me from shipping this and anybody else ever dealt with this. And usually there's someone else like, oh, yeah, I've a. You know, maybe we me or Bradley or somebody knows the answer begin help them. But usually there's somebody else like, oh, have you ever tried this? Or this happened to me two years ago and I did this and you have this interactive conversation that you're not gonna get in a Facebook group. You're not gonna get anywhere else other than maybe an in-person event, which there's four of those a year to for helium-10 elite. Did you get to come to for free? That are that value right there. Sometimes I learned stuff in there, you know, I didn't know from somebody else that right there, connecting with other high-level sellers and being able to share is as valuable as the presentations, if not even more valuable in some cases, and I'm so. There's things like that, that that you're not gonna get anywhere else.
Bradley Sutton
Just last week I don't know if it was on your call or on one of the regular weekly one that you're not on there, it was before you. Either way was before you came on the call there was Elizabeth, who's an elite, elite member, and she was talking about how she's done like something like a two million dollars on TikTok shop Some crazy, some crazy number like that and so she was just like people were dazzled with what she was saying Just ran, you know, just like just randomly got on there. She was just one of their participants and was talking about that. Now we're actually gonna do a train. She's gonna do a training in October in the elite in-person workshop in New York where she's gonna show people I'll kind of like reverse engineer how she was able to get to this level of success that she's had on on TikTok shop, which is definitely a hot topic.
Kevin King
So that's hot, that's. That's big right now. That's big. If you're not paying attention to that, that's big. You know I had Perry Belcher.
This will be coming out on the AM PM podcast in October. So be sure, but Perry Belcher if you don't know who he is, he's one of the top marketers in the space right now. He started digital marketer. Yeah, the big expo with 7,000 people I mean sorry, traffic and conversion is. He was one of the founders of that. He started digital marketer. He's really big in the marketing space and old-school marketing guy.
One of the things he actually said on that podcast, among a bunch of other cool stuff, is that he's like if you're going from Amazon to Shopify, it's a mistake. You should not be doing anything on Shopify. He said we're finding far better success by setting up funnels with click funnels or high level or one of the other, and doing single product drives it. The conversions are way higher, the Sales are way higher than driving someone to a Shopify site where it's there's too many confusing things that can distract them and he's like that's where these Amazon sellers because I asked him for one of the mistakes people are making said that's one of the mistakes a lot of sellers. Amazon sellers are making right now, as they should be focused more on driving stuff to single products with upsells Rather than driving to a Shopify store.
Bradley Sutton
Here's all my 20 things my, my company sells, but yeah, yeah, I mean the tick-tock shop that there's, just whatever is cutting edge. You know we talk about an elite, so so it's actually the longest in history and that you know. Kevin just said it started in in 2017. So it's we're talking over six years, almost seven years. It's been closed for the longest time in history. I think the last time it was open was in March of this year I'm not sure by the time you guys are listening to this episode of its open, but sometime in in September, October, we're gonna open it up for a couple weeks or so. So this is the time to sign up. Guys write this down h10.me forward slash elite. H10.me forward slash elite. And even if it's not open right now, there's a button on there where you can join the waiting list so you can make sure that when it does open for the short window that it does, that, you guys can get in.
But but you know the benefits are this is like the only way to really talk to Kevin. You know people Want to ask kept. You know want to hire Kevin as a consultant all the time. Kevin doesn't have the the bandwidth do that, but once a month he'll go on there and just live, you know, just in a regular zoom call. You can ask him anything you want. You can ask other people anything you want in the Facebook group.
Or we have two weekly zoom calls now one at In the afternoon on Friday us time and then one that I actually hop on at midnight because it's 8 am UK time Every Friday and and we hit the, we hit the Europe. You know, all the European sellers and people in Asia, you know, can hop on a call and network with each other. We have four quarterly workshops. The next one's coming up in October, the fourth one of the year. We had one in, you know, during Amazon accelerate, September 11th, and now October, right during unboxed, we're gonna have one where we're gonna be talking about, like I said, tick tock shop, and also we're gonna have a PPC Expert and there's a whole bunch of other Advances of being on the elite program. So if you guys are interested to add this to your helium tenant count again, go to h10.me forward slash elite and Either sign up right there if it's open, take advantage or if it's closed, just just join the waiting list so you can hook up with Kevin that way.
Kevin King
There's some software tools to that. They get extra tools or extra capacity or something right.
Bradley Sutton
Yeah, elite members usually get access to tools like way before, like we just launched Some historical Cerebro. Elite members have had that for like a year and a half, you know, but now barely diamond members are getting it. Like a year and a half Later there's some tools like our elite analytics so that Kevin actually developed himself he gave the the kind of blueprint for it. That's still only elite members can can access that diamond members don't have access. Then that's been around for like two years. So lots of advantages, including networking and training that elite has.
You know, back in the day, like I said, when I was an elite Illuminati member, it was only the. You know there's a I think there was a Facebook group Maybe at that time or something, but it was mainly just one of those training calls a month and that was enough value For me and now it's just like all you know tons, tons of other value. So guys, make sure to check it out. Another thing you know I'm wearing my my OG Billion Dollar Seller Summit shirt today from the very first one, from the very first one and the next one time and place In 2024 for the next billion dollars.
Kevin King
There's actually two. Come with the next Billion Dollar Seller Summit, May 18th to the 23rd in Kauai, Hawaii, which is gonna be amazing, and then right after that one from the 23rd to the 26th, I have a second event called level up, where we're? So the first, the billion dollar seller summits, mostly for Amazon sellers and all the traditional things that you're You're used to like you are Bradley from a billionaire, saw something, the level up, or switching resorts, take it, everybody that's staying, that chooses to stay, and they're going to the Waimea Canyon, which is the Grand Canyon of Hawaii. It's like a little Grand Canyon that you in Hawaii that then we're taking them on the Nepali Coast on a dinner cruise. The pop for the poly coast is where these mountains, these beautiful mountains, come right up to the edge of the water. It's just stunning Dolphins jumping everywhere, and so that's gonna be cool. And then we're switching to Hanalei Bay, to the one the chain, the ones 300 million dollar resort that just had a overhaul and it's like 14, $1500 a night to stay there, but we got a rate that's like way less than half of that For people coming to the event. And then we're doing it's called level up, so it's six speakers, only ones Amazon, the other five, or you know, like Perry Belcher just said, he's probably gonna speak at it, jason Flatlin is someone that's maybe speak at us, a couple other Molly Mahoney, it's probably gonna speak at it, and some some other, and then we're mixing that in with Some mind and body stuff, like we talked about earlier, because that's important for our engineers. So there's gonna be cryo therapy, there's gonna be a sound therapy lab where you listen to the bowls and it helps reset your mind. We're doing hot yoga, a bonfire on the beach, and so it's. It's gonna be pretty cool.
We're doing a race. You know we did that race here in Austin. You were in that's that scavenger hunt we did a couple years ago here in Austin. People love that. So Probably problem one of the problems when you go to an event you don't get to see the place. You're like you see the hotel and maybe you see a bar or something with a restaurant. So we're doing we've got 25 Avis rental cars thing or 30 Avis rental cars all lined up and you're gonna broken the teams of four and you're gonna do an amazing race across the islands one day. So you're gonna see, then you're gonna be able to see the entire islands and experience the island. Quiet is a place where you're not gonna want to be sleeping aping in the back. You know you're gonna be like looking out the window after every turn going Holy Callis is beautiful. I've never seen something so beautiful my life. It's a drastic Park Island and so you're gonna, but you're gonna be able to see some cool stuff all in some back places that you wouldn't know they're not on the tours map. We're gonna take you to this one cool beach as part of the race. You're like, holy cow, I'm coming back here because nobody's here, nobody knows about this place. It's like a secret little beach. So that's. That's gonna be cool too.
If it's your third or more trip, you're gonna get like a drastic park experience in a helicopter ride Over the island and stuff. So, like Bradley, if you're out there, you get. You get that for free, as, since you're a regular, since you've been to three, this is your third or more we're gonna take a helicopter around the island as a tour is amazing fly up to the inside. This 10,000 foot waterfall and a helicopter in land and this, this drastic park kind of vehicles gonna pick you up and take you through this Amazing like plantation kind of thing and to a VIP dinner that night. It's gonna be really, really cool. So, yeah, that's a billion dollar seller summit calm.
If you want information on that, then in October I'm doing the billion dollar exit summit so the billion dollar exit summer, doing this with Scott Deets so somebody may know he's got the, the exit ticket or whatever it's called him and he them to Probably the top guy and helping people exit. He helped manning Guillermo exit Helium 10 help who's involved in that Done over a half a billion dollars worth of exits for Amazon sellers. So and you may be like, yeah, but right now I'm not thinking about exiting, but you, you might be in a year or two years and now's the time to actually start working on it now To maximize and add a couple extra million dollars to your exit. By working now, rather than waking up one day and say I want to exit, I want to be out of here in three months, you're gonna be shooting yourself in the foot. So we're doing a.
It's very small 25 to 30 people in Austin, October 10th to the 13th called the Billion Dollar Exit Summit and it's hands-on. So he's bringing his whole team, so it's want some a lot of one-on-one stuff. It's not a bunch of presentations from all these random people. You're gonna walk out there with a plan like, okay, this is what I need to do specific to your business. So that's, that's happening in October.
Bradley Sutton
Awesome, awesome, alright. So, guys, billiondollarsellersummit.com to get more information on it. Alright, like always, let's go ahead and close this out with your 30 or 60 second tip that you can leave for the sellers out there, do you haven't checked out Levonta.
Kevin King
That would be a really good tip. I leave a NTA, I think calm, I think is the is the URL. But especially for the fourth quarter coming up. You know, offside Amazon traffic is huge for ranking. You know you get the 10% referral bonus if you're brand registered and it just helps you in your rank Even if they don't buy. If you're sending traffic from outside social media or outside media, blogs, whatever, even if they don't buy, it helps you on your rank.
But these guys you know that's, but it's kind of a pain in the ass to go set all that stuff up. You got to find people on TikTok or you got to find blogs or you got to find these affiliates and like coordinate everything one-on-one, one by one, by one. These guys have got over a thousand of the top affiliates, from TikTok people to people who are in the affiliate business. That's what they do to blogs like USA Today. USA Today will do a holiday gift guide for pet products this year. If you have a pet product, you want to be in that gift guide in USA Today with two million people reading it online. You, these guys, can facilitate that in the way. It's seamless, the way it works is you just connect your Amazon account to their system and it automatically imports all your products.
Once your products are in there, you can go in and cherry pick them like I only want to promote these three. I'm willing to give a 20% commission for you know this dog bowl and then that goes into their database, these thousand affiliates. When they're writing their stories and looking for things they can search that database. Oh, I want, I want to promote this dog. Well, he's given 20% Off. They just automatically pick up the code, the, everything. It's all done for them. They put it into their blog or their, their post or whatever, and it's all automated or you can go in there.
I think they let you do 50 a day. You can reach out to people and they're growing really, really fast and they just had people on prime day the last, the July prime day. Do over a million dollars just off of outside traffic, off of this program on prime day, and just imagine what that does to your listing on Amazon and the internal Amazon stuff, how that's gonna get that file flywheel going. So that's that would probably be a tip of there under the radar. And you know a mission is here. They don't give me a kickback or anything for this, but that's a tool that I think any Amazon serious Amazon seller is a fool to not use. I'm an absolute fool to not actually take a look at that, especially for this fourth quarter, and get a strong competitive edge Over your competition get more like that.
Bradley Sutton
Guys in Helium 10 Elite. h10.me/elite. Kevin, thank you so much for joining us. I know you're traveling a lot more than you were in the previous years. I'll probably hopefully see you at one of these upcoming events and then, for sure, at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit next year. So Keep on. By the time I see you next time, you know I might not even recognize you're losing so much. Wait, hopefully you won't recognize me, because I need to. I need to get on the path.
Kevin King
Yeah, it's slow but by. Yeah. If we go along in a period of time, you know I've lost a bunch.
Bradley Sutton
I'm not trying to do it quick. All right, we'll see it. We'll see you next time you.
Ever wondered what it takes to breathe new life into a product whose sales have hit rock bottom? Well, we're about to pull back the curtain on the process. Kickstarting the journey to redemption, we delve into the realm of listing optimization, cross-examining ASINs, and pinpointing top keywords for single or group listings. In this highly practical session, we use our Project X egg rack product as a case study to illustrate the steps to revitalizing sales, from initial setup to shifts in market trends.
Then, we navigate the rough seas of competition research, undertaking a meticulous analysis of competitors' pricing, product dimensions, FBA fees, and reviews. We reveal how powerful tools like Helium 10’s Market Tracker can unlock a comprehensive understanding of the market share held by various competitors. Wrapping up this segment, we ponder the implications of our competitors' profitability on our pricing strategies, equipping you with the knowledge to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the curve.
Lastly, we dissect sales and keyword performance, shedding light on the art of effectively monitoring them. Discover how Helium 10's Keyword Tracker, Cerebro, and Adtomic can unravel the mystery behind your listing losing rank and sales. We also discuss how subtle tweaks in prices and keyword targeting can help reclaim your competitive edge. Rounding up, we explore the process of competitor analysis on Amazon, offering a wealth of insights on identifying keywords your competitors are ranking for, and assessing your own keyword performance. This is a must-listen for anyone keen to understand when to pull the plug on an unprofitable product and how to give it a fighting chance at survival. Tune in to gain a wealth of knowledge and strategies that could just save your product from the brink of extinction.
In episode 490 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:
- 01:13 - Project X Is Back?!
- 03:42 - Revitalizing Amazon Sales With Project X
- 06:31 - Analyzing Competitor Pricing and Profitability
- 07:29 - How To Leverage Helium 10’s Market Tracker Tool
- 16:01 - Amazon’s Test On Hiding The Bullet Points
- 16:08 - Results After Emma Helped Improve Our Listings
- 18:13 - Analyzing Sales and Keyword Performance
- 24:27 - Analyzing Keyword Rankings and Sales
- 26:54 - The Power Of The Cerebro “Time Machine”
- 30:48 - Competitor Analysis Process in Amazon
- 39:22 - Revitalizing Old Products & Introducing New Projects
Bradley Sutton:
Today's episode marks the return of one of our most popular series ever Project X. We're going to talk about the steps that any Amazon seller should take If they have a product that has tanked in sales. Can we revitalize it? How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. Do you want to see how your listing or maybe competitor's listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you want to compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other? Maybe you want to see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings? You can do that and more with the Helium 10 tool Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. In this episode we are bringing back Project X. Maybe once a month or every other month I'm going to start doing some Project X follow-up episodes. There's a lot coming. We actually started recording season two last year and we got some great footage and some products are actually coming into stock. That was from those recordings. We're going to follow up on some of the original Project X products, if you'd like. What in the world is this Project X that Bradley's talking about here?
Bradley Sutton:
A few years ago, we did this case study. It was mainly on YouTube and you can go back and watch it, but it was all about trying to take some products from zero to hero. We did this reality TV show, vibe program, where we showed you every step of the way how we were able to find products, get them launched, optimize them and then scale them up in the feature. Ever since that show maybe three years ago, four years ago now we did that We've been maintaining those products, not doing that great of a job because we're not full-time Amazon sellers here. I try and run this in my spare time. That's part of what we're going to be talking about today is I've been neglecting some of these products and sales have gone way down. That's what we're going to be talking about today is do you have a product that maybe you've neglected, maybe you haven't been neglecting it, but sales are way down? It's a product that's one or two years old and you're just not doing as well as you did in the past. What are the steps that you can try to take in order to revitalize it or in order to try and get those sales back up and see if you can salvage all the time and effort that you put in a product? Now, what we're going to do today, guys, I'm doing 100% live. I'm not going to prepare this or try to pre-do some research here. I'm going to air this episode right after I film it, a few days after I film it. We're not even going to have time to see the effects. It's going to take maybe a month or two to see, or I did the things that we do actually have an effect. I started noticing this product going down a few months ago. We've already done a little bit of work. We've actually talked about it on this show, where we had Emma from Marketing by Emma come in and revitalize a little bit some of the images and also some of the copy. Now it's like, hey, let's see how that did and what more needs to be done.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me give you some background first on this product. This product wasn't one of the original Project X products. This is something we were doing when we expanded the brand, we made this brand called Gui’s Chicken Coop and then it was an original in Egg tray. We still have that product. But then we're like, hey, along those same lines, we found that there were these stackable egg racks that were trending on Etsy and Pinterest. The same way, we found the original Project X products. We're like, hey, let's be the first person to make these.
Bradley Sutton:
On Amazon, which we were and we were just dominating, we had some really, really great sales. Let's actually go in and take a look at some of the sales here I am on our Insights dashboard and I knew that even I put here last year and it was one of the top five products. You could see that towards the end of last year we were doing well. We were doing, I mean, for Project X. It was doing about $5,000, $6,000 a month. Profit was decent. Let's take a look at what the profit was towards last year Over $6,000 worth of profit. So it was decent. It actually overtook some of the original Project X in sales.
Bradley Sutton:
But let me show you what happened since the end of last year. We started off with a bang, but then some competitors started coming to the marketplace. We were the first ones and they're like hey look, how good these Project X guys are doing, we're going to try and undercut them a little bit. Let me show you what happened to our sales because of that. All right, I'm going to go ahead and show you this year's worth of sales. You can see, at the beginning of the year we were still doing about $6,500 a month, but then sales just took a nosedive. It halved in March down to $3,000. April it was only $1,000, and then it's been hovering between like $1,000 and $2,000. First of all, you got to understand what happened. Now. Unfortunately, I wasn't running Market Tracker on this the whole time. Otherwise I could show you guys exactly when people started getting into the market. Maybe you're like me and you weren't running Market Tracker the way you should have. I am now and I'm going to show you guys what I can see in the last couple of months on Market Tracker. But let's go ahead and go to Amazon and take a look at what the competition has been doing. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and enter a stackable egg rack here on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's just take a look at a couple of these big players. Some of them have been around for a while, but this guy here, this Kinlin, has been just crushing. Now, first of all, take a look at this price point $20.95. Let me tell you I was actually selling this product for $38. We were the only ones and we couldn't even keep them on the shelves Right off the bat.
Bradley Sutton:
You can see an issue here $20.95. Well, let's just take a look at the Helium 10 BSR chart here to see has he been doing this price the whole time? First of all, let's take a look at when he started getting serious. You guys notice anything here. It was right exactly in March of this year. You can totally tell that by looking at this BSR chart, where it looks like he maybe was experimenting with some units here and there, but he really wasn't selling that consistently. Then all of a sudden, come March of this year, he just starts going bonkers. His price point has actually always been looks like $20.95. He stayed pretty consistent on his price, but literally almost half the price of our product. That's one of the issues right there. His sales are like you know maybe five, six, x what our sales are. So it wasn't just him, though there's other people who have jumped in the market.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me actually show you I actually set up market tracker a couple of months ago. This is not market tracker 360 that you have to pay a lot of money for, that's for like huge, like five, $10 million brands and agencies, but the regular market tracker that all you helium 10 users have. I created the market to kind of like track who are the players, who are my direct competitors for the stackable egg rack market? And, as you can see here, I picked about 17. Now, keep in mind, for almost a year we were the only sellers of this product. Like like nobody had anything that was like ours, where you can just buy these extra levels of this egg rack and then stack them up. Now there's 17 players that have come in and take a look at a lot of their price points $20, $30, $22. Here's one for 38, but it has four racks, all right, mine only has two, um $27. Uh, here's another one that's like $15, $28. So everybody's coming in at this cheap price point.
Bradley Sutton:
Uh, you can take a look at my market share. My market share used to be a hundred percent, right, my market share used to be a hundred percent. Now it is 11.2%. That product that came in in March, is crushing it. They have 50% of the market right now, and so that's obviously a problem, right Like that's why my sales have gone down. So the question is what can I do about it? Can I just lower my price? And can you guys lower your price almost by half and still be profitable? Probably not.
Bradley Sutton:
I actually did some research and that was one of the first things. I look at my dude like like I might have to discontinue this product. Let me look at what the numbers are. So actually, let me take you through what I did. Uh, I went and checked my product price. I forgot I think I was paying too much for this, but you know I was the only seller. I was making a ridiculous profit. It was like probably like more than 30, 35% or so, and so I didn't. I didn't care really what price I was paying. So I was just curious. I was like how in the world can this product sell so cheap?
Bradley Sutton:
So I first looked at their at their page. I was like, okay, are, are, is their dimensions a little bit different? Let me actually go ahead and open up my product in another window here. Okay, here we go. I've got my product open. So now you guys are going to kind of see the comparison.
Bradley Sutton:
So the first thing I was just wondering was what's going on with, like, their FBA fee? Now, look at this. Their FBA fee is only $8.83. I'm like what in the world? Like how is that possible? All right. So I look at the size of their package and it's 14 by six and a half by two. All right, now compare that to mine. I've got $12.43 FBA fee, okay, and my product size is 15, seven by four. So, right off the bat, it's like how in the world can they do this product in half of the width of my product? Because I'm like, wait a minute, you know it's the same exact product, right? So I actually ordered one of theirs. You can actually see it here in my Amazon window when I go to their page and says, hey, you purchased this, you know, back in July and it's interesting. Their product first of all. They make it like almost like an IKEA package. You actually have to put this together. It's in pieces Now to me.
Bradley Sutton:
I would have thought they would got some bad reviews for this because they don't say that in the listing. You know my product. It already comes all assembled. You're good to go. Go ahead and put your Huebles in there, your eggs, right? But no, they don't have any bad reviews.
Bradley Sutton:
But, like me, if I bought that, I literally would have left a bad review even if they weren't my competitor because I'm like I think I'm not time for this. I buy from Amazon for convenience and now all of a sudden I have this two layer egg rack that literally comes in one, two, three, four, five, six pieces and I got to like screw it together and do like Lego and stuff and try and figure out how it works. I'm like, no, I didn't get time for this. So, just, it was just shocking to me. How can people not complain? I guess maybe because the price is so low or something. But I was like, okay, well, there's one thing I'm not going to do, right, so if they're saving a couple or four bucks on their, on their FBA fee, so I'm like there's an advantage that they have right off the bat.
Bradley Sutton:
But even besides that, what I did was I was like, well, what kind of profitability might they be having? So I actually ran the profitability calculator and then if they, if this is their price, and let's say they're doing, you know, they're doing some um PPC, that maybe they have 10% tacos on there. So if they're doing 20% profit even with this lower uh you know shipping price that Amazon is charging them, that means that their product manufacturing costs is got to be like around $4. And mine is like seven or eight or something. Uh, something like that was what mine was.
Bradley Sutton:
And so then I went into, you know to, to my listing. I'm like, well, this, this kind of sucks, how can I, how can I compete? Now, remember before I was like at 38, 97, and I think my manufacturing cost was like, let's just say it's $8, right? And then if I had 10% tacos, all right, uh, in order, you know I was doing. Third, like I said, I was doing like about 30% profit here.
Bradley Sutton:
But then I'm like okay, what if I were to have to lower my price like $21? Well, what's going to happen? Look at this my profit is negative, 2.85. So you know I wouldn't have lowered the. You know I don't like race to the bottom anyways, but rather about my. Okay, obviously I'm not going to lower my price. But what if I lower my price to like $30, or let's just say 33. If I'm at $33, what kind of profit? Can I make 20%? Maybe it's okay, you know.
Bradley Sutton:
So I actually did that. I lowered the price temporarily just a little bit ago to $33. But knowing that, hey, I've got to go to my factory because $30 is $33 probably isn't going to cut it. I need to get a discount. So if I can go to my factory and lower my manufacturing costs from like, let's just say, $8 to $30, let's go with $6, for example, now, all of a sudden, if I lower my price to like $28 or $29, right, I can still maintain that 20% margin. So I might even try and get a little bit more aggressive on this and actually get a little bit aggressive on the box size to see what's going on.
Bradley Sutton:
So here's the first part. You know, without even worrying about, you know, conversion rate or how's my listing, optimization or what keywords I'm on, I'm looking at just like the kind of logistics of everything, right, so here's their. I bought their product, here's their box. Now I see what they're doing. You know, let me see what I can do. Now I'm considering a little bit, like, is there a way to still do this kind of stackable thing that they're doing without screws and without so many pieces. You know I'm still considering it, but at least I know that if I want to lower my price to under $30, it's still doable. But I've got to, you know, take down my costs by a couple of dollars. But in the meantime, I just started doing experiments. I was like, let me just lower the price and so you can see. If you look at this product right now on Amazon, I put it down to $33.97 and because it's the lowest price in 30 days I had this nice big red sticker that comes up in the search results and it actually comes up right here on the page. So I'm like, who knows, maybe that will, maybe that will help me out. You know, just a little bit.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so, as I said, I, ready a couple of months ago, started trying to say, hey, we need to get Emma in here, and let's do some some of the images a little bit different and let's see how it, how it performs. So she came in, she, she gave like you know new title. She had Chevali do some new images here. So Shivali actually took a lot of these images by herself and so we kind of revamped what we were doing here with these images. I actually told Shivali, hey, I need you to change this image. But she didn't do it. I'm gonna have to remind her. Now I'm looking at this. I didn't like this last image because it needs to not get multiple sets to have all the storage like it needs to be. Hey, get more top racks in order to get all the storage you want. So I got to get what Shivali to change that.
Bradley Sutton:
But anyways, Emma went in and did a lot of updating. By the way, I hate this test that amazon is doing right now where they Hide the bullet points. All right, because, like, for example, when I saw that that competitor had Um, you had to like assemble it in order to Make it. I made that my first bullet point. I said no assembly was required, unlike the others. You see out there, this comes ready to use out of the box no screws, no multiple pieces. But of course, after I did that, amazon is like doing this experiment for the last month or so where they're hiding the bullet points, so annoying.
Bradley Sutton:
Anyways, as you can see here, Emma put in some A plus content. We never had a plus content, uh, in the past, and so first thing I wanted to see was wait. First of all, when did I change this Um, and then how were the results? As far as like conversion rate at the very least? So I had forgot when I changed it. So, um, what?
Bradley Sutton:
Let's go ahead and take a look here on my insights dashboard. When you do things to your listing It'll you'll get an alert, but then also I can put my own notes. So I'm pretty sure it was May. Let me just put my mouse over here. All right, view all, and sure enough, all right. Here we go.
Bradley Sutton:
Um, I put an updated Listing and a plus content looks like May 16th. So I put a note here, I uploaded the listing and and did a plus content at that time. All right, all right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to check what the Conversion rate was like, kind of like the few weeks, or actually a couple months leading up to that. A plus content and listing content change and let's just see how it was after.
Bradley Sutton:
So let's go ahead and hop back into the insights dashboard. As you can see here, I've got for one April 1 to May 15, and of course, you can do this in your Seller central as well, but obviously just easier, do it here in your insights dashboard. You don't have to go into Seller Central or try and Find where it's at. Uh, here's the egg rack, and then I'm here under listing so I can see here All right, we've got a conversion rate of 3%. Okay, unit session percentage of 4%, right. So let's go ahead and take a look at what it was After the change. Let's go ahead and go from like may 18th To the end of june and we're going to look at the same number, looking for the conversion rate for Egg rack, and look at this Wow, 8% almost, and 6% conversion rate. All right, so definite increase. So you, you could see like, hey, maybe the sales would have even been worse if we didn't make that change. We were able to to not quite double, but you know pretty, pretty nicely increase our unit session percentage and conversion rate.
Bradley Sutton:
So now, what else can we do? Because it's probably Not just about the price. Price is probably the big thing. What you want to do, guys, if you have a listing that has lost a lot of sales, is you want to see like, have you lost, you know, keyword rank? So let me first let's go outside of helium 10 and let's hop in a search query performance and see if we can go ahead and do some Diagnostics there. All right, so I just started search query performance here. I'm going to look at ASIN view. All right, let me go ahead and look at my double rack. Here it is.
Bradley Sutton:
And let's go ahead and look at one of the months where we were just kind of crushing it, like like we were doing really well In January of this year, right? So let's take a look at some of the top keywords here and then let's go ahead and open up in another tab this same report and let's take a look, let's see if there's any information for August. You know, August we had probably like only One-third the number of sales. So let's go ahead and compare. Looks like they don't have information for August yet. Uh, here in search query performance. So let's go ahead and look at july. All right, let's compare.
Bradley Sutton:
So in January, uh, the number one keyword for us was egg holder countertop. We got eight sales from it. You know, 48 cart ads. Wow, 48 cart ads. So there's probably even more sales. That happened after there for the egg holder countertop. All right, let's go switch over here to july. An egg holder countertop brought us Zero sales, wow, okay. So where, where in the funnel, did we leave? So this is the beauty of search query performance in In January there was 25,000 searches and we had 13,000 impressions.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, all right, let's go ahead and take a look. All right, July 13,000 search volume, so a lot less search volume, first of all, all right, 25,000 versus 13,000, okay, so search volume, you know, just overall, might be down, but then the impressions was 3,000, all right. So you guys remember we had a Search Query Performance team on this call. What does that mean? If there was 13,000 searches and I only had 3,000 impressions? It means that my organic and sponsored rank most of the time was in the top of the page. So at this point, at this point, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to Helium 10 and this time I'm gonna open up Keyword Tracker and let's just see what's going on with my keyword ranks for Egg Holder Countertop. All right, so let's go ahead and do that together. All right, so I got Keyword Tracker open. I was tracking all items and the variation here is the Egg Holder Countertop.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's go ahead and look at the history of Egg Holder Countertop for the organic rank and specifically, I wanna take a look at what was going on in most of January, all right. So you could see here in January I was towards the top of the page a lot of time, like in the top 15 results. Look at that Top 15 results almost across the board for organic. Let's take a look at what my sponsor was. Was I even advertising for this keyword at that time? Okay, now I'm looking at sponsored and what. This is kind of weird. So it looks like I've never advertised for this keyword. So that's kind of strange. So, like I definitely wanna check my Adtomic. But that's interesting. That means most of my.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's go ahead and look back at Search Query Performance. Okay, it makes sense. My search volume was 25,000. I only had 13,000 impressions. That was 100% organic. So that right there is like a miss. I don't know what was going on or why I wasn't advertising against my number one keyword. So there's potential right there, where I have a history of converting for this keyword. Maybe I need to start go ahead and put that in my sponsor as a matter of fact. I'm gonna go ahead and do that right now. All right, so here I am in Adtomic. Let's go ahead and open up one of my performance campaigns. That means that's what I put my exact manual. I'm just gonna go ahead and add this as a target. Here we go, let's go ahead and add target and let's enter a new keyword, exact match, and we'll call this egg holder counter top. And there we go. All right, there we go. So we just made one potential move. Again, now it's from search crew performance. So the rest of what I would need to do is I need to go through and take a look at these other keywords that I was getting sales from, like.
Bradley Sutton:
Here's the second one, just an egg holder. I was able to get three orders from back in January. Here I got six orders. From what keyword is this? Wooden egg holder, all right, wooden egg holder got me six purchases and I actually had 184 clicks on 4,000 impressions. So that's pretty impressive.
Bradley Sutton:
Now Wooden egg holder is still my number one keyword. Only 2,000 impressions, 29 clicks. Wow, guys, that is pretty crazy. My click share is only 3%. So I had 29 clicks out of 2,000 search volume or impressions.
Bradley Sutton:
But before egg holder countertop or a wooden egg holder, I had 184 clicks with only double. So that just shows me that's gotta be price, guys. All right, that's the price effect right there, if nobody even clicks it. You know, and I have a similar image that means people are like why am I gonna click on this 33 or $38 product when we've got these $20, $22 ones, all right. So in this case, you know what I already lowered the price of 33. I wanna do a test on if I can go further and I wanna get that. Since I have that lowest price in 30 days, let me double up on the badging and let me go ahead and throw a coupon in there at the same time. So I got that red lowest price in 30 days badge and I've got one of those green coupons, so I'm just gonna go ahead and hop in and throw one of those coupons, all right.
Bradley Sutton:
So for those who haven't done coupons before, you just go to Seller Central. You go to advertising and then hit coupons, all right. And then let's go ahead and create a new coupon, all right. Next step is you're gonna hit, search your catalog and let's go ahead and put the ace in in here. Here's the product. Let's go ahead and select it and hit continue.
Bradley Sutton:
Next step you're gonna do is set the start and conclusion date. Let's go ahead and start this like on September and let's have it run all the way to the end of September. Let's make it a percentage off. I'm just gonna go. Let's go with 10% off, a double-digit number there, limit redemption to one per customer and let me make a just a budget of a hundred bucks on this. Let's just test it out. Next thing you gotta do is you gotta fill out this coupon title and targeting. I'll do that off-camera. Okay, so I got my coupon set up. That's gonna go active in a few days.
Bradley Sutton:
We're gonna come back in October and then take a look at all right, how much did that increase? You know, click-through rate, because I'm never even gonna get to the add to cart, I'm not even gonna get to the purchase If I can't even get them to click the listing in the search results. I might even have to go to a deeper price based on what these competitors are doing. So we just covered search, create performance and how I can go dive in there and look at all the keywords that were working for me before, and then look at all the ones in search, create a performance at least, and then look at all the ones that is happening now. Now, remember I was selling crazy units a day like five 10 units a day. Back in January, if you look at a search create performance report, it only showed like about 15, 20 sales for the entire month. And remember that's because Search Query Performance doesn't cover a lot of the other scenarios of how people purchase.
Bradley Sutton:
So looking at where I was ranking as a whole is important, and let me show you how I can do that. I can look at a holistic look at where I was ranking organically and sponsored and then do that comparison. It's gonna give me a lot more keywords to look at. Let me show you how. So what I wanna do is I wanna go back into my listening. I'm just gonna run Cerebro on my own listening, so I just have to go ahead and hit this keywords button. If I'm in the listening, I scroll down to the Healing 10 Chrome extension here, just hit the keywords button, or I can just enter my ACE into Cerebro and get it All right. Here's all the keywords I'm ranking for now.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, same thing that I was doing in Search Query Performance. I'm actually gonna keep another tab open here and I wanna run another instance of Cerebro, and the reason is is because I'm going to compare what's going on right now to what was going on in January, which was like the most recent killer month that I was having. So how I can do that is when I'm in Cerebro I'm gonna hit this show historical trend button and I'm gonna go ahead and check what was going on in January. You can see I was organically ranking for a decent amount of keywords. Let's go ahead and apply the filters and now let's see what I was ranking Like, let's say, organically, in the top 10. So what I'm looking at now, guys, I'm like taking a time machine. That's why it's called historical trends, but I call this Cerebro time machine because I'm just literally taking a time machine back to January of this year and I'm running Cerebro as if it was still January and let me see where I was ranking on average for that month. So to see what you know decent search form keywords I'm gonna go ahead and enter a minimum of 500 search volume and let's go one to 10 on the organic rank and let's take a look at some of these keywords. And, sure enough, I'm definitely gonna expand it out to more than just one to 10, because I get sales from other parts of the page too.
Bradley Sutton:
But take a look, there are those keywords that were right from search through performance. That's why you know I could have just skipped that search through performance and got the data here as well. But here we got wooden egg holder, egg holder tower top and there are a few other keywords. Now let's actually switch to right now. Let's take a look at where I'm ranking for on some of these keywords. So what I wanna do is I actually wanna check on these top 10 keywords. Where am I ranking now?
Bradley Sutton:
So let me take this a wooden egg holder, for example, keyword and then let's look at Cerebro. What is going on right now for this keyword? All right, so here I just did a filter for a wooden egg holder in July, and look at this my organic rank is 25. So there's there's definite drop in sales. I went from organic rank two, to sponsored rank one, and then now it is sponsored rank five, organic rank 25. So there's a big fail. I need to kind of, you know, improve on what was the highest search volume keyword at the time Egg holder countertop. We already looked at that one. Another one here is a chicken egg holder, all right. So let's look at chicken egg holder and then go ahead and look up where I was ranking in last month for this chicken egg holder organic rank 53, sponsored rank nothing. In other words I wasn't sponsored at all. But back in January, I was organic rank seven, and sponsored rank five. So there's another kind of plus there, guys, where for whatever reason I let some keywords fall off and I'm not even advertising for them anymore.
Bradley Sutton:
Now the interesting thing here is is back in January I was not really getting play for very specific keywords to my product. And when I say very specific, that would mean, like this is a specifically a stackable egg holder or a stackable egg tray or a multi-tier wooden egg tray. You know, those are very specific to what this functionality was. It's interesting because since my product was kind of like the first to this niche, people weren't really searching for those keywords because they didn't even know it existed. But now I bet, if we would look at it, you know, there's some other sellers probably getting some play for those keywords. That that I'm probably not right now, because we almost, like, created a niche. That's why there's so many different coffin shelves and things like that. We were the first to really, you know, go hard with that kind of product and now there's just a million coffin shelves. But anyways, as you can see there, even just comparing myself to myself, I took my foot off the gas off of some keywords for whatever reason, and that definitely, regardless of price, is probably playing a role in my drop in sales.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's now take a look. You know, instead of comparing myself to myself, which is what we're doing in search, career performance, and cerebral, let's compare what's happening now myself, my product, compared to some of those competitors who have overtaken me in sales. Are they getting sales from keywords that maybe I don't even have in my listing? Let's hop in and let me show you how to find that. All right, so I'm here in the search results for stackable egg rack, and now what I want to do is or what you guys want to do, you know, I hope, if you're following along, do this in your own product. What you need to do is go to Amazon and go to the search results of, like your main keyword or main page. You can also do this inside of Helium 10.
Bradley Sutton:
If you're, if you're tracking your competitors, I like doing it from Xray, just because it's a nice visual experience and the first product that you click on in Xray. Now again, I know this is kind of harder for you guys who are driving around or running around or riding a bicycle and trying to picture what I'm doing. Make sure to go to YouTube to watch the version of this episode to really get the full feel. But hopefully, I'm describing this, you know, decent enough for you. All right, so the first thing you want to do, since you're comparing your product versus your competitors, you go into Xray and you choose your product first. So I'm looking for Ghee's Chicken Coop here. It is right here.
Bradley Sutton:
And then now you pick like four or five of who are the best sellers right now. And you know, sometimes I sort it by sales. This category sometimes trips out and, and you know people switch categories. So I'm actually going to sort it by BSR and let me pick the closest ones to my product that have the lowest BSR, the ones that have a better BSR than me, meaning that at least for the last few hours or today, they were selling better.
Bradley Sutton:
And here's that number one product, kinglin. Here they're the ones I want A hot look at. This Kinglin product has sales of 666. You see, I knew there was something. There was something weird going on with this product why he could sell so much. You know, deal with the devil. I see how it goes, okay?
Bradley Sutton:
Anyways, seriously speaking, though, let's go ahead and select him. We definitely want to know what keywords he's doing, and I'm only choosing the products that are very similar in function to my products, like here's a quail pigeon egg holder. You know, mine is not for quail pigeons, so I'm not going to pick that one. All right, there we go. I was able to pick a few products, and now we're just going to go ahead and run Cerebro.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the first thing that you want to do is you want to see if are there keywords that they're getting sales from that I am not even ranking for, let alone not on page one. For all right, let me show you how to do that. I have their products compared to mine. I'm going to say position rank that's my, my product zero, minimum, zero, maximum. All right, I'm going to go ahead and put a minimum search volume of 300. And then the next thing I'm going to do is I am going to do advanced rank filter minimum one. All right. Advanced rank filter number one, minimum one. That means I'm looking for a keyword that at least one of the these other competitors is ranking in the top 10 that I am not ranking for at all. And to do that, I go to advanced rank filter, number two, and I put minimum one, maximum 10. All right, there you go. I mean, as a goal, you want no keywords to come up here, and sure enough, there are no keywords that came up for mine, thank goodness, all right. So that means that hope you guys understood what I just did. I was checking are there any keywords that I am not ranked for at all but at least one of my competitors is in the top 10? The answer to that is no. You guys want that to be no as well for yourselves, all right. Step two All right, I know there's not one that I'm not ranking on, but what? Are there any keywords where I'm ranking like between like 15 and 306, but at least one of my competitors is ranked in the top 10.? And I would assume that there's a number of them. And sure enough, look at all these keywords here. All right, so wooden egg holder is one.
Bradley Sutton:
Let's take a look at what's going on here. Wow, look at this. There are a couple competitors ranked for and ranked five, and yet my position is 25. So there's a keyword that potentially I can try and increase on my sponsored rank to get some, you know, to start competing with those other two products. Here's another keyword here. Look at this, this counter egg storage. You've got one competitor at position seven, another one in the first 20, but or two more in the top 20 organic positions. And me, where am I ranked? 91. There are a total of 50, 17, sorry, 17 keywords on this list or at least one of my competitors is most likely getting sales from because they're in the top 10 positions in the organic results. And yet I'm like anywhere from 25, and here's one keyword that's, I'm all the way at 220. So there still is some low-hanging fruit. So there's a lot more stuff I'm going to go into.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm going to go look at my Adtomic. If you guys don't use Adtomic, you're not going to be able to do what I do, because I'm going to be able to go in and look at my history on what keywords I was crushing it on back in January and February and see what's going on with those keywords Now, like, did I accidentally pause it? Or did one of the healing 10 employees who keeps screwing with my account because they're trying to run test, accidentally archive something. The reason I say if you don't have Adtomic, you can't do that is the only way you would be able to look at that is if you were downloading your search term reports from Amazon during that time because Amazon only lets you see I think it's like two or three months worth of data, and that was January February. With Adtomic I can go back like two years, so I have no problem. So that's my next step.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm going to do I already did, you know some listing optimization, but I'm also going to do some next level list optimization. Once I take a look at all these keywords and look at the keywords I'm not doing great in, I'm going to check in Listening Builder. Do I have them in phrase form? Or maybe that's why I'm not doing so great for it is because I'm just indexed for it, but I don't have the full phrase in there and that will help. That could help my relevancy. So I'm definitely going to optimize that.
Bradley Sutton:
I told you I'm going to go into those images and I need to kind of like make people understand that they can buy extra racks, to kind of like stack it up. That's another thing I'm going to do. Another thing I'm probably going to do is I'm probably going to go to azrank.com and do some customer testing, like have some customers search for some of these keywords and then let them give me a report on what they think of my listing versus these other ones and which ones, like, would they pick first, second and third, and which one last and then, and then I might get some insights there from, like, real customers on. Is it really just the price that people are kind of tripping on? I'm going to go ahead and hop in and use Helium 10 Audience, which is powered by pick food.
Bradley Sutton:
I'm going to run some split tests. You know, like I just told you that we changed the images right, but was that the right move? I'm going to? I think that the A plus content definitely was the right move because you know it helped our conversion rate, but that main image we actually didn't change. So I'm going to check. Did they take any more pictures that maybe I could split test on? I might not want to split test this on a live listing because you know it could hurt my conversion rate, but let me go ahead and run a Helium 10 audience so that I can, you know, pull 50 Amazon buyers and then see, see what they think.
Bradley Sutton:
And then, like I said, for my next order, I got to get a price that's at least like 20% cheaper, if I can, from my factory, and I might even look into changing a little bit of the dimensions. Actually, matter of fact, you know what this is important. So let's go ahead and hop in here and see what we can do. Let me show you something cool, alright, so let's just go hop into my listing and let me show you how I can kind of like play around with the pricing here. Let's go ahead and run the profitability calculator once it comes up and let's see if I can like maybe shave a couple of inches off of this. What might happen? Let's take a look. Alright, so if I can get my manufacturing cost down to like $6, and still with a 10% ACoS, and if my price I want to put this at like $28 more or less, what would happen if I can shave just maybe an inch off of the length?
Bradley Sutton:
So let's go 14.12. It was at 17% profit. That brings me to 18% profit, so not much. What about this width? Let's bring this down to seven. Wait a minute. Wow, did you guys just see that? I just took the other width or the height, from 7.28 inches. I just took off a quarter of an inch and it increased my margin by over 4%. That's kind of crazy. Let's try that again 7.28. Yeah, it was 18%, large standard size, but then I take it down to seven and it drops me under three pounds outbound shipping weight. So that might be an easier win to just shave off a quarter of an inch from the height and I get 4 percentage points back on my profit margins.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, that is definitely doable. You see, you see guys, like, like how you just got to like, dive in there and start playing with this. You never know what might happen. I think it's because I was right on the cusp of that dimensional weight for three pounds and it put me at 2.99 pounds just by changing 0.28 of an inch. On one side of the product, I say 4 percentage points.
Bradley Sutton:
So these are the kind of things that you guys need to do and at the end of the day, let's just say I do all of this stuff and I start losing money on PPC because I have to spend so much and I just can't, I can't compete, I can't stay profitable. Yeah, you got to be able to pull the plug. You shouldn't have complete emotional connections to your products, guys. You got to be able to pull the plug sometimes. But, anyways, these are the steps I want you guys to take.
Bradley Sutton:
If you have a product that's been out for a couple of years and you're like man, can it be revitalized? Don't just give up without even trying these things. There are things that you can do to maybe get some traction back. So again, this is one of the Project X products. We're going to have some more Project X episodes coming out on some of the products you know and some of the launches of some brand-new projects. These are brand new products that we've been doing in our Project X that you guys haven't even heard about yet. So look forward to that in the next episode. I'll see you guys there.
We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Brand Evangelist and Walmart Expert, Carrie Miller. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week. FTC reportedly may sue Amazon later this month after talks break down https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/amazon-facing-ftc-antitrust-lawsuit-later-this-month-report/ TikTok is ending its support for Shopify‘s storefronts on September 12, but the ecommerce brand has found a new way to operate on the ByteDance-owned app. According to The Information, Shopify will integrate its vending platform into the TikTok Shop hub. https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/09/01/tiktok-shop-ecommerce-merch-shopify-storefront-integration/ Amazon doesn't name Temu, Shein, or AliExpress as potential threats in any of its latest SEC filings. However, according to the latest app store rankings on Data.ai, Temu and Shein are currently the two most downloaded shopping apps in the U.S. on iOS and Android. https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/05/meta-platforms-growth-chinese-amazon/ New York-based eCommerce company Benitago has reportedly filed for bankruptcy. The firm is seeking protection from creditors two years after raising $325 million in funding, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported. It listed both assets and liabilities of between $50 million and $100 million. https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2023/report-ecommerce-company-benitago-files-for-bankruptcy/ For this week’s training tip, Shivali Patel shows us how to create your own QR codes and design your product inserts inside Helium 10’s Portals tool. Lastly, Carrie invites you to join Helium 10’s Winning with Walmart Facebook group to connect, network, and ask questions to a community that is selling on the Walmart.com platform.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Carrie talks about:
- 00:45 - Amazon / FTC Update
- 01:30 - TikTok Shop / Shopify
- 03:19 - Most Downloaded Apps
- 05:22 - Aggregator Benitago Bankrupt
- 07:22 - Amazon Price Tracker
- 09:00 - Pro Training Tip: Create QR Codes And Product Inserts Inside Helium 10
- 14:09 - Join Our Walmart-Selling Facebook Group
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Let’s catch up with Eugene Wong, an accomplished 8-figure Amazon and 7-figure Walmart seller, as he shares the latest developments in his thriving e-commerce empire. Eugene not only walks us through the intricacies of managing his expanding businesses but also reveals his secrets to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, turning personal hobbies into profitable business ventures, and exploring new income streams.
Join us as Eugene discusses his journey into the world of TikTok Shop, where he has successfully launched products. Plus, get a sneak peek into the brands incubated by his dedicated employees and learn about the innovative system changes and automation he’s implementing in his business systems. This episode is a goldmine of entrepreneurial wisdom for anyone looking to diversify their income streams outside E-commerce selling and thrive in the ever-evolving online seller landscape.
In episode 489 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Eugene discuss:
- 02:52 – Eugene Shares Updates On His Business
- 03:44 – His Healthy Habits And Habits Outside The Amazon Grind
- 06:13 – Let’s Talk About Sports Cards From Hobby To Business
- 09:13 – Problems, Balance, & Boundaries For The Main And Side Businesses
- 13:54 – “You Need To Think Of What Your Hobbies Are”
- 15:43 – Diversifying Your Income Streams
- 18:00 – Launching Brands Incubated By His Employees
- 20:54 – Let’s Talk About TikTok Shop
- 24:32 – Browsing Eugene’s TikTok Shop
- 28:03 – TikTok Is Banning Amazon Links?
- 29:49 – Business System Changes He Is Implementing
- 33:03 – Eugene’s 60-Second Tip
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got an eight-figure Amazon seller slash seven-figure Walmart seller back on the show, who’s gonna have a little bit different kind of episode. We’re gonna talk a lot about how, as entrepreneurs, maybe we can take a hobby of ours and turn it into an alternate income stream, as well as how he’s launched on TikTok shop. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba, or Pinterest page? And maybe you see a cool product that you wanna get some more data on? Well, while you are on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what’s happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you wanna then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got back on the show for the second time, a very, very serious seller here Eugene. Eugene, how’s it going, man?
Eugene:
Hi, what’s up Bradley? Doing very well. Glad to be back.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, so, so guys, you, Eugene has sold multiple eight figures on Amazon, seven figures on Walmart. If you want to get his full backstory you’re gonna want to go to episode 306. All right. So h10.me/306 to get a lot of how he grew up and what his parents wanted them to do, and then the kind of direction that he went to. Quite an interesting story. We’re not gonna go too much there, but you know, that, that was almost a couple years ago. Now it’s like pulling teeth to get Eugene to come on podcast. He’s so humble and he doesn’t like I don’t have much to say. I’m like, dude, you sold a hundred million dollars, few, $300 million online. Anything you say is interesting. So finally we got him back after two years at Eugene on the show. Welcome back and how, how are things been going with you?
Eugene:
Things are good, and happy to be back. Lots of changes to update you on.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool, cool. Now, right off the bat, Let’s just talk about on the business side of things, numbers, just raw numbers, 2021, we are still kind of in Covid and things. And 2023 at the end here. Things have changed, better, worse, whatever the case is. How are your numbers on Amazon and Walmart compared to a couple of years ago?
Eugene:
So, I think last time when we first last spoke on the episode I projected, I think 18 million, and we were pretty much right there at the end of the year. So it wasn’t surprising. Like we kind, kind of forecasted 18 to 20 and we fell into the lower tier of that. But we hit our target, so we were happy with that, we hit it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Would you say Walmart and Amazon have grown or stayed around the same amount, or have both been increasing in a similar way, different ways? How’s the trajectory been?
Eugene:
Well, actually, Walmart got worse for us. Amazon is the one that increased Walmart to spread got even wider, which were, I mean, it’s, it’s something that we continue to batch our heads over, and we’re trying to still crack the code, but it went down. Yeah. Which stinks.
Bradley Sutton:
And now we’re gonna get maybe into some strategies that you can share with us that you or your team is doing on the business side. But I want to take a step back and go outside completely outside of the business side. Right now this wasn’t a big focus of mine when I had you on the podcast two years ago, but if you’ve listened to the podcast anytime in the last year, you’ll see that I, I ask almost every guest, like, Hey, what do you do to take yourself out of the business as far as for you know, hobbies and as far as health routine and et cetera. So let’s start, I know a lot of what your hobbies are, so let me start on the part that I don’t know about. What are you doing to stay physically fit, healthy? You know, like, you seem like you’re a pretty fit person when I see you, so you you’re not just sitting in front of a computer eating junk food all day. Do you do the gym or do you walk, or what are you doing to stay fit?
Eugene:
Unfortunately, or admittedly, I don’t really do too much physical activity right now because of, because of my hobbies and the work, right? I mean, obviously eat eating healthy well try to. But there’s not much like I don’t go to the gym too much anymore. I do help out with my kids’ sports that they’re in, football and soccer. So that keeps me pretty active, I guess that’s probably my main source of exercise.
Bradley Sutton:
And what else are you doing? You know for hobbies you like, like, I know, I know you’re big on Lego and stuff the family, like, you still doing projects like that, or what else?
Eugene:
Lego, actually if you wanna buy some, I have a lot for sale, but, Lego, I didn’t fully quit, but, but I’m downsizing that because I just don’t have time for it. I do a lot of surprisingly, I mentioned this also when I was at Sell and Scale sports cards, right? I had my eyes on that, that business model. And good or bad for me, whenever I get involved with something, I always look for the business angle, right? Not, not about money per se. It just, it just like finding the passion in it and sports cards. Not sports cards.
Bradley Sutton:
Hold that thought. I’m gonna share my screen of something that I was involved in yesterday here. Oh, no. Now, now just explain like, kind of like what’s going on. These are your hands we’re looking at in this video right here. And you’re opening up these pack of cards. I see your name right here.
Eugene:
You drips my name.
Bradley Sutton:
So this was a live Facebook. Explain like you’re doing commentary on what’s going on here, explain what we are looking at right here. Oh
Eugene:
My gosh, I can’t believe clip that. I’m turning red right now. Yeah, so, so that’s that’s, that’s part of the sports cards part. It’s pretty much, that’s called braking. So, pretty much nowadays, this is not like your, your childhood sports cards. Nowadays, boxes can cost 500,000, even $10,000. It’s sickening. But a cheaper way to jump in is, is you can get your team. So let’s say you like the Philadelphia Eagles, and instead of buying the whole box and ripping every single pack yourself and paying the full price, you can just buy one team and you get all the cards for the Eagles. If you’re a fan of the Eagles or if you want to gamble, which is kind of one of the elements to it. So I’ve I’ve evolved from, from being a pure hobbyist into kind of like collecting and ripping product and opening basketball and football stuff to evolving into breaking, because I saw the business side of it, and it’s very fun.
Eugene:
It gets me outta my element. It’s actually a very stress reliever for the Amazon side of business. In fact, I need it. Like, I need an outlet like that. It’s very creative outlet, because I have to first of all sell and engage an audience which is complete against my, my my personality. Like, I’m a super introvert, like, being on here, you had to rich, you twist my arm, but, yep. But I dunno, something about the sports cards. I’m just very comfortable with it. I’m very knowledgeable with it, and I like helping people most importantly.
Bradley Sutton:
You started as a, on the hobby side, like, you would go into Facebook groups and like join the breaks as a person who would buy like a certain player or a certain team. Is that correct? Or did you start immediately on the flip side where like, I’m gonna make this a business from day one?
Eugene:
No, no, no. I definitely wasn’t the business from day one. I was basically gambling, right. I was, I was opening the packs myself and, and, and paying in other people’s breaks, but it wasn’t sustainable. Yeah. I knew that entertainment was not a sustainable form of–.
Bradley Sutton:
But it was like a rush, right? Like it’s a rush. Like, guys, let me tell you, you from experience, like I’ve been doing this for years too, and it’s fun. Like for those who aren’t into sports cards maybe it’s kind of hard to describe what we are talking about here, but it’s super fun. But what I like about this is that you took something that was an escape on the side like a little hobby. And then you’re like, wait a minute, I could actually turn this into maybe even a side business where you’re still doing your hobby, but now instead of the money just going out and you paying it, it’s almost like maybe you’re breaking even now. So you still get that rush and that escape from your Amazon business, but you’re almost able to turn it into a side business. Because the way it works is this, this is not easy work, first of all, to organize this break, collect payment from like 20 strangers to, and then later organize the cards to different teams. But, but that’s kind of like built into the, built into the price, right? So are you kind of like breaking even on this now, but you’re still able to get that rush that you did when you were just a pure hobbyist?
Eugene:
I mean, in the beginning when you first start out, when you don’t have any, you don’t have reputation, no one knows you. Yeah. You, you might be losing money or breaking even, but I mean, again, I’m humble, but it’s hard for me to say this, but like, I built quite a following and, you know what I mean? I snap fill my, or I’m using the wrong terminology. I fill my pretty quickly. And usually a lot of people struggle. And I’m in a group that has a hundred thousand people and I’m probably one of the larger ones. And the stuff fails ’cause people trust me, my reputation’s there. I’m not one of these like, shady guys and I know what I’m doing. So reputation’s everything in this industry, just like Amazon as a brand, you know what I mean? Like one big mistake or, or one, like one shady element will take you down. And this literally is the most sensitive hobby where it will, you will, your name will be tarnished forever if you, if you mess up in a shady way.
Bradley Sutton:
You slip a good card out or something, something like that. Now how much time a week are you spending on this I guess we could call it side business/hobby.
Eugene:
Probably too much time. And, and I think this, this is a good, good blend of the Amazon and, and what we like the business aspect. It’s one of those things where, where I struggle with balance and boundaries, right? So I know I’m sitting on a gold mine with my hobby that turned into something. Now the problem is the scaling and hiring of people and hiring talent that goes live as well as capital to source product and stuff like that. So it, it’s a very similar business problem to the Amazon side, but of course I’m more passionate about it. But also it let, let’s, let’s be honest, it’s not gonna generate the profit that it does on the, for the Amazon business, right? Sure, sure. So I have to be realistic and real, real things in.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you have employees for this endeavor then as well?
Eugene:
I’m interviewing right now.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. But right now, until now, you’ve kind of just done it all on your own.
Eugene:
Yeah, yeah. Okay. For, it’s been a year over, a little over a year and a month.
Bradley Sutton:
But then, but then we talking 20 hours a week, 10 hours a week, 30 hours a week. How much would you say you’re spending on the baseball cards or sports cards?
Eugene:
Maybe 20. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Now, when that happened, does that mean that you, it was 20 hours less on the Amazon side? Or is it a mixture since this it’s kind of not like to me, when, when I do sports card stuff, and, and I, I’m very similar to you. I was in the sports card. I’m actually flying to Japan in a few days. ’cause I’m setting up at a card show to sell some of the stuff that, that, that I have over here and over there. So I get it. To me it’s, it’s work. It makes money just like you’re profitable on this, but it’s also fun. It’s also an escape. So, so did, did you decrease your Amazon workload by 20 hours? Or is it kind of a mixture? You maybe only took away 10 hours or something because this is kind of like a hobby as opposed to just business for you?
Eugene:
I don’t think the 20 hours replaced 20 hours of Amazon. I mean, I guess the balance definitely took away some from the Amazon. And, and of course my guys are, are solid, and I know they kept things going. But of course, there’s some things that fell by the wayside, right? It’s, I normally don’t miss, and I admittedly like, this is why I need to balance, this is not the golden goose right now. It can be. But I need to find a way to develop it without hurting the main golden goose, right? So, so that, that’s, I’m, I’m living through it right now and trying to balance that out. It’s just that I, I can’t, I don’t wanna give it up because it took almost a year to build this up into this thing. And now, now I know there’s another level to climb, but, but I’m not at the stage where I can say, Hey, I’m 100% all in still on that because I can’t give up the Amazon side.
Bradley Sutton:
Wait a minute. Are you the one who also had a huge eBay account where you’re also selling the cards on eBay?
Eugene:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Y you were the one who made all those listings, or
Eugene:
No, that was, alright, now you’re gonna make me give away the secrets here. That account was, we used to sell very heavy on eBay. Okay. So we, we sold, this is before like, we got heavy into apparel. We were selling electronics and, and,
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, okay.
Eugene:
Yeah. So
Bradley Sutton:
When you say we, this is like your, your, your main conglomeration the, the same business that you’ve been doing for 15 years. This wasn’t as okay. Now it’s starting to, to come into picture a little bit more. Now you
Eugene:
Gave this Yeah it looks like that. It looks like it, like 500,000 sports card sales, but it, it’s not, yeah. But I’m starting to, because assignment model is potentially in the works as well too, but that’s a whole another infrastructure.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Yeah. So guys, I mean, the reason why I brought this up wasn’t just because I think this is cool that, that he does sports cards like me there’s a few people in the industry like Brandon Young and Mitul Patel, and a bunch of people of us are all in like this group where we, we talk about sports cards and stuff like that, but it’s the fact that think about what your hobbies are. And you can’t apply this to everything, but there’s a lot of you out there who might have a hobby, and this is kinda like the Gary Vee mentality actually, where it’s like, can you actually monetize the hobby where it’s not just a complete dream? Like if my hobby is swimming or something like that like if I’m, if you hobby was swimming and you’re like, I’m gonna start swimming for 20 hours a week, it’s kind of, it might be hard to monetize that per se but for the rest of you guys out there, actually I’m, I’m sure I could come up with something like maybe I become a swimming influencer or something.
Bradley Sutton:
Something like live streamer, I’m sure there’s, but, but, but that’s my point. Like a lot of it, even if it, even if it seems extreme guys, is there’s ways where you can turn some of your side side hobbies or, or things into almost like a side business where you are getting that escape from your day-to-day. Amazon, which is what I’ve been preaching for the last year, guys you have to have hobbies and things that take you away from the daily grind you know, resets your mind and, and just puts you in a different space. But at the same time, you gotta be careful that if you’re just like like one of my hobbies is Korean, Korean dramas. Like I just watch Korean dramas all day. I could if I had the time, but that there’s no monetization for me on that, that means it’s literally just taking away time from, from my, my, my Amazon businesses if I just go deep into it.
Bradley Sutton:
So you’ve gotta have the balance, but then think about it like, is part of, of this hobby is there a way to monetize it where not only would you break even, but now all of a sudden you’ve got another profitable business like Eugene has here with a sports card. So I, to me, it’s fascinating what you’ve been able to do, but again, you would not have been able to get to the point where you could even do this if you did not build up your team in a good way and be able to delegate so much of your Amazon business to your team.
Eugene:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think my, my role had had evolved, and this is probably the past couple years, is that you gotta let the team do their thing, right? And my role now has become, okay, how do I make sure the team has a secure future? I have to branch out and go outside of the box and do different things, right? I’ve, I think there’s, there’s been other failed attempts at things whether, whether it’s an Amazon type of type of business or outside of completely outside separate from e-commerce type of business. And you know what I mean I’m always looking for new ways to generate income, right? And that’s more in general to diversify, which is very important I think not only within Amazon, but even outside of having Amazon as a business and then having, I don’t know, own something else, going to real estate, anything else, right? Sports cards, whatever. And that’s another way to protect my family, not not only my like personal life, but like more, like I said, the guys here that, that they deserve. They’re running the day-to-day, they deserve something to take home at the end of their whatever tenure or yearly bonuses and things like that. So that, that’s very important to have that opportunity.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, let’s switch back from, from hobby back to business now. How many brands overall do, are you currently running?
Eugene:
We only have three brands, right? And it’s all under the same account we have.
Bradley Sutton:
So let’s say like these three brands are selling on Walmart, you’re selling on Amazon and maybe have some.com websites or something for them.
Eugene:
Yeah, they’re not all on the same marketplaces. Some have their own website. Some are on multi-platform, some are just on single platform. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Alright. Any, anything, like, have you launched any new brands or have any new things in the pipeline or that you’ve done lately?
Eugene:
Yeah, we something that, and again, this is a a situation from one of our employees. It was kind of incubated by them, which I loved. And basically a pitch came across my desk with one of my employees. I’m like, Hey, like, what do you wanna talk about? And they had this great idea, the conceptual it was and they have like anxiety and ADHD, which which they struggle with. And they had a, a concept, a product concept that would help with that. And the mission statement, the vision, it resonated with me. Obviously required an investment. There was a risk there because this was not our lane. This is definitely not apparel or electronics that we were used to.
Eugene:
This is like basically it’s a weighted, weighted lap pad, right? But it was, it’s really made for kids. The ones on market just were not, were not as good, right? The quality or, or, or the way the, the, the weights are shifting inside and stuff like that. So internally we developed a better way to do it a better weight system. We also have ones that are custom. We have like a dog as well too. This is, this is a dog, and you can fill this with whatever you want. Rice or, or glass bees. We have a, we have a unicorn. So like, that’s the new brand that we’re, we’re trying to invest in slowly. We’re not trying to sink all our chips in that, because that can really hurt us long term, right?
Eugene:
So we’re trying to play that out, that just launched this year. And it wasn’t, it’s not one of those like products that we’re used to where we’re used to selling, let’s say like five, 10, 20,000 units of it a year, and then okay, wins and repeat. This is a definitely a lot smaller niche, but this was a passion project by someone internally that I committed to these guys. Like, look guys, if you have passion projects, let’s let’s discuss it. Let’s talk about it. Right? I can’t say yes to everything. However, there’s certain ones that we can’t bring aboard. This is one of them that passed the initial phase, and now it’s all the way through. And this is kind of one of our first brands that we really made like full effort of full branding, not how we, like, HD is like a, was like a mix of stuff.
Eugene:
And while it’s getting better now, it’s really focused on apparel. It didn’t start that way. This was our first clean brand that was fully immersed into this concept. And we have a, a future plans for sensory types of items for it as well too. We have workbooks we have influencers. It’s more of a lifestyle brand. But it’s one of those that it’s gonna be capped it. I don’t think it’s gonna be ever one of those $20 million a year things, at least I don’t think, but of course there’s, there’s future plans. We wanna do trade shows and, and pension get on shelves, Walmart well target probably more, more so. But but that’s, yeah, that’s one of the exciting things that we have in the pipeline is just, it just we gotta be patient and drive it the right way. Because you can burn through resources, especially PPC, PPC is if you don’t do it right, you can really hurt yourselves. And, and we, we’ve been in that boat a couple times already this year.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, I’ll very unique. I never heard about I mean, I’m sure people, people have it, but I haven’t had a guess that, that have said, Hey, we had a internal kind of where the employees could, could come up with ideas. You know, you have employees who, who have been with you five, 10 years, they know the business. All the ideas for new products doesn’t have to come from the owner you. So that’s cool to open up ideas and be open that to that who knows how much stuff your employees out there might have might have some ideas about some new products. Okay. TikTok shop is something that I think has grown exponentially as far as buzz around it. We’ve had other Helium 10 Elite members like Elizabeth talk about some of their some of her amazing success in TikTok shop. Are have you taken any of your brands in TikTok shop? Are you utilizing that or just influencers at all in TikTok?
Eugene:
Yeah, we we actually just started we we’re really late to the game, I think, well, I think we’re late to the game obviously in China. I mean, they have factories that are just going li like live factories, literally. Like, there’s cubicles of people going live which is crazy, and the amount of money that brings in is disgusting. So we finally made the leap in using our HD clothing brand to jump onto TikTok shop or TikTok live and TikTok shop. That’s how it evolved. So so the minute that opened to us, we didn’t get invited to the first round of it during the beta but as soon as it opened up to us, we gave it a trial. We put some listings up and right away we got some sales, which is cool.
Eugene:
And when we stocked out on TikTok shop, the sales went to our website as well too. So, so we got double wham, we got bonus sales on our website, which we never really get, like our website just to have a website, to be honest with you. We don’t focus on it. But we got sales there and TikTok shop. And then when we went, when we did more TikTok lives, we connected with more, more creators. And that went viral as well too on a couple posts, and we sold out a lot of our stuff. Now, the, the bad part is we were not prepared at all for the inventory. Like, we’re prepared for inventory for Walmart, Amazon, and that’s really it, right? And then now with TikTok in the mix, those sales are very unpredictable. We can’t say that, hey, just because that, that influencer posted that content that it’s gonna sell a hundred dresses in two days, we don’t know that.
Eugene:
So, like, I don’t even know how the heck to order for that. So it’s a problem we’re trying to figure out right now without like blowing the budget on, on over ordering inventory for a chance. So we usually pretty tight with inventory. We don’t like taking too many chances, especially with apparel. Apparel, you get stuck with it, you’re in trouble. So, so it’s a good and bad problem to have. So, so we’re also just like peace pets. We’re, we’re not taking a, a gung-ho approach where we’re just gonna throw everything at it. We just gotta take our time and learn some of the, the growing pains. And of course, TikTok shop has growing pains. I’m not an expert at it, but like, I’ve heard enough horror stories that there’s a lot of I think internal things that, that are not just like when I say Walmart or Amazon when they first started, there’s a lot of things that don’t go right.
Eugene:
For, for both the seller and the buyer. Things can be abused and manipulated. So so there’s a lot of that stuff that, that, that happens still, but but it’s definitely gonna be the future for sure. And, and I, I’m investing in that more and more each day. Obviously I think all brands should go on there. Clothing I think is actually a very easier thing because we just have a model that talks about it and wears it and walks around in it, right? And demonstrates it. That’s pretty easy.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, so I’m here looking at your TikTok channel here. ShopHDE I see you’ve got a few videos here. Lemme just pull up one, enhance performance and style. Okay, so I see here, there’s a, a shop button. I’m gonna hit this. I’m gonna hit this shop button, and let’s see where it takes me to, ah, okay. So it just takes me like, I can just instantly I add it to the cart and then have this. It’s kind weird looking leopard skin shorts here shipped to me. That’s that easy as that. This is like my first time looking at, at TikTok shop, and then I can actually go click here directly to your shop and I can see all of your products, I’m assuming. Okay. And I can see best sellers. Looks like your tennis outfit is the top sellers here. Actually, it’s all women’s clothes, like your men’s. That just shows you that, that I guess more women are using TikTok shop, perhaps, because none of your men’s products are, are on this bestseller list here. That’s interesting.
Eugene:
Yeah, men don’t like to shop on TikTok. Apparently. We found that out early on.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Okay. So now all of this this is your channel here. These, these aren’t your employees, like, are like, are these influencers here who have done all are these, like, what do you call it? Is this UGC or are some of these your actual employees or people you have hired to do videos? What are we looking at here?
Eugene:
It’s a mix of, I mean, we, one should be one of our employees. It’s a mix of influencers as well as our, our our models in China that makes some of the videos and photos for us. So it’s a collaboration.
Bradley Sutton:
Now here, I just happen to see this 8,000 views. Like is this a, a, a video that you boosted somehow, or just randomly? It went kind of maybe mini viral or something? This particular one right here, 8,000 views. That’s pretty good for this. Maybe that’s why I don’t, this is one of the top sellers.
Eugene:
I know. I didn’t think it was that one, but we had an influencer that blew, blew a couple up and their, their audience just went crazy and they stocked us out. We had to cancel orders and everything like that, so that was a mess. But, but yeah, a couple videos went viral from the, from the creators, which is kinda like, that’s for us, that’s one that was one of the secrets. We, we don’t need to create everything on our own, and we don’t have the expertise or the skillset to necessarily create every single one on our own. So we might as well leverage that, give up some of the commission and utilize their, their following their audience to make our stuff go viral. And then like I said, the inventory is, I don’t know how to solve that fully yet. Maybe some other gurus out there know how to, but without spending both loads of money on over ordering inventory, I we’re trying to figure that out. So that keeps me up at night.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So like, what, what kind of numbers are you doing overall? Like monthly or weekly on TikTok?
Eugene:
End of June is when we started on getting onto the TikTok shop. And then I think July was our first month of full month of sales. I think it equated to probably like like 300 some more to think, which is not for us, that’s not a lot. But from a new platform like that, we were excited and we, again, we love creating nothing from something. And that was one of the things. And, and yeah, so we want to keep it, keep it going. We wanna invest harder into it. And that was I don’t wanna say our person didn’t try, but that was like, that was like such early stage and we’re able to get traction like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Just imagine in the beginning, you actually don’t even get big commissions right? From TikTok. Don’t they give it to you free commission or something like that? Do you know?
Eugene:
I know there’s a lot of perks that TikTok gave to onboard you. And, and they’ll, they’ll reimburse you on shipping. They’ll give sellers like a 30% off coupon that we don’t take to hit on they TikTok takes to hit on it. So there’s a lot of those special deals behind the scenes.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Well, this is cool, guys. You know, like, like some, like he just said they just got on there here a couple months ago and are already doing like over 10 orders a day. Less fees than Amazon. But we talked about this on the weekly buzz recently, guys that TikTok is trying to move to send everybody instead of allowing potentially this, this is just a rumor for, for right now, but you know, TikTok, people have been saying that TikTok is gonna like, stop allowing influencers maybe to send links to Amazon. They want people just buying on the TikTok platform. So if you haven’t got set up with TikTok shop, this might be something to look into and then get, get to some kind of cadence here. Like obviously Eugene’s team here is, is posting on a regular basis, and we saw just one random video got six, I see one with 6,000 views here.
Bradley Sutton:
Here’s another one with, with 8,000. So it can sometimes, you know people pick up on this and, and they can definitely boost your, your sales and for at least the, the time being, even if TikTok shop is out of stock, like he said, what people are gonna do is they’re gonna go look for his website or maybe go look for his Amazon store and find their product. So, so there’s residual benefits, not just the, the traffic that TikTok shop brings, but it’s also gonna boost your dot com sales and your, your Amazon sales. Pretty cool. One thing you mentioned before was that you having your own warehouse and, and having a big business, you, you’ve got your own internal systems in place, but you were making like, some big systems change over something at your company.
Eugene:
Yeah, I mean, long story short is we, we had to, we had some personnel changes more from the, like the developer side, which is like we’ve had our internal like systems that run our warehouse management systems, our our data harvesting, our like just customized data that we pull down from Amazon API and, and manipulate into usable chunks that, that help us internally as, as a team. So I’ve kind of, in a way lost a big chunk of that as far as like being, have that flexibility to be able to kind of create whatever you want on the fly. I still have it, but it’s not as workable and or, or more so the employee is not as, as available. So it’s one of those things that I hadn’t planned for very well over the course of, of building the businesses is just kind of not rely on, on that system so much.
Eugene:
And we’ve been trying to break away slowly, but I think it’s one of those things you get lost in the comfort, and, and that’s a major mistake. And that’s definitely one of the teaching tools that, that I would tell anybody is, is like yeah, don’t, don’t, don’t pigeon your hole yourself in and get locked into a situation like that. Really it’s like, it, there’s other, there’s enough services right now compared to when we started that deal with forecasting inventory data management, data harvesting that can that maybe the basic Amazon report is not enough for people. Like, I know it’s not enough for us. It’s too basic and it’s it takes too time consuming to drill down to what we really need it for. So we need to have scripts that run behind the scenes that pull down big data sets to formulate into this grouping or these triggers for us for the different departments that focus on the specialties to make them, Hey, I know this happened, so I gotta look at this and do this, right?
Eugene:
Without that, it can get messy and you’re gonna miss a lot of things. Yeah. So, so we’re in the process of trying to find how to blend these worlds together now where, alright, we can’t go fully customized. We can do a little customization, but who are we gonna partner with? Who are we going to, I guess, park our business with to be able to kind of fill a lot of those gaps? And then the ones that we can’t fill we’ll need to figure out how to restructure that process internally and, and find out how we make do without, without having that. So, so it’s a little, little bit of a turmoil for that. It just definitely, you can still get it done raw with like raw data and, and spreadsheets, but at, at this stage maybe if you have like selling fry products, you can do that, but our clothing is, we have so many skews, so many new, new styles that come in, new PCs because of clothing, t’s almost impossible to manage. So so we need systems and efficient data systems to be able to run the business properly. So yeah,
Bradley Sutton:
That’s one of the reasons why I was like, man, apparel is like crazy. It’s like one, you have one item, but it could have 25 variations. If it has like five colors and five sizes each, it would be a nightmare to try and manage. Alright, well, just like with your first episode we always close these with asking for your TST your 30-second or 60-second tip. What kind of strategy do you have for our listeners today?
Eugene:
You get the right people in the right seats and you get the hell out of their way. I think as simple as that, we used to micromanage, we used to try to lay this corporate structure down and, and that was just suffocating and it just didn’t work, right? Like, like we’re, we thought we were from running from our business classes. Oh, this is how you run a business. No. You can do it that way, but, but employee satisfaction, I think it can be really bad. So we, we really just kind of give them the tools that they need, give the training that they need. Some, sometimes there’s not a lot of training that we have to pay for training to get them to the, to that level to build those core competencies. And then from there, just get outta their way.
Eugene:
They’ll need you, they’ll, they’ll reach out to you when they need you. Because if you step in, like right now, if I step into every decision, like, oh, I don’t like that color, I don’t like that pattern, I don’t like that dress. Well, they did the data. They have multiple people that did the research data behind the scenes already to validate that, hey, we make decisions based on data. That was a data driven decision. It wasn’t like, oh, I like that purple color, it looks cool, right? That that doesn’t go anywhere. Right? So, so I try not to step in anything now, I do step in for any legal copyright things. I mean, that’s where my eye is trained. Like, hey, I think we’re violating that looks too close to that type of situation. Let’s stay away from that.
Eugene:
Like, that’s where I step in. But other than that, they gotta have that greater freedom. And, and of course there’s gonna be certain levels of spend where, where I, I do need to step in, but like, other than that, like, it’s not, let, let them roam free, but, but you gotta let them run and exercise their creative freedom. If they’re not very creative people and there’s certain ticks that, that that drive them, I mean, you focus on that, allow them to do those things, and it’s definitely a form of respect at that point. Right? Of course. You gotta develop that trust. It’s not like day one you hire someone in their seat and, oh, do whatever you want, right? It’s not like that. It’s over time you do that. But that’s kinda like the biggest things I’ve learned is just get out of their way because you’re gonna slow them down if you try to baby them or micromanage them too much. I think it’s pretty simple.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Alright, Eugene, thanks for coming on here. Again, we really appreciate the knowledge and a little bit different. I wanted to do a little bit different podcast today with a little bit different vibe. And so you bring a unique viewpoint to things. If you guys want to know more about what, what Eugene and I are into all these baseball card stuff, you can check what’s your Instagram for the the baseball card stuff?
Eugene:
it’s @eugerips like my first name, @eugerips
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, so take a look maybe we’ll, we’ll add some more Amazon sellers to this sports card phenomenon. So Eugene, look forward to seeing you maybe at one of these conferences coming up and wish you the best of success.
Eugene:
Likewise. Thank you Bradley.
In our monthly training and “Ask Bradley Anything” episode, we talk about an important aspect of Amazon selling, uncovering the four secret metrics that a whopping 99% of Amazon sellers are missing out on. We kick off by shedding light on the abundance of untapped data points, highlighting the importance of these hidden gems provided by Helium 10. One of the standout tools in this episode is the Cerebro Match Type Filter, which allows you to reverse engineer your competitor’s PPC strategy, giving you a competitive edge like never before. We also explore the significance of Cerebro’s historical trends and how to check product trends week by week, all while unraveling mind-blowing insights from the Amazon Recommended Rank column. Discover why this column is incredibly vital in today’s time.
Plus, don’t miss the engaging Q&A session with Bradley, where we address burning live questions from our audience. Learn how to get more reviews using Helium 10 Follow Up and gain a deeper understanding of how the Amazon Recommended Rank truly works. Lastly, catch Bradley at upcoming events for even more valuable insights. Tune in now and level up your Amazon selling game!
In episode 488 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Eugene discuss:
- 01:24 – There Are A Lot Of Data Points That Sellers Are Not Using
- 02:09 – Why Are These Helium 10 Data Points Are Important
- 04:45 – The Cerebro Match Type Filter
- 08:01 – Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s PPC Strategy
- 10:19 – Looking At Cerebro’s Historical Trends
- 14:37 – Checking Product Trends Week-By-Week
- 17:11 – Mind-Blowing Data From The Amazon Recommended Rank Column
- 18:31 – Why The Amazon Rec Rank Is Very Important
- 24:23 – Q&A Session With Bradley
- 26:04 – Getting More Reviews With Helium 10 Follow Up
- 28:34 – How Does The Amazon Recommended Rank Work?
- 32:28 – Catch Bradley On The Following Events
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today in our monthly live training with Ask Me Anything, I go over four data points that 99% of your competitors are not using, and I also answer all of your recent questions live on the show. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you a YouTube vlogger, blog writer, course creator, or other kind of influencer or educator? Maybe you just have a network of people interested in e-commerce. Did you know that you can earn commissions of 25% for life for everyone that you refer to Helium 10? We’ve got many partners earning hundreds, even thousands of dollars monthly in commission from Helium 10’s partnership program. If you’d like to join our affiliate partner program, please go to h10.me/crushit and tell them you heard about it from the podcast. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Monthly Ask Me Anything that actually goes live to our Serious Sellers Club members. It gives you a little taste of what we do inside our Serious Sellers Club every every week we’re gonna be going over some pretty cool stuff today.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s mainly gonna be about some data points that a lot of sellers are not using. You know, even sellers that have Helium 10, you know, obviously seems like everybody nowadays is using Helium 10, right? But these are some things that in kind of studies I guess you can say, or my networking, I definitely know that a lot of sellers are not using. So anyways, we are talking today about unique data points, all right? And one of them, like, ah, to be honest, I was like planning to kind of talk about this more on special episode 500 of the podcast. You know, how we always do the big numbers. I’m actually flying to the Maldives to do it, so we’ll talk about how it affects the Maldives honeymoon period. But I was like, you know what, I’m gonna give this group a a treat.
Bradley Sutton:
We’re gonna talk about. We’re not gonna wait till October, episode 500 is not happening until October. We’re gonna go through this a little bit of it. Now, I’m not gonna spill the whole beans, but probably I don’t wanna like, you know, give false hope or here or anything, but this is like, it’s gonna end up being a pretty impactful, if not epic game changing thing to look at that nobody’s looking at right now because of the way the Amazon algorithm has kind of adapted over time. It’s a completely unique way to really kind of understand why your products aren’t getting PPC impressions, why you can’t seem to rank for new products or even mature products where you just, you know, like, you know, you’re converting well, but for some reason Amazon does not, does not show you highly for this keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, like, I’m gonna show you a way how to know if that happens. All right? So what I’d like to do, let’s just open it up actually. If can some people throw me a, an example or a product that they want me to look up like it, you could send me to a specific ASIN. It could be your ASIN, it could be a competitor’s ASIN or maybe something else. Like maybe it’s a keyword that you guys want me to look up. I want this to be your show too. Lemme look up this acrylic. Let, lemme hold on. Lemme, lemme look up acrylic shelf dividers. Let me see. Okay, we’ll go ahead and do this. Let’s how do I add this to this stream here? There we go. Lemme make it a little bit bigger, okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Acrylic shelf dividers. Alright, let’s maybe pick one of the, one of the ones that’s a top seller. So I’m gonna run X-ray on this page. Okay, let’s see if I didn’t even check if there’s any BSR here. Okay, it looks like there is BSR. Excellent. Alright, let’s see. One of the top sellers looks like this Hem Devore Clear acrylic shelf dividers. They might be doing up to 2000 units a month. Let’s go ahead and pull them up in Cerebro. And let’s just say that set some context here. Let’s just pretend that maybe you know, I, I’m an acrylic shelf divider seller and I just want to get some more insights into the niche and into my top competitors. So we’re gonna go ahead and run that in Cerebro.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, so now we pulled it up into cerebral. Now the first thing that I think that people are not looking, again, you guys know how to do Cerebro. We’re not here to just like, Hey, how do use Cerebro? We’re trying to find unique unique data points here, right? The first thing that I want to show you guys is the match type. Did you know that we are showing all of these other situations? What about, let’s say Amazon’s choice? They have not shown up in Amazon’s choice. Now, what is Amazon’s choice? This is not necessarily that they’re Amazon’s choice for a specific keyword, but what happens is, is if you go to the search results, do you guys see these special widgets here? It looks like search results, but it’s really kind of like a sponsored, all right? And the reason you know it’s sponsored is because it tells you right here, under highly rated, for example, that these are sponsored results.
Bradley Sutton:
So there’s different widgets that show up in search results and one of them is an Amazon’s choice. And as you can see, this keyword doesn’t seem to have an Amazon’s choice widget. It has a highly rated widget. All right? So that’s one of them. Other ones that have shown up in the past that aren’t showing up anymore is like editorial recommendations. So let’s see if we can pull up highly rated and this product here has shown up on 26 different search results for highly rated, alright? So like maybe I’m looking at numbers maybe in Search Query Performance, right? Maybe this is my own product. I’m looking at numbers in in PPC and, and I’m just wondering like, where is this product? You know, this, this product is getting 2000 sales, but the numbers don’t add up.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, remember from our Search Query Performance webinar last week, highly rated is not showing up. So if somebody were to type in acrylic shelf dividers, right? And they actually choose one of these products and take a look, right? Take a look that this product is right in there. I think this is the hum ofor that I’m pretty sure that’s the product we were looking at. Or is it n in K? Nope, six two, they’re not in there right now. They were in there before, if somebody clicks on this, this is not going to show up in search career performance, it’s not gonna show up in Product Opportunity Explorer, right? So like any sales that come from here, the seller themself wouldn’t know about it. You as a competitor obviously wouldn’t know about it, but that’s why you can look, use Cerebro to look at this.
Bradley Sutton:
Where are they showing up for in highly rated? Let’s take a look. If there are more for, if they are doing sponsored brand headers, you guys know what that is, right? That is what you see at the very top right here, right? So right now the one is that’s showing up for is this, you know, Soye brand, but if I look at Cerebro, I can sell, well now I know their sponsored brand header strategy. I mean, I’m not even sure, I don’t think that they’re, they’re just, you know, doing, you know, that much broad here. There’s only 69 keywords that, that they have showed up for in sponsored brand header. And you could almost guys look at this, you can almost reverse engineer what their target is for sponsor brand headers. If they’re doing phrase it looks like they’re doing phrase and they’re doing broad, one of the two four closet dividers, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Do you see how many keywords say closet and divided? Look at that. Like just by one click. I haven’t even like filtered anything else after this, I can now tell that they’re running a broad match or phrase match campaign in sponsor brand headers for closet divider as a root word. That’s crazy. This just shows you, you know, it looks like they also have one shelf divider potentially is a broad match that they’re doing. So I can directly see what exactly is going on with their sponsored brand header strategy, right? So this is like stuff like, tell me right now, did has any of you ever just run your competitor and run sponsored brand header to reverse engineer what words they’re targeting for their brand? Probably not, right? Maybe only a couple of you. If you have, then great, if you haven’t, then you just learn something valuable.
Bradley Sutton:
And then remember again, this is something that is not counted in Amazon metrics as far as Search Query Performance. The only way that you would know if somebody is getting clicks on this is by looking at this like, hey, where, where are they spending heavily on? Right? Because these sales do not show up in Search Query Performance or what else can we look up here? We can look up sponsored brand video. Like are they running video ads? I don’t know. Look at this. No data came up. So what do we, what do we learn now? Hey, this competitor, despite being number one in the niche, they do not seem to be running sponsored brand video ads. So there’s one thing that I can beat them on, right? If I’m running sponsored brand video now I know, hey, this is nice, I don’t have to compete with the number one seller in this niche on video because they don’t seem to be running video.
Bradley Sutton:
All right? Another thing that people are not, you know looking for enough in my opinion is the Historical Trend. This is for diamond members, all right? So before this is only for elite members, so very few of you, you know, like Rolando and, and a couple others had access to this, but look at the seasonality of their keyword reach and their sponsored reach. So let’s go ahead and show historical trend and let’s look up very interesting. We can go back two years, we can go back two years here and take a look at the, the orange that you guys are seeing is their organic reach. So we see that these guys peak in September, so, so we have September that we’re just about upon us. Now we know like, hey, looks like they go pretty hard in September and October for their organic keywords that they are ranking for.
Bradley Sutton:
And you can kind of see why, I know this is kind of small for some of you guys watching this on, on video right now, but do you see how this purple increases in September and October? The purple indicates how many sponsored keywords that they are showing up for. So it looks like these guys spend, I’m just looking at one chart here guys. It looks like they are spending more in PPC in September and October, right? At least that’s what they did last year. And then what that added spend did, like, you know, you can just see, look, at August, they were only showing up for 200 keywords in PPC for regular sponsored products that jumped up to 500 in September and it looks like 400 in October. And then for some reason come November it goes way down.
Bradley Sutton:
They were only showing up for a hundred keywords in sponsored ads. So now I’m looking at this and I can kind of like prepare for Q4 a little bit, alright? If this is the number one player, this is who I’m competing with, maybe I’m gonna save my spend in September and October and go hard in November during, you know, peak Christmas shopping season when he’s holding back. Or I could look at it opposite, maybe I’m looking at this and I’m like, wait a minute, maybe he’s trying to get ranked for keywords and going hard on sponsored ads before those keywords jump up in volume. But guess what, guys? This is not a guessing game. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go directly, I’m gonna choose September and I’m going to look at Cerebro as of September, 2022. All right? I want to see what he is ranking for completely.
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s go ahead and look at his, his sponsored rank. Where was he ranking highly for in sponsored keywords in the month of September, 2022. And let’s give it some search volume. Let’s, let’s give it at least like 200 search volume. Let’s take a look. Alright, so take a look here. These are keywords that he was, I put one to 10. Let’s go really to the ones that he was showing up for in top of search. Let’s go one to five in sponsored keywords. And now right here I have the 66 keywords. He was either doing a top of search bid modifier to get to the top of page or he was just doing a super high bid last year, right? And then I can kind of see right here, which ones did that help get him organic rank. And look at this, there are some keywords here.
Bradley Sutton:
Look at this shelf dividers. He was going hot and heavy on this keyword. 18,000 search, 17,000 search volume. He was number one sponsored and number one in organic rank for that time period. All right maybe I’m wondering, hey, did this get him to be one of the top clicked or top purchased? I don’t need to guess. Let’s look into the brand analytics. It’s right here. This is another one of the four things that people are not looking at. Alright, we’ve gone through three of them. Now I’m gonna hit this ABA total click share, which is 18.8%. I’m gonna click this and I want to go back to September of 2022. Let’s look up week by week on September of 2022. Lemme just go to the beginning of September and let’s go to the end of September.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, so here we go. Week by week, what were the top products picked? All right in the very beginning of September, he was not one of the top clicked. But look at this guys, this is crazy. I love it. After a couple weeks of heavy PPC spend, the week of September 16th, 2022, who was the number one clicked ASIN for this keyword right here? Metaphor, clear acrylic shelf divide the product that we are looking at now. So he went from not even being in the top three to the top three, the, the next week week 18 to 24, he was still number one. He increased his conversion share to 14%. Out of all the purchases that happened for this keyword, this guy had 14% of all the sales. And then the next week after that, the very end of the month, that going to October, you can kind of see he dialed back a little bit and now he became the third, the third biggest seller.
Bradley Sutton:
Right? Now, let’s see what about right now, what the last three months? What if I want to see what happened in July? Take a look right here. This is what showing what is going on here in July or last month, July. Right now we’re pretty much in September. In July, 2023, he was the number one clicked product and it was almost all organic. Look at his sponsored rank. Average was 15, meaning he was showing up at the bottom of page one, maybe top of page two in sponsored results. So could this be why he focuses so much in September and October? Maybe he’s got some data that says, you know, like, I could be the top clicked one without having to do sponsored ads too much in the month of July. Look at this, in May, going back two months in May, he wasn’t even advertising for this keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
He wasn’t even doing a sponsored ad for this product in the month of May, but he still was able to maintain click share of 20%. This is the power of this information guys. We’re taking brand analytics, which is directly from the horse’s mouth, directly from Amazon and comparing it to Helium 10 data, which shows organic rank and sponsored rank to reverse engineer this competitor’s strategy. So guys, this is available for the Diamond plan and and above. So if you guys, I hope you guys can see this. If you can’t really see the value of this, then I’m not sure you guys are putting your best foot forward because if you understand Amazon and understand the power of looking at what competitors do, you probably are sitting there like, wow, this is kind of like mind blowing. What is possible?
Bradley Sutton:
This is stuff that you couldn’t even dream about doing two, three years ago because this data just wasn’t around either from Amazon or from Helium 10. Now this wasn’t the complete kind of like a mind blowing thing. The thing that I’m gonna be focusing on guys in my episode 500, one of the things is what’s called that is that first thing I showed you that Amazon recommended. Take your top product, your top ASIN, find your top asin, copy it and run a new cerebral search for it. I want to match type and I hit Amazon recommended, okay? And then I hit apply filters. If you have a mature product, it should be like a thousand. Kinda like this product has been around for two years. Now I want you to click the Amazon recommended rank column. So now it should rank it from one and going on.
Bradley Sutton:
Now this is what is critical guys. Let me explain what we’re looking at right here. Helium 10 is the only place where you can get this right now. This is showing you what, according to the Amazon scoring system, what Amazon advertising views as the keywords most relevant to this product. Now, this is not helium 10 hacking, you know, this user’s account, but there’s a backend thing that Helium 10 has access to. And we’ve had access to this for years and we’ve shown it for years. But this has kind of been a sleeper thing here, but this is what is going to show you how Amazon views your product. Alright, so tell me guys, in your top, let, let’s say 20 keywords here, do you see keywords that are super hyper relevant to your product? Let’s take a look at this product. Again, I’ve never looked at this product before today.
Bradley Sutton:
These, these are acrylic shelf virus. Look at the number one keyword that Amazon thinks is relevant closet shelf. Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. This is for closet shelves, closet organization, number two, shelf divider, number three office shelf, bedroom organization, acrylic shelf divider. I think that was the keyword that we, that literally was the keyword that we used to find this product. All right? So now it’s like, okay, these people are, or this product Amazon is really showing, you know, kind of, well, it really understands this product. I’m gonna go a lot deeper into this guys, but I have been testing this and crazy stuff. This has not always been the case, otherwise I would’ve made it more of a big deal about this before. But the Amazon algorithm has changed in the last, it’s always changing, but it has this aspect of it has really changed where this Amazon recommended rank, which is based on an Amazon data point.
Bradley Sutton:
This is not some Helium 10 estimation or algorithm or something. It is highly predictive of the kind of success you’re gonna have with either PPC impressions or even ranking organically after interactions. And here’s the one thing, it is a little, little hint, it’s almost too much information I’m giving out. Have any of you ever had trouble ranking for a keyword where it’s like, Hey, this keyword is the number one. Like not, maybe not number one, but this keyword is super, super important to me and I know I’m getting sales from it, but I can’t get past like page or position 10 on page one. I can’t get past position 20. Like what’s going on? Like, I’m like one of the top ones. Check what your Amazon recommended rank is for that keyword and if it’s below 10 or something, maybe it’s something like 25 or 30 or, or even worse.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s the answer right there of why maybe you are having trouble ranking. Alright, so there’s four things that we went over today. I think that most of you, none of you are using all of them. A couple of these, maybe some of you guys have. But number one, look at the other placements in sponsored and just other widgets that you, you or your competitors are coming up with being sponsored brand video, you know sponsored brand header as the Amazon’s choice widget, the highly rated widget. It’ll give you a more holistic view of where your competitors are showing up, where you are showing up in search results that things like Search Query Performance is not gonna give you any data on. Number two, take a look at the historical ranks of your competitors’ products and your products. Where were you? What, what do they do on a historical basis of where they’re concentrating their PPC spend where they are, how many keywords they’re ranking for organically month by month over the last two years.
Bradley Sutton:
And then the third thing that we went through today was this Amazon recommended rank to see how Amazon thinks that how relevant you are for the keywords that you think and that you know you are relevant for. These are all super important things that I think not enough people are looking at. You know, how many or there’s actually four things I mentioned there, but do that and you get a leg up on the competition, especially now coming into Q4. Super important to do these things in Q4 and looking at it from a historical viewpoint too, because now you wanna know what your competitors do differently, what they are doing right now, you know, August, September is not the exact same strategy. I mean, how many of you guys just don’t do anything in Q4? Like maybe, maybe some of you guys, you know, you’re, you’re not in a niche that that has, you know, has a lot of gift giving or new keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay? Maybe you guys aren’t doing much, but I would say 90% of you, you guys probably add some Christmas related keywords or you add some other targets in there, right? So this is going to be critical for you guys to be able to reverse engineer what your competitors are doing during this time period. Now we’re gonna open this up to questions that any of you guys have, but this is what we do every week. Those who are in our Serious Sellers Club, if you to get in our Serious Sellers Club, it, it’s for our higher end sellers. You’ve done about $500,000 worth of sales in the last year. Then you’re automatically entered into our, our secret Facebook group where you know, you guys can network with each other. And we do these weekly trainings every single week, 52 weeks a year.
Bradley Sutton:
One question, best way to increase reviews, easiest way guys is Helium 10 Follow Up and then setting the request a review template, alright? That’s just my go-to. Now, back in the day, I used to make custom emails. I used to make custom emails and, and they were really great. But then what happens is, is Amazon, even though emails are totally fine they, they just get bent outta shape over some minor, minor thing, which is not, you know, in any way against terms of service but to whatever bot that Amazon is using. It just thinks that it is. And so it would like sometimes suspend me for sending messages for like 30 days or not me, but other people. So for me, just so I can sleep at night and I don’t have to worry about ever getting suspended, I only use the Amazon request review template that is inside of Helium 10 Follow-Up.
Bradley Sutton:
And then I set it to after how many days the order goes. So like, let’s just say I’ve got a supplement. Well, I don’t want that email to go out right away. So I said it like, Hey, send this 20 days after the product was ordered, send this request review out. If I’ve got like some party supply, which I do have a lot of like straws and stuff like that, I’ll put that a little bit sooner. I’ll be like, send this seven days after the item was ordered. Send this request or review out or eight days. So easiest way to increase reviews ’cause it’s completely free if you have Helium 10 and all, all levels of Helium 10 have that Platinum, Diamond, Elite. Any other helium 10 related questions I can get to before we get going here?
Bradley Sutton:
What is the normal rate conversion for review? All right, so you’re probably, you know, in Follow Up you can actually kind of see like what kind of rating what kind of rating you guys get review rating in there, right? So it varies by product. You know, I can do the same exact strategy for two different products and it’s going to it’s going to show different, it’s gonna show different different things. Like I had one for an egg tray that I used to get one rating for every five orders. It was insane, right? That that’s just like unheard of crazy. And all I was doing was a request review, right? Other products get one out of every 10, you know, ratings, right? Other products go one out of every 25, right?
Bradley Sutton:
If you are one out of every a hundred, if you could only get one rating out of every a hundred reviews, or I’m sorry, a hundred reviews, a hundred orders, you probably don’t even have request review on. So you can actually see this inside of your Helium 10 FollowU p. Like here’s one of my accounts like the ones that I’m tracking and I’m not requesting a review a across the board on this. I’m actually not requesting the review completely, but it’s only like 3% here. So like one out of every, you know, 30 or so, 30 to 40 reviews I’m getting a rating on. But if I were to actually go in here and look at the product level, some of my products are, are doing much better than than that. That’s just my overall account, which I don’t even have it on, on, on everything.
Bradley Sutton:
Make sure you’re looking at that guys, because if you start it, you wanna know kind of like if it’s gonna have an effect, it always should have like a, you know, a few percent effect on your review velocity for sure. I’m actually curious. I’m gonna look at like my old July numbers. Yeah, look at July guys. You guys were looking at what my review rate was just for this month, but look at July, where it, it requested more reviews. I had 130 reviews requested and look at my request rating to conversion rate 8%. That’s pretty decent. 8% almost one out of every 10 orders, 11 orders or so, I got a review or a rating, I should say the keywords tab instead of the products tab. Manny says, according to which criteria does the Amazon recommended rank work?
Bradley Sutton:
It’s not a criteria. It it that that’s an actual Amazon data point that we are pulling from. All right? So it’s how Amazon scores keywords to a listing. And if you’re asking me how does that work on Amazon slide, nobody could tell you other than Amazon itself and they would never disclose that information, but, you know, you gotta just use common sense that it’s whatever their relevancy kind of like mechanism is where they just look at the how the listing is is optimized and maybe the history of interactions of customers with listings similar to that. You know, like, you know, if you were to ask anybody, if anybody tells you they know how that works, then they’re lying because none of us know exactly how it works. I mean, there’s so many scientific documents that Amazon has published and you could like look at it and kind of like understand how Amazon is making their algorithms, but there’s no like one exact formula where you can just reverse engineer reverse engineer that wish I was Mark Cuban says, when checking the Amazon recommended for competitors, should I do this for one competitor product at a time or many competitors product at once?
Bradley Sutton:
Very good question. The answer is either or if I just wanna look at like, hey, what is the number one guy or gal doing? And that’s what we did today. We looked at the number one seller for those acrylic, whatever the heck is we are looking at shelf dividers or something. We want to, we want to maybe reverse engineer what they specifically are doing because they’re just night and day better than the rest of that, that niche, right? Or maybe there’s like six or seven kind of like, you know, very on the, on the same level competitors. I can put all of them in there and then check what is the highest Amazon recommended rank average meaning that these are five top competitors. And by looking at the average, now I know what most of them or what Amazon is finding most of ’em relevant.
Bradley Sutton:
Now how, I’m glad you brought this up. Why is that beneficial? That’s beneficial in itself is because now if they’re listing optimization is similar, you know, like the main keywords that they’re using and you are using some of the main keywords and your listing optimization and vibe is similar to that one price point, et cetera. Well, what does that mean? Now you can almost predict what your Amazon recommended rank is or how Amazon is gonna view your listing relevant if you’re using those listings to kind of structure yours. I’m not saying copy the listings, nobody should ever copy listings, but obviously if you’re in the coffin shelf niche, you’re gonna do stuff that’s similar. Like, Hey, I’m gonna have the word coffin shelf like two or three times in my listing, duh, right? Doesn’t mean I’m copying it, but it just, it allows you now to predict that, hey, if, if I’m using a lot of the same keywords and optimizing my listing around it, I now know that Amazon’s probably gonna, you know, right off the bat view me relevant for these because I can see that Amazon or these other listings are relevant to Amazon for it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay? So as a reminder if you’re part of our Serious Sellers Club or Elite members, elite members get this too. Whether they’re part of the Serious Sellers Club or not you guys get this trained every Monday or Tuesday at 11:00 AM Pacific time. So make sure that you’re getting the invites for this. If you’re not in our Serious Sellers Club Facebook group and you know, you have at least $500,000 of sales in the last 12 months, make sure hit up customer service. They’ll help you get into that Facebook group so you can take advantage of these trainings every week. We’ve got about 900 members there in that Facebook group who, who network with each other throughout the week. And guys, you notice today I’m wearing my Tokyo shirt. By the time you’re watching this, if you’re watching this on the podcast, I’ll probably be in Tokyo.
Bradley Sutton:
So next week I won’t be on this call I’ll be in Japan, but September I’m gonna be on the road a lot guys. So I hope to see you guys at some of the events I am going to be at. Let me get a couple of the the next one. The first one that I’m going to be at is going to be in Amazon Accelerate. In Seattle. We’re actually gonna have a networking social on the 11th. Alright? So if you’re gonna be in Seattle, Amazon 11th through the 14th about make sure to come out to Amazon Accelerate you Elite members, you’ve got a workshop on the 11th that you guys can go to if you’re a Serious Sellers Club member. I sent out an email saying a few of you guys I can get on a scholarship to get into that that Elite training that normally you have to pay $600 for.
Bradley Sutton:
So make sure to go to the Facebook group and hit me up there if I didn’t give you guys a hookup for that. And that’s the 11th to the 14th on the September the I think it’s the 16th, all right? Yeah, September the 16th. I’m gonna be in Milan, Italy at an event with Simon. And so if you guys wanna attend that, just go to h10.me/italy. So that’s on the 16th, I’ll be there. And then after that I’m going to the Maldives to Film episode 500. We, I’m gonna continue this conversation. I don’t think you guys can join me on that, but anybody who wants to feel free and then busy, busy October, I’ll be seeing you guys hopefully at Amazon unboxed at the end of the month. That’ll be in New York.
Bradley Sutton:
And then another event, I’m doing, seller velocity. There we go. The link is h10.me/velocity. That’s another event I’m doing on the 11th in New York City of October. All right, so h10.me/velocity, if you guys would like to attend that. And then right after that is Amazon unboxed and I’ll also be in Korea on the October 19th doing an event there, h10.me/kconference. If you guys are in Asia, wanna make a quick flight over to Seoul, Korea, h10.me/kconference. So a lot of cool events happening in September and October. I hope to see you guys at one of them. But until then, have a great time and we’ll see you next week on this weekly training. Bye-Bye now.
Amazon and Shopify are partnering with the Buy with Prime service, Recapping the Walmart Seller Summit, and a new Helium 10 tool just released yesterday! This and much more on this episode of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Chris McCabe calls 2023 a “wacky and wild year” in the Amazon space. Tune in as he dives into key events and trends that have shaped the Amazon-selling landscape. From the headline-grabbing antitrust lawsuit, FTC vs. Amazon, to how the new Inform Act has been affecting sellers in the US, we dissect the topics that matter.
In this episode, discover what common mistakes Amazon sellers are making and the consequences they face. Our expert emphasizes the critical role of interpreting Amazon’s policies accurately to maintain a thriving seller account. We also tackle the challenges of managing multiple Amazon brand accounts, shedding light on potential issues that arise. In an insightful twist, we explore Amazon’s rollback of account enforcements in 2023, Brand Registry revocations, and offer a cautionary note on the rise of new blackhat tactics that sellers should be wary of.
Lastly, we talk about the rollout of a new module for Freedom Ticket with Chris McCabe, and don’t miss out on the Seller Velocity Event, a must-attend gathering for anyone seeking to excel in the Amazon marketplace!
In episode 487 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Chris discuss:
- 02:34 – 2023: A Wacky And Wild Year In The Amazon Space
- 04:17 – Antitrust Lawsuit: FTC vs. Amazon
- 10:52 – A New Module For Freedom Ticket With Chris McCabe
- 14:15 – What Are Amazon Sellers Getting In Trouble For?
- 15:18 – Interpretation Of Amazon’s Policies Is Vital
- 16:07 – Talking About The Inform Act
- 17:55 – Join Us For The Seller Velocity Event
- 20:58 – Issues With Having Multiple Amazon Brand Accounts
- 24:53 – Amazon Rolled Back Account Enforcements In 2023
- 25:45 – Watch Out For These Blackhat Tactics In 2023
- 27:07 – Amazon Brand Registry Revoked Issues
- 29:56 – Top Amazon Policy Compliance Tips From Chris
- 31:39 – Buyer Messaging Issues You Could Get In Trouble For
- 33:55 – How To Contact Chris McCabe
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we bring back one of the world’s foremost experts on Amazon suspensions and compliance issues, and he’s gonna give us an update on things that’s gonna get you in and out of trouble. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Black Box by Helium 10 House is the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world outside of Amazon itself. We have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces, from USA to Australia to Germany and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might wanna get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me/blackbox. Don’t forget, you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.
Bradley Sutton:
And we’ve got a serious person here. Chris is one of the very few who have been on the podcast now four times. As you guys know, we have like one per year kind of like rule kind of thing. And, and we don’t always invite everybody back. Like we try and invite back the ones who everybody kind of request because they’re either very interesting or they have interesting topics or both, like in Chris’s case here. So if you guys wanna get the, we’re not gonna go full on into his backstory. If you want to check out some previous episodes, guys, you got a pen. He was first on episode 24, way back in 2019, episode 24 of the podcast. Then he was in 151 and he was also in 278. So we covered lots of things, but these are, you know, I would say just go to 24 to see his backstory.
Bradley Sutton:
But when we talk about the topic we’re talking about today, which is, you know, like compliance and, and legal things and stuff, I would almost say that those older episodes don’t, don’t even listen to it because these kind of things change like every year. And so this is the episode that you guys want to listen to because we’re gonna talk about what is happening here in August, September of 2023. And a lot has happened in 2023. But first of all let’s just see how you doing, Chris, you know, I’ve seen you a couple times in the past few months in different parts of the world including Japan. How’s your travels been?
Chris:
Japan was amazing. I spoke at an event in Istanbul, which was also interesting. This is the first year, by the way. Thanks. And kudos to you for doing unscripted. I like this. One reason I like coming back over and over is because of the authenticity of this podcast, and thank you so much. The approach you use, which makes it not only enjoyable, but informative and also fresh and different and interesting which given, appreciate that giving a lot of content out there. Not even, not even podcast glut, but like Amazon related content. That’s one reason why this is, you know, one of the better podcasts out there.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you so much.
Chris:
It’s always a pleasure and privilege to be back on. I like what you said also about 2023 has just been a wacky and wild year for, I don’t even know how many reasons we can touch on in the next, you know, 45 minutes. But it’s been so zany to the extent of even a seasoned veteran like myself has been kind of impressed. And it does, it doesn’t or it does take a lot to impress me in this space because sometimes I’ve had trouble predicting what Amazon’s going to do next. And sometimes I’ve also had trouble predicting what business owners and sellers and even service providers might do in reaction to things Amazon’s doing. And to top it all off as of today recording, you know, we’re recording in August of 2023 on the cusp of the filing of the antitrust lawsuit by the FTC and the government against Amazon. So it’s just a crazy way to start Q4.
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s talk about that real briefly, because I don’t know, you know, maybe you have your own opinion. I’ll give you my opinion and whether it’s right or wrong, still, just my opinion, it doesn’t really count for much. But when I, when I first talked about that, that story in the weekly news, I was like, you know, I was reading these stories about how the head of the FTC is like kind of banking on this being her big bang. And I’m like, this is not the right move if you’re looking to make a splash. I’m not sure if she understands the Amazon seller’s viewpoint, but for me, there is a lot of problems that Amazon sellers have with Amazon. You know, like, like it’s not perfect. Everybody understands it, but we still love Amazon. But if we were to pick something that we wanna, like, go against Amazon for the preference to FBA listings or prime listings would be like maybe 75th on, on the list.
Bradley Sutton:
Because like we, we love FBA, like, it makes to me, we, I say we, but I love FBA, it makes sense to me that the algorithm would favor FBA listings because I’m not gonna deliver in one day to customers, you know, like, I can’t, I mean, sure I could, but I’d be paying FedEx $40 in order for that. You know, like I have zero problem with Amazon prioritizing FBA, not to mention now they’re bringing back seller fulfilled prime, which almost negates this whole thing of oh, only FBA things. But is this kind of like your take as well, or do you have a little bit different on this?
Chris:
It’s such a big topic. The first thing is what’s the history of lawsuits that tried to break up companies? Most people think back to the 1980s and Atlantic Bell and Pacific Bell and Southern Bell had to be split up from Bell, right? Bell was a conglomerate. They, they wanted to split it up into regional pieces. But I mean, aside from the Bell case, and then I think it was 1984, how many other companies have been broken up with antitrust lawsuits? Yeah. Not that many.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah.
Chris:
So you start from a position of you are not expecting Amazon to be broken up. Disclaimer, I’m not an antitrust legal expert by any means. I’m an interested observer like you are, like a lot of people are. I probably know a little bit more about it than the average person or the average Amazon business owner, because I was one of the subject matter experts for the House subcommittee’s investigation back in 2020. So of course I was on calls with people who were investigating it. I’m cited in the report, this is in a secret, this is public knowledge, but I’m not, that doesn’t makes me by no means an antitrust lawyer. Yeah. I am still looking at it in terms of my interest in how the marketplace shakes out.
Chris:
Not AWS I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about AWS and some of the other parts of the Amazon universe like you, I’m thinking about brands and Amazon sellers, and especially anything that would impact our clients or future clients. And so it’ll be interesting to see how this topic shakes out from the seller perspective, because I’m not sure people really know or understand how it will, it’s definitely gonna come up at the Seller Velocity Conference that, you know, we’re co-organizing with Helium in the fall, October 11th and 12th in New York. But when the lawsuit is filed, which will be pretty soon, maybe after Labor Day, I think that’s when people will start showing their cards a little bit, and then I’ll kind of come back with maybe more of an assessment on, Hey, this is like really far wide ranging investigation that’s led to a far reaching lawsuit, or will they narrowly define what they’re interested in here? I think it’s just gonna be a fascinating chapter in Amazon’s history. And Amazon to a certain extent right now atleast controls the chart and path of e-commerce history, and we’re all e-commerce enthusiasts. And we’re all interested in entrepreneurship and brands and brand expansion. I mean, it’s one of the, the main focuses of the Seller Velocity conference every year. So how rough and tumble it gets. I don’t know.
Bradley Sutton:
I just think that in general, you know, like sometimes there’s people out there, there’s influencers who try and always be antiaz Amazon and this and that, right? But when it comes down to it, guys, not one of us should ever be rooting for something like this to happen whether we think Amazon is right or wrong. Because if something like this ever goes through, well guess who’s the ones who’s gonna suffer. It’s gonna be us as sellers, you know, our fees are gonna go up and, and it’s gonna be more difficult to do things. So like but anyways, yeah. Let’s not harp too much on this because it’s still a lot of speculation still too early. Let’s talk about what’s affecting sellers, you know, nowadays. And actually just interestingly coming up on Freedom Ticket, you have recorded or are recording, I believe, by the time this episode airs a brand new module for, for Freedom Ticket even, right?
Chris:
Let’s start with that because I’ve been working on that a lot this week. Nice. Still putting on the final touches, and I wanna make sure Helium 10’s happy with it before you post it and publish it. But I’ve enjoyed doing it. I think it’s important material. It’s all geared around avoiding account or ASIN suspensions and I think it’s really important, especially it’s great that you’re launching it ready for Q4 because of the compliance issues, because of the nature of compliance investigations on specific listings. Because I can’t tell you how many times we hear from brand owners who have their hero product, their ASINs, that are giving them the most revenue per day, per week, per month, suddenly flagged for review, suddenly suspended. In some cases, Amazon just hints that they’re going to suspend it, but they don’t tell you whether or not they’ve decided yet, which is a bit tricky.
Chris:
But it’s better than having them suspend those listings outright and just saying, yeah, well now you’re in the reinstatement strategy protocols, and that can go either way. That can cut good, that can cut bad. Because that puts sellers back on their heels in terms of, well, are you ready for this? You might have only had a day or two to prepare to have to appeal for your bestselling ASIN to go down. And as you know, we work with brands that if they lose a top selling ASIN some of our clients, they’re losing 40 or $50,000 every day that that listing’s down.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. So guys, if you want to get the full module, those of you who are Helium 10 members, just go hit the Learning Hub, and then go to Freedom Ticket 3.0, and then go to week two, and it’ll be right here in 2.14 is where Chris’s module will be. Now we don’t wanna just give away the whole thing right in here, but just in general, 2023, what are the main things that people are getting in trouble for legitimate, you know, like, obviously there’s always new Black Hat strategies that are out there. Course, and we can talk about that, but, but what about legitimate sellers, maybe unknowingly are getting in trouble for in 2023? And
Chris:
I’m glad you mentioned there’s always black hat. So Amazon is overcompensating for some of the Black Hat by punishing sellers that haven’t done something wrong and accusing them of harming another seller or harming a competitor. There’s a huge spike in complaints to Amazon from brands complaining about other competitors attacking them. So we are getting some clients who are falsely accused of it, who have to dispute it. So there are people that will start getting some messages. We’ve detected some behavior where you’ve harmed another seller, not so much that you’ve damaged buyer experience. It’s not so much about buyers that you’ve attacked another seller in the marketplace. We can set that aside for now. I definitely address that in the module because it’s important. And as we’ve seen, sometimes Amazon over enforces just to make sure they get all the bad characters right?
Chris:
It doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. It doesn’t mean it can’t be appealed. You can definitely fix it and appeal it. But beyond that there’s a lot of listing violations that are being flagged for a variety of reasons. Some sellers have created listings erroneously for a while, and they were never flagged. They were never reported, and now they’re getting reported and they’re confused. We’ve been doing this for two years, for two months. We’ve been putting certain terms, let’s say certain claims like health claims in the title. We’ve been using certain health claims in back, let’s just say supplements, right? For example, we’ve been putting certain health claims in backend. Keywords are in the title, and we were never flagged before. Why are we getting flagged now? It could just be because they’ve never been reported for doing it before.
Chris:
So a competitor did report them, the report was from the competitor, but it was a valid complaint. It wasn’t an unsubstantiated attack. So I think some sellers are suddenly put back on their heels by these investigations again, they might just get a note saying, you’re being reviewed, you’re not necessarily suspended yet. Or, it’s an auto suspension because of the keywords they’re using that the terms they’re using that should have been deleted. Some of it’s the sellers themselves doing it and not realizing they’re making mistakes. On some occasions, we’ve seen them hiring outside agencies or consultants that don’t know compliance. They’re marketing people, the revenue generation people, their salespeople, but they don’t know the policies. And sometimes they don’t know the laws, the relevant laws, or the FBA, you know, or the EPA, let’s say agencies and how they’ve interpreted the laws.
Chris:
So it’s kind of like the same as getting into trouble with Amazon because you interpreted policy one way, and Amazon interprets it another way. You always have to kind of change how you interpret it and make sure you match Amazon’s interpretation. Yeah. unless they’re wrong, there’s always the caveat. If Amazon’s interpreting their own policy incorrectly, and I can tell you this, and Leah who works with us can tell you this all the time. Amazon interprets their own policies wrong. Some, occasionally it’s going to happen to everyone at some point, but for the rest of the time, you have to make sure that your interpretation of their policies matches their interpretation without really thinking that you can just battle them backwards and force them to take your way. Because we’ve seen some sellers and some brand owners grab a lawyer, they think they can get a lawyer to write a letter for them and send it to Amazon and back Amazon off. If there’s no legitimate standing to that argument, that’s not going to be any more effective than a seller support case.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now I think that something that everybody was scared about, you know, two, three months ago obviously, was when the inform act came, and then people were getting like, Hey, your account’s gonna get suspended. But, you know, the dust has kind of settled. Amazon like admittedly, they didn’t have a good rollout. The system was broken and, and people were getting messages, even though they had done stuff, and it was kind of crazy. They would say, you need to submit your postcard. And then, and then before we even got the postcard and the message disappeared, so you’re like, Hey, is everything good? And like, I have not heard of any, like, mass suspensions or, or things like that, but do you have anything you say about this? Like just moving forward, like, just to put a lid on this, like, Hey guys, just if you’re a new seller, get all this in a row. If you haven’t done something, do this. Or can we say about the whole inform act stuff? Yeah.
Chris:
And I can do that pretty quickly and concisely. The Inform Act is did not result in a giant batch of suspensions. That’s one of the feel good stories of 2023. We did hear from some sellers suspended, we did work with people to iron that out. It was a fixable problem in most cases. Some sellers, I think, were slow to react to the Inform Act and didn’t get their paperwork straight, didn’t get their documentation consistent. And some people panicked, appealed the wrong way. That’s typical of suspensions. Most of them were able to get it resolved before they got suspended. Some people had to do it after they got suspended. But account verification suspensions are kind of what the Inform Act stuff morphed back into. And verification and identity verification is with us forever. Amazon’s trying to improve their KYC, their know your customer procedures.
Chris:
Even they were even doing that before the Inform Act was passed, and there’s a good reason why they’re doing it. And there’s a good reason why banks have been doing more to bolster their KYC procedures. That’s just the age we’re living in. Know, your customer is something that every platform, every business, everyone needs to pay close attention to. Because if you’re not paying attention to who sellers are in the marketplace, example, then you, Amazon could be exposing their buyers to actors, bad actors, or misleading misrepresented business owners. And it reflects badly on them and their reputation for managing the marketplace. So yeah, as long as you understand that verification procedures are serious and you’re not really loose with your documentation, you understand that everything in Seller Central has to match up with the documentation you present, whether it’s your name, your address bank statements and so forth. You should be. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Tell us a little bit more about the seller Velocity conference coming up. Like the last year, Carrie went, I wasn’t able to go, so this is gonna be my first time. So I’m just interested what, what I can look forward to. I know what I’m gonna be talking about, and I’m gonna be presenting, but I don’t know. You know, like how many people are, are you expecting. What kind of activities you have, et cetera.
Chris:
Yeah. We’re expecting right around a hundred people, which is what we do. This is our, this is our fifth incarnation. We’re going back to New York City this year. That’s where the first one was in 2018. I’m sure you’ll have lots of info in the notes about it. It’s a two day event. We have a networking heavy event on the second day of the event. The first day is the conference, so-called Conference day, which will be in Midtown Manhattan. We got great speakers like you. I mentioned Joe Kovac earlier. We’ve got Janelle Page, who a lot of people in the community know she’s gonna be our MC this year. So you won’t have to listen to me J Drone on and on. You can listen to Janelle, who’s a lot more exciting to listen to than I am.
Chris:
But the theme this year is going to be optimizing performance as a means of driving your brand’s growth on Amazon or beyond Amazon. And we focused on this this year because we’re really seeing that competition, competition, at least on Amazon, is unprecedented. You have to have such a tight game now. You can’t afford to learn as you go. You can’t afford more than a certain number of mistakes per year, whether it’s in your ads, whether it’s in your account, health management whether it’s in ASIN creation, listing content and detail page content. You really have to have a well-rounded, highly tuned game all the time. You know, we even have started telling people in terms of their communication strategy with Amazon to start writing drafts of potential appeals they might have to have in place just in case lightning strikes.
Chris:
So you won’t be left scrambling trying to figure out how to escalate, how to appeal for reinstatement. Again, not being caught unaware and rolling back on your heels when account health calls you or compliance teams come knocking on your door. Have the game plan in place before things happen, because I can guarantee you some of your competitors are thinking that way and they’re worried about things maybe before you worry about them, or they’re planning for a rainy day before there’s a problem. It doesn’t have to be a problem with Amazon directly. It could be a problem with a competitor who’s really savvy, who knows how to game the system, who knows how to make you look bad, let’s say. Or they simply know how to make themselves look better than they’re supposed to look because they are getting away with padding their reviews or something like that. Those things matter. Those things directly impact sales rank. So those are the types of topics and many more that we’ll be covering this year.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Cool. All right. So guys, if you want to register go to h10.me/velocity, h10.me/velocity. What about, you know, another thing that I kind of wanna put a lid on, because I always hear just conflicting things is, you know, from Amazon even and that’s the matter of multiple accounts. I think everybody understands that, whether they get approved from Amazon or not you gotta have different bank accounts and different entities, and there’s gotta be a reason, you know, and stuff like that. But then the differing thing where people talk about is, oh no, you don’t need to ask Amazon permission anymore. Just go ahead and do it, and it’s all good, and you’re not gonna have to worry about it. Now, I mentioned this just ’cause literally last night, somebody at our company at Helium 10 she’s been wanting to start her own Amazon business, and then somehow her name was, I don’t even know, like she was never an admin on this other account, but we had a company account, like a company, it wasn’t even the Project X account.
Bradley Sutton:
I don’t even know what account this was, but she got her new account shut down saying, oh yeah, we think you’re the same as this person. So on one hand I’m like, well, if this is not even an issue anymore, and it’s not even the same, it wasn’t like, you know, with her social security number or something, she had started another account, or I mean, it, it was just that she worked for a company, Helium 10 that had this other account. To me, it’s still an issue then of, of this whole multiple account thing. It’s not something that just, you know, you can just be, yeah, lemme just start seven accounts, and I don’t even have to ask Amazon. Like, is this just a outlier experience or do you still need to be careful when starting new accounts?
Chris:
It’s true that you don’t need to ask for permission in the old days. Back in my Seller Performance days, you had to ask for permission until Seller Performance. Granted it not Seller Support, Seller Performance, the team I used to work on had to give you written permission. Those are the old days. Basically, they didn’t want a deluge of emails asking them if they could have, you know, spend time looking at whether or not it was justified. So they basically said, here’s the policy. You need to read it, understand it, and make sure you don’t violate it. If you do violate it, we’ll come knocking on your door. But here’s the policy. We think it’s clear. Of course sellers might disagree how clear it is. What they’re mostly interested in is not seeing a competitive advantage. Like if you have two accounts selling the same type of products, maybe not the same exact brand.
Chris:
If you have the same ASINs on two accounts, the same brand on two accounts, then it looks like you’re just trying to create multiple storefronts so you can game the system and have a competitive advantage over somebody that has one seller account. That was the intention of the policy going back to my years of the company. And that’s still the core piece that they’re most interested in in terms of seller compliance. What a lot of sellers were doing wrong was they thought, well, as long as I have an account with a different LLC and a different email address and a different, bank account, well then the rest of it doesn’t matter. They weren’t thinking about is this a competitive advantage over another seller or not. And of course, the Amazon’s interested in having a fair marketplace. It’s not a fair marketplace if one seller has a competitive advantage over another, number one. Number two, all the copycats will come out and do the same thing. If it works, if Amazon lets anything go, anything goes, it’s you. They’ll slide by anybody. Then everyone’s going to do it. And then you start getting into, I mean, we already know that a lot of accounts based in China are run by people who have dozens or hundreds of accounts, right? The message that your coworker or staffer got, I assume it wasn’t about being related to a suspended or blocked account. It only mentioned multiple accounts.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, I believe so. I didn’t see the message, but that’s what it sounds like.
Chris:
Probably a mistake. They’re not really sending those messages that much anymore. Again, that’s kind of what–
Bradley Sutton:
I thought too.
Chris:
Yeah. That’s sort of another feel good story of 2023. People probably think we’re always talking about dark clouds and bad news around here. No, that’s the second good story is that they have rolled back multiple account enforcement, and I did some digging into it again, 10, 12 days ago when I was in Seattle. And I realized that a lot of investigators at Amazon, I think were sending that message in error. They were kind of grabbing the wrong dropdown, and in a lot of cases they meant to send a message about related accounts, but that was for related to a suspended seller, which is totally different than multiple accounts. And some investigators at Amazon were mixing and matching and confusing the two, which is alarming because those are two totally different concepts.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah.
Chris:
For whatever reason, those mistakes are being made, I think most people in your audience, and, and most people in the Amazon seller community will tell you that they’re seeing that message less and that’s a good thing, and it’s the right thing.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Alright, cool. Now let’s switch back to the other thing we kind of alluded to about like black hat, you know, things, like every year, the main thing is, is is different. There’s been, you know, black hat for themselves, they use brushing, and then as far as attacking other sellers, there’s, hey, you know, they, they find listings where you know, in the past where maybe in other marketplaces they didn’t, or in their market, their home marketplace, they didn’t fill all their flat file out, right? So they’ll hop in on some foreign marketplace and throw some adult keywords or health claims or something to get them all suspended. What’s in 2023? What are sellers having to deal with where they end up having to, you know, maybe even get your help or it gets them in big trouble with Amazon before they get it fixed. Yeah,
Chris:
And I’m glad you brought up the international marketplaces, because it’s not only just using illicit backend keywords in other marketplaces that you don’t sell in, but also rights, ownership issues. People who research and figure out that you don’t have a trademark registered in Canada or in the uk creating listings for your branded products in those other marketplaces, because they know that if you submit an IP claim without the trademark registration in that region, Amazon won’t accept it and will reject it. They might even punish the brand owner for submitting an unsubstantiated IP claim. This is one of the big deals in 2023, is we’ve heard from a lot of brands who had their brand registry revoked for submitting false or unsubstantiated IP claims. And there’s, that’s a huge topic we could talk about, you know, 40.
Bradley Sutton:
I like that. I mean, that might sound like, oh, this is bad news, but oh my goodness, how many messages have I seen in Facebook groups where it’s like, yeah, you know, like, I just got this message, and then I’m not really infringing, but Amazon just is telling me, oh, no, you gotta get the person who did this claim to revoke it. But it’s like that person is maliciously even doing it in the first place, so of course they’re not gonna revoke, you know, so it’s like this vicious circle. So it’s kind of good news what you just said.
Chris:
Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of a good news, bad news. Obviously. The bad news is if you are not legally aware or trained and you start submitting IP claims all over the place, which has been a problem for a while, right? A lot of brands had brand registry revoked because they were submitting false counterfeit claims against resellers that they couldn’t recognize or identify without doing test orders. And, or they would just send a note to Amazon, these people aren’t authorized to sell our products, so we want you to take ’em down. So here’s a counterfeit complaint, or here’s a trademark infringement complaint. They didn’t understand what they were doing. Or even worse, they were hiring a law firm that was helping them submit illicit IP claims simply because they wanted to collect more legal fees for something trendy, which is really scary.
Chris:
But of course, Amazon doesn’t punish the law firm you hired, they punish you as a seller, and the buck stops with you. You have to understand where these rules and policies are. So the good news is we finally succeeded. I think people like you and me and others getting the word out, don’t shoot first and ask questions later. Amazon tends to punish you for that. Make sure you do things the right way, right? If you want to deal with unauthorized sellers, control your distribution channels you know, you talk to people like Joe Kovac, who’s one of our speakers at Seller Velocity this year in New York. But also you just make sure you go one step at a time very carefully before you make any claims that could get, you, get your whole account suspended for submitting illicit IP claims or get your brand registry revoked. So we’ve seen fewer people coming to us with that problem, which means the word is successfully getting out this year.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So based on what you’re seeing around there, what are some just maybe tips that you can give to sellers out there on stuff they need to be a little, a little bit more careful about than before, or perhaps do something completely differently than before? It could be about any aspect of Amazon or even a Walmart, but what are some of the signs that you’re seeing and how should sellers pivot a little bit?
Chris:
Yeah, and I think one of the issues is understand that either your agency or your consultant, or you have to have compliance people somewhere in your ecosystem that know the policies and know local laws, because you’re not going to be able to make excuses later if you, you, and it’s also, it’s not just listing content, it’s also the info on your packaging. We’re still seeing people put offending language or violation language on their packaging itself, and sometimes they have to pull all of their items out of FBA when they make those mistakes. It’s only happening for people that haven’t thought about it before they created the packaging or before they created the listing, or before they hired people to do that sort of stuff for them. Understand that from Amazon’s perspective, that’s a you problem, not a them problem.
Chris:
They don’t think it’s up to them to tell you all the laws, all the policies. I mean, they post on the policy pages, but they think it’s up to you to understand what compliance is, right up to whether or not you have to hire an attorney to explain it to you. And I think people understand now that they’re going to lose out on a lot of sales to a lot of competitors if their competitors have their compliance act together and they don’t because their listing’s going to go down and go down for longer, and they might have to incur the cost of withdrawing inventory from FBA. And if their competitors had that all sorted out before they even went live with the product, then they’re, they’re losing sales rank too. The longer you’re down for an account I’m sorry, an ace in suspension, the other guys are beating you on on sales rink as well. So you might have all this inventory, you can’t sell, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Any, anything going on with reviews of late, you know, like the buyer seller messaging getting blocked, you know, I remember, that’s kind of old news already. But you know, like some people didn’t realize, Hey, I can’t send an email and click the request to review. Or I couldn’t infer that they give me a positive review, right? And now I can’t, you know, do messages or, or Amazon gave me a nasty note because they didn’t like my insert card, right? Anything new in 2023, we kind of like, similar to the last few years, similar
Chris:
I still see people who have five stars across their, the top of their insert that’s considered asking for a five star review, even if it’s unspoken or unwritten. Don’t have five stars at the top. And just, the only thing I’ve seen lately on inserts, just if we’re talking about inserts, is stay away from the, are you happy or, you know, do you have a problem with the order? Contact us. Here’s how you reach us. No problems with your order. Do you mind leaving us a review? Stay away from that language that’s still considered out of bounds. I’ve heard from a lot of people who buy from competitors and show me their inserts or show me whatever free gifts and discounts they’re doing and, you know, report that stuff because that shouldn’t be going on anymore. I know it’s discouraging when you open a seller support case or you send emails to the abuse prevention teams and they don’t answer, or they, unfortunately, sometimes Amazon responds and says, we took a look at what you sent us and there’s no violation here, so have a nice day.
Chris:
I mean, it is discouraging when they do that. That’s not the end of the story. They’ve done that with our clients too, and we still manage to get that done and get that reported because those sellers shouldn’t be doing those things. So just be careful. Just because your competitors are getting away with stuff doesn’t, you know, two wrongs don’t make it right. It doesn’t mean that you should be trying it too, and it doesn’t mean it’s allowable any more than looking at a detail page live on the site that shows somebody doing something and believing that it’s permissible because you see somebody doing it at any given moment. I can look at any detail page on the site and find a violation. All it means is it hasn’t been reported yet and it hasn’t been Yeah. Actioned yet.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. If you’d like to reach out to Chris to get some more help, you know, just go to hub.helium10.com. You can type in any search right there, ecommerceChris, and then just type in ecommerceChris, anywhere on the interwebs, and you can definitely be able to reach out to him. I keep telling, you know Leah, we need to make a ecommerceleah.com as well maybe, even if it’s just a forwarding link to e-commercechris.com. We’re gonna have to work on that. And
Chris:
A big thank you to you, Bradley, by the way, and Helium 10 support for this year’s conference has been wonderful and enormous and very positive and encouraging from many of many Helium 10’s teams and members. And it’s refreshing that you guys are still creative and that you’re open-minded and that you’re interested in creating new and different kinds of content, not just on this podcast, but also for in-person events. Because without you guys, this year’s Seller Velocity conference you know, would not be possible. So we thank you again for co-organizing with us and co-hosting.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Thank you so much for having us, and I’ll be seeing you there in a few weeks. Thanks. And definitely we’ll have you back on for the fifth time next year.
Chris:
Great.
Let’s dive into the world of successful Walmart-selling strategies with the latest SSP episode! Join Carrie Miller and her guest, Jake Lebhar Co-Founder and COO of SellCord, as we explore key topics such as his company’s remarkable experience managing an impressive portfolio of 250 brands on Walmart, and the burning question: Is everyone cut out to sell on Walmart.com? Tune in for invaluable insights into navigating the application process, including expert advice for sellers whose applications face rejection and application tips tailored for international sellers.
Discover Jake’s expert recommendations for launching a product on Walmart, unravel the mystery behind COMP errors on Walmart and gain a comprehensive understanding of dealing with account suspensions and compliance issues inside the Walmart marketplace. Don’t miss out on Jake’s personal journey and takeaways from the Walmart Open Call, as well as pro tips for using the Helium 10 Xray tool for Walmart. Learn about new advertising features and placements on the horizon, and dive into Jake’s top-notch advice on conquering the Walmart marketplace. Wrapping up, find out how to get in touch with Jake Lebhar and SellCord, rounding out an episode brimming with practical strategies for thriving in the Walmart marketplace.
In episode 486 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Jake discuss:
- 02:13 – Jake Lebhar’s Backstory
- 02:59 – Managing 250 Brands On Walmart
- 05:21 – Is Everyone A Good Fit To Sell On Walmart.com?
- 07:55 – Advice If Your Seller Application Is Rejected
- 11:42 – Application Tips For Sellers Outside The US
- 13:38 – Q: What Do You Suggest For Sellers Looking To Launch A Product On Walmart?
- 15:14 – What Is A COMP Error In Walmart?
- 18:46 – Talking About Walmart.com Account Suspensions
- 22:27 – Getting A Hemp Product Inside Walmart.com
- 24:20 – Is It Too Late To Sign Up For Walmart Open Call?
- 25:01 – Jake’s Walmart Open Call Experience
- 28:03 – Helium 10 Xray Tool For Walmart
- 28:16 – Tips For Launching A Brand On Walmart
- 29:38 – New Advertising Features And Placements Coming Soon
- 30:07 – How Can I Deal With Compliance Issues with Walmart?
- 31:03 – Jake’s Top Tips On How To Succeed In The Walmart Marketplace
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TranscriptCarrie Miller:
Today on the podcast, we are talking with Jake Lebhar from SellCord, and he’s gonna be sharing some strategies for sellers who maybe applied to the Walmart marketplace and got rejected. We’ll also talk about COMP Errors as well as what to do if you get suspended from the Walmart marketplace.
Bradley Sutton:
How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure to join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook, or you can actually go to h10me/walmartgroup and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join, you can tag me and Carrie with questions, and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Serious Sellers Podcast, brought to you by Helium 10. My name is Carrie Miller and I’ll be your host. And this is our winning with Walmart Wednesday show where we come live once a month and we answer all of your burning Walmart questions and we give you lots of great new up-to-date information about Walmart. Thank you all so much for joining me again today. I’m really excited ’cause we have a really special guest today from SellCord. His name is Jake Lebhar and he deals with a lot of of the questions that I get often about you know, count suspensions, COMP Errors, how to get your account activated if you were rejected from Walmart. So we have a lot of really good information coming from Jake today, so I’m really, really excited about that. So I’m gonna go ahead and bring him on.
Jake:
Hey guys, how are you Carrie?
Carrie Miller:
Good. How are you doing?
Jake:
Thank God. Easy. Wednesdays, this Walmart Wednesdays is perfect, you know.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. I’m really excited to have you on today, especially because I’ve had you help me with some comp barriers and just some difficulties that I’ve had and I’ve also kind of referred a lot of people to you to help you know, get everyone going. So I’m pretty excited to talk with you about these things today. I’m gonna start with some questions. Maybe Jake, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself and, and your whole kind of Walmart journey?
Jake:
Yeah, I’m Jake from SellCord. I’m one of the co-founders here. I work with David Millstein and Michael Lebhar, which, you know, I’m sure the listener, some of them, you know, may have seen them. They have been on quite a few webinars and Freedom Ticket and whatnot. So yeah, I started in the e-commerce space when I was 13 years old as a seller. Up until 2018, we were just selling on Amazon. We ran into issues with one of our accounts with an account suspension on Amazon actually. And that part we weren’t able to get solved, so we really moved to Walmart. At that time we had one of the first few, like 3P accounts, you know, in Walmart. So we just started spending all our time there and there were very few sellers we were sharing our sales with, like one piece sellers.
Jake:
We were selling fitness products. Covid came along and then it flew off the shelf. And yeah, ever since then we basically we started off managing a few, you know, relationships that we had in the space. We managed their Walmart accounts and in 2020 we just branched out, you know, started SellCord. And since then it’s been a crazy ride, basically launching and scaling brands on Walmart. You know, currently we’re managing over 250 brands on Walmart. You know, some clients, you know, are doing, you know, just 10% of their Amazon sales. But then we have, for example, a brand that does 750k a day on Walmart, just to give you an idea in furniture. Yeah, there’s a lot of opportunity, there’s especially a lot of opportunity for the 3P brands right now to come in and kind of take their share of revenue from all those one p sellers that have been on Walmart for a while.
Jake:
And I think that’s what people really need to understand that yeah, Walmart isn’t exactly where Amazon is right now, but there’s so many markets where you can just come in and take your fair share and also establish yourself as an early settler on Walmart. So I’m always really excited and that’s why I do a lot of sales every day and, you know, hey, telling people about the opportunity that there is on Walmart. I always wish I would’ve launched more products in Amazon in 2013, and that’s kind of what I compare Walmart to right now. So that’s a little background to me and what I spend my time with everything for my whole day spent on Walmart, and it’s really exciting, you know, how quickly they’re growing.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. Did you say was it a 1P seller that’s 750 K a month? No, this is Marketplace
Jake:
Actually. This is Marketplace.
Carrie Miller:
Oh, marketplace. So a third party, 750k a day.
Jake:
Yeah. Just to give people like the extended idea that there is, there are some categories like that, like furniture and stuff, which are massive in Walmart. And then there’s also, you know, some categories which yes, in the average, like if someone would want me to give an give a number, it’s usually about 10%. You know, like you’ll hear around, it’s usually about 10% of what you can make on Amazon, but that number is growing every month with how quickly. You know, Walmart’s growing, so I can be sitting here next year and saying it’s 30%. And I wouldn’t be surprised literally if Walmart’s growing, you know, that quickly. I’m very definitely very optimistic about it.
Carrie Miller:
Wow. That’s very encouraging. ’cause People are always asking me about, you know, how much there, you know, opportunity there is. And I guess it really depends on the effort you put in. I think that’s really the bottom line is how much do you wanna make on Walmart? That’s where it is. So I guess that kind of leads me into another question is, do you think that everyone is a good fit for Walmart? And like, you know, who do you think has the best chance at success for, you know, doing, like, getting to the point where you’re doing 750k a day? Like, what, what do you think, what have you seen?
Jake:
So there are more niche categories that aren’t built out, you know, in Walmart, like they are in Amazon. I do think everybody is a fit, but some are more of a fit than others. Meaning that if you have a more niche product, you know, that, you know, the search volume isn’t, you know, that high or you see that the category’s just not, you know, it’s not competitive. You just see, see a few sellers selling your product and then just random listings of other products not related. Yes, the category isn’t that big in a Walmart for certain, you know, the niche products, but it’s definitely worth listing the product. And for most products, even the more like niche products, you should be able to at least bring in a few hundred units in sales a month if you really launch a properly. And even if like for the main keyword, you know, you’re not able to bring in a ton of sales, there’s always other ways that you’re able to bring in traffic through advertising.
Jake:
I think a lot of times people kind of limit the opportunity at Walmart by looking at just the search volume, by just the Walmart search volume. When really, and Carrie, I know you spoke about this before, there’s a lot of searches that come from just Google and most of the Walmart searches come from Google, come into Walmart that way. So there definitely is, you know, opportunity for these niche products, even if it looks like, you know, sometimes the market isn’t that great. And yes, for the more niche products, sometimes it can only be about five to 7% of your, you know, Amazon sales. You know, depending on, you know, how good your Amazon store is, obviously. But on the most part, you know, you always have a decent amount of potential to come in there with. And you never know, which niches pick up, you know, really quickly.
Jake:
I’ve seen some niches and I’m always auditing different, you know, products and everything like that, that have just, you know, grown because, you know, shoppers are just starting to get used to shopping those products on a Walmart and you know, obviously Walmart started off by like, you know, their grocery and that’s what they’re really known for. But once you know, customers and shoppers are starting, you know, getting used to, Hey, I can also find this and I can find this. And they’re just seeing a lot more of a variety now those niches are opening up, so you never know exactly when it’s going to like open up and when you can hit 10%, but if you could already hit 5-6% right now, or 5-7% right now, why not launch it and, you know, get yourself to the top of the page and it’ll be a lot cheaper right now to get yourself to the top of the page. Yeah. You know, with your efforts and your advertising and everything like that. So yeah, there are, you know, there are more niche categories, but it’s definitely worth for everybody to go, you know, into the game.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I agree with that. So what advice would you have? I know there, I get this question a lot, like maybe in the last two or three years somebody has applied to sell on Walmart, but they were rejected. What advice do you have for them and is there, is all Hope lost or like what do you recommend for them?
Jake:
So yeah, this is a subject that I’m very familiar with because I’m talking to a few sellers a day on this that, you know, have been, you know, rejecting a Walmart and we’re probably getting like 40 to 50 accounts at SellCord accepted a month. So let me just explain a little more. Yeah, it’s, it’s crazy. And I’ll just explain a little more of the background of how the Walmart application process works and what’s going on, you know, in Walmart, so unlike Amazon where you could just easily open an account, everyone knows with Walmart there’s a bunch of like nightmare stories where people have tried to open accounts and then, you know, for three, four years they just haven’t been able to get in contact. They’ve tried getting new contact and they can, so I’ll explain kind of what goes on, you know, behind, you know, the Walmart applications.
Jake:
So obviously Walmart’s getting thousands of applications a day, like from Amazon sellers, right? Just this past year there’s 40% more sellers on Walmart than there was last year. 40% more 3P sellers. So just to give you an idea of how many applications they’re receiving now, they’re verifying every business and there’s a few things that they’re looking into every business. But at the end of the day, any regular Amazon, or not even Amazon, any regular, you know, business has a good, you know, proper tags, documents that, you know, that everything matches their address matches and everything like that, they’re able to get an account at Walmart. It’s not like Walmart was a few years ago where it was, they were looking really into the SKU count, the amount of revenue that they’re really not that like picky anymore. They’re just taking on a bunch of sellers right now.
Jake:
They just wanna make sure that, you know, verified seller. Now there are different reasons, and I’m not gonna sit here saying I know all of them ’cause at end the day that is the trust and safety department, and there are, you know, different reasons why they will reject, you know, an account. Sometimes that information doesn’t add up. There’s one thing that they saw that looks a little off, and a lot of times they’ll just end up just looking at the application, not approving it right away. So they’ll put in the archives and then, you know, that’s it. Once it’s in there, there’s no way to contact Walmart. You know, there’s no way to get any information in it, and you’re kind of just like left in the dark because they put your application in archive. I’ve seen sellers that make 30-40 million dollars a year and their application, there’s an archive and you know, it’s not like, you know, Walmart’s a corporate company.
Jake:
There’s a lot of people working there. It’s not just like, you know, they’re, you know, you can just reach out to somebody like, oh, you’re a massive brand, you know, we’ll take you in. You know, you have to, once the, once the once the applications are on the archive, it’s kind of impossible to reach ’em. So you really have to work with one of the Walmart partners, whether it’s myself or, you know, there are a few other partners that definitely, you know, have contacts with Walmart or Walmart directly. Honestly, if you meet Walmart or show Walmart directly, you can also, you know, speak to them. But with working with a Walmart partner like us, we usually, you know, have the contacts, you know, in Walmart that are able to take the application out of archive and basically show the trust and safety team, oh, here’s the documents.
Jake:
And they basically find the issue that was in the application. So, you know, maybe this one was the address didn’t master document they provided, or there was this, you know, they wanted to confirm that the business is actually operating out of this state, or one or two, you know, small things they need to confirm. And then, you know, they’ll just approve it. And, you know, our applications, you know, when I get, you know, people coming to me with applications, we usually get them within that week just, you know, approved. It’s just some back and forth information with Walmart and that’s it. But that’s just how the Walmart game works right now. It’s kind of like having something on the inside just basically taking the application out of archive and making new live on Walmart. So yeah, it’s definitely different than the Amazon process.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. And I have sent some people over you to you who were rejected and they were able to get on, so that’s true. You, you have to have somebody who has the access to Walmart to be able to get you back and reinstated or have your application reviewed again. So that’s, that’s really good information. And I know I’ve also sent some international sellers your way. So what advice do you have for international sellers who want to sell on Walmart? Any kinds of tips or insight information about international?
Jake:
So international, I know there’s like, and I have quite a few people in my inbox that keep asking me like when their countries are gonna be added because you know, right now it’s just like, you know, UK, China, India.
Carrie Miller:
Japan
Jake:
Japan, Canada, and then the other ones, there’s one, there’s one or two.
Carrie Miller:
Mexico.
Jake:
Yeah, Mexico. And then they are adding all other countries and hopefully, you know, within the next six months to a year, you’re gonna see a lot more added on. Right now they just, you know, started like with the main ones. So you know, for those, you know, for those countries that you have obviously, you know, sign up, why not, you know, ready, you know, get moving with it. If we’re talking about is the question also what sales are, you know, like Walmart, Canada sales or Walmart, Mexico, or are you just saying for those international sellers on Walmart.
Carrie Miller:
The international sellers on Walmart? I know you guys have helped somebody, I think from Israel who was like, he was selling millions on Amazon, but he couldn’t get, his products were already on Walmart by other dropshippers, but he couldn’t get on and you guys helped him.
Jake:
Yeah, because a lot of times the international sellers and those accounts, they’ll get flagged because their IPs and everything like that, especially Israel being, one of them, Walmart’s seen a lot of and that’s my hometown, you know, just seen a lot of like, just activity that they don’t like from Israel or just a lot of applications being submitted. So certain countries, sometimes they just, you know, they have a harder time, you know, accepting applications from those. So definitely, you know, you know that that’s where you have to, you know, basically go through the back door and, you know, we have to go in there for you saying, Hey, you know, this is a good brand. We go to Walmart saying this is a good brand, they’re serious about scaling, this is the brand, no questions about it, you know, let’s get them going.
Carrie Miller:
Okay, very good. And I think this question kind of goes along with it. What do you suggest for sellers looking to launch a product on Walmart? Is the keyword research tool with Helium 10 a good start? Or like what do you recommend? I know you guys have launched some new products like just for Walmart, so what advice do you have?
Jake:
So I do plenty of audits you know, for new brands coming in, and I’m always using the Helium 10 tool, there’s no question about it. Obviously there’s that abstract traffic, which is, you know, hard to always, you know, to estimate, but I found un 10 very accurate. I’ve crosschecked it on multiple, you know, accounts that we manage and the X-ray tool’s working well as well. So I can definitely speak for that. And I wouldn’t if, I would’ve if the sales were off, but I definitely crosscheck it across many of our accounts and it’s pretty much accurate. So you use the X-ray tool as well as the search volume tool. If you kind of like, you know, spend some time on on both of those tools, you’ll be able to get a good idea of what your category really is like.
Jake:
And then, you know, part of it is obviously logic and, you know, common sense, like the larger products right now, you know, the, the more general products are gonna have a higher search volume, and that’s what you’ll find. So being that I’ve done like so many audits by now, I can kind of, you know, throw out a product to me, I can kind of tell you, you know, with just guessing around how much the search volume is and you know, how big, how many of the product, you know, you can sell on Walmart. So once you start really just spending a few hours in Walmart and, you know, using the Helium 10 tools, you kind of get a good feel of what categories are like, what the search forms, like, what the sales are like in comparison to Amazon. You know, all the tools are really there for you. So use the tools and you’ll have an easy time figuring out what potentially you have.
Carrie Miller:
All right. And the next question I have for you is about COMP Error. So what, like, what happens if you get a COMP Error? What is it? What does that mean?
Jake:
Yeah, so Walmart’s still trying to figure out their COMP Error, you know, process, and it’s definitely not as quick as Amazon where they have, you know, internal SOPs of every single thing that’s, you know, should be prohibited. And that’s not like on Amazon, I’m sure if you list many products, you know, right away if you have the wrong keyword or whatnot, they’ll flag you in a second. On Walmart, many times you can have your product listed for a few months and then out of the blue they’ll give you a COMP Error just because the system, you know, found something all of a sudden. So because they’re still building out their processes, this is just one of the annoying, you know, processes that, you know, affects accounts where, you know, they’ll add in a few new keywords, may be into their you know, COMP Errors, you know, system, whatever it is that’ll say, okay, you know, whoever has these keywords in their titled in their anywhere in their copy, you know, will get flagged and then all of a sudden a whole bunch of listings, you know, throughout Walmart will get flagged for those products.
Jake:
And then you have to, you know, take out some keywords sometimes, so there’s no exact guide on, you know, which on what to remove or, you know, which keywords are flagged like internally at SellCord, we always, you know, keep a document of like, which, you know, keywords and everything like that can, you know, can be flagged and which products usually are the most common and everything like that. I think it’s pretty much, I haven’t checked Amazon’s like comp, you know, process or prohibited products and everything like that, but I’m assuming it’s pretty much similar to Amazon’s. But yeah, what I do know is you just have to go back and forth with them and it, and it does take time to get a response from them sometimes to respond in a week or two.
Jake:
It’s not gonna help bumping up the case 50 times because that’s just Walmart’s support right now that that team is growing and they’re figuring it out. You know, they work hard at Walmart, it’s just that they’re growing at a rapid rate right now. So it’s just, you know, certain processes, no matter how much money you have as a company, takes time to build out, right? So yeah, randomly you’ll have listings that’ll get flagged for compliance and you just have to play around. And also, once again, use common sense and try to figure out which keywords, you know, would be maybe the ones causing the issues and then re-upload and re-upload the listing or a lot of times it even works, you know, if you are able to use another UPC for the listing, just re-uploading under another UPC and a lot of times you won’t get the error on that next listing. So first try taking out like some keywords that you think may be problematic after that, if that doesn’t work, maybe even try listing the product again under a new UPC.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I know with, with mine it was a keyword that was forbidden and it’s pretty much what I think you should do is if you take Amazon, there are some forums that have, people already have kind of discovered a lot of the forbidden keywords on Amazon. They’re pretty much the same on Walmart. Things like antibacterial, antimicrobial, all those kinds of things. Like they’re called like basically pesticides on Amazon. So what I remember what we did is we just deleted some of these forbidden keywords out of my listing and it just went live again within 15 minutes. So that is you know, something that they don’t even tell you. So I was trying to open a case and open a case and I don’t know what a COMP Error is, but and then when I reached out to you and you were like, oh, just take out those words, it went live immediately and you didn’t, I just closed the case. So Yeah,
Jake:
A hundred percent. Yeah, I remember searching up the Amazon you know, the Amazon like you were and being like, okay, it makes sense, you know, if we have one of these, it makes sense, Walmart’s going to, you know, shut it down as well.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. so here’s another question. What happens if your account gets suspended and are some account suspensions, you know, permanent? Like what advice do you have for account suspensions?
Jake:
Okay, so Walmart or like, I don’t know what it is about like Sundays or something like that. Like in the be of the week, a lot of accounts will get suspended before Monday. I don’t know if Amazon works that way as well. They have like, because they keep, you know, changing around their metrics and like, you know you know, really, you know, put, putting their foot down on different metrics. Obviously the most common ones are, you know, just being on top of your shipments, late shipments, invalid tracking rate and then like too many cancellations. Those are the most common ones. And then here and there you’ll find like, you know, for like other reasons, but those are the most common ones. Walmart’s a lot easier about their standards, their seller performance standards.
Jake:
It’s not like Amazon where, you know, you have to freak out if you miss a message within 24 hours. And Walmart just started putting those metrics into place. But like, I haven’t seen an account suspended, you know, because you know their response times and everything yet. So most accounts will get suspended just because they either have some API that’s just shooting in a bunch of inventory that they don’t have and they’ll have a ton of canceled orders or their shipping templates aren’t set up correctly. And they’re not shipping orders in time and or just invalid tracking. A lot of times they’re not uploading tracking if, you know, they don’t have the right tool connected. So those are just the most common reasons and Walmart were to suspend accounts for those. So what to do when you have an account suspension you put an appeal together just like you would on Amazon, and a lot of times they ask for the invoice of the goods, just the invoices for the products, let’s say that were canceled to make sure that you guys basically, that you have them in stock, make sure to always provide that on the first appeal.
Jake:
I was actually just on a call right before this webinar with an account that a suspended account and their, in their first appeal, they didn’t include all the invoices. And now their second appeal is, is taking a lot longer for Walmart to look at. They will always look at your first appeal really quickly, and these days, in most scenarios, they’ll respond literally the next morning. So you want to give them all that good information in the first appeal. If you don’t give them all the information they need in the first appeal, it could take a lot longer to hear back the second time around. Once it gets to like the third appeal, meaning, you know, you’re submitting something for the third time and they denied the past two. It just lengthens out the process and could take a while before you get your account back.
Jake:
You can always get a suspended account back. It’s impossible to get a terminated account back. Terminations usually happen after, like an account is suspended for like four times, like four extensions or something like that. I haven’t seen that many terminations ’cause it’s very uncommon, but it does happen here and there. Or they’ve terminated a few accounts for like shipping products via Amazon fulfillment service and this and that. So I always warn people about that, like, people are still trying that funny business. It’s like, yeah, it’s like, no, you’ll save a lot more money by just returning the goods from Amazon, paying Amazon for 35 cents or 50 cents whatever return fee and then chipping it into Walmart. Like, don’t try that. But they’re very quick on their suspensions. Recently it’s like, you know, it used to take weeks to hear back from Walmart these days it’s like seen many accounts suspended and you know, we, we have an account reinstatement service, so we’ve gotten many accounts like by the next morning they’ll back in live on Walmart.
Jake:
So very important. You’re just very careful about the first appeal, basically. Yeah.
Carrie Miller:
So if you, if you need help with that, you can reach out to cell cord and they can take care of that. I do know you’ve gotten some people up that have sent your way. So that’s very helpful. Let’s go ahead and get into some of these questions here. I think I’ll go with this one first because, and I have a little bit of an explanation for this. Carrie’s having a hard time getting a hemp cream of mine on Walmart. Even Walmart giving her the runaround. If you can help her get it on, I’ll treat each Novo. I actually have made some progress in this. The hemp thing, once I put it on, I got a COMP Error for the hemp listing and then I was able to get past it and it was reinstated because I was able to prove, you know, there’s other products just like this that are selling at Walmart. And then I tried to get it into WFS and it was kind of taken down again and they were like, no, you can’t sell this product, you can’t do anything. But I was recently able to get it so that I can sell it and so we can ship the product. So basically fulfilled by the, by merchant kind of shipping. We just can’t fulfill it through WFS. Have you seen this kind of thing before?
Jake:
So you actually have more of an update than me on that. I’ve seen so many issues with hemp right off the bat. I was gonna say really hard to get a hemp product through. Yeah. I know that there are ones live and people always come back to me with that and I’m like, Hey, listen, you know, they may have listened to Walmart a little before and gotten it through. I think I even saw it in their guys specifically. It’s like, no hemp products, but like you’re saying, there you go, that’s a wall. Great workaround that like, you know, try listing it. You’re probably not gonna be able to send it to WFS, but like, you know, the fact that you gave them that was like good enough to push your listening through. And I’m not saying that’ll even like work for everybody but I know they’re very strict on hemp Walmart.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I was actually told by support to stop contacting them, they told me to stop contacting them, that was the final answer. So then I went directly to Walmart and they were able to give me the go ahead to sell it fulfilled by merchant. There are same products that are being sold on, on Walmart. So they’re 1p I think mostly that’s why they’re shipped by Walmart. Yeah. Okay. So kind of a rough one. Okay, so another one, this is from Bradley too. Is it too late to sign up for Walmart Open Call?
Jake:
Yeah, I just ended like, I think it was someday last week.
Carrie Miller:
Are you guys going to open call again this year?
Jake:
Yeah, we’re gonna be at Open Call and more importantly next week we’re gonna be right next to you guys by Walmart Seller Summit. That’s gonna be exciting.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. Very, very cool.
Jake:
It’s gonna be really exciting.
Carrie Miller:
Do you, can you share what products you’re going to Open Call for? Or is it secret?
Jake:
Oh no, not at all. We have like fitness products and everything. That’s how we got ’em, you know, originally Michael, my brother has a nutrition two by four nutrition brand that they got into Walmart stores nationwide, you know, after they launch a marketplace. So it’s pretty cool. We’ve gotten a lot of brands recently, and it is why, you know, brands will come to us sometimes they don’t even care about marketplace sales. They just want to get into Walmart store, sorry, Walmart stores. So it’s a whole other side of Walmart. If you want to get into Walmart stores right now, you have to launch a marketplace and the buyer has to see that you’re basically getting your products, you know, to the top of the page or optimized properly, and they’ll notice your products. Like if you ask a buyer in the Walmart category, like, you know, if you tell ’em about your product and they’ve seen your brand a lot they’ve seen you sponsor, they’ll be like, oh yeah, I know you guys.
Jake:
And that’s a great way to get it into Walmart stores. And we, we have gone many brands in this past year and to Walmart stores, brands that are just mom and pop, Amazon shops and they’ve gone into Walmart stores, which is huge, right? So it’s a really cool part of Walmart that, you know, Amazon doesn’t really have where, you know, you’re not looking, and again, there’s no Amazon stores looking to get into, but Walmart retail’s huge and because of their emphasis that they’re putting on marketplace, you know, they’re putting a lot on the line for that. So they’re saying, Hey, you know, any new brands you wanna come into our stores launch a marketplace for us. So that’s a really cool side of things.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. Are you guys going in for the latest four by four product, or would that automatically get invited to the Walmart stores? ’cause I know that you guys just launched another four by four product.
Jake:
Two by four products.
Carrie Miller:
Sorry, two by four.
Jake:
That’s Michael’s that’s Michael’s brand. So I don’t know exactly as much where they’re holding on the launch. I don’t know if every SKU’s in or whatnot, I’ll have to check with him on that. But I know we’re always, like some of our clients are going down with their products you know, that they, they’ve launched a marketplace, let’s say, for the past year or two, and, you know, they’re going down with their products and, you know, presenting them as well.
Carrie Miller:
All right. Let’s see, let’s go down here. So we’ve got Jake, are we saying SEO needs to be more optimized in a way to pull the right SKUs and volume to show it during a search that a shopper lands on the, I don’t know exact, do you know what he’s saying?
Jake:
Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think he’s just saying that you need to, and you need to optimize a Walmart listing for– It’s basically even for, for some main keywords that you could find in the space, even if it’s not directly like, related to the product. So sometimes we’ll do that where we’ll give up a little on like, you know, exactly what we wanna say the product is in order to get it in a larger space. So you know, let’s say Bamboo cutting board, you wanna put in the regular cutting board space? Well, you’re technically gonna have the cutting board keyword, but I can give an example off the top of my head, but yeah, sometimes, and I think this is his question, but you want to find whatever keywords, you know, are somewhat relevant to the product to, you know, get in that space because it is, you know, easy.
Jake:
Right now, it’s relatively easy to launch in some spaces in Walmart where even if you know your product isn’t exactly related to the, to the main keyword, you can still make a lot of sales off that. So it’s really case by case. You have to know, I guess, which product it can be like too irrelevant or else, you know, just, it’s gonna be, you’re gonna have a low conversion rate, but here and there, yes, we will like, use a larger keyword that’s maybe not exactly like the product, but, you know, maybe bring in some extra sales.
Carrie Miller:
All right. Somebody else said, is there a way to get the X-ray tool for Walmart working to the Platinum plan? We do, I think have some uses of, for the Platinum plan, but mostly Diamond is where you’re gonna get full access to, you know, unlimited access to the Walmart tools. So if you do wanna sell on Walmart, I would recommend going to the Diamond Plan. David, ask any tips for launching a nutrition brand on Walmart?
Jake:
Yeah. Launch sooner than later. That’s really, I mean, we could talk from today to tomorrow about all the Walmart tips and everything like that, but there’s just, like I said, there’s 40% more sales on Walmart this year, and there’s thousands of sellers coming in every day, literally into Walmart right now. So we know how competitive this space is in Amazon. And right now Walmart is, you know, not even a quarter of that. So you want to get in for nutrition specifically because, we’ve seen how quickly the nutrition game came up with Amazon, where, you know, in the be, you know, 2014, 2015, you had like–
Carrie Miller:
Yep.
Jake:
Nutrition brands, and now every day there’s a new one coming out. So yeah, get a head start, basically. If you wanna go more into details, yeah, it’s just more, you know, it’s starts with the listing optimization advertising. Everything has to be strategic because there are a decent amount of sellers in the nutrition space already that are putting in the proper work. So, you know, you wanna basically get ahead of the game right now. And there’s new advertising tools that are, you know, coming out constantly, sorry, not tools, but just like Walmart’s offering, you know, like video ads, you know, it’s coming out and there’s a few more, you know, a few more ways, especially nutrition brands can use to, you know, to advertise on Walmart. So launch now, basically. Yeah.
Carrie Miller:
Do you know when the video ads will be available to everyone?
Jake:
They say by the end of this year, so Okay. Anytime within the next few months hopefully. Yeah,
Carrie Miller:
I saw that there’s also brand stores as well in beta.
Jake:
Yeah. Brand. Yeah, that’s the most exciting one. Yeah, but also search brand ads, right? SBA search brand ads, you know, that’s also, but yeah, nutrition, you gotta launch ASAP because ASAP just being more competitive. Yeah, it’s a competitive space.
Carrie Miller:
All right, last question here. How can I deal with compliance issues causing my listing to get unpublished?
Jake:
Oh, that’s David over here. Look at that. Yeah. How can I deal with compliance issues causing, okay, so this, David, you should have been there at the beginning of this. If they’re getting unpublished once again, just like the compliance issues that we were, you know, talking about before you have to number one, you know, try to find the certain, the keywords that are wrong, just to recap your, trying to find the keywords that, you know, maybe causing it, you know, to, you know, to get ’em published. And then, you know, if after that, and if you’re trying for a good, you know, I would say two months, cap it at about like two months of going back and forth with Walmart and not finding out which keyword it is, then try a new listing. For now that’s what I would do.
Carrie Miller:
All right, perfect. All right. I think we’re about done for this episode, but I was wondering if you had any last tips or anything that you wanted to say to the people who are listening. We have about quite a few people listening right now. So any tips or anything that you didn’t get to say that you wanna tell people?
Jake:
Yeah, sure. I mean, let’s talk about Walmart in general. We see the traffic that’s coming into Walmart now. You know, I’m gonna be meeting Carrie by the show next week where Walmart is coming down with their whole executive team, I mean the CEO of Walmart, CEO of Walmat US, head of e-commerce in Walmart marketplace, just to show. And they’re all coming down for this show. It’s called Let’s Grow. Just to show you how much they’re putting in behind their marketplace. So when a company that big like Walmart shows you, you know, that they’re putting that much behind their marketplace, you know, that they’re spending whatever ad dollars to get more shoppers on the marketplace, you know that they’re fixing up their platform in whatever ways to get more shoppers. So they had, they grew 28% in overall sales this past year, which is a nice number.
Jake:
They’re the fastest growing marketplace, and by next year, they’re definitely gonna even beat that number. So we’re looking at, you know, the next few years of tremendous growth from Walmart. I know Walmart has been around technically as a 3P marketplace since 2018. And here and there, I’ll get a settle. It’ll be like, yeah, Walmart tried, it didn’t work. It’s very simple. This is the first time they’re actually putting proper effort into it. Before they were trying to, like, they started off maybe using Jet and Shopify, they realized none of that will work, and they’re just taking their own approach and they’re handling everything themselves. And that’s why it’s been working right now. And this past year it’s seen tremendous growth and it’s just gonna be crazier from here. So I remember, like I said, back in 2013, I was watching the first YouTubers putting out their Amazon content.
Jake:
So this is it right over here. You know, this is the first like Walmart content, and I know there’s a reason Helium 10 is investing a lot, lot in it, because the earlier you get in, you know, the more opportunity there is, and it doesn’t cost a lot to launch a Walmart right now. You know, take a bit of that Amazon revenue, you know, profit that you’re making and launch it into Walmart, and you’re setting yourself up to be one of the top sellers in whatever category you are, whether it’s niche, more, you know, really competitive category. If you are just detailed and on your game and optimizing listings, optimizing your ads, figuring out the new Walmart ways, you know, the new Walmart promotions that may be eligible for you, just doing all the, like the nitty gritty stuff, that’s how you’re going to, you know, get to the top of the page in Walmart, be one of the top sellers.
Jake:
If you’re like the other 90% of sellers of Walmart, they just list their products and wait for it to sell and don’t put any work behind it, nothing’s gonna come of it. And then you’re just gonna have that same outlook on Walmart. Oh yeah, just, I make, you know, 2% of my, of my Amazon sales. There’s no point to spending any time in it. Just like Amazon took time to build up. Walmart’s gonna take time to build up. So final tip, put in the work, now’s the time. All opportunities are in the timing right now, so now’s the time and, you know, start, get down and dirty. You know, with the, with the Walmart stuff, which aren’t that easy, we know how much errors and issues could come up. So if you’re one of the few sellers that fights through that, you know, then you’re gonna, you’re gonna win, right? If it was easy, everybody could do it. Spend the time and now put in the effort now, and I guarantee you’ll see results and especially over the next few years as Walmart grows that, you know, the numbers will just keep scaling.
Carrie Miller:
That’s really good advice. Yeah, I definitely agree. Put the effort in now and start now. So, well, thank you so much for joining us. I think you gave a lot of really good insights for questions I get all the time. So I’m really glad we were able to do this episode and talk to you since you’re an expert in these areas. So thanks again for joining us and we’ll see you. I’ll see you next week at the Walmart conference.
Jake:
I’ll see you then. It was a pleasure being here.
In this episode, let's explore the hottest news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce industry: From TikTok's plan to ban Amazon links and sunset Shopify integration, Amazon's influencer video offer, to Walmart's surging online sales. Discover new Amazon listing requirements, Etsy's diversification efforts, and Amazon sellers sentenced for price fixing! Learn about Solana Pay's Shopify integration and catch the replay of the Amazon data webinar. Plus, learn how to download your reviews inside Amazon with this week's training tip. Tune in to the latest episode of Helium 10 Weekly Buzz hosted by Bradley Sutton, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Chief Evangelist. ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Today, we have a special Serious Sellers Podcast episode where we recap our latest fireside chat with Amazon. Our guests are Francesca Smith and Julia Hiltzik, Senior Growth Consultants at Amazon, and they are members of the team behind Brand Analytics, Product Opportunity Explorer, and Search Query Performance! And for the first time ever, Amazon is “opening the hood” and letting us know how these data points are collected and used. Tune in and learn how you can leverage unique Amazon data points in conjunction with Helium 10 to level up your business.
In episode 485 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Francesca, and Julia discuss:
- 00:28 – Why This Is A Special Episode
- 01:26 – Search Query Performance Brand View
- 04:27 – Search Query Performance ASIN View
- 05:10 – Search Query Details
- 06:50 – Search Analytics Search Volume Is Now Denormalized!
- 09:10 – What Counts Towards Search Volume
- 11:05 – What Does Not Count?
- 12:00 – What Counts For Products With Variations?
- 15:10 – Difference Between Helium 10 And SQP?
- 17:30 – How Is Search Query Score Calculated?
- 19:00 – How Does Product Opportunity Explorer Work?
- 21:26 – Product Opportunity Explorer: Search by Keyword or ASIN
- 23:12 – Product Opportunity Explorer: Keyword Niche
- 24:40 – Product Opportunity Explorer: Search Terms Tab
- 26:58 – What Is Unit Sold Data Based On?
- 27:45 – Download Feature Now Available In Product Opportunity Explorer
- 28:30 – Niche Details: Insights
- 30:15 – Niche Details: Trends
- 30:56 – Brand Analytics x Helium 10
- 34:39 – Search Query Performance x Helium 10
- 37:15 – Q&A with Francesca And Julia
- 41:20 – Get Your Tickets For Amazon Accelerate Event
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today’s a special episode as we’ve got reps from Amazon, from the departments that are responsible for Brand Analytics, Search Query Performance, and Product Opportunity Explorer, opening up the hood for the first time, these super cool metrics and answering all your questions about them. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that is our recap of our Fireside Chat that we had with Amazon. Now, these are the people at Amazon who actually work in the departments and are responsible for Search Query Performance, Brand Analytics, Product Opportunity Explorer. And for the first time ever, Amazon is kind of like opening up the hood and letting everybody know like how these different data points are to be used. So this is definitely something that is gonna be very informational and we wanted to make sure that you guys got the best highlights of it. For those of you who missed the our live workshop keep in mind that if you have questions after this send them in our serious Sellers podcast Instagram account, because we’re gonna try and do a follow-up event where we go over all of the unanswered questions that you might have after today’s lesson. So let’s go ahead and hop right in to this Fireside Chat. Now you work for Amazon. Can you go ahead and you know, tell us what your title is there, how long you’ve been there, et cetera?
Julia:
Yeah, so my title at Amazon is a senior growth consultant. I’ve been at the company for about a little over two years now. And I get to work with our awesome analytics tools that you were just talking about. So excited to be here.
Bradley Sutton:
Talk about what we’re seeing here a little bit, Julia.
Julia:
Yeah, so this is a screenshot, I believe it’s from your Project X account for Manny’s Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf brand, the famous coffin shelf. So you can see we have where the customer starts and where they end going from impressions, clicks, card ads, and purchases. And in this case, just to clarify, purchases means orders. So what’s really cool is you can see for each of those four metrics what your brand count is, or how many of each metric your brand’s ASINs received versus Amazon as a whole or total count. So you can start to really get a sense of what mark your market share is for a specific search term over different time, sorry, over different timeframes. You can also see where the customer’s dropping off across the funnel. So in our case, you know, if I’m adding to my cart and not coming back to it, I might drop off before I see purchases show up. So maybe you have high click share, but a customer isn’t necessarily transitioning to adding your product to their cart. You can start to think of different strategies on how to entice them to move forward, you know, towards a purchase. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> maybe it’s a coupon, maybe it’s getting more defensive with your ad campaigns or even just optimizing your detail page to include certain buzzwords that customers are searching for.
Bradley Sutton:
I know some of you guys that don’t have big screens right now, maybe it’s gonna be hard for you to see the number, but those of you who can see it take a look there at the top. This is what we had opened up before. Do you see how the number one keyword was coffin shelf? Right? You see there under search query volume, it says that there are 4,000 searches for this keyword, and my brand had 9,000 impressions. Now, of those 9,000 impressions, if you look on the right hand side, you’ll see that buyers clicked on one of my brand’s products about 220 times. Okay? And of those 220 times, only 30 people added it to their cart. Now, if off screen, you can’t even see it here, if you scroll to the right from there, you’ll be able to see how many purchases I had from those 220, or from those 30 adds a cart. So this is for my brand as a whole. Now, this is the brand is Manny’s Mysterious Oddities, I have like five or six different coffin shelves and a coffin tray and other spooky items in there. So this is showing me this kind of level of information at the hole, but what other view do people have an option to see?
Julia:
Yeah, so you can also switch to the ASIN view to see which we did earlier actually. And you can see which are driving the most engagement for you. So you’ll see a similar format to the brand view, but at the ASIN level, so you can drill down to see how each of your products are performing. Another difference on this view is that, which is really cool, you can see now that each search term has a, has like a hyperlink. So if you click on one of those, you’re going to be able to see the top 10 ASINs with their actual number of impressions and clicks for the selected timeframe, which is data that we’ve never shared before.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay? So we can see that here, like, like take a look guys. So this is, this is, you can only click on the word. So everybody, I hope you guys are doing this with me. I hope you still have your window open. So if you were on the ace in view, you’ll see that all of the search terms have a hyperlink. Now just click on one of those and this is the window that should show up. Does everybody see the search? And see who were the top 10 products that had activity for this keyword? And if you see here, I’m not number one, but something interesting here that, again, I understand that you guys probably can’t see if, unless you’re looking on this on a big screen, but I noticed there was one competitor here that only had 3% of the impressions, alright?
Bradley Sutton:
3% of the impressions, and they had 200 clicks, 200 of the clicks, all right? That means their click share was 10%, despite only having 3% of the impressions. So people are loving this product right now. Take, compare that to mine, where I had more impression share. I had 4% on one of these products, but I only had 6% in the click. So these are the kind of insights that you’ve never been able to to see before. Now, us, a while back, there was actually a big change in the numbers that were shown in Search Query Performance. And then there was a message across the screen that said, Hey, this is used to be normalized and now it’s de-normalized. So can you talk a little bit about the search volume that we see in Search Query Performance and what this whole normalized and de-normalized? I mean, I think we already know that. I’m like, I’m the de-normalized one ’cause I don’t purchase and I’m kind of weird, but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here.
Julia:
Yeah. So within the 24 hour period, we count all search queries by the same customer. And what this means is that if a customer types in dog brush if they enter it into the search bar, again within that same 24 hour timeframe, the search volume will count as two. Whereas before it would only count as one. And there are some other nuances as well. If a customer searches for, again, dog brush and they click through to the next page of search results, or if they hit the back button, this is also going to add to the total search volume.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, hope everybody caught got that. That was very important. You know, so, so you know, th th you know, like if you’re using Helium 10, you might see a number that’s a monthly number that almost is the same as, or very similar to the weekly number. So you might be think, wait a minute, thi this monthly number must be off because Amazon is showing that this in a week, it gets this almost. But remember what the, the Helium 10 data is normalized. All right? So does, did you guys understand what she was saying? Like when you type in dog brush, that’s one search. And then let’s say I click on a product and then I click back well, there, there’s another search all of a sudden. Now what if I go to page two of the search results? Well, guess what?
Bradley Sutton:
There’s another, another search right there. So it’s just a different, it’s not that one way to look at search volume is right and one is wrong. It’s just one is de-normalized, one is normalized. ’cause Different people have different viewpoints on what they wanna see. But with Search Query Performance, the number that you see includes all of those different scenarios. Now next question. You know, if, if we go into the search results, you know, I I could see one product maybe like seven times, right? You know, it could be the sponsored brand headline ad. It could be a sponsored brand video ad. There’s an organic placement, there’s a sponsored product ad. Maybe there’s the, the highly rated like little widget and maybe there’s some sponsor display here or there. Now we’re going over now all of the top questions that, that you users had submitted for what is going on in Search Query Performance. So the one of the top questions is, is what, which of all of these placements counts as an impression that Search Query Performance is, is counting?
Julia:
Yeah, there’s a lot going on on that first page of search results. So both organic and paid placements are included in Search Query Performance in that impressions number it’s the same as I, like you were saying, shows up twice. So once sponsored, once organic, it will count as two. So it’ll count as two impressions. Also mobile app, any views or purchases on mobile are counted. And then in terms of pages, there is no concept of scrolling. So if the page is loaded, the ASIN will be counted as impressed. The customer has to click on the subsequent page for those ASINs to count in the report. So within the mobile app, infinite scroll is actually still using that pagination logic, but it’s just hidden from the customer. So when the customer’s scrolling to the bottom of the screen, when they reach page two, the results will be counted as they would on the desktop when a customer clicks on page two. And then lastly, just as a clarification point multi-unit purchases. So if I put three dog brushes of the same Asian in my cart and buy it are counted once, so that would be counted as one order, so not as three separate units.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent. Excellent. Guys, I hope you understand the fire that’s being given right here. Like, this is stuff that Amazon has never fully explained in their documentation. This is like a historic moment here. Amazon is opening up the hood and letting us know what goes into this. Like all if all of a sudden, like, you see Julia’s camera go off me, it means she’s maybe giving us too much information. Her bosses are like, yanking her away, but let’s keep going here with this stuff before that happened. So that’s what counts. Now another question that a lot of sellers were having was, what are the things that don’t count for impressions and purchases et cetera?
Julia:
Yeah, so we don’t include paid ads shown in widgets, like what you’re seeing on the screen here, like highly rated climate pledge friendly new arrivals, as well as Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Video Ads. We also don’t count purchases that originate from search, but occur after the customer clicks a link to the PDP. So if it’s from the brand store or like from the related products, from a different detail page,
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, that makes sense. Alright, now another question that comes up and that I’ve always had too is variations. Because now this opens up a whole other can of worms here. Let’s say I type in a search, I click a listing that has variations, be it color, be it size, whatever. But then when I click into it, it’s maybe the red one or something. But now I go in and I click on the black one or the blue one. What happens then?
Julia:
Yeah, so this is a little tricky and I’m gonna do my best to explain it, but basically the child ASIN has to be clicked from the search page to be counted as a purchase through search. So the impressed ASIN has to be purchased for it to be considered as a search attributed purchase in SQP. In the case that we have pictured here, child ASIN A or the gray T-shirt would have one impression and one click if I click on it when it comes up in search, but zero purchases if I decide to go with a different t-shirt color child ASIN B or the red T-shirt is a variation of child ASIN a. So if I decide to click on this color and purchase it, it would have zero clicks and zero purchases since it didn’t show up and search and get the original impression.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Okay. It’s a little bit complicated, but I think overall I hope it may makes sense to most people now though in some categories I don’t think I have this in for the coffin shelf, even though I have variations, but I know in some categories in the search results you can actually, while still being on the search results click through to a different variation, like in this little mini carousel kind of thing. So in that situation, how does Search Query Performance work?
Julia:
Yeah, so there is a nuance where if a child ASIN is impressed, but a different color or pattern is clicked from a search page that child ASIN child will receive the impression. So for example, if I search for red bedsheets, we can see on the screen that this ASIN has multiple colors that you can click on. So if I click on the blue color, the blue ASIN will actually receive the click, but the red ASIN or what appeared in search results will receive the impression.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now how does the brand level, not the ASIN level, but the brand level search crew performance report account for a customer who clicks through to a product page for a Brand Parent ASIN, let’s just say, but then they purchase a different ASIN from the same brand, from that same page. So we were talking about the ASIN level here, but what, how does it work when we’re looking at that brand report?
Julia:
Yeah, so it’s the same logic if a customer clicks through to the detail page for Brands Parent ASIN, but then purchases a completely different ASIN from the same brand. So brand is an aggregation of ASIN level data. So if a brand has two ASINs A and B and the impressed ASIN is A and the purchase ASIN is B, the metrics are computed independently for each ASIN and then aggregated or rolled up to the total brand level, which is what you would see on your brand SQP report.
Bradley Sutton:
Got it, got it. All right. Next thing, another question that users have is probably the most common thing that as soon as this came out, everybody was saying, Hey, there’s no way this is right. You know, like the purchases seem way too low. Like for example, what I’m showing you guys right here in the screenshot I have Helium 10 atomic, what I use for my PPC management, and I just did a date range of eight six to eight 12. And just in PPC, you know, forget about my organic orders just in PPC for the word coffin shelf or for the search term coffin shelf. Amazon is saying that I got six orders, but then if I look for the same exact date range in Search Query Performance, it’s saying that overall organic and sponsored purchases, I only got four. And so e everybody else, you know, has a very similar thing where it’s like, wait a minute, this doesn’t even match with what my Amazon advertising is saying.
Julia:
Yeah, so that’s a great question and probably the most frequently asked for sure that we receive. So search for your performance attribution is currently only 24 hours. So you will see a difference between SQP and your advertising reports, which does have a longer attribution window. We are looking to update this in the future to show a more consistent view. However, for now, let’s say you received a click and add to cart ad from advertising one of your sponsored products campaigns but the customer left the product in their cart and not like you, Bradley, only checked out and they, you know, they checked out or purchased it four days later. So you may actually see that attributed sale in your advertising report, but you won’t see that reflected in Search Query Performance since it’s outside of the 24 hour window. So I know it’s a little confusing right now, but definitely something to note.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, that kind of makes sense. You know, the attribution window, the action has to be taken guys within 24 hours. So, you know, if, if I search for something and I’m clicking, I’m adding it to cart and that all happens like at the same time, those are all counted. But then if I just leave it there and I still purchase it the next day, even if it was just 25 hours later, it’s actually not going to count in Search Query Performance. So good to know. Alright, next question is on the left hand side, the very first column after the search term itself is this column entitled Search Query Score. Alright, so how is this calculated and is this like the reason why sometimes keywords might fall off of our Search Query Performance list?
Julia:
Yeah, so I actually saw a question in the chat about that earlier. So glad that we’re addressing it now. The keyword score the Search Query Score is calculated for each query based on impressions, clicks, card ads, and purchases count. You know, the four metrics we don’t share the calculation externally, but
Bradley Sutton:
I thought you were sharing everything with us today. What’s going on here? Hold them back on us, Julia.
Julia:
95%.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Okay, that’s cool. Sorry, go ahead.
Julia:
But basically the higher the number of impressions clicks, card ads purchases, collectively the higher the keyword score, and then we use the keyword score to rank the queries based on performance. So essentially, to answer your question, yes, this would be the reason why you may see a search term one week, but not the next. We only show within the brand view the top 1000 theories in the selected timeframe and top 100 for ASIN view.
Bradley Sutton:
Francesca is gonna be talking about product opportunity explore. But before we get into that, please introduce yourself to us how long you’ve been at Amazon and what’s your title, et cetera, et cetera.
Francesca:
Yeah, so my name’s Francesca Smith. I am a Growth Consultant at Amazon. Work really closely with Julia and the Product Opportunity Explorer team. I’ve been with Amazon for about five years, so most of my time actually has been spent working with some of these seller central analytics tools, so really excited to be able to share more about Product Opportunity Explorer and Brand Analytics.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, I see here on the slide here it has a little section about customer searches. Now you guys, as in the Opportunity Explorer team, kind of like take it to a different place than just a Search Query Performance. So can you talk about how you group these, et cetera?
Francesca:
Absolutely. I can definitely walk you through that. So very similar in the search funnel description. Earlier, customers tell Amazon what they want when they enter search terms to find their next purchase. So we’re taking that same search data, but there is a clustering component to it. So essentially what we’re doing is combining those similar search terms and those top click products to group them into product niches. And so we’re looking at the top 90% of click and purchase products coming from the search terms. So from there you can take a look at these niches and understand more about what customers are looking for and identify any other opportunities for improvement. And then last–
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, hold on really quick. Hold on really quick. Did anybody catch something she just said that is new? Like, she kind of just like completely glossed over it, but it, but for those of you who have been using Product Opportunity Explorer, she kind of like slid something under the radar there that is new Robert’s Got it. Steve’s got it. Okay. Yeah, Helen’s got it. Yes, 90%. Like before guys what Product Opportunity Explorer would be based on was 80% of the market, but they just like slid that under the radar a couple of weeks ago where it’s now 90%. So anyway, sorry for interrupting. Go, go ahead and continue.
Francesca:
Definitely excited to reveal that. Yeah, so I think really from here we’re taking the same concept, being able to review what are those search terms, what are those top clicked and purchased products representing the top 90%. And from there, sellers can use this information to understand where they can potentially launch new products, discover potential for new products, as well as how to optimize their own listings.
Bradley Sutton:
Here, I entered coffin and this is showing the matching niches for coffin. Now we’re gonna talk a little bit later about what exactly makes up a niche, but Francesca, what if instead of a keyword I entered an ASIN?
Francesca:
Yeah, so if you enter asin what we’ll end up sharing here is a Target ASIN, which is the ASIN that you just entered. And then we’ve also got similar ASINs that are gonna be in the same bestseller rank category as yours. And we’re also going to order them based on the relevance to the title as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Now guys, here’s just a quick hack. Quick hack here of how you can use this information. Let’s say, you know, a product and its variations have been in stock the whole year, never went outta stock. You know how Amazon reports BSR at the parent level, you know, not at the child level. So you never know which one is a good seller unless you, you know, use the other hack of using Helium 10 review insights to look at who has the most reviews. But another way to, to kind of estimate which color is selling the most is you enter that any of the ASINs into Product Opportunity Explorer. And then as you can see here, the top ones are almost always going to be the other variations. And if they were always in stock for the last 360 days, you could see kind of which one is probably the sold the most. Like the black one here got 22,000 clicks, and then the pink and the purple only about five, six, 7,000 each. And so that’s just like another way of getting estimations on how much each child item in the variation is. Let’s go to the next kind of view here. And this is a a keyword niche. So if I were to click into one of those keyword niches that, that came up, and I’m gonna go to this page now again, talk about how you make a keyword a niche.
Francesca:
Yeah, so what we do is we take a look at groups of similar search terms and check out what are those top clicked products that represent the 90% clicked and purchase products. So that’s actually what you’re looking at here on the products tab. Those top 90% of clicked and purchase products after customers might enter coffin shelf. If you wanna see what those similar search terms are, you can actually look at that in the search terms tab as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, so, so guys, this is actually a kind of cool way to see the domination or the non domination in certain niches. Like if there’s only five products that you see in a keyword niche, that means that those five products make up 90% of the sales. And so those five products are absolutely crushing it? So it might be, you know, some people might view that as opportunities, some might view it as the opposite. There, there’s, there’s no one way to look at things, but then you look at a niche where there’s like, it’s made up of 200 products, well, that means it takes 200 products to get to 90% of the sales for that niche. So, so just that in itself, the number of products that show up here is an insight. Keeping going here on this, this topic of the keyword niche, this tab is a different tab. This is the the search terms tab that make up this niche. So how, how, what goes into to this getting, getting search terms into this page?
Francesca:
Yeah, so these are going to be the search terms that are going to have a really similar search to purchase funnel. So you’re going to see coffin shelf, coffin bookshelf these are similar terms as coffin shelf, and we basically share with you there that search volume, the search volume growth, and the top three clicked products. I think a lot of times if you haven’t taken a look at this page, search conversion rate is often missed as well. So you can really see what are those successful search terms and maybe study these over time to see where you might need to transition in terms of discoverability.
Bradley Sutton:
Absolutely. Now just for those who didn’t notice this a few weeks ago or a few months ago, Amazon changed the Opportunity Explorer Search Volume to 100% match the Search Query Performance one. So if you see a number in Search Query Performance, it, it’s based on the same exact de-normalized data that you would see in Search Query Performance here in Opportunity Explorer. Now really quick, this page, I’ve talked about this before a year ago, something on this page inspired a Manny’s mysterious oddities product. So I noticed that a lot of products were getting like 1% and such conversion rate, you know, like coffin shelf, but then this keyword coffin bookshelf was getting like 0.1, like less than 0.1%, meaning that people were not finding what they were looking for. They were searching for it, but not clicking into it.
Bradley Sutton:
And so that told me that the market was kind of bare for this product, and so that’s why we made a coffin bookshelf and, and started killing the game with it. But that original idea for the product came directly from Product Opportunity Explorer. So that was a good, what did you say?
Julia:
I love hearing that.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes. She gets she gets a little bonus check from Amazon every time somebody says, says something like, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll need a little bit of a commission on that. All right. Now, now that was a good overview of these tabs here. Now one of the tabs there, it had shown something that said units sold. So where does that unit sold come from?
Francesca:
Yes. So again, taking that same concept from Search Query Performance, this unit sold data is based on when customers purchased products after entering the search terms. So it is a search to purchase conversion sale that is counted. And we are also following the same logic there as Brand Analytics. The sale only counts if the customer searched one of the search terms and made a purchase in the first 24 hours. So that same attribution time window is the same as Brand Analytics logic.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, perfect. Perfect. Now, a couple questions came in already about this. We’ll get to the questions later, but is this available for download or through the API only?
Francesca:
We are very excited to share that we have just launched the download feature in Product Opportunity Explorer. So you can download data and Product Opportunity Explorer in five different places. You can download the niche view, the ASIN view of the search results page and then when we go into those niche detail pages there we have the products tab and search terms tab. I think the most popular download that we’re seeing right now is on the search terms tab. So definitely take advantage of that. And then we also have one more download there on the product deep dive page where this niche product appears in.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. Speaking of the niches, this page here, Niche Details insights. Now, what are a couple of highlights from this page? This is something we haven’t shown people yet.
Francesca:
Yeah, so on this page what we essentially do is provide some high level statistics about this niche. So you can see starting from that top line, which we will get this update here, here to show you that it is top 90% of clicks and purchases. But we’ve got, you know, from today, 90 days ago and 360 how many products have existed in this, in this niche. So you can track, you know, how many entrances are coming in, in and out. We also have the what I think is really important and what we heard from sellers when developing this page is they wanted to understand how many products and brands were representing the top five or, or 20. And so you can see we have the top five and top 20 product and click share displayed. This page can also tell you a little bit about the maturity of the niche.
Francesca:
We have things like what is the average brand age selling partner age, and then probably my favorite part of it is the customer experience, which is that bottom section there. In addition to seeing that star rating tracked over time, we also display average out of stock for this niche. And I think this is one of those really simple ways to identify if there is unmet demand. If there’s a consistent high out of stock there, you’ll, you probably do have some opportunity to to meet unmet demand there. And then it’s a little bit cut off on this slide, but we also have the listing quality score so you can get a sense for how these ASINs are, are doing in terms of their listing quality, you know, title, image, detail page. That’s a really easy way to differentiate yourself if you’re taking a look at that.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Another page we didn’t show was this trends page. And this is cool because of all those search terms that are in that niche. This aggregates that data and, and shows the, the overall search volume week by week. Alright, week by week it’ll show the search volume and then it actually so shows the product count as well. So this is kind of interesting. You can kind of see like over time, well that 90% metric of how many products it takes to the niche, you can kind of see is it going down, you know, going down, meaning that, you know, there’s a few products that are starting to dominate a little bit more, or is the number of products going up, meaning that it’s kind of like wild west in this niche as far as who’s dominating the sales.
Bradley Sutton:
Those of you who have a Helium 10 Diamond account, I hope you are using the Brand Analytics. We talked about Search Query Performance which is inside of Brand Analytics. We talked about Opportunity Explorer. Some of this stuff you need to start using in conjunction with each other. Like if you go to cerebral or magnet, if you have a Diamond account or above, you are gonna be able to click on any of these keywords and see the, the top click and purchase share that comes directly from these data points we’ve been talking about today. And why this is beneficial is because sometimes combining Helium 10 data with what we talked about, it gives you a next level of insight. Like, for example, if I was looking at these coffin letter boards, I could see that to be the top clicked in October of last year, for example, it was almost all about organic rank.
Bradley Sutton:
Like the, the other top two click. They weren’t even in the top, you know, they weren’t even on page one or two of sponsored ranks. But sometimes you’re gonna see trends where the sponsored rank is more important, like for our coffin shelf, if you look at Brand Analytics, you see, hey, coffin shelf is the number one most clicked product for this keyword, but then you look at the Helium 10 data and we’re only 12th or organically, but we are number one. So then now all of a sudden I’ve got this insight, well, wow, for this keyword, I really have to make sure my sponsored rank is at the top because it looks like people are buying from the sponsored ad on the top row as opposed to the organic rank. Another keyword might be something totally different, but again, you need both the Search Query Performance and Brand Analytics data and then combine it with the Helium 10 data, which like I said, if you have the Diamond account, you’re going to be able to do.
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing that you guys can do is on, you know, even people on the free account of Helium 10, you guys have the search widget. When you go on the widget for BSR on any Amazon page, I suggest looking at your top competitor, right? Look at your top competitor and find when they had, they were just crushing it in sales, you guys should know that it’s the valleys of A BSR, the lower the BSR, that means the higher the sale. So I’m looking at this one competitor and I can see that, oh my goodness, like in July they had this crazy dip in BSR, so they were just probably selling like crazy. They had another crazy dip in like November, you know, during the holiday season where their sales just kind of skyrocketed compared to what it was normally.
Bradley Sutton:
So there’s the Helium 10 data, and now I go into Search Query Performance or Brand Analytics, either one Brand Analytics, if it’s not my competitor, if it’s my product, I would look at Search Query Performance. If it’s my competitor product, I would run it in Brand Analytics. And then I go into the daily or weekly history for this Amazon data point that correlates to this exact time that they had a big peak in sales. And now I can see where were the keywords that they were one of the top clicked for that day or for that week. So another situation where you combine Helium 10 data and then now take it back to Brand Analytics and get some additional insights. Another thing that we just opened up again for Diamond members is the time machine. So I could, instead of just looking at Brand Analytics, who is the top three picked?
Bradley Sutton:
If I noticed that there was somebody crushing it in sales in the month of September, 2022, well I can enter them into Cerebro and now I can hit this historical function where I click on a month like September, and now I know all of the keywords that they were ranking for, all of the keywords that they were running sponsored ads for. Another way that you can combine data Search Query Performance, this is, this is directly from Amazon. This is what we were looking at. I can see here that coffin shelf, I had about 4,000 or the, not I, but Amazon had search volume of 4,000 for the week, and I, as in my product had 4,000 impressions. So as you guys learned from Julia, that means that pretty much every time that somebody searched for this product, my product showed up once on the page, right?
Bradley Sutton:
But take a look at this coffin decor, it had a very similar search volume of almost 4,000, but look at my impressions, there is only 704. So if you see this in Search Query Performance, you are like thinking what in the world is going on? Why is my impressions to search volume one-to-one on this keyword, but it’s like one to five on this keyword. What’s going on? Well, this is where again, you now take it to another Helium 10 tool keyword tracker and take a look here, this is coffin shelf. You could see that for my sponsored rank and my organic rank, most of the time I was towards the top of the page, it was going off and on. And so it make, it makes sense that at least one of these times, every time somebody searched, I was near the top of the page on those times.
Bradley Sutton:
But then take a look at that other keyword, coffin decor, look at my organic rank and my sponsored rank, my organic rank. Most of the time I’m on like page two, page three, sponsored rank. Only half of the time I’m on page one. So now all of a sudden it becomes clear what I’m looking at in Search Query Performance of why I’m getting so few impressions. It’s because my organic and sponsored rank, which are the two things that Search Query Performance is taken into consideration. It’s not high. So now, you know, for, for my sponsored rank, I can just snap my fingers and increase my bid if I wanted to and, and go to the top of the page. And hopefully over time that might help my organic rank. These are just like two three of the ways where you can combine what we’ve learned today with Helium 10 data and then really getting to understand what is happening with your products on Amazon or what is happening with your competitor products. So make sure to use this especially if you’re a Diamond, you have a Diamond account, you’ve got full access to all of that. Ahad says it’s not a question, but more of a request. Hey, can you add the parent ASIN option in Search Query Performance? Because when we have a lot of variations, it’s hard to look at it. So I guess that’s kinda like a feature request.
Julia:
Yes, that’s something that we are definitely looking into is also a very common request and totally makes sense when you have a lot of variations, it’s a little tough to figure out what is coming from which child. So keep your eyes peeled for that for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
David has a question for me. He says, Hey, if a search period performance is de-normalized, helium 10 is normalized, why is Helium 10 search volumes always higher? It’s not, the one you’re looking at is the week. Alright, the one that shows up in Helium 10 is a 30 day search form. So it’s much, much higher, the search courier performance, you’re comparing a month to a week which is two different, two different things. You, if you wanna apples to apples, you can compare the month, the 30 day value. This is from Nicole, why would a product or search term not have any matching niches? I’m assuming we’re talking about opportunity explorer here. Yeah, that’s a good
Francesca:
Question. Question. I can take that one for Product Opportunity. Explore, it’s possible that there might not be enough search volume yet on the term that you typed in. So I would just go ahead and try some alternate terms to see if that could bring up some results. I definitely like what Jason pointed out with how he started with SQP going into OX to see what are the related niches to those search terms. I think if you’re not finding what you need, just try different search terms or you can also try the ASIN view as well. If you type in your ASIN and go to ASIN view, you can also take a look on that ASIN detail page, what are the niches this ASIN matches to, and you might be able to discover some niches that way as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And keeping with you, Francesca Logan says where it says, we talked about this a little bit, but where it says average units sold, is that per listing per month or it’s overall all of the products in that niche.
Francesca:
So it would be all of the products in the niche for the last year. And just keep in mind that it is counting the sales in that 24 attribution window. So it’ll probably will not match up with your standard sales reports.
Bradley Sutton:
Kay says, when you’ve got like 300 plus products, four brands, it’s a lot of data to go through. So what do you suggest the main focus or takeaway should be with the Search Query Performance? Like, you know, like if she’s a one woman show, you know, she can’t just sit there all day every day going through 300 products, Search Query Performance reports. So what, what would you say she should be looking for?
Julia:
I mean, in my opinion, I think you really focus on your top and your bottom ASINs, especially in Search Query Performance. Your top ASINs are most likely going to be showing up in the top 100 or at with those top 100 keywords. So I would really look at those top ASINs and see how you can continuously improve them. And then also take a look at, you know, are my bottom ASINs, are they showing up in this report and can I, you know, can I do anything to get them higher up on search or to get them, you know, more purchases. Also, take a look. I think some of the key funnel metrics are really looking at those clicks to add to carts, add to carts to purchases is your, you know, are you getting that traffic and if you are, are you getting the conversion from it? If you aren’t getting the conversion, take a look at, you know, your competitors and look at why is it pricing, is it your detail page? Could you be advertising more on different keywords? So I think that those are really the most important things I would take a look at. But agreed, it is a lot of information and we are going to try and find some ways to make that a little bit easier for you.
Bradley Sutton:
Well guys, that’s another reason that we gotta Hurry app Amazon and get this available in the API because you know, once that’s available now Helium 10 can like do a lot of that work for you and then you can set alerts and stuff. We’ll just let you know when certain things happen. Hint, hint, wink, wink to Julia there, I was teasing Francesca and Julia that they’re gonna be celebrities after this. ’cause So many people we had over 1200 people live on this webinar. So please ask them for an autograph. If you see them walking in Amazon Accelerate, you can ask them offline some questions. If you guys haven’t gotten your tickets yet to Amazon Accelerate, it’s still open. Go to h10.me/accelerate. Let me that’s just an easy way to remember the link. So h10.me/accelerate, that’ll take you directly to the Amazon website.
Bradley Sutton:
And I see that there’s maybe 60 other questions, but it’s hard to scroll in this Zoom thing here. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna consolidate all your questions. We’re gonna try and get to everything that Search Query Performance or Product Opportunity Explorer related. I saw a lot of questions that were just general, but we’re not gonna cover those. But we’ll try and do a follow-up, either podcast or video or something with Julia and, and Francesca. I thank you two very much for coming on here. This is unprecedented. You guys have never really opened up the hood on these things before. So we thank you for allowing us to break this to the audience out here. Jason, thank you for coming on and giving us a real world, real life experience of an Amazon seller who has benefited from this information. And I’ll be seeing all of you guys and everybody else out there, hopefully at Amazon Accelerate. Thank you so much. Goodbye everybody.
Today, we’ll have a special TACoS Tuesday episode in the Serious Sellers Podcast, where our host Shivali Patel and her guest, Chris Rawlings of Sophie Society, dive into the world of Amazon PPC by answering your questions live and talk about strategies to level up your PPG game, uncovering hidden gems that can significantly enhance your click-through and conversion rates. We kick things off with a critical takeaway: the importance of benchmarking your essential metrics, a practice that forms the bedrock of a successful Amazon PPC strategy. Tune in as we unravel techniques to boost your CTR and conversion rates while exploring the intriguing “Random Walk Hypothesis.” Listen as we tackle live audience questions and even share wisdom on countering dips in conversion rates caused by negative reviews. Exploring bid adjustment modifier percentages and unveiling the Stealth Targeted Product Placement Campaign, we ensure every stone is turned in in your quest for Amazon PPC excellence. Stay tuned till the end for ways to connect with Chris Rawlings and Sophie Society, plus an invitation to participate in Chris’ Amazon PPC Challenge that will propel you to the next level!
In episode 484 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Chris discuss:
- 01:12 – Meet Our Guest Chris Rawlings
- 03:01 – Amazon Ads Strategy For New Sellers And Brands
- 09:58 – You Need To Benchmark Your Key Metrics
- 11:45 – How To Improve Your CTR And Conversion Rates
- 15:58 – The Random Walk Hypothesis
- 19:46 – Q: How To Find CTR And CVR In SQP and Product Opportunity Explorer
- 21:32 – Q: My Conversion Rate Has Dropped Because Of Bad Reviews
- 25:26 – Q: Do You Do Bid Adjustment Modifier Percentages On Top Of Search And/Or Product Pages?
- 29:38 – The Stealth Targeted Product Placement Campaign
- 32:29 – Join Chris’ Amazon PPC Challenge
- 32:59 – How To Contact Chris And Sophie Society
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TranscriptShivali Patel:
Today on TACoS Tuesday, we answer all of your PPC questions, live and discuss some underrated and rarely discussed optimization strategies that have the potential to completely transform your click-through and conversion rates. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think
Bradley Sutton:
You wanna see the size of your niche or your market, maybe how much sales overall is it generating, and more importantly how the size of your piece of that pie changes over time. Or maybe you want to know when there’s a new mover or shaker, an up and comer in your niche that you need to be on the lookout for. You can monitor these things and more with Market Tracker by Helium 10. Find out more information at h10.me/markettracker.
Shivali Patel:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday special, where we talk to you about anything and everything Amazon PPC related. Today our guest is Chris Rawlings, who is a multimillion dollar Amazon seller and the host of Profitable PPC Challenge. He’s also the CEO of Sophie Society, which has become recognized as one of the most in demand PPC and conversion optimization agencies. There is. They regularly work with 6, 7, 8, and even nine figure businesses today. Chris is here to answer your questions. Let’s go ahead and get Chris up here. Alright. Hi Chris, how are you?
Chris:
What’s up? I’m good, I’m ready to go. Let’s answer some questions.
Shivali Patel:
I love that energy and PPC is such an exciting component of your brand, your business, building out your business, even reoptimizing later on. It can be a little bit nerve wracking. There’s so many different components and if you don’t know what you’re doing, man, man, oh man, that can really affect the bottom line of your business. So where are you now?
Chris:
I’m in Cyprus. I’m in Cyprus with my team and we’re actually doing like a PPC deep dive workshop here. So we’re going super deep on PPC every single day. Today we had a bunch of sponsored brand, defense campaigns up and we were talking about, you know, sponsor display retargeting and we had all kinds of wizardly things going on here at our PPC workshop in Cyprus.
Shivali Patel:
Well, that’s incredible. I’m excited for everyone that’s tuning in and listening in on this episode to tap into some of your knowledge and expertise that I know those of you, those of the people that are there in Cyprus right now are enjoying. But let’s just kind of backtrack into the beginning stages of an Amazon seller’s journey. Maybe let’s talk about what really goes on or how should somebody be approaching their ad campaigns or their advertising aspect of their business once they’re just getting started as an Amazon seller.
Chris:
So when you’re just starting, the key is to not make it too complicated. That’s the key. A brand new brand just starting on Amazon, can’t be running every ad type, every possible ad configuration, every targeting and you wouldn’t want to anyway. You’re gonna blow your budget and you’re gonna hear a lot of fancy things, different types of campaigns you can run and different types of features in in PPC and most of it you can just ignore when you’re just getting started. The most important thing during like a new brand new product launch is using PPC as a tool for ranking. So a lot of your ad budget is gonna go to campaigns that are specifically purposed for getting you ranking and mostly that comes down to single keyword, exact match sponsored products campaigns. So inside sponsored products, which is one of the three main types of advertising available to most sellers, you can target one single keyword in the campaign.
Chris:
And exact match means that it’s Amazon is only gonna target people who search that exact term and that drives ranking very powerfully. The next most powerful ranking driver is ASIN target, meaning you’re putting your ad on another ASIN on their listing rather than in search results. And you want to target the ASINs that are already ranking for the keywords you’re trying to rank for. And advertising on those ASINs gets you to rank better for the keywords that they rank for. So it’s like a rising tides raises all ships type of deal for that. You’re gonna wanna drive a lot of your ad budget to just those types of advertising. And really, if you want to keep it super simple, you could just do just that. And that makes it so much easier for someone just getting started where they don’t have to learn like the entire complex sophisticated suite.
Chris:
I will say like as the launch progresses and as the brand matures, you’ll get left behind if you don’t start to learn more and more sophisticated ad strategies, which some of which I’m sure we’ll go into during this hour, but in the beginning, keep it simple. Focus on ranking and sales velocity. Get to your review milestones as quickly as possible. The first five reviews, there’s a big increase in click-through rating conversion rate. Then there’s another big increase, another plateau after 21 reviews. And then once you get into the hundreds, that’s the next big jump. The thousands is the next big jump after that. So hit those milestones as quickly as you can.
Shivali Patel:
So when you talk about a plateau, could you go a little bit in depth with what you mean with that? Like the ranking itself or just in terms of reviews?
Chris:
Yeah, so review strategy is one of the factors that affect PPC. That’s not taken into consideration when looking at PPC metrics because it’s one of the few things that affects both your click-through rate for certain keywords and your conversion rate once they’re on the listing. So the two numbers that affect PPC that are not PPC metrics the most, ’cause we all know a costs average cost of sale. I spent $10 in advertising and I made a hundred dollars in revenue. I had a 10% aid cost rate and TACoS, which is what this whole session is named after total average cost of sale, which is I spent $10 total in advertising and I got a thousand dollars in in sales. So my TACoS is 1% because it’s in, that’s my all my total sales, not just my advertising sales.
Chris:
But there are other metrics that are super important that affect PPC that are not PPC metrics and click-through rate and conversion rate are the most important ones. So everything that you do to increase your click-through rate for your most relevant keywords and everything that you do to increase your conversion rate, more people that land on your listing end up buying, make your PPC more effective and make your TACoS and ACoS healthier and lower. And reviews is one of the few things that affects both click-through rate and conversion rate. So you get a double hit. So getting more reviews, number of reviews, that’s one thing. And then getting better star rating in the better average star rating in your reviews is the other main metric when it comes to reviews. So putting in place systems that increase your number of reviews at a faster rate, we call that review velocity.
Chris:
How many reviews do I get per a hundred sales? So if I get one review for every a hundred sales, that’s a 1% review velocity, a healthy review velocity is four, 4%. So that means every a hundred sales that I make, I get four reviews. That means you’re doing great if you have a review. Velocity of four. I know sellers that have review velocity up to 8% where every a hundred sales they get, they get eight reviews. And I wouldn’t really try to go past 10, I honestly wouldn’t really try to go past five. ’cause At a certain point you start to send red flags to Amazon, they might be doing something tricky, but the main things you can do to affect that are having a Amazon terms of service compliant product insert or packaging feature that gets people on into your ecosystem in order for them to get the warranty or something else that helps ’em with their product.
Chris:
Like how to guide and then get them on your email list and then later on down the line without offering them anything in return or asking ’em to leave a good review, just invite them to leave a review. That’s one of the primary things you can do to up it. But also helium tends tool that that allows people to automate the request review within Amazon is also a great way to do it. There are lots of ways to do it, but those milestones that I mentioned are where the, the, you see like the steepest drops in the steepest increases either in conversion rate or click-through rate or both. So the first five you get, it’s like big difference between when you’re between one and four and when you’re after five and then the first 21 you get, again, a big difference when you’re before 21 and after 21. And then once you’re in the hundreds, big difference again. So putting in place the systems to make sure you get to those milestones quicker is, is, is good.
Shivali Patel:
So let’s say somebody has gone through those steps and has really optimized those underlying factors you’re talking about, which is really interesting ’cause you don’t hear a lot of people talk about it. I feel like it’s, it’s kind of known, but no one’s actively thinking about it thinking, okay, well like what should I do to optimize these underlying factors? But let’s say somebody has gone through those things, well then when do you really start to begin adjusting or thinking about things like, well this keyword might not, I I should change out this keyword for my ad groups. Or even just considering that the click through rate or conversion rate isn’t what you want it to be, or you wanna change something out in your actual ad set.
Chris:
Yeah. So the main way to know whether you’re doing good or bad when it comes to these outside factors that affect PPC, like click through your click through rate and your conversion is by benchmarking them. So for conversion rate, for example, you can use the product opportunity explorer tool, which is inside Seller Central to benchmark the search term conversion rate of the entire space for that search term. So now, you know, for those sellers that are ranking for that keyword, what they convert at and each space is, is radically different. If I looked at the search term conversion rate of like vitamin D supplements, it’s gonna be totally different than the search term conversion rate of commercial hand blenders because one is something that people buy all the time, you know, over and over again and it costs less than $20.
Chris:
The other thing is a $300 item that people tend to shop around and, and do a lot of research for, right? So first you have to benchmark it by getting that data. And now you know, okay, is my product above or below that benchmark in terms of my conversion rate? Now I know some idea of if my conversion rate is good or bad. If it’s bad, then every dollar you put into PPC is not totally wasted, but in a sense wasted because you haven’t fixed underlying issues that are gonna keep your PPC from allowing your product to perform well. So once you’ve benchmarked it and you know whether it’s good or bad, if it’s bad, fix the underlying problems to make it good. If it’s good, then you do wanna shift your attention to proper PPC management and you’re in a good place to perform well with PPC.
Chris:
As long as you have everything dialed in, some of which we’re gonna. When it comes to click through rate, you normally, you’re you. So a big part of the benchmarking of this is benchmarking it against yourself. You do have the search query report inside brand analytics that allows you to see the whole funnel for your product and for the space which helps you benchmark your, your click through rate. And then you also get your own click, click-through rate inside your advertising metrics, inside the Amazon ads dashboard and in your search term reports. So now you know your click through some idea of if your click-through rate is healthy, and it’s the exact same thing with your click-through rate as it is with your conversion rate. So once you’ve determined that you click through rate is at least above is above average and your conversion rate is above average, now you know that you’re ready for PPC, but most people or a lot of sellers are not always gonna be in that scenario or they’ll dip in and out of those scenarios as time goes on.
Chris:
And that’s why it’s, those two metrics are so important to measure over time because once you dip below the benchmark for your space or for that keyword for that product, now you know you have an issue to solve. And there are a lot of ways to solve those two issues and we can, we can get into them now or later or whatever, but each of those has a diagnostic checklist that you can go through to, if I have a click through rate problem, there’s so many things I can try to solve it. And if I have a conversion rate problem, again, there’s so many things that I can try to solve that problem. So you really have limitless options available to you to solve those things.
Shivali Patel:
I think now’s a great time to get into it. Let’s, we’re already on the topic and I’m sure those people that are listening in would love to know. So what are those? What’s that checklist?
Chris:
So clickthrough rate and conversion rate, the two most important things that have to be healthy in order for your PPC to perform well. Let’s start with clickthrough rate. Let’s open up the box of clickthrough rate. What’s inside clickthrough rate? What is click-through rate? What affects it? Well, everything that the customer sees on your listing thumbnail is affecting whether or not they click through. So just talking about the listing thumbnail for a second, because there’s also the topic of the actual keyword relevance itself. But just to talk about the listing thumbnail, what elements, what makes a listing thumbnail? Let’s, let’s talk through it. So the primary image, first of all, again, getting everyone on the same page, listing thumbnail is what you see when you search Amazon. And those are the search results. Each one of those things is a listing thumbnail. You’re not on the listing yet, you just have a little preview of it, right?
Chris:
And what do you have? You have a primary image, which is the first image you upload on the listing. That’s the only visual piece of content that shows on both the thumbnail and the listing is the primary image. And that’s arguably the most powerful factor for influencing the clickthrough rate. That’s its own science in and of itself. So it’s primary image. What else is there? There’s the title of the product. So the title is like the main text that you see in the thumbnail. Then there’s the number of reviews, which we talked about before. So now we have three factors affecting click-through rate. Then there’s the review rating. Is it 3.5? Is it 4.5? Is it four 4.8? And there’s not just the number 4.8, 4.7, but the icons of the yellow stars, which is more important even than the review rating number.
Chris:
Is it showing as four and a half yellow stars or is it showing as four stars? Those are really the main, the main two options. Most products are gonna fit in one of those two categories. So we have that. Then we have the badges. Do I have a bestseller badge? Do I have an Amazon’s choice badge? Do I have some of the more exotic badges like climate pledge friendly or small business badge? Those, that’s the fifth factor there. Then we have the price, the price of the product influences whether or not someone clicks on it. Then there’s the potential to have a strikethrough price, which is independent of the price itself. Having a strikethrough price can affect whether or not someone clicks on it. Then there’s the size of the thumbnail itself. So not many people know this, but you can influence the size of your thumbnail.
Chris:
And if it’s bigger, it’s more likely to be clicked because of the random walk hypothesis. This is a hypothesis inside chaos theory and math. I majored in physics. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that to you ever, but I’m a math guy. So I think of things mathematically, statistically, as much as possible. And when a shopper who’s, who’s scrolling through search results, you know what we do on the phone? We flick the motion, the word of for what our thumb does is flick. We flick and it zooms through things and then we stop, we stop with our thumb and then we flick back up and then we stop. And it’s, it’s, it’s a random, you know, it’s a random motion. The bigger your, your listing thumbnail, the more likely someone is to land on it randomly when they’re flicking through search results.
Chris:
So that impacts it as well. So now we’re at, I’ve actually lost count, I dunno if we’re at eight. All those things affect click-through rate and each one of them is its own full science. So I could go so deep on testing different things on my primary image. I can go super deep on getting super highly relevant keywords by pulling data from my search terms to make sure that my title is highly relevant in getting me more clicks. I can go really deep on getting every type of badge. I can go really deep on maximizing the size of my thumbnail. There’s so many things that I can, I can do. So you could see how it’s like, yeah, there’s, you always have limitless options to improve when you have issues with these, these underlying factors. And then conversion rate. So conversion rate, we have some things that are overlapping, like the review rating, the review number.
Chris:
Those two things also affect conversion as well as the click-through rate. But then there are things that are completely independent that don’t affect the click-through rate at all that are very important for con for conversion. Like the secondary image set. Everything after the primary image is the secondary images. Do I have a benefits graphic? A features graphic? Do I have lifestyle shots? Do I have in-use shots? Do I have flourish shots? Do I have a competitor comparison shot? If you’re missing any of these things that might be affecting your, your conversion rate and making you below average for the space. Then you have the copy of the listing, the bullet points, the title itself as well affects somewhat the, the conversion, although it’s not the the biggest thing. Then you have the video on the listing. So this is also not the top of the list but it does affect the conversion.
Chris:
But the most powerful things that affect conversion are the visual content on the listing, which is the secondary images, the a plus content and the brand story content, the brain story section. And these are again, things that each one is their own science and you can look up on YouTube how to create the best version of it. There are lots of videos on it. I have some videos on it. The q and a section and then the top voted reviews. So this is a part that you can’t see in the click-through rate. So it doesn’t affect the click-through rate at all ’cause it’s not in the, the thumbnail. But the top voter reviews are actually arguably more important than any of the content because most Amazon shoppers, their shopper shopping behavior is actually to click onto the listing and they skip all of the content almost immediately. Go right to the reviews, read the top voted ones, and then if they’re satisfied they’ll read the rest of the listing and all of the content that you put out as the brand. And if they’re not, they’ll click back and look at some other things.
Shivali Patel:
It’s almost like you’ve been looking over my shoulder the whole time I’m shopping ’cause that is exactly what I do.
Chris:
It’s what I do too. I do the same thing.
Shivali Patel:
I’m just like, I don’t care about any of these listing description images.
Chris:
Yeah, I don’t care what you act to say about your product. I want to hear what people had to say. People
Shivali Patel:
Have to say about the product. Yeah, yeah. I mean speaking of clickthrough rate and conversion rate, this is I think specific to search query performance and product opportunity explorer. So is there anything you wanna add?
Chris:
Yeah, so what is the best way to CTR and CVR on search query performance and product opportunity Explorer? Yeah, so go to Product Opportunity Explorer, navigate to product opportunity explorer inside Seller Central. Put in a go to search term, then put in a search term and then you’ll see right in the Product Opportunity Explorer, the search conversion rate, they call it the search conversion rate, which is the average conversion rate for listings that are ranking for that search term. And that’s your benchmark right there for the click through rate. You don’t get the raw click through rate in the search query performance report. You get like your, your click share in the search query performance report. So you basically get to benchmark. You don’t see it itself, the actual click through rate, but you can see if it’s high or low.
Chris:
And if you’re getting more clicks, you, you see relative to the funnel, if you’re getting more or less clicks than your competitors that are ranking for that term. Relative to the other stages of the funnel, like if I’m getting lots of conversions but not more conversions than I should based on the, the space but less clicks than I should, then I know, oh that’s the part of the funnel that I need to work on is the click part of the funnel. So that’s what the search query, performance search query report helps you with. But the, another great way to benchmark CTR is just your actual advertising data. You see how you’re doing and how it changes over time with your, your search term reports and right inside the advertising manager as well.
Shivali Patel:
Awesome. I see we have some more questions here, so let’s jump into those here. We have Victor who says, had a few bad reviews, some trouble with the product, but I fixed it 4.4 stars. Do you think I should relaunch 46 total ratings? People still buy the product, but I can see that my conversion rate has dropped. So what would you recommend here?
Chris:
Yeah, so let’s see. 46 total ratings still pretty early on in the product’s life. I know that feels like a lot when you’re in the launching phase ’cause you’re like, yeah, I had to beg, borrow and steal to like get there. But 4.4 stars is not bad. You still have the four and a half star image in the gold stars. So you’re still showing us four and a half gold stars. Your conversion rate, so you’re saying your conversion rate dropped because you had a few bad reviews. So this isn’t bad enough for you to relaunch 4.4 stars and a couple bad reviews, 46 ratings. I mean, there have been way worse scenarios that have come back from this and without having to relaunch and and start fresh, that is an option if you wanted to try it. But you, it’s, you have to risk that you’re gonna have to deal with, you know, relabeling all the inventory and starting from scratch and doing a brand new brand new ace and getting, starting from zero reviews and all that stuff.
Chris:
So it is possible for you to come back from this. And basically what you wanna make sure of is that those negative reviews aren’t showing as top voted. That’s key. The main thing is the top voted reviews. ’cause Those are the ones that everyone is looking at. So the way to get them off of top voted, since you say your conversion rate dropped, I’m assuming that these negative reviews are showing it stop voted because otherwise it wouldn’t affect your conversion rate that much with a 4.4 star rating because that’s, that’s not bad. That’s, that’s pretty good. So the way to do it is get more reviews and the way to get more reviews is to get more sales and have review systems in place. So some of the main ones are automating the request, request a review button, which you could do with helium 10 in a smart way that doesn’t request it from folks who ask for a refunder or a return for instance, which it’s great.
Chris:
Also having a product insert in place has a follow-up sequence. So the product insert has like a URL or a QR code. The customer scans, it brings ’em to a landing page where they put in their information, they get put on a list and then later on down the line that you invite them to ask for to leave a review. So that, and then also there are things that you can do that are kind of like review triggers that you can pull at any time. So if you have a negative review, there are things that you can do to quickly bury it. And one of those things is keeping a sort of bank of customers who accidentally left seller feedback as a review, which happens to every seller. This is very common because shoppers just still to this day don’t really get the difference between seller feedback and a review.
Chris:
So I’d say it’s anywhere between one and five and one in three seller feedbacks is actually a product review, whether it’s negative or positive. And so this is kind of a bank that you can, you can like, it’s like a like a water tower that you can like drain at any time, like pull water from at any time because you can ask these people who left this feedback, you can let them know they left feedback as a review, they left a review as feedback mistakenly and to ask them to please leave a review and some portion of them will, especially if they’re actually really delighted by the product. So that’s a good way to quickly, quickly bury bad reviews that are coming in that are affecting your conversion rate. So yeah, long story short, I would say if it were me, I probably wouldn’t relaunch, although you know the situation better than me and it is an option for you. You still can come back from it, is ensure that the negative reviews are not showing up as top voted. And if they are, do everything you can to fix that and then push for ranking with your PPC hard for highly relevant search terms.
Shivali Patel:
Wonderful. What about this question right here, which is, do you do bid adjustment modifier percentages on top of search and or product pages?
Chris:
Yeah, that’s another awesome question. I guess I’ll have to get close for it ’cause it’s an awesome question. So yeah, the bid adjustment modifiers are super useful for all different reasons. So you can go up to 900% on your, your bid adjustment modifiers, meaning you’re giving Amazon a huge amount of leeway to adjust the bids the way that you want them to be. So every sponsored product campaign can show either in search results or on product detail pages. It’s kind of annoying because if you’re targeting search terms you think, well I’ll only show up in search. Well, it’s not the case. Amazon can show your ad either place whether you’re targeting keywords or ASINs. So if you really wanna show up only on product detail pages or only in search, you can up the bid adjustment modifier that Bradley is is mentioning, is referencing here to make it more likely that you show up where you wanna show up.
Chris:
So here’s an example of that is if I know that I need to drive search placements, top of search placements for a particular keyword that I wanna rank for and say I sell kids omega three gummies and I know that the highest relevant search term for me because I really focused on my particular customer demographic is non choking kids chewable omega three gummies because all of my branding is about how no, no kid can choke on it ’cause it’s circular and it has hole in it or something like that. I’m literally just making all this up. This isn’t, this isn’t a real scenario, but if I know that that’s my my a super high relevant search term for me and I really wanna rank for it, I’m gonna want to get a lot of top of search clicks for it because that drives ranking the most powerfully.
Chris:
So when I create that campaign a an exact match campaign for non choking kids chewable omega three gummies, I’m going to put a bid adjustment modifier on top of search to make sure that most of my placements are top of search. And I’m not showing up so much on random product detail pages because I know that that’s what’s gonna drive my ranking and I wanna show up there. And I also wanna segment my campaign so it’s easier for me to tell which campaigns are doing well and which ones aren’t for my ranking. So I’ll go, you could go super high on that. You could start with a hundred percent, you could go up to 2, 3, 4 or five, 600% all the way up to 900%. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that Amazon is still, even if you go 900%, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Amazon is still gonna gonna show your, gonna only show your ad there.
Chris:
It still can show in the other placement like product pages, but it makes it more likely and it makes, it allows you to control those ads more. And then the same way it goes the other way for product pages, if I know that I want to, like we were talking about earlier before target products that are already ranking for the keywords I’m trying to rank for and I have my list already and I want to just show up on those product pages, I will adjust the, the product pages up to make it more likely that I show up only on those pages and not as much in search. Oh, and then there’s one other related factor to this and that is there’s a type of campaign that’s super lean. This is another if, if people are trying to take actionable stuff out of this.
Chris:
And that brand story thing was one that anybody wrote down or, or thought, Hey, I could do this. Here’s another one coming at you right now. This is a type of campaign that we, we discovered, and it’s not complicated, I’m sure that other brands and and agencies have discovered it themselves, but we put a name to it and we called it a step campaign, a stealth targeted product placement campaign. This is a type of campaign, we apply it to every brand, every brand should be running this type of campaign. It produces a low volume of sales, but they’re highly profitable and they, well they tend to be highly profitable, not always, but they tend to be high margin, high profitable campaigns. And we have some of these that have been running for definitely months, quarters at least over a year. And they’ll produce week after week 8% ACoS sales.
Chris:
We have one that’s producing consistent average 5.1% ACoS sales, but a lot of times it’ll be 13% ACoS, 12% ACoS. You can get really healthy ACoS with these campaigns. And what it is, is you target, it’s ASIN targeting inside sponsored products and you target the same product that you’re advertising. So usually you’re targeting either other competitors’ products or your other products. Right? So that’d be sponsored product offense campaigns, ASIN targeting offense campaigns or ace in targeting defense campaigns. Either I’m trying to get on a competitor’s listing or I’m defending my own listing. Well this is even further in than that. It’s like inception. I’m advertising my listing on my own listing. So it’s like, is that possible? Is that a dream within a dream? Within a dream? Like and Amazon actually won’t do it, so they won’t show your ad for your listing on that same listing because it’s pointless.
Chris:
Like what would happen? Nothing would happen if someone clicked it. They’re already on the listing. Like it’s not, all it could do is reload the page. So what it does do though is it then takes anybody who’s landed on the listing and then not purchased and gone back to search results and it’s like instant retargeting. So it immediately starts showing the ad to them in search. And also probably on product detail pages, I’m not sure, but in search, once they’ve visited your listing, so everyone knows retargeting within sponsored display that you can do, but this is a site type of effective retargeting that you can actually do within sponsored products. So that’s a, that’s another application.
Shivali Patel:
That’s incredible. I yeah,
Chris:
It’s cool. It’s cool hack. Yeah.
Shivali Patel:
‘Cause you think a lot about retargeting and you have that when you’re driving external traffic, but I’ve always wondered on Amazon, so I I had no idea. That’s really cool. Thanks for sharing. Now one last question. How can people contact you if they’re interested in asking you more questions or working with you? I know you also have the PPC challenge that’s coming up, but how can people contact you?
Chris:
Yeah, like you said, if people want more actual one-on-one time with me, joining the PPC challenge that we’re hosting at the end of next month is the best way to do that. You’ll actually see me live every day. It is a commitment you have to show up every day. In order to join, you have to have the ability to do that or at least watch the replay daily. But it’s the most well-attended Amazon PPC focused event for sellers by sellers. And that is a five day event happening at the end of next month. I’d love to see you guys there live. So if you want to contact me live, that’s, that’s the way. If you want to contact me asynchronously, I’m hello@sophiesociety.com or my Instagram handle is @hippiemogul and you can hit me up there and I do check my DMs. Well,
Shivali Patel:
I’m excited for everyone listening in to hopefully implement all the things you learned today, and hopefully you did learn a lot. I know I did. I look forward to seeing you again, Chris, and best of luck as you go ahead and start this PPC challenge. I’m looking forward to hearing about it next time.
Chris:
Yes. I’m excited as well. And this was great to do Shivali, it was really, really fun and I hope we, I hope we do it again.
Shivali Patel:
Absolutely. All right, take care.
Chris:
Okay, take care.
Today, we talk about the latest stories in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space. From Amazon review changes to how Walmart+ is ramping up pressure to Prime. Let's see what's buzzing this week!
In the world of Amazon and Ecommerce business expansion, the Latin American market holds immense potential. Belen Bauza and Cecilia Meghirditchian, the dynamic duo from Nocnoc, come from diverse backgrounds that uniquely equip them for navigating this vibrant marketplace. Let’s dive into their journey and unveil the strategies for expanding your brand across Latin American marketplaces. Discover the top 5 marketplaces in the region, backed by compelling numbers that underscore their significance. Nocnoc emerges as a game-changer, simplifying the path to expansion with their user-friendly platform. Learn how to seamlessly set up your Amazon or eCommerce product catalog within Nocnoc, leveraging their brand awareness program, listing translation services, and their experience launching successful products on the Latam marketplaces. Uncover the success story of Project X Egg Tray on Mercado Libre and other prominent marketplaces. Looking for a good deal with Nocnoc? We’ve got you covered! Seize the exclusive Bradley Amigo Discount. The doors to Latin America’s thriving online marketplaces are wide open – it’s time to step in with confidence!
In episode 483 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Belen, and Cecilia discuss:
- 02:33 – Belen And Cecilia’s Backgrounds
- 04:24 – Expanding Your Brand In Latam Marketplaces
- 07:17 – Top 5 Marketplaces In Latin America
- 09:39 – The Numbers Tell It All
- 14:57 – Nocnoc Is Making It Easier To Expand In Latin America
- 19:05 – Setting Up Project X Products Inside Nocnoc
- 20:45 – Nocnoc’s Brand Awareness Program
- 22:38 – Project X Egg Tray In Mercado Libre & Other Marketplaces
- 23:43 – Nocnoc Helps In Translating Your Listings
- 26:15 – How To Get 3 Months Free Trial With Nocnoc
- 27:00 – How Much Does Their Services Cost?
- 28:00 – Get The Bradley Amigo Discount
- 28:15 – Bradley’s Experience With Mercado Libre
- 29:20 – Tips To Succeed Selling In Latam
- 31:05 – How To Reach Out To Nocnoc
- 32:40 – Your Favorite “Knock Knock Joke”
- 33:20 – Cecilia’s 60-Second Tip
- 34:25 – Belen’s 60-Second Tip
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
How would you like to potentially increase your sales on some products by 10 to 15% with no upfront cost or inventory requirements? You can do that by opening your catalog in minutes to Latin American marketplaces reaching 500 million customers. Today’s guests are gonna explain how, how cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
What was your gross sales yesterday? Last week. Last year. More importantly, what are your profits, after all your cost of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool Profits. For more information, go to h10.me/profits. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a couple of people who help serious sellers from all over the world get into a certain part of the world. And we’re gonna be talking about what that is in a couple seconds here. But let me go ahead and introduce our two guests. Now, I had said, you know, before to myself, I wanted to try to, to get the pronunciation right of both of your last names. So for first of all, like, like for example, Belen, I’ve never said your last name, but like I noticed on it, you’ve got an accent, like on the last part of your name, so is the way you pronounce it Bauzá or just so Belen Bauzá and then now Cecilia. So let me give it a try here Meghirditchian or something.
Cecilia:
Well, almost.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh my goodness. And guys
Cecilia:
Meghirditchian. Better than some of my coworkers. So it’s better.
Belen:
Yes, it’s difficult for us. So sorry. No worries.
Bradley Sutton:
It is spelled a lot worse than it. Even that sounds, guys like, it sounds pretty cool. And then you try and spell it like, like if that was the winning word for like, you know, some spelling bee. I was watching the spelling bee where these 14 year old kids in America, they spell these crazy words. They would never have been able to win the spelling bee if they had that. And anyway, we’re just going to we’re just going to call you Belen and and Cecilia here because that’s a lot easier. You are calling us now from Chile. Is it? Or what part of the world are you in?
Cecilia:
Uruguay, South America
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, excellent. Excellent. So what is that where you guys were born and raised?
Cecilia:
Sorry?
Bradley Sutton:
Is that where you were born and raised? Both of you?
Cecilia:
Yes. We are from Uruguay, but the, the team is distributed in Brazil, Mexico United States, China, also Argentina. So just the headquarters are in Uruguay and we are from here, but the team is from all part of the world.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, excellent. Now, what did both of you end up studying in university then?
Cecilia:
I studied business management because I was really interested with marketing. I saw like, it was like a good way to learn about how a company works and also all the different areas. So I ended up studying that and I really loved it. And now I am like specializing in marketing.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So yeah, you’re kind of working in the field that you studied. What about you Belen? What do you study? Yes,
Belen:
I also study business and I have three degrees. I study also marketing and communications. It’s like corporative communications and yes, I also study digital marketing, but yes, I, I’m continue studying every year. I’m doing something new this year, for example, I study like some programs of digital graphics. I dunno if you have like that there. I’m learning to use some programs to make like additional photographs and all that things, but I don’t know, I’m always, I’m 30 years old and every year I’m studying something new.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, was your company here NocNoc, was that the first entry into e-commerce for both of you or were you involved in any way, like another company or for yourself? In e-commerce?
Cecilia:
Yes. It was the first time that I was so immersed in the e-commerce area because my best companies were like solution providers or software providers, but not in e-commerce. I mean, we had like retail clients, so I knew something about the retail market, but not like in depth like it is now. It’s like my first time really selling marketplaces and home marketplaces work because here in Latin America, e-commerce is not just e-commerce. E-Commerce is like marketplaces because it’s the, it’s a huge it has a huge volume of e-commerce sales. So yes, it’s the first time like I really started learning about that. And the market.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you also do other Spanish and Portuguese markets? You know, for example, Spain and Portugal like help sellers for their or only ones in North America and South America. Okay. Now is what you’re focused on is non-Amazon marketplaces. Like you’re not helping people to sell on Amazon Brazil, for example. It’s mainly the non-Amazon.
Cecilia:
We do. The Amazon Brazil, Amazon Mexico. But in LATAM America, Amazon is not the main marketplace. So if we only help sellers to sell in Amazon, they will only gain like five to 10% of the share potential e-commerce sales in LATAM. So what we do is to help them expand in the most marketplace possible. We have like 15 market different marketplaces that we have agreements, we have stores on them. So basically it’s not just, okay, I help you expand to Brazil to replicate your business in, in Amazon, Brazil. It’s like, I help you expand to all the market basis. Sure.
Belen:
If want to expand to Latin America, it’s important. They have to understand that it’s not the same like US that you throw your products in Amazon and you’re probably going to have a good performance. Because everyone knows Amazon is like the king in US here in LATAM, you have many, many marketplaces in all countries. For example, in Brazil you have more than 30 marketplaces and you want, and if you want to have real sales, you must be in most of these ones, for example, I know, but Mercado Libre is one of the biggest ones, and it has only a 12% of the share. So imagine the important to understand what is happening here in which marketplaces you have to be selling to have a good performance and to make sales. Yes. ’cause If not, if you’re in only one or two, marketplaces going to be quite difficult.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now you mentioned, hey there, there’s 30 marketplaces in Brazil and we know there’s many n other countries. If you were to list the top five for GMV or, or for the most volume of sales, what are the top five marketplaces in all of Latin America?
Cecilia:
The first one, Mercado Libre, because it’s present in all countries, but also in ra, Brazil is the strongest one. So it’s the strongest.
Bradley Sutton:
So, so the specific one, so then is number one out of all the mecal libre, like for example, I view Amazon USA and Amazon Germany as number one. And number two, it’s both Amazon, but, but separate. So then number one, out of all the countries marketplace would be Mercado Libre. Brazil,
Cecilia:
Yes. Mercado Libre Brazil. Then I would say I think maybe Magalu, Brazil too.
Bradley Sutton:
Also the top two are from Brazil. Interesting. Okay.
Cecilia:
I believe the top fire for Brazil, because Brazil.
Belen:
Yes. But of course that it depends a lot in the type of product and the price you have. Because for example, maybe for your product, if you’re selling, I dunno, something, a small device of technology probably in Brazil is you, you’ll have more sales in Mexico because you can’t sell there, eh, a full price, more expensive. Or if you have cosmetics, it’s going to be better in Brazil because in this markets you have like more competition and more people are used to buy this type of products. What we have in Nono is like a special team that, first of all, we analyze a little bit your products to understand in which country you are going to have a better fit. Because it’s, we can say like, well, I think that Merkel live in Brazil and then Maga and then Merkel live in Mexico are like the, the biggest one and the best ones. But of course that it will depend a lot in the type of product. We have products that if they wait, I don’t know, more than, I don’t know, 10 kilos, maybe you can be in some countries, you have like different laws different prices and weights that we have to understand in each country. So more or less, yes, it’s like Mercado Libre Brazil Magalu, Mexico,
Cecilia:
Americanas too in Brazil
Belen:
Americanas popular.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I never even heard of that one. Well, what country is that in?
Belen:
Brazil
Cecilia:
Americnas in Brazil too. Brazil
Bradley Sutton:
Also Brazil. Okay. Now, you know, before we go into too much details about selling down there, let’s just give, let help people understand the, the potential. So can you give some numbers from some customers, you know, where hey, you don’t have to say their name or anything, but I know one seller, you know, they started, they’ve been on there for one year and now they are doing, you know, $5,000 per month down there, they’re doing 10,000. You like what is the potential for somebody who is, you know, an Amazon USA or an Amazon Europe or like you said, maybe they’re from China and they open up in Latin America. What is the ceiling, I guess you could say for, for sales?
Belen:
More or less for you to understand? It’s like in LATAM you can have like the 15 or 20% of the sales you have in US. Every seller, every case is so different. And it would be depend in the disposal if there is a affluent communication. But yes, I think that maybe–
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, so I mean like if I’m selling a million dollars in Amazon USA, there’s a potential, yeah, hey, I could do a 100,000-150,000 or so in Latin America amongst all the marketplaces, but if my product is good for it, you know, like if I’m selling if I’m selling in in Mercado Libre and Magalu, I can’t be selling a shirt that says I hate Luis Suarez or something like that. You know, like, maybe if that’s my product, maybe it does good in America. It has to be kind of appropriate for the marketplace. Now have you ever seen a case where maybe there’s something that even sells better than somebody in another marketplace, but actually sells better? Like for example, everybody says something similar about Amazon USA and Walmart USA like, hey, Amazon USA usually 10 to 1, the sales, but you know, Carrie, who, who works with us here, she’s got a couple of products where on Walmart it actually sells better or the same as Amazon just because there’s more demand. Is there anything like that or usually it’s always less than than the other marketplaces.
Cecilia:
First of all some marketplaces have like their own special day, special sales. So it has happened to us that, for example, during a certain period of time, the seller had more sales in LATAM because of that special sale. That the hot sale, for example, in Mexico, that was in May. During hot sale in Mexico. That seller had like, I don’t know, three times, four times more sales in, in Mexico in LATAM than in the US for a specific product. And also, of course, I think depending on the marketplace because there are some marketplaces where we can push with ads on advertisings or maybe the keywords works better. And I don’t know that sales increase in the specific marketplaces. And we are always monitoring that analyzing the performance on each marketplace to push sales, to push advertising campaigns inside the marketplace. And of course that’s what we try to do, like to push sales in the marketplaces we see most potential.
Belen:
And also what happens a lot is, for example, when we start with a seller, they always tell us like, okay, look, this is my top selling product. This is the best sky you here in US. And when we expand their products, they can’t believe that, for example, a product that they don’t sell too much in US is the best opportunity here in LATAM. And the product that they are used to sell a lot in US is not that competitive here in latam because of course that you have a lot of factors that, I don’t know, season or sales, for example, when you finish a campaign in US, maybe then it’s going to be attractive here in LATAM market. So yeah, it is like, it’s everything different of what is happening in US, and these are good opportunity for sellers because maybe you have some products of summer and then here summer, so you can finish your size here. So it’s like we are always looking for different opportunities for sellers to boost their sales.
Cecilia:
Yes. last year the one of the top selling products in Brazil during Christmas was an outdoor game. So, of course, in the USA, an outdoor game won’t make sense because it’s winter, but here the beach, outdoor playing games. So we see that all the time during the different seasons. And I also remember, this is really funny, it’s like a funny fact. I think it was last year too, that Brazilian football player had a, the nickname? They told them pigion, like people told them that he was called pigion. I don’t know why. So a seller had pigion pledges toys. I don’t know why a Chinese seller. So during that time, the sales for that pigion plus boost in Brazil and seller said to us, what’s happening that this specific project had a lot of sales. It was because of that, of that nickname of that Brazilian football player. So those things usually happens. Yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now the way that that you guys even exist is because it’s hard for, for example, Americans, Canadians to just open up and sell these marketplace. I know, like I did, maybe I want to say eight or nine years ago, I started Mercado Libre in Mexico, you know, when I was doing in a phone case business, and it was tough. Like I had to have someone local and just, you know, like thinking about the customs and making the listings, it was a headache. And I ended up stopping, like after, after a few months, I was just like, this is not, I could see the potential, but I’m like, I don’t have the time to deal with this. So, so if I understand correctly, like the thing that you guys do is you take all of that hassle away. Like nobody has to have entities or bank accounts or anything down there, and I don’t even have to ship to Latin America. I’m shipping my products to Florida, right? And then you guys take it from there, and then that’s how you deliver from there to the customers. Is that right?
Belen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that NocNoc exists because we understand the headaches of the sellers when they try to expand. And yes, what we try to do is like solve all that problems. Like we make payments in dollars, we take care. You only have to give us like your bank account in US, and we transfer in dollars there. We make translations listing, we have customer service 24/7. We have offices in Mexico and Brazil, and if you have cancellations, we found returns, we’ll take care of that. We have our warehouse in Miami, so sellers only have to ship there to Miami for a seller. Imagine that is the same like selling in US. So they only ship there. It is like the first month shipping, and then we take care of everything. It’s like we ship to Mexico to Brazil, they have, if the seller has questions or problems, we’ll chat with them.
Belen:
We’ll answer the questions. It is like, I think that’s what happening with us. Our key in our business model is like we, we take care of the sales headaches and we try to solve all that problems because we have so many marketplaces here and to understand what is happening with each countries regulations are changing every day. So we understand the problems. These can be for a seller if they want to, to start selling by themselves. And yes, I think that this is like a whole solve problems. Yes, it is. Like what it is NocNoc.
Cecilia:
Yes. And also, and most important, we have the local team in all different countries that are experts in regulations, in compliance, in customs. They know which products can be sold in each marketplace, in each country. So that’s really like one of the, the biggest advantages, I think because you are talking with someone who knows the market, who already has been selling in the market for years and knows which products can or can’t be sold. And we do that like catalog analysis before telling a seller, yes, you can sell this, or no, we are really honest with them about everything, about pricing, about products. I think that’s the key of success, that we have a team that is really committed to customer success and to boosting sales in marketplaces. Well, yes, because
Belen:
No, yeah, that is really important. We have like a team and we have the experience and the knowledge of understand what is happening. When we have a new seller, we see that their catalog, and we know if with that price, they are going to be competitive. What is happening with that, that type of products in each country, we, we know in which marketplace is going to have more sense. It’s like we, we, we have offices in each country dedicated analysis teams that are always understanding which products are going to be better. So it’s like, I think that the, the knowledge is like, yes, really hard, but it’s really necessary here to make work side.
Bradley Sutton:
Now what I did, and you know, you guys know, I don’t like you know, talking about things I don’t have experience with. So I actually went through the process of getting set up here with NocNoc, and I took one of the Project X products, the, the egg tray. We figured that one would be a little bit more wide wide reaching as opposed to the coffin shelf, and it was pretty easy to get it set up on their website, you know, set the price of, you know, how I’m going to you know, the price before I ship it to them in Florida. And then what they started doing is going to the different places for example, Mercado Libre, right here, this is what it says. This is Mexico, I think. Yes, lib.com do mx.
Belen:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
And we’ve got this is not $805 even that’s pesos guys, so don’t worry. I’m not I’m not doing some crazy price. And we have the, the listing is translated and, and then you, since, since you’re selling it on a bigger account, you guys get this Mercado Libre gold mark because you’re a big seller, as opposed to me, if I was just getting started, I wouldn’t be able to have this, this badge. Right, exactly.
Cecilia:
We also have some stores that are like exclusive. So for example, company in Mexico is we have a store there, but we are the only international store available. So it’s the only way that any seller can like, have their products there in mere sellers, of course, can enroll by theirselves. It will be much more difficult and they won’t have like their reputation as we have, but we also have some other stores that, okay, the only way of selling is with NocNoc. So that’s a good point.
Belen:
Yes. And also when we have is like, eh, in some marketplaces we have like spaces, like banners, blog where we can push products. If we have new sales or marketing campaigns, we can like boost your sales, like you have spaces in the best marketplaces in LA town where we can publish your brand, your product. So that is really, we will be really difficult for a seller if they want to make it by their own to have like that reputation, that spaces in Mercado Libre or in Amazon or in Americanas, I don’t know. And yes, this has been like a work of years of NocNoc, and we have so good reputation in this marketplaces that for us is really easy to show your products, to help you have like a brand awareness to make your brand known here, because we work with brands that are new in, and right now we have like a new brand awareness program that for us, imagine that it’s really easy to make sale.
Belen:
I don’t know a small device of, I dunno, a computer, a Sony computer, okay, here in LATAM, we all know what it is, or a Apple, I don’t know any brand well known a perfume, a Carolina, a red perfume. I can make you say that tomorrow if you want, but what, what happens with new brands that want to start a growing latam and nobody knows the brands, their products. So what we do is like a brand awareness program that they can start, I don’t know, like paying $300 per month, and we can help them with influencers, with blogs with us, social media. We, we can make like an Instagram if you want. And yes, it’s like something new. We, we, we started working and it’s going really good because for new brands, it’s really important to, to get known the brands in the beginning. Yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Okay. Now there’s other you know, I don’t I can kind of speak Spanish a little bit, but I don’t speak Portuguese, but I can tell this is a Portuguese, so this must be Brazil here. Yeah. So it’s called Bandha instead of or still called wait, which band? There’s both. So the, wait, the word is the same, or wait, I thought it was a different word
Cecilia:
In Portuguese and Spanish.
Bradley Sutton:
It’s the eggs. That’s a different word. Okay. So the same in Portuguese and Spanish. Okay. OBO is Portuguese for eggs, I guess. All right, interesting. So I can see here the listing is completely in Portuguese, translated here. Yeah. I cannot read any of this down here. Interesting. what one is this? Dot cl Is this Chile?
Belen:
Yes. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. So here’s another, the same listing I guess, in Mexico here. So yeah, you put it in a lot of marketplaces there. There’s another one here. The pictures aren’t loading for me, but this is that Magalu. Big Brazilian website here. And so now it’s in this place, and it was pretty easy. It was pretty easy to get this set up here in this, in this portal that I did. Now let me show people another screenshot here of, you know, I don’t have we, we just added this just a little bit ago, so I don’t have a lot of I don’t have a lot of sales yet, but here is a dashboard of I guess one of your other you know, customers and you’ll be able to see what’s the pending orders, products out of stock and wow, look at this. $3,400 worth of sales, the top SKUs. Okay, this is pretty, pretty easy to to to navigate. Go ahead. Yeah,
Belen:
No, yeah, there you have like all your information, your balance, your what, your job. I use dashboards, pending orders, and also in the service center, you can upload your products. You don’t need help of us. If you want, you can make it by your own uploading products manually, maybe then in your Seller Central, you can show that you can upload products manually or you can integrate via a p I and we can help you with our IT team or you can upload with your ASINs, your Amazon ASINs. We take all the information from there and we’ll get like descriptions, titles, photographs, and we’ll translate everything to marketplaces here in LA Town or your, with your SKUs information, you upload a, a template that you can download it from there. And it’s like really easy and friendly for sellers. It’s like you log in, you will have an account, you say, okay, I want to upload products. You upload it, and probably in two days your product will be published in these marketplaces. And once we start with communicating with the sellers, we can make marketing like actions, we have campaigns, discounts, adds a lot of things to help them have more sales. So yes, the process of uploading products and starting seeing your products in publications in marketplaces is really fast and really easy.
Bradley Sutton:
Is there a setup fee for any of this? Like, I didn’t pay, but I don’t know, is that just the Bradley Amigo discount or there’s no, there’s no there is, there is. Do other people have to pay to get started on the platform? Well,
Cecilia:
First of all, eh, we offer three months free trial for anyone to try. So if you don’t want, I mean, if you want to try your success in Latin America, maybe you are not so sure about starting with your owner solution, we will give you three months free trial. Okay? So during that time, we of course we’ll help you get sales and boost your sales we’ll do analysis for you to determine which product are most successful, how it went, and then if you decide to continue, we of course offer like a small fee, but it’s the land maybe can talk more about that, but it’s really, really small. It’s just for us to like operate and have your account open. Yes,
Belen:
Yes. It’s like, well, three months for free and then it is only a fee that goes from 30 to $90 per month depending on how many SKUs you have. So probably you can have like a hundred SKUs with us and pay us only $40 per month. Yes is a little small commission for all the things you can make here. And for sellers, it’s like they only give us their products with the FOB price that the amount of money they need get by any sale they have, and they will have that money in their balance in their, we are going to pay them in dollars. And yes, it’s only a small commission that we charge sellers, but they can trade for free. And we have like also a budget, a marketing budget that we can help them extra these with discounts, with ads once they start selling. Yes, we can help them with that marketing actions also, and if you’re Bradley friend, we can help you, like maybe we can make something like the first month, we can give you a 10% of discount by saying us that you are Bradley friend. So yes, tell this opportunity.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, there we go. Alright, we’re gonna have to make a NocNoc code Bradley Amigo discount will be the code that you enter or something? No, but yeah, just, just name drop me.
Cecilia:
We’re gonna make something. Of course, yes, of course.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright guys, just inserting this sound bite because actually we made this Bradley Amigo discount code happen. So make sure to stay at the end and I’ll give you the link on how to redeem this. Now, I mean, to me, this seems like a no-brainer, especially that there’s no upfront costs. I’m not having to send inventory, you know, in and, and then maybe it sit like, like I said, when I was doing Mercado Libre in Mexico, I sent you know, like 10 cases worth of phone cases that I ended up not selling, and I just lost it all because, you know, I couldn’t get it right. Nobody’s having to set it up. So it’s like a no-brainer, almost like, Hey, we should set up a call with you and then, and then maybe do you take a look at their, I mean you did, you did that with mine a little bit where you took a look at the products and said, Hey, you know, let, let’s start with this egg tray one where somebody could just reach out and then choose one. Just, just see how it goes. Maybe it works out well, maybe doesn’t, maybe you should try a different product, but I’m trying to see the downside here. There’s no downside, you know, since it’s free to start, at least
Cecilia:
We encourage all sellers to send us their entire catalog because sometimes they only send us, I don’t know, I want to try this product, and they send us one or five ASINs or SKUs. But we, we always tell them, no, no, send us your entire catalog because we can help you determine the products. We feel. We’ll have a lot of sales. Yeah. Not just the ones you want to try. So we always encourage them to sign up to our website or to schedule a free exploratory call and we can’t help them get started asap. So as soon as they reach to us, we’ll start the process. We’ll study and analyze their catalog expand all projects in the marketplaces.
Bradley Sutton:
Now how like for example, me, I’ve got my own warehouse here. And so like, you know, when I was calculating it out, like how it’s gonna ship to, to you in Florida, it was pretty easy. ’cause I have the egg trays right here. I know how many days it takes me to get to, to Florida, how, how long it’s, or how much it costs. But what about the sellers who maybe they don’t have a 3PL warehouse, they only have Amazon inventory. Are they Yes. Doing the, the, what is it called are are they just taking inventory out of Amazon and then sending ah, yes to you or doing the, oh my goodness, my mind is blank right now. What’s it, what’s it called? Okay. It
Belen:
Is like they have fulfillment with Amazon,
Bradley Sutton:
Multi, multi-channel fulfillment. Is that what they’re doing to send to you? Then
Belen:
We have sales that work that way, and once they have an order, they advise Amazon, they take the products from there and they should be to us it’s like, yes. Really simple for that. Yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Now guys, if, if you’re interested to, to give ’em a try, there’s there’s a couple different ways. Like I suggest going to the you know, our, our hub, they have been in the hub. We don’t just put anybody in the Helium 10 hub. So just go to hub dot helium ten.com and then right in the search you can type in knock, knock and it’ll, it’ll be the, the only one that comes up and then you can hit get in touch. How else can they, they find you out there like your website and, and
Cecilia:
Sure they find you website
Belen:
They can. Yes, they can sign that directly in our website or also they have the option to have an exploratory call by free with us and we can have a meeting with you a 15 minutes meeting and to explain a little bit more to talk about your products, to see like if there is a real fit or not. So yes, please don’t hesitate to to sign up or ask for an expiratory and we can help you.
Bradley Sutton:
Put another soundbite in here, guys. They did actually make this discount code happen. So if you want to save 10% cash back on your sales for the first month, go to h10.me/bradleyamigo. Alright, h10.me/bradleyamigo, no spaces, no anything. And that I’ll take you to the NocNoc page and then get you that 10% cashback. Alright, now one last thing before we get into your 30 or 60-second tip or strategy is, I’m sure you get it all the time, but because of the name of your company, I need to know what is your best knock, knock joke?
Cecilia:
Oh, I don’t know.
Belen:
Don’t know what, sorry,
Bradley Sutton:
You don’t know. Oh, but but you don’t know about this. You don’t know about knock, knock jokes. Yes, in America.
Cecilia:
I know that I know them, but okay, it’s
Bradley Sutton:
Alright. I’ll give you one. I’ll give you one. You guys ready? Yes. Alright. Knock-Knock. Who’s
Cecilia:
Who’s there?
Bradley Sutton:
Interrupting Kat,
Cecilia:
Interrupting Cat.
Bradley Sutton:
Meow.
Cecilia:
I’m gonna, I’m gonna make that joke to my boss.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, there we go. All right. Yeah. Sorry guys with the dad jokes, but all right, now let’s get serious your 30-second tip or strategy of the day.
Cecilia:
Okay. my strategy would be if we are going multi-channel and also multi-country, if you are starting to blind like a multi-country strategy to pay attention to your keywords, of course, because they will vary from country to country. For example, the keywords we use in Colombia are not the same one we use in Mexico, even though they both speak Spanish. So that’s a good way. Like searching the, the most popular and trendy keywords and to see which one applies to your products will be like a, a good strategy. And also, of course it’s not a literal translation. If we have something in Portuguese and we want to translate it in Spanish, it, we don’t have to make it little because for example, I don’t know, waffle machine in English will translate as Makina in Portuguese, but in Spanish is, it’s different. It’s like, yeah. So you have to pay attention to that. I don’t know, Berlin, your team,
Belen:
I think that everything visual in marketplaces is really important. Every day. We, we are dealing with that. You have a lot of competition, a lot of similar products, a lot of grants, and we are like trying to make like everything more, more important and put that to be in the top with a good photograph, a good title attractive to make it different from the competition. And look what is happening with similar products. Look to a competition, what they’re doing good that you don’t, or maybe, or it is like, don’t, don’t publish a product and forget about them. It’s like a day-to-day work to understand what is happening there.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Excellent. Excellent. All right, well thank you so much for joining us today. Are you going to be coming to America for any upcoming conferences? I know I’ve seen you at a couple of conferences before like Amazon Accelerate or Unboxed or anything The rest of this year,
Belen:
Yes. Maybe next month to Amazon Accelerate, we are going to be there and yes, we we’re like seeing month by month what show is going to be new to be there. But yes, we are always trying to be every month in a different show in US, so yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Alright. If anybody else is interested in Accelerate, I’ll be there too. You can go to h10.me/Accelerate. And I would love to see everybody there. Maybe it’s in Seattle. Maybe we could find a local Uruguayan restaurant there and you could show me some dishes. But healthy ones, yes. Not the online food that’s s eats there. All right guys. Thank you so much and we’ll see you soon. Thank you very much. Thank you
Belen:
Thank you very much. Bye Bye.
Cecilia:
Thank you very much. Bye Bye.
In this information-packed Seller Strategy Masterclass episode, Bradley dives into the world of advanced competitor research and alerts using Helium 10’s powerful features. From unlocking historical keyword insights for seasonal products to harnessing the trend-tracking prowess of the “Show Historical Trend” button inside Cerebro. Discover the strategic advantages of the Cerebro “Time Machine” and uncover hidden opportunities by examining significant drops in your competitor’s BSR. Bradley unveils the true value of these features, guiding you to reverse-engineer your competitors’ success on a month-to-month basis and offering insights into top-level competitor information. Bradley also teaches your, how to set up tailored alerts from competitors’ listings, customize your notifications, and gain priceless insights into pricing and coupon strategies. Join us to grasp the immense potential of these new features and create an unfair advantage against your competitors with your own suggested insights. Let’s learn how to elevate your Amazon game today!
In episode 482 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:
- 01:31 – What You Will Learn In This Episode
- 03:00 – Using Cerebro History For Seasonal Products
- 07:31 – The Cerebro Show Historical Trend Button
- 11:51 – How To Use The Cerebro “Time Machine”
- 13:25 – Look At Big Dips In BSR
- 14:29 – Why Are These Features So Valuable
- 20:43 – Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s Success On A Month To Month Basis
- 23:54 – How To See Top-Level Information For Your Competitors
- 25:19 – Getting Alerts From Competitors Listings
- 27:04 – How To Customize Your Competitor Alerts
- 28:07 – Getting Insights On Pricing And Coupon
- 29:21 – How Valuable Are These New Features?
- 32:36 – Suggest Insights That You Want To See In Helium 10
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today in our monthly Seller Strategies Masterclass, we’re gonna be going over some amazing features that you should be using that’s gonna help you see what your competitors are doing on keywords on a month to month basis, going back to yours, and allow you to get notifications on if they change their price or add a coupon to their listing and much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think
Bradley Sutton:
You wanna know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for. Maybe at the top of page one, you can actually find that out in seconds by using helium ten’s keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. Don’t forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast, discount coupon SSP10. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.
Bradley Sutton:
And today, we are going to be going over some kind of like game changing features of Helium 10 here, where these are strategies that you should, guys, should be using, whether you’re using Helium 10 today, or maybe you, you’re using another tool that might have the, these strategies. I’m not sure if anybody else can do what I’m about to show you today, but for some of you who aren’t elite members, a lot of this will be game changing for you because you’ve never had access to this. But I’m gonna be showing you guys how to look at the history of where somebody was ranking in a certain month. There’s a plethora of applications for it. We’re gonna be going over that today. You’re gonna be able to see what was like their Cerebro, or where were they ranking organically?
Bradley Sutton:
Where were they ranking in sponsored ads of a certain month of any time in the last couple of years? You know, where were they showing up in Amazon? Recommended what was the search volume of those keywords when they’re ranking for it? And this is going to be great if you’ve got a seasonal product that you’re just about to launch. It’ll be great to just look at your current products, to look at your competitors, what they’ve been doing in the past, just there’s a never ending list of, of kind of cool things that can come from this that you cannot get anywhere else in Seller Central. This is not something that you can get in Search Query Performance because it’s for your competitor’s products. And then I’m also gonna be showing you some ways to track your competitors that you’ve never been able to do before or that you had to do manually.
Bradley Sutton:
So let’s go ahead and hop into it. Now, the first the first kind of use case I want to give is, let’s just say you’ve got a seasonal product, like something related to holidays or maybe it’s, you know, like a Valentine’s Day product or Christmas or something like that. Now, let’s go ahead and just use something. Let’s pretend that we are gonna do Christmas straws. I used to do a lot of straws on, on Amazon for Project 5k. I still do a lot of straws. So let’s just say I wanted to relaunch on Christmas straws. So if I were just to type in Christmas straws here, I spelling this, right? Yeah, Christmas straws. You know, I’m not sure these products are not selling well, you know, like these two aren’t even selling like 50. Because, you know, here in, in August, people are not exactly ordering Christmas draws unless they’re really trying to get ahead of the curb.
Bradley Sutton:
So if I were to choose this and run cerebral on it, you know, would I know a lot of the main keywords? You know, probably, but, but they’re probably not even ranking for that many keywords. Let’s just take a look at some of the estimated sales here, but the, these products are probably not doing many sales at all. And so the keywords that they’re getting sales from, the keywords that they’re ranking for also will not be the kind of true keywords that they are getting their sales from during Christmas time, right? So what is the way that we can find out? Well, first of all, are these Christmas straws even in stock? Like I, am I even looking at the bestseller just because it’s page one, you know, position one and two and three and four and five are they the best seller?
Bradley Sutton:
So let me just show you how to do that. And yeah, look at this. A couple of them are only doing 109 hundred units of sales, but this is across the whole, across all of their variations, which they’ve got tons of variations in this listing, but these are not the best sellers necessarily at Christmas. So what you can do is you go to brand analytics, And I am going to look at, as you can see here, I’m gonna look at brand analytics, top search terms, and I’m going to go to reporting range monthly and select year 2022, and then I’m going to go to December of 2022, and then I’m gonna type here under search term Christmas straws. Now take a look. The number one keyword for Christmas straws was Christmas straws. And the, the rest of ’em are just long tail keywords that have Christmas draws in it.
Bradley Sutton:
And let’s just take a look at the second one here. Let’s see, how did they do? They had 6% of the click share and 6% of the conversions. This was the number two listing for all Christmas draws in December during Christmas time of last year. So let’s look at this listing now on Amazon. And look at this guys. It’s unavailable. This product is not even in stock. So if I was just looking at Cerebro on the top products right now, I wouldn’t have even seen this product on Amazon, right? And if I were to run Cerebro on this product, now it’s not gonna show me anything useful because it’s not even in stock. So it’s not even ranking right, right now, right? So this is what you can do. I’m going to take this and go ahead and, and I’m gonna go ahead and put it in cerebral, okay?
Bradley Sutton:
It’s gonna run cerebral. I can click on keywords right here inside of the actual Amazon listing. It looks like it actually was in stock recently. Just went out of stock a few weeks ago. But let’s go ahead and run Cerebro on this. And you’ll see probably not that many keywords are going to show up now because it hasn’t been in stock in a couple weeks. So we still have the history. It wasn’t stock within 30 days ago, so there’s still a lot of keywords here, but almost none of these have any significant search volume you guys see here. Almost all of these are like, you know, 200, 150, some of them zero search volume. So this is not really gonna tell me what the best keywords are, but watch this. What I’m going to do is I’m gonna hit this button.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, this is something that you guys who are diamond members and above now have access to Elite members have had this for a year. This is something that I, I’ve always wanted for years and years. We were able to launch it last year for Elite, but now it’s available for Diamonds. So you Diamond members. I mean, lemme just kind of preface this with, with how amazing I think this is. I would’ve paid for Elite membership just to get this. I would’ve paid the $400 for Elite just to get this feature. That’s how powerful. It’s now it’s available to Diamond members, you know, and you only have to pay like $150 more for it. More than worth it just for this feature, let alone everything else that the Diamond has. And you guys know me, I’m not like some software salesman where I’m, I’m gonna tell it to you straight.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s how valuable this is. Now, why? Let me explain, watch what happens when I hit show historical trend here, which is now the new thing that you d members have available. It’s gonna show me the history of this asin. And as a matter of fact, I wanna make, you know what? I wanna make sure that only this listing is th this might have had other variations in this. So I’m gonna hit exclude variations. That’s something important that you guys should do. Now, it might, it might, it might just come out with the same information. But whenever you’re in cerebral, if you are in a variation listing, and the listings are very different, like there are in the Christmas category here, or in the straw category, I should say hit exclude variations to make sure you’re only analyzing this ace. And sure enough, the number was different here.
Bradley Sutton:
But anyways, I’m gonna look at this show historical trend. And, and look at this guys, you could see how many keywords they were ranking for in history, In July, June, may, April. Obviously they, they weren’t even ranking for any keywords and they probably weren’t even showing up in the search results for many products. They probably weren’t even in stock. But then look here in December, you could see that they had 613 organic keywords and 618 sponsored keywords. So what you do is you then hit this month of December. ’cause Obviously that’s when they probably sold the most for this product. And then I’m gonna hit apply filters. Now, here’s where the magic happens. Now all of a sudden I am looking at Cerebro as of December of 2022. In other words, Christmas of last year. So now this top selling product per brand analytics for this keyword and this niche, I can now look at why were they the top selling product?
Bradley Sutton:
What keywords were they getting sales from? And so you can just take a look here. Let’s go ahead and search for anything that’s over like 300 search volume, where maybe their organic rank was between one and 15. Let’s go ahead and apply. And then right here I could see the top keywords for this product. Christmas straws paper, looks like they were even getting some action on Halloween straws for some reason. That’s kind of interesting. So yeah, I wouldn’t have expected that. Paper, Christmas straws, paper straws, there are one of the top ones. So they were getting a lot of sales just from regular paper straw keywords Christmas, plastic straws, Grinch straws, holiday straws, all of these keywords that probably have no search volume now or very little Now I can see which ones they were getting sales from. And now I know which keywords that if I am going to make Christmas straws, what are the keywords that I need to start ranking for now in August to get ready for December?
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, so there’s one use case. I hope you guys can see the value in that is if you got a seasonal product and, and you’re wanting to make sure that you have some special PPC campaigns, oh, by the way, speaking of PPC, I could see what, what, what were they putting their money in as far as PPC goes. I could go to sponsored rank one to 10 and just see what keywords they were paying for top of search placement. Let’s actually go one to five, so that’s more towards the top of the page and take a look. Now I could see which keywords that they were showing up for in sponsored results are very high, right? But that’s the first use case. You gotta, like I said, you’ve got a seasonal product. It’s, maybe it’s a summer product, maybe it has nothing to do with holiday, but it’s maybe something that’s only for summer or only for winter, and you are not in that time period.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, like, let’s say it’s a St. Patrick’s Day, or let’s say it’s spring decorations. Well, people are not usually buying spring decorations in August. So whatever’s showing up in Amazon right now is not going to be the best, the indicative of which products were the top ones and what their performance is, what keywords they’re ranking for in springtime, right? So any ASIN at all, even your own ASINs, you put into Cerebro and then hit the historical trend and now you can see Cerebro as of those days. Now, I could also do this for a multi ASIN search as well. The same way that you guys do multi ace in searches in cerebral. So I could see, hey, where is everybody kind of like ranking for overall? Alright, now that’s one use case. Now for another use case of how you can use this Cerebro historical data.
Bradley Sutton:
I call this time machine, cerebral time machine, how we can use it in order to analyze what the competitors have excelled on. Let’s go ahead and, and go into the niche of egg trace. That’s something that Project X has a lot of. And so maybe I want to take a look at one of the competitors here who have been selling for a while. Let’s go ahead and run. I’m gonna run X-ray right on this page, and I wanna find somebody who has been selling products for a while on here. Let’s take a look. So I’m gonna look for somebody who’s been selling for a while, at least like a year or two. And then let’s go ahead and see if I can find something that will show some kind of seasonality with their, with their keywords. So first of all, let’s go ahead and say at least estimated sales.
Bradley Sutton:
I want somebody who’s been selling at least a hundred units a month, okay? So of the ones who have sold from at least a hundred units a month we see here, here’s one that was made in 2021. So let’s just take a look at his listing, see if it’s relevant. It’s a egg tray stackable. All right, this is cool. So, so this guy’s been selling for a while. So what I might wanna do is I’m going to look at his BSR chart because I want to see when it, or if he had any kind of like really peak times of sale. So I’m gonna go to all time on his BSR chart, and then let’s take a look here at when he was selling really well. And there’s not too much, like this guy is not that his sales don’t seem that seasonal, all right?
Bradley Sutton:
But however, look here, there is kind of a dip here in a couple of BSR dips. So I’m looking here, let’s just say that he had a bigger dip here in March of 2023. So how I can use that information is I would go to, again, hitches this keywords button and now it’s gonna open up cerebral for what’s going on right now, which of course is, is valuable in itself, but what I’m gonna be looking for is how to tie in his increase or decrease in sales to keywords. Now, I, you couldn’t really see it. I’m just doing this live guys, so you know, I didn’t pick a great one right there, but you’d especially be mindful of your competitors who have big dips in their BSR or big increases in their BSR, meaning that their sales go way down.
Bradley Sutton:
So what you do is you run Cerebro, and then I’m gonna hit again the show historical trend. And let me look back at that month where he was doing a lot. Now look at this, I said March. Look, all of a sudden he went from 48 sponsored keywords to 401 sponsored keywords from February to March. So that’s in interesting in itself. So what I would do is I would go here and I would choose this month, and I would now look at his keywords that were from March of 2023, and then I would take note of what he is ranking for organically high. Now, what I would do in another window, let me just show you guys here, and now I, I probably download this there, there’s other ways too, I could do it. But what I would do is I would look at, I would open up another window and I would look at the month where he wasn’t really doing much.
Bradley Sutton:
Like in February, like let’s say that his, his keywords, his sales went up in March. So I would go ahead and open it up. Let me go ahead and do that right now. So I would open up another window of cerebral and let me look at their previous month where maybe their sales weren’t as much. And then I’m going to compare what is going on here between these two months. So here I have March, I’m gonna go ahead and put minimum, let’s just say 500 search volume and let’s go organic rank one through 10 for March. And let’s do the same thing. Minimum 500 search volume now that I’m looking at February and look at organic rank one through 10. Okay? Now let’s just take a look here at their main keywords would an egg holder, counter egg holder, et cetera.
Bradley Sutton:
And what I’m looking for is something that went up from February to March. So let’s see, wooden an egg holder, he was number one in March, but in February he was number one too. So we know that he didn’t get extra sales from that keyword counter egg holder, he was number four, he was number two before. But look, look here, there’s a couple of keywords I can tell already that is not even on here. And as you can see here, in March, he was ranking position six for this keyword egg storage for countertop. Let’s see where he was ranking in February, because I don’t even see that keyword here. So let’s just open this up to maybe rank 50. And then let’s look for egg storage for countertop. I don’t even see he was not even ranking guys in the top 50. So guess what?
Bradley Sutton:
If there was an increase in sales in February to March, which there was, we now know that we can tie some of that increase in sales to the fact that he was now at the top of the page for egg storage for countertop, wherein in February he was not even ranking in the first 50 positions for this keyword. So you guys see the power here you would do it the opposite way. Let’s say that somebody, one of your competitors had a really bad month of sales, you saw that from his BSR, like he normally gets around, you know, 5,000 B S R and then the next month his B S R was like 15,000 or 20,000, right? So his sales obviously went down. Well, now what I would do is I would do the same search that I just did right here, but I’d be looking at where did he lose keyword rank and now what does this do?
Bradley Sutton:
This is going to show me what are the keywords that I really need to maintain my rank on. You know, like sometimes we have this idea, hey, I need to be at the top of the, the search results for all these keywords, but you really want to be top of the search results for the keywords that have the best chance to bring you sales. So what can we learn from this, this lesson here? Look at your competitor’s listings or even yours. You know, if you don’t have Search Query Performance, you know, this might be the only way you can do this, but look at your competitor’s sales history on when they had super great months or super bad months, and then look at the previous month and compare it to the month that they did super good or super bad. And now see if you can tie certain keyword ranks going up or down, tie that to their sales going up or down.
Bradley Sutton:
And now you know, like, hey, if my competitor lost sales because he went from the top of page one to page two for this keyword, well, guess what? I better make sure that I don’t lose the top of page one for this keyword. I’m gonna make sure I, I bid heavily on sponsor ads or the opposite way. Now you know that, hey, during this month, this competitor increase in sales and it’s because they got to page one for this egg holder countertop keyword that I wasn’t even paying attention to. Now, you know, that’s an important keyword. So that’s another way that this is super, super valuable, this Cerebro time machine or historical trend feature. Now, let’s just say that you’re doing a multi ASIN search. Like for example, maybe I’m I’m back on that egg tray page. I’m gonna say, Hey I wanna run all of these stackable egg trays all together at the same time in Cerebro.
Bradley Sutton:
So I just select them all and then I hit run Cerebro. And now what I can do is, again, going back to the show historical trend, I can actually see at a very granular level this whole niche, like, look at this, these products weren’t even doing that much back in 2022, but I can see overall these products have gotten stronger on their organic placements. All right, if I hit this button products, I could see at the product level how many keywords they’re showing up for organically, right? Let’s go back to this keyword type. And what I can do is I can see, I can click on each of these ASINs, I could see that this product has only been around for three months, and then I could see how are they doing and sponsored and organic. So take a look at this one here.
Bradley Sutton:
I just clicked on this one ASIN, I could see that in December, for whatever reason in April, they actually don’t run any sponsored ads at all. So there’s another insight I can get like, hey, if my competitor turns off their sponsored ads in December and February, well now I know that I can go ahead and crush them on sponsored ads during, during this time. Here is another product that I clicked on. And as I’m looking over time, I can actually see that he is turning down his sponsored ads because of it. He’s actually losing his organic placement. Like look at this from July to August, I can actually see that his organic keywords have gone down and you could tie it directly to maybe a decrease in his PPC spend. I mean the, the, the possibilities go on and on guys.
Bradley Sutton:
The reason why I always wanted this tool was because I love Cerebro as is, you know, like I love to be able to look at where a product’s been ranking for somewhere in the last 30 days, but so many times I want to see what their situation was in a certain month of the year, like going back maybe two years, maybe I wanna look back at the last two Christmas seasons how they did. And now this is going to allow you to reverse engineer your competitor’s success on a monthly basis throughout the year. And also spot trends like maybe you see that your competitors, they’re increasing in the keywords that they are showing up for in search results. Maybe it’s decreasing. Maybe you could see are they spending more money on PPC? Are they spending less money on PPC?
Bradley Sutton:
There’s so much things that you can do. So again, if you have a diamond account, hop into cerebral and look at the historical trends ASAP. If you do not have diamond, you just have platinum. Trust me guys, the value you can get from this, I cannot even put into dollars how much value you can get. I mean, imagine if I was selling those Christmas straws how much money I can get by making sure I start ranking for the right keywords in August and September when it’s super, super cheap as opposed to waiting until December and then let me run Cerebro and see where my competitors are ranking for. I mean, you can’t even put a dollar value on that, you know, because it’s gonna cost so much less to get ranked for these keywords when the search volume is low because I have the visibility on it and not having to wait for this year’s information.
Bradley Sutton:
So guys, if you don’t have Diamond you can use one of our discount codes like SSP10 to upgrade and get a 10% off discount if you haven’t used a coupon in the last couple of years. So SSP10 will get you that discount, but guys, get this right away. Alright, the next thing we’re gonna be talking about today, we are going to go into Insights Dashboard, speaking of competitors for something that I think is really gonna help you monitoring what is going on in the competition. And again, this is something that you know, Diamond members can get full access to you Platinum, you have limited access to this, but you can also get some information here and enter some competitors. So if you look on your dashboard you have the, my product table, right? And I, I have all of my, my product families here.
Bradley Sutton:
You can see me. Here’s my coffin shelf and my coffin egg tray, my stackable egg rack and some egg trays here. But what I want you guys to do, and you might see this for some of your products, is click this down button and then click on competitors. And this is a section where you need to put your top five competitors who you think are the most, like your product that you are battling sales for. Now, some of you might have this already, and that’s because Helium 10 might have put some competitors here. But what I want you guys to do is, you know better than Helium 10 what, who your competitors are. So you can edit your list here and, and pick which ones are your top competitors. You know, maybe just drop the ASINs in here or, or just, you know, do a, a quick search for them.
Bradley Sutton:
But what I want you to do right now, you know, you can even pause this episode and do this and do this and pick this up later, is for all of your top products to put your competitors here. Now let me just show you the kind of fire that comes from this. If you do this, the very first thing is now anytime I can just click here and I can see some top level information for the comparison. Like what’s their current price, what’s their current sales, what’s their current revenue for the last 30 days, what’s their listing quality score? For the buy box, is it FB A or FBM? Does it have variations? Coupon this guy is running a 5% coupon. All right, this, this has never been available inside of Helium 10 before. Let’s take a look.
Bradley Sutton:
If he is running a coupon, lemme just take a look at this coffin shelf right here. There it is right there. You see he’s got a 5% coupon, right? So you can just see that instantly right in here inside of, of your competitor dashboard. The other thing I’m going to be able to do is if I have all of them selected, I can go ahead and run them all in Cerebro or I can one by one run them in Listing Analyzer. Or maybe I want to see, hey, for this product here what is showing up in the frequently bought together for this coffin shelf competitor, I hit analyze and then I hit product targeting in black box and it’s going to go ahead and open it up right here. And I could say, Hey, show me everything that has been show that is showing up in frequently bought together.
Bradley Sutton:
And now I have the full list of products that are frequently bought together with my competitor products. Those are great for product targeting ads, et cetera. Right now, that’s just, this is just the beginning guys. This is what you’re gonna start to be able to do. So what you’re gonna start seeing is you’re gonna start getting these insights and alerts for when competitors do things like, for example, I got one here that a competitor has updated their listing. So I’m gonna take a look at this and see what they actually did. And I can see here that, you know, this is obviously not my competitor, this is a shoe here, but we just threw in some random competitors. Oh, I can see that my competitor changed their title and now I’m gonna go see, well, what did they change it from? Two.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so maybe there’s something going on there. I wanna look at that. Maybe they changed their image, maybe they changed their bullet point. You are gonna start to get these insights or alerts on your competitors’ products. I mean, we’ve always been able to do that on our own products, in, in alerts, the Helium 10 tool alerts. But now if you have specified your competitors in your Insights dashboard, you are gonna get alerts on what your competitors are doing. And this is something that hopefully you are checking on on your own, but maybe you had to hire somebody to go look at all of your competitors listings every day and say, Hey, who changed their their image, who changed their title? What’s going on? Now you are gonna get those insights. Other things you might get insights or alerts on is, for example, look at this, five competitors, BSR sales or review counts have drastically changed.
Bradley Sutton:
So let’s just take a look at that and let me go ahead and open it up here and then I can see, all right, well look at this. B S R they went from their BSR in one day changed by 5,000. Good grief. Alright their sales went to went down. So you can see these little like little magic buttons right here. That means that there was something that changed. Now here’s the thing. Maybe you don’t care if somebody’s BSR goes down by 25,000 because it’s not that big if they were at 277. So you can actually go in and customize how you want to get these alerts. Like maybe, hey, I only want to get BSR insights if their BSR gets better than myself. Or maybe their BSR increases by 20%, or maybe it decreases by 20%, or I just wanna know if the review count increases by a certain number percentage or decreases by a certain percentage, that’s what you want to get inside.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, maybe the reviews you know, Amazon takes away the reviews and you want to capitalize on that by going harder on your PPC. Like, you know, sometimes Amazon might take away all the reviews of a competitor, right? You know, and just, and they’ll give it back. But maybe that during that time you want to, you know, capitalize and pounce on it and, and go a little bit harder in PPC. Well now you can know when your competitors reviews are taken away. Maybe you want to get a notification if their sales drastically increase or decrease in a day. ’cause Maybe you know, something is going on. Another thing you are gonna start getting insights on is your, their pricing, right? This is super, super important for a lot of you is what are your competitors doing with pricing and coupons?
Bradley Sutton:
So you’re gonna be able to specify what kind of insights you get and when. So for example, for these coffin shelves, I see, oh, this one sourpuss Coffin Shelf, they raise their price. Oh, now this goth vanity, they had a coupon and now they don’t have a coupon, right? They don’t have a coupon going on. So you can get notifications, and again, these are customizable. So hey, a coupon was offered or it’s no longer offered. If the price increases by a certain amount or a certain dollar amount, or the price or the price decreases by a certain amount, all of this, you are going to be able to specify and say, Hey, I want to get notifications or insights on this. Guys, this is really powerful because hopefully you were checking some of these things before, but you probably, it was probably a very manual process to monitor when your competitors are changing their title, their image, when they have big peaks in sales if they start running a coupon that you are not and you are not running a coupon.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean, a lot of us, we like to match our competitor coupons, like, Hey, my competitor’s gonna run a 5% coupon for this week. Well I wanna do a 5% coupon. So this is gonna be powerful for you to stay ahead of the game so that you are not having to kind of play catch up or make some really long manual process to monitor what your competitors are doing. Now, this is just the beginning guys of the Insights Dashboard for competitors. Like I said before, what’s coming is we’re gonna start letting you know, hey, your competitor is getting sales from this keyword and you don’t even have this keyword in your listing, right? Your competitor is ranking high on, on sponsored for this product or for this keyword, and you’re not even bidding on this keyword in P P C. Would you like to add it?
Bradley Sutton:
Pretty much anything you could possibly imagine that you are doing now, either manually in Seller Central or Amazon to monitor competitors you are gonna be able to do without doing it because helium ten’s gonna do it for you and we’ll just give you insights or alerts on when these things happen. So what I want you guys to be thinking about right now, I just told you what’s definitely coming, that keyword one, a lot of those keyword ones, but you let me know or not let, don’t let me know that you have no way to contact me. Let Helium 10 know what kind of competitor insights are you looking forward to or do you want help on? I just told you a whole bunch that we are currently doing right now, like, you know, when the competitor changes their price and, and things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
I told you what’s coming as far as when competitors are ranking highly for certain keywords that they’re not May, maybe it’s a, a keyword rank. Hey, you want to know when your competitor drops or inorganic rank for a certain keyword. But what I want you guys is think of your best competitor insights that we could help you out on. Something that you are having to tediously manually do right now. But we can automate it for you. And then what I want you to do is on your dashboard at the very top, under send feedback, hit this button and then go ahead and answer this survey that comes up so that you can offer insight into what insights you want to get as far as the competitors go. Again, some of this stuff is not game changing in the fact that oh, nobody has ever thought to monitor your coupons, your competitor coupons.
Bradley Sutton:
It’s something that you’re probably doing, but it’s a manual process. We’re just trying to automate automate it. So let us know, help us help you, but in the meantime, all of your products that you’re currently selling, go in there and add your competitors. Now, one question I get is, Hey, I’ve got a lot of variations right now you can only add competitors at the parent level and it populates the variation Later on, you’re gonna be able to take like, Hey, here’s my five competitors for my black coffin shelf and I want five pink competitors for my pink coffin shelf, et cetera. So right now you have to select the competitors at the parent level, ASIN level or the parent ASIN level inside of insides dashboard. But don’t worry that’s, it’s coming soon where you’re gonna be able to do it one-to-one.
Bradley Sutton:
So all of your all of your child items have their own competitors, right? Really exciting stuff guys. This is just the two things that we went over today in Cerebro, the historical thing, and also these insights and notifications on what is happening with the competitors. This is stuff that does not exist in the industry today and stuff that you can start getting the leg up on your competition. A lot of it is maybe stuff you’re already doing, but instead of you taking five hours to do this stuff or paying somebody to do it, now we’re just gonna do it for you and deliver the results. So make sure you Diamond members are using this. And again, both of these things I mentioned are only on the Diamond plan. So if you want to test it out, see if it’s right for you, just use a discount code SSP10 and try out the diamond plan for a couple months.
Bradley Sutton:
And if you don’t find the value in it, go ahead and go back to the Platinum plan. But trust me guys, if you are not finding the value in it, you’re not using it in the right way because you cannot not get value out of these things and have it not be worth the $150 more that the Diamond plan is cost because these are super, super valuable. So let us know, give us feedback on these tools. How would you like it to be changed, both the Cerebro one and Insights Dashboard. Let us know what we can do and I hope you guys have a great time playing with these new tools and we’ll see you in the next episode.
Let’s discuss this week’s buzzing news about Amazon and E-commerce. From Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime is back to Amazon events happening in the next two months, and more!
In this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we feature the awe-inspiring journey of Elizabeth Rivas, the operating mastermind behind two remarkable 8-figure brands. Discover her captivating backstory and how she soared to greatness in the Amazon space from humble beginnings. Unravel the secrets of 1P and 3P seller programs, and gain valuable insights into killer PPC and listing optimization techniques.
Dive into the fiercely competitive niche of supplement brands and learn how to thrive in a crowded category niche in the Amazon marketplace. Brace yourself for game-changing marketing initiatives and innovative strategies for Amazon brands who want to crush it. Elizabeth’s serial beta testing approach and her favorite Helium 10 tool will leave you inspired. Learn and take advantage of her ingenious launch tactics using Helium 10’s Market Tracker 360 data and the joys of an 8-figure seller while using the all-new Insights Dashboard. Plus, learn how you can grab a free demo of MT360!
In episode 481 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Elizabeth discuss:
- 01:30 – Elizabeth’s Backstory
- 02:57 – How She Got Started In The Amazon Space
- 03:43 – Started From Nothing To 8-Figures In Sales
- 04:46 – Amazon 1P And 3P: What’s The Difference?
- 09:05 – 1P Seller PPC And Listing Optimization
- 09:49 – Which One Is Best? 1P Or 3P Seller Program?
- 14:00 – Talking About AlgeaCal’s Amazon Brand
- 15:58 – Competing In A Very Competitive Niche
- 19:41 – Talking About Amazon PPC And Their CPC
- 25:59 – “You Don’t Have To Be The Cheapest In Your Niche”
- 29:26 – Marketing Initiatives And Strategies Inside Amazon
- 33:31- Serial Beta Tester And Other Creative Strategies
- 36:43 – Elizabeth’s Favorite Helium 10 Tool
- 37:33 – Launching Products Using MT360
- 39:05 – Why She Loves The New Insights Dashboard
- 39:26 – How To Get A Free Demo Of MT360
- 40:48 – Elizabeth’s Healthy Habits Outside The Grind
- 43:46 – Elizabeth’s 60-Second Tip
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’re gonna talk to a seller who’s already brought one company on Amazon to eight figures of sales. And by next year. She’ll bring another company to over 10 million in sales. And it’s through using a lot of cool strategies she’s gonna share with us by opening up her products and listings to us. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you an agency enterprise-level seller or an eight or nine-figure seller and need advanced analytics market Tracker 360 might be the product for you to get a demo of Market Tracker 360, go to h10.me/mt360. That’s h10.me/mt360. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a serious seller here from not too far away from me, but coming from Canada. We’ve got Elizabeth. How’s it going?
Elizabeth:
Hi Bradley. How are you?
Bradley Sutton:
I’m doing just delightful. Thank you. Now where in Canada exactly are you at?
Elizabeth:
Yes, so I’m located in the province of Quebec about an hour from Montreal. It’s called Mirabel. So I’m near the mountains here.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now is that where you were born and raised, or did you go there at a later stage in life?
Elizabeth:
So my parents are originally from El Salvador in Central America and my mom came into the States and stayed there for five years in the 1980s. And I was born there. I was actually born in Long Island in New York. I
Bradley Sutton:
I hear a little bit of New York there in the accent.
Elizabeth:
Maybe because of my cousins, but I’ve never lived there actually, I came here to Quebec and I was like a year and a half. Okay. So I’m mostly Canadian although I have my two passports there. But yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s kind of amazing, you know, like, Hey, you can be in New York when you’re seven months old and then it just sticks with you? So somehow I guess I lived there for a year only or two years. I still feel like, and I was like, more than 20 years ago, I still feel like a little bit of like a New Yorker, but anyways, been in Canada most of life. So then I’m assuming English, Spanish, and French? You speak?
Elizabeth:
Correct. Yes. So my mom talked to us at the house in Spanish. French came at school and English too. But I did have the opportunity to study at the HEC Montreal, which is in European university here in Canada.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. What was your major?
Elizabeth:
It’s a marketing and international in business.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And then upon graduation, did you enter that field?
Elizabeth:
Yes. So part of of my career path here is a bit different because I didn’t really touch e-commerce before like 2018. Prior to that, I was actually selling to big companies in pharma, like Thermo Fisher, VWR 3M. I was a marketing sales director, so I have always been in the business field, but it was more B2B, it was not digital.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Alright. Interesting. Now, how, then, you know, in the late 2010s, I guess Yeah, you could say, how did you discover Amazon e-commerce?
Elizabeth:
Yes. so in 2017, I started working at a company called Pelican International. They’re the Canadian company, which is actually the largest manufacturer of plastic kayaks. And I had a particular mandate, which was to develop an accessory product line for them to sell online. So they usually sell out all of their products through big stores like Sporting Goods Costco, and Walmart. And they didn’t have any real presence with e-commerce direct to consumers didn’t exist at the time, and they wanted to start it with Amazon. So because it wasn’t an existing channel, I just like actually just arm myself with my enthusiasm, and curious mind, because I didn’t know anything about Amazon. Okay. and, you know, like even after now it’s been like five, almost six years that I am within this ecosystem, it always continues to surprise me every day.
Elizabeth:
It changes always. But at the time, just to go back there we were set up as an Amazon 1P. So we were not doing 3P seller. And after 18 months we lounge a full accessory product line in 2020 for paddles dry bags and many different accessories for nautical outdoor activities. And it was a whole process because Amazon helped out during the process of the lineup. I’ve actually read through it, like at the time I didn’t use Helium 10. So I’ve actually read a lot of all the reviews of different competitors and based off those reviews, we came out with the different models and concepts with our RND company I’m sorry, the department outsourced these models in China. And that’s how we came with, you know, like when I left in 2022 the brand alone was selling eight figures across a hundred different ASINs, and it started from nothing.
Bradley Sutton:
And what in particular were you responsible for
Elizabeth:
I was responsible for everything, so from A to Z.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So then, you can take most of the credit then from that increase in sales?
Elizabeth:
Yes. Most of it, of course, I had like a team, you know, with me helping me out. Like just RnD and graphics and content and everything. But like the strategy, like the go-to-market strategy. Yeah. It came from,
Bradley Sutton:
Did you launch products as well, or just take their existing listings and, and, and try to just, you know, market it in a better way on Amazon? Like where did a lot of most of that growth come from?
Elizabeth:
We launched products, like all of them. For instance, we used to have five different models of paddles. When I left, we had five different categories and each of them have three to five different variations. So it was mainly like taking the small, small category of accessories that they had and just broadly coming with different subcategories and how do we sell these to the Amazon customer.
Bradley Sutton:
And a hundred percent of the products that were launched were all 1P or like through Vendor Central, where it says, shipped and sold by Amazon.
Elizabeth:
Yes. It was all through 1P.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, for those who might not be familiar, you know, we’re not gonna fast forward yet in your journey to the 3P side, but what are some of the biggest differences like things you might not have control over, things that are completely different on the process when you’re a 1P as opposed to 3P?
Elizabeth:
Yeah, so I feel like 1P it’s good when you have a good relationship with your vendor manager if you get to talk to him. The first year we didn’t have this relationship, so it was kind of hard. But basically what is different is that you don’t control demand. You don’t have all this access to different promotions that you do with the 3P seller side although I’m not really familiar of the changes that have been made in the last year and a half, ’cause I’m not anymore in the 1Piece. So maybe it is but just like brand analytics, like on the 3P side that it’s, it changed my life, you know, here as a seller now and the vendor side, we didn’t have access. I believe they do now. But at the time they didn’t.
Elizabeth:
One of the things also, it’s forecasting, the forecasting process the way they order for us, it was every Monday, so they actually just issue PO’s and you have to go to how can I say, the process of seeing if you can accept those or not if you have enough stock or not. So it was more how can I say a little bit more difficult. And also all the negotiation part, you know, with the percentages that they take for allowances and all of that. It gets very corporate. It is a B2B relationship when you are a 1P seller.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. How about Amazon advertising? Is that a very similar experience or are there differences there with how you run the PPC?
Elizabeth:
It was however I run it now on a very different strategy side, meaning that I do it with an agency. I do have the budget. I’m with a company now that has a budget for that. Pelican at the time didn’t do it that way. It was very sporadic and we didn’t really have like a strategy around it. It was more like a keyword base. So I don’t know exactly what they’re doing now. I believe they have somebody doing the the advertising part.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. what about listing? You know again, some of this is different to me ’cause I don’t have personal experience, you know, with 1P, how much control over your listing optimization do you have? Or is Amazon the one who is creating the listings or you have full control over the images and the copy and things like that? So
Elizabeth:
Copy and images, you do have full control. The only thing that you don’t have full control is pricing. That’s one of the things that we didn’t like. It’s like interesting. It was sporadic. Sometimes they just run like a deal or something on our, on our product listing, and we didn’t even agree to that, or we didn’t issue that.
Bradley Sutton:
But they still have to pay you the same, like if they decide for some crazy reason, Hey, we’re gonna give a 50% off discount. It’s not like there’s gonna, they can tell you, Hey, you need to give us 50% off, or something like that.
Elizabeth:
Exactly. So mainly, I believe it’s mainly for them to, they, it’s, I’m pretty sure it’s an algorithm doing that, so they have too much talk, it’s not moving enough. So they just like issue like a 10%. Our problem with that is that you know, it’s, we were an omni-channel company, so we had other retailers also where we cannot just run random promotions and having 1Price at Sporting Goods and another on Amazon, you know. We were a map company, but they don’t, like, Amazon doesn’t really go with the MAP policy, you know, so that, that was one of the things that was difficult for us. But it was more the, like the first, first 18 months, because after that, when we got our good relationship with the vendor manager, he did understand that we cannot be like, playing around with our prices.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, in retrospect, you know, my question is gonna be like, which would you choose? Like, so, you know, there might be some sellers out there, or some companies maybe they’re not on Amazon yet. I’ve heard this question before, it’s like, Hey I’m trying to get on Amazon. I actually have an offer from from Amazon. They wanna do 1P with me. They want me to go vendor central route. Or should I just start, you know, like, like most people and, and go full 3P and just, you know, set up my own seller central account and, and, and do everything on my own. Are there situations where that answer might be different or is, is your answer the same in all situations? And if so, what is which, which one would you choose?
Elizabeth:
That’s a pretty good question. I think 3P seller is just like the setup that you need to have to launch, and it just offers so much more opportunities and more control. Especially if you do it FBA the only part where I see it a little bit more difficult, it would be like when you do big bulk items like kayaks. Those are not profitable on a 3P seller program, you know? Yeah. So the fact that Amazon is buying those from you, stalking them, and you actually just giving in an allowance. Yeah. Mainly allowance is big, but it doesn’t cover for, what would it cost for you to send it out to an FBA center? Okay. So I would say that it depends on your product, depends on the dimensions. If it is for Control 3P all the way I do believe you do have much more capabilities within the 3P seller program. One, ultimately what we’d love to have, it’s like a 3P seller program direct, you know where you have all this infrastructure that can have a customer services and Sure. Where you have the full control and you own the Amazon customers data, that would be the ultimate setup.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Alright. Now, you seem to be riding pretty high, bringing this big brand to eight figures, but you’re not at that company anymore, so how, how did it come about that you were looking for another opportunity?
Elizabeth:
Yeah, so after five years with Pelican, I found a brand called AlgeaCal, and it really caught my attention. It’s a company based in Vancouver. They make supplements for bone health. They are experts in bone health and everything that they do is around both bone supplements. So it just call out to me because I do have my family all, almost all women’s in my family suffer from osteoporosis. So it’s something that their mission really called upon me, and I joined them, you know, to help them grow their Amazon business because they already had something going on there. They were a seven figure, very nice, healthy company. I just thought that my experience could bring them to the next level, you know? And since it’s been a year, almost a year and a half now that I’m there we’ve achieved a double digit growth. We launched–
Bradley Sutton:
So when you got to the company, what, what was like their annual revenue and about now?
Elizabeth:
It’s still seven figures, but we are, we are getting to like next year we, we’ll make the eight figures for sure. Actually this year is our most successful year in history. We also launched Amazon Canada, and we most recently launched walmart.com too.
Bradley Sutton:
Wait, isn’t this a Canadian based company to start with?
Elizabeth:
Yes, it is.
Bradley Sutton:
So before you came to the company, they had decided to, to start an Amazon U s a? Yes. Not even in their own home marketplace.
Elizabeth:
Just by the way, Pelican did the same.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Well, I mean.
Elizabeth:
They started with the US and then they went for.
Bradley Sutton:
I know people who go both ways. You know, obviously US is way higher demand, but then some people are like, Hey, this is my own country. I’ve already got my packaging, you know, for this. I’m assuming the you know, I have a little bit of experience with supplements in North America and it’s like completely different. Not completely, but pretty, pretty big differences in packaging for my US version and Canadian version, like the Canadian one, I think it had to be in French and English and I can only say some things. Is that similar with, with you guys too?
Elizabeth:
Yes. So supplement facts are different. The measurements there it needs to be bilingual. You need the NPN number too for your your products. And, you know, there’s also the formulation, like for instance vitamin D in, in Canada we cannot be above 800 I IUs on, on the supplement facts. But however, on in the us we have it at a thousand IUs. So it, it, it, it really depends on the, on what you’re selling. Part of the, part of al what it’s good, it’s that we actually manufacture in the US and in Canada. So that’s, that gives us much more leverage there to have our own formulated products for the different territories.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now I’m just looking here, I’m just going to run X-ray keywords on here just to see some of your, your main keywords that, that, you know, might be driving some traffic. ’cause I’m not fully familiar with your brand, but I would’ve expected mainly branded keywords, which I do see here. You know, I do see your brand algae cal, you know, you’re ranked high and Algae Cal plus, but you’ve got like, you know, high search volume keywords that I would think is very like, competitive, like calcium supplement, 70,000 search volume keyword, tons of products. And you’re coming in at this price point of like $70, $80, I saw another product, you had a hundred dollars. Yes. You know, the traditional thought might be, man, it’s gonna be hard to complete compete in supplements at all, let alone with this like super high price point. So this is a product that, you know, according to Helium 10 estimations, you’re selling over, you know, between these two variations here, over 2000 units a month. So you’re obviously very successful. How are you able to compete in such a competitive niche at this nearly a hundred dollars price point?
Elizabeth:
Yes. so I think you got a great point here Bradley. It’s that our product is high end in the calcium supplement category. Part of it is because we have a unique formulation that most of the calciums comes from rock based calcium. Ours is actually plant-based. It comes from the south shores of Brazil. And it’s based from a red Algea that contains the 13 different nutrients that are proven. And that’s, that’s one of the things with AlgaeCal, we actually have three clinical supporting studies that says that our product will increase bone density within six months. So if a customer starts today and has osteoporosis, goes for a DEXA scan, which is a test that your doctor can subscribe for you to do, and we can see the density of your bones within six months, you will see an increase in bone density.
Elizabeth:
And if it doesn’t and you have proof of that, we’ll actually give you back all your money. That’s one of our guarantees that we have. So it’s like, yes, it’s an investment, but it’s an investment that works. And that is the message that we are trying to get to our customers as much as possible through Amazon. We do it very well on their D2C side. And my mission was to do the same on on Amazon. You know, we have today we have a community of over 25,000 members within Facebook. That is actually a community where we share recipes. We have lives with different doctors or bone experts. So we are not just selling a calcium supplement, we’re actually taking care of our customers, giving them all the support they need. Our biggest customer is going to be within the seventies, eighties.
Elizabeth:
They are hurt, their bones hurt. Most of them maybe just broke a hip. They can’t move anymore. They can’t do their activities as they did before. So we have this our customer service. We actually call them bone health consultants because that’s what they are. They actually provide support to these customers. And they are like our average call, it’s above 30 minutes. You will not have a call of five minutes. We actually want to understand what you eat, what are your exercise activities what other supplements or medications you are taking to making to make sure that our product is well integrating within your lifestyle. So that’s our difference and that’s what we’re trying to put out there. Within our PDP, if you look at it we have a lot of content.
Elizabeth:
I know that most of our competitors they do it more shorter bullet points and imagery for us. Yes, the imagery needs to be condensed straight to the point, but also it needs to have much mu much information around it towards why to take our product. We also have our A+ Content that has a lot of copy, I know. But the customer needs to understand at what stage of their li their life are their bones. So that’s one of the things that we are trying also to communicate through the the A+ Content. We also have all these documents. You know, we have spec sheets, we have a Bone Health Companion, which is actually a magazine that we release every two months with different recipes. And every two months we go in it and we change it. We have the user guide also of our products. So a lot of different content, and I know that maybe not all of the customers will read through it, but I wanna make it available to make sure that for those ones that really want to do their research, the information is there.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Interesting. Now, again, I’m just looking at the, the main keyword here, and sure enough, I mean, I didn’t look at it before, but sure enough, it’s just what I thought. You know, like you look at who’s at the top organic position on some of these keywords, and you’ve got nature made $15 and Nature’s Bounty, $11 and $12 you know, another, another one here, $15. And then you could, you could just, now first of all, I’m just looking here, like your organic positions even isn’t even that high, but you’re still getting tons of sales from this keyword because you do have multiple, looks like you’re out bidding them on sponsored ads. I saw like, like I refreshed the screen and now it’s not there anymore. But I saw like you had two spots here in sponsored ads. I see you’ve had sponsored header, the Sponsored Brand Header, the headline ad there. But, and you can compete on this, on this, on this keyword. Now, I would assume, like, I don’t even wanna know, almost the cost per click on a keyword, like calcium supplement must be like outta control, like, I don’t know, $10 or something crazy, right?
Elizabeth:
No, not that bad. Calcium supplement is not that bad. The worst, we do have a product, which is an Omega three fish oil supplement that is just incredible. But calcium supplement, it’s around four to $5 a click. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. I mean, that’s still, coffee shelf is like 50 cents. But for I guess at that higher price point, it allows you to bid high. You know, like sometimes, I mean, just imagine guys, that four and $5 price point is what these like nature made and these $11 products are having to compete at. They’re obviously losing money there, but they’re making the money back on the subscribe and save, because you get people into this product and you get them on subscribe and save, and now you don’t have to pay PPC on them forever. But if you go in at a higher price point, because it’s a higher end thing it’s important to get them and subscribe and save and make even more money.
Bradley Sutton:
And, and it’s not a race to the bottom guys. You know, we’ve had people on the podcast before Anne Ferris, you know, might be one that people are familiar with, and she’s in like the baby niche. And, and people sometimes go into their main keywords and they actually look for the most expensive. So her strategy is, Hey, I want to be the most expensive on the page because people, parents, they want to make sure they’re giving their baby the best. They don’t want to go cheap on that. And this might be one of those niches too, you know, like, like calcium supplements. I mean, this is like somebody in their twilight years, you know, it’s like, Hey, I want to make sure my last 20 years on this earth are as pleasant as can be.
Bradley Sutton:
I don’t, might not want to go ahead and get this $11 calcium that I used to get, you know, when I was young. So it’s a strategy that’s I think, important to understand that don’t always be thinking you have to be the cheapest in your niche in order to be successful. And here we have Elizabeth as an example. That’s not the case now. I guess while we were talking, I was running Cerebro on your product here. And I noticed you’ve got like a lot of sponsored brand Sponsored Brand Header. I see you’re running some, looks like some, some video on some keywords. And then you’re, you’re showing up in the, the highly rated section here. So you’ve got a lot of placements. What gives you the most bang for your buck? Is it your organic placement? Is it the sponsored video, your Sponsored Brand Header? Where do you think that you’re, you’re getting the best ROI? Yeah,
Elizabeth:
So at the moment, our ratio is still 60-40, so 60% of our sales comes from organic, 40% come from sponsor. Okay. Out of that sponsor. What is really working for us at the moment is definitely sponsor brand videos sponsor brands videos, and you do have to have, you know, the content and how can they say the different types of videos that you wanna have, depending on what it is, your strategy or what are your targeting. But it’s mostly for engagement. It’s, it’s the best. It’s the best placements that we’ve reached for the last, I would say, maybe two months since it has been available. And part of it is also because we tied it with our Amazon store our Amazon store. We recently did a full refresh on it, and we have different pages sub pages there.
Elizabeth:
For instance, we will have sponsor brand videos at the moment about adding to cart if we want. And once they click, they go on our subpage, which is for deals. So we make sure that the customer looks at a sponsor brand video ad, and then they go out on the right subpage where they will be more comfort. You know, we actually run a campaign for osteoporosis month in the month of May, and everything was around bone health, and we had this sub page called Bone Health that was built that is a half for conversion, but also half for content. And it did really, really good. We pair it out with subscribe and save coupon. We’ve managed to only that month get 550 new subscribers. So that’s one of the things we’re trying to leverage more and more.
Elizabeth:
It’s also our subscriber space. It is now 4% of our revenue and we are increasing at about eight to 10% every month. So that too, we need to make sure that we get that customer once, then we want it to be a loyal customer. Yeah. because we do know what is our LTv down the road, and we wanna make sure you know that yes, the cost per acquisition for that, that particular customer, yes, maybe during Prime day it was almost nothing, let’s say. But on the long run, it will bring you much more revenue.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Interesting. Now I’m looking at just another key word. And I saw one of your Sponsored Brand Video comes up. It looks like it almost starts with like a UGC or Hey, this is like, you know, our typical avatar here and this customer submitted, it’ll kind of like get the attention of some people might scrolling here. Is that kinda like the route you went with this video? That is
Elizabeth:
Correct. We actually, like I mentioned before, we have 25,000 community members and we receive hundreds of testimonials every month. It’s incredible how our community loves our product and wants to talk about it. So our video team does a lot of different ads with these testimonials, and we just feel that it’s much more engaging. The message really resonate with our audience when it comes from a real life testimonial.
Bradley Sutton:
I see at the very top of the page, this is one of the first I’ve seen of a different kind. I mean, this is that same keyword, but this, you know, traditionally is just a regular, you know, Sponsored Brand Ad or Sponsored Brand Headline ad where there’s like 3 products. But then what I’m seeing here, it’s another video that auto plays and it almost seems like it takes a bigger section of the top of the page. Yes. But this one is going to your storefront. What kind of ad is this here at the top?
Elizabeth:
That’s the sponsor brand video. And it’s actually, you have, you can choose that per category or you can choose it per subpage. And that one is actually just going to our homepage, if not mistaken.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. So you have two Sponsored Brand Video ad placements on the same exact page. So that’s an interesting thing I haven’t even seen before.
Elizabeth:
Which try to get the more real estate that we can. And I cannot take credit for all of this. It’s our agency. They’re pretty, pretty innovative there. We work in pair, you know I draw the strategy, they execute. One of the things that really worked with us too is that it’s been maybe a couple of months now that we’re doing a lot of DSP and we are actually moving much more towards DSP advertising okay. Than sponsor just because of the capabilities of doing, really targeting with audiences. And that really just gives us much more control over what are we serving to the customer, depending on where on the purchasing journey they are. So for instance, we are pairing customers, let’s say upper funnels. It’s more about are these customers?
Elizabeth:
I don’t know. Let’s say for instance, one of the things, because I used to work with Pelican, I knew that their audiences on Amazon actually were about 50 plus because these are customers that didn’t really want to, you know, go to Sporting Goods, take out the kayak, put out on the car. They actually just rented out sorry, buy it, and it went out to the cottage. So what I did is we actually had an outdoor video where we see a couple just doing Kayak on the water, and we have all of this messaging around fortifying your bones to make sure that you can continue doing your activities and that video we are actually using it in the category for nauticals within the Sponsored, but we are also using on DSP so on DSP, we’re able to say, you know, like if they bought a kayak within the last 60 days and they are 50 plus we can do like a lot of more targeted audiences there.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. What other unique programs are you doing? We’ve talked about some common ones. We’ve talked about some more unique ones, like, like DSP any more unique things that you’re, you’ve, you know, programs that you’ve taken advantage of at Amazon or have we hit most of them?
Elizabeth:
I tend to be, I’ve been classified as a tester. I love to test everything. Every time I see a beta out there, I’m just trying to get my hands on it and see what I can do with it. And I think it’s part of the success because you can really try and test to see what’s resonating, you know with your customer. One of the things that we’ve recently have done, and I cannot tell you if it’s going to work or not, ’cause it’s fairly new, it’s actually, you know, these tailored promotions that came out on Seller Central. We can actually now serve an exclusive deal, let’s say, to a particular audience. For instance, we’re doing with brand card abandonment audience, which is perfect because Prime Day was just like a couple of weeks ago, you know and we are serving them a coupon for, to get them within the brand. But we’re also at the same time having this catchy add to card OTT video within DSP that is serving to that same audience the ads, so they can see that we have a coupon. So it’s just like making these connections between what you’re able to do in promotions, how you can pair it out with DSP or with sponsor. I guess just being very creative.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. And then now, now that first part that you mentioned, a lot of regular sellers have that, like the second part is definitely through DSP, but that tailored thing, I think, I think a lot of sellers now have access to that. So you’re combining both of it. I like it. What about in Helium 10? What, what are some of your favorite tools and, and functions that, you know, like you said, you know, back in the day you, you didn’t have Helium 10, like what kind of things are you using now for your brand that you’re probably thinking, dang it, I wish I had this in 2017 when I was, when I was trying to, to figure this out. Or something like that. Yeah,
Elizabeth:
So I have have a colleague of mine that he’s really the one that is using you know, Listing Builder, Keyword Tracker, Cerebro, all of these most of, for me within my job more a strategic level we actually use Market Tracker 360. So Market Tracker 360 is one of the tools that we, that I use a lot to understand actually how much of market shares are we actually getting every quarter what are our competitors doing that maybe we are not. And also for product launch. So we are launching new products in September and October and more part of the research is all based on Market Tracker 360 to see like, what is really our competitive advantage here. What is the market that we wanna target, what are we trying to aim, you know, with this product launch after six months, 12 months? So it’s just part of our strategical planning. But other than that–
Bradley Sutton:
Now for those who are listening, like, and they’re like looking at their dashboard like, wait a minute, I don’t have this. So Market Tracker 360 is kind of like, almost like separate from Helium 10. For higher end sellers. Now this is it’s not something that you have just like in your diamond plan or, or something. Even me, I haven’t used it. It’s for kind of big sellers like Elizabeth here. So talk to me about what, like one strategy, like you said you, you’re looking it at launch, so like before you get into the niche, what are the data points that you’re looking at in Market Tracker 360 to are you saying that you’re looking at that to even decide if it’s something you want to go in, or you’re like, Hey, we are definitely going in here. Let me just kind of like benchmark what the existing landscape is doing so that I can see taking market share from them, or, or how are you using it in this sense of launch, like you said? So
Elizabeth:
At the beginning it was more to, yes, we are launching this new product, what is the benchmark, you know on Amazon? Now it’s difficult for me to go into the details without revealing what we’re going to launch and I can’t do that. But one of the things now with time knowing that, okay, this is our market share, it’s more about how do we position the product so the product have different ingredients if we want in it. And with Market 360, for me it’s about, okay, what is the market for each individuals of these categories or these sets of keywords? So we have these different ingredients and or vitamins if we want within the same formulation, and we wanna see which one of them has the more potential for us. As far as sales and then serving within that category and say, Hey, by the way, we’re not just selling this.
Elizabeth:
Our formulation have this, and this for this price, actually. So it’s about getting more value to the customer within one category and made them switch from what they are already buy-in. But actually they are paying for something that if they go with our product, they will get much more value out of their money. So that’s the type of strategy now, like, but it’s more like go to market and yeah, I could maybe talk to you later on next year about how it went, but that is how I’m utilizing to Market Tracker 360. But another tool that for me as a director marketplace I love is your new dashboard, your new dashboard insights. I just go in, I have all the information I need and I saw this morning that now we have competitors there for each of our products. It’s awesome. So for me, it’s just going to 1 place and having all the information when I need it.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. So guys, if, if anybody out there is, you know, doing four or $5 million or more and think that Market Tracker 360 might be a fit for you, just just go to h10.me/mt360, You can get a free demo on that tool. As far as what you also mentioned, the insights dashboard, that’s what everybody has access or as long as you have a diamond and above and we got some cool things, Elizabeth, that’s, that’s crazy. You know, the competitor was just a start. But now, once you set your competitors, you know, like we’re gonna tell you, Hey, did you know that your competitor’s getting sales from this keyword? And you don’t even have it in your listing? I mean, theoretically you should have been, I mean, I’m sure you, like you said, you have a colleague’s using or that’s probably the his or her job to use Cerebro and try and find those.
Bradley Sutton:
But now, instead of him having to take 10 minutes to do it, you’re just gonna instantly get this notification that, that did all the work for you. It’ll be interesting to see. I wonder if your competitor is gonna feel, or your competitor, your coworker there is going to feel a little bit nervous. Like, man, Helium 10’s taking my job way. I gotta find some new strategies to stay to stay relevant here. Before we get to your last strategy like we always ask everybody for their 60-second tip of the day. Let’s switch gears. Somebody who’s in the kind of like health niche here. And might have some interesting insight, but what I ask all my guests is this year is on the health side.
Bradley Sutton:
Like, like we’re, we’re all entrepreneurs, we’re, we’re working for companies in the space. Actually, your story is similar to mine. Like before Helium 10, I used to work for a supplement a very popular supplement company. I didn’t sell on Amazon myself, but anyways regardless if we’re in the supplement space or we’re not, health is important and, and sometimes when we get in these kind of jobs and it’s, it’s fun for us. I’m sure I could just see, you know, from talking to you, it’s fun and sometimes we, we might overwork ourselves or, or, or just, you know, forget that we just work 12 hours. Like what do you do for hobbies to make sure that you get away from work and what are some like healthy habits that you have, that to make sure that you’re, you’re staying, you know, grounded emotionally, mentally, physically?
Elizabeth:
Mostly. One of the things that I do is to have like a routine. I’m a early person. I wake up at 5:00 AM I make most of my day in the morning, you know, reading I’m listening to either one of your podcasts or some something else about Amazon for sure. I go for a run. I love running. I’ve started out, at the beginning I couldn’t even have like half a K I couldn’t even do that. And now I run between 10k and 15 k every week. So I love to run. I run in trails nature. I love nature and just getting outside. So it’s something that really helped me out.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, let’s close it with what’s a 30 or 60-seconnd tip? You know, you’ve been talking a lot about your strategies and things, but is there something you mentioned today you can say in 30 or 60 seconds or less that you think can help our listeners out there?
Elizabeth:
Yeah. So we’ve been talking about different strategies, you know, that could help you within Amazon marketplace. But one key takeaway that is, I think it’s crucial, and I did talk about it and during our conversation is content, but not just any content but the right kind of content. So we are using ChatGPT, I’m pretty sure a lot of our audience here. But we use it to dissect our product reviews, but not just to gain deeper understanding of our customers. We are really asking about their psychological, social, cultural factors within these reviews to try to understand, you know, their intrinsic and extrinsic values. So really what they are trying, what is driving the customer ths your product and what are they tangibly wanting to have, you know, what are the benefits that customers are getting out of the product.
Elizabeth:
And we actually had a lot of success with this understanding these various factors and values from our customers. We tailored our message. We actually, like, for example, on our analysis, it revealed that like a large portion of our products were actually purchased by adults for their agent parents. So we actually took this and we make it a, a caregiver campaign with Amazon DSP with tailored messaging around these adults, not targeting 55 plus, but maybe targeting 28 to 45, you know, with this message. About taking care of your parents, not just an investment for them, but also an investment for you. So these types of information you can get by utilizing ChatGPT with the reviews, but not just like, oh, what they are saying, no, no, no. Like go deeper. Ask them, yeah, ask ChatGPT, like really questions about what do you think their values are where do they find our products? Like for us, it was a lot recommended by doctors. So now we have a lot more, much more doctors or clinical types of imagery within our content. So these types of informations are very good to have.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Alright. Well Elizabeth, it was great, you know, getting to know, you know, your story really inspiring and seeing all of the success you’ve had. Where will I be seeing you? Like, are you going to Amazon accelerate or maybe Amazon Unbox or any of these conferences coming up?
Elizabeth:
So I’ll be at Amazon Unbox this year.
Bradley Sutton:
Unbox. All right. I’ll see you there in October. And when we have you back on this show sometime next year hopefully you can be able to say that, hey, maybe you hit that eight figure mark already for the second time now in six years. So that would be awesome. So thanks a lot and we’ll see you soon.
Elizabeth:
Thank you Bradley.
Welcome to another special episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast which is our monthly training and live Ask Me Anything with Bradley Sutton. Our focus today would be how to analyze listings, whether your want to get into a niche or maybe compare yourself to your competitors. Bradley will show you a quick way on how to look at their keyword strategy, their listing optimization strategy, and most importantly their listing image strategy as well. Let’s hop into it!
In episode 480 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:
- 01:22 – Using Helium 10’s Listing Analyzer Tool
- 02:55 – Cool Features Inside This Tool
- 04:37 – The Category & Subcategory BSR
- 05:22 – Traffic and Conversions Graph
- 06:29 – Compare Key Metrics Across ASINs
- 06:47 – Listing Quality Score Analysis
- 13:03 – Media Comparisson Feature
- 15:28 – Export Images Of Your Competitor’s Image
- 16:52 – Another Way You Can Run Listing Analyzer
- 17:39 – Product Research with Listing Analyzer
- 21:18 – Q&A with Bradley
- 21:45 – How To Send Tool Ideas
- 22:19 – Profits Tool Questions
- 25:25 – Why Is Your Bullets Too Short?
- 25:50 – Draw Graphs For Product Sessions
- 27:26 – Compare Key Metrics Data Automation
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we talk about how you can analyze your competitor’s keyword, listing optimization and image strength and strategies, along with answer all of your questions you gave live on the show. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10’s Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly Ask Me Anything and training. So welcome one and all to the show. We’re gonna be going over how to analyze listings, especially maybe you’re gonna get into a niche or maybe you want to compare yourself to your competitors. So a quick way to look at their keyword strategy, their listing optimization strategy, and in my opinion, almost more importantly, or one of the most important ones is their image strategy as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Without further ado, I’m gonna, I’m gonna hop in here. Have your product in mind. Find your top keyword on Amazon where you are on page one. Alright, let me show you guys. I obviously picked Coffin Shelf, you know, for me, and I ran X-ray on the page. All right. Now the very first item you pick, I want you to pick your product. All right, so I chose our coffin shelf first and Manny’s Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf. You guys see that here? I put a check mark and then I want you to choose like 5 or 6, 4, 5, 6, whatever of your main competitors. All right? So I’m you’ll notice here that I am not choosing like these makeup shelves because to me, that’s not my competitor. Are they competing with me on page one for my main keyword? Yes, but I think that that customer avatar is a little bit different.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m just trying to hyperfocus what my direct competitors are doing. So, so black coffin shelves is what I’m choosing, and it has to be very similar and, and form function and price. And I, I want it to be selling a little bit. Like I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna choose, oh, I didn’t choose this guy here. I should have chose him. He’s selling like 147 units, but I’m not gonna choose some of these. Some of these others, matter of fact, I might run this again. The, some of these other guys are actually selling some decent amounts of units. Well, that gothic life, I already had, let me see, I didn’t choose this one here. Spooky look, spooky looky life. All right, come on guys. With these, with these, some of these brand names that people are choosing are, are not great.
Bradley Sutton:
All right? So once you guys have it chosen, let me know in the chat if you guys have about five or six or seven competitors. And then what I want you to hit is run Listing Analyzer. All right? Once you’ve got that hit Run Listing Analyzer, all right? And then it’s gonna open up Listing Analyzer in another window. So now you guys should all be looking at a screen that kind of looks like this. Now, if you had connected your Helium 10 account to to your Amazon account, you’re gonna have some extra information here, such as the Act, the actual sales of your product at the top of the screen right Now. Another thing that if you only have one sku, it’s probably gonna show up here. A cool thing that this is good for, but your Insights dashboard can do it too, is that it’s gonna track your alerts, right?
Bradley Sutton:
So it’s going to track the alerts of when things happen to this exact ASIN or this exact SKU. So like for example, if you change your price on July 4th, right? What you’re gonna see is a.here on July 4th, and then you’ll be able to see, oh man, my sales went up or my sales went down, you know, and then take action. Let’s say you did an image change and you want to know when it actually registered on Amazon and then how things happen afterwards. Well, that’s gonna show up. So that’s the benefit of having alerts set up on your account in Helium 10 is on this chart here in Listing Analyzer. It is going to graph out when these things are are happening. Alright, so now the next step that we are going to go over here is, lemme see if this other one went.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, there it is right there. Let’s scroll down. Here is the subcategory and category B S R. Now, I don’t think I could see this on Amazon. Let me just double check and look at the B SS R in Amazon here. And let’s see, I don’t think, yeah, it’s not, when you look on Amazon and use your Helium 10 Chrome extension, it’s not gonna show you the subcategory B Ss R. So Listing Analyzer is one of the only places where you can actually see what your subcategory at the lowest level is. So it gives you home and kitchen 175,000 here on July 5th. And then it says floating shelves 644 here on July 24th. It says 281 and 1089. So it gives me a little visibility into my subcategory BSR. Now, if I had chosen the right SKU, which I didn’t, you guys should see under traffic and conversion, some really cool graphs, it’s going to show you the history of your sessions, page views, and unit units ordered.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is kind of important to see what your sessions rate is, what your average page view rate is. I’m gonna have to check this which data points it’s actually pulling from. And then your units ordered your average order session rate. That’s pretty abysmal as you can see here. 2%, 3%, that is no bueno. All right, that’s not good. All right, so this shows me like how it was over time, and I can actually choose different dates. So this is kind of cool because when you’re looking at this in your seller central dashboard, or perhaps other parts of Helium 10, you might not see it fully grafted out here. All right? So it’s really cool to see it graphed out, like what kind of conversion rate you are seeing. Again, this is on your product. You don’t need to have your own product to run listing Analyzer.
Bradley Sutton:
And I’m gonna show you guys how to do that in a couple seconds here because you guys are gonna give me an idea of what I should do. Alright, so now this is where we start getting into the nitty gritty here, where it is this section that’s called Compare Key metrics across ASIN. So these are all of the products that I had pulled in from X-ray. It has my product and the other product. So I can see, hey, what’s the listing quality score of these products? This is just the the Helium 10 algorithm that is based on what you know, users said was the best practices, right? I could say, Hey, where’s the seller region from? Wow, okay, I see three of these coffin shells and manufacturers are from USA, there’s actually an Australian one here, and then one from China.
Bradley Sutton:
I could see, hey, are, is everybody in the same category and subcategory? Look at this. Not all are, here’s one that’s in standing shelf units. So it might be interesting to, to see for this seller, do they have a better conversion rate or, or not a conversion rate, but a better rate of sales. You know, due to being in that other category, what’s the price? If I wanted to go in and say, wow, look at this guy who’s so cheap. Has he always been this cheap? Has he always had this price of $21 and 99 cents? Well, I can click this graph here and now instantly I can actually see how let’s go, let’s go all time. Let’s go one year. And I could see, okay, well, he was actually 23.99 before he went up to 29.99. He was 23.99 for months, and then starting in June, he dropped down to this 21.99 price.
Bradley Sutton:
So I could, I could see that if there is an inventory levels available, we’ll see that here. I could see the history of his reviews. I could see the size, this is a good one. Like, let’s say everybody was the same product as mine and I knew they were the same size. Instantly I’m gonna see like, wait a minute, why, how is this one person able to get their product in a box that is nine inches wide or something like that, you know, when everybody else’s is seven inches. So that’s gonna give you some, some insights there as well. Another thing that I like to look at is the age of the listing. I’m like, man, here, this guy’s brand new. He’s only launched this product two months ago, but everybody else is kind of mature listings. Hey, everybody’s got this number of images.
Bradley Sutton:
Now what I’d really like to see though, guys, is this one on the end here where it’s top 10 keywords and top 10 search volume. So if I’m looking at this, I can kind of see the strength of me compared to my competitors, right? And look at this, look at this. So I’ve got 31 keywords that are in the top 10, and if I add up those search volumes, it’s up to 9,000. But then look at this competitor. He’s top 10 for 63 keywords. And if I were to add up those search volumes, it’s 32,000. So maybe I wanna see which competitor is this. Now look at this guys, take a look here.
Bradley Sutton:
This guy is selling 212 units. He’s almost double a lot of the other competitors. And now instantly, I kind of know like, well, okay, now it makes sense. Look at him. He’s 212 units per month. But part of that has got to be because he is ranking for so many keywords in the top 10 for more than everybody else, all right? I’m doing pretty good. I’m ranked for 31. You know, he’s better than others, but these guys are getting probably a lot more visibility. So that’s how you can kind of see the strength of the niche. As I go here, I could see what’s the average listing quality score. All right. Hey, nobody, look at this, nobody it’s telling me that nobody has symbols or emojis in their listing. So everybody’s doing the right thing. Everybody’s got five bullet points. So these people obviously know how to make Amazon listings.
Bradley Sutton:
Everybody’s got the first bullet point capitalized. The first letter of the first bullet point, I should say. Let’s see, everybody’s got at least 1000 characters in the description or they’ve got a plus content. Only one of them though has video in their listing. All right? So there, there’s maybe some opportunity I see there, all right? Everybody’s got more than 20 reviews. So this kind of just tells you the strength of the listing and I could actually go in one by one and then take a look at some of these ASINs one by one a little bit more. All right? Now this is another part that I really, really like. There’s not much going on here in the coffin shelf, ’cause Coffin shelf is a very small niche, right? But this is this is showing me the total shared keywords of these products.
Bradley Sutton:
In other words, the number of keywords where at least two of these ASINs that I entered here are organically in the first seven pages. Now, here are some of the top keywords I believe to be listed here. It’s gotta be, you know, at least some of them are in the at least like three of them are in the top right or something like that. Or in the top 10, if I’m not mistaken. Now, this is where you can see the strength of your niche. So these are the top keywords in the niche. And now what I’m looking for is on this right hand side. Now, th this, this has been here since last year, guys, this is nothing new, but I think a lot of you guys haven’t been using this as much. But take a look. These numbers represent where we are ranking organically.
Bradley Sutton:
So what you wanna see is who’s got the most light green numbers, right? That means that they are really crushing it. Now, if a whole bunch of people have a bunch of dark numbers, then that means that they’re not doing very well, right? And then look at this. Look, look at this guy here of the top keywords of the niche. Every single one, he’s in the top 20. Look at that. He’s ranked seven, he’s ranked 8 7, 19, 19. So what you would want to see here is perhaps a bunch, a few of the competitors that maybe are not doing as well as the others, right? Like you want them to have a whole bunch of these non dark green ones or these dark green ones. And that means that for their keywords, they’re rank lower on the top. And then now you know, you have more opportunity because the more that the top competitors are not ranking for the top keywords, that means you’ve got a little bit more opportunity there.
Bradley Sutton:
So, so that is something that’s really cool about this. All right? Now almost all of this I think you can see if you’re a platinum member, let me go scroll up here and then kind of show you what you can do if you’re a a diamond member and above. All right, I’m gonna hit this button right here. You guys should see that here. Optimize, not, not optimizing. Let’s see, but whoops, I hit the wrong button. Media comparison. You guys see that under compare key metrics across ASINs. Find that, scroll to the right and then hit media comparison. All right? When you do that, what it’s going to do is it’s going to plot all of the images from these competitors on one page. I know those of you listening to this on the podcast in your car might have trouble picturing this, but this is super, super cool because this is the strategy we’ve been teaching for years about, hey guys, you’re trying to get into a niche where, where these competitors are, you know, have been on here for a year or two, they’ve probably been testing their images, right?
Bradley Sutton:
They’ve probably been been split testing using manager your experiments, or they’re like, man, you know, I got some complaints about this picture, or I got some bad reviews about something that people couldn’t understand, so let me just change my image and show it. And if these are the top competitors, you can kind of get a feel for what has been working for this niche, right? And it’s all right here. So for example, if, if I’m looking at this like this, what, what do I notice? I’m like, wow, you know, in the first few images, everybody has an image where it’s an infographic that has details of the size of the product. Everybody. So look at this, everybody, like in their first three or four images has this infographic. You guys notice that here, every single one has got a very similar image where it breaks down the exact size of the product.
Bradley Sutton:
So now if you’re making a new product or maybe you didn’t have that in yours, it’s like, man, I should probably think about putting an image like that. Another thing that I don’t notice here, you know, which could be good, could be bad, but I don’t notice any models in these, IM in these images. So maybe people being confused about the size of the product isn’t that much of an issue because if it is, what would you think that you would see? Right? You would see a bunch of lifestyle images where somebody is holding the product because then it gives perspective. So the fact that none of the top competitors have that could mean that nobody is getting, you know, some, some bad you know, nobody’s getting bad reviews on that, right? What else do you guys notice here? Almost all of these images have like little spooky trinkets in them.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, very few show the actual coffin shelf just completely empty. And so there’s just various different things that you can glean from this. Now, if this was a brand new image, what I would do with this information is I would ex, I would hit this export media button up here on the right and then it’ll make a PDF and I can actually share this with my graphic designer or photographer and be like, Hey guys, this is what’s working for everybody else in this niche. You know, how can we make sure our images have a similar vibe, but maybe we can do a little bit better? So this is one of my favorite buttons actually in all of Helium 10 guys. This is how valuable it’s ’cause back in the day. This is not a new strategy. I’ve been doing this strategy for five years ’cause I learned it from Tomer Rabinovich, but what I would do is one by one, I would have to go into all of my competitor listings, copy and paste their images into like a PowerPoint or a Google Slides, and then get, you know, print it all out and then try and look at it all in a printout and then, you know, send it to my, my designers and things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
But now I just took all of that work and it’s one click of a button. Alright, let’s go ahead and try this on another niche. Let me see if anybody puts something in the comments here. Castor oil pack wrap. I have no idea what in the world that is. Let’s look it up. Castor Oil Pack Rack that was given by Kate Marshall. All right, let’s look up that inside of Amazon. I think I kind of know what this product is. Alright, so what, let, let me show you the other way you can run listing Analyze. It’s kind of good that, that we’re doing it this way. I could just go to Listing Analyzer right here in my screen, and then I’m just going to go back to the search. So the other way I can run Listing Analyzer is just put in the competitor ASINs by copying and pasting the ASINs.
Bradley Sutton:
So let’s go ahead and do that here. All right. Now if you run Listing Analyzer, it’s gonna look a little bit different because I’m not selling castor oil packs, right? Okay. So it’s not going to put it into, you know, I’m not gonna be able to see those alerts and things like that. Like I could on my product when I was running coffin shelf. Which is fine. When would I use this part of the tool? Well, I would use this part of the tool guys. If I’m doing product research and I’m thinking about getting into a niche, I might go ahead and choose some of the top competitors. And now what I’m looking for is I wanna see what’s their image strategy, what’s their strength of the keywords, what are the top keywords that we are looking at here?
Bradley Sutton:
And that’s what is going to be helpful here. All right, so let’s take a look here. All right, so I see this main one here has a listing quality score of 8.2. Here’s a sales estimation overview of these products. Here’s the category B S r, history of it, and let’s go ahead and open up media comparison. First of all, we’ll do this a little bit backwards. All right, let’s see what we can find out. I have never looked at images of castor oil wraps before, but let’s see, do we see any differences? Right off the bat, guys, right off the bat, what’s the big difference that you see with these images compared to the coffin shelf? Every single one of these listings have models in multiple images. You guys see that big contrast we already found just by one click of the button.
Bradley Sutton:
Looking at the media comparison. Now I’m like, all right, for this product, obviously having it on models is super important compared to the coffin shelf. What else do we see? I see everybody has a detailed, just, here’s one that’s similar to the coffin shelf. Look at this. Everybody has a detailed picture showing the looks like the length and the height of the product, and an infographic about that. Look, all of these competitors have that same, that same vibe right there. Now I know that, hey, this is something that must be important to the customers because that’s why they have it. So I just got all of that information with just a click of the button looking at their image strategy. So really, really cool feature right there that you can see. Let’s go ahead and look down here at the listing quality score.
Bradley Sutton:
Not all of them have 150 characters in the bullet point, but for the most part, these guys are professional. Look, they all, they all have a thousand pixel images. They’ve got seven plus images. Only one has videos, though they all got 20 plus reviews. So for the most part, they’re doing pretty good on their listings. Now, take a look at this, these keywords here, right? Look at these keywords, and now all of a sudden I could see the strength of these competitors. So just by looking at this, like I’m not even looking at the keywords itself. I kind of know that this middle one here, they’re, they’re doing pretty well because look how many of these top keywords they are in the top 10. Remember I’m looking for the light green color. Now, compare that to this last competitor. Most of their keywords, they’re actually in the dark green, and you can see the number corresponding to it.
Bradley Sutton:
They’re ranked on the bottom of page one, or potentially on page two on some of these. So I can see, hey, what’s the relative strength of these competitors on the top keyword? So guys, you could do this for any you could do this for any listings out there comparing yourself to your competitors or you’re looking to expand into a new niche. You wanna see, hey, what’s the strength of the keywords of the competitors in this niche? What are they doing on their image strategy? How is their listing quality score working. This is something that I want everybody using this week multiple times. Some of these you can only do if you have a diamond account. But most, a lot of the stuff that I went over, you can absolutely see if you have a platinum account as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, now let’s go ahead and open it up to any questions that you guys have about Helium 10 or about listing analyzer in general. Edison says, when off topic, when will AI feature listing builder be available for Germany? That’s not off topic. Edison, that is a Helium 10 question. So it’s absolutely on topic. It will come when enough people ask for it. So we always prioritize the, the functionality that we do based on how many requests there is. So every, if anybody, if you’re in a country where a listing builder with AI is not working yet send in a request you, you click let me show you guys where to click to send in request to, at the top of any Helium 10 screen, to the very right of the button that says what’s new, you hit the question mark, right?
Bradley Sutton:
And then you hit share your ideas and that’s where you would say, Hey, I need listen builder for Deutsche Bitta, right? Isn’t that please in German? I don’t remember. Alright, let’s see. Vaed says I need to, I want to see the manual cost, which I added by myself in the profits tool, It should absolutely work. So, so if, if you entered something in to your cost, there’ll be a record of it and it should be there. So if you’re not seeing that cost, you just a, you know, open up a ticket with support and then they’ll, they’ll they’ll help you out. Like I, all of my costs of goods sold, we is, is completely in there, even the ones that I enter with a flat file so that it has dates on it. So that should absolutely be there. Bain Kirk says, can we see more than 60 days for traffic and conversions? Yes, but not there. Listing analyzer. To do that, you would need to go Kirk into profits. Let me see if I can find it on the fly here.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. You would go into profits and then I think if you’re looking at it at the product level, I would go to product performance. Actually, you can do that from the dashboard too. What am I saying? You can actually do that on the dashboard. I’m gonna show you guys two different ways you can do this from the dashboard and from the product performance page. So if I’m in the product performance page, where I’m gonna want to go, Kirk is on the top right there is going to be a date range. All right? So this date range is where, you know, I’m assuming you want it to be outside of 60 days. So I would change this date range at the very top. I don’t know why Europe is showing April. I don’t even sell in Europe. Let me change that to u s a. You would change this date range, find the product you’re looking for, and then let me show you where to look for that, you would go right here and it’ll show that page views and sessions. You can see it from any time period, but it’s not gonna be a fancy graph like was on Listing Analyzer. But let me see what that graph looks like. Can I even see the graph from here? Let’s take a look. Page views sessions. I might be able to see that from the listing. Dashboard.
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s go down here. I’m at the child level again, you would change the date right up here on the top right, and let me hit listing. I think it’s an under listing down here. There we go. Let’s hit listing. Okay, and then there it is right there. You see unit session percentage sessions and conversion rate. You’ll see that right down here. All right, and then in product performance, I have, yeah, I can’t see the full one, but I can add a, a widget here that I can graph it out to in in profits, Kirk.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let’s see more questions. Why are my bullets so short? Alright, you’re gonna have to stay tuned for that episode of why she changed some of our bullet points. But, but in a nutshell, remember Neil, that overall you can only index for a thousand characters total on your bullet points. So you should keep them where it it, it comes really close to a thousand characters on bullet points. Tunji says, is there any way to draw a graph for sessions in Helium 10? Well, outside of listen analyzer not necessarily, but let me show you one thing, what you guys can do on the insights dashboard. All right? Go up here to the top and at the very top right it says chart. All right, so you are gonna hit the chart and then choose. I’m gonna, I’m gonna show you, it’s not here because I already have it on mine, but you’re gonna choose the one that gives you your detailed percentages and that is called sales and traffic conversion.
Bradley Sutton:
Right here. UIs want to add the sales and traffic conversion chart to your dashboard. This is for you too, Kirk, and this is gonna show this graph throughout for all of your products. But I can go into individual products like for example, our coffin shelf and now for any time period. So yeah, completely erase what I said about 30 minutes ago where I said you couldn’t do this. You absolutely can. This is how like Insights dashboard, it has so much stuff that I even, I’m not keeping up to date with it, but look at that here. I could see what my conversion rate sessions, page views for any time period at all. How cool is that guys? Pretty cool, I think. Cool. I’m glad you asked that Tunji. ’cause I just discovered something about Helium 10 I didn’t even know was available or I knew it, but my memory is so bad. I forgot.
Bradley Sutton:
Kirk says on the compare key metrics data section, can we automate it to give us some keywords where we do better while others are selling and doing well? Absolutely. That’s what’s coming. That is exactly what’s coming, Kirk. That is exactly what is coming where you’re gonna set your you’re, you’re gonna be able to e eventually set your parameters and say, Hey, give me a notice when my competitor is in the top 10 sponsored results, but I am not advertising for it. Like, that would be an example. Or you’d be like, Hey, give me a notice when there’s a keyword with at least 1000 search volume where my competitor is organically in top five and I am not on page one. I mean, just random things that you’ll be able to do because everybody has their own, you know, everybody’s got their own strategies of what they wanna see and what they don’t wanna see.
Bradley Sutton:
This is what you’re doing already in cerebral, I’m assuming. Absolutely gonna be able to automate that so that we can just give you the results and you’re no longer gonna have to like run cerebral every, every other day for your products. Alright guys, that’s it. We’re at time here. So thank you guys so much for joining us on this. Serious Sellers Club members and elite members get this every single week, 52 weeks a year pretty much. And the rest of you, we, we like to open this up once a month and then we repurpose this as a podcast as well. So thank you all, all non-elite and Serious Sellers Club members for joining us. Hope you guys got some benefit of it and we’ll see you guys in the next episode. Bye-Bye now.
In this episode, let’s talk about the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, & E-commerce space. Amazon Prime’s record-breaking delivery speeds, angry Etsy sellers, WooCommerce x TikTok Shop, and the biggest Alibaba event here in the USA. Let’s see what’s buzzing this week!
Join us on our latest SSP episode as we tackle the latest strategies on Amazon listing optimization, A+ content, and other marketing strategies. We start with Emma’s backstory, where we explore the journey of moving from Missouri to Las Vegas, sharing the challenges and adventures she faced. Then she shares incredible success stories from her clients, proving the power of her methods and strategies. Stay tuned as we discuss the numerous benefits of having an optimized listing and how A+ content can be a real game-changer based on Emma’s insights. Learn how Emma helped Project X products convert more and discover budget-friendly tips for creating compelling listing images. For aspiring sellers, we offer invaluable advice on exploring other niches, breaking down Project X’s A+ content, and how you can do it too! Curious about avatars in Amazon product marketing? Tune in to find out! And if you’re eager to learn more about her latest strategies for A+ content and the case study with Project X, we’ve got you covered with Emma’s New Freedom Ticket modules! Finally, we wrap up this episode with Emma’s explosive 60-second tip, leaving you inspired and empowered!
In episode 479 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Emma discuss:
- 02:30 – Moving From Missouri To Las Vegas
- 04:25 – Cool Success Stories From Emma’s Clients
- 05:45 – The Benefits Of Having An Optimized Listing
- 07:17 – A+ Content Is A Real Game-Changer
- 11:20 – Listing Image Creation On A Budget
- 14:12 – Breaking Down Project X’s A+ Content
- 15:00 – How Did Emma Help Project X Products Convert More
- 22:14 – Tips For Newers Sellers On Other Niches
- 27:50 – What Is An Avatar In Marketing?
- 30:00 – New Freedom Ticket Modules With Emma Tamir
- 31:30 – Emma’s Healthy Habits
- 33:10 – How To Get In Touch With Marketing By Emma
- 34:35 – Emma’s 60-Second Tip
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a listing optimization expert on the show who’s helped hundreds of Amazon sellers, and she’s gonna show her latest tactics and also show how for one Project X listing, she was able to double the conversion rate. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Not sure on what main image you should choose from, or maybe you don’t know whether buyers would be interested in your product at a certain price point. Perhaps you want feedback on your new brand or company logo. Get instant and detailed market feedback from actual Amazon Prime members by using Helium 10 Audience. Just entering your poll or questions and within a short period of time, 50 to a hundred or even more Amazon buyers will give you detailed feedback on what resonates with them the most. For more information, go to h10.me/audience. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And I’m not going too far in the world away from me. About three, 400 miles in Las Vegas is where you’re at right now, right, Emma?
Emma:
Absolutely. Las Vegas, Nevada,
Bradley Sutton:
Trying to stay cool in that ridiculous desert heat We were just talking about. I’m melting here at 84, but what did you say it is where you are right now?
Emma:
A whopping 30 degrees more. It is 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Apparently my math is not mathy. This afternoon.
Bradley Sutton:
We’re gonna be talking about how to make your Amazon listings hot, hot, hot, 115 degrees. But, but yeah, it’s not in, in real life. I’m not about this life. Anyways, just to let people know, we had a little bit of your backstory in episode we did about a year ago, so if you guys wanted to check that out, go to h10.me/368. Or if you’re watching this on podcast or YouTube, just look for episode 360 8 from the podcast. Last year she was on with another friend of the show, Rich Goldstein. So that was a good episode to check out. But today we’re gonna be talking a lot about some case studies that Emma’s been working on with us, as well as some new content that this we’re gonna announce is gonna be available in Freedom Ticket. But before we get to there, let’s just talk about it. Vegas is not where you were born and raised. You just told me you moved from Missouri. So was that a difficult decision to ’cause Missouri to Vegas is kind of a geographically, and culturally, I think a kind of a big difference there. It’s
Emma:
Definitely a big difference. I’ve actually lived a lot of different places in my life, including out of the country. I studied abroad in Ecuador. I taught English in Spain. I lived in Israel for almost three years, so it actually wasn’t super difficult for me to decide to move to Vegas. I will say I wasn’t the most enthusiastic when my husband slash business partner eras first proposed the idea in my mind, Vegas was the strip and not much else. But as I’ve spent time here, I realized there’s a whole city beyond the strip, and it’s a really awesome place to get to spend my days.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool, cool. Have you been to any of the Vegas, Amazon events since you’ve been there? Like Prosper and stuff, stuff that before you would have to take about two, three flights to get to, but now you just hop into an Uber and, and go to it. Have you been able to experience that yet?
Emma:
Yes, and it is amazing to go to an event and then know that you get to sleep in your own bed, <laugh> not have to stress about,
Bradley Sutton:
Ah, that’s a good point. Yep.
Emma:
<Laugh> no stressing about packing everybody’s living in a hotel, you’re just like, okay, goodnight. I’m gonna go get a good night’s sleep without any noisy neighbors or whatnot to worry about. I can brew myself my nice coffee in the morning. Yeah, it’s a, it’s, it’s a great place for the industry that we’re in, and it’s a great place to enjoy all the fun things that Vegas has to offer.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Cool. We’re gonna be talking about some project, some, some Project X stuff here, but, but what about just your, your regular clients? Like any cool stories has happened since last year? I mean, obviously I know some people don’t want their products put on blast, but but any stories without, without burning somebody’s identity that you could say like, oh, you had one client and then you guys worked on this plan together, and oh my goodness, their sales doubled or some amazing story like that.
Emma:
A client actually, they didn’t know what was going on. Suddenly their sales were just going through the roof and they’re like, what’s happening? And an employee of mine noticed that they’d gone viral on TikTok and they didn’t know it. So they’re like, oh my gosh, what’s happening? So that was really cool just to be able to be a party to that whole experience, because that can really change a business and the snap of a finger and honestly create a whole lot of other challenges. It’s not all roses. It’s great to have lots of sales, but if you’re not really in a position to know how to manage it, it can definitely create some road bumps. But all the time–
Bradley Sutton:
Was that just random or, like just somebody randomly put it on TikTok or so you guys did that?
Emma:
No, I mean, obviously, well, not, obviously, they were most likely found originally by this person because they had a good listing that helped sell them on it. It wasn’t anything that was well known and then all of a sudden they just blew up. But all the time we have people contacting us about positive impacts that they’re enjoying everything from serious improvements to conversion on their conversion rates, to just completely changing the entire profile of their business. I think, obviously as many sales as possible is the really exciting part of what we do, but there are so many impacts that a well optimized listing can have on your business that go beyond just the conversions. So if you’re dealing with lower return rates or more enthusiastic positive reviews, all of those things kind of feed each other and create this positive momentum that can really strengthen and make a business more efficient so that it’s maximizing whatever spend you’re putting into it to get the most out of those investments. And then generating really positive returns. So I can’t even think of one in particular, but I just know that on a regular basis, we’re getting those messages of the positive ways that what we’re doing is impacting our clients’ businesses.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Now, what do you think is one of the biggest factors nowadays that obviously I’m sure when you, when you take on clients, you, you, you, you give complete once over and, and optimize everything. But, what is the biggest game changer for your, your clients that you’ve done where like, people are just doing things the wrong way. Is it, like, on the p p C side, is it, is it going from no A+ Content to A+ Content? Is it creating a brand story? Is it refreshing the images? Is it just the listing copy, what all of this works together? Of course, you can’t have necessarily one for the other, but if you would point to one of those things that really consistently makes a big difference what would you say it is?
Emma:
I don’t want to speculate just purely based on one particular part of the listing. My gut tells me that probably A+ Content is one of the most significant things that you can upload to a listing and have a positive impact. But I don’t have those, that exact enough data to be able to say with certainty. But the reason why I would say that is a few fold. So one being that Amazon comes out and says, A+ Content positively impacts your conversion rate, and they’ve clearly got all the data on that. Sure. Two, you’re gaining more space for SEO because you have the image keywords. So you have a lot of additional fields that you can fill in with keywords that you wouldn’t have previously. So we’re having an impact on SEO, we’re having an impact on the customer experience. You also have an opportunity to be able to upsell or cross-sell with with that comparison chart module, whether you have standard A+ or Premium A+. So it just is influencing so many different aspects of of what you’re trying to do that I feel like that has the most far reaching elements. So I guess that would be my answer.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, pre Premium A+. That’s kind of a newer thing for some people because like, like that wasn’t always available just to the, the masses. What have you been seeing, like, like would you suggest to everybody, Hey, get qualified for Premium A+ Content and 10 out of 10 implement it? Or have you seen cases where putting the effort and spending to get a video and this and that, like it really didn’t change conversion much? Or is it something that you suggest to everybody to get to do
Emma:
To me while it’s free? This, so originally, for those that aren’t familiar, premium, a plus used to only be something that was available to a very select group of very large businesses. It was invite only, and you still had to pay a lot of money in order to, to be eligible for it. So about a year ago, Amazon made it available to any seller that is brand registered, has had has uploaded a brand story and has had at least 15 pieces of enhanced brand content approved within the last 12 months. So you don’t, you no longer have to spend money in order to qualify for the program. Of course, creating premium A+ Content is going to come with a heftier bill, just because there are more dynamic modules, you’re able to upload more images, it’s wider screen. So even having better resolution images, all of that definitely matters, but if you are able to qualify for it, I think that there are so many of the modules that give you so much better ability to really present your product in a way that is more aligned with what a customer is wanting and expecting to see when they’re interacting with a website.
Emma:
From that perspective alone, it’s worth making the effort. You also, if you are low on budget, you don’t have to upload a video, or if you do upload a video, it can be something very simple. You don’t have to go have a super highly produced video. I mean, I think one of the interesting things, even with this case study that we’ve been working on, Bradley, is these are images that Shivali created, she didn’t go to some high priced photographer to get everything done. And, and so it really demonstrates the ability that no matter where you are budget-wise, there’s still a lot that you can do to make the most of the tools that Amazon is giving you in order to be able to sell your product to the best of its abilities. And then maybe as you gain more traction, as you add more products to your catalog, then perhaps it’s worth taking it to the next level and, and upgrading the quality of your images. But I, I wouldn’t let that be a barrier to you. There’s so many different levels of photography and design out there, and with AI you can do some good design work without needing to be an expert at Photoshop anymore. And so, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, Let me just show the results. I know we’re gonna show the results and then work our way back and kind of reverse engineer what happened. But let me just share my screen here for those, watching this on YouTube, and I’m just taking a look at the product performance page in Helium 10 for this Egg Rack. And if I’m looking back at, when is this the first 10 days of May, which is before on our old listing we had a unit session percentage, as you guys can see of 4.93%. Now, sales were still pretty high because in those days we were the, like, all those days, as in all of two months ago, we were the only game in town as far as this particular kind of product for like a year.
Bradley Sutton:
We kind of had a stranglehold. Now it was interesting, went out of stock like for a couple of weeks, but during that time around June was tons of competitors, Chinese competitors came in and are like, I wouldn’t say half the price, but, but very, very cheap price. So like, theoretically you would’ve thought our sales would go to zero because our sessions were way down. But take a look at this guys. If I go up here, as you can see from the first 10 days, so a kind of apples to apples comparison first 10 days of July, and then we look at that same product, look at our unit session percentage now went to 11.24, so more than double my sales would’ve been dead because like, our, our sessions have gone way down, but our sales have not gone down as much as one would expect thanks to this much better conversion rate on the page.
Bradley Sutton:
So let me just show you the end result here of what what was done. We have new images here. What we’re gonna talk about your thought process here with these. We’ve got some new copy right here. We’ve got new bullet points and this listing did not have A+ Content, and now we can see some A+ Content here. So I know it’s been a couple months since you worked in this, but, but think back to the think back to the, your thought process when you saw the old listing, which was just thrown together, you know a while back as part of a Project X like episode or something we had done. But like, what was, what was the things that jumped off where you’re like, okay, yeah, we definitely need to upgrade this?
Emma:
There were a lot of things for, I mean, first of all, clearly there was no A+ Content, so that was a no-brainer for us. The images were just a few basic product images. So we, I don’t bel if I remember correctly, and I could be mistaken, there were minimal lifestyle images. I don’t think any of them really had text in them, which, we’ll, we can get into that and, and why that’s so important. And the bullet points were not the worst, but pretty bland, just sort of straightforward. They didn’t really have anything that helped to communicate why you a person would want to buy this type of egg rack in particular. Another thing that we noticed is that it was very limited in sort of how the product itself was being presented. And so that was something else that we really thought about as we were embarking on this revamp, was how can we think creatively of who’s going to be buying this, why they would be buying this, how they can make the most of it, and put together a strategy that’s going to address all of those things throughout the entire listing.
Emma:
So really bringing to it a clear sense of who the customer is, what they care about, and why this product is, is the best product out there, rather than just kind of a more basic explanation of what it is, and then allowing the customer to decide that.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, and we in the past I’ve worked a lot with professional photography studios and three d like AMZ One Step in others, but, but as you said sometimes sellers might not have a thousand dollars, $1,500 depending on what what kind of a shoot it’s done to, to really be able to, to, to afford something that extravagant. And we want to show kind of like, Hey, if you don’t have that kind of budget, maybe you could only afford hiring somebody from Upwork, perhaps to do some Photoshopping after you’ve taken some pictures with some decent pictures with cell phone or, or you have a nice camera. And actually all these pictures, guys, like, I’m pretty sure this is Shivali’s father’s hand. He’s got some bling here, some gold bling here. He is now a hand model.
Bradley Sutton:
Here, these are all pictures done, like with Shivali’s cell phone at her house in North Carolina. A hundred percent of these, this doesn’t look like Shivali. So I’m not sure if this was like a stock photography or, or something here, but everything, like how did you go about this? Did you like give her directions, like, alright, hey, I need a shot, like in a fridge, or, or did you just tell her to just take random pictures or did you give her like this specific direction here on this stuff?
Emma:
Yeah, so we gave pretty specific directions. That’s one thing in general, whether you’re working on a listing or a website or anything that has multiple professionals involved, and they don’t have to be contractors, they can be people on your team, it’s helpful to have someone taking the lead so that there is a clear unifying concept because otherwise everybody’s working individually and then trying to match that up and make something work is really difficult. So we gave a creative brief that suggested the different types of images to create so that those images would then align with the text that we were writing, so that it would be a very strong piece of marketing to gather when you combine those two things. So the image and the text are reinforcing each other. And so in those images, I think we have everything. I mean, some of these are even reflected in the keyword research, right?
Emma:
So kind of to take a step back for a moment, your research for creating a listing is really going to help determine the direction that you take. And so part of that is the keyword research that you’re doing. So seeing what kind of keywords are people searching for? That was one of the things that was really eye-opening for us because we realized, hey, there are a lot of competitors that are using terms like cake pop holder or all these little serving because it has these holes in it that make it so that it can be really great for single serving things if you’re hosting a party or wanting to display food somewhere. And so we didn’t want to stay so limited only to being an egg holder because there were all of these other ways that you can utilize it. And the keywords were really what illuminated that opportunity for us.
Emma:
And so then we wanted to make sure, well, if we’re using keywords like that, then we also need to be showing people what we mean when we say something like a cake pop holder so that they can visualize it and imagine what it would be like to be hosting a party. And this, this egg holder, it’s a more rustic design. It’s wood, it’s kind of a traditional and a little bit timeless too, where it’s very possible that the people that are buying this, they like things that are going to last that they’re also going to be able to maybe use in a variety of ways so that they’re not just buying something that only has one function in their household, but something that they have that they can use in different types of settings. So it really even expands what the possibilities are and even helps to justify the investment a little bit more since this is a on the pricier end of an egg holder. So that’s one example. It’s an, another set of keywords was talking about an egg holder for the refrigerator. This egg holder can be used either in the refrigerator or either on the counter. So being able to demonstrate those things in the images was really important so that people can visualize, okay, this is what it would look like if I put it on my countertop. This is how it would function if I put it in my refrigerator. And, and helping to create those connections for people makes the purchasing decision much easier.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. But what you said, it seems like without me talking to you at all during this process, what you, how you just described this egg rack seems like exactly the way that you, that you tackled that project as well. So this is kind of like a, a template guys of you, you could be in a gothic category, you could be in a kitchen category you could be in supplements, but the the principles are the same. Now that being said, what, or are there categories or kinds of products where your approach actually is different than what you’ve been talking about because something different works in different categories? Or is this approach that you’ve been talking about applicable to most and I’m not, of course, obviously I’m not talking about books or, or something like that, but just most regular products.
Emma:
Yeah, so I think the main difference is, so both in the gothic item as well as with the egg holder, these are a little bit more niche products. So they’re not as competitive as category of categories. And so you can go a little bit broader with how you position something. Whereas on the other side, if you are selling something that’s in a very competitive category, then it’s actually a much better approach, especially when you’re a new brand and you’re launching the very beginning to go hyper-specific. So you don’t want to expand out too and go in too many different directions because it’s going to be really difficult and very expensive to try to gain any kind of traction. So you mentioned supplements. If you’re just selling like a fish oil or something like that, which I’m not recommending that you sell fish oil, well, if you just try to sell general fish oil, like an average fish hold oil, that would be good for any single person to take.
Emma:
You’re not going to go anywhere with that. You’re gonna spend a lot of money and you’re just going to die a slow death on a, a page, whatever, a hundred. Yeah. whereas if you were to maybe identify through doing some keyword research that there’s are actually a lot of people that are searching for fish oil for recovery from knee replacement surgery. I’m just making this up, then it might be worthwhile to make your listing hyper targeted to people that are going through knee replacement surgery. So instantly, what is that going to mean for you? People that are getting knee replacements most of the time are older. And so you wanna make sure in that case that like the images of people that you’re using are older people that are, it’s going to make sense that they’re getting knee replacements versus if you have a bunch of young looking athletes, there’s going to be a big disconnect there.
Emma:
And so I think that’s one of the main elements that you would want to be using in order to determine your approach to how to go. It’s very easy especially as a new seller to kind of get starry-eyed and want to just sell to everyone. And I encourage people to really resist that urge and try to start off quite specific. And then if you eventually want to get a little bit more aggressive, once you have some reviews, have some good movement, demonstrate that this is something that has potential, then maybe you can get a little bit more aggressive with that. But yeah, I would say that overall, aside from that, the basic principles of making sure that the keywords that somebody is searching are also reflected in the content, and that I don’t think is always the most obvious thing.
Emma:
We think of keywords as the thing that gets people in the door, but if that’s what’s on someone’s mind when they’re going into the search bar to search for a product, and then you’re showing them, Hey, this is what you were searching, that’s going to help them understand like, oh, this is, I’m in the right place. I wasn’t just Amazon didn’t just take me to some random product that doesn’t have anything at all to do with what I was searching for, which as a customer, I’ve had that happen plenty of times.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So now one of the big things that you, you tackle with this, like you said we did not have A+ Content. So I know there’s like different, different ways to, to kind of tackle A+ Content. Some people like to just have kind of like, make it seem like it’s almost all one image and, and that it just kind of flows, but it’s really different images. ’cause That’s what A+ Content makes you put it in modules. But what was your reasoning behind this kind of like, approach here? And I see a lot of like there’s like it seems like you’re, you’re focusing in on some of the features of it like, like the, the wood finish and then how it has these pegs so that doesn’t go over.
Bradley Sutton:
You show an actual chicken coop. I’m assuming this is maybe to go along with the branding here. And then you show some other use cases like, looks like some chocolate, I’m getting hungry as it is like you said, the cake pops, and then now you can also show how you can, I mean, so you’re saying a, there, there’s like a lot going on here. Do you always wanna focus on the features like this, or sometimes you, you tell a story more, it just depends on the product? Or is this kind of like your plan for A+ Content?
Emma:
I would say it all really depends on the product and what’s required. And the approach really is what do we feel that the customer needs to know? What’s really important about the product that we need to communicate? And also what are the things that are really going to resonate with somebody or make them care about something? And so there were certain design features that we felt like were very important to this product that we did want to highlight. So the fact that it’s solid wood showing the fact that it’s stackable and expandable, I am imagining this and sort of the, the avatar that we had in our minds, which for those that aren’t familiar with what an avatar is, it’s essentially sort of an imaginary person with a very detailed profile that is a potential customer of yours.
Emma:
And it can be a really helpful tool when you are creating any kind of marketing content so that you’re writing specifically to a person instead of just kind of to a whole blob of potential buyers. And so we’re imagining someone that either aspires to have chickens or maybe even has chickens. It’s actually a very popular lifestyle to to have some backyard chickens and raise your own eggs. But if you can’t do that, maybe going to the farmer’s market. And there’s a lot of different ideas that are kind of tied up in that. And so we wanted to draw that connection because it’s very different than if you’re purely just needing function and you don’t care about how it looks like and you don’t really care about the whole idea of everything, then you can just buy a cheap acrylic or plastic egg holder that you can put in your refrigerator and that’s that.
Emma:
But this is something that can be a really nice piece on your counter and is something that’s going to last and that’s sort of aligns with visually the look of that rustic homesteading lifestyle that might just be aspirational or is in fact something that they’re pursuing. And so thinking about, the host, the gracious host the person that’s wanting to eat healthy, all of the different ideas that are associated with that, and then wanting to present that in a way that is visually helping to communicate those ideas. And then textual textually reinforcing the key details.
Bradley Sutton:
Now you what you just said was just some of your tips for A+ Content, now you actually redid one of our older modules that needed some refreshing in, in freedom ticket. So guys go into a Freedom Ticket. And I want you guys those of you who have Helium 10 and we’re trying to always update ones that, that might need refreshing, but go into 8.11. It’s week eight, 8.11. You’ll see Emma’s new module here. And then around eight it’s not showing up here right now, but around 8.13, 8.15 About, you’re gonna see another module. And what was that one about? So it wasn’t about A+ Content, but what was the other one you made about?
Emma:
Yeah, so that one is sort of for a slightly people that they’ve, they have a listing and they’re trying to figure out do does it need work? So sort of how to think about is it worth it? Is it time to do some revamping? So thinking about really that optimization process of you have a listing, it’s existing in the world, how can you think strategically about that to really take your listing to the next level?
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Cool. So good stuff there, guys. Make sure to check that out. And and once it’s once if you haven’t seen it yet, I might have a clip of it. I’ll try and throw it into the Weekly Buzz or something as well. Alright, now, now before we get into your last Amazon tip of the day one thing I ask people 2023 is my year of health and wellness. So like, what are some of your habits as far as like hobbies when you need to get away from, from the Amazon world what are some things that you’re doing to keep yourself physically, mentally healthy?
Emma:
Yeah, I would say the top one is an evening walk. It sounds really simple and basic. The evening walk is having to get later and later as the temperatures rise because 7:00 PM is still pretty toasty here, but it’s great. I would say for all health it’s fantastic exercise. Walking is still shown to be one of the best ways of, of exercising your body, but it’s also, it’s great to be outside. I think it’s very good for your mental health and I, I feel so much better when I am walking regularly. Also drinking a lot of water should not be underappreciated. And especially again, in the climate that I’m in, I feel like I’m in a losing battle, but most of the time when I don’t feel well, I’m thinking like, okay, what’s going on? And then I sort of run my mental checklist of how many cups of water I’ve had. And so often, either if it’s a headache or I’m feeling a little bit lethargic, it’s just because I haven’t had enough water. So two really simple, basic things, but I think that some of those types of things can have the biggest impact. So
Bradley Sutton:
I like it. Now before we get into your Amazon hacker, if people want to find you on the interwebs, one of the easiest ways is through Helium 10 guys. Just go to hub.helium10.com and just type in Marketing by Emma actually comes up right here in the auto complete, but Marketing by Emma. And then you’ll be able to reach out. And then if you’re an Elite member, you actually have some discounts, like I’m an elite member so I can get some discounts. If you’re a Helium 10 member, there might be different discounts that, that, that end up here. But make sure to hit the get in touch. How else can people find you on the interwebs out there?
Emma:
Yeah, so our marketingbyemma.com is probably one of the best places to go. And on our website you’ll be able to find, if you’re more of a phone person, you can call us, you can WhatsApp us, you can text us, you can email. All the things are there. We also offer a free listing analysis. So if you see all of this and you’re like, I don’t know, this is over my head, please take a look at it and tell me what I’m doing wrong, we can do that. Also,
Bradley Sutton:
I’m looking here, 92 5-star reviews. Good grief here in the hub. And guys, when you, when you see verified reviewer, that means they were signed into Helium 10 when they left the reviews. So you could, you could see lots of verified reviews here, just like on Amazon. My goodness, pretty impressive. I like it. Alright, now what’s your last 62nd or 32nd tip of the day or strategy that you can share with everybody?
Emma:
I think I just wanna talk about the importance of understanding your competitors and going super niche. I think that ultimately Amazon is getting more and more competitive. You are dealing with it yourself, with this a rack holder and fight the urge to want to go broad instead, go specific. Find those opportunities. They always exist. And the more niche you can go, the more opportunity you have to be able to really connect deeply with customers, get that fan that fan loyalty, that excitement around your product, and then you can just use that to build your momentum. So we see that in many of the biggest D2C brands out there, not just on Amazon. It’s a really effective strategy. And as AI becomes even more dominant, it’s, it’s more and more important to go specific to strategically position and to be clear about what makes you special, and then really highlight and celebrate that so that people have a reason to buy from you.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us and thanks for your great work on this egg rack. And yeah, like if you, if you want to go tweak it now, after seeing it and knowing what’s going on, let’s work on it some more and then share results later with it, with everybody. Awesome.
Emma:
I would love to. Thanks so much Bradley.
Let’s catch up on the latest ventures of Crystal Ren, an Amazon seller from Singapore, after exiting her Amazon brand last year. She also shares how she successfully utilizes other people’s money for her new brand, while also addressing the intersection of consumer goods and mental health services. Get an exclusive insight into Crystal’s new Amazon business and learn valuable strategies for achieving consistent profits and income. Crystal divulges her Amazon launch strategy and her valuable sourcing and negotiation tips and learn essential lessons from Crystal’s recent trips in other Asian countries. Find out Crystal’s exciting outlook for 2023 and beyond.
In episode 478 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Crystal discuss: • 01:30 – Remembering Bradley’s Trip In Singapore • 03:05 – What Is Crystal Up To These Days? • 06:01 – Using Other People’s Money For Business • 08:08 – Consumer Goods & Mental Health Services • 11:10 – Diving Into Crystal’s New Amazon Business • 12:50 – Making Profits And Consistent Income • 17:06 – Crystal’s Amazon Launch Strategy • 19:09 – How To Win The Amazon Game • 22:54 – Crystal’s Healthy Habits & Hobbies To Relax • 27:28 – Sourcing & Negotiation Tips • 33:51 – Lessons Learned From Recent Trips In Asia • 37:02 – Crystal’s Outlook For 2023 And Next Year • 39:07 – How To Reach Out Crystal Ren • 40:01 – Crystal Ren’s 30-Second Tip
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Let’s catch up on the latest ventures of Crystal Ren, an Amazon seller from Singapore, after exiting her Amazon brand last year. She also shares how she successfully utilizes other people’s money for her new brand, while also addressing the intersection of consumer goods and mental health services. Get an exclusive insight into Crystal’s new Amazon business and learn valuable strategies for achieving consistent profits and income. Crystal divulges her Amazon launch strategy and her valuable sourcing and negotiation tips and learn essential lessons from Crystal’s recent trips in other Asian countries. Find out Crystal’s exciting outlook for 2023 and beyond.
In episode 478 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Crystal discuss: • 01:30 – Remembering Bradley’s Trip In Singapore • 03:05 – What Is Crystal Up To These Days? • 06:01 – Using Other People’s Money For Business • 08:08 – Consumer Goods & Mental Health Services • 11:10 – Diving Into Crystal’s New Amazon Business • 12:50 – Making Profits And Consistent Income • 17:06 – Crystal’s Amazon Launch Strategy • 19:09 – How To Win The Amazon Game • 22:54 – Crystal’s Healthy Habits & Hobbies To Relax • 27:28 – Sourcing & Negotiation Tips • 33:51 – Lessons Learned From Recent Trips In Asia • 37:02 – Crystal’s Outlook For 2023 And Next Year • 39:07 – How To Reach Out Crystal Ren • 40:01 – Crystal Ren’s 30-Second Tip
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Crystal’s back on the show to talk about what she did after her big Amazon exit last year, and how she started a new brand this year with other people’s money. And she gives us her best sourcing tips and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
How can you get more buyers to leave you Amazon product reviews by following up with them in a way that’s compliant with Amazon terms of service? You can use Helium 10 Follow-up in order to automatically send out Amazon’s request a review emails to any customers you want. Not just that, but you can specify when they get the message and even filter out people that you don’t want to get that message, such as people who have asked for refunds or maybe ones that you gave discounts to. For more information, visit H ten.me forward slash follow up. You can sign up for a free account, or you can sign it up for a platinum plan and get 10% off for life by using the discount code SSP10.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. This is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And speaking of different parts of the world, we are going right now, I believe. Are we live in Singapore? Is that where you’re at right now?
Crystal:
That’s correct, yes.
Bradley Sutton:
All the way back in Singapore. It was nice to be out in Singapore a couple times. Was it this year or last year? But I got to do the touristy things there, like see the gardens and look at some places. That was in one of my Korean dramas I was watching, so, so I love it out there in Singapore. But this is not your first time on our show. Crystal has been on the show. We’re not gonna go too much into her backstory because we have it in, I have it written here in my notes, episode 351.
Bradley Sutton:
So if you guys wanna find out her crazy story about how I discovered her from an Amazon YouTube channel and then found out that she had invested a hundred thousand dollars into her first Amazon business and brought it up to seven figures how to exit. And basically that was, you know, I don’t know about by a year and a half, or a little bit less than a year and a half ago. So now this episode, we’re not gonna be going into too much of the backstory, you know, but again, if you’re watching or listening to this and this is your first time listening to to Crystal, maybe maybe pause this. Go to h10.me/351, Get her backstory. ’cause We’re gonna be talking about it as if you guys know about it already. So, Crystal we were just talking like, I, I know you’ve been traveling a lot all over the world, going to weddings and going back home to, to China and everything, but I, I want to go all the way back to the last time we talked. And at that time you were not, I wouldn’t want, I don’t wanna say retired, but you were kind of like still in the aftermath of your exit and just kind of like kicking back and traveling and stuff, so That’s right. Was that pretty much your life for a year or so or what was going on after that exit?
Crystal:
Yeah, no, so actually when we talk, I believe it was pretty much exactly a year ago, I was, as you said, traveling and also kind of manage my finances at the time because you know, I think this should be in the 30-second tip, but I’ll say it now anyway. I think once after you have an accident, it’s actually better to have a plan before you even exit it, just because otherwise you’re gonna find yourself in a situation. And now this is not just for me. Like I heard other sellers saying the same thing, like, it will be a period of time when like, you’re just like, what am I gonna do next? And I heard, you know, people saying that, you know, for a few month or maybe like a year, they’re just like, oh, like, you know what’s next?
Crystal:
So I know people who have the plan before they make an exit, perhaps they already started another, the brand or like, they know, you know, they’re gonna dedicate a few months traveling. So they’re planning that already. Like, I felt like that will make your timeline more productive. And I didn’t do that. So like, I kind of regret it now. And another part that I should say, like I just didn’t know was like how much hassle it goes into manage your finances, because after you have an exit, like you kind of need to decide where do you want to put the money into, right? Like that also took some time for me to like figure out like, how should I allocate, you know, invest this and that. And I would say like, you know, doing business and investing is completely two different ballgame.
Crystal:
Yeah. Some people hire, you know, professional investment professionals for them. Like, it’s funny ’cause I actually had my CFA I used to work in investment bank, but when it come down to your own money, you still think about it differently and you are so much more like risk averse, minus so many. So I felt like that is actually worth some time into it, but I just unfortunately, like underestimated how much time that it would take. So it took me a few months to kind of get my things together. And I was traveling, you know, I think in Europe, in France going to, you know, weddings, I think I was in New York San Francisco. I was in Vegas for the prosper show. So I did a lot of traveling then. But then around August I started to start, you know, preparing for my second brand. So this time around I did a little bit differently. So I, last time I completely bootstrapped it which means I used a hundred percent of my own saving. But this time I actually looked for investors. So I talk to VCs, like I talk to individual investors family and friends. So like, I actually, this time around, I’m using other people’s money to
Bradley Sutton:
Well, let me stop you there and ask you about that, because the first time that was, I mean, that you had a lot already a lot saved up. Now you had to exit. So you actually had, I would even imagine more cash. Why the decision to use OPM other people’s money instead of instead of your own, like the first time, you
Crystal:
Know, the thing is that I could, right, but then I was kind of more thinking about exploring different options, and then I was thinking, I wasn’t sure what kind of values investors might add, you know, kind of what kind of perspectives they might give it to me. And you know, like what, they take me to a different height. So that’s what I was thinking, kind of ’cause a lot of friends around me, I mean, to be honest, I’m a rarity. Like most people I know, they start business with VCs or like other investors. So that’s why I was thinking, okay, maybe I should also explore that as well. But I’m gonna tell you about conclusion after that. But that’s kind of what I was thinking in my head, so that’s why I kind of spent a month just talking to different investors and see what they think, et cetera.
Bradley Sutton:
How did you approach that? You know, like, are these people that were already in your network or did you go to some kind of like website where, where you can meet them or, or networking events? How did you meet these, these people? I
Crystal:
Think those are mostly kind of in my network or like, friends, friends or like, you know, people introduce me to people. I think that if I’m not mistaken, when it comes to investors, it’s much harder to cold call. So like, if you got referred by other people and then then they already kind of, you know, you have that weak link. It’s much better to get the bonding from them and, and to kind of build that trust. And also you can like gonna sit down and talk about it in person, you know, like maybe have a cup of coffee together. Like it’s all about trust, right? For these kind of relationships.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. So these were people, you know, outside, I’m assuming maybe outside of the Amazon world, mainly?
Crystal:
Yes. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
So I’m just curious, like what’s the impression of, of these, you know, these hardcore maybe investors Yeah. That had no experience on Amazon. You explain how Amazon works. Like, are they, like, what are you serious? Like, or did they pretty much, do they pretty much know the the game?
Crystal:
So I think and I felt like I wanted to get into it later, is that I never kind of positioned myself as a Amazon only business because I try to position myself as like, Hey, I wanted to do this brand and this is what I’m thinking about. And this is my direction, this is my track record. So I think if you were only talking about Amazon, then most investors these days think about aggregators and, you know, aggregators, you know,, let’s be honest. Like, you know, they don’t, a lot of them failed. So like, it kind of doesn’t give like Amazon, like a good rap on the street when it come down to investors. So like, I would just kind of tell them that, you know, this is my track record and yeah, this is what I wanted to do, you know, this is the gap in the market, et cetera. But,
Bradley Sutton:
And also, yeah, so I mean, it was, yeah. For somebody brand new, it might have been harder. First of all, they don’t have people in their network like that and then coming in with no tracker, but you, you can show them, Hey, you know, or first of all, you know me, you know, like, because these are people from your network. And second of all, Hey guys, here’s my resume of already exiting a and building a big business. So that definitely helped. I’m sure.
Crystal:
Yeah. I felt like it helped, but also in the meantime, like I felt like investors are naturally skeptical. So even if you have a track record, like they, they might be willing to take a call with you, but it doesn’t mean that they will give you the money, you know? So it’s like they always have this sort of KPIs where like they’re, oh, tell me about it while you hit this KPI or something like that. And my conclusion, by the way, even though I raised some money, but like, I kind of stopped at some point because my conclusion is that for a consumer goods business, if you do have a good product, you don’t need to raise a lot of investors money.. So I felt like investors put a lot of money into say something like a technology, because technology has a long process of RnD.
Crystal:
And that process needs a lot of funding because it’s gonna go through a period of time when that happens, there’s no return, you know, they don’t have any income or something like that. Versus for a consumer goods business the setup capital is much lower than a high tech company. And your product, if it does well, can fund your business going forward. So technically it’s kind of like a cash flow business. It doesn’t need like that millions of dollars to start off with in the first place, unless you are, you know, like I felt like in the, say 10 years ago when the D two C model was much more popular in investors’ world, where like they will spend a lot of money building like website, you know, putting in advertisements, money, like pr, you know, that kind of things where like they build a hype up. But that’s a different model, so that’s not Amazon, right? So and that’s kind of my conclusion after the whole, you know, experiencing fundraising.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So for your new Amazon business, did you end up choosing somebody and, and saying, Hey, let, let’s work on this together? Or did you end, at the end of the day, end up using your own money again?
Crystal:
Yeah, so I did use some of their I, I use other people’s money to build this business. But I also put my own money into it.
Bradley Sutton:
And when you approached them, like, did you already have like did you already have the product in mind and, and the, the brand in mind? Or were you just like, Hey, let’s build something together and let’s work on it together and decide what it is? How did that work?
Crystal:
It’s funny because I felt like you know, we’re talking about there’s different wrongs in this world, right? Like, we’re talking about this like very early angel wrong and you know, friends and family wrong, like just super early, right? So I felt like for that wrong, it, it’s really just like people’s faith in you. Because if you’re talking about like seed wrong or like series A you already have a product that you have some, like product market fit, it can show traction. It’s a completely different topic. ’cause People was, they started to see a track record of this business, like, you know, oh, this is a product, you know, this is how market reacts to it. But like, when I first started off, like had a rough idea of like what I wanted to do, and I have a rough idea of like what my product’s gonna look like, but I had nothing, you know, like I hadn’t really built it. And I was just like, okay guys, this is what I wanted to do. So that was a very different conversation. I felt like people kind of bad on me because like, they believe in me, and obviously I pivoted at the idea later. So, so yeah, it’s interesting, you know, like to go through the process.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Alright. So actually no, I didn’t, I didn’t remember this but I was looking at the notes that our podcast director Mhel prepared, and one thing you had mentioned in the last episode, or the last year’s episode was, was you were perhaps thinking if you were gonna start another Amazon brand, you wanted to do something that was either consumer goods or something that actually had dealt with like mental health. Did you end up going that direction or what?
Crystal:
Yeah, so it’s funny ’cause I actually looked hard along to the mental health business, and I try to like kind of merge these two together where like I have a consumer goods business in mental health. And I honestly, like, this is what I discovered, okay. Like, you can do a consumer goods business, like the old D2C model where you have this amazing product, this shark tank, you know, it’s on Kickstarter and you know, whatever, right? Like the, the way the blanket in like 2010, 10 years ago where like they raised like $5 million the first like, you know, when they first got money from Kickstarters. Or you can do Amazon business. And it’s really hard to kind of merge these two together because the, the way to think about like a ground big breaking product idea and kind of do a lot of RnD in it, that is like the Shopify business, right?
Crystal:
And kind of create that desire and demand in the market, or that you just follow the market demand what you see on Amazon and the way to think about these two and the abilities you use is also different. So for Amazon, it’s a lot more, you know, data analysis, like profit and loss analysis and like do some incremental innovation. But you go with the market demand and the other one is like you completely just created, right? Like, you are like, okay, like I want the market to have this product. It’s amazing. So I felt like in my mind at the time, like I wanted to do mental health, but the, the products that, you know, like the market demands in that, in the mental health space, in terms of physical products, it’s so limited. Like mental health is always like a service and is extremely customized to each, at every one of them I have looking to Amazon.
Crystal:
And there are some products, like for example focus on autism, right? A very niche market, but like, it’s a good, it’s a good market, but it’s very li very, very limited. So at the time, I was say, okay, like I needed to broaden my hypothesis if I wanted to play the Amazon game. So that’s why I started expanding to wellness and beauty. So like, not just mental health, but like more kind of wellness and alternative heating methods. But that’s like kind of a technology, device products, right? So I end up going that route. So I end up, you know, I did create something like that, but it was just not like, you know, strictly in mental health.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now again, last year, you know, the, the crazy stat from from your episode was that, you know, regardless of, you know, it was your money, but regardless of whose money it was, it was, you had invested a hundred thousand dollars, you know, into the company this year. Like you said, you got you know, some investors, but overall, regardless of whose money it was how much was your initial startup cost this time around? Was it also, did you also do a crazy six figure investment like that? Or did you start with less?
Crystal:
So the hundred thousand dollars investment I did at the time, that was the first year’s investment. So, which means those are the money I put in like over the time in the first year, right?
Bradley Sutton:
I thought it was like a hundred thousand before you even had one sale or something. I was about, that was why it was crazy to me,, I was like, what in the world? Yeah,
Crystal:
Okay. But, you know, I did put that a hundred thousand dollars aside, like, I protect it, you know? So I was like, okay, this is money for the business, right? Like, I’m not gonna, I’m gonna starve myself before I even use that money. So like, that’s kind of the spirit behind it. And this time around, it’s the same thing. I putting like, I would say a little bit less than that, but like so far, but still quite a bit, you know, into the business.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. So when did you actually launch the product? Like what month?
Crystal:
Yeah, so officially, it’s month launched this year in January. It started in January. It’s a bit of a tricky category because it’s like kind of linked to medical device. So I got a lot of like you know, the, the restricted product and it got taken down, got taken down again, you know, so, so a lot of that kind of delayed the product launch.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. But and then did you start with one SKU, or did you have a variety of ones that you started with?
Crystal:
Yeah, so I did start with like two, three SKUs. So like, I kind of just go hard on it for a little bit. Instead of last time where like, I think even last time I was going a bit aggressive too, compared to, you know, some other people. Like I probably start with one, but then I added two the month after. So so far, like I have had three, four SKUs.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And how has it has it done? I mean, obviously, like you said, you’ve run into some, some hiccups. Have those hiccups been resolved and Amazon is not restricting it anymore? And then do you have steady sales now? Yeah, I have any of the products failed already or have any of them taken off? What’s going on?
Crystal:
So I have I have I mean, I’ll say most of existing products, SKUs, they’re quite stable and they’re generating sales, but I constantly would have new SKUs that I wanna launch to be taken down. So like in this category, I think that’s just a constant struggle. And as far as I know, like, not just me, but like anybody in this kind of like medical ish wellness space you just need to be extremely careful of what you say, otherwise you need to have f d a approval, this and that.
Bradley Sutton:
What attracted you to, like, to make you pick this? Did you just see some, some, a lot of demand and, and the existing competition was you felt not strong and easily beatable, or is this something that you thought, you know, maybe the demand isn’t quite there, but you foresee the demand going up? Or what made you choose this?
Crystal:
Yeah, so I think my logic to play Amazon game is very similar. I think that Amazon is a very bottom of the funnel channel. So like, you know, think about Shopify or whatever, that’s like a top of the funnel channel where like people go there and it’s cold tropic, but like unless they know your brands and they go look for it. But like for Amazon, it’s the bottom of the funnel. So like you cannot be the market demand, in my opinion, right? Like, the easiest way to go with it is just to kind of flow with it. So I always take the approach where, like, I want to be in a market where there is demand and there’s less competition. So like, I think everybody does it slightly differently, but like, that’s just kind of my logic always. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. What has been your best month? So far of sales?
Crystal:
My month of sales has always been quite stable, like, around, you know, five figures. So that’s kind of, because I haven’t really launched more products. I think last product launch was February, March, so that has been like, kind of constant stable figure.
Bradley Sutton:
Is it profitable already or it’s still trying. Well that’s pretty good. That’s, that, that’s not something that always can be, can be achieved. All right. So what was your strategy for launching? Did you just use PPC or did you build up a, a social media? Did you send outside traffic run any Google ads or anything like that?
Crystal:
Yeah, so like, I’m planning on Google ads later on. So far for the products I launched, I actually just used via PPC. And then but I think I’m gonna probably start running Google Ads very soon in the future. I think it’s also because at the time my website, I just built it and like, I didn’t quite like it, so I didn’t want it to, I guess you can run Google ads to Amazon, but, you know, like I was like, okay I’m not sure if you know, this brands look legit, you know, with my website. Like, I didn’t really feel like it was up for it. So I didn’t really wanna go outside of Amazon, but I think over time I’ll start to run those outside traffic as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right, cool. What are some other strategies that, that you utilize ’cause it’s like, not everybody can, can be making over $10,000 a month right Off the, right off the bat, you know? ’cause That means it’s already Yeah. Instantly six figure, six figure business. So what helped you you know, in this very difficult niche to already start, you know, having that kind of volume?
Crystal:
I think first of all, like, I always tell people, and, and I would actually like to, you know, talk to you about, you know, some insights I’ve noticed in my recent trips in Vietnam and China, talking to Amazon sellers there. But I think, and this is what I tell them, by the way is that like your product in Amazon business in not, we’re not talking about the Shark Tank, whatever, like Shopify business in Amazon business products, 80%, and the rest is 20%. If you have a great product and the like, in terms of it meets the market demand, the rest of things are like not as good. It doesn’t matter. People also gonna buy a product. So the product comes first, and that is your quality of products that will be measured by the, you know, your rating, right? And so if you have these two things, then you’re pretty much winning most of the game. So that’s what I kind of do too. I will only place an order if I’m a hundred percent confident in the product, and that’s what I will say, like I do. And then the second thing is I try to build my credibility for these kind of niches. Yeah, it’s very important to have credibility. We’re
Bradley Sutton:
Gonna close the episode with just a bunch of strategies from you of what you’ve learned in these last couple things. But before we, we get to that, I actually, you know, I, I didn’t do this last year, but my big thing this year is, is talking to people about what they do for mental health. And you’re somebody who can appreciate that. So, you know, I tell people like, Hey it’s important to have hobbies. As an entrepreneur, it’s important to know when to take it easy and have an escape, you know, because sometimes, as you said, when you first started, you were just working, you know, 20 hours a day probably, and then that’s not good for your physical or mental health. So I’m wondering, you know, you know, my hobbies is travel and stuff, so yeah, I’m wondering what’s, what’s your hobbies as far as what you do to kind of relax, and then what are some routines that you have for either mental and or physical health?
Crystal:
Oh, gosh. I feel like there’s so many. So, like, another reason, by the way, I actually didn’t get to that. But you know, this year I have also spent a ton of time developing my own, like, personal self. So like the kind of time where, like I used to spend on my business now, I took a lot of them back just to kind of work on myself internally, and we can talk about this for like another, like two hours, but my philosophy is that at some point, like, you know, money, it’s important, but like, it’s not going to buy you everything. And then, like, you know, when I first started Amazon business, I saw the salsa was, oh yeah, it’s so great. But now I saw, you know, I see the cells, you know, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but I don’t want to get too carried away by the money because it’s, it doesn’t give me the same amount of joy as it used to anymore.
Crystal:
So like, I felt like you needed to look inside of you and be like, what makes me happy? And money isn’t the answer. It’s never will be. So, and there’s, nobody can give you the answer other than yourself. So I felt like that self-development is so important. So there’s a few things that I do. Like, first of all, I also write about, you know, topics on self-esteem for Asian, because I think that Asian as a, as a community, like we lack self-esteem because of the you know, everybody want us to be perfect. You know, let’s face it, growing up, you know, with Asian parents, they’re so strict at the education system and everything. So like it’s really hard for your mental health. You never feel like you’re good enough. So I write about these topics in a way, it’s also like self meditation for myself, where like, I reflect on the topic and it’s just so healing.
Crystal:
So that’s one thing. Like I talk about those things, you know, on TikTok and, you know, stuff like that, like on LinkedIn, write all those things. So that’s kind of my hobby. But also, you know you know, I meditate almost every day. Like, I have done hundreds of meditation sessions for the last two to three years. And I also read a lot of books you know, spiritual books, you know, ranging from Buddhism to you know, to, to mindfulness to like some kind of medical books in the medical area. And I, you know, I have my own like, you know, like obviously I have my own therapist, but I don’t just use one therapist. So like, for example, I also going to like, use energy healers, I go use a medium. So like, I go to that route? Yeah, yeah. To, to kind of make myself understand, you know, like the, the things in the spiritual world, because there’s things in the material world that we talk about. But in the spiritual world, there is such a rich world.
Bradley Sutton:
Sounds like you need a coffin shelf. I think, you might be the target market for for my spooky stuff here,
Crystal:
Oh my God. I was just talking to my quality inspector the other day in China, and they told me me that the most spooky inspection they ever done was like a two coffin, actual coffin company, and they need to inspect the coffins, and it was so great.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, so they have to lie inside of it.
Crystal:
Yeah, they need to lie inside of it.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh my goodness. Nah, nah, I’d be like, nah, I’m good. All right. Yeah, this passes, this passes. Okay. So, so that’s some good, you know mental health and physical health you know, routines. But what about, what about some specific, let’s go going back to Amazon. Yeah. strategy or marketing, like, you know, specific PPPC strategy, specific keyword research you were doing? Listing optimization. I actually leveraging ai. Like whatever yeah, yeah. What can you tell us?
Crystal:
I will go back to a few sourcing tips.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Crystal:
I like that. ’cause You know, first of
Bradley Sutton:
All, you’re definitely an expert on that.
Crystal:
First of all, I’m Chinese, right? I was born and raised in China, spent like 20 years there. So I know China like quite well. And so, so I felt like that I can give some advice on. And secondly, like, I felt like a lot of people you know, like, let me put it in this way, a few days ago, like I was talking to Amazon itself, and they said that they couldn’t find good sourcing service providers. And now if you do sourcing, like you probably need to listen to this because they need it. But anyway, so sourcing, I felt like it’s an area where like a lot of people struggle with themselves, especially if you’re individual sellers. So from China, like the first thing I wanna say, and I think that Kevin King probably said it in one of his courses with you as well, but said that you know, in China there’s different areas for sourcing different things.
Crystal:
Yeah. So if you want to like source for like wood you might need to look in one area. If you want to like source for textile, you need to look for another area. And if you want to source for electronics, some other area, so that’s a hundred percent true. And sometimes, a lot of times those materials and those products are like actually concentrated in one city. So that means if you source anywhere outside of that specific city, you are actually getting worse material, worse product, and and worse price. So like when you look for factories, like always try to, you know, like see where they’re located and see like whether they are in, you know, the the area that these products have, you know, like are concentrated in. So that’s number one. And number two is that be careful when you use sourcing agencies, because before, like I actually used one myself, like now I do it all my sourcing myself.
Crystal:
If I need help from another sourcing person. I used somebody I could trust, but sourcing agencies always be careful when they’re in China, because you needed to, first of all, sometimes they get kickbacks from the factories, so maybe they, they were like, okay, I’m gonna do a sourcing, this is a price, but they, and this is a money I charge you, but they also keep some money for themselves from the factory. So to be extremely careful of that. And then one way to get around it is that like, I would just have them to gimme a list of factories, right? If I were to be the person who use associate agency and be like, I’m going to reach out to them myself, right? Like, don’t reach out to them like, your work is down here, or something like that.
Crystal:
Or do like, project with them the end there. Or I will also go reach out to a few more factories besides the one they suggest me just to compare the price and terms and stuff like that to see if there’s no, like, no abnormalities there. And then you also need to always order maybe like few samples from the sourcing agency, but also some factory you choose. Because in the past when I used the sourcing agency every single time, the factory the sample, they give it to me. It’s always worse., the samples I found myself from other factories for some reason, you know, so quality is right. That’s why the price is cheaper. And perhaps they also, you know, you know, have a kickback themselves, right? So that’s something I wanted to, to say. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. That’s, that’s good. I think that’s important to, to understand about that. What about on the negotiation side? Obviously, you know, not everybody is a native Chinese speaker and obvi, you know, you would have advantage over me, for example, or my daughter can speak Chinese, so I can probably get her a little bit, but for the average person from Europe or North America, yeah. You know, what are some tips on the negotiation? You know how can we get the best the best deal out there?
Crystal:
Best deal out there, man. I think it really depends on who you’re talking to. So it is funny because like some of the companies, they have like almost two divisions. So they have a international division and they have a local division. And if you are like a foreigner, a westerner, they give you a white person price. And if you are a Chinese, you talk to the main Mandarin, they give you a Chinese person price and the Chinese person price will be cheaper than, you know, the Westerner price. And this is validated, like, I know this because they told me. So I felt like, you know, it’s obviously better to have somebody negotiate on your behalf who’s Chinese, right? If you trust ’em, right? Because, you know, just based on what I just told you about the sourcing agency thing.
Crystal:
But also another thing is from my own personal experience, there’s, there’s certain times there’s benefits to use a trading company. Like people always say that, oh my gosh, I don’t use a trading company. Like, I don’t understand why, because trading company can give you such a good service that if you just negotiate directly with a factory, they’re never gonna give it to you because of, you know, like something that I mentioned before, like how, you know, they don’t see the you as like the Chinese person price or something like that. But the trading policy sometimes can negotiate on your behalf a better, much better payment terms that you can, you know, like, so for example, if you were to only negotiate on your, you know, with a factory yourself, you can probably get like a best case scenario like what, like 20-80 or something that you need to pay like a hundred percent before, you know, they ship out your products. But if you go with a trading company, sometimes they can give you a better payment terms, which extends beyond, you know, after you have shipped out the products and maybe like 30 days, 60 days, something like that. Because they have, you know, perhaps other clients that they don’t present as well, so they can negotiate together. And they also have that existing relationship with the factory that you don’t have.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Alright. So, so speaking of sourcing in China, again, I meticulously follow you your Instagram because I love living vicariously through others travels as well when I can’t travel. And unfortunately I haven’t been able to get back to China. And I know I saw you a couple of times, it seemed, went back to China, I’m assuming maybe checking with, you know, your sourcing or, or your factories. But tell me about your, your trip to China. Like, what did you learn? Because I think even for you, that was the first time you’ve been back in China for a long time, since the, before the pandemic, right?
Crystal:
Right. So I think yeah, I have, you know, it’s really o eye-opening experience recently traveling in different countries in Asia, China included. I also went to Vietnam, Amazon inviting me over as a speaker in, you know, I think like a huge big Amazon event in Vietnam where they recruit sellers from. And also got to speak on behalf of Amazon, China in Shanghai to the business there. So I, I gotta see, you know, a lot of different businesses e-commerce businesses and consumer goods businesses in China and Vietnam, and it’s such an like an eye-opening experience. And I felt like it’s two different worlds, right? Like China and the US. So first of all, China’s going through a transition. So first, you know, a lot of people are thinking, you know, like making China cheap stuff. Like they have made a lot of money on Amazon the past 10, 15 years because they are the supplier of the products, right?
Crystal:
So think about Amazon in 2012. You know, if you can sell a piece of cloth or like a mop or something, you make a load of money, right? Because they need those products, they had no products, and then the Chinese people make those products, right? So if they knew the opportunity on Amazon, they will make a lot of money. So that’s how they did it in the past 10, 20 years. But now they are forced to transition because they no longer well have the product advantage going forward because a lot of, first of all, a lot of manufacturings are transitioning into places like Vietnam, Mexico, et cetera. So things are going to be no longer made in China. In fact, I think yesterday India is going to be the first country outside of China to make iPhone. So secondly that Chinese economy currently is going, you know, pretty bad there might be a deflation risk in China.
Crystal:
So the businesses in China are also getting, they’re getting less orders from foreign companies. Their domestic economy is not doing it as well. They’re trying to find ways to expand their overseas businesses because it’s not as competitive as domestically. And now how can they compete? They need to look for ways to build proper brands. So China now is in Japan in the 1980s where it was transitioning from made in Japan, cheap stuff to made in Japan brands. So, so they’re going through that transition as well. I believe that in the future the competition you see from China is not going to be those like, you know, like, okay, like let’s go on a price for kind of competition. It’s going to be a stronger competition, and they’re also going to be building, you know, like western oriented brands. So that’s my observation there on my trips.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright. Interesting. Now, just in general, you know, you were crushing it on Amazon, you know, 2021, first part of 2022. Now we’re, you know, middle second half of 2023. What’s your, what’s your outlook? You know, ’cause it’s, I’m sure you’ve seen it’s not a hundred percent the same game as it was even just two years ago. So, so what, what’s been, you know, some of the biggest differences that you’ve seen and do you have any outlook on how it’s gonna be maybe next year?
Crystal:
Yeah, so I think because I have built a brand, you know, I started build one in 2020 and I built, started build another one in 2022. I have seen a lot of differences in comparison. So first of all, like Amazon in 2023, there’s so much more competition and I think everybody knows that. Because, you know, D2C brands are getting to Amazon retail brands are getting to Amazon, Amazon originated brands are getting outside investors. So, which means they are stronger themselves. Individual brands are got bought out by aggregators, which means they’re getting institutionalized. So, so the competition is in a complete different level. Like, let me put it this way, in 2020 for example what a plus came out. You know, there’s what, like less than 50% of people in my category are using a plus. Now everybody is using A+.
Crystal:
Like, that is a basic requirement, right? Almost to people. So, so it’s definitely getting very competitive. So I think it’s very important that you have a reason behind beyond making money to get into the game. So first of all, you need to have a, like either a good product, which means, you know, like a distinctive advantage in your product, like a patent, you know, or something that’s a differentiator that is harder to copy or, you know, in a good category. And either that or you are well founded. So you are able to do, you know, more on marketing more in product developments. And also you can’t just rely on Amazon as one channel. You need to go all channels. And I, I felt like I have heard this, you know, from other people too, but I think in 2023 it becomes a lot more important than before just because of the sheer amount of competition.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Alright, well you know, you, you know the drill since this is your second time around, what’s we, we always close with a 30-second tip, but before we get to there, how can people find you on the interwebs? Maybe they follow, follow your story a little bit, maybe reach out to you in the future?
Crystal:
Yeah, so I’m actually you know, if you are interested in for example, offer unique services that you think is suitable for Asian sellers, just because, you know, I do have a network here you know, in Singapore and in China and, you know, just because of what I mentioned before, where like they are trying to, you know, build, you know, actually Western brands. So if you do offer unique services in those areas you know, I am looking for good partners, service providers to work together. And if you have unique product ideas or you want to work together in any kind of capacity, you can always reach out to me on Instagram, my name is it is the, the handle is literally Crystal Ren but it is xtalren, so X T A L R E N, that’s my Instagram handle. You can DM me anytime if you wanted to contact me for anything.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Alright. What’s your 30-second tip of the date?
Crystal:
So one tip I learned to increase your productivity by the way is to color different activities you do. So put everything together on your calendar. Like, if you go take a shower, you put it on your calendar. If you go to do some paperwork, you go put it on your calendar, but you want to categorize them differently. So, for example, I categorize them based on, you know, deep work, shallow work. So deep work could be something like a drafting agreement, right? With a supplier. And that would probably take like two to three hours of uninterrupted time. And shallow work would be something like I don’t know, like you know, putting together expense report, you know, so that’s some kind of administrative work that you need to do. And you know, there’s other things, for example, like personal time you know, a shower.
Crystal:
So you mark them differently to make sure that you have enough of deep work time a week so that you know how much, how many hours you spend on deep work, how many hours do you spend on shallow work, which is something that you wanna shrink as much as possible and how, how many hours do you spend on personal time, which maybe perhaps that’s something that you wanna protect right? And you also want to make sure that you have a balanced life so you’re not overworking. So by coloring them into different categories, you can see that visually whether you’re being productive and whether you are having like a balanced week. And that’s what I’ve been doing for now, like six, seven months now.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. I like it. I like it. So you gave us two 30-second tips. We’re at the beginning, one at the end. I like it. All right, well let you know, you’ve done a lot in the last few years and, you know, we’ll definitely have you back next year and who knows what you’re gonna be able to tell us. Maybe you’ve already exited this new medical brand then, or maybe you’ve, you’ve grown it to seven figures. I’m very excited to see what the future holds. Look forward to seeing you hopefully at at, at an event and wish you the best of success in your endeavors.
Crystal:
Thank you so much, Bradley.
It’s time for this week’s breaking news in Amazon, Walmart, and Ecommerce! Starting with the FTC vs Amazon lawsuit, Walmart+ benefits for members, AI-powered Alexa, and more!
In this episode, Vincenzo Toscano shares his inspiring journey, from being a literal rocket scientist to a successful Amazon seller and agency owner. Diving into the nitty-gritty, he discusses upcoming case studies with Helium 10 and explores the strongest Amazon marketplaces. Gain valuable insights as he unravels the differences between managing accounts in the US and EU, divulges his Amazon launch strategies, and reveals how to stay relevant on the platform. Listen in for Vincenzo’s top listing optimization tactics, utilizing Amazon’s Search Query Performance, effective product research methods, selling tips for Walmart, and a collection of both horror and success stories from his clients. Don’t miss this episode!
In episode 477 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Vincenzo discuss:
- 02:02 – Vincenzo’s Backstory
- 03:41 – Today’s Guest Is A Literal Rocket Scientist
- 05:11 – Selling On Amazon And Managing His Agency
- 06:47 – Talking About His Upcoming Case Studies With Helium 10
- 07:44 – What Are The Strongest Amazon Marketplaces?
- 08:43 – Differences In Managing An Amazon Account In US & EU
- 10:59 – Sharing Vincenzo’s Amazon Launch Strategies
- 15:06 – How To Know What Amazon Thinks Is Relevant For An ASIN
- 19:33 – Vincenzo’s Top Amazon Listing Optimization Strategies
- 21:48 – Utilizing Search Query Performance
- 23:56 – Vincenzo’s Product Research Methods
- 26:14 – Selling On Walmart Tips
- 31:19 – Horror Stories And Success Stories From Vincenzo’s Clients
- 33:50 – Find Ecomcy At The Seller Solutions Hub
- 34:31 – How To Contact Vincenzo Toscano
- 35:12 – Vincenzo’s 60-Second Tip
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a great story from somebody who went from being a rocket scientist to now running a large Amazon agency and running a lot of his own brands, and he’s gonna give us all of the latest strategies as far as PPC, Amazon Launch, and even Walmart. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Wanna keep up to date with trending topics in the e-commerce world? Make sure to subscribe to our blog. We regularly release articles that talk about things such as shipping and logistics, e-commerce, and other countries, the latest changes to Amazon Seller Central, how to get set up on new platforms like Newegg, how to write and publish a book on Amazon KDP, and much, much more. Check these articles out at h10.me/blog. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got somebody here who’s been helping serious sellers out there for years. Vincenzo. How’s my italian accent?
Vincenzo:
Thank you Bradley. How you doing?
Bradley Sutton:
How’s it going? You are actually in the UK right now?
Vincenzo:
Yes, I live in the UK in London, but I’m from Italy, as you can say, from my name.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes. Yes. I think I told you this before, but my favorite or one of my favorites, you know Korean dramas. I watch tons of Korean dramas. Like I probably watch a hundred in the last few years, but one of the top five is one from Netflix and it’s called Vincenzo.
Vincenzo:
I know
Bradley Sutton:
About a Korean guy who was born in Italy.
Vincenzo:
Yeah, actually I got a team in Asia, and, and they told me, they always tell me, oh, this is happening right now in the, in the series and all that. And it’s like, it’s crazy that there’s this guy that’s very famous called Vincenzo, but yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Yep. Yep. But so you were born in Italy, in Naples, you had said?
Vincenzo:
Yes, I was born in Italy in Naples. When I was around three, my family moved for business purposes in Venezuela, South America. That’s why I just speak Spanish.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s why you speak Spanish, because I know you’ve come on a Spanish podcast before. Okay. Now things are coming into a picture here.
Vincenzo:
Yeah. I went to Venezuela, lived there 15 years, and then unfortunately with everything that happened with the country, I left the country. And from there I went to the US. I lived close to one year in New York. Then from New York. I went to Toronto another year or so. And then from there I, I chose the UK to pursue like my undergrad degree and my master’s, which is completely different for what I do, which is Whoa, whoa.
Bradley Sutton:
What did you what were you studying?
Vincenzo:
So, I studied aerospace engineering and I specialize in everything in terms of control systems and computer science behind turbines.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So then did you ever work in that after you got your degrees?
Vincenzo:
Yeah, so actually I, I used to work for Roll Royce. You know, roll Royce is very well known for cars, but actually their biggest one of the biggest revenue streams is making turbines for airplanes. And they had a, a manufacture ca facility here in Darby, which Darby the easiest way to find Darby in the uk. If you put a finger in the middle of the UK, that Zaby is the most centric city in the whole uk. And I was working there, I worked there for two years. Yeah,
Bradley Sutton:
That’s kind of like being a rocket scientist in turbine there.
Vincenzo:
Yeah. Okay. We could say that. Yeah.. So then,
Bradley Sutton:
You know, I’m sure that’s a good paying job. Yeah. What then inspired? Like, were, did you start doing stuff on the side while you were working there, like getting into e-commerce, or, or how did this this happen?
Vincenzo:
Yeah, so the thing is, I love engineering. I love everything when it comes to space, all that kind of stuff. But the thing is, because I come from a family that is very business oriented it reached a point that, you know, it was getting that I wanted more freedom in terms of location, in terms of time in terms of how much money I could do. And I remember looking online, that was around, around 2017 or so, you know, ways of doing money online. And that’s how I came into contact with Amazon. And then from there, I started using my part of my salary as an engineer mm-hmm. <Affirmative> to basically just try things on Amazon, sell products and so on. And from there I started selling multiple products. I, I did brands and everything and that.
Bradley Sutton:
Which marketplace did you open up in?
Vincenzo:
So I started first in the uk, the next one into Europe, and then also us. Yeah. Yeah. What, what was
Bradley Sutton:
The first product you sold?
Vincenzo:
So the first product, which then it was became very saturated. It was, you know, these elastic bands to do like exercise. Oh yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Uhhuh <affirmative>
Vincenzo:
Yeah, super saturated. And I will never advise <laugh> anybody here in this podcast to do the product. But, you know that time it wasn’t that saturated. That’s was one of the first products. And from there, you know I started selling products and eventually I was making more money by selling the, actually my engineering job. And from there, you know, that was also the period when all these Amazon events conferences were becoming a thing in, in Europe and the USA, so
Bradley Sutton:
What year are we talking about right now when you’re selling? So we’re
Vincenzo:
Talking 2018, around that 2018.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Vincenzo:
Cool. And then from there, I started going to events or so, and then I realized, you know, actually I could also make money basically supporting brands and also business owners, because I realized there were a, a lot of people going to these conferences. They had an amazing product, amazing brand, which is difficult to do. They did the most difficult part, but they did not really know how to operate. Right. And, and from my experience of being a seller, then I say, oh, actually there’s a another opportunity here. And that’s how I also found that a comse where we’re basically a full Amazon and now actually also Walmart, a full brand management agency. So yeah, it’s been a journey <laugh>.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, have you all throughout this time, did you keep your own private label accounts going and still selling yourself, or you just switched a hundred percent to just doing the agency?
Vincenzo:
Yes. I keep selling, actually. I also doing a little bit of the wholesale approach as well, working with some direct manufacturers. And something I also very excited about which I’m, I’m on the work of doing, I also gonna explore the vendor work, so I’m working with some partners to also do the vendor program, like with some brands we’re working, bringing from overseas. So yeah, I’m still a seller, but I will say where I’m spending most of the time, to be honest, is with agency. We’ve been growing quite fast last couple of months, and now I’m more focused on building the teams, all the processes, and making sure we’re basically giving the best service and resource to our clients that trust us, you know? Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, from when you started on Amazon, you know, 2017, 2018, around there, did you start using Helium 10 from day one, or, or you started later in your career?
Vincenzo:
So I remember when I started, my first actually tool was viral launch from my close friend Casey Gauss. Yeah, Viral Launch started with that. And then I remember after, you know, listening many goats with AM/PM Podcast. Which was basically the biggest podcast at the time. And still right now, one of the biggest. Manny Announced that, you know, the, he was bringing Helium 10 and start playing with it. And to be honest, since then, I switched completely to Helium 10. And that’s the tool I use for all my businesses and also for our clients. And, and in fact, we’re actually working with Helium 10 to do some interesting case studies looking forward to that. But yes, we’ve been using Helium 10 for everything from every second.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Cool. Cool. Now in your experience selling where, what marketplaces have been the s strong, you know, you, you obviously started in the UK, but what marketplace would you say is strongest for you now?
Vincenzo:
So I would say the strongest are for sure the US and the uk. Those are the strongest. And I think if you talk to a lot of sellers, that’s u usually the norm because, you know, those are some of the biggest markets. Germany is also an interesting one. I’ve been seen traction, but honestly the US and UK are the, are are the ones we’ve seen the most activity, and also with some of our clients the same.
Bradley Sutton:
H how do some of your strategies differ? Because, you know I mean fortunately for people selling USA unfortunately for those in Europe, there’s a lot of features like in Seller Central, you know, that, that US has available, but that either Europe doesn’t have, you know, like I don’t think Europe has virtual bundles, right? That’s right.
Vincenzo:
Yeah. Yeah. So like the things though.
Bradley Sutton:
What are some of the big, the, the biggest differences you say because of things like that where your operations, you know, whether it’s your account or your client’s account where it, there, there’s some huge differences in how you operate an Amazon U s A account versus an Amazon Europe account.
Vincenzo:
Yeah, so I would say one of the, the, the big benefits of operating in the US and also in in Europe is that a lot of the strategies that right now we’re implementing, let’s say in the us, they haven’t arrived yet in terms of either in the form of knowledge to content or in the form of actually, you know tools through the Amazon platform itself. So the nice thing is that when things are happening in the us usually Europe is six months to one year behind in some of these things. And we can prepare our clients for that and make sure that as soon as they become available in Europe, we’re the first one to, to take advantage of some of those tools. So I think in terms of strategies, of course the US is a, is another animal altogether.
Vincenzo:
I mean, the US is much more a professional marketplace in terms of the players that actually selling there is much more complex. We see all these huge in, in influx of money that came during the basically aggregator space. And we have all these big companies with hundreds of employees, basically 24/7 when it comes to Amazon. And the US is, is definitely a very tough market would say right now to, to start selling from zero. Where in the Europe, that’s not the case. Actually, in Europe, we’re seeing much easier for some of our clients to penetrate certain niches than the US And that’s actually been a key for a lot of our clients and the way we actually structure the strategy, because what we’re doing with a lot of our clients is the ones that are struggling to the us, we’ve been bringing them to Europe, and we actually opened all the Pan-European program and so on. And with that approach of diversification and actually finding these on top areas, they’ve been seeing a better resource that actually only focusing in the US. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Okay. Now you know, one of the, I was just looking at, at your listing on the hub.helium10.com, you know, that’s, that’s where we have like agencies and, and people who are part of our network and, and you guys are actually one of the very few Helium 10 certified agencies in the world. That’s right. I was, I was looking at your, your, your page on there and it says, you know, one of your specialties is Amazon launch. That’s right. So what are some of your, you know, launch strategy are, are you pretty much using PPC for launch? Are you relying on outside traffic? What’s, you know, I, we, we could spend a whole episode talking about this, but what are some of the, the highlights of your launch strategy?
Vincenzo:
Yeah. Something that’s been working very well for us is using brand analytics data to basically understand which are the main cues we need to focus towards launching. I’m gonna give you a very simple example for this. So the issue when it comes to launchings, that people sometimes thinks it’s all about generating sales at all costs and negative for X amount of time until you get potentially rank organically on certain keywords. But we have identified that lately Amazon has been very heavily focused when it comes to ranking in conversion rate, right? So what we’ve been doing when it comes to launch is that, first of all, we need to of course identify the top 10 keywords that bring the most revenue to our competitors. And you can easily do that with Helium 10 by doing a reverse ASIN with Cerebro.
Vincenzo:
We find which are the key, where these competitors are ranking on page one, because we know that 70 to 80% of revenue comes from those keywords. Once we identify those 10 keywords, we then also by using a brand analytics, we wanna identify what is the average for example, conversion rate of our competitors on some of these keywords. And once we understand the conversion rate, that’s when we start strategizing the, the launch phase. Because something that we usually do when it comes to PPC, and then I’m gonna come back, why the conversion rate is very important, is that we only start with exact match campaigns and we only start with the top 10 keywords. The reason for that is because when it comes to launch, and I see this a lot of people when it comes to content and events, and a lot of people are actually migrating towards this strategy is the idea of actually launching phrase broad automatic and all these broad campaigns from day on is actually not efficient.
Vincenzo:
Because first of all, when you’re launching a product for the first time Amazon has no data at all or doesn’t have any real relevancy history attached between certain keywords of the category and your product and what happens. And in fact, you can do this test by going to Amazon when you launch a new listing, if you go and create, for example, a campaign on, on for phrase a, abroad a and look for even suggested keywords, you’re gonna see the tab is empty. Right? The reason why Amazon cannot even suggest a cure in the first place because it has no history. So why would you give free basically a window to Amazon to spend your money around? By
Bradley Sutton:
The way, do you know how to do that? How to check that in Helium 10?
Vincenzo:
In what sense? The keywords?
Bradley Sutton:
No, the what a, the Amazon thinks is relevant to your listing for advertising. I’m gonna drop a knowledge bomb on those. It’ll give you a chance first. Drop
Vincenzo:
It. Alright, so
Bradley Sutton:
You put your, you put your ACE in once it’s done, once you have it active you, or even if it’s not active, you can do this. You throw it into cerebral and most people, you know, 99% of people who use Cerebro That’s right. They’re doing it in order to just see, hey, like, I just wanna see where it’s ranking organically or sponsor whatever. That there’s nothing that’s a hundred percent right. You know, that that’s what you should be doing. But fil when you have a brand new listing, it’s not gonna show anything for organic and sponsored. That’s right. ’cause It’s just new. So you filter it for Amazon recommended, and then sort it by the rank Amazon recommended rank, and the one that’s number one, we’re actually pulling that from the Amazon API. In the advertising API of what score it gives that keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
So then if you have trouble like, like getting impressions, it’s like, like you just said, it’s probably because Amazon doesn’t think you’re relevant. And so if you wanna know what Amazon thinks of your new listing put into Cerebro, we’re pulling from that Amazon advertising a p i, and then you could see look for rank 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, because that those are the highest keywords. And I, I did that I was launching this you know, one, one of these socks as one of these tests, and it’s about bringing me like coffee, right? And so because it’s a sock, like I couldn’t get anything for like coffee keywords in advertising, even though it was a, I mean, a hundred percent like the number one keyword for this is bring me coffee socks or something. So I threw it into Cerebro and I was like, there was nothing about coffee. It was just all like, just regular socks or men’s socks and so that’s how you can tell what Amazon thinks is relevant. Alright, go ahead.
Vincenzo:
It’s very interesting. And actually to also add on top of that tip, we also need to ensure, of course, to that work efficiently to make sure you have a very, very well optimized listing. Because if you didn’t do a very well optimization in terms of the keywords you put on the listing, or even choose the right sub category, which is a huge mistake we see all the time, then you could, Amazon will collect your, recommend the wrong keywords because you don’t have their right to categories or the right keywords in the list in the first place. But now going back to the PPC, yes. We do only m match a campaign keywords because we wanna make sure we force basically the system to build the relevancy between which are your top keywords and, and to Amazon. So Amazon understand and create that history link. And while we’re doing these very aggressive Excel match campaigns, we keep a very close eye on the conversion rate.
Bradley Sutton:
When you say very aggressive, like what is that like? Are you trying to make a bid that’s gonna get you only a top of search? Okay, cool. x
Vincenzo:
Yeah. And while we do as well to basically in our conversion rate, we cover a very aggressive coupon. So we do like a 30, 40% coupon because we need to understand that when the listeners see new and you have no reviews, you basically need to find a way to make it a no-brainer, a deal that somebody will say, okay, this product has, one doesn’t reviews, this one has zero, but what do I prefer to spend $50 or spend $20 on something very similar? Right? So that’s the thought process you need to do as a brand owner. And that’s what we do. And by making a very aggressive price reduction, then we keep very close AI owner conversion because then by using brand analytics, and we do this on a weekly basis, we wanna make sure that our conversion rate on a specific keyword is very similar to what the top sellers are doing those keywords, because that’s how Amazon understand, okay, these products actually a catching up or having similar performance at the top sellers and actually deserve a spot on the first page.
Vincenzo:
This is very important. And the reason why I keep emphasizing this is because I see a lot of people only focusing on sales and sales at all costs, but what’s the point of having all the cells that you want by being on the negative X amount of thousands of dollars? If your conversion rate is very bad, then you build a very bad history for your product, and it’s gonna be very difficult for you to then build that organic ranking back again. So that’s the per first part of the launching. The second thing that we do is we bring some kind of external traffic into the formula, right? So the way we do this is first a factor we we’ve been playing around is with influencer marketing. So usually we try to build like a group of five to 10 influencers that very basically have a very warm audience around that specific product.
Vincenzo:
And we try to come into some kind of agreement when it comes to bringing the extra traffic, especially if we have the brand referral bonus, because with the brand river referral bonds, we get up to 10%, which most of these influencers, if you use only the Amazon influencer product, they get two, 3% at max, and you can do a very nice setup where they make more money, and at the same time they rewire you with that external traffic. And by having a very warm audience, which by the way, what we do in between to filter the traffic we do a landing page, is to make sure that the traffic that comes from external converts very haly. And again, we spike that conversion rate. And Amazon also sees that as a way to rank your product higher. So by combining very aggressive PPC on very relevant queues, making sure you’re converting very high on those queues by being very aggressive with pricing, then con using external traffic, which is external traffic. I gave the example of influencer, but you can also do an email list, you can do even a Google advertisement. There are so many other ways, it depends on your niche, of course. I think those are usually the two approaches most people should be doing nowadays to rank your product higher organically as soon as possible. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, you know, you talk a lot about conversion rate you know, during launch and after. And obviously the one that, you know, spikes in the first part is, is just having that super low price. You know, where makes a no brainer, but then obviously, you know, you could have that low price and if you have a garbage listing, your conversion rate’s gonna be low, and at the same time you raise the price to regular, you know, potentially your conversion rate could go down. So like what kind of listing optimization things are you doing to try and make sure that your conversion rate always stays pretty high, even at a regular price?
Vincenzo:
Yeah, something that we do a lot is we use the tool within Amazon to do split testing, and we play a lot mainly with the, with the main image. That’s the thing that we seen spike in the most, the conversion rate. And thankfully with AI, it is very easy now to come up with new images in a matter of seconds, right? Just by having the right prompts and using many tools out there. So what we do is basically we always keeps during the launch phase when it comes to let’s say we have a very aggressive pricing, and then slowly we are gonna start increasing the price because of course we wanna start getting the profitability, we start doing a little split testing with the main image and the title, which are usually the things that we see affecting the most, at least the initial results page, which is what people see the most.
Vincenzo:
And we do, usually the split testing could last usually between a window of one week to two weeks, periods. And we test different angles, different shadowing, size of the pro main image with the packaging, sometimes even the, the the, the contrast of the colors. And these are things that we keep testing on a week or two weeks period to see if the conversion rate spikes or doesn’t spike. And then that’s how we keep doing split testing. Then after we actually have found the best like image, because it reaches a point after doing a lot of split testing that you’re not gonna have a lot of fluctuation on your results, then you start testing other things such as the title, then you can even do split testing within the listing itself, and always keep an eye that your conversion rate is close to the standard of what your competitors are doing. Because if you keep their conversion rate within those standards, your organic ranking is gonna stay stable right. Than what most people have seen, which is they go to first page because they do all these hundreds of sales to maybe rebates, which is not allowed or external traffic and so on. But once they stick on first page, they don’t stick the landing because of what they don’t have the conversion rate, which is very important. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
So to look at your competitor’s conversion, are you talking about like at the keyword level? So then are you looking at search query performance? So look at your competitors conversion rate. Okay.
Vincenzo:
That’s right.
Bradley Sutton:
How else are you using search query performance? You’ve mentioned a couple times, you know, now. Is there any other ways that you’re, it’s in your, your kind of SOP to manage the effectiveness of a listing?
Vincenzo:
Sure. Another thing that we have a close eye is the basket analysis. So we usually like to understand if people after buying a certain product are buying other accessories or things like that, because then if we identify a strong pattern when it comes to the basket analysis, what we can do with that is basically we can say, okay, these certain competitors keep getting a, a purchase in the same transaction. Let’s actually do some pro targeting, heavy pro targeting on this product because there’s definitely a link there and we can leverage that. And usually if you identify the right you know, matching between data, we have found a good use of that data. Another thing that you can use brand analytics tool is to also understand how your conversion rate throughout the, the funnel improves right from the impression to the actual add to card to the actual purchase.
Vincenzo:
So if usually throughout the whole channel you see that you’re having some kind of downwards in terms of conversion, like people add to card, but then for some reason then they’re not making a purchase, that’s usually a red flag because if they went all all the way to the funnel and then they’re actually converting approaches, it could be an issue of pricing usually. So then we start playing with pricing. But if the opposite happens, like throughout the whole funnel, impressions are relatively low, then actually from those impression, they conversion become higher in terms of add to cart. And from the add to cart, the purchase conversions much higher. That means the issues that we’re not pumping enough traffic into this listing in the first place. So that’s when we decide actually we need to put more money and scale our advertisement. So that’s usually some of the sort of process we do with brand analytics. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, for your own brands or for your customers brands who come to you and say, Hey, we’d like to, you know, launch some new products. How are you doing, you know, what are some of your product research methods? Like how are you finding, you know, product line extensions or new opportunities whether it’s a brand new brand or, or, or looking at a brand where, hey, you know, we want to add a couple of SKEWs. What are some of your methods for finding opportunity?
Vincenzo:
Yeah, so one of the things well, Helium 10 of course, we using Black Box for that. So you can find amazing ideas there when it comes to accessories throughout the whole catalog tool that Black Box gives you in terms of funding competitors, so accessories and things like that. That’s one way of doing it. The second way that we do it is basically by using brand analytics. Just to make a quick point on this again, which is using the, the basket analysis and see if there’s some kind of accessory that people keep buying with your product. Like let’s say you’re selling vitamin, vitamin C and then you see every single person that buy vitamin C buys magnesium. This a correlation there, so maybe you’re missing magnesium, your supplement lineup, let’s try a magnesium. And then when we launch magnesium, we use, for example, sponsor display, a type of target advertisement, and we retarget vitamin sync clients because we have seen from data that people that buy vitamin C realistically could buy also magnesium.
Vincenzo:
So that’s usually a top process that we can also do. Then the third thing that we can use, we actually will be doing that a lot, and I’m gonna be speaking on a conference next week about this, is using AI. AI has been amazing for this because usually what we can do with AI as well is for example, one simple way of doing this, you can now with AI analyze the reviews of a specific niche, and you can tell, let’s say this AI, tell me what the top things people love about this niche, things that people hate about this niche, a specific product and things that people potentially would like to see on a product. Then with those ideas, you could try to come up with a new variation and maybe a new functionality, a new feature that is lacking on the market. And that’s usually been working very well because then once you have some ideas drafted that AI throws at you, then you could even keep using AI to give you ideas in terms of how you can even start the manufacturing process, the launch process, how you could do the branding. AI is been amazing for them.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. What’s a Walmart strategy you can say? You know, a lot of people are reluctant, maybe, you know, sometimes to sell at Walmart but you know, Carrie even has some products that she sells more on Walmart than she does on Amazon. Of course, that’s more the exception, not the rule. But regardless of if a product is a home run or not, I’m sure you have, you know, a couple go-to strategies maybe you’re using for Walmart.
Vincenzo:
Yeah. So when it comes to Walmart, totally agree with you. So not all the products are, are working on Amazon will work on, on Walmart in the first place. So something that you need to do is first do a market analysis on Walmart as well. And thankfully, you know, Helium 10 has amazing tools when it comes to Walmart as well. So you can analyze the search volume of certain keywords, you can see where the relative revenue that some of your competitors potential competitors are doing Walmart. And then from there you can make a basically a strategy and an educated, basically projectional if it’s gonna be a good market or not for you. What I will say about Walmart, and this is something I’m very excited because you know, in the last couple of months we became official partners with them.
Vincenzo:
One of the only agencies top only 20 agencies are working directly with them, and we’re one of them. And because we’re having a lot of meetings with them and things in the backend, something that I feel people is missing where is, I understand that we come from the Amazon space and, and everybody is always in law with the seven figures, eight figures and all that kind of stuff. And because they don’t see that now on warmer, sometimes they, they step backwards and, and they don’t do it is warmer right now because of, of the patterns I’m seeing, the numbers I’m seeing and everything is like 2014-2015 Amazon, right? And I feel like maybe you’re not gonna do the same amount of money that you do on Amazon. And maybe you, you could imagine that yes, you’re gonna dilute your efforts by going to Walmart, but I can definitely guarantee you that Walmart, if you jump right now, you’re gonna have the early move advantage.
Vincenzo:
We’re talking about some of our clients that are paying two to $3, some C P A C P C on Amazon when bring it to Walmart, we’re paying sometimes 50, 70 cents, right? That’s a huge difference. The competition is much lower. And because we already have that, you know, brand Amazon brand that, you know, the Amazon brand is like a survival brand. We know all these tricks are already about P P C, how to some kind of media and all that. And Walmart is only in baby steps compared to Amazon. If you bring that experience and you bring that especially a very good product, I think you’re really set for success because Walmart doing amazing things in the backend, very excited things are coming, and I think it’s really the, the only one I see right now in the market that can compete with Amazon. So definitely give it a try for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, so what I wanna do now is, you know, as an agency, you know, you, you have so much experience with, with a a, a lot of sellers, so I’m gonna do one, one negative, and then we’re gonna go one positive, but the negative, you know, you don’t have to mention any names or, you know, throw anybody under the buzz here. What, what is the craziest, stupidest thing that you have seen one of your clients was doing? Like, like, you know, ’cause that always happens. You, you onboard a client and you gotta take a look at their account and see what their strategies have been. And you know, you gotta, yeah. I mean, otherwise you wouldn’t have a job if they were doing everything perfectly. There’s nothing, there’s no reason to hire somebody like Ecomcy, but what is the abs the most face palm event where you’re just like, oh my goodness, I cannot believe these guys were, were doing this. Like, they have never negative matched PPC keyword.. Just something crazy. Can you, is is there anything you can think of like a, a funny story that, that you noticed when you took on a, a client?
Vincenzo:
Yeah, there are many, but I, I mean, for example, one I can think on top of my mind is this guy that he was doing pretty decent. This, this guy was a, like a, a seven figure seller. And, when we went inside his PPC, I mean, usually when you’re doing seven figures, you expect people should have figured out how to do PPC, right? And we go inside and this guy had campaigns, manual campaigns, like this guy had a campaign with around 500 keywords on it, and the 500 keywords were all mixed between exact phrase and broth. So that he had the, he had the same key or exact phrase, and bro in the same campaign, and he didn’t have any negative match. So it was like a carnival all the, all over the place. What madness and, and yes, that, that’s a very is example.
Vincenzo:
I can think. Another one is like this sort guy also a very good product and, and branding. And they were doing also nice revenue only doing automatic targeting. They, and this, they’ve been doing fine selling since 2015. They only had automatic campaigns that never Tesla, like product targeting, sponsor brands sponsored display. We have seen even people without using anything in the backend, no search terms or having their own aria. I mean, these are yeah, crazy things like this all the time. And, and it’s, it’s crazy because when these people come to you and you see their revenue, you say how you, you came, you made it this far with all these mistakes and it’s crazy. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Interesting, interesting. All right, let’s flip it to that. Instead of the horror stories, what is some cool success stories? You know, like, you know, somebody, you, you know, you were able to help them with some strategies and they were able to, to double their sales or, or they just try this one thing and you know, they brought in all this, you know, new traffic or, or some, some kind of cool story that you can now share.
Vincenzo:
Yeah, of course. So we have this supplement brand that came to us. And when they came to us, they were doing like half a million or so in revenue. So they were not very big. And the thing is, this was like a, a client that bought the brand during the aggregator crazy period, right? There was a person that he had no clue about Amazon. They just bought this because his accountant say, oh, Amazon businesses are now hot. You, you should buy one. Okay? And the bought this Amazon brand, they had no clue about Amazon. They came to us like, we just spent all this huge amount of money on buying this brand, and we have no clue. We came in and we had to redo everything from scratch because all the listings were breaking compliance, doing claims that were in, right?
Vincenzo:
So we didn’t had to do all the images, listings, reapply for some of of, of their categories. On top of that, what we did is because they were doing only USA, we actually have them to expand to, to Europe as well. And now we actually also bring it into Walmart on a span of around, yeah, close to three years. They went from doing, as I say, close to half a million. Now they’re close to hitting 4 million in revenue because of all these crazy things that we did from scratch for them. So this is, this is literally the power of doing things right, because yep, these guys had no clue about Amazon. And we came in and we basically re remade the brand from scratch. And I think just to make an emphasis on this case study, one of the things that brought the bonds revenue for this brand was actually doing the international expansion.
Vincenzo:
This something, I know people is scared about that because of taxes, because of the languages and all that, but please, guys, if you’re the type of seller that you’re already controlling, 70% of a specific niche, even 60%, don’t lose sleep of getting the extra 10 to 20%. Use the extra, actual extra budget and effort to expand into other marketplaces. Because I feel Amazon, the easiest way to scale are two ways, either new marketplaces or more product. I feel they always this, this sort process for some cells that, oh, is I haven’t reached my potential because I haven’t found the perfect bit or the perfect keyword or the perfect placement. Sometimes the reality is that you reach certain level that, that sit on specific niche and, and the best way to keep growing, just diversify. Don’t, don’t lose sleep on, on having the perfect tacos, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So that’s my advice. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
I like perfect tacos, but I’m talking about the ones that I, that I eat
Bradley Sutton:
Anyways before we get into your, your final tip, your final strategy of the day I just want to show people like how they can, how they can reach out to you. So guys, just, you know, go to hub.helium10.com and then type in the search Ecomcy and make sure you’re signed into Helium 10 when you do it. Because I didn’t even realize this until I saw this. If you’re signed into Helium 10, you can actually qualify here for a 10% off discount with them and a free consultation. That’s right. But other than here, how can people find you like on the interwebs, you know, maybe and also your, your podcast too.
Vincenzo:
Yeah, sure. So the agency, if you look for Ecomcy in all the social media platforms, you’re gonna find us. My name Vincenzo Toscano on all the social media. I’m very active, ma mainly on LinkedIn, doing a lot of content there. And the podcast, if you’re interested, is the e-commerce lab. And we also do like two episodes per week, also bring experts from the field to talk Amazon related stuff and e-commerce. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, so now let’s close it off with your 60-second tip or 60-second strategy. What is something that you haven’t, you know, you’ve been given a strategies the whole day, but what is something you haven’t mentioned that that’s kind of like a quick hitting one that you think people can, can learn from?
Vincenzo:
Yeah, so when I, when it comes to strategy something that we’ve seen a a lot, I know maybe you have heard this tip before, but it’s focused on the second language of the country you’re selling on. So, for example something we having a lot of success lately with our US brands is using Spanish cures in Canada, we’re using French related cures. For example, in Germany there’s a big population of, of Turkish people Polish and all of that. So there’s a huge potential of using second secondary languages on all these markets. And on top of that, what I would advise as well as an extra plus tip on, on top of this tip in the US for example, you can request your translation to be updated the Spanish one because some of the translation that have been done if the listen is old is it was done with the old translation engine that Amazon had, the backend. So you can actually request Amazon to redo your translation. And this sometimes can help you a lot to reindex for some Spanish queue that you’re not indexing the first time and actually be more relevant for Spanish related keywords. So that would be my tip. Yeah. Cool.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, well thank you so much for coming on here and you know, it was fun to come on your podcast. Now, now we, we’ve been on each other, so I’m sure we’ll, we’ll do it again sometime next year and yeah. And I’m excited to see about this case study you’ve been working on with, with the other team and, and we’ll definitely let everybody know when when that’s ready as well.
Vincenzo:
Yeah, it should be very interesting. And thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure. And until the next one. Yeah. Alright.
Bradley Sutton:
I hope to see you maybe in Italy if you, if you’re gonna come Yeah, when I go to this event in September, so let’s meet it in Milan. Alright, we’ll see you then.
Vincenzo:
See you.
Welcome to another episode of our Winning with Walmart Wednesday series! Today’s host is Carrie Miller, and she sits down with two sellers who found massive success in the Walmart marketplace. They share their inspiring stories and reveal the secrets behind obtaining the coveted Walmart Pro Seller Badge. From speeding up inventory check ins WFS to mastering the art of A/B testing for different product types, this dynamic duo provides valuable advice on how to excel selling on Walmart.com. Tune in to learn about their 90-day product launch plan, how to use flat files to solve your technical problems, and the latest Walmart parameters for the Pro Seller Badge eligibility!
In episode 476 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie, Gustavo, and Leonardo discuss:
- 02:06 – Gustavo And Leonardo’s Backstories
- 03:03 – How Much Are They Selling In Walmart.com?
- 04:23 – Why Did They Choose Walmart?
- 06:10 – 90-Day Product Launch Plan In Walmart.com
- 09:22 – Walmart Changing Parameters For The Pro Seller Badge?
- 11:20 – Optimizing Your Listings For Walmart.com
- 14:15 – The Buy 3 Variations In One Listing Technique
- 15:38 – A/B Testing Your Listings And Product Types
- 19:07 – Reduced Pricing Strategy
- 22:07 – How To Get Your WFS Inventory Checked In Faster
- 23:56 – Check Out The Walmart Lessons Inside Freedom Ticket
- 25:50 – Selling Liquids In Walmart.com
- 27:10 – How Do I Turn One Of My Images Counter Clockwise?
- 32:14 – Walmart Selling Advice
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TranscriptCarrie Miller:
Today we are gonna be talking to two Walmart sellers who have found quite a bit of success on the Walmart marketplace. They’re going to share their listing optimization strategies, tips on how to get the Pro Seller Badge and tips on how to get your Walmart inventory checked into WFS quicker. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think
Bradley Sutton:
If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10, Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook, or you can actually go to h10.me/walmartgroup and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join, you can tag me and carry with questions, and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast. I’m gonna be your host, Carrie Miller. And this is our winning with Walmart Wednesday that we do every month where we give you some great Walmart information and we answer all of your Walmart questions. So today I’m really excited because I have two new guests that you’ve probably never seen before, and they are Walmart experts. They’ve been selling on Walmart, and so they’ve got a lot of great knowledge to share. So we’ll ask them some questions, you’ll get to know them about their story. And then we’ll go ahead and take your questions live. Go ahead and bring on our guests and introduce them to you. So we have Gustavo and Leo and they’re from Venezuela. So thanks so much guys for joining. How are you doing?
Gustavo:
Thank you so much, Carrie, for having us.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. So I’m pretty excited to talk about your story. You guys are pretty inspiring. You’re, you know, been working really hard on Walmart. And so I wanted to just kind of give people a background about you just about your kind of e-commerce start and how, you know, your, your company got started. So can you tell us about, you know, just how you got started in, in e-commerce?
Gustavo:
Well, I don’t know about inspiring. But we started on Amazon in around 2016. We sold household items in the UK. We eventually launched in the US and after a couple of years of trial and error we did reach the bestseller badge with several of our products and, and we got excited and launched new brands and we grew those as well. And so more recently we did hear that Walmart was starting to grow a ton. We decided to give it a try. We knew some people and some brands that have launched there successfully. And so far it’s been really exciting. We really didn’t expect the platform to work as well as it is. Walmart’s like a sign us an account manager. They’re adding new features every day. It’s kind of cool cuz you can see some of the like Amazon features that we’ve known you know, for years starting to pop up on Walmart. So it’s like they’re really putting money into this. And you know, we’re already reaching a good amount of sales things are growing, so it’s exciting.
Carrie Miller:
Can you tell us maybe how many sales you guys are doing on like a monthly basis or just to give people kind of an idea of like what your sales are in Walmart so far?
Leronardo:
Sure. We just launched into Walmart, but right now we’re doing that between 20 after eight k a month right now. For the top product in our assortment, we are in average selling like 45, 45 units daily. Even without having top organic ranking position. We even launch for the same position right now. We have the, the second position after, you know, a month of alert work of optimizing our listings, adding rich media, tested the main images, mainly all the, basically all the Amazon, Facebook, and also all the send resources and also suggestions available in your podcast and in your webinar. So we’re very thanking for that.
Carrie Miller:
Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, so I mean, 45 sales a day for some products is pretty amazing. I mean that’s you know, more than some people are probably doing on Amazon for some of their products. So really, really exciting news and really inspiring knowing that there is some, you know, definitely some good opportunity on Walmart. So basically the main reason you guys decided then is just you wanted to expand. Why did you guys choose Walmart to start selling?
Gustavo:
Right. Wo we’ve seen several successful Amazon brands launch to to Walmart. And I mean, we do a lot of modeling. Like, we try to see what the, what is the best brand out there, what are the best brands doing? And if we can, you know, take a similar path, that’s usually a good choice. And so we’ve seen like, hero Cosmetics obviously had a fantastic run at launching from Amazon into retail. I think they recently got acquired by like hundreds of millions. Yeah there’s like, we, you know, there’s like Angry Orange True skin, like a lot of really good brands that have launched from Amazon to retail. So it’s, to us it was like, okay, some of the big brands are doing it, like they’re really successful people are doing it. Like there’s gotta be something there. To us it’s better to come in early.
Gustavo:
So if Walmart continues to grow, like, I guess, you know, the brands that are in now have a, have a headstart. It’s also easy to find, like in walmart.com particularly, you can look at a lot of information with tools like Helium 10. Helium 10 is actually the one we use the most. Cause you can actually like, analyze the sales. There’s not, like on Amazon, there’s like a thousand softwares that do that, like in, in walmart.com, there’s not too many. It’s also like part of a multi-channel strategy for us. So walmart.com is like the first platform, but ideally we’re trying to look at can we get into Target and Ulta that we’ve heard are fantastic platforms as well. And like, there’s other ones as well. So it’s a, it’s a first step into, into a retail expansion and understanding how other markets work. And we’re seeing that applying a lot of the Amazon strategies do actually work. There’s not a lot of people doing these things. You know, optimizing listings, optimizing your images, doing all the things that you kind of know from Amazon.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. That’s awesome. So I guess that leads into my next question cuz when I talked to you before Leo, you mentioned that you have like a 90 day plan when you launch on Walmart and that’s kind of the day, the amount of time that it takes you to even get to considered for the Pro Seller Badge. So can you just kind of like walk us through your 90 day plan when you launch a product on Walmart, all the things that you do to optimize and then get the Pro Seller Badge?
Leronardo:
Yes, for sure. Due our experience in Amazon, we link our strategy of launching Walmart into the process of obtain the Pro Seller Badge in Walmart. Because this, the badge involves all the key elements that are successful seller must have in any marketplace. He wants to participate at first they want, they have to provide a great customer experience through onsite deliveries and also providing great customer services. They have to also target a 90% listing quality score in order to drive conversion across the whole assortment products. Third, they have to be compliant with any Walmart target product policy and content policy in order to have a reliable offer in this marketplace. And also to have consistent sales over these 90 days. So the first thing that we, we, we do to achieve that is to use WFS to reduce our sales exposure to any delay in our shipments and also in the imagery handling in order to fulfill this orders.
Leronardo:
The second thing that we do is optimizing our listings based on the warmer suggestions, based on the huge same suggestions and also using the best practices that are competitors are using in their listings in Amazon on also in Walmart. The third thing that, that we use is having all our complimentary information updated. I’m referring to the MSDS, I’m referring to the in Snowbird and also to the product labels that are needed to adverse to sustain a case of product content, product ownership, and also to convert our products to WFS. And the fourth, and I think is the most important thing for our company and for our brand is to have a great product. We have a great product that match our customers expectation and also the promises that we make in our business.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, that’s very good. That’s really good. I mean, it’s true. The Pro Seller Badge is kind of like a guideline to help you to really not only rank, but just get more sales, but then also people start filtering for the Pro Seller Badge too, which gives you even more sales. So it gives you more exposure. But something I think people don’t know about the Pro Seller Badge too is that you actually get 20% discount off of your referral fees, which is really cool, a really good perk cuz it’s gonna increase your profitability. But did you guys get the email, I think I got it today that said that they’re changing the parameters for the, for the
Leronardo:
Yes.
Carrie Miller:
What did you think about that?
Leronardo:
Yes, and I think it’s a way that Walmart is going to filtering more the sellers that are participating into Walmart because as customer, I always buy, even if we’re in any part of the United States from Walmart, cause it has reliable prices, it has shipments. So I think for one hand it’s a great idea in order to feature in more sellers for the other hand maybe be difficult to meet some of those requirements if you are not participating in programs like WFS. Yeah. If you’re, yes, because you have to, to reduce all exposure to those delinquencies that warm is more targeting this one.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, definitely. So if you are fulfilling products yourself, you have to be very careful because the, the qualifications are, I mean, there’s just really no margin for error when it comes to, you know, shipping. So you pretty much have to use WFS if you want the Pro Seller Badge. They also increase the number of sales you have to have within a 90 day period to 250. So I’m curious to see, you know, how many people maybe drop off of the the, the pros seller badge, but that’ll be that’ll be something to watch.
Gustavo:
We made that mistake at the beginning. We, we launched with our own warehouse and we were fulfilling orders ourselves, but it is just much better. It’s like with Amazon, you eventually realize that you, you need to be using FBA. It’s just works much better. Fees are better, you’ll get the prime badge. Like same thing with Walmart. You, you just need the WFS badge, like we were fulfilling in three days. But if like it was ever four and then you would start to get like you know, your score would decrease cuz you’re not fulfilling on time. And so it is just like go all in. If you’re gonna go to Walmart, just go all in, just send your inventory. It’s gonna be much simpler longer term.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, cuz especially cuz you can get kicked off the platform if you make certain little mistakes. So it’s, it’s just easier overall, less anxiety probably. Okay, so what tips do you have just in general for optimizing your Walmart listings? Just to, to get them so that they’re going to, you know, rank and, and convert the highest on Walmart?
Gustavo:
So we track our conversion rate the most. I think that’s one of the, obviously the, the biggest or most important metrics along with like sessions. But when you’re tracking that the main thing, you’re obviously, you’re looking to increase it. But what we do is we will maybe test main images for sure and then the other images in the listing, but it’s like very targeted, like you wanna change, like the position of the product, the appearance of the product, the lighting, everything, anything you can, any items that are inside the product, like in the, in the main image for sure. That’s like super important. It’s probably, you know, with the 80 20, it’s definitely in, in the 20% of things that, that produce 80% of the results. Helium 10 has audiences, which works great for that. Shorter titles, like we’ve learned stuff along the way.
Gustavo:
Like we used to have long titles like on Amazon and now it’s shorter titles we’re realizing work better. We’ve also realized we can upload videos, which increased conversion a ton. So that’s by creating a case. You can upload videos, which is fantastic for conversion as well. We’re testing out a ton of stuff with the copy inside, so just changing the copy, like the main bullet points stuff that you say inside the listing. Anything that you can to really just bump up your conversion rate, then you just have to be tracking it. Like if you’re not tracking it, you don’t know the result. So you just have like a weekly tracker or even a daily tracker of your conversion rate and you can go, okay, I mean I changed this on Tuesday, it’s been four days. Like how’s it changing? It’s been, it’s been a week. Like sometimes there’s a delay.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, well I love how you guys, you know a lot of people just put their listing up on Walmart and they’re like, oh, it should be converting. It’s just like Amazon. But I love that you guys have taken the time to really optimize for Walmart and doing, you know, you can use audiences like you said to split test images because images on Walmart are, I think, the most important thing because you literally have people advertising right. Below you and you have to sell the customer pretty much in the images. So that’s a really good point. But I love how you’re really testing these things and really focusing on all the things that are available on Walmart to, you know, get to the top. And it shows you guys are, you know, successful so far. So it, it’s been
Gustavo:
One example of that is we’ve realized that a lot when we went, when we went to our orders, we actually have several variations and people were buying all three of the variations at the same time. Yeah. So we saw a lot of people were buying ’em, but we’re, we were never promoting them together. So in the listing we now talk about you should get these all three together cuz they actually do go together. But we weren’t like, oh sweet, we, we weren’t promoting them together after we realized a lot of people are just buying all three right away. We’re like, okay, maybe we should put that on the list and go, you can grab these, you know, together. So that’s just how–
Carrie Miller:
How are you putting it on the listing? Are you just writing it on there?
Gustavo:
On one of the images, you could just go, these three go well together and you can give the reasons why they go well together and then you can grab ’em all here and kind of put it–
Carrie Miller:
How do you help people find it? Do you just like say grab ’em on Walmart or find them on Walmart or
Gustavo:
Well there if you, we would have all three variations on that same listing so that you could, okay. Like people can easily see that like all those three products are there. It’s just a reminder that you can buy all three right away.
Carrie Miller:
That’s a really good point cuz some people don’t really think about it. Sometimes you have to tell them what to do. That’s really, really a good like a strategy. So that’s even good for Amazon. So if anyone’s listening that isn’t on Walmart yet, that’s something, you know, you could definitely remind people that they, you know, to get all, all the products on your, all the variations basically.
Gustavo:
We actually got that idea cuz we try to talk to customers as much as possible. So we had customers on our website and stuff and we call them every so often. And one customer said, oh I, you know, I always buy, I like your product because I can buy all three that I need at the same time, can I just click on add to cart to all three variations? And we’re like, oh, that’s, that’s a good idea. Like, then we checked our orders, we saw that a lot of people were doing, then we’re like, oh, we should, we should really remind people that they can do that here.
Carrie Miller:
That’s that’s such a good point. Oh my gosh. The little things that really can make a difference. Okay, so going along with you know, AB testing, what do you all think about AB testing the product type and do you have any strategies for that?
Leronardo:
Yes, it’s very important for us. At first we target the product type and also the path that our competitors have for every keyword. Because if we don’t have the correct product also path, our product is not going be index for the main keywords we’re targeting to. So our recommendation should be to use, maybe to use Helium 10 or also to search manually through the search grid what are the prototypes that our competitors are using. And also because if you, if you target the correct prototype, you’re gonna have a bunch of filtering attributes displaying your listing that were being displayed to the customers before. So these filtering attributes are also very important to be find, to be search searchable in all the keywords that your customer are looking for in, in warmer any changes can be made using a case by submitting a case in support center, even for the club side and also for the shelving bag. We also recommend to use a case instead of changing it through the growth opportunities dashboard because it is more directly and also it’s going to be, you’re gonna, you’re gonna be, you have received a response maybe in the next couple hours, no more than that.
Carrie Miller:
Do they give you better product type options when you do it that way?
Leronardo:
No, I usually search for the prototype.
Carrie Miller:
Well, you know which one you want.
Leronardo:
Yes, I know what whatever. Because in the, in the growth opportunity dashboard, they, they show you a couple of of them, but sometimes it’s not best. And sometimes also your competitor has a more accurate prototype depending on the first, on the first vaccination that Walmart gave gave to you.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. Where are you finding these, the product types of your competitors? Is it on the, the shelving path on the listing or where are you looking?
Leronardo:
Yes. AB testing.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. Yes.
Leronardo:
The second last we’re targeting to.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. Yeah, I mean it’s interesting how much more exposure you can get. Cause I noticed myself just having a challenges getting into certain keywords. So it is really important to, you know, AB test the product type. So how many times is there a product that you had to do multiple, multiple changes on the product type? Like what’s the most you’ve had to change the product type to find the right one?
Leronardo:
We have a product that has like bestseller product, let me say like around creams, bestseller creams. So you have to look for any specific prototype that is also go, is going help you also to achieve maybe the vessels batch in that category because we know that the four top five, the four five products are going to have the vessels branch. So depending on the prototype, ah, their picks, the popular picks or this kind badge, like the best seller badge are gonna be assigned to you. So it’s very important.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. That’s really, that’s a really good point. Yeah, so look at the products. They’re the best seller badge products so that you can look at their product type cuz they probably have the right product type. That’s a really good point. Okay, so something else I wanted to talk about is reduced pricing because a lot of sellers have a hard time getting the reduced tag. And so you’ve actually explained the reason for that to me and maybe a different strategy to get a reduced price on Walmart. So can you talk a little bit about the reduced price strategy that you guys have?
Leronardo:
Sure. Walmart, since Walmart used the 90 day average price to calculate whether you’re giving the strikethrough or not, you should have a strategy based on when you are going to display it and how much are going to display. At first our, our story is to have two prices. The main pricing that we are advertising any point of time without being containing a deal. And the second price we are using for the flashback and also for campaign or maybe special days we are targeting like weekends where maybe the traffic warmer is higher than other days. It’s very important since Walmart demands that some items in order to participate in these campaigns are also flashbacks, have the strikethrough. If they, if they don’t have it, they’re not going participate. So you have to be very careful. And the second strategy we use is the timeline. If you, you have to, to narrow the timeline, you’re displaying this strike through because if you’re not, if you’re not going to narrow it, the the 90 day average price is going to become lower. So if you want to add, to get this right through to this and also to increase your conversion rate, you’re, you’re gonna have, you’re gonna a lower and lower price. Ok. So in order to be, to get the structure,
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, so that’s really interesting. I didn’t realize it’s the previous 90 days. So you have to kinda keep beating that 90 day average price when you do the strikethrough. But Flash Picks is probably a good one. So you have your, your main price and then if you get the plat flash picks deals. And I think you mentioned to me too that you can open up a case if you don’t see Flash pick steals available to you in your growth opportunities. Is that correct? Is that what you guys did?
Leronardo:
Yes, and also because you have to submit offer for any case, for any flash pick or for any campaigns. And you have to be, you have to work with former in order to monitor all this, your submission status. Cause sometimes maybe the campaigns already started and sometimes you get in time, but there are some, maybe if you are offer is not good enough if you’re, if you’re selling also your products in other market places, so search on Amazon and your price is not getting bid by that, but that the price you’re advertising there, maybe you’re not considered. So, but thankfully to our account manager, we, we have been, we run through this and we are taking care of any flash pick on any campaign we’re advertising.
Carrie Miller:
Very nice, very good. Another question here is we were talking about WFS Walmart fulfillment services and how sometimes, I mean for me it’s taken like two weeks and sometimes a little bit longer to check in inventory and I think you have a strategy to get the products checked in faster. What, what do you think about that and what, what’s the strategy that you use to get your products checked in faster?
Leronardo:
We usually know that for the timing longer for hazardous products at first to convert our products we use flat file from changing from server fulfillment to warmer fulfillment. We received this advice from support center. Cause at first we were having issues also to cover our products to WFS and the second advice is to having an US compliant MSDS. Sometimes warmer does reject some products, even if they’re not hazardous since they don’t have an MSDS, which is complained to to the US regulations. The second thing we, we need to consider is that we have to, is better to send a print images of the packages instead of a picture. Because in the plot file is is mandatory to send a print picture of the label. So in order to avoid any delay, they should send a print images instead a picture. And the third consideration should be also the, the type, the product type you are sent, you are inputting in the flat file because we at first considered that our products were notone instead since chemicals, they should be considered as them even if they don’t have any hazards component in their formula.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Yeah, so flat files are probably the best way to go on Walmart. And we actually have instructions on how to use flat files for Walmart in our freedom ticket on Walmart. It’s under, for all helium 10 subscribers, it’s in our Freedom tickets. It’s week 11. So our our freedom ticket course that comes with every paid subscription. You can go into that and we’ll, we show you how to do that. There’s another thing that you mentioned to me about flat file uploads though, that was like you were having a hard time updating the product and you said that you need to use the, the original flat file upload in order to update products. Is that right?
Leronardo:
Yes, that’s right. There are like two flat files. The new items set up flat file or maybe all the conversion flat file or even the change some specification from the prototype but different from the new item setup. The new item setup allows you also to display more keyboard feature attributes and more attributes are display in the, in this flat file. They are not going to be displayed even if you use manual setup the product or even if you change after using the other type of app file. So for us it’s always the best way to also to update any images, to update on any descriptions. Even the key features we copy the with when, since the key feature has like a specific formula, like specific, I have to say like a way to input it in the Walmart seller Central, we always start at first the key features in the manually setup product setup. And then we copy the exact formula that Walmart give us is like a code for a website, you know, when they have like molding, when they have any specific character and then input it into the flat file and put it into a Walmart.
Carrie Miller:
Wow, that’s pretty interesting info. Okay. Another thing is too, cuz you sell, I think you sell kind of liquids and I, I’ve actually run into an issue on trying to get a product into WFS because they want you to label as a pesticide first and then they check it. And did you have that situation where like for our product we were trying to upload it to WFS, but they said we have to label it as a pesticide and then send the safety data sheet. Did you guys have anything like that when you were trying to get into WFS because you had liquids or were you, did you get accepted right away?
Leronardo:
We get accepted right, right away since we changed correctly the ide, which was a chemical. Okay. And secondly, we already sent the MSDS stain pesticide product. It wasn’t like any, doesn’t have any hazardous check the standard requirements that are needed to send an MSDS a compliant msds. And some key features like as you said, pesticide, any canus component, any even California regulations that are ingredients should need, it should be staying in the MSDS. As soon as all these criteria are met, we they’re good to, to go.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. Very good. Very interesting. All right. It looks like we have a question here. How do I turn one of my main images counter clockwise 90 degrees and how do I change the order of variance on an in seem color size? I, I’ve had this issue too, like literally my sizing, it’ll go large large, medium, extra large. It, it’s not an order for the sizing. And I don’t know something must be happening with his images where they’re not like showing up correctly. So do have you guys had this issue?
Leronardo:
No, we haven’t. We, we, we shouldn’t try to any, any images we submitted into Walmart or any marketplace. We when we upload in this cloud, we try to check if the images are the correct, have the correct size, and also are the correct ones we’re trying to submit. We haven’t, we haven’t confirmed this issue. I dunno, it should even as
Carrie Miller:
Do you upload your images directly or do you do it in the flat file with a url?
Leronardo:
We use a flat file with URL might, what you used to do is we, we use Google Drive link. You can, you cannot submit a Google drive in the normal form to download or your copy from Google. You have to transform in a specific formula. We find even in the internet that you would allow to any, any person to only click in Daily Link and that automatically is gonna download the file into your computer without doing anything, without showing display. Like, I dunno, like any new screen,
Carrie Miller:
Is it like a tiny URL or something like that? Or,
Leronardo:
Yes, it’s.
Carrie Miller:
Okay.
Leronardo:
I can even share with you the formula in order to use it.
Carrie Miller:
That’d be great. That would be awesome.
Gustavo:
And that, and that’s probably the best way to upload images. Cause if he is or or if they’re uploading images using like the edit button on the listings, that’s like the worst way to try to upload images. It sometimes they won’t go through so as, as I said flat files are probably best using the link. Otherwise get
Carrie Miller:
And you have to create new links though for each time you upload on a flat file though, because I’ve noticed that they, when you upload the same flat file or the same images again, it doesn’t, or maybe you wanna change a few or the order you have to change the URLs. Is is that still the case for you guys or changing the URLs every time you re-upload a flat file?
Leronardo:
What happened with us is at first we weren’t able to modify the order because we have like WFS conversion request pending is while the, we have other conversion WFS conversion that already got involved into Walmart. Ok. So maybe we think it’s a problem in the system on one hand. The second thing that we do is we change the world that we’re displaying. We use like a open hosting cloud in order to always been changing this images. If this is not happening, we always create a case. A case we get a case and we submit the flat file in order to Walmart to consider also the assets and the change on those assets we’re requiring to.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. Yeah, so maybe that’s probably the way to fix that, is to submit a flat file exact so that you can fix that the image issue. And then what about the order of the variations? Do you use case, do you, did you have to just submit a case when this happened to you? Or what do you do to fix that?
Leronardo:
We haven’t confirmed this issue. We know that the first a variant that’s going to display or is, is the primary variant. If it’s this is not happening we always create a case in Warren in order to maybe change the order of those variants we we’re displaying.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. So maybe the yeah, maybe the primary variant should always be the size you want to come first. Maybe that’s something I’ll try. I actually have opened multiple cases because my sizing is wrong too, so that’s really, really helpful.
Gustavo:
And there’s also a way to change, like the image that appears in the variant, which is, I mean, something small, but like you can maybe use an Oh really add something else to highlight whatever it is you’re, you’re selling. Like if you have different flavors and you have berry and stuff, like you could put like an image of a, of a berry there, like something that can show a little bit more what the berry is.
Carrie Miller:
Wow. That’s, that’s even better.
Gustavo:
It’s something small, but it’s kind of cool, which is like, can highlight whatever it is you’re selling.
Carrie Miller:
Very cool. I think this was a lot of really great Walmart information for everybody who’s listening. So I think it’ll be really helpful, especially just troubleshooting and knowing you should, you know, there are some ways to fix things like with flat files especially, but then also opening up a case is always a good idea too. I wanna thank you guys so much for joining. Is there anything else, any kind of advice that you have as before we let part ways and just that you have advice for anyone who’s wanting to sell in Walmart or thinking about it? What do you guys think?
Gustavo:
So there, I mean there’s, there’s definitely a couple thing we’ve learned. We were told that Amazon, at Walmart, I can say Walmart Amazon, Walmart might suppress. I, I think Walmart might suppress you if your price like higher than in your other channels. So you, you definitely wanna make sure that you have, you have similar pricing as you have. Like say if you’re selling on Amazon or other marketplaces, try to match those prices. Focus on quality listings. Rich media is a big one, I think like Rich Media is coming up and that’s gonna be very big. I think similar to how Amazon added the a plus, you know, yeah, there’s tons of room to, to explore with adding images, videos, stuff inside your rich media. That’s, that’s gonna be very big. I think it’s gonna help with conversion and a ton of stuff like that. People post reviews quite fast. I think that’s not happening as much with Amazon with like new products. Like people will post reviews fast. So I think it’s important to have a quality product right off, right off the bat. And yeah. And you’ll have to invest in pbc We’re, we hired a, a manager for now, but I think that’s, that’s definitely key as as just as it is with Amazon.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. It’s actually crazy how many people, when I ask them if they’ve started pa pay-per-click on Walmart, they’re like, no. Cuz they’re like, you know, they’ll say, oh, I have no sales on Walmart. And I’m like, well, did you do pay-per-click? No. So you would never do that on Amazon. Right. So it’s crazy.
Gustavo:
You, you have to, yeah. Yeah. It’s part of the, it’s part of just like, you know, knowing how to play that game.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, definitely. Well thank you guys so much for joining. Really appreciate you guys taking the time to answer questions and just, you know, show, tell us all the things that you’ve learned. I think this is a lot of really great info for anyone selling at Walmart. I think people are gonna be really excited about it. So thanks again and I guess I’ll see you all later. Bye everyone.
Gustavo:
Thank you Carrie.
In this episode, we talk about a record-breaking Prime Day, Walmart Pro Seller Badge eligibility updates, and more breaking news in the eCommerce industry!
In the world of e-commerce and retail, barcodes play a crucial role in product identification and inventory management. But what lies beyond those familiar lines and numbers? Join us as we dive into the fascinating world of barcodes with an exclusive interview with Michelle Covey, a leading expert from GS1 US. Michelle shares insights into her current endeavors and sheds light on the latest innovations in barcodes. We discuss whether Walmart adheres to the same GTIN requirements as other retailers and explore the concept of GTIN hijacking scenarios. For Amazon sellers, we uncover strategies to avoid GTIN problems. Additionally, we address the varying pricing ranges of GS1 licenses across different countries and provide guidance for those who purchased second-hand barcodes. Tune in for an informative and engaging discussion! If you’re interested to learn more, here are additional resources talked about in this episode and provided by GS1 US:
- Homepage – https://www.gs1us.org/
- Estimate How Many GTINs You Need – https://www.gs1us.org/tools/barcode-estimator/home
- GS1 US Podcast – https://next-level-supply-chain-with-gs1us.podcastpage.io/
In episode 475 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Michelle discuss:
- 01:39 – What Is Michelle Up To These Days?
- 02:24 – Is There Innovation In Barcodes?
- 03:03 – Does Walmart Have Same GTIN Requirements?
- 06:05 – GS1 US Answers All Your Burning Questions!
- 07:53 – What Is A GTIN Hijacking Scenario
- 09:50 – How To Avoid GTIN Problems With Amazon
- 13:13 – Why Amazon Does Not Like Barcodes Outside GS1 Or Resellers
- 14:00 – Why GS1 Have Different Pricing Ranges For Other Countries?
- 16:09 – What If I Bought Second-Hand Barcode?
- 18:10 – What GS1 Barcode Or GTIN Fields Does Amazon Look At?
- 20:31 – What Are GS1 License Owner Certificates?
- 21:35 – Does A Brand Name Change Need A New GTIN?
- 23:28 – Common Error Messages Amazon Sellers Get From Their Barcodes
- 25:24 – Always Think About Your Packaging Strategy
- 27:30 – Upcoming GS1 Barcode Innovations
- 29:43 – Michelle’s Healthy Habits And Habits Outside Work
- 31:20 – How To Reach Out To GS1 US & Michelle Covey
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
If you’re a serious seller, you know you need an official barcode from GS1. But there’s error messages that come up here and there, and questions about what Amazon can really see from GS1 and other concerns. So we actually invited an official rep from GS1 to answer all these questions. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you afraid of running out of inventory before your next shipment comes in? Or maybe you’re on the other side and you worry about having too much inventory, which could cap you out at the Amazon warehouses, or even cost you storage fees? Stay on top of your inventory by using our robust inventory management tool. You can take advantage of our advanced forecasting algorithms, manage your three PL inventory, create pos for your suppliers, create replenishment, shipments, and more. All from inside inventory management by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/inventorymanagement. And don’t forget, you can sign up for a free Helium 10 account from there, or you can get 10% off for life by using our special podcast code SSP10. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And back for the second time, we’ve got somebody who indirectly helps millions of sellers out there potentially. Michelle from GS1. How’s it going?
Michelle:
It’s going great. Thank you for having me today, Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Now we’re not gonna go too much into your backstory this time. If you guys are interested, make sure to check out episode 357. All right, so episode 357 was the first time that she was on the podcast. And we talked about, you know, the history of, of GS1, and we talked a lot about some, some basics, you know, like what’s the difference between GTIN and EIN and a whole bunch of cool stuff. But I wanted to just, first of all, just what have you been up to? Like, how’s the last couple years been since you’ve been on the show?
Michelle:
Well, you know, always busy. I think there’s always plenty of work to do. And I’ve changed roles. I’m now in our innovation team, so, but I still help support a lot of the Amazon community, but I’m also working–
Bradley Sutton:
All right, hold on. I gotta ask. Barcodes are barcodes. How do you innovate that? That sounds like a really tough job to have. Like, all right, barcodes are completely set now. We need you to innovate something cool.
Michelle:
No, you could always innovate. I think that, well, we can take that discussion too, but like where industry is going with barcodes, you’ve seen the linear barcode on your products. They’ve been around for 50 years and they’ve been working great, but you start to see 2D barcodes, QR codes on things why not make that the barcode that goes beep up the checkout stand? So we’ve been working on that too. So yeah, I can talk more about that if you want.
Bradley Sutton:
Now that you mentioned that I saw something interesting the other day. It was like these crazy, I’ve seen, you know, QR codes that have some like logos, you know, embedded in it, but now it’s like, looks like art, but it’s really a bar. Like it’s really a QR code. I’m like, how is that even possible? But okay. There is innovation barcodes, I guess. There probably wasn’t for, for a few decades, but now, now we’re getting back back there. You know, right, right before the call, you know, you had mentioned Walmart, and so I just want, you know, let’s just start off there. One thing that’s interesting, you know, about you know, when we’re talking about barcodes, I know just from my limited experience, you know, obviously on Amazon, you know, I have tons of experience. I usually actually put an FNSKU, obviously everything needs a GS1 barcode, you know, for the backend. But I put the Amazon FNSKU sticker you know, over it when I send it to Amazon. But when it comes to Walmart, it’s actually the opposite. Now I have to actually cover up, if I had, like, if I had printed my Amazon FNSKU I actually have to cover it up with the original UPC. Now,
Bradley Sutton:
What is your experience like, you know, like do you, do you see a lot more sellers you know, selling on, on Walmart? And does Walmart have the same kind of very strict rules like Amazon does about the GS1?
Michelle:
So, good questions. I think, and this is something we always talk about when we are talking to the seller community, especially new companies that are just starting out. First of all, always identify your product with the GS1 GTIN that global trade item number, that’s what gets encoded into the barcode. So we talk more about GTIN but again, if you look into listen to that pressed episode, we, we interchange ’em with barcodes very quickly. But so get your, your number. And that’s what’s used on Amazon, but it’s also used on Walmart. So Walmart has the same GTIN requirements for identifying your product. But their barcode requirements are the traditional GS1 barcode. So having that UPC barcode, or if you did assign an EIN, that EIN barcode to your product, so they want that one to go, you know, beef at the checkout. Amazon doesn’t really have, in most cases, a traditional checkout. Everything’s done on the marketplace. And so they use that FNSKU for like their just fulfillment process in their warehouse.
Michelle:
Yeah. Okay. But for most part, we always say, you know, again, sellers usually start on Amazon and don’t think about it, and they’ll just do the FNSKU and then they won’t think about, well, if I am expanding into other channels, I now need this other barcode. So it is a challenge. We’re hoping that Amazon will use more GS1 barcodes in their fulfillment center because it does cause that dichotomy among how you, you know, barcode your products, whether it’s for Amazon or for most other traditional retailers that use the GS1 system.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, personally, I have never applied for a GTIN exemption, you know, to get, I mean, like, I just don’t understand the, the point, like even if I’m not selling on other marketplaces, it’s like, to me it’s just a no-brainer. Would you agree with that? I mean, people might say you’re biased here, but why do you, is it just laziness that some people don’t want want to get a, a barcode or that’s being cheap, or what?
Michelle:
It could be. So there are a couple of reasons why a GTIN exemption or seller seeks GTIN exemptions. One is if you do have a generic product or you label your product generic, right now, currently Amazon does not allow you to have a generic product with a GTIN. However, that’s changing soon. So we do know that they’re, you know, cuz in the standards you can actually have a GTIN associated to a generic product. So they’re working to change that. So we’re really excited that they’re understanding the use of our standards. So that’s one category that we’ve seen the GTIN exemptions, generics other ones could be laziness. Yeah, it could be. We’ve also seen it in high SKU intensity, like in the apparel sector where they have, you know, runs of a hundred thousand different types of t-shirts that could be all customized, that’s a lot of GTINs to assign and maybe not every one of them will be purchased. And so, you know, why, why spend that money on it? So that we’ve seen that case too trying to come up with some solutions for those categories. But ideally, of course I’m biased. I would always say assign a GTIN to your product.
Bradley Sutton:
Sure. Yeah. Alright. I mean, I’m not biased and that’s what I would say <laugh>.
Michelle:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
I actually, you know, there, there are some questions from some of our users, you know, when they found out that I was going to, you know, go ahead and have you back on the show. And, and, and Jay you know, who’s actually been on this podcast before, he was wondering about what’s the latest as far as like catalog corrections made when, like, let’s say the ASIN is showing the incorrect brand, but the UPC is assigned to your brand or no, aligned to your brand. So I’m not sure if I understand that question, but looks like maybe there’s a product that has the wrong brand but has the right UPC, you know, like is does, is GS1 gonna provide any help? Like, does, can Amazon see that, you know, if if it was a GS1 barcode, can Amazon see that it’s assigned to a certain brand in GS1? And then maybe that will help you know, make the transition.
Michelle:
So I think what you’re explaining is what we call a GTIN hijacking scenario. Where you go to list your own product, you own it or, and you have the GTIN associated and then it’s already on the platform.
Bradley Sutton:
If that’s what he meant, then yeah, that I exactly know what that is. It’s happened to me before. Okay. So, so how do you, what’s your suggestion on?
Michelle:
So the best way that, you know, we’ve been working with Amazon selling partner support to try to help sellers through that because it can get very tricky. So if you are the, the rightful owner of your GS1 GTIN what we recommend is, first of all, when hopefully you know, or the reason why it might be out there is it was on the platform a lot longer before Amazon started doing some of the checks against the GS1 database. So we’ve seen that. Because right now, anytime a new GTINs listed, it does check against our database to ensure that that company is associated to that GTIN. So
Bradley Sutton:
What does it mean by like associated? Like what if I have multiple brands, it let’s say I have two, or let’s say I have three companies, you know, obviously with, with you know, GS1, you know, I’m one company, but let’s say on Amazon, you know, I might have three or four accounts, you know, each of them have four different accounts or four different brands or something. If they’re all in the same GS1 account, does that count as, you know, being, I forgot what the word you used related or whatever, or do I need separate GS1 accounts as well?
Michelle:
You don’t need separate GS1 accounts. Now the, this is where it does get tricky cuz you think about like some of the large multinationals, like Coca-Cola, everybody knows Coca-Cola, right? The company is Coca-Cola Company, however, they have multiple brands. They have Diet Coke, Coke, Coke Zero. So they’ll have a whole list of brands. Now, unfortunately we don’t store at GS1, we don’t store all the brands associated to that company. So I think what you’re saying is how does Amazon know that I have Diet Coke, Coke, Coke Zero, all that. That is upon the brand to submit that to Amazon. So they have a like a brand authorization form that they’ll ask new sellers to provide so that they have listed out all the brands that they are authorized to sell. We’re working with Amazon to try to figure out how to help provide that data. But Amazon is looking for that brand level information from directly from the sellers. Right now, unfortunately we don’t, at GS1 don’t collect all that brand information too. So we collect the company name Coca-Cola Company and then your license, but we don’t collect all that brand information and share that with Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, because I was, I’m just thinking, you know, like in my personal experience, I have like a GS1 UK account and I use it for our, you know, helium 10 products, which is called Project X’s Reality TV show that we did on YouTube a couple years ago. But then I also use that same account for the GS1 account to, to make barcodes for some of my other, you know, personal Amazon accounts and, and other people’s Amazon accounts that I, or not other people’s, but you know, other accounts I have full control over. Now I haven’t had any issues, you know, on the Amazon side, so is it maybe because Amazon has already tied, you know, these different accounts to that same, you know, GS1 will say, okay, it’s using the same, you know, prefix and and it’s obviously coming from the same account. Is that why I’m not having issues or It
Michelle:
Could be, it could be. And it could be that your brand, so you are using only your, your brand. There’s cases where third party sellers can be selling same brand. So two or two or three people can be selling the same brand. And so how does Amazon know which seller is authorized to sell that brand? Cuz some may or may not be able to. So in those cases, especially the third party sellers, if they’re not a first party seller, then they might have to submit this brand authorization form, if that makes sense.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. All right. Sounds good. Another question from Jay, and this is just, you know, I was gonna ask this myself too, but still pretty much the same, where like, Hey, Amazon does not want anybody buying barcodes not from GS1, like from, you know, resellers that that’s still gonna be a, a chance to get you in trouble, right?
Michelle:
Yeah, again, they do check that license information against the GS1 database and they, they are pretty firm with that. You know, I’ve, I’ve heard other cases where I’ve had it before again, before they started making these checks against the GS1 database some of these GTIN s were allowed on the platform, or maybe they weren’t true GS1 GTINs, but they are definitely staying firm with it must come from GS1.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. You know, a few people are just curious, like why different GS1 offices have have such different pricing structures. So like, are you guys pretty much different entities or does one have more value? Like does one have more power than, than the other? Or more value as opposed to you know, we’re talking about, you know, databases in Amazon, et cetera, or what, what’s going on there?
Michelle:
We get that question a lot. So if you’re not familiar with GS1 or if you don’t wanna go back and listen to that other episode, just a real, real quick recap. GS1 is a global company as far as we have global standards and we manage them in each local region through local offices. So GS1 us, GS1, uk, GS1, Germany, GS1, Brazil and each of those offices, while we all help administer the standards, we do all operate independently. So we all have different business models. So it’s kind of like a federated model across the, the globe. We all help administer the exact same standard but in each region different business models. So yes, you’ll run into different pricing structures. You might also run into different bundled offerings or support offerings in each region.
Michelle:
So why, why would you go to one over the other generally in your local region, you’d go to your local office. So in the US, GS1 US supports the local office we have in, in-language support and in time zone support. So some, you said you have some accounts for GS1 UK. They may not have, correct. I mean, they actually are an English speaking country, but if you were needing support and it was, you know, your three o’clock in the morning, that’s when you could get them. But maybe not at your, you know, four o’clock in the afternoon. So it just depends on where you want your support and maybe some of their offerings. But it’s up to you, it’s up to, you could go to any GS1 office to get your GTIN s. It’s just, you know, you make those decisions on language support, you know, customer support and possibly other service offerings.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Another question that somebody had here was, let’s say, you know, there’s somebody who didn’t know any better and then got one of the, the these secondhand, you know, from eBay or somewhere else or what they thought was a reputable website, a GS1 or a bar a barcode or UPC and they want to get compliant, you know, cuz maybe they’re scared that Amazon might shut them down or something. Like what should they do? You know, that they’ve got an Amazon listing, it’s already tied to this shady UPC code. Is there anything they could do to become not shady?
Michelle:
Well, you know, so Amazon is going back and doing, not only are they checking on initial listing they are starting to go back and clean up bad data or data that’s not authentic GS1. So you might might be a seller that have been on the platform for a while with a non GS1 GTIN and be asked to update it. So we’ve seen that. We do find it’s actually tricky if you are one of those sellers that has a non GS1 and you’re like, out of the goodness of my heart, I wanna update this to a GS1 GTIN. I’ll be honest, I don’t think Amazon has a very good standard operating procedure for that to help sellers do that. Because when you do switch it over, it doesn’t carry some of your customer reviews, you know, all of the, the stats that you want it to. Very easy. I know that they’re working on a process to make that easier for sellers to do that changeover. But from my understanding, it’s still pretty tricky to do that in the, in the middle of, you know, a listing that’s already active and then also if you have inventory in stock in their warehouse that causes an issue. So there’s a lot of complications. So it’s not a quick yes, do it. There’s a lot of considerations to, to be made before you actually do that.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now, you know, if we’ve done the right thing and, and we do have GS1 account and, and, and we’re, we’re doing, we’re, you know, generating new UPC codes, the, the right way, you know, setting it up on Amazon, et cetera. You know, what exactly is Amazon looking at from GS1? Like what’s the fields that are important or what, what are the ones where, hey, don’t, don’t worry too much about it. You know, like, I’m assuming that they’re not going down to the very SKU level or manufacturer SKU field inside, you know, when we’re creating a GS1 barcode, but, you know, are is the most important thing the you know, what company we use to register with that we make it our brand or what, what is actually Amazon looking at when they’re verifying information from GS1?
Michelle:
So they have a lot of like proprietary scripts. So some of it I’m not too aware of cuz they do have their own algorithms, but the, the fields that they use from GS1 that they check on the database is your company name. So like, again, I’m gonna go back to the Coca-Cola example. Coca-Cola Company Inc. So they’ll look at your company name, they’ll look at your prefix or your license. Cuz at GS1 US, we also license single GTIN. So it could either be your prefix or even your single gtin. And ensure that that the identifiers you are adding to your listing match your range within your prefix that’s assigned to your company or your single GTIN. They do look at brand name, but again, they don’t collect that from GS1.
Michelle:
So they kind of marry it together and then use that brand name for a validation as well. And then going through the rest of the listing process, there might be some other errors that come up. Again, I think I told you, if you’re now then listing for a generic, it’ll check and see, oh, does it have a GTIN or not? You know, and it may throw an error or not. So there are some other checks along the way. And then of course, you know, they do all other checks not necessarily against GS1 data, but like, you know, you know, the product descriptions are right or, you know, they have other fields that they check. But from a GS1 perspective, it’s the company name and the license and oh, and the address of the company.
Bradley Sutton:
Now this has never happened to me, but I know I’ve heard or I’ve seen in like message boards or something where sometimes maybe there’s an error, you know, Amazon says, Hey, no, this is not your, your, you know, the right GS1 or something, or the right you know, UPC, you need to submit something to prove it is, or maybe there is something that you could submit. So what would I be going to GS1 and printing off or something to, to show Amazon that, hey, I’m legit.
Michelle:
So for each identifier, you’re, you license for GS1 you get a license owner certificate, so a prefix certificate or even a single GTIN certificate. So at GS1 us, you log into your my GS1 US account, print your certificate, and that shows your company name with your g your prefix and or your GTIN. And it also gives you we also assign a, what we call a GLN, a global location number, which is basically that that ties to that address and that submit, if you submit that into selling partner support, that proves your ownership.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Cool. Elizabeth here has a question. She says, can I keep the same barcode g gtin if I switch brands, keep selling the same product and rebrand it? Somebody had told me that I have to create a new login entirely with a new brand and get a new barcode. So it sounds like maybe she’s been selling, you know, let’s just say she’s selling this water bottle under, what is this Takea brand, right? and she’s still gonna sell this water bottle, but now she wants to, you know, to, to change it to select bottles in cor you know, select bottles brand or something like that. What responsibility does she have, if any, on the barcode side you know, maybe on Amazon, everything say the same, same ASIN and, and things like that. Does she have to do anything differently now that it’s a new brand?
Michelle:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So anytime your product changes materially so a brand name change would require a new gtin because you’d also think about it too, from a sales perspective and tracking sales. You would wanna know which brand sells better than the other. You could do that. But from a GS1 standards perspective, yes, as a product, if your brand changes, if an image on your package changes, if if the contents change significantly, if your net weight changes there’s a couple of other things, but you know, if even if you printed it in English and, and you also sold it in Spanish, you know, if you have two different types of packages, you’d want two different GTIN.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. We touched on this a little bit earlier, but what are some, you know, I know we touched on it last episode, but you know, things change in in a couple of years. What are the, you know, some common error messages that Amazon sellers are getting these days? As far as you know, when it comes to their, their UPC,
Michelle:
There’s like two or three as it relates to GS1 data. One of the first ones when you first go in to enter, like the very first question on the listing is what is your product identifier? And then there’s a dropdown, and it’s GTIN, UPC, EIN, there’s a couple others ISBN that one always confuses people because we’ve confused people. We call ’em GTIN s. But then you know, when you get a 12 digit, it’s actually associated to the UPC barcode. Again, go back to your Previ s episode. So if you’re entering the 12 digit, you’re actually supposed to select UPC instead of GTIN. If you have a 13 digit identifier that gets encoded to the EIN, select that one or the 14 digit is actually the GTIN.
Michelle:
So that one always trips people up because, you know, GS1 calls ’em GTINs, but then we also interchange them with UPCs and stuff. So that’s one of ’em. And then again, if it’s a GTIN hijacking that, that says this product already exists on your, on Amazon, but you are like thinking this is the very first time you’ve entered it, it’s probably a GTIN hijacking. So again, providing your certificate to selling partner support saying this is truly my GTIN. And they could help you clear that. We do find that if you write the words, especially if you’re submitting a case online, write the words GTIN hijack or hijacking the, their algorithm sends it to the proper queue. So that’s been a tip that we’ve heard works and we’ve heard also internally from the selling partner support team put that word in there and gets ’em to the right queue versus other words in your list, in your case. And then again, the, the generic that one kind of trips people up, but we’re, we’re hoping that that one will change here in, in the coming month.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. What are some other, you know, common questions that, you know, I, I think we hit a lot of the most common ones. And these are literally the, the questions that, that people are asking me about this. But are there any others that you’ve been getting that maybe I haven’t asked today that, that you think some of our listeners might, might have?
Michelle:
I think we touched on it initially, but again, you know, a lot of sellers start their journey on Amazon and just feel like that’s the only place they’re going to stay. But we always say think about growth strategy. So think about where you, your product may end up and it could end up on a store shelf. It could end up on another channel such as walmart.com or some of the others. So, you know, think about your barcoding strategy, your packaging strategy. We did hear I, I did talk to a seller a couple weeks ago about somebody who did not print their barcodes on their products and then all of a sudden they got picked up by Target and now they have to figure out how to redo all their packaging and they have like thousands of packages that they now need to put a barcode on.
Michelle:
So, yeah you know, think ahead, you know, she didn’t expect it, which was a great problem that she had, but you know, now she has to go back and print stickers and put it on her packaging, but change her packaging in the future. So so that’s one thing. And then you know, know, we’re also, like I said, we’re working with industry to move to that 2D barcode. So start investigating if you are using barcodes on your products, how that 2D barcode could be used as well, cuz it could be used for not just the point of sale scan. It now can inc include, include consumer engagement. It could in include traceability, so you could track your product back to source. It’s good for recalls. You put warranty information, there’s a lot you could encode into that 2D barcode. And so we’re hoping to see a shift in, in barcodes that innovation in barcodes over the next couple of years. So always we’ve got a wealth of resources at GS1. If you’re interested in going and innovating in your barcode we could help with that.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Well, let’s talk a little bit more about that. Especially being on the innovation side here, do you think that there might be a, a day where, where there’s gonna be a new standard instead of just you know, the, the, the typical, you know, barcodes that products have had for, you know, a thousand years not a thousand years, but, you know Yeah. For, for, for every hero. Like, like could we move to QR codes as being a, a new standard or, or some other kind of format.
Michelle:
So it’s, remember it’s not necessarily a new standard, so you’re still using that core set of identifiers, that GTIN it’s just embedded into a different type of barcode. So at the base of it, it’s still using the same standard. And you’ll still need to get your GTIN, it’s just encoded into a different type of bar barcode cuz that barcode, the 2D barcode, can carry so much more information than just that linear barcode. I mean, think about it, you could scan a QR code with your phone, whereas you can’t scan a linear barcode with your phone. So that’s where technology is going. And so we thought that the barcode should move with the technology changes and now a consumer can scan that barcode and find so much more information about it than just used for a price lookup at the checkout stand.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Any last words of wisdom or last strategies that you think the listeners need to know about?
Michelle:
No, I mean, I kind of talked about it, you know, just always think about growth, always think about where your product could end up. And you know, plan for, plan for success is what I always like to say. So yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Now one thing I do ask not along the lines of, of e-commerce here, but I’ve been asking almost all my guests here in 2023. This is my year of physical health, mental health, hobbies and stuff. Cuz you know, regardless of we’re selling on Amazon and we’re working at GS1 or whatever, you know, sometimes we, we get a little bit too much caught up in our work and we don’t remember to, to disconnect. So I’m just curious, what’s your, what’s your, what’s a couple of your hobbies? You know, mine is, is food and and travel a lot of it, but what’s some of your hobbies and what, what about your you know, you have any routine for mental and physical health?
Michelle:
I am an avid gardener, so most people who know me know that I love to, I guess, decompress in the garden. So but I’m not a vegetable gardener, so I’m an ornamental gardener. So I like to plant flowers and I like to. Yeah, flowers. Yeah. I can’t grow vegetables like the, the squirrels and the gophers and the birds eat everything. So I gave up on that kind of gardening. So I’m an avid ornamental gardener, so that’s where I decompress and have fun.
Bradley Sutton:
Unique ones in your garden?
Michelle:
I’m starting to get into herbs because you could also use them for cooking, so kind of on the edge of vegetables, but they’re also really they’re just different. So yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, well, if the zombie apocalypse happens might not be able to have a lot of food there, but you’re, you’ll have a nicely decorated place, I guess. Okay.
Michelle:
Be very loving.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, cool. Cool. All right, well, there you go. I like it, you know, no, no, two people have the same, the same hobbies, but, but the important thing, guys, if you’re listening, you know, every single guest does have something that they’re doing. You know, it’s important, you know, cuz there, there was a time where I probably couldn’t say that I did. And, and, you know, you work yourself, you could literally work yourself to death if you don’t have your own escapes True. So it’s important that everybody picks their own their own thing. All right. Well you know, Michelle, thank you so much for, for joining us again. And if people want to, you know, maybe they’re like, Hey, I didn’t get my question in, or I’m still curious about this. People wanna, you know, reach out to GS1 to ask some questions. How can they they find you guys on the interwebs out there?
Michelle:
Sure. So we’ve got first of all, our website is gs1us.org which has a lot of information out there. We also have a very robust YouTube channel, the GS1 US YouTube channel, which has a lot of great videos. We also do a couple of spotlights on small businesses and how they got started out with GS1 and some of the challenges they may have been facing. So those are some great business some great resources. We also do a bo a podcast if you’re interested in just all things supply chain. We’ve got a, the supply chain podcast, which I’m sure we could provide all the links for you. So those are some great resources.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Awesome. Awesome. Will I be seeing you at any upcoming Amazon events like Amazon Accelerate or anything like that?
Michelle:
I don’t dunno yet. I haven’t really I usually go to the Prosper Show. I think we saw each other at the Prosper show, but I don’t have anything planned at the right now for the rest of the year.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. All right. Well, I look forward to seeing you when I see you. And then if not, you know, next year we’ll definitely try and bring you back on the podcast and see what kind of cool things you’ve innovated there at GS1.
Michelle:
All right. Sounds good. Thank you.
In this special TACoS Tuesday episode in SSP, we dive deep into the world of Amazon PPC strategies with Melissa Davis, a Fiduciary Account Manager with Profitable Pineapple Ads. She has 8 years of experience in managing Amazon PPC. In this episode, Melissa shares her valuable insights on the main strategies for Prime Day. We also discussed the key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider when stopping a campaign based on your PPC strategy and answered other burning Amazon PPC questions that the community asked live. Melissa provides valuable tips on video ads, highlights what’s working and what’s not. Furthermore, she shares her top things to do when taking over a new account and sheds light on when it’s appropriate to consider DSP and what an acceptable minimum spend on DSP is. We wrap up the episode with Melissa’s advanced Amazon PPC tactics and her expert advice on building a solid Amazon storefront, whether you have one product or multiple. Don’t miss out on this insightful TACoS Tuesday Amazon PPC ask me anything episode!
In episode 474 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Melissa discuss:
- 01:59 – Melissa’s Background
- 04:26 – Main Strategies For Prime Day
- 06:23 – How To Control ACoS In A New Listing
- 11:05 – What KPIs Do You Use To Stop A Campaign Based On The Underlying PPC Strategy?
- 12:16 – Using Top Of Search Boost
- 13:10 – Insights On Video Ads, What’s Working And Not
- 16:06 – Top Things To Do When Managing A New Account
- 20:18 – When Should You Consider DSP?
- 21:58 – What Is An Acceptable Minimum Spend On DSP?
- 22:40 – Do We Need To Calculate Your Bid Price Or Choose Suggested Price?
- 23:52 – How To Determine What PPC Costs Are Going To Be
- 26:36 – Keyword In Exact-Match, Is It Better To Negate It From Phrase Match?
- 28:01 – Advanced Amazon PPC Tactics
- 29:54 – How To Build A Solid Amazon Storefront
- 33:30– Building Your Storefront If You Only Have One Product
- 37:40 – How To Get In Touch With Melissa Davis
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TranscriptCarrie Miller:
Today on the show, we have Melissa Davis from Profitable Pineapple. She’s a fiduciary account manager for them and has over eight years of Amazon PPC experience. Today we’re gonna be talking about Amazon Prime Day strategies for your PPC Amazon stores and the importance of running ads to them and video ads, and so much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
If you’re like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don’t have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I’m managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic For more information. That’s h10.me/adtomic.
Carrie Miller:
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. My name is Carrie Miller, and I’m your host today for TACoS Tuesday, which is our monthly podcast where we talk about all things PPC and answer your questions live. So let’s go ahead and get into it. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of TACoS Tuesday. I have a very special guest who we’ve actually never had before, so I’m really excited to have her. Melissa from Profitable Pineapple, she’s the fiduciary account manager. Thanks so much for joining me, Melissa.
Melissa:
Hi, Carrie. It’s really great to meet you. I’m super excited. Yeah,
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I just wanted to kinda get into, you know, your background and, you know, see who you are so that everyone in the audience can get to know you and yeah, so
Melissa:
Definitely. So I started on the Amazon platform about eight or nine years ago as a data assistant. So I started cleaning search term reports before I even knew what a search term report was. I’ve always been really good with spreadsheets and, and admin, things like that, so awesome. I’d started there with a fairly well known Amazon guru and just cleaning data for her and saving her some time and efficiency on that kind of stuff. And then I started asking questions and I started saying, you know, what are these reports and what do you do with them and how does this tie in? And what do you do with all these other things? And she was so great. She kind of took me under her wing, taught me everything that I know to the point that at like we were building courses and teaching.
Melissa:
So some people might recognize me from that. I was very blonde then though, like in 2018-2019. I was very blonde then, so maybe they don’t recognize me. But yeah, I used to run q and as for a pretty well known course that a lot of people have taken and really started just getting into all of the aspects of running an Amazon account from advertising to inventory, to issues with support and all of that. So really have like a, a pretty unique and well-rounded experience and skillset. But advertising has always been kind of my main focus. So I would say definitely expert level advertising, but gosh, if you’ve been on working with Amazon for as long as I have, I think you’ve probably seen just about everything. So in the meantime, you know, covid hit and everything kind of went a little crazy and so I’d, I’d gone off on my own and I was managing some clients just who knew me through the course and through some other things and just recognized me and that I started working with different agencies, doing some consulting, doing some account management really just depended on what their needs were.
Melissa:
And then most recently jumped on with profitable Pineapple. So I know that you guys have had Adam and Travis on before, so working with them and their team, and they are absolutely fantastic. So
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, I’m so excited. Yeah, they’re great. We’ve we’ve had Dr. Travis on here before, so yes I know lots of people really like his teachings. He’s been in our elite group too. So I wanna get started though, because today is Prime Day. So I wanted to you know, just see if you had any tips or anything that you wanted to talk about in regards to Prime Day. And if you guys have any questions in the audience about Prime Day let us know what PPC questions you have in regards to, you know, what kind of strategies you should be using, or if you have any questions of something that’s going on right now, go ahead and drop those in the chat.
Melissa:
Yeah, definitely. So first of all, everybody breathe because I know that Prime Day is like very, very exciting and nerve wracking and oh my gosh, it’s this big thing. Take a breath, everybody’s gonna be okay. The day is here and tomorrow will come too. Main strategies for Prime Day are really just manage what you’ve already got going. I really do tell a lot of people, you know, look at the history of your campaigns. Look at how they’ve done in the previous 30 or 60 days. Not necessarily not necessarily when they’ve announced Prime Day, cuz then you start to get into the, the shoppers are clicking, they’re adding to cart, but they’re waiting for Prime Day to purchase cuz they wanna see that, that discount bar pop up when they go into their cart this morning. I know I’m guilty of the same thing.
Melissa:
I do avoid ads though, you know, business ethics and things like that. But I, I looked in my cart this morning to see kind of what was on sale and what was going on with that. So I, I think that’s becoming a lot more popular than it had been previously. So one thing that we did see quite a bit across the board was a lot of clicks, higher ACoS with these weeks coming up to Prime Day because everybody’s just shopping and they’re looking to see, you know, what that deal’s gonna be then. So I like to base performance on like I would say like May 1st to the end of June. So looking at that, is your ACoS okay? Is it a, is a campaign that’s converting or a target that’s converting for you? Generally on Prime Day you know, you’re gonna see the same kind of thing. You’re gonna be able to convert then and get those sales coming through at that point. So that’s how I kind of trust my metrics in the system and trust my decision making in increasing budgets or, you know, increasing bids because that attribution’s so delayed, you’re not seeing exactly what’s coming in and those numbers look really, really scary right off the bat. So really looking at that history that history to see where you should be increasing those budgets and increasing those bids at to see where you’ve already won.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. So do you have like a calculation of how much you should increase the budget or do you think it’s a good idea to do it quite a bit?
Melissa:
Usually the well-performing campaigns, I do about 20 to 30% increase right off the bat. Like, I’ve got it ready to go. I know that I wanna spend more there because they are say 5%, 10%, 15% under the ACoS that I’m comfortable with. I already know that they perform well on their own. And then I just really watch ’em throughout the day. I log in, you know, every hour, every couple hours, what’s still in budget, what’s almost outta budget? Is it one of those really well performing campaigns or is it not? What are the metrics? It’s, it’s so many things. What are the metrics look like today? Is it something that’s never performed before? If it’s something that’s never performed well before, I generally don’t give it more budget than I’ve already had because then you’re gonna just see a higher a cost, you’re gonna see more spend come in on something that you don’t have any, you know history or data that’s gonna come convert. You’re just really testing on a day that has the highest traffic, you know, that Amazon has. And it can be a reward, but it’s a huge risk to try to get there and it’s certainly not guaranteed.
Carrie Miller:
Do you think there’s a certain placement, like do you think video ads do better on Prime Day? Is there a certain kind of strategy with just placement too or do you just go with what you already have?
Melissa:
I usually just go with what I already have except for maybe not necessarily video, but sponsored display. So one of the strategies that we’ve really kind of leaned heavy in for for Prime Day is sponsored display remarketing for views remarketing in the last seven and 14 days because so many people have been shopping lately and they’re viewing, they might be adding to cart, but maybe they didn’t, they just looked at it remarketing to them right now and showing them that you have a deal on it, they’ve already seen it, it’ll get that light bulb in their head to say, oh, I recognize that I was looking at that and now it’s 25% off or 50% off. Awesome. That’s what I wanna do. So for these two days, I, I really lean heavily into that seven and 14 day remarketing. And then the post Prime Day strategy that I’ve been using is to also run that same kind of remarketing, but only down to seven days and then keep a coupon on it.
Melissa:
It can be a little coupon, five, 10%, but show the customer that even if they didn’t purchase on Prime Day, they’re not totally missing out on a deal. So that’s something too that we are I’ve seen it work, but we’re testing it in a few different categories now. But you know, a lot of people are going after those really high ticket items on Prime Day whether they get ’em or not, they might feel like they’ve really missed out the days after, but they’re looking if you can get them on those remarketing cuz they’ve looked and not purchased, that’s usually where I like to go.
Carrie Miller:
That’s really smart to do the remarketing. I, yeah, hopefully everyone was listening to that and I actually noticed just in my own sales, the sales, you know, when we kept the coupon on, they continue to be kind of Prime Day numbers,
Melissa:
The, the next two days. Yeah. Yeah. You definitely see that velocity transfer over the next I would say probably like a week, maybe even 10 days. 10 days seems like a stretch, but through the weekend for sure.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. That’s amazing. Okay. It looks like we’ve got some questions rolling in. Yay. How can we control, this is from Asim. How can we control ACoS in a new listing?
Melissa:
So controlling ACoS in a new listing is going to depend on how much you wanna spend and what those CPCs are gonna do. You really want to decide what your strategy is for that. Do you want to gain organic rank on a couple of keywords and really go really heavy into those? Or are you trying to span that out across a larger number of keywords to really just see where you can get those conversions and testing? So the ACoS is going to heavily rely on what you’re willing to pay for that traffic and whether you have any data on whether it can convert. So I guess if it’s a new listing, you probably don’t have any of that historical data for targets, unless it’s like a variation or something similar to what you’ve already done. But I would definitely say controlling that spend is going to be your best way of controlling your ACoS.
Carrie Miller:
All right. Thank you. Yeah, it says his next comment says when we start PPC and a new listing, the ACoS is much too high. So yeah, I guess it depends on,
Melissa:
Yeah, so what I generally say is, you know, if your a cost is really high, your a and it really does depend on how much you’re spending. So you can, you can have a hundred percent AC oS on a $20 product when you spent $21. The ACoS is a little misleading at that point because you really haven’t spent that much money on it. And if you have, you know, a $2 click or a $3 click, or a $2 $3 CPC, you’re only testing that on, you know, eight to 10 clicks to try to get that conversion. But you really need to look at some more things within your listing. You know, do you have any ratings? Is it possible to add it as a variation to see those ratings to gain more traffic? There’s a lot of different variations or variables within there that that you can kind of play with a little bit. But I would definitely say if you’re trying to control ACoS, definitely control that CPC and what you’re spending.
Carrie Miller:
All right. Thank you for that one. Okay. Yeah. So what KPIs do you use to stop a campaign based on the underlying PPC strategy?
Melissa:
I guess I would have a, just kind of a follow up for that. Is it a ranking campaign? Are you trying to go after organic rank or go after knocking off specific competitors to gain some B S R? There’s a few different things in there. I generally always look at tACoS. I’m, it’s tACoS Tuesday, but I’m big on tACoS. So if I have some campaigns in there that I’m really trying to rank for organically, I’m okay with those being a little bit higher on the ACoS side. Because I’m looking for overall sales and I’m looking for those organic sales to come in. If it’s a really competitive keyword, you’re gonna have to spend the money on it to get up there. And that’s really the only way that you’re gonna start getting those sales if you’re using strictly Amazon advertising.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. Okay, so here’s another question. Have you ever run SP and SB campaigns for the same keyword at the same time?
Melissa:
Absolutely. A hundred percent. Yep. So essentially what you’re doing is you’re showing the consumer that you are incredibly relevant or you believe you’re incredibly relevant for this keyword that you are the best product there. So get that headline for that keyword, get those sponsored product spots. You could even do a sponsored brand video and take another spot within that page. Yeah, we’ve for sure done that for, you know, full search page domination.
Carrie Miller:
Awesome. okay. He has another one. Do you increase the bid by x percent in campaigns for TOS visibility?
Melissa:
Are we talking, I’m assuming we’re talking top of search boost or let’s see here for doing top of search boost? Yes. I, I use tap of search boost all the time. If you’re looking to try to get some more visibility, but you’re not comfortable really putting that CPC super high, the top of search boost percentage is a great way to do that.
Carrie Miller:
All right. Okay. And he said, yeah, the TACoS is the truth at the end. Very true. Yeah. The TACoS are very, very important. So I wanna talk a little bit about video campaigns, cuz I think a lot of people I, I get questions about this cuz they’re like, oh, I don’t have enough money to make a video and I don’t, you know, I don’t know how to make a video, but in my experience, very simple videos have done really well. So can you give us some insights on just video ads and what you think works best for video ads?
Melissa:
Yeah, definitely. Amazon has a video builder. If you don’t have any, any experience with it, Amazon has a video builder within campaign manager that they can do that. You can also hire it out. Amazon has their content creators and different things that you, if you wanna spend some money to do a really good one, you can certainly do that. But I really find that it’s the visual that brings everyone in and it needs to be something really quick. So you have to catch their attention right away because what they’re doing is scrolling and you wanna get ’em to stop scrolling so they could scroll right by, you know, if it’s a very, you know, blurred, there’s no words, it’s just like a product that’s like zoomed in and zoomed out. It’s probably not super interesting to what they’re looking for. But that’s why I like to say it kind of ties into the question before, if you’ve got the headline, you’ve got the sponsored product and then they see it again as a video that’s three times.
Melissa:
Now that they’ve seen it within the same search, they’re likely to click on that. So I would definitely say something that really punches out right away within the first couple seconds. You really wanna get their attention to get them looking at that. So that’s gonna be the most important part. I’ve, I’ve worked with quite a few clients that are, you know, they want the ad to tell a story and they want their ad to show them this and this. And I said, you know, the idea that people are watching 45 seconds of an Amazon ad is fairly low. I mean, some of them do, but most of them don’t. You, you really wanna just catch ’em right off the bat and go, oh yeah, that’s what I’m looking for. Have ’em click on it and then get that sale from them.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. Like maybe they put their top selling point right there or exactly
Melissa:
What
Carrie Miller:
Exactly,
Melissa:
Whatever that benefit is that your product offers that you think makes it way better than everybody else. Put it right in their face, put it bold, bright, and ready to go.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. Something I think could be a good place to look for inspiration is if they have it, TikTok is really good. Those viral videos that they have, the people who go viral, they usually have some really good attention getter right at the beginning and it’s the same idea. Just you gotta get something that, and they do a lot of product sales on TikTok. So really something to think about. Maybe add that kind of what is the best thing that my product has offer and what you know, what can I do to really stand out?
Melissa:
Yeah, definitely I feel like all of those all of those start with like, someone like yelling. They all start <laugh> somebody yelling about the issue that your product is gonna solve and then they get into how your product solves it. Yeah. I know I’ve caught myself a few times watching ’em and not even realizing that I’ve watched an ad Yeah. Until I’m like 10 seconds into it and I’m like, oh, they got me. They really did get me on that one. So yeah, they really do. Yeah. It’s something like right off the bat that really kind grabs ’em, shows them what your product can do right away. But I think you definitely see a longer viewability in TikTok than you do on an Amazon ad. People don’t quite scroll the same way on the Amazon ad as they do. But what I do love about the Amazon ad is how much space it takes up before they get to more of your competitors.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, exactly. For sure. Okay, here’s another question for you. Say you were to take over a new account. Okay. And and this new account they’ve not been doing well and they need some help to really boost their sales and their, you know, their TACoS are outta control. What are some strategies, what are the first things that you do to kind of, you know, when you take on a new account to really optimize it and just start improving upon the account?
Melissa:
Yep. So I first take a look at where they’re bleeding money. So what are they trying to spend money on where they’re not converting? What do those targets look like? Are they relevant? Are they not relevant? If they are relevant, why aren’t they converting? Tie that back to the listing. Take a look. Are they, is it in the title? Is it in the bullets? Are they indexing for it? You know, really looking at where those huge issues are right away and then stopping it. So we might need to get back to it later, but let’s make sure that for the time being, let’s run on what we know works. Rather than doing too much testing, I think that a lot of new accounts when they first get started, if they don’t have the knowledge, it is all a test, but you really need to like dial it back just a little bit because you are just throwing things out there, letting Amazon spend your money and not necessarily knowing where you’re gonna convert if you don’t have any historical data.
Melissa:
So I love using long tail keywords that are super relevant. They don’t have as much, they don’t have as high a search volume, but you can get ’em a lot cheaper. Start getting those conversions in and then expand from there to go a little bit broader with those. Get the organic rank going, get those reviews going. That’s where I like to start with maybe like a new listing. But making sure that within a new account that they’re also working on that too. I also like to look at their negatives. Have they added any negatives? Are they spending a bunch of money in auto campaigns that they ne they shouldn’t necessarily be? It’s another point that I would look at. And then I really start to optimize starting with their best seller. So everybody’s got a best seller or a number one product hero product that they have.
Melissa:
Start with that. And then really do really good keyword research, really good competitive analysis, making sure you have all the targets that you should be on and do that profitably. So if you can be a little bit more competitive where you wanna rank, put the spend there If you wanna test out some more stuff cuz they don’t have enough historical data, span it out a little bit. But I’ve had new accounts come to me, you know, with, they’re trying to go after 20, 30, 40 targets and I’ve brought it down to two or three and just said, this is where we’re focusing that money, this is where we know we convert. Let’s get that organic rank up and then let’s start expanding.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. So how quickly do you usually expand those keywords? You know, when you, you’ve narrowed it down? Do you just put them in different campaigns or how do you?
Melissa:
So I like to put them in different campaigns. So I like to, if if a campaign is performing poorly, I’m totally fine shutting it off. If it has really good history though, I really like to try to save it. So if it’s got good history, you know, let’s say you’ve got a manual campaign, it’s got all exact keywords in there and there’s 10 keywords, there’s two in there that perform really, really, really well. Everything else is terrible. They perform at a good a cost, they bring in the most orders. That one I could save, turn everything off, pick the best seller and change that into like a single key phrase campaign. So just using that one for that I would save the history there, move the second one to its own and see how it does by itself. That’s really the best way for you to control the top of search, boost the product page, boost the budget, the CPC to determine how much you should be spending on each of those. So if you’re going for organic rank, that’s where I really like to push that in those single keyword campaigns.
Carrie Miller:
Wow. So you just have literally just one keyword in each campaign.
Melissa:
One keyword in a campaign per product. Cuz that’s really the only way that you can attribute the right sales to it or attribute the in the right metrics and decide if this is going to work for you or not.
Carrie Miller:
And when you expand out, are you doing more single word campaigns? Are you gonna add to those campaigns?
Melissa:
I’ve done both. So it really depends on how the product and how the account has taken to the single key phrase campaign. If it took a little bit to get it going, I’ll probably start another manual campaign with four or five keywords in it that I wanna test, see how those do in there and then start picking them out. One thing that I don’t do though is I’ll shut it off in there, but I never negative it. Like if it’s a good keyword okay. And it can pull from there. If you can get it cheaper in an auto campaign, get it cheaper in an auto campaign, you don’t need to put a negative in there as long as it’s still relevant.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. Very good advice. So DSP, I’ve had actually some people ask me, you know, when they should dis you know, move into SDP, they’re not really sure if it’s worth it or how they can really see if it’s working for them. So can you give us some insights on, you know, when you might wanna consider DSP, how you know it’s working and you know, what, what you should?
Melissa:
DSP is a big commitment. So DSP needs, it needs a good amount of spend to work. So I will say that right away. I mean, if you can commit to you know, the thousands of dollars that it takes to get DSP running, I’ve, I’ve personally tried to, in the last couple years, tried to run some DSP campaigns with an agency that we were working with with really low budgets like 500 or a thousand dollars a month. And they don’t work, they just don’t get the traffic. They should, they don’t get the conversions they should. You really need to be in a place where you can test that and you have the commitment for that spend. If you’re confident in your product that you can use that type of placement and use that type I would definitely do it cuz we’ve, we have for sure seen it be super successful where it’s appropriate. But it’s not a, it’s not a beginner’s game. That DSP is something that you know, you really need to get into. And just speaking from previous experience if you’re working with a DSP account manager, don’t be afraid to push back a little bit.
Carrie Miller:
Okay.
Melissa:
Push back a little bit. Tell them where you want your product to be. Tell them what your competitors are. Tell them where you don’t want your product to be or what, who your competitors aren’t. I know that some of the ones that we’ve done previously, we almost did them as like an entire campaign build and a spreadsheet and sent it over and we were like, this is the only place that we want to be. Please don’t spend our money elsewhere. Okay. So that’s, I mean that’s something that we have done before. It takes a little bit of a, an edge and a little push, but it’s certainly doable.
Carrie Miller:
What do you think the minimum spend should be? Just to give people an idea? Cuz I know you said definitely not 500 to a thousand,
Melissa:
Not 500 to a thousand. I’ve heard 10 K is a minimum for most. Okay. I’ve heard that. I’ve seen it work for five, but I would not, I mean, if you’re not willing to spend like two or three K at least and be prepared to not see super awesome results at that, I would wait until you can get to the point where you can do five or 10,000.
Carrie Miller:
We just started some DSP and it seems like it’s working, but our, our budget’s 5k, so Yeah.
Melissa:
Yep. I would say, I would say right around there is a comfortable spot to start. I would be worried about, about anything a little bit less than that. Yeah.
Carrie Miller:
That makes sense. All right. So we have some more questions here. Do you calculate your bid price or just choose something in between the suggested price range mentioned by Amazon?
Melissa:
Depends on how important profitability is for you and where you’re at in your sales journey for your product. If it’s a new product and you really need the, and you really need the traffic to get going, you’re gonna have to use that suggested bid price. If your margins don’t allow for you to be within that suggested bid price, all you’re gonna do is just like slowly bleed money over a long period of time cuz you’re really not getting a lot of traffic. You really wanna push out there and get out there right away to make sure that you take advantage of that honeymoon period that Amazon gives you right off the bat. So I would say at the beginning of the product’s life, you’re definitely gonna wanna be in the higher end of that suggested bid range. After you’ve been established, you have the reviews, you’ve got organic rank, then I start to figure out the bid price based on profitability and what we can do with that. That’s how, I guess that’s where the, the different phases that I usually go with are a very easy way. If you’re not getting impressions, a very easy way to find out why is to look at that suggested bid range. And if you’re under that low piece that, that very low excuse me, the minimum suggested bid range, that’s why you’re not getting impressions am Amazon doesn’t feel like you’re bidding enough.
Carrie Miller:
Here’s something a question like say somebody’s launching a new product and they’re not sure what the PPC cost is gonna be. Do you have a, you know, weight that you’re g you can kind of test that out or see what you should expect and whether or not you’ll be profitable with a product or?
Melissa:
Well, there is. So there is and there isn’t. So this is something that I have tested, but it’s not always true, but it does give you a really good idea of kind of how you can do this. If you’re brand new to Amazon and you’re saying, you know, I I just wanna figure out how much I’m gonna spend for what I’ve always said in the past, if you cap your spend, you’re gonna cap your sales. It’s always what happens if you’re gonna cap your spend, you’re gonna cap your sales. But what you can do is go into campaign builder, put the keywords in that you want to advertise on, add them to a a draft campaign, take a look at what those suggested bid ranges are, take each of those, multiply them by what you think you’re gonna convert on.
Melissa:
So are you gonna convert in 10 clicks, 15 clicks, 20 clicks? And then how much are you gonna give that per day? So looking at how much is gonna cost you per conversion based on the suggested bid range that they’re giving you. I usually just go off the mid range of that. Let’s say if I’m looking at a newish product, it’s probably gonna be like 15 to 18 because it doesn’t have a lot of reviews. It’s gonna need some more clicks to get going with that. Take whatever that is, multiply it by that and then say, okay, do I wanna give this enough to convert if this works, do I wanna give it enough to convert one time two times, three times a day? Cuz if you’re looking at 20 clicks 20 clicks for conversion, it’s a $2 CPC on average for the suggested bid range that’s gonna be $40 just to get you one conversion that that campaign is gonna have to at least have a $40 budget. Do you want more than that per day? That’s probably what it’s gonna take until that conversion rate starts to get better. So that’s kind of the formula that I use just in a, an estimation way cuz that’s gonna tell you what you’re gonna have to spend initially for those to get traffic. Yeah,
Carrie Miller:
That’s, I mean, I think, I think that’s the one thing that people forget to calculate when they’re calculating, when they’re trying to, you know start a new product or starting to sell on Amazon is they completely forget about the pay-per-click part. Agreed. And so I think
Melissa:
That’s a, and I think it’s like a, I think a lot of them come into it with a, oh, I only have to spend 10% of my sales to get there. And I’m like, but if you haven’t started yet, 10% is zero. So you’re gonna have to allot some money to get that going. Unless you have a magic genie of external traffic that’s going to build up your organic and you have an amazing email list and a lot of brand loyalty, you really need that, that Amazon PPC to help you build.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it’s an interesting, interesting thing that but that’s a really good strategy, so thank you for that. Yep. Somebody else, streets of Ontario says, if I have a keyword in exact match, is it better to negate it from phrase match? Why or why not?
Melissa:
I, if it’s a keyword that’s converted, I don’t negate it anywhere. If you’ve pulled it out of somewhere else search term report or something and you’ve put it as exact match, I always leave it because you might get it cheaper in that phrase match campaign. It might pull a little bit cheaper from there than the exact match. And you want the sales regardless of where you’re gonna get them, because the ranking is gonna help you either way. So that’s not something that I do if I am, if I have a keyword that’s an exact match that’s not converting, if it’s relevant but not converting, I might negate that as an exact match in that campaign. But if it has something within there that is not ever going to be relevant, then I would do that. Just that word as a phrase match. So I’m not negating everything else in that phrase that’s relevant for mine.
Carrie Miller:
Very good. All right. If I cannot afford the suggested lowest bid price for a keyword, even though that might be relevant for my product, I have to skip this keyword and need to find I e a cheaper long tail keyword. Yes,
Melissa:
Correct. Yes. So I would do that and then I would start going after competitors that have the same price range as you within $5 ish. And then also go after about $5 ish and a lower star rating than you have. That’s usually how I kind of niche down competitors when I’m going after product targeting.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. Very nice. All right, so I wanna get into some advanced tactics. Yeah. So what are some advanced tactics or features within Amazon PPC that that experience sellers can leverage to gain some, you know, competitive advantage? They wanna just take it to the next level. What, what do you recommend there?
Melissa:
I I really do recommend these single key phrase campaigns, these single keyword campaigns that you really wanna dominate on. Give them enough budget, go after them, take it with the top of search if you know you’re converting on them. I mean, really, really go after that, really win that over and then take over multiple spots once you have the historical data. I know that a lot of people there was a, there’s a Twitter thread that went around I think about two years ago or a year ago that I swear 50 people sent it to me and they’re like, you have to see this, this thing is crazy. He shut off all his Amazon ads and I said, well, yeah, and I won’t name who it is, but
Carrie Miller:
Oh, I remember this, this thread. Oh yeah, yeah.
Melissa:
They’re in, they’re in Target and they’re in Walmart and they have their own website and they have all of this brand loyalty following where they already have the organic rank for it. They don’t need their PPC. Yeah. This is not applicable to 99.9% of sellers on Amazon. Yes. Like the fact that they put that out there. And then I had all of these, you know, there mid-age accounts, great products and everything, but I was like, this will not work for you. Everything in your account will die if we shut this off. Yeah. I, I don’t suggest going after things like that. You really need to look at when you’re taking advice or strategy advice from another buyer. Look at the level of their account, look at their category. Like if it’s something similar to that, that’s just crazy. But I really believe, you know, if you wanna take over a keyword and you want that organic rank and you wanna own it sponsored brand headline, really get the the sponsored products top spots there, sponsored brand video at the bottom. They also have the sponsored brand video that’s driving to the storefront now. Have you seen that yet? That’s taking over the headline search.
Carrie Miller:
Oh, I don’t, I don’t know if I’ve seen it. It
Melissa:
Is so sponsored brand video has opened up to storefront traffic, so you can drive to the storefront now rather than the product detail page. These are appearing in place of the headline ads. So they’re actually the first thing that you’re seeing to go to the store, which is super interesting because it’s not showing three products now, it’s just showing the one with the video, but they are going to your store so they can see your whole catalog. I really foresee Amazon starting to expand their store coverage and ads for the stores. I think it’s gonna be really, really big for brands. So another strategic thing you do is really make your storefront unique, authentic, and all about what you’re offering. I think storefronts for the most part are somewhat looked over at the beginning Yeah. Because it’s not a, they really wanna get that product out there and get that product sold. But the storefronts I think are gonna start becoming a lot bigger cuz you can drive so much more traffic to them. You can get those multi-unit purchases, you can get repeat buyers once they really like your stuff. And it’s really a good way to show your consumer that you are an authentic brand, you care about your products and really kind of portray that through your visuals and your creatives there.
Carrie Miller:
Wow. Do you, can you think of like a, a store that you’ve seen on Amazon that you think was really good example? I’m always trying to look for a good examples of of stores. Sometimes I go to the store and it’s like one little picture and maybe one tab and then others, they have this beautiful, you know, these beautiful infographics and videos and I can’t think really like a website.
Melissa:
Yeah. I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but I will tell you that if you just put I, I mean I could, I could come up with some terrible ones, but I could just give you examples of what, of how they build them. Yeah. The product grid, don’t use the product grid. The product grid is terrible unless it is at the bottom of the page. So if you’re, if, if you’re just trying to add variations to the bottom of the page, go ahead and put those down there. But what you really wanna do with your store is on that first page, highlight your hero product, highlight your number one seller, and then really give the creatives and the images like the chance to sell that. It’s like have it be used in real life. Really put the consumer in the situation where they would want or need that and they can see themselves using it. I think that’s the biggest thing, rather than just using the, the product square and it’s this, and here’s the price and that’s it. And you can scroll through the product images, but those really don’t tell you anything. I really think like expanding those lifestyle images, showing the product in use is huge for these.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. and yeah, it’s, it’s interesting because you can actually do the stores yourself and it’s pretty easy to just kind of, they have these little templates that you can literally Yeah. Drag and drop and and do it, do it yourself if you want to start trying things out. And then you can get, you know, some graphic designers from Fiverr and to help you out. But definitely it’s such a great place to really showcase your, your products and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I agree with you. I think that people have been kind of sleeping on that and a lot of brands that I’ll click on their brand name, it’s literally just either their products.
Melissa:
Or they’ve not even built storefront and it just takes you to like the, the search for their brand name
Carrie Miller:
Or it doesn’t even take you to their products. It’ll be all their competitors’ products when you click on their brand name too. Absolutely. So we haven’t done a store. Yeah. It’s not too difficult to, to put together a store, but you know, a lot of people do hire professionals to do it, but I personally did our store myself. Yeah. So it’s definitely doable.
Melissa:
I built many a store.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. And people are always like, oh, how’d you learn? I’m like, I just, you gotta get in there and just do it, you know? Yeah. It’s not,
Melissa:
The best way to do it is look at your competitors and see who you like, or even not your direct competitors, but look for a really good brand name of something that you purchase yourself. Something that you, like, a product that you trust or a brand you really trust. What does their storefront look like? Yeah. You don’t, maybe you don’t necessarily wanna copy obviously their images, but if you wanna look at their templates and the way that they’ve got it built out, and if it looks really eye appealing, it’s super easy to build with an Amazon. I mean, Amazon, yes. For as big as it is, it is very simplistic tech-wise when it comes to building out stuff.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah.
Melissa:
Fueling out one product, build out subpages for different things that you’re using for it. The other piece of this is your virtual bundles. Make sure your virtual bundles are on the appropriate pages for those products, because you can use those in sponsored brands too. As long as they’re in your storefront. They’re not in your storefront, you can’t use ’em. And that’s the only place you can get ads for those virtual bundles right now.
Carrie Miller:
Oh wow. That’s oh, somebody Shivali, she’s a Helium 10 girl that I work with. Awesome. She’s an evangelist as well. So she says, true I’m launching a new brand at the moment and looking forward to conveying brand values through the storefront, hoping it hits home with consumers. Yeah. I do think it is.
Melissa:
So, I think it’s huge and I think showing the consumer that it’s not a that it’s not necessarily Amazon that they’re buying from, because I, that’s really the general assumption of most consumers is that they’re buying from Amazon and they’re buying from, you know, Jeff Bezos and that’s what it is. But it’s a lot of small businesses, so every time, you know, I have friends and family who talk to me about Amazon and you know, they’re like, oh, Amazon did it. I’m like, you bought this from a private seller. Like, I know you don’t realize that, but this is a different company. Amazon didn’t produce this thing, they’re not running this, you are buying from like, an actual small business, whether you realize it or not most of the time. Yeah. So yeah, just trying to like, I’m always trying to like educate people and see if I can get them on board with understanding a little bit more of it.
Melissa:
Same here. But yeah, it’s it’s, it’s a different beast in Amazon and the, the overall assumption is that it is just Amazon. It’s a big store and there’s not a lot of personality to it. So if you can convey those things through your storefront and through your a plus content and all of that, yeah, it’s super helpful because I think it really makes a connection with the consumer where they trust your product and, and they know that they’re getting something of quality or they know that they’re working with people, you know, who care about what they’re doing.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. I think that’s really key. Is it, it conveys quality because when I’m, I shop a lot on Amazon. I buy most stuff off of Amazon, and when the listing doesn’t have that added kind of the a plus content or just nice photos, I don’t really trust that it’s a good supplier because, you know, really if you really care about your products, you’re gonna put effort into putting mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, into your photos, into, you know, what you’re doing on your listing and on your storefront. Yep. So
Melissa:
I usually assume, like if they haven’t put that much effort into it, I generally assume it’s mass produced and it’s probably of low quality that they’re just trying to put it out there to sell a high quality of it just to get them going. I really love, and, and working with Amazon for as long as I have, I shop a little bit differently than most. But I really think that like, you know, if you go to a, if you go to, if you’re shopping or something and you’re going to a small boutique, you’re looking for stuff of quality, you’re looking for something that you’re not gonna have to take back or send back. So I think that that’s kind of rolling over to Amazon a little bit more than it was previously where everybody used to be looking for deals. Don’t get me wrong, it’s Prime Day. Everybody’s still looking for deals, you know, you have to price competitively. But I think that you can really, you can really showcase your authenticity and the quality of your product in the different avenues and channels that Amazon is providing to you, which I think is awesome. So yeah, ABC content storefront, your video ads, they’re really giving you more opportunities to show a customer who you are.
Carrie Miller:
Yeah. Well, and on this storefront, that’s where people can follow you too. For Amazon posts. So you can even, you know, reach them even more. So, that’s pretty much the end of our show, so I just wanted to say thank you again for coming on. If somebody wants to get in contact with you because they really liked what you know, you’ve been saying on here. How can somebody contact you after this?
Melissa:
So you can contact me melissa@profitablepineapple.com, so that’s my email address. It’s the best way to get ahold of me. I work with, I’ve been working with Profitable Pineapple Team for a few months and I’ve known quite a few of the members now for years. So if you wanna get ahold of me, that’s probably the best way. If you have any follow up questions, I’m always happy to offer it. One of my passions with working with Amazon is really helping consumer or helping sellers build their businesses and seeing success with it. Having all of this knowledge is no good to me. I don’t have a brand, I’ve only ever helped people build theirs. Oh, okay. So yeah, that’s, that’s really my, my passion for working with Amazon is helping people navigate all of that and learn as much as they can through what I’ve already learned.
Carrie Miller:
Very good. Well, thank you. So your email address and then are you on LinkedIn at all or?
Melissa:
I am on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. I think it’s my, the last part of it’s like melissa.davis515. But it’s Melissa Davis. You can find me on LinkedIn too.
Carrie Miller:
Okay. And thanks again everyone for joining and asking questions and and thanks again. Melissa and another person said he appreciates you too.
Melissa:
It was great to meet you. And thank you everybody else for coming on. I much appreciate the questions. Yeah.
Carrie Miller:
Nice to meet you and we’ll see you later.
Melissa:
Sounds good.
In this episode, we cover the latest news in Amazon and the E-commerce industry. This week’s breaking news includes results from Prime Day, how the UPS strike can affect your business, and more!
In this exciting episode of SSP, we had the privilege of sitting down with Farhan Huda, he is part of an incredible company that is on track to become the first-ever 10-figure seller that we’ve had in this show! Join us as we dive into Farhan’s captivating backstory, their brand called Utopia, and his manufacturing experiences in China and Pakistan. We also discuss how they reached the impressive 9-figure mark and their journey towards 10-figures. Farhan also shares his valuable insights on avoiding problems with Amazon, their criteria for successful products, how they’re staying competitive in crowded markets, and strategies for success. Don’t miss out on Farhan’s top strategies for newer sellers and his 60-second tip that could transform your business. This episode is a must-listen!
In episode 473 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Farhan discuss:
- 01:25 – Farhan’s Backstory
- 03:22 – Talking About Their Brand: Utopia
- 05:17 – Manufacturing Products In China And Pakistan
- 11:49 – Hitting The 9-Figure Seller Mark & On The Way To 10-Figures
- 12:53 – How To Avoid Problems With Amazon
- 15:30 – “Every Household In The US May Have Bought Our Product”
- 16:20 – How Often Do They Launch Products?
- 17:26 – Are All Their Product Launches Successful?
- 18:45 – Their Criteria For Successful Products
- 20:08 – How They Stay Competitive In These Product Categories
- 22:09 – 9-Figure Seller’s Top Strategies For Success
- 23:56 – Selling In Walmart.com
- 24:37 – Utopia’s Top Marketplaces Outside The US
- 25:23 – Should You Consider Manufacturing Products In Pakistan?
- 27:23 – Farhan’s Hobbies & Healthy Habits Outside The Amazon Grind
- 29:12 – Top Strategies That Newer Sellers Should Do
- 31:39 – Why Is There A Big E-commerce Boom In Pakistan?
- 34:24 – Farhan’s 60-Second Tip
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a nine figure Helium 10 user who is going to be talking about their story of their company. And if we have them back on the show next year, their trajectory might make them the first 10 figure seller to be on this show. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you a YouTube blogger, blog writer, course creator, or other kind of influencer or educator? Maybe you just have a network of people interested in e-commerce. Did you know that you can earn commissions of 25% for life? For everyone that you refer to Helium 10, we’ve got many partners earning hundreds, even thousands of dollars monthly in commission from Helium Ten’s partnership program. If you’d like to join our affiliate partner program, please go to h10.me/crushit and tell them you heard about it from the podcast. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. This is a show that’s completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a super serious seller here I believe you’re in Canada right now? Is that where you’re calling in from?
Farhan:
I’m based off of Canada,
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Awesome, awesome. So Farhan, welcome to the show. Where, where in Canada are are you at?
Farhan:
I’m near Toronto. Mississauga.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. How long have you lived out there in Toronto?
Farhan:
Oh, it’s been a while. I moved to Canada in 2003. So since then I have been in Canada, but I have been working in and out of US all along since I’m here. So I have been traveling quite a while. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Originally from Pakistan?
Farhan:
I was born and raised in Pakistan.
Bradley Sutton:
What part?
Farhan:
Karachi.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Been that’s my favorite food in Pakistan when I’ve been there is, is from Karachi. The chicken briani was, Oh my goodness. Amazing. It’s my mouth water, just thinking about it. Yeah.
Farhan:
Near the beach. And then, I don’t know if you have been to Toronto, but if you come, we have a lot of good Pakistani food.
Bradley Sutton:
One restaurant here in like, all of San Diego that, or at least that I know of. And so, yeah. All right. I, I’ll, I have another reason now to go visit Toronto. Now I’m assuming you went to university there in Toronto as well?
Farhan:
So I did my bachelor’s from karachi. Then when I moved here, then I upgraded my degree from University of Toronto.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, what did you study?
Farhan:
Computer Science.
Bradley Sutton:
Computer Science. All right. Now, upon graduation and getting your degrees, is that what you started you know, getting a job in and things?
Farhan:
Yeah. Yeah. So I, I graduated in a software, and then I worked for a few software companies over here. Then I started my own software company basically working as a consultant. And then my friend was having this startup or expansion of Utopia, basically. He was working in New York as well, and trying to set up Amazon business. And then he needed my help, so I joined them and then expanded from there.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, so about what year was this?
Farhan:
So that was 2014.
Bradley Sutton:
2014. Okay. Okay. So
Farhan:
Yeah, when I started helping Utopia. So it’s about nine years.
Bradley Sutton:
Did it start as an Amazon based business, or was it a .com business? Was it a you know, brick and mortar business?
Farhan:
So a little bit of story is that, so my friend started around in 2009, 2010 when he had some stock. So his dad had a towel business in Karachi. Okay. So when he retired, he moved to New York with him. To keep him busy, they imported few, few lots tried to sell on eBay, well before even eBay. They had a wholesaler they contacted, but they didn’t have good experience. So they tried to sell it themselves. So started with eBay and then for a few years did eBay, then Amazon popped up. They started doing Amazon as well. And then obviously eBay went down, and then Amazon picked it up.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. So when you joined the company, what did you join as, or what was your responsibility in those early days?
Farhan:
Early days, so I was in product management. We were adding more products. So initially I was doing part-time basically I was trying to figure out whether that’s gonna work out or not. So basically initially working on adding new product through Alibaba. Then we went to China, mainly Canton Fair few times between 2014 and 2016 added more product expanded the US business. And then between 2016 and 2019, basically we launched 2017 Canada and Europe. And then basically expanded over over there. And so me, from the beginning, I was in the product management. Then I grew from there took our other roles in supply chain, HR, procurement sales and whatnot. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the family business started in Karachi. Now, at that time, were they manufacturing only in Pakistan, or even at that time you were importing from other countries?
Farhan:
So initially it was towells only in in Pakistan. And then when it picked up, we saw some, some decent reserves from there. So then we started basically we are brand owners, so we manufacture only in our brand. So we were manufactured from China. So then we added other home textile product words like bed sheets, converters, pillows, curtains, you name it. So until 2018-2019, the other products we were doing from China, and in 2019 we started expanding our, our manufacturing facilities in Karachi and started slowly moving products from China to, to our own facilities. And now it’s about, I would say 80 to 85% manufacturing and in Pakistan, and rest is in China.
Bradley Sutton:
How do you choose what you make in Pakistan versus what you make in China?
Farhan:
So it was straightforward initially. Mostly the I would say stainless steel products. So we have, our bigger portfolio is home textile, but we, 20, 25% of our products are plastic based and cookware, stainless steel as well. So, so those were I would say we were, we didn’t have the expertise in the beginning, so, so we were doing those in China initially is still to date we are expanding our manufacturing capacity. The good problem we have is that whatever we manufacture, we, we import or buy ourselves in US and Europe and sell. So there’s always a challenge for the capacity. So if we wanna fill the gap, we want more inventory. So we still, sometimes we take some of the home textile goods from China as well, but mostly the kitchen products, stainless steel, although we are setting up our TNS steel and, and cost iron and product line in Pakistan as well. So the long run goal is to be independent and, and do all the manufacturing in Pakistan.
Bradley Sutton:
So the, the stuff that you get from China, it’s not necessarily, you don’t run the factory, you don’t have full control like you do in Pakistan, you’re just buying from
Farhan:
That is correct. So the main reason the business strategy was that. And that came into being around 2017-2018 other big sellers were coming on Amazon. Amazon was doing their own private label, so they were getting bigger orders from the vendors as well. So if you are manufacturing, let’s say from a bigger vendor as well, but they have multiple customers, so I mean, you are not higher up in the priority, and then you will face the supply chain challenges whatnot. So having your own manufacturing capacity, you have control for the manufacturing, supply chain quality and price as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Once you have a SKU that you’re producing in Pakistan or producing in China, I almost, I’m not sure if I understood correctly, but do you have backup factories at all? Like where sometimes you might make it at one place and sometimes you make it another, or once you have something made somewhere, a hundred percent of the manufacturing is at that factory.
Farhan:
So the goal is to have a hundred percent manufacturing of that factory, let’s say in Karachi and Pakistan. But if, if we are having some challenges in terms of, let’s say manufacturing capacity or some of the, let’s say the print items, right? We, we, we haven’t scaled up in our manufacturing. So, so, so part of this of the printed products on the Bedsheet side or on the, on the curtain side, we are still doing from China, because we have some, like, we are still setting it up in Pakistan.
Bradley Sutton:
But what I mean is like, let’s, regardless whether you’re making something in Pakistan or China, yeah. Like it almost sounded like you were saying you, you have like a backup. Sometimes the production is not enough, or Hey, this SKU is only made at this place, this SKU is only made in China, this SKU is, or do you sometimes, oh, man, we’re, we’re, we’re behind in Pakistan, so let’s switch manufacturing to–
Farhan:
Not like only in one location.
Bradley Sutton:
So that was why I was asking my question then, is like, that’s interesting to me because like, do you ever run into issues where, you know, the quality is a little bit different or customers notice that something is different, or maybe it’s just like the, the color is slightly off or anything like that when you’re switching back and forth between factories?
Farhan:
Yeah, yeah. So, so we would try to minimize that, but you’re, you’re right, sometimes the shades challenges are there. Quality. I think a lot of vendors or manufacturers, we are working in China. We are working for about 10 to 12 years, so they know what quality we like. And then we have a very, very strong quality team that do pre-inspections as well in China to make sure that quality is up to the mark. But yeah, on and off, we do run into challenges there sometime. And that could be from either side that one of the recent imports we did. And, and, and there are some, some bad reviews or in quality reviews are coming from there. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. Now, it wasn’t your product, but I, I was just thinking about that. And I ordered some I had bought a new, we, we, we bought a new sofa at our house, and then I bought these like, I don’t know what you call them, like sofa covers mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And then I just bought like, you know, four or five to test out over one part of the sofa, and we’re like, oh, okay, this is good. Let’s, let’s go ahead and buy the other four. And it was really weird. Like one of them, like, I know I bought the right color, but it was just slightly off. And I’m like, that’s kind of weird. Now, now I’m, I was too lazy to make a bad review and I just figured that nobody you know, my, it’s not so bad where my guests would notice, you know, but I’m like thinking like, Hmm, when you started talking about that, I’m like, huh, I wonder if whoever I bought this from, it, maybe it might have been similar. You know, they’re making, they’re making stuff at different factories and
Farhan:
Yeah, different locations, different manufacturing. And sometime it could be the different raw material or the way the chemical com compositions are even with the same factory when we make the darker shares like dark gray or black, even so in, when we are doing dying and, and, and other processes, sometimes those they, they can be a little different, right? We try to keep it exact the same, but, but it could be the raw material and, and other, other, other technical details. Yeah. Which could process with the difference of the shared, especially. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, you know, our mutual friend Denise told me that you, you guys are nine figure, you know, company. When did you hit the, the nine figure? What year did you hit the nine figure mark?
Farhan:
Around 20 16, 20 17? Yeah, I mean, we are on track of, maybe by next year we will hit the billion dollars. So wow.
Bradley Sutton:
On, on Amazon Marketplace sales or what, what
Farhan:
On Amazon only? I would say it’s around six 50. I was talking about as a, as a global utopia. Awesome. But mainly big portion is, is Amazon. So Utopia is a umbrella, long mentioned. We have few businesses mainly are around Amazon, which is on Amazon sales, but Utopia Industries is for manufacturing. Then we have Utopia for fulfillment, which is mainly for our logistics, for all the warehousing and delivery from in and out, from warehouse to, to how,
Bradley Sutton:
How about like Walmart and, and other marketplaces as well.
Farhan:
We have tried, Walmart is not that big. Ebay, we still do, but I would say still like one to 2%. We do have our own B2B side YouPay d.com, which is about two to 3%, but 95% of our sales e-commerce sales is mainly from, from Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, when you have an account that is doing hu literally hundreds of millions of dollars on, on Amazon, like to me, I’d be super scared, you know, cuz Amazon, as we know, just sometimes just randomly my Yeah. Suspended account, like have you guys gotten suspended at all? Or, or your account shut down?
Farhan:
Yeah. Yeah. We, we had few few nightmares like that. And, and, and most of them when, whenever we, we worked with Amazon. So for the last three, four years, we are their premium account. So we are in the top of the chain. So we have a premium account membership so we work closely with, with the, with that team. So, so probably you’re aware that on and off Amazon run their bot or, or some sort of a algorithm and then they start sending those, those emails that your account is at risk and whatnot. So we worked clo we worked closely with them, but yeah, few years ago, there was a time when, when they kind of for a few days actually our account was stopped, right. And then we worked with the team and it was enabled again, and then we kind of had an SLA with them.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean, those two or three days, you’re losing more than many Amazon sellers make in a full year. That’s crazy.
Farhan:
Yeah, it was a million dollar multimillion dollar loss. Right. Wow. But then we work with them, we had an SLA and then now even if we get, it’s not at the account level, it’s usually at the product level. And, and, and most of the time, the, the premium account team, they resolve our issue right away. Like I would say the last month we had one of those emails, I think a lot of sellers got, got those emails. So I just called the guy and then he was able to re have, have it removed more.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Wow. That’s, that’s kind of crazy. Yeah. I’m looking, I’m looking at your, your, I was just looking at your, your main page on on Amazon here. And there’s, you know, you could just see some of these skews, like this is not the full, you know, just one skew 20,000 units. I mean, you’re selling like literally thousand units a day, onal for, for some of these, these, these products. And it’s just really, really impressive. And I just noticed that while we were on the phone, I was looking just to make sure that betting or that, that, that that throw wasn’t bought from you. But I just happened to, you know, I went to my orders on Amazon and I, I typed in Utopia mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and sure enough, in 2022 I, I did buy some cotton washcloth. So if you guys are listening out there, check your Amazon orders, look for Utopia and see if PR probably 50% chance you’ve bought some one of the their products. In the past.
Farhan:
We have saying in our company that at, I mean, every household in us have at least one of our products, especially our bedding products, and we claim that we are like number one online bedding sellers in, in us. So we have been studying, if you see batch years, you will see reviews and then all that from there, you can see how many years we sell every
Bradley Sutton:
Day. Not exactly what you thought you’d be able to say in 20 years that when you graduated with computer science degree, not really that you’re gonna have a a home product in every household in North America.
Farhan:
No, I wasn’t even, I, yeah, I never thought of I, I would be doing that. I would probably, okay, I’m on the software side. I’ll probably make some, some products or work for a company. Like, I don’t know, Facebook was not a dead time, but Google and whatnot, and then probably having a startup and whatnot. But I mean, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Now how often, you know, do you guys, how often do you guys launch new products? You know, very often you just kind of stick to your bread and butter, or are you just constantly trying to find the next, you know, new
Farhan:
Very often solutions? We have dedicated so we have a big product management team, which, which looks after all the marketing, pricing, strategy and whatnot. And within those so we have 11 product teams out of two are dedicated for the research and development. So we have a process like every week we have, we are shortlisting products adding new variants and working on new products as well. So I would say in a given year, we, especially like last two years after Covid, we have been launching every month, tens of tens of product new, new categories as well, obviously in the diff same similar genre, home textile and in home and kitchen. But and a lot of products are, are, are, are being researched and, and in the last phases of launching as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Now do you, you know, because you have such strong, a strong brand and so much traffic and things like that, are all of your launches successful or sometimes you launch a product and you’re like, Nope, this is just not gonna work out. We’re gonna have to cut this.
Farhan:
No, we, we had some bad experiences in 2018, 2019 where I think that was not the right time. We tried to introduce some products, some electrical products. We were going out of our comfort zone, I would say or different genre. And then we did some baby pros as well, and even home, home and Kitchen Pro as well. And, and I think we were in that not that mature in terms of launching in 20 18, 20 17. So at that time, I would say our, our success was 15 to 20%, but nowadays for the last, I would say 12 months it’s, it’s easily 70 to 80%. So still, I would say 20, 30% of the product doesn’t work out. We try, we give them each product launch at least couple of cycles, two to three cycles. When I say cycle, it means that delivering decent amount of inventory to Amazon so six to 12 months, and after 12 months of a certain group launch we review and see whether we want to continue that or, or not. But
Bradley Sutton:
Well, what’s your criteria? Like what, what determines successful versus unsuccessful? Just profitability or a set number of units that you want to do?
Farhan:
Profitability is, is one thing, but I mean, for the first six to 12 months, we don’t look for profit, right? That’s part of the marketing strategy. So we look for how, how the customer is reacting to it, what are the reviews? If the reviews are 4.7 plus, we are accumulating reviews at a certain pace. So we are selling probably, you know, that one to 2% buyers give you reviews. So if you’re selling enough units, so you’re generating less in first year, you have 300, 500 reviews, good reviews and then you see the potential as well that where you can grow in terms of profitability wise and whether you can take the best seller or not, because where we are the size of, of the company, we are, we only, well, we mainly look for the best seller.
Farhan:
If we can get a best seller for that particular rescue or, or, or the group, right? If that potential is not there, if you’re not getting a good review from the customer, we still don’t decide to stop it. We, we see why customer is not liking it, whether it’s the quality, whether there’s the feature or is the U s p that’s why it’s not popular that we can improve. But yeah the criteria is to, to get the best seller, good reviews be on the top first page organically for sure. And then, then eventually making the profit on it.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, traditionally, you know, some of the categories you’re selling in are, are some of the most saturated, you know, most competitive categories out there. So are, are you, is it hard to stay profitable? Like, like are you having to, to play the price war game or because of your brand awareness, you can come in at a higher price point than maybe some of the newer Chinese sellers or, or things? Yeah. Like that and what’s your strategy there?
Farhan:
So, so for the last two years, it gets very, very price competitive. But for us, I think the main advantage is that we were always very price competitive. We work on volume rather than having a bigger margin on each, each unit. Right. And, and that’s why when we did our manufacturing and we leaned it, so we are vertically integrated, so we try to make our manufacturing cost at minimum and, and, and to keep the profit margin reasonably not very high so that we can give that advantage to the buyer, right? And, and then from, from from, because we were, we have some early seller advantage as well. We have been selling for, for last 10, 12 years. So, so the products they are there, which are mature, adding more variations to that or related product, they pick up very well when we do, yeah.
Farhan:
New launches. Then through our marketing strategies, like different strategies, selling on the 50% loss and then, and all that coupon strategies, deal strategies, we, we bring a product to a certain level, like first page or close to the best seller, and then we, we focus on, on the profitability. But we don’t, we don’t do like very high margin on, on any of our product. Our product, if you see like converters or pillows or even hangers they’re very price competitive as compared to even Amazon Basics. So because our competitors are like bigger giants, Amazon Basics and <inaudible> and whatnot. So, so, so we, we keep our price very competitive.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, what, what are some of your you know, let’s talk, you know, some strategies, some unique, some things that you, you think you do are unique. You know, you’ve already talked a little bit you know about, about your, your, your strategy here, but what you know about launching things, but, but what are some other strategies, whether it’s, you know, reviews, whether it’s branding, whether it’s packaging, whether it’s, you know, logistics. Yeah. You know, when you get to this level, I’m sure you’ve, you know, have a few tricks up your, your sleeve. So what, what are some things that you think you’re doing that maybe the majority of Amazon sellers might not be?
Farhan:
Yeah, obviously I, I won’t be sharing the core, core secret. Secret,
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah, sure. Right? Yeah. But please show me all of your SOPs and let, let’s share it with the world
Farhan:
<Laugh> for sure. But on the high level, obviously, your product needs to first satisfy the customer need, right? So, so what’s your product? Whenever somebody’s launching a product, what are their U s P? It needs to be price competitive, because what you see sells, right? So your, your pictures, your, your videos should be up to the mark. You should do PPC marketing. It goes upfront, but to be competitive, obviously the packaging you mentioned, because if you’re doing fba, it goes with the volume and, and, and, and the dimensions as well, right? So your packaging needs to be accordingly. So it’s, Amazon won’t charge you too much for the FBA fees. Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm. And, and, and then, then the quality of the product and how, how you’re doing your, your marketing through the deals, through the coupons, through through keyword marketing. Obviously this is one of the main, the ppc you need to learn that art and, and, and you need to be on top of it. Amazon changes their algorithm, not very often, but, but, but they do change it often, right? So you need to be well versed about that, so, and then change your marketing strategies accordingly.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Now when you say, Hey, Walmart hasn’t worked out, do you just like, give up on Walmart completely, or you still just sell there? Just don’t put much focus on it?
Farhan:
We, we still sell. So we, we started on Walmart around 20 18, 20 19, actually, 20 18, 20 19. We tried a lot of platforms. We tried jad.com, we tried sharers, we tried Target, we tried Walmart, and then we said, no. I mean, our, I mean, it could be beneficial, but they’re way behind in terms of our revenue and, and, and return on investment. So, so we focused on Amazon. Recently for the last six months, we are still doing Walmart. You will see few of our products who are there, there are a couple of guys looking after that, but the focus is, is, is very low.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Okay. Foreign marketplaces what’s num number two, three, and four for you as far, obviously, you know, USA is number one, but for foreign Amazon marketplaces, what, what’s some of the top for you
Farhan:
For us Europe and Canada? So Canada, in terms of revenue, I would say is, is around eight to 10%. But the profitability in Canada is very high interest. Profitability is, is around 15 to 18% uk. We sell all across uk, Europe in Europe, we have France, Germany, Spain, Italy. So if I do combination of all I would say in terms of revenue, 70% in us, 20% uk, Europe, and 10% Canada. But profitability ratios are different, obviously.
Bradley Sutton:
So, I mean, it makes a lot of sense that your company, you know, manufacturers a lot in, in Pakistan, obviously, you know, the company started there. But for, for anybody, you know, whether somebody’s from Pakistan or not, you know, there are certain perhaps products that you might suggest that, hey, you know, you probably should look at at, at Pakistan as opposed to China. Like, I, I, I agree with you, like, Hey, maybe stainless steel. Yeah. You know, unless you have your own stain, you know, like, like that’s probably, you know, good just to be in China and plastics and, and stuff like that. But would you say anything related to textiles is better to start in Pakistan or only certain kinds of, of textiles? Or how would you suggest to somebody who’s, who’s looking to get into a new niche and they’re like trying to decide where they’re gonna source their product?
Farhan:
De depending on, on, on the products itself, right? But I mean, home, home textile, if you’re doing any home textile, gu a lot of bigger retailers like Walmart, target, they’re importing from Pakistan, they’re bad shoes, they’re comforters their pillows. So, so the home textile not in Karachi, but even you go on the other province, Punjab, faba site, you have a lot of home textile manufacturing units over there. Spore goods are really good. Some of the dental equipments like FD approved dental equipments for, for dentistry and, and operations and whatnot. We do our cosmetic care products. We have utopia care brand so like scissors, cuticle, nis and whatnot. We do from, from from Pakistan as well. But yeah, any, any of the home textile good. I, I think in terms of quality and price competitiveness Pakistan is, is very good. Garments, even jeans related products they are being manufactured in Pakistan, and, and you will, you will find a very good quality I think in that region, like Bangladesh, Pakistan, the cotton, the quality of the cotton is really good. So, so those, those part sounds really good if, if they’re doing the justice with the manufacturing and, and, and the quality control.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, we’ll, we’ll get back into you know, the, the, the Amazon strategies in a couple, couple minutes here, but one, one question I ask a lot of, you know, lately the, my guest is completely non, non entrepreneurial related, but it’s important, I think because, because, you know, I, I had health issues last year and, and as entrepreneurs sometimes we don’t know how to, you know, balance, you know, work, work and life. So just, I’m just curious, number one, what are some of your hobbies that you do when you want to get a, you know, step away from, from Utopia? So what, what’s your, what’s your opposite of utopia your, your personal utopia, and then also what are some of your, your habits, your healthy habits, like whether for mental health or physical health, like, you know, gym you have Yeah, yeah. You know, sports that you do. Go ahead.
Farhan:
Yeah, so, so first thing is, I mean, I, I have been playing cricket. I don’t know if, you know, there’s a sports like mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, baseball, cricket, it’s very popular in, in that region, Pakistan or England as well. So I still play that that’s the one thing I told my wife and we were getting married that I, I can’t leave cricket behind, so I still play in the summer, in the winter, obviously I play indoor in the summer I play outdoor cricket, right? Okay. Other than that I like biking and hiking. So in summer with, with my cares or with my friends, I go for biking and hiking. So that keeps for, for my mental health and whatnot. I have noticed that it’s very working well for me, if I, if I sleep early around 10, 11 and wake up around 5, 5 30, so I get my, my own time like without, with family and whatnot I get a few hours in the morning before kids wake up, and then in the night as well, I get a proper healthy sleep. So that, that’s working out very well. So that, that’s what keeps my, my mind at peace as well. And I think physically healthy as well, doing gym or just running in the morning. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Okay. All right. Back to the strategies, I’m just curious, you know, you have a lot of experience on, on Amazon now, obviously, you know that the average person who’s just starting or maybe, you know, smaller company looking to expand, they can’t just use the same strategies that you, you know, they, hey, let, let’s, you know, take a huge loss for six months and let’s do this crazy campaign, and, and, and let’s get up to 20,000 units of sales in the, in this, I mean, like, you know, that’s not the average person, but you know, in your experience, like what, what, what should the average person, you know, whether they’re new or, or maybe they are like a, you know, small seven figure company, you know, like what do you see as some of the the niches or, or, or some of the, the opportunity, you know, cuz my opinion, I’m sure you, you agree that some people say, oh, it’s too late to, to sell on Amazon. No, it’s not too late. You know, there, there’s still plenty of opportunity Yeah. On Amazon, you guys have your niche, you guys have your process of what you do. Yes. But when you’re, when you’re doing your, your thing, I’m sure you see other things like, oh, you know, if I was just by myself, I probably would’ve done I probably would, would get into this or, or something like that. Yes. What, what would you think for for people out there?
Farhan:
No, you are absolutely. I I think it’s still opportunity is there and it’s huge opportunity on, on Amazon all across e-commerce. And especially in e-commerce. Amazon is the giant, right? So opportunity is there for, for anybody who’s starting or, or a small scale as compared to 2012 or 2014, it is a lot of more, more sellers out there. But it’s still, if you, if you can find categories or, or products I will not recommend to go for a niche product because obviously you’ll have to do more marketing and, and you’ll have higher risk score there. So, so products which are everybody’s need, every household need or product where you see less competition, right? Pick those product don’t like start crawling first, then walking and running, right? So look for the products and target maybe 10 units a day, then 20 units a day, 15 units a day, those make those smaller wins. And then then increase your portfolio from there. Target maybe make your milestones in a way that in first three months of selling, you wanna be on the second page on your, your keyword search. Then six months you wanna be on the first page organically, right? Because that’s, that will take you for the long haul. Maybe in the first year, you can be on the first page organically. That would be a great, great success order there.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Cool. Cool. You know, I, I, I, I visited Pakistan a couple of times and seen firsthand the, the kind of like enthusiasm about e-commerce is crazy. Like I did, like, yeah, I don’t know, I’ve probably done five or six events and there’d be anywhere between 500 and a thousand people, you know, at each one. And what, how do you, how, how do you view the, the kind of like, you know, 10 years ago that wasn’t the situation, you know people weren’t into e-commerce. Like, what, what do you, what what’s going on over there? Like, like, why, why? So why all of a sudden is there this big boom, you know, like in the past, maybe people thought about, you know, getting, you know, help for their Amazon business, all right? Maybe Philippines, you know, maybe only India, you know, but like, why, why, why, why is Pakistan coming on so strong lately?
Farhan:
There, there, there are few, few success stories there as well. Utopia being one, right? When we started and we opened our first office in 2015, and we were having very hard time finding people with the e-commerce marketing experience, let alone Amazon, right? So what we did, we, we looked for the, one of the top a few top business graduates universities, and hired people from there and trained them, right? So over the course of, I would say eight, nine years there were a hundred of resources we hired and, and they moved out of utopia. They start, some of them, I know a few of them, Danish being one, they started their own entrepreneurship training centers as well. They help a lot of sellers as well. They work with other, they, they work with other giants, manufacturing giants or, or corporate giants were there to set up those training centers.
Farhan:
And at the same time, as I said Pakistan is a, a manufacturing, like one of the bigger strength in Pakistan is, is home textile and manufacturing. So those giants, they got entrusted looking into success of Amazon, success of Utopia and other like enablers and, and whatnot. And, and they, they came up with, with like a big, big, big initiatives to expand. And then on, on the talent side there has been a a lot of good talent. It’s just to show them direction, right? What I have seen when I, when I was kid, everybody was doing like, engineering and, and doctor and whatnot. But now for the last four or five years, it’s, it’s like there’s a boom of e-commerce. People know, and especially with the covid push, everybody’s going towards e-commerce or online sellings or social media, right? So, so on the talent side as well, people are very motivated and, and interested learning e-commerce and, and, and, and the good talent is, is working over there. And, and on, on the training side or on the university side as well people are, are, are taking initiatives and, and, and training those guys in the right direction as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Cool. Alright. Something we do on the shows LA last we call either the 60-second tip or 30-second tip. You know, you’ve been giving us different strategies and stuff, but you have something you can say that’s kind of quick hitting maybe 30 or 60 seconds strategy, Amazon or non-Amazon, whatever. Maybe, maybe it’s your own Briani recipe. You wanna, you wanna give in 60 seconds? I’ll let us know what, what, what can you tell us here?
Farhan:
I’ll, I’ll just say what I, I, I say my, my team. Whatever you guys do, just keep trying. If you’re launching a product or working as a virtual assistant in the beginning whatever field you’re working, try to be the champion of that field. Work. Go for the excellence, right? And then, or be the magnet and, and the other success and money will, will come towards you. So whether it’s been your marketing strategy or you’re making a ani, go for the go for the excellence of that particular task. And, and, and then things will come to you eventually. And then be, be persistent and keep trying.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, Farhan, thank you so much for joining us. And Incre, congratulations on all your success. We usually try and invite guests back, you know, maybe once per year, and who knows, maybe by, by the next time you’re on here, you’ll be our first ever 10 figure. Sure. 10 figure seller coming on here. All right. I really hope. Thank you very much and we’ll see you later.
Farhan:
Thanks for inviting Brad. Have a good day. Take care. Bye.
Welcome to another seller strategy masterclass episode! Today, Bradley walks us through Helium 10’s Listing Builder and Insights Dashboard. He shows us valuable information like how to get help from Chat GPT to start creating your listings inside Listing Builder, how the new Insights Dashboard can save you a lot of time by doing your work and delivering the results that you can view in an all-in-one dashboard! Plus, he shares an upcoming game-changing feature for Insights Dashboard that will blow your mind! Tune in and learn all his tips from these amazing Helium 10 AI-powered tools.
In episode 472 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:
- 01:25 – Welcome Back To Another Seller Strategy Masterclass Episode!
- 03:03 – How to Check If You Need Spanish Keywords In Back End of Your Listing
- 05:29 – How To Prioritize Your Spanish Keywords
- 08:39 – How To Get Help From Chat GPT To Create A Listing
- 14:16 – How To Compare Key Metrics vs. Previous Time Periods
- 15:42 – How To Measure The Results Of Your Listing, PPC, and More Tests
- 19:29 – How To View All Of Your Product’s Metrics In One Place
- 22:14 – How To See Product Performance at Parent Variation Level
- 24:24 – How To Have Helium 10 Do a Lot Of Your Work For You
- 26:00 – A New Game-Changing Feature That’s Coming For Insights Dashboard
- 26:29 – Get Insights For Competitor Changes And Activities
- 27:19 – What Kind Of Insights Or Notifications That You Want?
- 30:39 – How To Send Your Feedback For The Insights Dashboard
- 31:24 – The New “Profitability Down” Feature
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today I’m gonna show you things like how to use ChatGPT to help you get started writing your listing, and also some new ways that you can save hours and hours of work by having actually Helium 10 do your work for you and just delivering you the results. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image, or Amazon changed their shipping dimensions, so they had to pay extra money. Every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me/alerts. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And today we’ve got another edition of our Sellers Strategy Masterclass, which is a monthly series where I give you guys just strategy after strategy on how you can use helium 10 and other tools in order to help your Amazon and or Walmart business.
Bradley Sutton:
And so today we’re gonna be focusing on a couple of tools. Mainly a lot of this is gonna be powered by ai. And so the first thing we’re gonna be talking about is Listing Builder. That’s why I’m wearing my LB hat. Today. Let me know if anybody actually knows what team this comes from, but I consider this my listing builder hat. We’re gonna be talking about how AI can help you, especially when you have writer’s block. And then I’m gonna be going into a lot of insights dashboard, which is just like next, next, next level stuff, guys, like, I’m gonna be talking about some things today where it might be a process that, that took you or one of your employees, maybe three, four hours a week, some of these processes.
Bradley Sutton:
And now it’s gonna be like three or four seconds, literally, I’m gonna talk about that. And then I’m gonna show you a way that you can participate in kind of like helping the roadmap of Helium 10, because this is just the beginning. There’s a lot of stuff that we actually need your input on. So I’m gonna be showing you some cool things that are coming, and then how you can actually shape the direction that we’re gonna take some of these new tools in. So let’s go ahead and get started. The very first strategy of today is how to utilize Spanish keywords in your listing when you maybe have more than 10 keywords. Now, this is something that I think all of us know, right? Like, hey, we need to have Spanish keywords in our listing to be indexed for them because there are so many you know, hundreds of thousands of people, not millions of people, for example, United States who search in Spanish on the Amazon platform.
Bradley Sutton:
So, like, for example, maybe you guys are familiar with you know, Cerebro and how you can find different Spanish keywords. Like here, I just looked up a collagen peptides, what I’m looking at here and there was like 20, 25 Spanish keywords that had the word colágeno in it that all had like 400 or more search volumes. So in the collagen space, there’s obviously a lot of products that utilize Spanish keywords and they have a lot of search volume. So here’s how you can know what to do here, because you don’t have room to put every single one of these phrases in the search terms, in the backend of your listing. By the way, I know a lot of people, or some people talk about using maybe image alt text from an actual image.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m gonna check that to see if you are not indexed, if that will actually get you indexed. I’m not talking about A+ Content, alt image. I’m talking about like in the meta description of, of your images. Gonna definitely be testing that I think it helps, or I’ve pretty sure it helps on Google, but I wanna see if you can it take you from a not indexed to an indexed state on Amazon. One thing that I’ve tested extensively and never have had much success on is doing that in the alt text of the actual A+ Content. You know, I’ve tried that not many times, like I’ve tried it like 13 or 14 times where I take a word, be it Spanish or be it another keyword that I am not indexed for, all right?
Bradley Sutton:
Not searchable on Amazon and put it only in the alt image text for the A+ Content, and then check like a few days later in my index and I can’t get it to work. Now some people might maybe just stuff it completely and then maybe have some success getting some keywords indexed. I wouldn’t do that in the first place. Even if it did work personally, I would not put Spanish keywords or just, just or keyword stuff, those alt image parts of A+ Content because it’s kind of against Amazon terms of service, first of all, because it’s, that’s meant to be a section that is for like blind people or people who use screen readers and things like that. And that’s just not even that’s just not cool I mean, there’s millions of people searching Spanish on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Guess what? There’s thousands tens of thousands of blind people searching on Amazon. And imagine they go to your listing and they’re trying to understand what the images are, just, it’s a bunch of Spanish keywords and they’re not even a Spanish speaker. So it’s just not a cool experience. So for me, I put my keywords in the back end of listing the search terms. You know, a lot of that, a lot of it, not all of it gets indexed. So when you have 20 keywords like this the question might be, well, how in the world can you get indexed for all of these keywords? If you’re not indexed already, you can only put a few of these maybe in the search terms. So what I like to do is once my listing is active, if I wanna prioritize this, I’m going to go to Amazon to, to my listing and to the very top right, I’m going to select the Spanish version.
Bradley Sutton:
You click on the flag that’s next to the search bar, And then hit Espanol, and then it’s gonna transfer the listing in into Spanish. And then scroll down to where the Helium 10 Chrome extension has a little widget where you can see the BSR, and at the very top there’s these little buttons, And you’re gonna want to click on Listing Optimizer when this listing is in its Spanish form. And then what happens is, is you are now going to import that Spanish listing into the old Scribbles tool. So you could see how it, it put the title, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It says here, it pulled in the whole front end of the listing, right? So then what I do is I’m going to go ahead and put in those 20 or 14 or whatever keywords that I had been curious about or that I want to index for.
Bradley Sutton:
And I hit apply. And now what Scribbles is gonna show me is if the Amazon translation for this has these keywords in it Now, I said this is about Listing Builder. Obviously I’m showing you scribbles, but you can definitely do this in Listing Builder as well. And as you can see here, there’s only one keyword in phrase form that the Amazon Spanish translation has. Now, this is something you’re gonna notice. Amazon is using its own translation. It doesn’t mean it’s the most optimized form of Spanish that people are actually searching. Here’s a proof of it. This is a listing where the top keywords for collagen. It’s not showing up in that phrase form. So if you’re index for it, okay, maybe it you decide that, okay, hey, I don’t care if it’s in phrase form, all I care is about being indexed.
Bradley Sutton:
But maybe some of these keywords you wanna be have in phrase form in your listing, not in the translated form or in the translated version, but just in the backend of your regular version to send more of that rank juice to Amazon. So this will tell you how many of the individual keywords are in there. Like you could see Colcolágeno is in there <speaking spanish>. So like, there’s these various individual keywords that made up, the Spanish phrases are definitely in here, but perhaps the ones that I have the highest search volume where I think is the most relevant that’s what I’m going to choose to put into my listing. So this is a quick hack on how you can use Scribbles or Listing Builder, import the, the listing from Spanish the Spanish Amazon translation, and then see how the listing is optimized.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, let’s just talk about just regular English listings for Amazon USA. Maybe you are not a native English speaker you’re from another country, English is not your first language, and you’re struggling with getting started writing your listing. Or perhaps maybe you are a native English speaker like myself and just you have writer’s block, we all get it. Sometimes you’re like, man, I don’t know how to get started writing this listing. Right? What are some ways that you can use AI to help? Let me go ahead and show you. If you have your list of keywords your, your phrases and your words I’m talking about Listing Builder Now maybe you’ve got 10, 15, 20 different phrases, and then you’ve got an additional 100 or so individual words you want to get you want to be indexed for.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, you go into Listing Builder and then what you do, this is very important. You gotta enter in the product characteristics. You know, this is important because I know there’s some tools out there, or if you’re just using ChatGPT by itself and the tool only has, you like import keywords search terms are important to get in there, but you need to have product characteristics too. So like here, I just threw together something for this listing, this coffin shelf listing. I was like, Hey, this is a coffin shaped shelf for hanging on the wall or tabletop, it’s made of wood. It’s good for smaller spooky trinkets. It’s a black paint. And then I put the brand name. Now of course, I should probably have you know, put more here in product characteristics. You know, things that come from maybe the review insights of the of my competitors.
Bradley Sutton:
You’d want to fill this up as much as you can. I’m gonna put here, I wanna show the brand name at the beginning of the title what my product name is. It’s just gonna put coffin shelf. And then you can choose like the tone. So you know, do you want it to be formal, casual, friendly, humorous, persuasive, educational, empathetic, inspirational. You know, not all of us can just think and change our mode to these different, these different styles. But you can do that with with ai. So I’m just gonna choose humorous cuz it’s for a coffin shelf and then target audience maybe it’s just for men or maybe it’s for women’s for certain ages. I’m gonna go ahead and put that. And then like, let’s say under this words and special characters to avoid, let’s say I had some keywords that for sure I thought maybe ChatGPT is gonna try and throw in a, a drug related word that it doesn’t realize that it’s forbidden against by Amazon, like CBD or something.
Bradley Sutton:
Or maybe it, no, I think it’s gonna put in a cuss word because it’s very common. Or maybe a brand name or something like that. I can throw those into words and special characters to avoid. And now the mo, what’s the most important part of your listing? Well, it’s gonna be the title. So that’s what I suggest working on first. All right. And then put in the keywords that you definitely want to include in the title. All right, your top two or three keywords. The way you do that is you hit this button here, and I’m gonna go ahead and choose coffin shelf gothic decor and gothic decor for bedroom. Remember, that’s like one of the Maldives Honeymoon or Bali Blast kind of strategies is making sure that you try and have nested words together. Like, so if two of your main keywords are gothic decor and then gothic decor for bedroom, perfect example of you know, a couple keywords that you’d want to get into your listing or into your listing title so that you can kill two birds with one stone.
Bradley Sutton:
So once you go ahead and, and choose which keywords you want the title, just hit this one button, write it for me. And then what’s gonna happen is ChatGPT is gonna come up with a suggestion on what it can be. Now, look at this. I had put spooky, right? And it says here, Manny’s mysterious oddities coffin shelf, the perfect gothic decor for bedroom spook up your space. That’s even using, what is it called? Alliteration or something like that, with this black wooden coffin shelf. Now remember, these weren’t even keywords I put in, I put made of wood and it knew to change it to wood, and I put that it was a black color and it just put black there. So if, if I’m good with this, all I have to do is hit use suggestion and then boom goes to dynamite it used up some of my keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
So right there, I might not have been whether I’m a native English speaker or not. That is arguably a lot better than what I could have come up with in five seconds, which is how long it took ChatGPT to do that. And then basically you just keep going on, like say hey, alright I’m good with that title. Go ahead and write the bullet points and try and use these, these words. And then as you go along, you choose if you want to accept what ChatGPT has given or you wanted to rewrite it, and then keep writing out your listing and including your description at the very end. If you still have phrases and, and keywords left over, we’ll just go in there and edit it out and use up all the keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
So I personally don’t use ChatGPT in order to just make a complete listing and just like say, Hey, go ahead, ChatGPT, take the wheel. What I use it for is to get ideas on, on changing a title or if I am starting from scratch, just to get me on the right track you know, making some kind of theme that I can follow. Because you know, a lot everybody has writer block sometimes, and right off the bat it’s going to give you kind of like a direction you can go with on your listing that you probably wouldn’t have been able to come up on your own. So I highly recommend using this. This is for those of you who have the Diamond plan on Helium 10. Alright, let’s now switch to something new-ish.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, it’s been around for a few months and it’s called Insights Dashboard and some of the different ways that you can utilize this to help you with your analytics and help you basically grow your Amazon business. So the first strategy I wanna talk about is how to compare key metrics versus previous time period. So this is exactly what you see just when you log into Helium 10 now. And for example, I have the revenue metric being shown right here. Now at the very top of the screen, I’m showing like some dates from last month in June, right? May maybe I want to actually just look at the whole entire last month of June. So June one to June 30th. Now, if I have this comparison button toggled, what this is going to show me is each day it’s going to kind of show me this time period versus the previous time period.
Bradley Sutton:
So regardless of what time period I’m looking at, it’s going to compare it to the previous time period. So here I’m looking on June 16th. Overall my gross revenue was $322, but on that same day, last month, in May 30 days before it was $400, My profit margin went from 13% to 8%. These are things that I might want to look at, like, what in the world is going on? Why is my profitability down? Why is my sales down? Well, this will help you look at trends, So that’s the number one thing is comparing your metrics to previous time periods. The next thing is how to measure the results of your listing PPC and more tests. So I, I could be on any of these pages right here, but the cool thing is, is this add note button.
Bradley Sutton:
So let me explain why you would even use this. You know, maybe you’re using manage your experiments inside of Seller Central. Well it’s going to take detailed notes of well, what’s happening, what experiment you’re doing, but what are some experience you probably run on your own? What if you’re changing a bullet point? What if you’re changing an image? What if you lower the price of your product by a couple dollars? What if you maybe add some Spanish keywords, the backend of your listing what if you increase your PPC budget for a product? What if you increase your PPC target your target cost per click, right? On a certain a certain keyword or search term, right? I mean, the list goes on and on. We are always doing things to our listings, hopefully to try to increase sales or to get better conversion rates, et cetera, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, you could make these changes and then just go back and kind of like, remember when you did it, or maybe you wrote down some notes somewhere and then, alright, let me try and figure out when I did this and that. I mean, you should be doing that, I hope, I hope you just don’t blindly make changes and like cross your fingers, hope it works. But what you should be doing is taking detailed notes of when this happens. And so that’s what you can do right here on the dashboard. If I do something, I’m gonna hit add note, and then I pick what date I make the change, and then I choose, Hey, what did I do? And I could make my own, I put a whole bunch of tests right here, but I can make my own you know, action.
Bradley Sutton:
Like, Hey, increase my PPC bid or change this listing image, and then I choose the actual product that I did the change to, and then I can even write more notes here in the description. Now, what happens is it’s going to show up on that date, So for example, right here, if I hit this actually just shows me the alerts. So these are alerts that I made or not that I made, but that happened in my listing. But if I had made some change, like I increased my budget, it would show up here on this date. Let’s say it’s June 9th. And then what I would want to do is, let’s say I’m looking at that specific product and I changed a PPC bid. Well, what I’m gonna wanna do is after that exact point in time, I’m gonna be looking at my sales, or I’m going to be looking at my refunds.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m gonna be looking at my you know, my PPC spend, whatever my, my keyword ranks, whatever the case is, I wanna see what kind of effect that had. Now, you might think, oh, hey, if I just do that one time, I got one product. You know, that’s not that necessary. I don’t need to do that. But, but trust me, guys, even if you only have one product, this is important because maybe you remember three weeks from now what you just did, but you can remember a year from now, like Prime Day is coming up, right? And maybe you’re, you did some test, Hey, I, I’m doing a two week pre-prime day sale, or a one week pre-prime day sale. Well, a year from now, you’re preparing for Prime Day. Do you remember what you did?
Bradley Sutton:
Even if you only have one product last year, you might not. So now all you have to do is look back on the date range of this year’s prime day. I’m talking about a year from now. And you’ll see this note that you added, Hey, on this date, I lowered my price, I did a temporary sale. And now you can look back. Well, how did I do? Ooh, my profitability went down and my sales stayed flat. Were you gonna do that again next year for Prime Day? Probably not. So this is why it’s important to go ahead and take these notes inside your insights dashboard so you can track all of the different things that you’re doing that you’re trying to increase your sales. Next strategy here is how to view all of your products metrics in one place.
Bradley Sutton:
As you know, helium 10 has like a million tools. Seller Central has tons of different data points. Well, how can you see everything at once? Well, here on the bottom of your dashboard and the products table, you can see everything now. Like, here’s my my Project X Gui’s Chicken Coop egg rack, right? I can go ahead and see here. Hey, all of my keyword ranks, I don’t have to go into keyword tracker to see it. I can even see how many keywords I’m tr I’m in the top 10. I can see what is my category bsr, my subcategory, bsr. Maybe I wanna look at without having to go into Amazon or go into a tool, Hey, show me the entire history of the BSR of this product. What’s my star rating on it?
Bradley Sutton:
What’s the history of my reviews? You know, how many units do I have in stock? How many days of inventory does that stock represent? What’s the price history of this product? How many sales have I had today? How many units sold in this time period that I selected here at the top of the page, do I have, what’s my refunds been units and the dollar amount of refunds? How many page views in my page view rate? This is this is coming from your business reports in Seller Central, right? What about my sessions in my unit session percentage? What’s my conversion rate? What is my gross revenue, my net profit, my profit margin? How much Amazon fees did I pay for this product? What’s my ROI? What’s my cogs? It pulls in your PPC data for this product.
Bradley Sutton:
Here, look at this one. I spent $200 last month on PPC. This is how many impressions got me 140,000 ad impressions. This is how many clicks I got. This is my rate, this is my ACoS my RoAS. Do I have the buy box? All of this guys I know some for, for those of you listening to this, maybe in your car, as you have trouble picturing this, this would have to take multiple helium 10 tools plus seller central. It’s all in the same table, and I can choose different views as far as what I want to see. So this is kind of like what I highly suggest you guys doing right away if you haven’t played with this yet, but just hop right in there. Those of you with a diamond plan, you can have up to a thousand products that you can track here.
Bradley Sutton:
I think if you have the platinum plan, you still get like 20 or 50 or something like that. But go in there, start playing around with it. Take a look at your keyword ranks. Take a look at your alerts you might have had things happen to your listing that you didn’t even realize was happening. Take a look at your inventory levels. All of that is right here, and you’re not gonna have to go into separate tools anymore to see this. You can see it all right in one place. Now, one interesting thing that we kind of like are one of the first ones to do. This is my double egg rack. Now, I just happen to know that I actually have multiple variations. I’ve got this double egg rack, I’ve got the bottom rack and a top rack as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Maybe I wanna know, instead of just seeing the sales of this double rack. What is my whole entire egg rack listing? How is it doing on sales and some of these metrics? Well, if you hit here the related ASINs, I could say, Hey, view related child ASINs in the table. So now what, what it’s gonna do is it’s going to show me the, the three products that have to do with this ASIN. This main ASIN, it has two other variations. And now I can see all of those aforementioned stats that I was talking about together. Or maybe I’m like, you know what? I don’t wanna have to add up all of these maybe I have a listing that has 10 variations. Like I’m selling the clothing category, and I’m like, Hey, I wanna know for my t-shirt, my red t-shirt, total how many sales that I have across all the sizes.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, now you can actually view things at the parent level, And it aggregates all of the data. So those three child variations I was talking about, now this unit sold, represents all of it put together. So I I don’t know of any other major tool that, that does this, this has been something that you guys have been asking for, for a while, but those of you with variation listings, you can now view all of the metrics for your product. You can’t do this in Seller Central, right? You could even do this in Helium 10 before, but again, you could view it at three different levels at the very skew level. You know, like me, I have multiple SKUs per ASIN, because I have a FBM and a FBA SKU. You, I could look at it at the very SKU level.
Bradley Sutton:
I could look at the ASIN level so maybe it adds both of those s skews together, or I could look at the whole parent level where it shows all of the child items together my keyword ranks, my sales, my PPC, et cetera. The next strategy is basically how to have Helium 10 do a lot of work for you. And this is gonna be kind of like the thing I’m gonna be talking about the rest of this episode, because this is the most beneficial the most, the, the thing that can just really put money in your pocket because of the time and the data that it gives you. And you know, there’s a reason why this, this new dashboard is called Insights Dashboard, and that’s because of the insights that it gives you. So if you look on the left hand side, those of you with the the diamond plan you’re gonna start seeing these insights.
Bradley Sutton:
Like for example, hey I got this insight. Your gross revenue for this product is down 300% from the previous week. You know, you might wanna look at it. So normally maybe I’m paying somebody to look at my gross revenue or some certain metric, and hey, let me know when it’s bad. No, you don’t have to pay nobody to do that more. You can just program this to, to let you know when some of these things happen. Here that there are some negative keyword suggestions for my PPC campaigns I did not implement. This is telling me to go ahead and implement it. There are here it says competitor keywords that I’m not ranking for. Here’s another one where it says, Hey, your main image size is not a good dimension. You know, go in and, and you might want to check it out.
Bradley Sutton:
Hey, we found $50 worth of refunds that Amazon could owe you. Go ahead and submit that. Hey, transfer inventory to avoid running out. There are so many different insights that it’s already giving, giving you like some of the alerts that might happen to your, your product, like your image changes or your listing gets suppressed. Now here’s the exciting part because there are some things that are, are coming that are just gonna be kind of crazy soon. Or by the time you’re watching this, you might be able to click on competitors on your product table. You guys know me, I don’t use this word lightly, but this is what’s gonna be game changing for you guys, cuz you’re gonna be able to add up to five competitors per each one of your product.
Bradley Sutton:
Just like you kind of see here in this mockup. Now, let me explain the fire that this is gonna bring you all right. Now try and hold if you’re driving, you should pull over because probably gonna blow your minds and you might get too excited and start speeding and blame a speeding ticket on me or something, right? So, so make sure you’re sitting down when you hear this. You are gonna be able to assign competitors to each of your products, and that’s just gonna open the floodgates of insights. Imagine this guys, your competitor raises or lowers their price. You’re gonna get an insight or an alert about that. Let’s say they change one of their images they change their title. You’re gonna get this insight drop in your dashboard. No more having to like pay your employees to monitor you competitors every day for these kind of things.
Bradley Sutton:
Just get this guys. Let’s say your competitor is running like a lightning deal or a coupon, or they just changed their price lower or, or they’ll run a special deal today. Guess what? You’re gonna get an insight. You know, you’re gonna know, hey, your competitor is running a sale and you know, how do you use this information? Well, some people, they’re like, Hey, I gotta match whatever my competitor’s doing. So this is something, this is not like game changing in the sense that, oh my goodness, you’ve never monitored these kind of things from your competitors people. No, of course, I hope that you guys are monitoring that. But the game changing part is you’re probably doing, you’re having to do this, you’re yourself manually, or maybe you’re paying an employee to mindlessly go in and look at a hundred of your ASINs and then 300 competitors total for each of those ASINs and refreshing them every day.
Bradley Sutton:
Hey, let me know when they’re running a lightning deal. Hey, let me know if they changed their image. You’re not gonna have to do any of that anymore. We’re gonna let you know when these things happen. The thing, the parts that I really like is the keyword level. I hope it’s part of your strategy where you’re paying one of your employees to go in once a month or once every other month and run cerebro on your listing compared to your competitors listing to see if they’re ranking for any new keywords organically to see if they’re bidding super high for a certain keyword in sponsored ads that you’re not even indexed for. Like, imagine that you are gonna get a notification that says, Hey, your competitor is getting sales from this keyword, their page one, position three, and A, you are not ranking at all for this keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
B as a matter of fact, you’re not even indexed for this keyword. C how about adding it to your third bullet point? Would you like ChatGPT to create a new bullet point based on that? That’s the kind of stuff that’s gonna come guys to, to this insights dashboard. So again, if your mind is not blown, you don’t understand the gravity of how powerful this is gonna be. Now here’s the important part. We need each of you to kind of like let us know what other kind of insights you want to have that you now take action on based on what you is happening to you or your competitors. So now you kind of know the direction that this tool is going in, and now that you know you can assign 3, 4, 5 competitors to each of your ASINs, what kind of notifications do you, do you want?
Bradley Sutton:
Like, is there something you want to monitor on your competitors? Now, a few of the things I didn’t mention that’s already gonna gonna happen is like BSR level, you’re gonna be able to specify a percentage. Like, Hey, let me know if there BSR changes by this percentage. Let me know if their BSR passes mine. Let me know if my competitor sales goes down by this much percent. Let me know if their review of velocity goes up by this amount. Well, we’re already gonna do like tons of stuff. So maybe your ideas that you have, we might already have in, in motion, but still don’t let that stop. You still let us know what exactly you want to see from your competitors that you would want to get insights for. And especially I’m talking about strategies that you are already doing. Now, this stuff is not brand new like anybody could see if you’re, if a competitor BSR goes up or down, but you gotta manually do it right now.
Bradley Sutton:
So that’s what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about like showing you some new data point that nobody has access to. What I wanna do is take the strategies that you are already doing and how can we automate that for you so we can give you more time back in your pocket? So the way that you guys can give us kind of insights into what you would wanna see in Insights dashboard is scroll to the very top of your dashboard, and at the very top, there’ll be a button that says, send feedback that specifically for this dashboard. So make sure to click that and let us know. Just say, Hey, Bradley said to use this to to give feedback on what I would like to see for my competitor insights. Some more things that I didn’t show you guys that’s coming that’s on your own listing is you are gonna have this new metric where it’s called, I think we’re calling it the profitability down where it’s like, Hey, if my sales goes down by this much percent, or my conversion rate goes down by this percent or my sessions goes down, give me a note.
Bradley Sutton:
A notice instead of you, again, having every day to go in and look at your, your business reports to check these data points, we’re doing that work for you. So tons and tons of stuff that is coming to this Insights Dashboard, and it already is powerful that it can help you with a lot of your day-to-day activities like as of right now. So if you have not activated this dashboard, make sure to do it. But again, tons and tons more stuff coming and we’re gonna be able to build on this platform to bring you other insights, to bring you other metrics. So I really, really, really need a favor from you guys, and that is for you to just dive into here, play around with it, see how it works, and then hopefully your creative juices are kind of you know, turned on and you’ll be able to give us some, some feedback on the kind of things that we can help you with that our AI can, can go ahead and automate for you and just give you the results.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean, I’m super excited about this Competitor Insights where I don’t have to worry about having a VA every day check if my competitor has a coupon on their listing or if their image change or I don’t have to worry about you know, if my competitor is, is getting sales from this keyword that I’m not unless I’m checking it every day. No, all of this stuff is gonna be automated and I’m just gonna have this notification in my insights dashboard if it happens. So again guys, please click on that, send feedback and let us know. Hope you guys were able to learn a couple of strategies from this. If I talked about things that you guys currently aren’t doing, go ahead and watch the video of this helium10.com/podcast. You can look watch the videos on there of each of these episodes, or you can view that usually one week after it goes live on our YouTube channel. Just look for Helium 10 Serious Sellers Podcast and you’ll be able to find these episodes. So again, I hope you guys enjoy this episode and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye-Bye now.
In this episode, we cover the latest breakings news in the Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, & eBay marketplaces. From Amazon’s FTC antitrust suit to this week’s training tip on how to streamline your FBA reimbursements.
In this episode, we had the pleasure of welcoming back Lailama Hasan, to share the results of her recent case studies. Tune in and discover how her findings can help you enhance your Amazon listing optimization game! We started by diving into her customer behavior case study, exploring what consumers are truly looking for in your product listings. From there, we had dived into the significance of titles, premium features, discounts, coupons, and reviews in the eyes of Amazon buyers. She also talked about how changing titles led to an astounding 93% increase in sales. Surprisingly, she revealed that removing the brand name from your Amazon listing titles can be a game-changer. So, make sure to tune in until the end to learn how to level up your Amazon listing optimization game in 2023!
In episode 471 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Lailama discuss:
- 01:09 – Catching Up With Lailama Hasan
- 02:30 – What Is Lailama Up To These Days?
- 04:15 – Diving Into Her Customer Behavior Case Study
- 06:33 – What Are Consumers Looking For In Your Listing?
- 08:18 – Titles, Premium Features, Discounts, Coupons, & Reviews
- 10:29 – Is Amazon’s Choice Badge Important?
- 13:55 – Changing Titles Lead To 93% Increase In Sales
- 14:22 – Removing The Brand Name In Your Amazon Listing Titles
- 17:47 – People Are Going For Shorter Titles
- 19:20 – Getting Creative With Amazon Product Photography
- 20:40 – Can AI Replace Creative Agencies?
- 23:05 – DIY Product Photography Techniques & Using AI Software
- 24:01 – Creating Compelling Amazon Listing Images
- 24:34 – Make Sure To Subscribe To Lailama’s YouTube Channel
- 27:36 – How Frequent Should You Refresh Your Listings
- 29:27 – How To Find Lailama Hasan In The Interwebs
- 29:54 – Find AMZ One Step At Helium 10’s Seller Solutions Hub
- 30:37 – Lailama’s 60-Second Tip
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got Lailama back, and she’s gonna tell us the results of a couple of cool listing optimization case studies that she’s done that will help you optimize your listings for 2023. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you wanna be able to sync your listings that you create in Helium 10 to your Amazon account in one click, including being able to sync subject matter, which you’re not able to even edit now in most listings on Amazon, you’re gonna want to use Helium 10 Listing Builder. Make sure to find out how to use Listing Builder by going to h10.me/listingbuilder. That’s h10.me/listingbuilder. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got my sister from another Mr. back today on the show. My former co-worker here, Lailama. How’s it going?
Lailama:
I’m doing great. How about you?
Bradley Sutton:
I’m doing just delightful. Now, you’re back working at AMZ One Step And so I wanted to reach out to you and to kind of just like see what you’ve been, what you’ve been up to. I mean, even before you worked at Helium 10, you would come on this podcast and give us some cool listening optimization strategies and, and things like that were of great benefits to the audience. But before I get into that, are you moving with your brother and and sister-in-law to Toronto or just them?
Lailama:
Yeah, yeah. Entire time I am with them.
Bradley Sutton:
For some reason I thought that they were only moving, but you’re, you’re moving to that city. That’s a big move to go from Edmonton to Toronto.
Lailama:
It’s like a four hour flight, so it’s gonna be a big change too, like this city.
Bradley Sutton:
A cultural change though. Like it’s completely, it’s very different, right?
Lailama:
Like New York 2.0.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Do you guys have a place out there already?
Lailama:
Yeah, we’re all set. We’re packing up, busy moving these days, so, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
And like having to leave friends behind and, and stuff like that or how’s that?
Lailama:
Sad. But, you know, we’re pretty flexible that way. We came to Canada seven years ago, so, you know I’m sure I’ll be fine.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, how does that work for like, AMZ One Step though? Cause obviously you and you know, Tayyaba your sister-in-law, like who was just in the podcast a few weeks ago. You guys do a lot of work at the studio, I believe you told me you were working at the studio there doing shoots until like 10:00 PM Like are you guys opening a new studio in Toronto, or all your work is gonna be remote now, or what’s going on there?
Lailama:
Not as yet. I don’t know if we’re gonna start like a studio there, but we’re gonna have a studio at home. Cuz I’m making YouTube videos now too, so that’s gonna be where I do most of my work in the studio.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Lailama:
Work from home, but there’s gonna be a studio allocated to it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Yeah, I’m sure you know, Saddam will keep you busy. He’ll make sure that you’re, you’re working. That’s one thing he does well, right? So that should be no problem. Now let’s, let’s talk a a little bit about, you know, what you’ve been, what you’ve been up to. Like when you go, went back to , like are you pretty much doing a lot of the similar stuff that you used to do back before? Like, you know, make content for them and then also like manage like photo shoots and things like that? Or what kind of stuff have you been working on?
Lailama:
Yeah, so content, YouTube, educational videos, and then also creating commercials for clients. So, you know, just, again, very listing optimization focused. But on the site I also have been running case studies to get some extra insights. Like, you know, all the sellers already know what works, what doesn’t work, you know. But I really wanted to dig deep into you know, how the little nuances, like for instance, this case study that I recently did was focused on consumer purchasing behavior. And I think, you know, a lot of us know how to optimize for the Amazon algorithm, but I really wanted to see the other side, like what makes people add your product to the cart.
Bradley Sutton:
So how did you set this case study up? Like were you like capturing the screen of how people navigate on the buying pages or what did this case study involve?
Lailama:
So this video is actually coming out, shameless plug, but what we did was we took a bunch of participants and we gave them like a price range. We didn’t wanna give an exact dollar value because you don’t wanna like tilt them in a particular direction either. Sure. And we were recording their screens and at the same time I’m behind the camera looking at their screens and trying to ask them at every point why they did what they did or what made them go for that. And they were also like voicing their opinions on everything. So it was great. Like, what are people thinking in real time as they’re shopping? And you know, there were some really interesting insights. So a lot of the information did confirm things that we already know. For instance, like I’ll actually give you a very interesting thing that I learned from it.
Lailama:
It was like, we all know that Amazon badges are great. It’ll give you the, you know, higher clickthrough rates because people, it builds that trust. It’ll increase organic traffic, so on and so forth. But once you’ve peaked the curiosity of your buyer and they click on your listing, you know, what happens after? Do they guarantee that sale? Not really. Like, yeah, you can reach out to the relevant buyers with these badges, cuz look, we’re here as sellers and we’re thinking, okay, we’re gonna do so and so these are our strategies in order to get that Amazon badge. But for the consumer, like they don’t even know how we got there, how we earned that badge. So they’re looking at it and they’re like, oh, it’s flagged Amazon’s choice. Let’s see why it is Amazon’s choice. Now they’re on your listing and they’re looking for information that will convince them to buy your product.
Lailama:
And so a lot of the times what I noticed with these listings was they’ve optimized for the algorithm, but not the consumer. Now what I mean by that is these weren’t being added into the cart. So I dug deeper and I’m like, okay, why aren’t you left convinced? Like, you know, they kept saying things a lot of the times it was either things like missing information in the images. So secondary images, people were trying to look at their competition and almost replicate the same kind of information that they had on their secondary images, which doesn’t necessarily mean that consumers wanna know that information. So that strategy where we just like copy paste from our competition is not gonna cut it. You have to look at the information in your reviews, your Q & A section, what people really wanna know about your listing. So missing pieces of information, you know was a big problem either in the images or in the product description. Sometimes it was too advanced, sometimes it was too beginner friendly and, you know, people who actually were enthusiastic about a certain category or were experts on the subject matter didn’t look for the information that they wanted. So, you know, I would say like, people aren’t optimizing for the consumer. We almost lose that sense of the consumer side of us when we become Amazon experts.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I’ve always said that, you know, people focus too much on the algorithm. You should focus on the algorithm, you know, you gotta be discoverable and stuff, but at the end of the day, it’s not the algorithm who’s buying the product, it’s a human being. And so if you lose that part then, you know, then you’re in trouble. So what would you say, I dunno, top five, top three. What are some interesting things that you discovered from this, you know, analyzing the consumer behavior? Like what things that you found out that you think that sellers should now take action on, or at least should be thinking about it, you know, as they optimize their listening?
Lailama:
Again, going into the nuances of everything, right? Yeah, people will have nice titles, but what consumers were really looking for was a feature being listed in the title in the beginning or in the first few words, like let’s say bag with compartment. That was a big one. Like this person was looking for a bag with compartment. So that’s a feature. And then a lot of sellers were also listing the use cases of these features. So like bag with compartment for shoes, for laptop, for so and so. That sometimes would really confuse our buyers, you know? Sure. They were like, oh, if it says it’s used for a laptop, can I not use it for shoes? So I would say like, sometimes people almost go overboard with stuffing their title with keywords and that’s not necessarily a good idea.
Lailama:
A lot of the times, like whatever’s viewable in the mobile experiences, all that a customer wants to see, they don’t want like a huge list of it. Cuz sometimes it can confuse them as to what they can use the product for. So that was one thing. Another thing that was really interesting was pricing strategy was a big thing here. People were judging based on your prices. So if you were priced way below the market average people would be like, okay, is it not good enough quality? If you were way higher than the market average, then they were looking for that extra like premium feature that would make them think that it’s worthy of that price range. But then there were products that were competitively priced and the ones that were like even a bit higher, but discounted people went for that as opposed to the lower non-discounted prices. So discounts were playing a huge role in how they were making their decisions. Like they were really drawn onto the listing based on the discounts. And 80% of the people were not even adding coupons onto their carts. So they were drawn into the listing based on like 80%.
Bradley Sutton:
Good grief. That’s a lot.
Lailama:
Yeah. But they didn’t end up adding it to their cart. So it’s a win-win case for the buy a seller. Like if you’re not making use of coupons, then you should a hundred percent. But there’s one other thing to notice with the coupon rates is if it’s too big of a coupon, like a five, $10, whatever, it’s gonna be noticeable in the end price. So people will be like, oh wait, why isn’t it priced the same way? So they’ll go back onto the listing and add the coupon, whereas if it’s like one to $3, people usually don’t even notice it in the final price and, you know, will not even bother going back or notice it actually. So these were the two key things. And then the third one was reviews. A lot of people look at reviews because they’re shopping online. So yeah, we don’t entirely have control over our reviews, but working towards getting a higher review count. So one thing that was really common among people was they were looking for like a thousand reviews or higher, and that’s when they fully trusted the brand. Anything lower than that, they’re like, I don’t know. And then they would really focus on the review rating. If it was lower than 4.5, they’d be like, okay, this isn’t trustworthy.
Bradley Sutton:
I don’t take any products less than 4.5. I guess I’m a stingy person when it comes to that. Yeah. And a lot of people, I’m not the only one, I guess.
Lailama:
Yeah, no, a lot of people are like that. But you know, like you don’t really have a lot of control over your reviews, but what you can do is offer customer support. You can improve on the quality of your product. In fact, this happened during the case study I ordered for them and one of the product came damaged. So that product had no insert. They haven’t had an insert, but there was no like contact information or customer support mentioned on the insert. So they came up to me and the participants were like, can you get a replacement for this because it came damaged and I couldn’t find it anywhere. Even though on the description section they said reach out to us if you have any problems with the product. But they had nothing that they could, you know, help us out with cuz it was out of the return window for Amazon. So, you know, there’s like these little things that you can do to avoid negative reviews.
Bradley Sutton:
How much did it impact people’s choosing things in the search results or even their buying some of those badges? Like, you know, I’ve always been skeptical a little bit sometimes of how important like a bestseller badge or an Amazon’s choice badge. And it’s interesting now in the last like few days, there’s newer kinds of Amazon’s choice badges that are coming out. I forgot what it says. It’s like Amazon’s pick or it was something weird like that. But anyways, like, like did that have an impactful, did you see people trust those products more or not because they, they didn’t know where it comes from or what do you think?
Lailama:
So if it came in the first like five to 10 results, they were more likely to click on that first. So that was their first pick, which I would say is like a big influence, right? Because they were like, oh, if I Amazon you know, chooses this, or if bestseller, they would say, oh, I guess people are buying this, so it must be good. So I would say it had a major influence on the click-through rates at least. The rest is up to the seller then.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. Now you also did a case study on, on titles. What about titles? Amazon titles, I’m assuming.
Lailama:
Yeah. so this was a case study where, you know, we were done on a client’s listing and we saw a 93% increase in their sales just by changing their title. And they weren’t doing bad.
Bradley Sutton:
93% just by changing the title?
Lailama:
Yes. Which was–
Bradley Sutton:
What did you do? Like make the title ooze gold or something? Like how in the world is that?
Lailama:
So here’s the weird thing. We did not change any keywords. Okay. Keywords were not touched. We literally restructured it. Shortened it so that it was exactly what fits into the mobile viewing experience and we removed the brand name. And that’s something that’s been really working because unless you’re a Nike or something, people really aren’t looking at your brand name. So you’re using the first couple of characters, really important characters towards the brand name, which people don’t even know you yet, right? And we put this unique selling point in the beginning, so like, it was cutlery, we said it was like this number of items in a pack or something like that. And this is the kind of information people are looking for. So you, I would say like, you wanna figure out what the unique selling proposition or what the key pieces of information in your product category is, and then put that in the front. Now a lot of people did ask us like, we have been suggesting that this to some of our clients. And a lot of people are like, oh, but like, it’s not compliant if we don’t put the brand name in there. So on so forth. People get nervous about it.
Bradley Sutton:
It’s actually really interesting right now. It’s so stupid because what you just said is right, that Amazon, in their terms of service wants you to put the, the brand name at the beginning. But it’s, it’s been now three, maybe four months on some of our listings where on certain keyword results, Amazon takes out the brand name, like you put it at the beginning and Amazon literally takes it out unless you go on the product page itself. So like, you know, sometimes that’s good because like, you know, like if you don’t have a lot of brand recognition, just like you said, you know, like people don’t care but the brand, they wanna know what the product is. But then if you are trying to build a brand, or if you’re like Nike or something like that, I mean, literally the whole thing about the product is the brand. And if your brand is strong, and now Amazon is just saying, alright, you know, shoes, you know, instead of Nike shoes, you know, it makes all the difference in the world. So that’s kind of interesting. But yeah, because of that, it kind of like, to me, at least in my mind, it makes it less likely where Amazon is gonna suspend your listing if you don’t put the brand at the beginning. I mean, how could they do that when even they themselves take it out, you know?
Lailama:
Exactly. And another thing is like, we upload it through, we always split test titles. So if you upload it through manager experiments it technically has passed that bot test, so you’re good. If they’ve approved it, then you’re good.
Bradley Sutton:
Have you ever had one where it wasn’t approved? In the manager experiments?
Lailama:
Not so far.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Well that probably means you guys are doing the right thing. But that’s actually interesting point, like test like some extreme thing in manage your experiments to see like what it would approve because yeah, I actually just started one the other day and I was frustrated. I thought I would be able to start right away, but now it’s like, oh no, we, we gotta like, we have to like check this out and it’s gonna take like, you know, a few days. So obviously somebody must be you know, reviewing it or something before it approves it. That’s a good point.
Lailama:
Exactly. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright. What, what else can you talk about titles?
Lailama:
I think, you know, like it’s, what I’m seeing so far is like, again, it, what we use here could not, might not work for another niche, but from what I’m seeing is like people are preferring going for shorter and shorter titles. Like a lot of buyers even confirmed by this case study where just not attracted to these long titles. They were just like lost in the details. So this was kind of the main point or takeaway from this case study as well, like two different case studies now that people don’t want a really long title. While it may be good for like ranking purposes and so on and so forth, but if people are getting confused, ultimately you don’t wanna put that in there. And highlighting the feature is really important. Like, I know people do it, but like, putting it in the forefront of the title and also highlighting something that’s really unique about your product would set you apart.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. All right. So, you know, these case studies that you’ve been working on what, talk to me about just like your, your bread and butter, which is, you know, I don’t think you were doing 10:00 PM last night, a case study. You’re probably doing a, a photo shoot. So, so don’t tell me about the, you know, I mean if, if that product’s private, you don’t have to tell me the exact thing, but, but can you just, I’m just curious about like how photo studios work. Like what was it an Amazon product you did last night? Like how did you decide to, to set it up? And you guys have some, like I saw in your Instagram story you were like putting some like Roman statue props or, or something like that in this photo shoot. So, so talk to me about what you did last night and just in general. So some recent photo shoots that you’ve done.
Lailama:
Yeah, we’ve really been trying to get creative with the photo shoots. Like the Roman thing was statues and everything. We wanted to do that for like a brand for pants. Now if you look at most of the, you
Bradley Sutton:
Know, a brand, well, how does a brand for pants have to do with Roman statues?
Lailama:
So it was kind of like a fashion shoot, right? Okay. Because we wanted to make it unique. Like you look at all these Amazon’s basics and their pretty much the same thing. So I feel like with competitive niches, it’s just so hard to stand out. And so your creatives really need to be at another level because a lot of people will go for Amazon’s basic pants. But how do you set yourself apart? So you need to have like a strong brand presence. And that’s what I’ve been really working on and like videos and photo shoots as well as you know, you don’t wanna use the same techniques over and over again. Like sure, it’s a candle, so put it on a podium and, you know, just do the basic stuff is like, how can you as a creative agency give them that unique outlook?
Lailama:
And you know, a lot of people talk about like AI taking over and while, you know, I think it’s really convenient with all these different softwares where you can create images and everything, it’s much easier if you wanna do it yourself, but you know, like at some point you are really losing your uniqueness as a brand. And yeah, you know, that’s when you’re looking at the images, like this was one of our findings in the case study as well, is they were one of the participants looking for gym gloves. All the images just looked the exact same way done on against a black backdrop, like copy pasted almost, but a little bit of a difference in the design. And then it came down to like the very basic factors, like, okay, review count, review, rating and pricing. So the buyer wasn’t able to look past anything any of those three factors because everything looked the same and the quality looked the same, so they were ultimately gonna go to those things. So if you don’t have the kind of review count that your competitors have, or you are not able to compete on the pricing, then you really need to stand out in other ways.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now what are some techniques that you think people should use if they can’t, you know, hire AMZ One Step to stay until 10:00 PM at night to do photo shoots and, you know, it’s not cheap, obviously, you’re, you’re not doing this for $5 an hour. How can people get that effect, you know, from, from like home? You know, like, I, I still suggest, Hey guys, if you’ve got the budget, you’ve gotta use professional agents as matter of fact I don’t even know, I don’t know if Saddam told you this, but I just hit him up yesterday because I’m doing like this mini kind of project X with, I’m helping out somebody’s supplement brand. And I was like, Hey, I’m gonna get them to hire AMZ One Stepto kind of like refresh their, their images, potentially do 3D and stuff like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Because, you know, they, they did their images on their own and it wasn’t that great. But maybe I’m just starting out, you know I don’t have a huge budget. I remember before you had done a few, you know, project x products you know, photo shoots just on your own, even though you had the, you know, full studio. I was like, Hey, try and do this on your own to try and imitate what people would have to do if they, if they can’t afford a, you know, a studio. But, but what are some best practices? You know, like I can’t just go and get a Roman statue to Yeah. To, to use as a a, as a prop. So, so what are some techniques you can, you can talk to us about?
Lailama:
Yeah. For anything, any small items, like you can just take a picture in good lighting. And then there’s so many AI technologies, like even with Canva, let’s say they remove your background for you and then you take that and, you know, use softwares like flair ai, there’s a bunch of others like Mid Journey. And what you can do is use that background, that product that now doesn’t have a background and put it onto like another background, whatever goes with your branding. It could be like a candle that’s staged on a podium against a silky backdrop or something like that. So for infographics like that, I feel like there’s quite a few options. You know, you just get the background removed, put it on something else, and you don’t have to buy the props, right? So it saves you on the cost. It may not look as realistic, but yeah, it just definitely gets the job done.
Lailama:
And yeah, but anything that may require a model, like I’ve been trying to experiment with that. While these apps do give you like a lot of options, but it doesn’t quite have that realistic look. It looks more like you know, like a fake hand or fake person. So yeah. But infographic style images, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Like, if you don’t have the budget a hundred percent, just use one of these AI softwares. You don’t need to be an expert. It’ll remove the background for you, put it on to another background.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, I was looking at your YouTube channel here, and I saw this, this video here, I always like screenshot on on funny, funny, funny poses of you. So here this, it was about creating compelling Amazon listing images. So I unfortunately did not watch this video. First of all, I always joke like how I think I’m an honorary Hassan because as soon as I saw this, I remember seeing this thumbnail. I was like, wait a minute, didn’t you borrow this blouse from your, your sister-in-law?
Lailama:
Your attention?
Bradley Sutton:
You too. Like, how do I know? How do I know your wardrobes? Even I know even, but anyways, so, so I was too distracted when I saw that. I was like, I couldn’t take this video seriously. Cause I was like, wait, this is not, this is not te I’m looking at here. But anyways, what was this video about? Yeah, this listing images. Can you talk about it?
Lailama:
I basically broke down the different image types, and that’s not necessarily the infographic lifestyle, but image categories that I created my own. Like there’s a lot of people who wanna do comparison to their competitors. There’s dimensions, you know, like the basic kind of images that everybody wants to cover. So one of them was about, one of the categories that I talk about is dimensions. And again, this is another thing that we saw in the case study is to this day, a lot of sellers will put like three centimeters long, four centimeters wide. Like that doesn’t work anymore. Like, and I mean, not, not that it worked before either. Like people, it’s hard for them to visualize, you know, being on the other end. So you need to I’ve basically shown people how they could show the scale and dimensions of their products in other ways.
Lailama:
So one was an example of a suitcase. What we did was put it under, we placed it under a bed frame. So now people know, okay, this is the usual length of the bed frame and this is how it fits under a bed. So they have like a visual reference of, you know, how to show their dimensions. Yeah, you can add the numbers as well, but this just gives them an extra kind of reference. There was another example of like Mike, you put it next to like a can of pop, and that was like, everybody drinks Coke and Sprite or whatever. And so now they know how big this mic is gonna be when it arrives. So just different kinds of product image categories that people can make use of and not have to stick to the regular, like with comparison, people, you know, make use of your regular charts. It has this feature, competitor does not cross. So, you know, you just don’t wanna use these old techniques. They’ve been overused. So just ways to stand out from the crowd.
Bradley Sutton:
How often do you suggest that people refresh their images? I mean, this is not something that people should be, oh, yeah, every, every week change your images, you know, that, that might mess up your, your listing. It doesn’t give people a consistent, a consistent feel, but like once a year you know, should, should we change a couple, once every two years, once every six months? Do you have any suggestions there?
Lailama:
Images and your product title? I think like once or twice even like this seller that we changed their title, they were doing perfectly fine. But, you know, my thing is manager experiments is like an amazing tool. You can just use that and keep experimenting, like keep split testing. You might uncover another opportunity, which could give you such a huge boost in sales, right? So I would say like once or twice a year when you can just change up your title, or doesn’t necessarily mean changing up your keywords, but just like structure it differently. And the great thing about manager experiments is like you are running both titles at the same time. So half the people are shown the original and half the people the other. So you’re getting real time data and if you lose out, you’re losing out on only 50%. So the risk isn’t that big, you know what I mean? It same goes with images. You know, it has the capability to split test main images, secondary images a plus. So the, the second you think, okay, sometimes there are times when your product has a feature that you realize, oh, I haven’t highlighted that, and that is something people are looking for. Or you got a good or a bad review based on a certain feature. Maybe that is a good time to add that feature into one of one of your images.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, before we get into your 60-second strategy for the week, you know, I referenced your YouTube channel right there, that pe you know, you’re definitely giving content. So how can people find you on the interwebs? Especially the, the content that you’re, you’re putting out for people? People?
Lailama:
Yeah. It’s posted on the AMZ One Step YouTube channel, and I also shared it on my LinkedIn, which is Lailama Hasan. My name if people can spell it.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. All right. Now one interesting thing is like, AMZ One Step is part of the Sellers Solution Hub. But anyways guys, if you want to just reach out in general to AMZ One Step sometimes they have discounts for like, you know, elite members on the page, but if you are logged into your Helium 10 account, and then you wanna see what kind of, you know, bonuses they have, or at least just reach out through the hub, go to hub dot helium ten.com and then just search for AMZ One Step And you’ll be able to reach out to them that way. Now, what is yours? 30 or 62nd strategy of the, of the week for everybody?
Lailama:
Yeah. So a lot of sellers can get nervous about like, main image strategies, and we give a bunch of those strategies out right at the end. You wanna increase, increase your click through rates. So one way, one hack that I have for testing that out if you’re nervous about it, is upload the strategy that, you know, your agency or whoever’s come up with versus like a fully compliant image. And you know, what you wanna do is upload it on, manage your experiments, and if it gets through the Amazon bots, then you’re good to go and you can upload that image, actually, it will verify it for you, so it’ll automatically upload it for you. Because one thing I wanted to point out is a lot of people will be like, oh, this is not compliant, but you theoretically, 80 to 90% of the main images on Amazon are non-compliant with including props, you know, let’s say a fruit and fruit bowls or including a model in there, or, you know, adding an extra sticker onto your label. All of these are non-compliant. So this is just a hack that I have if you’re worried about it, and plus you get extra insights on which version works better.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, cool. Well well that was great to see you at the Prosper Show. Hopefully I can see you guys a again soon. I was trying to get you guys to go out to Bali, but with the move and everything that, that didn’t work out, I know you guys have a villa out there and another studio. But maybe we’ll get to work together on this one project that I was talking about for Project X. But regardless, I look forward to seeing you and your, your brother and your sister and your sister-in-law. Again, we can all, we can all hang up. Cause I swear I’m a, I’m a just a, just the American member of your of your family here. But thank you for coming on and sharing your knowledge and look forward to having you on the podcast maybe next year again.
Lailama:
Thank you for having me.
In this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley Sutton tackles all the burning questions submitted by our amazing community. From optimizing your Amazon listings to how to improve your ACoS, Bradley leaves no question unanswered. Join us as we delve into topics like changing images for dropping conversion rates, the impact of new content in Amazon listings, alternative KPIs for effective images, leveraging ChatGPT for listing optimization, periodic listing updates for different keyword sets, Helium 10’s guide to product launches, and more! Don’t miss this jam-packed episode where he shares his expert insights and actionable advice. It’s time to tune in now and take your Amazon game to the next level!
In episode 470 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley answered the following questions:
- 01:53 – Changing Images When Conversion Rate Is Dropping
- 02:18 – Does Amazon Love New Content In Our Listings?
- 02:56 – Any Other KPI For Effective Images Other Than Sales?
- 05:42 – How To Use ChatGPT To Optimize Your Listings
- 07:31 – Periodically Updating Listings For Different Sets Of Keywords
- 08:45 – Is There A Helium 10 Guide To Launching New Products
- 09:09 – Should A Keyword Become A Negative Target With Good Impressions & Clicks?
- 12:55 – User Customized Order Threshold On A Positive Rule
- 15:09 – My ACoS is Over 100% Any Tips To Lower It?
- 15:55 – How To Improve Your ACoS Using Helium 10 Adtomic
- 19:09 – What’s A Good Target To Hit For ACoS?
- 19:32 – Look At Your TACoS
- 19:53 – Let’s Talk About Bid Strategy
- 20:35 – What’s The Best Way To Learn/Start With Adtomic?
- 21:33 – How To Setup Rules Inside Adtomic
- 25:52 – A Tool To Prevent Running Out Of Stock
- 26:13 – Which Is The Best Filter To Get A Keyword From Cerebro
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today I’m gonna be going over all of your top questions that you guys have submitted as far as Helium 10 and other Amazon strategies. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And what we do, guys, is once a week, every week we have a training for our Sirius Sellers Club members, and our Helium 10 Elite members, Sirius Sellers Club is our private community of sellers who are doing over $500,000 a year on Amazon. And our Helium 10 Elite is one of our special communities as well. And once a month we are going to be opening up this kind of ask me anything to everybody and also repurposing it as we are doing right now as a podcast episode so you guys can take advantage of some of the questions that other people have and maybe it’s some similar questions that you have.
Bradley Sutton:
So here is our ask me anything for, for this month. I hope you guys are able to get some, some great tips out of it. And if you guys would like to participate in the July one, don’t forget to sign up to get notifications on when we’re gonna go live. If you’re on our email list, you should get a notification. If you’re subscribed to our YouTube, subscribe on our Facebook groups and you’ll get a notification on when we go live to do it. But we’ll definitely be doing this once a month. You guys could submit all your questions about Helium 10 live. Let’s go ahead and hop right into it. Whatever helium 10 questions you guys have on how I can help you with your Amazon business go ahead and throw it into the chat and I’ll try and get to as many questions as as possible.
Bradley Sutton:
Somebody from YouTube says, I changed my image because my, my conversion rate was dropping after changing my picture. It didn’t see much increase. Yeah, so just because you change your images, that doesn’t always guarantee that, oh, okay, hey, everything is going to be completely fine. You know, after that, that’s not, you know, that’s not, that’s definitely not the, the way it works. Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t try changing it because sometimes the image strategy changing can help, which is why, again, you use Listing Analyzer to look at what is working for your competitors. Andrea said Amazon loves new content. Yeah, sometimes that’s true. But I wouldn’t change your, Ima I wouldn’t change your listing all the time because at least on the, on the keyword side, sometimes it can actually confuse the Amazon algorithm. So just because you can do new, new listings and you’re a listing builder in Helium 10, I wouldn’t always, I wouldn’t always change my listing like nonstop because the, the algorithm might not be able to, the algorithm might not be able to, to react in time. Jesse says, is there any KPI we could use to see how effective our images are other than sales?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, I mean, at the end of the day, that’s what matters, sales. But sales is only the very, very end of it. There’s different steps. There’s add to carts. There is your session unit session rate. So for example, the first thing in Helium 10, I would be looking at, especially on our, on the new insights dashboard and something that I check like sometimes on a daily or weekly basis is my unit session percentage. Alright? Basically out, out of how many sessions, how many sessions, how many times people visited my page, what was my sales, right? And then the sessions itself, because think about it, if my keyword ranks stay the same, which they don’t always say the same, but let’s just pretend that on average my keyword ranks are similar from this week to last week and my sessions or page views, if either of those metrics goes down, what does that mean?
Bradley Sutton:
That means that people in the search results were choosing my product less. They clicked on it less. Let’s just say if the search volume was kind of similar, right? And so this is obviously something you can look over time. So I’m gonna be looking at my Helium 10 dashboard at my sessions, first of all, and my keyword ranks because if the keyword rank stays the same, but my sessions goes up, that means more people are clicking on it in the search results than before. Meaning that maybe they like this new price point I put, maybe they like my new title, maybe they liked my new main image. If my sessions goes down well then something is wrong. The same thing, like maybe we’re talking about your, your page views or I mean, maybe you actually change your a plus content or you change your secondary images, something you can’t see in the search results.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, the metric that would show that is of course your unit session percentage. All right? So if you were getting 100 sessions and you are doing five sales, well, your unit session percentage is gonna be 5%. That’ll show on your Helium 10 dashboard. But if all of a sudden that goes down to 2% after you change some images, well guess what? Whatever new images you have, they’re not performing as well as your old ones. So I would revert back to the old ones, right? If your unit session percentage went from 5% to 8%, well then regardless of what your sales did, you know, cuz maybe sales, you know, can go up or down if that, if that unit session percentage went up, you know, you made the right decision with changing your images. If you’re outside of Helium 10, and once you get into search crew performance, you can even take it to the next level and start examining your impressions versus your clicks versus your add to carts.
Bradley Sutton:
And then your sales Kunal says, how exactly can we use ChatGPT for optimizing and upgrading the listing? So here, let me tell you exactly how I do it. So I had a listing that I thought needed refreshing, and so what I did was I imported it into my listing builder and then I put some new keywords I wanted to include in there. And then for a couple of the, I didn’t do the whole entire listing, but like a couple of the bullet points, I just had the ChatGPT inside of Listing Builder, kind of like, give me another idea based on a different vibe. So like you can choose inside of Listing Builder the vibe that you want, like humorous or serious or there’s other, there’s other ones you can do.
Bradley Sutton:
So I was like, I wanna do a humorous one, maybe I wanna do a new title that’s humorous. So I put in there which keywords I want listing builder to use or ChatGPT And then I, I had it refresh I had it refresh a new title for me using that different vibe. And then maybe I didn’t use the exact one that it gave me, but it gave me an idea, like it made something in the way. I was like, oh, that’s a pretty cool way of saying that, or that’s a pretty cool way of saying this bullet point. So that’s how I personally do it. If I have a brand new listing, I’ll use it to get a start on it. I have all my keywords and I’ll have ChatGPT make round one. Now I go in there and I still change a lot of it, right?
Bradley Sutton:
I still change a lot of the listing because ChatGPT doesn’t always use all the keywords that I want to specify, but I have it get me on the right track because sometimes we all have, you know, writer’s block sometimes and we don’t know how to get started, but it usually as soon as ChatGPT makes a test listing based on what the inputs I put, I’m like, man that’s a great, that’s a great start. And then I go in there and I start optimizing it from the keyword the keyword basis. Matthew says, what are your thoughts on periodically updating your listing to try and optimize for different sets of keywords? So, so like I said, I am not going to do it that often. All right? Like when I say often I’m talking about I’m not, I’m not updating my listing like once a week or something like that, that’s gonna confuse the Amazon algorithm.
Bradley Sutton:
So I could do that in a Helium 10 Listing Builder. I could do a different listing every day if I wanted to, but no just because I could do it, I can do it doesn’t mean it’s a good practice. I usually don’t change my mature listings more than like once every couple months at most, because there’s usually not new keywords that comes up all the time. Now, if I just have a new keyword that I found that my competitor is ranking for, and it’s just a matter of throwing one keyword in there, sure, I can do that, but I’m not gonna change, you know, I’m not gonna throw into my title like once every month, you know, I don’t, I don’t wanna change my title that often, but I’ll throw in a keyword here or there if I’m trying to up, you know, change my entire bullet points, I’m not gonna be doing that once a month.
Bradley Sutton:
No, because again, the algorithm needs time to adapt to what we are putting in the listings. And if I’m constantly changing it, that could actually hurt my, my rank, my rankings. Is there a Helium 10 guide to launching new products? Yes, we have that like the mal, you know, we talk about in the Maldives honeymoon strategy. So this, the 466 and 467 is kind of like the, the pre-launch strategy, all right? So, so that, that’s what gets you like 80% of the way there. And then I would go to h10.me/400 And look at the second half of that episode as far as how I actually launch the products. After that, Michael says, should a keyword become a negative target if it gets a good rate of impressions and clicks? For me, let’s say I’m using Adtomic, I’ll tell you what my rules are that I put in helium 10 Adtomic is I say, Hey, if I get a keyword that has 20 clicks or spend, that equals half of the retail price.
Bradley Sutton:
In other words, if I have a $50 retail product and I’ve spent $25, I’m actually gonna suggest Adtomic to suggest to me to negative match that keyword. All right? If it gets like 25 clicks sometimes I’ll do even 15 or 20 clicks or $25 spend 50% of the retail price, because usually that means that there’s regardless of the buyer intent, my product is just not vibing with them. So it’s just wasting money. That being said, let’s just say that it’s one of my main keywords. Like if I’m selling a coffin shelf and I get great impressions, great clicks on coffin shelf and zero sales, before I negative match that, I gotta figure out what’s going on with my product because that I’m not gonna have success in Amazon. If one of my main 10 keywords, I am getting zero clicks, that means something is broken with my listing, something is wrong with my listing that people are not buying it, or I’m just gonna give up on that product because if, because if there’s nothing wrong if I can’t figure out what’s wrong, then I might as well just stop selling that product.
Bradley Sutton:
Because if my main keyboard, I can’t even get people to click on it and buy it, I’m not gonna have long-term success, I guarantee it. So if it’s just a random keyword, yes, I am negative matching that in Adtomic because it’s just gonna keep losing me sales. But if my impressions and clicks are really good and it’s one of my main keywords, and I can maybe make an analysis and, and compare my listing to other listings and figure out what are people not liking about my listing when they click on it, then yeah, I’ll try and fix it before I negative match that. Joe says, does Amazon provide more ranking juice for a keyword from a clicked product link versus a clicked PPC ad? It’s near identical, you know, in my test, and which is why like the Maldives honeymoon strategy that we talk about works, which is a hundred percent based on PPC, because it, you know, think about what matters to Amazon, right?
Bradley Sutton:
They want to get the sale, sure that they can get, you know, a 50 cent cost per click, and of course they, they wanna make money in sponsored ads, but at the end of the day, if they have a $50 product, Amazon is making $8 on the actual sale of the product, plus the money that they’re gonna make in fulfilling it. Their profit margins in the pick and pack and all that stuff, right? So at the end of the day, Amazon wants to make sales, and so it’s going to show the products at the top of the page that gives it the best chance to make that sales, regardless if it’s PPC, you have control over that, but the organic one is the one that Amazon’s algorithm has control over. So when you are optimizing your listing for keywords, and that’s what this strategy I’ve been talking about today is about, then you need to make sure that you are showing up either in sponsored or organic.
Bradley Sutton:
And if you wanna show up in organic, you have to start with a sponsor. So usually it’s, it’s not one or the other you’ve gotta try and optimize for, for both. But Amazon is checking what people are searching for, what they’re clicking on, regardless of if it’s organic or if it’s PPC. Easy stud rack from YouTube says under Adtomic suggestions, new keywords. I see in quotation mark here, user customized order threshold on a positive rule, I see red, yellow, and green dots on ACoS. I’m scared to check the suggestion. What is it suggesting? So when it says user customized order threshold on a positive rule, what that means is that you set a rule, which is what exactly, what you should have done is you set a rule saying, Hey, if, if in an auto or broad campaign, I get X number of sales at this, a cost suggest to me to add this to my manual campaign.
Bradley Sutton:
So that’s what you should have set up. It sounds like that’s what you did set up. So it’s suggesting, I mean, again, it’s suggesting whatever you entered into it. So the suggestions, there will be zero suggestions if you didn’t set up the rule yourself. So the fact that you’re getting a suggestion and an Adtomic easy stud rack, that means that you must have set up a rule. Now, I can’t tell you if the rule that you set up was good or not. This is a garbage in, garbage out thing. So if you gave it a terrible rule, well, yeah, you’re gonna get terrible results, but let me tell you what I put my rule, and then you can check your rules. So for my rule, for my positive rules, the one that means I’m adding keywords to another campaign I put in my Adtomic, if I get two sales for a search term or an ASIN, two sales, and the ACoS is below what my threshold is to be profitable, let’s just say it’s 30%, right?
Bradley Sutton:
If I get two sales at below 30%, ACOs suggest to me to add this to my manual campaign. So hopefully that’s what you did to set up yours, all right? And if you see it on the suggestion page and you hit the plus sign, you know, so you go ahead and submit the suggestion. It’s only going to do what you had set up for the rule. So I would go in, check what you had put for the rules, and then if you’re cool with that, then go ahead and run your suggestions through.
Bradley Sutton:
Michael says, thanks Bradley, your webinars ask me anything, and podcasts are literally lifting my business off the ground. I love to hear that, Michael, that’s awesome. Romaine says, my ACoS is over a hundred percent. Any tips lower. So hopefully you’re using Adtomic. So if you’re using Adtomic, this is what I would do. Romaine, I’m in the Project X account, and I mean, if you had the rules set up, Adtomic would be sharing, telling you what you need to do to get your ACoS down. But let’s just say maybe you didn’t set your rules up, or you just started with Adtomic. Like if you just, if anybody just starts at that Adtomic, here’s what I would, here, here’s what I would do. I, I would look at the last, like, let’s just say 60 days, all right? And I’m, I haven’t even looked at at the advertising here, so I’m hoping that nothing shows up here, but there might be some that that show up because I haven’t been on traveling for a while, so I haven’t been following up with my Adtomic here.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m going to go to my analytics and I’m going to go to search term, all right? I’m gonna go to search terms, and then what I wanna do is I wanna say, Hey, what have I spent at least or no, you know what, I’m gonna pick clicks. Is there any search terms that I have had at least 25 clicks? All right, but I have had zero PPC orders, all right? So this is just so simple. You can’t really, it’s harder to do this in Seller Central, but that’s why I love Adtomic. And look at this. Here’s 22 search terms, good grief that I have spent a couple hundred dollars on and that I have gotten zero sales. So take a look at this guys, right here, here is an asin. Alright? Maybe I wanna see what the heck is this asin.
Bradley Sutton:
So I’m gonna see what this ASIN is, this is another coffin shelf. Look at this, guys. I had not been paying attention to my Adtomic. I have gotten 116 clicks, this is terrible. What’s wrong with me? I’ve gotten 116 clicks on this keyword with zero sales. I spent $54. So I want to negative match, but I wanna see where is this showing up. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna show, I wanna see this in the ad group, the actual ad group. So I’m gonna hit this toggle for ad group. This is why Adtomic is so amazing, guys, if you guys aren’t using this, my goodness, you guys are wasting a lot of time. All right, so, oh, you see this is good. I actually have this ASIN as a target inside of, of this campaign. So I’m gonna actually click this and I wanna go into this campaign and then just take a look at what the heck I was thinking.
Bradley Sutton:
And what I did was I saw this on my analytics page, and now I opened up to the product target group, and sure enough, here is in the last 60 days, what ASIN was this? RK9, here’s RK9, 0 sale. So I’m gonna pause this. This is just wasting me money, like ridiculous. So I’m just gonna go ahead and pause this. And now I’m not gonna spend any more money on this target that is costing me money. Alright? What are some other ones here? Pink Coffin Shelf. Alright, for whatever reason on the research group, pink Coffin Shelf is not working for me. So you know what I’m gonna do? I’m without even having to go to the campaign, I’m gonna go ahead and add this as a negative match. So I’m gonna hit this negative target, and I want to negative match this on this research campaign.
Bradley Sutton:
There it is right there. I’ve gotten 85 clicks with zero sales, I’m gonna hit apply, and now this is never gonna show up in that campaign again. So if I would’ve just left this, that’s like $75 worth of spend potentially that I just saved over the next two months by, by taking three seconds and doing this in, in Adtomic. So, so that’s what I would do. The first step I’m going to do to lower my ACoS is seeing where I’m spending money and not getting any sales. There’s, there’s of course a lot of other things you can do, but, but that’s, that’s my, that’s my first thing. Michael says, what’s a good target for ACoS? It, it depends, you know, there’s, there’s no one answer for this. The best ACoS you could have is what makes you profitable, but you should also be thinking about your total ACoS or your TACoS, because sometimes you could be maybe not so profitable on an individual ASIN or on your ACoS on your actual campaign that you’re doing, but because you’re running this, it has this like ripple effect across your other products where overall you’re still profitable.
Bradley Sutton:
So don’t just just look at your ACoS, but if you just wanted to just be profitable exactly on what you’re advertising for, yeah, you can look at your ACoS and then you’ve gotta find that, that sweet spot where you can still be profitable. Pala says broad phrase and exact, what’s the difference between the bids strategy? Again, every, everything I do, no matter if it’s broad, no matter if it’s phrased, no matter if it’s exact, when I’m setting that up in Adtomic, is I’m just trying to be profitable and my target price for exact might be different than it is. You know, like maybe sometimes for broad and auto, I have to keep lower bids because the, you know, the targets can be all over the place, right? So I might have to keep a lower bid just to make up for all the keywords that it’s gonna show me that maybe I’m not gonna get many sales on. But yeah, it, it’s up to you and it’s, it’s up to your product at what you can remain profitable. There’s no magic number that you should be shooting for.
Bradley Sutton:
Robin says what’s the best way to learn with Adtomic is if you just started with Adtomic reach out to customer support and they’ve got like this eight boarding, eight boarding, I can’t even speak, right? Eight week onboarding, short and firm, eight boarding, eight week onboarding course where you can hop on calls like this once a week and just get demos on how to set the whole thing up. And of course we’ve got videos as well in the Adtomic where you can help get set up. But, but yeah, I would definitely rely on that, that eight week course, which is completely free to get ramped up. Brett says, I first started with PPC, had a very poor structure. I’ve heard that if you move keywords to new campaigns, you lose history. How do you recommend reorganizing? All right, so here’s exactly how I have it in Adtomic.
Bradley Sutton:
I wonder if I could even show you guys my, I think I can. Yeah, I’m gonna show you guys exactly how I have it set up in Adtomic, and this is, is the best way to have it have it set up. All right, let me look up my rules here. Perfect, perfect. All right, so I’m gonna show you guys my rules for Adtomic. Let’s just look at my promotion rules, my positive rules. This means how I find new keywords. All right? So take a look at what you see here. These are all of my campaigns for this egg rack product. I have got a research campaign that’s a broad campaign. I’ve got an ASIN product targeting campaign. I’ve got a performance campaign. That means that’s my exact manual campaign. I’ve got a sponsored display campaign here. I have an additional exact campaign because me, I like to keep my tar my campaigns, my exact campaigns to a maximum of 20 targets.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s just me. I just keep it on max 20. And then once I reach 20, I gotta make a new campaign, right? I actually have three of those here in this, in this, in this flow. And then here’s my auto campaign. So how I set these rules up, I know this looks like if you’re new to Adtomic, this looks like just a bunch of check marks. Basically I have this set up where it’s basically it’s saying, Hey, let me show you at the bottom here. If I have two orders on a certain target or a certain search term or ASIN and it’s 30% ACoS or less, by having, if I find that in the auto campaign, by me having this check mark in the research campaign, what it’s saying is if I find a keyword that I get two sales on, it’s going to go ahead and add it to my broad match campaign so I can maybe find some more long tail keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
It’s not going to delete it from the auto campaign that’s called keyword isolation. Some people call that I’m not doing that, I’m keeping it in the auto campaign unless it really starts taking off in the research campaign. The same time, it’s also adding an exact camp match for that search term that it found in the auto, in my manual, exact manual campaign, let’s say it finds something in the research campaign that’s my broad, it finds a long tail keyword. Again, it has to match this criteria of two orders and less than 30% ACoS. If I get that in my broad campaign, it’s also going to add that to my manual campaign. As you guys may or may not know in an auto campaign, it can show me for ASINs on product targeting, right? It can show me for an ASIN somehow. So the same rule applies.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s what I have here. I guess set up this once guys, and I never have to worry about this. If I get two conversions on an ASIN in my auto campaign, look at this, I have that, it’s going to add it to my product targeting campaign. Alright? My ASIN targeting campaign. So I can make Amazon show me for this ASIN and my sponsored display campaign. So again, all of my campaigns here are talking to each other thanks to Adtomic and I don’t have to go download my reports every single time and try and figure out and add things and delete things and negative, no Helium 10 is gonna do all that for me. And then, so let me just show you if, if the cam, if it actually works, I go to my suggestions. Let me see if there’s any new keywords that it’s going to suggest.
Bradley Sutton:
Hopefully, like I said, hopefully the answer is no, but wow. Look, look at this. Good grief. All right, so for this ASIN, look at this. I converted in a pink shelf or in my pink coffin shelf campaign. I converted for this ASIN right here. Look at this. I only spent $4 and I got $63 worth of sales. This was from an auto campaign, right? So if I put my mouse over here, it’s saying, Hey, you need to add this to your product targeting campaign and you need to add it to your sponsor display campaign. You think I want to do that? You better believe I want to do that. If an auto campaign can can perform this well, I definitely want to do it on purpose. So I just hit this button. Once I hit apply, boom goes to dynamite, it’s done. Adtomic just added that ASIN to my sponsor display campaign and it added it to my product targeting campaign.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s thanks to Adtomic finding it this keyword in an auto campaign. So now I’m gonna be targeting those 24 hours a day, theoretically speaking in my exact campaign. So that’s the power of what Adtomic can do. Jesse says, is there a tool we can use to prevent running it outta stock? Yeah, inventory management, inventory management and helium 10. If you set it up correctly and, and you set the right algorithm of what you know, of what your product is and the sales are all tied to, to helium 10, it’ll help you to not run outta stock because it’ll tell you when you need to order more, when you need to transfer some from, from your inventory, like from your 3PL et cetera. That’s what I use for all of my Amazon accounts. What is the best filter to get a keyword from Cerebro? I mean, it depends. There’s a million filters in there, but I like the one click filters in Cerebro. You know, if I enter a whole bunch of my competitor ASINs, the very first button I’m gonna click is the button top keywords, right? The next button I’m gonna click is opportunity keywords. Those will give you some great keywords right there.
Bradley Sutton:
Samuel says, Bradley, from your example, if you add those keywords to your sponsored display campaign and find that after 30 plus days it’s not performing in that campaign, do you pause that target? Absolutely. So it, regardless of how I found a keyword, when I found a keyword, why I found a keyword. If there is a keyword that is not performing well, I, and I’m not gonna go dig into figuring out, is there something wrong with my listing? Let’s just pretend that I know that everything is as good as it can be. I’m just finding out that this keyword doesn’t perform well. If I’m getting that 25 clicks with no sales, 30 clicks with no sales, or if I’m spending 20 bucks with no sales on a $40 product or a $30 product, yes, I am pausing that target because it’s just not working.
Bradley Sutton:
If you don’t have to get a sale every five clicks, no, but my, my number that I pick is anywhere between 20 to 40. If I go 40 clicks without sale a sale or 30 clicks, it’s very unlikely that I’m gonna get a sale after 60 clicks, for example. I hope that makes sense, so that’s why I go ahead and pause it after, after that amount of time. So I thank you guys for joining me on this training. We’ll see you guys next week. Bye-Bye now.
Welcome to this special Winning with Walmart episode on SSP. Today’s host, Carrie Miller covers a wide variety of topics about selling in the Walmart marketplace. She talks about how Walmart sends online traffic to your listings to get more eyeballs and sales, how to get Walmart’s Rich Media for free, and more! Additionally, she answers questions like what’s the process of joining Walmart.com as a seller and can international sellers sign up on Walmart?
In episode 469 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie discusses:
- 00:51 – Where Does Walmart Get Their Traffic?
- 06:23 – How To Get Rich Media In Walmart For Free
- 07:37 – Take Advantage Of AMX Platinum Card
- 08:17 – Process Of Joining Walmart.com As A Seller
- 09:01 – Carrie’s Blogs On How To Sign Up On Walmart and how International Sellers Can Now Sell on Walmart
- 09:21 – Helium 10 Tools That Work In Walmart.com
- 10:54– How Many Countries Walmart Is In?
- 12:19 – Does Walmart Accept Brand New US Business Owners?
- 12:48 – International Sellers Can Apply In Walmart Too!
- 13:53 – Does Walmart Accept PO Box As A Business Address?
- 14:17 – Let’s Talk About Walmart PPC And Helium 10 Adtomic
- 18:09 – Why Walmart Is A Good Opportunity Right Now
- 19:30 – Get Adtomic For Walmart Demos From Carrie Miller
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptCarrie Miller:
In this episode, we are going to be talking about all of the different ways that Walmart is sending online traffic to your Walmart marketplace listings so that you can get more sales. We’ll also be answering all of your Walmart questions. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Want to enter in an Amazon keyword and then within seconds get up to thousands of potentially related keywords that you could research. Then you need Magnet by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/magnet. Magnet works in most Amazon marketplaces, including usa, Mexico, Australia, Germany, UK, India, and much more
Carrie Miller:
This morning with Walmart Wednesday. I have some great stuff for you today, and I wanna talk to you a little bit about basically where Walmart gets their traffic. Okay? This is a kind of an interesting question because a lot of people wanna know, like, how can I get more customers on my Walmart page? Or how can I get more sales? And this is going to help you, I think, get a very good understanding of that. So the first thing is that most people are actually just shopping at Walmart. So there are, you know 90% of US households actually shop on Walmart. So if you can, you know, think about yourself, think about whether or not you shop on Walmart or if you go to Walmart you’ll know that there’s a lot of people already shopping at Walmart and they actually have an app.
Carrie Miller:
And many people, about 80% of people that are in the stores are actually using the app while they’re in the store, which is really cool. So there’s a lot of exposure there through the Walmart app where your products are. So that’s number one way is just because there are a lot of, you know, Walmart shoppers. The next way is Google. So I don’t know if any of you have noticed this if you’re already selling on Walmart, but your products actually, even if you’re not advertising, are showing up on Google. And the way that this happens is you optimize your listings for Google. And one of the ways to do that is to not keyword stuff. So on your title, if you’re following the guidelines that Walmart has set up for you to do this is going to help you quite a bit because the less keyword stuff you do, the more these search engines are gonna pick up your title and your product.
Carrie Miller:
So for example, here, this one is a Walmart product, you’ll see in the Google shopping, and it’s absolutely incredible because you’re not even paying for this and Walmart is, you know, doing this to help you get some exposure there. Also there are Bing searches. So not only Google searches, but anyone who’s using Bing as a search engine, you’re gonna be seeing Walmart ads there. So if you can see right here, we’ve got you know, a garlic press that’s being advertised under Garlic Press on the Bing search. So you’re showing up on Bing, you’re showing up on Google. So sometimes when you look at, so in, when you’re looking in Cerebro or Magnet for Walmart, which we have actual search volume on the Walmart app, you’re not actually seeing complete traffic because maybe people are coming in through, through Google. So you’re gonna, you know, see that 50% or so is what Walmart is saying is coming from outside traffic.
Carrie Miller:
So it’s really important to make sure you’re optimizing, maybe look up some Google Google Planner keywords, make sure you have some of those main keywords that are really related to your product, like in your title and in your listing so that you can actually show up on Google and bang for those. The next thing is something that’s really new, which is really cool, and I’ve seen this myself because I am all over Instagram and TikTok. You actually can see now that there’s a lot of people that are Walmart influencers. So if you search the hashtag Walmart partner or Walmart creator, you can see there’s a lot of influencers. Now, back when I did this search you know, back in January, I think it was, there were probably maybe 2000 hashtags, but if you search it now, there’s more than 11,000 hashtags for those those hashtag keyword searches on Instagram.
Carrie Miller:
So that’s pretty incredible. And there’s, there’s actually a quite a few more on TikTok, so lots of really great exposure. These creators are getting a commission, a really good commission depending on the category that they’re, you know, selling in kind of like Amazon. So you can see there’s, here’s some different you know, traffic, you know, creators that have shown their videos. So we have outdoor one, we had a Walmart summary, fines, a lot of clothing. I’ve seen a lot of clothing influencers really showing off Walmart stuff because people who are selling on Amazon are moving their stuff over to the Walmart marketplace. So there’s higher quality in clothing there. Home fines are big, that’s a big category. So you see a lot of home fines and there’s makeup as well. So if you’re in like the beauty categories, it’s really perfect for you to use influencers for that.
Carrie Miller:
There was a Father’s Day one recently that was just Father’s Day this last weekend. And so you’ve see, you see all these things and they actually also have their own Walmart creator pages like they do on Amazon. So they’re really kind of, kind up quite a bit in the creator space, in the influencer space. So there’s a lot of opportunity with that. So, you know, search those hashtags. Maybe you can find some creators that can create some content for you if you send their products work out some deals that way. The next thing is Walmart+. Okay, so Walmart+ is basically like Prime, so they’re gonna get the free two-day shipping. They’re gonna get you know, a lot of different perks. And one of the main perks I would say, especially with this economy, is that you get gas discounts.
Carrie Miller:
So you’ll see that you get, if you join the Walmart+ program, you get free discounts on gas, you get free shipping on two-day orders. You also get free delivery on grocery orders of there is a minimum purchasing it’s $35. But another thing is I’ve seen them working a lot of different partner programs. Now I’ve seen more than just this one that I’m mentioning, but you’ll see that this, this is the Platinum American Express. I was actually looking at getting this American Express card and one of the perks is that they actually pay for your Walmart+ subscription. So they’re really doing a really great job of getting Walmart+ subscribers, which is just really helping to funnel more people to Walmart through the Google searches, cuz maybe they’re looking at Google and searching for a garlic press and they’re like, oh, Walmart, I get free shipping, why don’t I just click on that?
Carrie Miller:
So there’s a lot of really good opportunity here with Walmart and the traffic. So something else that that is new that you guys might not know, and you’re listening now, so this is actually really good for you to be listing, is Rich Media. So Rich Media is a lot like a plus content and it is available now pretty much without having to pay. So Rich Media, you basically, you would have to go through kind of a provider and you would have to pay for hosting. You can still do that, but you actually can get it for free by going into your help center. So you’re gonna go into the items category, and then you’re gonna click on Rich Media. And then Rich Media, once you’re in there, you can click on video and there’s also a 360 image as well. So you can basically, it shows you how you can submit your videos for free so you don’t have to pay for getting that rich media up.
Carrie Miller:
So video is really, really helpful for really, you know, giving more benefits about your product. So if you can do that, if you have some time and you have some little slideshow videos, I highly recommend going in to, you know, the, it’s basically your contact support. So it’ll go, you go to Contact Sport and you do items in inventory, you’re gonna click on Rich Media, and then you’re gonna go through all the steps to create your rich media. So that is an, you know, an a very, very easy thing that you can do if you’re already selling on Walmart. Okay someone said, thanks for the heads up on the AmEx Platinum benefit. Yes. yeah, it’s, if you have the AmEx Platinum, if you’re a shopper, go ahead and just take advantage of that free membership to Walmart+, I know a lot of people have that card because you got a little lot of, you know, good perks and it’s like, I think it’s like $695 a year for that card.
Carrie Miller:
So one of the benefits is it, you know, pays for itself with all these different cool benefits and Walmart+ is one of those benefits. So make sure that you take advantage of that. Okay, so what is the process to join as a seller on Walmart? So for Walmart, you are going to want to basically go and apply. It depends on your your country. There’s different requirements. I actually have a blog for this, and it explains the different countries. But you’re basically going to go ahead and set up an account and you just apply, you put in your information and it’ll kind of give you a login right away. That doesn’t mean you’re accepted. You have to put in your business information once you’ve logged in, and then you wait for them to confirm that you are accepted and then you can put in your payment information and shipping details.
Carrie Miller:
So it’s really easy. It used to be a lot more difficult. You don’t have to put a whole bunch of information in. They really can look up your business on their own. So I’ll put the link to the how to, you know, sign up and then also the link to the blog article that really explains the different countries. So another thing that we do have that you guys may not know about is that we have some really great tools for, for Walmart. And so if you are a a Walmart seller already, there are Cerebro tools. So you can use Cerebro and do a reverse product Id search, and you can get all of the keywords. So for example, you have a competitor and you wanna see, you know, what keywords they’re indexing for. You can put in their product id, which is the last numbers on their url.
Carrie Miller:
You can take that product ID number, you can put it in Cerebro, and they’ll do a reverse search and it’ll show you all the keywords that they are indexing for. So it’s an amazing, amazing tool. We have Magnet for just searching phrases. So what you would do, say you have a garlic press, you can search garlic press and it’ll give you a lot of keyword suggestions that are related to garlic press. We have we have Adtomic now, so I can do, I’m gonna do a, a demo later on for that. But we have Atomic for Walmart, so you can do your pay-per-click management through Adtomic on Helium 10, which makes it a ton easier to manage your pay-per-click. So if you’re not doing pay per click advertising on Walmart, you definitely should be, that’s a hundred percent the most important thing you would never launch on Amazon without doing pay-per-click.
Carrie Miller:
So we’ve got Adtomic we’ve got inventory we’ve got profits management we and we also have our X-ray extension. So let’s see about some other questions. Someone said, how many countries is Walmart in? There’s I mean in terms of the actual retail store, they’re in quite a few countries, but availability, I believe it’s five or six countries, but they’re expanding constantly. So as you go to the signup page, you’ll see which countries are allowed to join. So you wanna check that out. And there’s definitely you know, a lot of expansion going on. They really want to get more sellers for sure. The UK, China, India, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, the us, those are all countries so far that are able to sell, but they, they have expanded to more recently. So they, if I didn’t list your country, it may also be available. However, if you’re a really, really big seller, you’re selling millions of dollars you might have an extra a leg up to be able to go onto Walmart. So you could send me a DM if you are kind of a, like a seven figure, eight figure seller and you wanna get on Walmart and you might not be in one of those countries.
Carrie Miller:
Does Walmart Rich Media direct on platform allow you to use Rich Media template for formatting or just upload videos? You’re just uploading the videos. They don’t have, they don’t have like the templates, but it’s pretty easy. You can follow the process. You can see when you go onto the and also, it’s nice to see you on here. You can, yeah, it, it’s just an upload for the video. So they, they had a lot of really cool templates before, and I think that might be what you’re referring to, but they’re gonna, I think they’re gonna be expanding that a lot more.
Carrie Miller:
All right, next question. Does Walmart accept brand new US business owners? I do believe they are accepting new business owners. You have to make sure that you have a business set up. Something I would recommend is maybe set up a Shopify account before so that you can kind of show yourself as you know, an established business and that you’re serious. So yeah, I would, I would definitely not shy away from applying, even if you’re a new seller. Okay, and then someone said, I missed when you spoke about international signups. So the international signups. So there are new, when we first started talking about Walmart, you really could only sell if you had a US business address, but now they’ve expanded to multiple countries. So you can you can apply if you’re in the UK, if you’re in Canada, if youre in India, China, I’ve written a blog on how all the different qualifications, because there are different qualifications for each country.
Carrie Miller:
So you’re gonna want to, you know, take a look at that. And each one’s different. So there’s different kind of business entities and things like that that you need to to show when you’re applying to Walmart. So it’s, it’s different for every country. And they are expanding countries constantly. They are that’s their main goal is to continue to expand and open up to more sellers and really grow their marketplace. So that’s pretty exciting for everyone who’s international. And if you’re not on the list yet, you know, definitely, you know, keep, keep a lookout. But if you are a really big seller, you know, sometimes they’re allowing you know, it depends on your revenue. But if you have, if you’re a high revenue seller, you know, in the millions, then you potentially could you know, get onto Walmart.
Carrie Miller:
So does Walmart accept PO Box as a business address? I don’t believe they do. So you’re gonna need a physical address. That’s, that’s the way it’s been in the past, is you really need a physical address for your business. So you could use, some people use their home address. So it depends on where you have your business set up, but you don’t wanna use a a PO Box that’s not gonna, they’re not gonna accept that they, they haven’t in the past anyway, so that’s a really good question. All right, any other questions?
Carrie Miller:
All right, I don’t see anymore. But if you’re not doing pay-per-click advertising, I wanna talk about that a little bit. Pay per click advertising is definitely a must. So we do have Atomic for Walmart and if you want to start utilizing Walmart Atomic, you can also send me a message on, on Facebook. Basically, on my product, I have the clicks I was getting on Amazon, were, you know, three and $4, and I was actually losing money on this particular product because the pay-per-click was so expensive on Walmart, it’s actually about 35 cents, 40 cents, you know, max 50 cents per click. So I really recommend if you, you know, haven’t started advertising on Walmart, it is a huge advantage if you start doing that, you’re gonna start to rank better. You’re gonna, you know, it’s much cheaper clicks, you’re gonna get more sales, and you can get all the way to the top of the search.
Carrie Miller:
So before about it’s been about a year now since they changed it, but before you could only rank advertise as high, as high as your organic rank, but now you can literally pay to get to the top of the search, and it’s not expensive. So I highly recommend, you know, taking a look at your category, see if anyone else is even advertising. A lot of times you might have a product and there’s no one even advertising on that product. So it’s really an amazing time to be on Walmart. It’s a very basic pay-per-click, very easy. I am not a PPC expert and I do it myself. You can do that with Atomic. So it’s a very, very helpful tool. So any other questions on here? I don’t see any more questions, but I guess I have a question to see if anyone on here is already on Walmart or if you’re in the, in the process.
Carrie Miller:
So if you are in the process, or if you’ve already started selling at Walmart, let me know in the chat. Just wanna see who’s on here and if you have any more questions. But if you haven’t taken advantage of the free Rich Media, do that 360 is available and you can upload a video. And then the other thing is, if you haven’t started Pay-Per-Click advertising, please, please, please start advertising. Go onto Cerebro and Magnet and search for exact keywords. Okay? You’re gonna find the exact search volumes, look for exact keywords, and you don’t need to forget about the low search volume. I’ve actually found that even low search volume keywords I’ve been making sales on. And I think the reason for that is because we have Google traffic that’s coming out like the Google searches, the Bing searches.
Carrie Miller:
So say, you know, the product gets, you know, a hundred searches a month or something like that, you’re still getting a lot, a lot of sales on that because of the fact that there’s a lot of outside traffic there and there’s creators. Now, maybe they would pick up your product, find some of those influencers that are doing Walmart that are Walmart creators, and you can find them by searching the hashtag Walmart creator or Walmart partner, and you can find some great influencers. Maddie says, I’m in Walmart, but can’t find a UK marketplace. Yeah, it’s, it’s mostly the, the US marketplace. So I would say right now the best opportunity for Walmart is in the US marketplace. They do, you know, have other marketplaces available, but I would say definitely if you can get into a Walmart fulfillment services WFS, you could ship your products in just like FBA. It’s a great opportunity.
Carrie Miller:
All righty. I think that is it. If there aren’t any more questions these revelations about the traffic, I think, you know, really hopefully sparked some, some thoughts in some of you to really optimize your listings for Google as well as Walmart. So you’re gonna get your keywords for Walmart from Helium 10, but then you can look to see if there’s any other keywords on Google Keyword Planner that might be really helpful for you to kind of rank for Walmart on Google. So if you have those lists already, you can, you know, utilize those. But definitely kind of think about what ways can I optimize my listing best? Look at the guidelines because on Walmart, they really don’t like keyword stuffing. Look at your listing quality score. The higher your listing quality score, the more visibility you’re gonna get and the higher you’re gonna rank.
Carrie Miller:
So you’re gonna get, if you have good shipping, you know, you’re, if you have the pro seller badge, there’s all these things you can do to optimize your listing on Walmart. Go to that listing quality dashboard and make sure you completely optimize your listing. And if you get, you know, 90 to a hundred percent, you’re probably going to be optimized for Google too. So that’s, you know, kind of a good rule of thumb, but Walmart I do have kind of a test product just to let you know about a revenue, my product that I’m, I really haven’t paid too much attention to. I should pay more attention to it, but it’s doing about, for one product, doing about 10,000 in revenue every month. I’m doing pay-per-click advertising and you know, I’m getting RoAS of, you know, between, you know, fours and $6.
Carrie Miller:
So really, really good opportunity right now for Walmart. So if you’re not already doing the advertising, if you’re not in there make sure you get in there and and start advertising. Utilize our Walmart Adtomic and I’ll do some demos on that later on and show you how to set it all up and get you all started with Adtomic. So again, if you are interested in Atomics, send me a message and we can get you all set up with Adtomic so that you will be ready for my demo. Alright, and if that’s it, I hope that you have a great rest of the day and thank you all for joining my Walmart Wednesday. Bye bye.
In this special TACoS Tuesday in SSP episode, let’s dive into the world of Amazon and Walmart PPC together with our expert guest Jocelyn Jeffries, Senior Manager for Retail Media at Pacvue. Our guest is an experienced professional managing $50 million in ad spend annually. Let’s listen to her insights, tips, and answers to our community’s questions about PPC asked live.
In episode 468 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jocelyn discuss:
- 01:33 – Let’s Meet Our Guest Jocelyn
- 02:25 – Managing $50 Million In Ad Spend Annually
- 04:21 – A New AI Innovation That Pacvue Released
- 07:10 – Jocelyn’s Favorite PPC Metrics
- 08:08 – How Do You Get New To Brand Data For Sponsored Product Campaigns
- 09:27 – What Are The Benchmarks For NTB Data?
- 12:53 – A Weird Situation With PPC And Attributed Sales
- 13:57 – How To Use PPC To Improve Your Organic Rank
- 16:34 – Tip When You Are Targeting Top Of Search
- 17:35 – Running PPC Campaigns After Missing The Honeymoon Period
- 19:41 – PPC Tips And Insights For Amazon Europe
- 20:45 – How To Use Day Parting In Your Campaigns
- 22:46 – PPC Sales Increased But Organic Sales Stays The Same
- 24:32 – PPC Strategy For Walmart.com
- 28:03 – Rolando Joins Us To Ask His Question Live
- 35:31 – How To Get In Touch With Jocelyn And Pacvue
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today, we’ve got somebody on the show who manages over 50 million in an annual PPC spend who’s gonna be answering a lot of your questions, such as, how did you Day Partying, how to advertise on Walmart, how to launch and get organic rank from PPC and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think
Bradley Sutton:
We know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/keywordtracker. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly tacos Tuesday show. TACoS Tuesday, where we talk anything and everything PPC related, whether it’s on Amazon or Walmart, or even off Amazon and Walmart. We can take your questions on PPC, on other platforms potentially as well. So every month we bring on a special guest. And so without further ado, I’m gonna bring her on here, Jocelyn from Pacvue. How’s it going, Jocelyn? Good,
Jocelyn:
How are you?
Bradley Sutton:
I’m doing just delightful. And what do you do at here at Pacvue
Jocelyn:
I am on our kind of managed service consulting team, so I’m actually guiding strategy for some of our largest enterprise clients which is very fun. We work with really cool brands, you know, across, you know, self-service, managed, et cetera. And we have a lot of fun, but really mapping out the entire strategy for the year, and we’re pretty deep partners at that kind of level where we’re involved in the retail side and the you know, promotions and merchandising and all of that kind of aspect when we’re that deep into the relationship with the client.
Bradley Sutton:
Have any rough, like, cool figures you can throw out, like, Hey, I manage one gazillion dollars worth of spend per month every day, or something like that. That impressive.
Jocelyn:
Yeah, I probably manage about 50 million in ad spend through the year, which is very cool. You know, when you’re up to that level of budget, you get to do a lot of fun stuff, a lot of testing, a lot of learning. You know, I love a good test and learn. That’s kind of my thing at this point. Whether that’s, you know, testing new, creative testing, new audiences kind of addressing some larger, you know, brand initiative questions. You kind of get to do that, some of that when you start getting up to the higher budgets, which is certainly fun for someone like me.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. What platforms are you knowledgeable on? I’m obviously Amazon, but are you currently, you know, running any campaigns on other platforms, be it Walmart, Instacart, et cetera?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, so I manage campaigns on Amazon, Walmart, Criteo, Instacart, DoorDash.
Bradley Sutton:
What’s the one you said before Instacart?
Jocelyn:
Walmart, Criteo.
Bradley Sutton:
What’s that?
Jocelyn:
Criteo is like Target, CVS shipped a bunch of the smaller retailers. They don’t have their own networks but that’s how Target does a lot of their advertising. So pretty much Jenny and everything I’ve done some campaigns on, which is fun. Obviously Amazon’s the biggest and has the most opportunity to learn and whatnot. But I do have experience in pretty much every retail media site.
Bradley Sutton:
I love it. I love it. I don’t, so at least one of us knows what they’re doing here. All right. So you know, I wanted to show this quick video. We just launched something at Pacvue yesterday. Now you tell me, how do you say this? Like, I’ve known about this film festival and stuff for like, years. How do you actually say, is it Cannes? Cannes?
Jocelyn:
I think it’s Cannes. Cannes Lions can
Bradley Sutton:
Cannes. Okay. Well, I’m, I’m just gonna go with that. But at the Cannes Film Festival,
Jocelyn:
Think it’s all real name, but most people call it Cannes.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, well, people don’t come to me for your Instacart advertising, nor your French word pronunciation, but everything else you can come to me for. But anyways, let me show this video really quick for everybody to see, like this really cool, kind of like AI innovation that Pacvue has launched. Maybe, maybe I can even ask you a couple of questions about it if you know. So let me just go ahead and throw up this video for everybody to see in 3, 2, 1. Here we go.
(Video):
Pacvue Excel copilot is industry’s first natural language generative AI for commerce built directly into Microsoft Excel. You can query all of your PAC view data in one place with prompts, like, show me my top campaigns by ad spend. Pacvue Excel Co-pilot can also generate pre-formatted dashboards. Co-Pilot can reduce the time it takes to produce these reports from hours to just minutes. Now teams can spend their time on critical thinking, discussion and strategy. All of these charts can be automatically generated into a prebuilt PowerPoint alongside the relevant analysis. Learn more about Pacvue Excel Co-pilot and Pacvue AI today.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow, pretty cool. So basically if I’m under, I haven’t seen this in action, so what it seems like it’s kind of like, hey, I can threw in a prompt like enter, say hey, like, Hey, show me this metric combined with this, make an Excel chart for it, or something like that. Or am I on the right track here?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, that’s exactly what it really does, and it’s a pretty powerful tool. You know, I think of that’s really how we think when we’re looking at reporting and looking at performances. You’re thinking in questions like that of what’s got the most efficiency, what has the highest conversion rate, things like that, where it’s gonna take some time to man either manually pull that or to, you know, shift through Excel files and whatnot to generate that. So it’s a much more like, I think, natural way to approach reporting. And it makes it so much easier and really kind of mirrors the way you’re thinking with the way performance is, is able to be displayed and makes reporting so much easier and so much time being saved. I think that’s what probably a lot of us who are hands on the keyboard are really doing is reporting out to your stakeholders, reporting out to your boss, reporting out to your client, whoever it is. A lot of what we do is, you know, the storytelling of reporting and performance. And so this makes it a lot easier to do at a lot quicker of a pace.
Bradley Sutton:
What are some of your favorite, maybe more under the radar metrics? You know, we’re talking about reporting, we’re talking about analytics and things. I mean, you know, everybody I’m sure looks at ACoS, you know, most people nowadays look at TACoS, which is the name of this show. But what are some other things that, that you, that’s important to you? Like what would you say is the next thing that people need to be looking at? You know your CVR or your ROI, your RoAS? Like what’s your star metrics?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, I think, you know, return is what most people use when they’re looking at performance, and that’s obviously important. You know, you need the kind of the one-to-one efficiency of what that ad spend is generating for you. But I also enjoy looking at new to brand percentage and subscribe and save. Those kind of are the two opposite ends of, you know, the, the full funnel, you know, where you’re kind of living in the middle, when you’re focused entirely on return, you’re look living in like the, just what is the revenue that’s being generated? You’re not looking at the long-term impact of how many new customers am I bringing into my brand or my store? And how many of those are becoming loyal customers through subscribe and save. So when you start looking kind of beyond the RoAS and you start looking at different sections of the funnel, that’s where you’re looking at more of a long term kind of growth plan versus very short term, which is where you can kind of get kind of pigeonholed into when you’re looking just at return.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now speaking of RoAS one of the first questions here, it’s from Jack and Jack says, let me see if I can get it up here. How do you, or not RoAS new to brand how do you get new to brand data for sponsored product campaigns? Is that available? I know it wasn’t like, you know, a couple years ago, but wasn’t that something that was recently released?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, so you can get new to brand data through for sponsored brand just through the native console, but through AMC, Amazon Marketing Cloud, you actually get significant, you know, much more data. That’s really what Amazon Marketing Cloud is, but it also allows you to get new to brand data for sponsored product campaigns along with all of your DSP metrics as well. So AMC is a very flashy, exciting topic. There’s a lot to do with AMC, but it does kind of fill in the gaps for some of the, the data that’s maybe missing. So that’s a huge kind of piece that we’ve been rolling out at Pacvue in general but also with a lot of our clients in the last, so it’s a year or so. It’s a pretty big huge topic and a lot of people are kind of overwhelmed because it is so much data and it’s hard to figure out where to even start. But you can kind of start by filling in some of the gaps that you have and, you know, just the native Amazon console.
Bradley Sutton:
And what do you do with this information regardless of how you’re getting it, you’re getting in Pacvue, somebody’s getting it you know, themselves, there’s something else. Now I know what my new to brand data is. What constitutes good numbers, what constitutes bad and, and what’s, what’s your action plan once you get that number?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, so new to brand is gonna vary category to category. If you’re looking at toothpaste that’s different than if you’re looking at TVs. You know, you’re not gonna be buying a TV every year or maybe you are. But you know, those metrics are really gonna differ by your category. So looking at some category standards is important. You know, we release our CPC report I don’t think we include new brand in that percentage, but talking with you know, your Amazon rep and getting some of that data through context that you have is important to kind of set, like, what is the benchmark for me? Because 10% for one brand is gonna be horrible for another and wonderful for a different brand. So once you kinda have a benchmark of where you’re starting and where you’re trying to get to, that’s really when you can start taking action.
Jocelyn:
And a lot of that action is gonna be around targeting and shifting spend. So, you know, if someone’s already searching for your brand name, they’re probably not gonna be a new customer. They’re already aware of who you are. So maybe shifting some of that spend out of brand defense and going into more general category terms where people are searching for, I don’t know, natural toothpaste versus, you know, the brand name itself. So that’s when you start shifting where you’re investing in order to impact certain metrics. So, you know, the reverse is true for subscribe and save. If they’re already brand aware and they haven’t purchased, you know, in the last 90 days, you can spend some additional budget on retargeting, for example, to try and generate more loyal customers. So once you kind of have your objective of what am I trying to achieve in the next quarter, for example, and what are my benchmarks and what are my goals for that, you can then start taking action and start shifting spend of in what direction is gonna start influencing those metrics. So those are really kind of the actions you start taking once you start looking at this broader data.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. So talking about, you know, PPC from a branded side, you know, your branded keywords and, and things like that, do you always keep those or do you suggest to keep those segregated like, hey, if any branded, you know, keywords or search terms come out, let me, let me keep those in its own campaigns, or do you keep them co-mingled with, with your regular random search terms?
Jocelyn:
No, I, we definitely always pull those out because you wanna know how much you’re spending on those, and you wanna know how much people are searching for those, you know, if that’s going to increase over time, you wanna be able to see that. And you’re gonna have a lot more control over how you’re defending your brand. You know, it’s kind of up to you of how much you want to spend on protecting your own brand name. It’s, if it’s very competitive and people are, you know, targeting your brand name, you need to be there to defend it. And if not, you can shift budget out of that, but you have a lot more control over how and where you’re spending when you have things separated out. So we typically have things break broken out by branded, you know, general non-brand category terms, adjacent, maybe, you know, similar products, things like that. And then competitor, if you are going after competitors that’s the best way to kind of structure your campaigns. So you have, again, much more control and you’re very intentional in, in how you’re spending your budget.
Bradley Sutton:
We’ve got a Facebook user here that says, Hey, I noticed a weird situation. I got impressions, zero clicks, but a sale. So like, is that is that a data error from, from Amazon, if, you know, is it, is there a such thing as getting zero clicks, but actually getting a, a attributed sale?
Jocelyn:
It would be something from the past. So, you know, if you are advertising June 1st through the 20th, and then you pause for the 21st through the 30th, for example, you may get some sales attributed after, you know, after the time that you pause where you may have zero spend and you know, zero clicks that day. But because they clicked on the ad, you know, four days ago, the sale may be attributed then. So it’s probably an attribution thing less, you know, they’re not converting on an impression that sale would not be attributed to that impression. But it’s possible that it was attributed at a later date. So if you run outta budget, you know, with five days left in the month, you’re probably still gonna be seeing some sales trickle in because of the attribution window. So I would say that’s probably what the situation is.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. I’ve got opinions on this next question, but you know, maybe we, we’ll, we’ll talk to you too, because it was actually interesting says, what is the best way to use PPC to improve organic rank? I was at the billion dollar seller summit in Puerto Rico last week, and there was a, a customer of PAC views there. Matt Altman, he runs a, an agency I forgot what the name of the agency was, but he, he was extolling the virtues of Pacvue, talking about how it’s really cool how they, you, you can kind of set rules based on your organic rank. Now, you know, now that you know, the last couple of years things like search, find, buy and two-step URLs are, are not you know strategies that we’re allowed to use anymore. Pretty much, you know, PPC is is one of the only, you know, on Amazon waste to improve your organic rank. So how, so how are you for your clients utilizing PPC in order in order to try and increase your organic position?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, I mean that’s kind of the beauty of Amazon is that you do have the ability to influence a flywheel through advertising. Obviously things like promos and inventory and retail readiness obviously play a factor in as well, but PPC is the, the factor that really have the most control over. So when we’re looking at improving organic rank, it’s important to look at why are we trying to improve organic rank? Is it a new product? Are we trying to be more competitive or are we trying to go after higher volume et cetera, things like that. But if we are purely looking at, I want to rank higher on natural toothpaste, for example, we’ll, we’ll run with the toothpaste example. It’s gonna be very intentionally spending. Again, that’s kind of what my whole job comes down to. But in like understanding how much you’re spending and what it’s gonna cost to, you know, compete on that.
Jocelyn:
But if you want, if you’re in the natural toothpaste space, you need to be competing on those terms. You know you know, Toms of Maine, 12 pack natural toothpaste, blah, blah, blah, blah, is only gonna get you so far. That’s not really gonna improve your rank. You’re probably already solid there, but if you’re looking to improve your overall rank for a product, you need to be going after the keywords that are gonna keyword lead to that improvement. So it’s very much about understanding where you need to be spending and what terms you need to be spending and what’s actually gonna lead toward you know, improvement and rank. I think that’s the, the first step and then it’s going and executing on that. So PPC is really the, the tool that you can use to influence specific pieces of search term and, and customer behavior and whatnot. So that’s really how you start going after improving your organic rank.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, we got another anonymous question here. It says the question says, I’m trying to get targeting top of search, I put the maximum Amazon suggested bid as well as a hundred percent on top of search, but still we are getting clicks on product pages. What should I do?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, so the bid adjustment is just gonna be adjusting for that target. You can do negative targeting. So you could do like negative a hundred percent on product pages, for example. It’s not like it adds up to a hundred. You could have a hundred, you know, 60% on top of search, it’s gonna increase that top of search bid 60%. Then you could also have, you know, 60% on product pages and it’s gonna increase the bid for product pages 60%. So it’s not totalling up to 100. So if you absolutely wanna cut off product pages, you can decrease, you can have negative bid adjustments, but just because top of search is at a hundred doesn’t mean it’s gonna completely eliminate product pages.
Bradley Sutton:
Wells has a question here. He says, Hey, we missed the honeymoon period. Our product doesn’t rank, so barely no sales. We’ve got a lot of competitors, so what do you advise us to do? We started PPC campaigns two years ago before learning Atomic or anything about ppc. So Osama’s got this mature product, I believe he actually sells in Amazon, Europe somewhere. If he’s who I think he is here. And, and obviously honeymoon period is, you know, this is a mature product, is two years old he’s not getting sales cuz he’s not organically ranking like, you know, I’m assuming he’s got some, you know, some reviews. So would you just suggest like trying to just go hot and heavy on some long tail keywords and, and build up some of those core keywords? Or should, you know, should he go extreme and maybe start over, you know, again, if he doesn’t have too many reviews or what would you say in a situation like this?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, so there’s a couple approaches you can take. I think the long tail keyword is a good way to look at it. You know, if you’re spending money on again, natural toothpaste that’s gonna be probably a waste of money to be honest with you. It’s gonna be so expensive for you to even try and compete in that, that it’s gonna be a waste of dollars. So starting to look at what are some of the longer tail keywords that I can win, you know, if it’s, you know, the most br you know, specific keyword ever, but if it applies to your product, going after that and starting to just chip away at some of that organic rank is gonna be a good way to start. And then, you know, if you have a similar product within your brand or you have competitors, you can start targeting their product detail pages.
Jocelyn:
So if someone’s not specifically searching for you, but they see you on you know, another product detail page, that’s a good way to kind of start again, chipping your way in and kind of moving from the outside in to the, the kind of larger volume because again, it’s gonna be a waste of money if you’re trying to go after those high volumes and you don’t have the foundation of strong rank. So starting to chip away I think is the best method and mantra of having it, and this goes to new products as well of if you’re starting from zero, it’s gonna take some time. So long tail and product detail pages is what I would recommend.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean along the same lines as his question but you know, if he is who I think it is, like I said, he sells in Amazon Europe. If I’m not mistaken, I’ve never sold an Amazon Europe. I’ve only I only sell in Amazon, you know, North America. I’m sure you manage across multiple, you know, marketplaces. Does your strategy differ like say Amazon, Germany, Amazon France compared to Amazon USA or pretty much you are using the same, the same principles and the same strategies?
Jocelyn:
I would say as far as like foundation, like campaign structure and segmentation, it’s gonna be the same, but it’s gonna be different. Like there’s nuances obviously in how people search in different regions and whatnot. So the targeting’s probably gonna be a little different as far as, you know, what keywords customers are using when they’re searching for your product. You know, some words in, you know, America that are English are different than, you know, the UK for example. So it’s I think more targeting, but the core foundations of how do I set up a good account, how do I set up a good campaign structure? Those are gonna be the same, those are gonna transfer over well. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Rolando says, how do you use day partying as part of overall campaign spending? You know, I think, you know, Pacvue has had this for probably over a year now. You know, we’ve had it in Adtomic, I’ve dabbled a little bit we call it Schedules in Adtomic. I’m curious, you have way more experience than me on on day parting, so, so how are you utilizing this?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of way to utilize it from a day-to-day perspective. You absolutely should be using it. Pacvue released maybe a few months ago, maybe six months ago, a feature where you can do day parting based on specific metrics. So you’re maybe for conversion focused campaigns, you are basing your day parting automation on conversion rate, or you’re doing it based on impressions or cpc. So you can choose what metric you wanna even base your day parting schedule on. But it is really crucial, you know, every product, you know, some products are the general, you know, eight to eight but some, you know, have early morning shopping hours, evening hours, things like that. So it is good to be using that no matter who you are. Because it does save a lot of money where there’s no reason to be spending at, you know, 3:00 AM for example.
Jocelyn:
Or it may be a really competitive time at 2:00 PM in the afternoon. Being able to make adjustments like that is gonna save time for, you know, preventing you from doing it manually, but it’s also gonna save money pretty significantly. And then day parting, as far as like special events, you know, we can set up schedules for Cyber five where we’re going aggressive, you know, the 6:00 PM after Thanksgiving to midnight or whatever. You know, and you can do that around Prime day that’s coming up, you know, next month. So there’s a lot of ways you can do it from an always on perspective, but then also scheduling around how do you wanna spend during tent poll events. So we definitely have that laid out for clients around Prime Day. Like I said, cyber five, any of the peak periods, it’s really gonna save you a lot of time and money to outline that. So I always recommend a day party schedule.
Bradley Sutton:
Here’s a scenario, I’m sure you’ve run into, so, so somebody the PPC sales ha have increased, you know, which is not you know, could be good, could be could, could be bad, obviously bad if, if it’s not profitable, but regardless of what’s going on, the PPC sales have increased, but organic sales are staying the same. So, so the, the PPC piece of the pie as far as sales go has increased organic is still the same. What other methods would you be using to, to help increase organic sales? This person asked?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, you know, there’s a lot of things that lead to PPC sales increasing is, you know, you could have been much more efficient in how you were spending or you could be increasing your budget. You know, there’s a lot of factors that lead to increased PPC sales, but there’s not always a one-to-one of, I increase my ad sales 10% this month and my organic sales also increased 10%. And sometimes it’s, you know, a kind of trailing you know, this line goes up and this line goes up, you know, two months later, for example. So I think, again, going back towards what terms are gonna be actually leading to an increase in organic sales you know, that increase in ad sales was coming from just branded terms. You know, those may have been people that would’ve already shopped and already converted if it was an organic placement as well. So understanding what is gonna lead towards incremental growth versus existing sales is something I would take a look at. So you’re not just kind of eating away at sales, that would’ve already happened if you didn’t have an ad showing up for them. Sometimes it’s a matter of where you’re spending and where those sales are even coming from versus would they have already occurred organically.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. I’m actually gonna send a, I see Rolando has another message. Rolando, I’m actually gonna send you a link. Maybe you can just hop on, hop on our our broadcast here and ask a question like, well, what about speaking of off Amazon, you know, Walmart is probably the, the second most, you know, known, you know, place to advertise and sell for as far as online marketplaces. How your PPC strategy lately for Walmart? I, it seems like in the last six months or so, they’ve really you know, really come a long ways. They’re still far away from the, the capabilities of Amazon on the advertising side, but, but you couldn’t even have what is it called, like second price auctions or what you know, like, like just, you know, a few months ago. So what are some big ways that your strategy differs? As far as Walmart advertising compared to Amazon advertising?
Jocelyn:
Yeah. So for those who don’t know, Walmart switched to a second price auction Q2 last year. So this is, we’re coming up, we’re lapping it essentially for the first year. And then they also changed the relevancy model. So that was kind of the big kind of hindrance of Walmart was, it was just not that advanced. And so it was very inefficient to advertise on Walmart. You know, first movers that got in early, I think did well, but overall it was more of an uphill battle than certainly Amazon. Obviously Amazon had quite a few years headstart, but with those changes, so many of our clients saw drastic improvements in Walmart. You know, we’re talking about triple digit growth basically because your money that you were spending was so much more effective once they made those changes. So a lot of it is kind of related to campaign structure as far as, you know, the product variations are a little bit different than Amazon.
Jocelyn:
So understanding how to segment your campaigns based on products and, and variations and whatnot, which they have now since recently allowed you to advertise much of the, the variations and really the different products themselves. So the campaign structure was very different based on the amount of products that you can even advertise and how you could advertise it, but it’s get definitely gotten a lot closer to what Amazon is as far as like a, an algorithm model and an auction model. They are rolling out some onsite display towards a kind of larger segment. You know, it’s been in beta for a while, but it’s becoming much more accessible. So I would say it was very sponsored product focused, but display is definitely becoming a bigger piece of Walmart now. So they’re doing, I think everything they can to catch up, I would say.
Jocelyn:
And then sponsor brand video, which obviously Amazon has had for quite a while. Walmart has rolled that out since as well. So there’s a lot more ad types now, but it was very much restrictive based on product and sponsor product was really the only ad type. So I would say our campaign structure has expanded much more in Walmart in the recent months based on what Walmart is making available. So that’s, I think, the biggest difference in the last three to six months is really accessibility to additional ad types and more ways of advertising your products than before.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. All right. Let’s go ahead and bring our first live guest on here. Let’s bring Rolando to the stage. Rolando, how’s it going, man?
Rolando:
Hello my friend. How are you?
Bradley Sutton:
I’m doing just delightful. Thanks. Thank you. You, this is a historic moment, first ever outside guest live on tacos Tuesday, so here we go.
Rolando:
Where’s my food man? Where’s my tacos
Bradley Sutton:
It’s right here. I got some right here for you. I got some right here. On my shirt there’s the tacos, but before you forget your question, what was your question?
Rolando:
In looking at PPC spend, obviously Bradley was talking about how PPC spend is going up, right? It’s unavoidable, but we can look at where we can get better value. So if we’re spending a dollar a click to convert on a, like you’re talking about natural toothpaste, could we find a cheaper way to do it, whether it’s externally, like on Google ads, or maybe that term is 50 cents per click and shooting that over to the listing or somewhere else within the Amazon ecosystem that brings more value or essentially like a retail arbitrage on keywords. That’s what I’m trying to say. How do you approach that when you’re looking at spend as it just keeps ballooning every year Yeah. On Amazon?
Jocelyn:
Yeah. You know, obviously outside Amazon signals influence you know, Amazon performance as well. So that’s always an example and that’s always an option. I would say looking at ad types because we have some clients where sponsored brand is so much more efficient than sponsored products. Maybe sponsored products is very, you know, in the highly competitive space and it’s cheaper to win, you know, a video placement than it is to win the top sponsored product placement. So kind of understanding where you’re spending as far as like an ad type, because natural toothpaste for sponsored product may be different for than sponsored brand video, for example. And thinking about, you know, sponsored brand as a whole, there’s a lot more options of, you know, outside just the product collection, you know, there’s the brand store. So how can you get people from the brand store into your product detail pages because people that shop on the brand store typically have higher order values, for example. So looking at where you’re spending, not just from a holistic bucket of money perspective, but from a an ad type perspective we have a lot of clients actually with dsp. It’s pretty effective and it’s actually more efficient than sponsored products based on, you know, interesting more refine targeting and an audience understanding.
Rolando:
I just heard that the business side on Amazon is getting ready to open up targeting on the sponsored display. Have you heard about that?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, so there’s a lot around business owners that you can target and there’s, you know, Amazon business lookalike and whatnot. So there is so much more, I think, refinement in who you’re actually targeting. You know, if you’re searching national toothpaste as, you know, a father of five, for example, versus me, a single woman in Denver, you know, those are very different audiences and maybe we have different conversions, for example. So I think that the real value of DSP is the audience understanding and kind of refinement. That’s the huge, huge piece of DSP. And when you’re looking at brands that have a very clear vision of who they think their customer is, it’s a better way to kind of approach that versus sponsored products, for example.
Rolando:
Can I ask you one more question while I have you here and Bradley? Yep. The B2B side and, you know, there are a lot of consumer brands on the, on the Amazon platform, but as you know, the B2B side on Amazon itself is, is growing every year. They’re making concerted effort with dedicated reps. They’re going after large enterprise accounts, government accounts. What’s the feedback that you’re hearing from your customers that have a contingent of B2B customers buying from them on Amazon?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, we actually have a few customers our clients that are thinking of like, how do we expand in to B2 B? I think they’ve met it pretty closed off, and I think they are making an effort to open up more in the kind of the coming year, because it’s only, I think about 10% of total Amazon revenue, if I remember that stat recently that we kind of heard from an Amazon contact. So they are, there are a lot of customer or clients who have thought about B2B and they haven’t really had the ability to go after it in the past and are now taking a look again of like, okay, Amazon’s kind of opening up some targeting and some placements and whatnot. How do we approach this? And it is very different I would say of what products you’re even including as far as, you know, you’re talking about pallets of batteries versus, you know, a 24 pack, for example.
Jocelyn:
Indeed. So so a lot of clients that are kind of have a presence but haven’t specifically gone after B2B are reevaluating it, certainly. And I think the B2B team at Amazon is reevaluating how do they kind of grow this side of the business? So I think there’s a lot more taring that’s available now, and I think it’s kind of like a mutual reconsideration that everyone’s doing right now of how do we make this work and how do we grow this side of the business. Again, it’s only 10%, so it’s not gonna be a huge kind of factor for a lot of clients. But if you were in kind of more the
Rolando:
Industrial industrial, yeah, we’re not office products. I would say we’re way over overindexed on, on for the percentage. You said we’re way above way, way north of that and the office space. So we’re seeing more of our sales come from B2B than that 10% mark. So it’s there. And then, and I, and I would imagine it’s only gonna get bigger as the overall pie start getting bigger at Amazon.
Jocelyn:
I would agree. Yeah. Awesome
Rolando:
Thank you for bringing me on, Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
He’s actually been on our Serious Sellers Podcast en Espanol before good episode there. So I gotta bring him on the English one. Now. My last question is, is, is, you know, speaking of what, what this person was saying about smaller accounts, you know, Pacvue is not for smaller brands, but I’m gonna ask you what, you know, how can people find more you know, reach out to Pacvue for, for more information or reach out to you? But before I do that, who are the people who should be, you know, reaching out? Like if I’m doing only like about $600,000 a year on Amazon and don’t have much PPC spend like, like I’m doing right now, may, maybe I’m not the right fit for Pacvue, but, but who would get the most benefit out of contacting you and, and maybe seeing if you, you guys can help them.
Jocelyn:
Yeah I mean, I think that Pacvue is, it is more designed for bigger clients that are gonna, you know, benefit from the tool. But I would say there’s a lot of different ways to work with Pacvue. You know, the clients that I manage are, you know, the big boys in the space, and those are you know, require a lot of additional support. But we have, you know, kind of consulting abilities and we have, you know, people that just use our platform just purely for the technology. And the, the benefit that you’re getting is really the efficiency in operations and the time saved and the ability to kind of step beyond like the day-to-day bid management and be able to focus more on strategic initiatives, for example. That’s really kind of what, and that’s what Helium 10 does as well.
Jocelyn:
You know, like any of our, you know, suite of tools is really helping you be more efficient at what you do day to day so that you can think, you know, bigger picture and look at more, you know, higher level operational initiatives versus, you know, changing a bid from 45 cents to 50, you know, for 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM for example. You know, like that is really the benefit. So I would say there’s not a ton of, you know, minimum spend. You know, there’s a lot of ways that we can work with clients who just want help saving time. So I would say don’t limit yourself, but pfu definitely is, to your point, more for somewhat larger sellers. But there is not, you know, a specific dollar amount that I would say you have to be spending in order to benefit from.
Bradley Sutton:
And then if somebody, you know, did think that they might qualify and how can they reach out to you guys?
Jocelyn:
Yeah, I mean there’s sales@pacvue.com would be a good place to start shooting us an email. And, you know, you’ll filter through a lot of, you know, the people that I’m not on the sales side, so probably wouldn’t end up talking to me, but feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or whatnot. And we can get you guys connected to the right place. But pacvue.com is a great resource for understanding what our tool can actually do for you and start getting you into the funnel of some emails and, and some contacts with people who are more on the sales side than I am. But pacvue.com is really where you’re gonna see a lot of what we can do and, and what we can do to help you. So I would say our LinkedIn and our website are basic.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, Jocelyn, thank you so much for coming on today. It was nice to have your expertise on here. And look for, it’s gonna be exciting to be seeing what copilot at Pacvue is gonna be doing for sellers moving forward. And would love to reach out to you maybe next year to come back on the show and, and help sellers like you just did right now.
Jocelyn:
Awesome. Thanks for having me today.
Welcome back for part 2 of this 2-part strategy series with Bradley! In this episode, we dive into a range of strategies and tips to supercharge Amazon brand pre-launch activities. We kick off with a quick recap of Part 1 before getting into advanced topics like reverse engineering your competitors’ PPC strategies, expanding your keyword search, and uncovering long-tail keywords. We also explore tactics for identifying products frequently purchased alongside yours and share a seller’s success story after using the Maldives Honeymoon Method. Additionally, we discuss leveraging search query performance, optimizing listings using the Amazon algorithm, and understanding indexing versus ranking. Tune in for valuable insights on all the steps you need to do before launching your brand on Amazon.
In episode 467 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:
- 02:18 – Make Sure You’ve Heard Part 1 Already
- 02:45 – Reverse Engineering Your PPC Strategy From The Competitors
- 05:05 – How Widen Out Your Search For More Keywords
- 06:19 – Get Long Tail Keywords Of Top 10 Phrase Roots
- 09:20 – Which Products Are Frequently Bough Together With Your Product
- 10:32 – How The Maldives Honeymoon Method Helped This Seller
- 13:07 – Bonus Hack: Using Search Query Performance With No Product Yet
- 14:48 – 10 Relevant Spanish Keywords? Check The Translation
- 17:56 – How To Use Frankenstein For This Strategy
- 18:57 – How Does The Amazon Algorithm Work For Listing Optimization
- 19:21 – Subject Matter Is No Longer Existing In Front Or Back Ends
- 19:51 – Amazon Indexing Versus Ranking
- 22:05 – Using Your “Keyword Bank” Inside Listing Builder
- 22:32 – Use Chat GPT To Build Your Lising Inside Helium 10’s Listing Builder
- 23:37 – Try To Nest Your Keywords Together
- 24:20 – Important Things To Note When Making Your Listings
- 25:24 – Don’t Use A+ Content To Index For Keywords
- 25:39 – More On The Difference Of Indexing And Ranking
- 27:17 – Check Indexing For Main And Secondary Keywords
- 29:32 – Add Top 10-30 Keywords Inside Keyword Tracker And Turn On Boost
- 30:11 – Setup Helium 10’s Market Tracker Tool
- 31:38 – Make Sure To Activate The SKU In Inventory Management
- 32:53 – Activate Your Helium 10 Alerts
- 33:27 – Use Follow Up For Automatic Request A Review
- 34:50 – More Bonus Tips: Strikethrough Pricing
- 36:11 – That’s It For The Bali Blast Pre Launch Strategies
- 37:06 – Stay Tuned For SSP Episode 500!
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today is part two of my two-part episode where I’m talking all about my pre-launch strategies for Amazon. You don’t want to miss today’s strategies because it’s gonna get you on the right track for the Maldives Honeymoon Launch method. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Wanna check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon? Or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result, have the actual search keyword in the title. You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome extension tool X-ray. More than 1 million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And I am still here in Bali. I just finished my last dinner with the team.
Bradley Sutton:
They gave me this like parting gift, vegemite. I’m not even sure how to pronounce this hat I’m wearing here. So again, thanks to Regina and Chris for organizing this event. It was awesome and now as for my last night. I got my flight in a couple of hours here. I wanted to record part two of my Bali Blast method, which is my pre-launch method. Again, you guys call it whatever you want. This is just me being silly with, you know, making up names for strategies and things. But if you miss the last episode, part one, make sure to go back and watch that episode. Otherwise, you know, a lot of this is not gonna make sense. But basically what this two-part episode series is, is like, hey, I’m like, Hey, you wanna get that Maldives honeymoon when you launch your product.
Bradley Sutton:
We know about the steps that’s taken there. What about before? You know, what comes before the wedding? Well, bachelor’s party or bachelorette party, and where’s a cool place to go for that Bali, which is just happens to be where I am. So I was like, let me call this the Bali Blast method just to make it trending in my own mind at least. So anyways, the last episode, we went through 16 different steps on, you know, everything from keyword research to a little bit of listing optimization. And we’re gonna do a little bit more keyword research today and also some more listing optimization. And we’re gonna bring you right up until almost getting your, your PPC campaigns ready. And I’ll give you guys some bonus, bonus strategies as well. All right, let’s go ahead and hop right into it.
Bradley Sutton:
The first step of today is actually step number 17 in this whole strategy, and that’s reverse engineering your PPC strategy from the competitors. All right? So basically what I want to do is put my competitor’s ASINs into Cerebro, just like I was doing, you know, to get the initial keywords, but this time I’m looking at sponsored rank average. So if I put a whole bunch of competitors into Cerebro, I’m gonna put a sponsored rank average from about one to 30 and maybe I wanna put in a minimum search volume. It’s not necessary, but I am then going to look at how many competitors are advertising for the keyword, like a high number of competitors and what their sponsored rank average is, which means if I were to take their position of where they showed up in search results, approximately what position would it be?
Bradley Sutton:
Like, for example, if they were ranking, you know, one four and eight, well, the sponsored rank average would be four, right? And the reason I’m looking at this number is because these will be some, some keywords that potentially, you know, are good or that at least the competitors have decided that they’re gonna pay more money. You know, you don’t get on the top of the page of sponsored results if you don’t have a, a pretty high bid and you don’t bid high unless you have some, you know, facts and figures that back up that that bid. All right? So it’s kind of, again, a way of reverse engineering what your competitor has had to learn through trial and error. And so this is gonna get you some more keywords that you definitely want to get indexed for.
Bradley Sutton:
Another step is, again, if you don’t have Helium 10, another way you can do some preliminary keyword research and get some more keywords is look at the Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer. Alright? Product Opportunity Explorer. Even if you don’t have brand register, you have access to that. It’s in your seller central dashboard. You enter in a, your competitor’s products and then find the niches that that product appears in. And these are niches of keywords, right? So for example, one of the coffin products, they are in the Halloween decorations niche. And then if you were to click in there, you are gonna see, you know, anywhere from 10 to 30 keywords that make up part of that niche. That’s another way to get some relevant keywords, I think not a lot of people are using. Even if you have Helium 10, it’s kind of like a cool way to get some more keywords for your listings.
Bradley Sutton:
Next is still in Cerebro. All right? I’m still in Cerebro and I still am looking at the same 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, whatever competitor ASINs. Remember that first step, which I went over in the Wednesday or the last episode, this part one of this was clicking the top keywords and the opportunity keywords. And then just now I talked about looking at the sponsored rank average. Well, in this situation, under the same exact search. I’m going to start widening out my search. Remember, I wanna start finding keywords where I wanna get indexed for it, but I don’t necessarily need to be the number one, you know, click item. I don’t need it in phrase, form my listing. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna have minimum search volume, maybe 200 or 300 or 400. I’m gonna put advanced rank filter number one, minimum one, okay, minimum one.
Bradley Sutton:
And then advanced rank filter two, which means where the range, I’m looking for 1 to 100. So basically it’s like, Hey, show me keywords where any of these products that I put as my competitors, at least one of them, at least one, is ranked in the first two pages. All right? So this is, you know, gets me a good list of keywords that I might want to be indexed four cuz they could potentially get me sales in the future. Alright, next keyword research step to get ready in this Blas method is number 21, get long tail keywords of top 10 phrase roots. Alright? Get long tail keywords of top 10 phrase roots. What in the heck does that mean? You know, when, when you’re looking at your, your top keywords, I already finished up until when I’m on step 21, I’m already finished with my steps that get me my keyword phrases.
Bradley Sutton:
So if I look at my keyword phrases, I might put them into a Magnet first. And let me just show you, what I can do is I can take those keywords and either stick it in magnet or just look at the keywords and see are there certain root words that are appearing? You know, Magnet will tell me if there’s keywords individual keywords that are appearing most often. It’s the ones that are most frequently there. Like for example, if I have a bunch of keywords like coffin letter board, coffin letter board, decor coffin letter, this coffin letter that, well, coffin letter and coffin for that sense are root words or phrase or mini phrases that are appearing in a lot of the keywords that I targeted as my main phrase. I know this sounds like kind of crazy, especially if you’re brand new.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me try and break that down one more time. Make sure you understand it’s really important, guys. All right, so if I have a list of 20 to 30 main keywords, I want to find the top keywords that are most commonly occurring. Because those 30 phrases, isn’t it completely 30 phrases that are completely unique keywords, right? Coffin, for example, if I’m doing coffin shelf coffin’s probably gonna be in half those keywords, right? So I wanna find those keywords, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into magnet and I’m gonna put that root, all right? So for example, coffin letter, I’m gonna put that root word here and I dunno, 3000 keywords might show up, but this time I’m going to use the filter in magnet that is entitled Smart complete. All right?
Bradley Sutton:
Because that’s gonna show me long tail versions and different versions like plural form or singular form of that root phrase, coffin letter. So for example, in this case, six different keywords come up, longer tail keywords. And then again, these are ones I’m gonna put into my secondary keyword list because these are ones I want to get indexed for. You know, maybe nobody’s getting sales for it right now, that’s why it didn’t come up in Cerebro, but it could be potentially, you could be the first one to, to rank for it all, right? Because if it’s a longer tailed version of a keyword that you’re relevant for, there’s a chance that it could be relevant to your product. So make sure to check those keywords as well. Next step right here is step number 22. Now, this is something that we went over in step three.
Bradley Sutton:
In step three in the last episode, I showed you guys about how to use Black Box Product Targeting in order to find frequently bought together products, all right? And that could be potentially be used for bundling or maybe to add something to give a good chance to get a good review. But in this sense, use that same function, all right? To see which products were, you know, really frequently bought together a lot with your product. All right? And now what you’re gonna do is some of those products, like maybe there’s five, hopefully there’s, you know, not too many, maybe there’s five or six. Pick a few of those really good selling ones that you think are more on the relevant side. And now what you’re gonna do, instead of trying to, you know, think of bundling options, this is gathering kind of loosely relevant keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
So for example, in this coffin letter board, frequently bought together search, there were like stickers that showed up and there were these you know, actual letters that showed up and there’s probably coffin shelves that showed up, et cetera. Now, none of these are like substitutes for a coffin letter board, right? It’s not like, oh, I’m gonna buy, it’s not like it’s not like the same product, right? So the keywords that are driving sales to these products, like let’s say it’s a coffin letter board, and the product that’s bought with it is a skull candle holder. You know, the keywords are most likely completely different. But here’s the thing, you are gonna wanna for the mo again, we’re, we’re trying to look ahead to the Maldives honeymoon method, the launch method, which, you know, if you’re, that’s the first time you’re hearing this.
Bradley Sutton:
We’ve talked about that in like at least 10 episodes here. Oh, by the way, I just talked to, you know I told you guys, I’m here in Bali organized by Chris Thomas. Chris Thomas is one of the leaders here in the Amazon collective and Amazon collected mastermind, and he’s also a coach, and he was on this podcast before, he was telling me in the car today that he helped somebody with this Maldives method, the Maldives honeymoon method, and was able to net something crazy, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, like within a one month timeframe, all unfulfilled by merchant products, but they used the Maldives honeymoon method, and he was like thanking me, thanking me for that. I was like, oh, that’s why I do this kind of thing. It’s so great to actually hear people using this methods again.
Bradley Sutton:
So, so what we’re talking about today, Bali Blast method, it’s trying to get us ready for that Maldives honeymoon. Anyways, I digress. We’re talking about frequently bought together products and then finding the top keywords for those products and then putting it in your listing. So when I say top keywords, if my product is a coffin letter board, let’s say one of the frequently bought together might be a coffin shelf, or no, what did I say? A gothic skull candle holder, right? I’m going to look using these same techniques we’ve been talking about or using brand analytics, whatever the case may be, I wanna find the top three to five keywords that are driving sales for that gothic skull candle holder. I can find that in brand analytics. I can run cerebra on it. And when I find the top keywords that are driving sales there, you know, by looking at what’s high search volume where they’re ranked at the top of the page, I’m gonna put those into my listing somehow.
Bradley Sutton:
And the reason why is I want to loosely relate my products to these other products that have a history of being bought together with my competitor’s products. Does that make sense? I’m not trying to steal the sales of a gothic candle holder. No. What I’m trying to do is set up my listing so that from day one, once I start doing ppc, maybe I’m going to product target these frequently bought together products. It could be that Amazon from day one might not give me any impressions if I’m trying to target the gothic skull candle holder, because Amazon might be like, wait, this product seems to be a coffin shelf. Like what would that have to do with this? Right? But then what I want the Amazon algorithm to do is be able to see like, wait a minute, this, this product has a lot of similar or some similar keywords with this product.
Bradley Sutton:
You know what? It’s very relevant to this product. We’re gonna start showing them this from day one that was actually, you know, a method we talked about too in, in Project X. All right, so Project X, you know, we talked about, you know doing some product product targeting as well. Alright, the next step here, that was step number 22. This is actually just a bonus step, but search query performance is something that was released, you know, a few months ago and, you know, people have like raved about it. Well, you can only do search query performance if you have an existing product and the existing brand, alright? So if you are doing, if you’re launching a new product that you’ve never had data before, you, you technically don’t have any access to search career performance data. Now, why would you even want search query performance data?
Bradley Sutton:
There’s some people I don’t look at it too much in this regard, but I know there’s some sellers who like to use it in order to get some more insights into like what kind of add to cart ratio certain keywords have, what kind of impression share you know, different products have, they wanna go deeper into the click share reports. So I, I did an experiment like a couple of months ago where I actually was going to you know, launch some socks on this, on the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities Seller Central account, and obviously I’ve never sold socks on the Manny’s Mysterious Project X account. All right? So what I did was I created a dummy listing, maybe made a couple FBM inventory, and I s I I made the listing active, sent some PPC, and then what happened after a couple of weeks, I had a whole bunch more data that I could look at in Search Query Performance.
Bradley Sutton:
So if you are launching something brand new that you have no search query performance history on, that’s kind of like a way around it now you’re gonna have to burn a UPC code and actually make a real listing and, and just put a really high price to, to make sure that nobody buys it. All right, the next step we’re gonna talk about, this is important. Step number 23 is if you have more than 10 relevant Spanish keywords, check the translation. All right? So if you are doing product or keyword research in Cerebro maggot in those, those earlier steps that we talked about, you know, I, I forgot what the steps were, like steps 10 through 17 or whatever, it’s very likely, if not guaranteed, that some of those keywords that you found, if you’re doing this in the American marketplace, you found some Spanish keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, here’s the thing. If you only found like two or three relevant Spanish keywords that you want to be indexed for, just go ahead and throw those in like the backend search terms. All right? But here, here’s what happens. What if you get like 12 or 15 Spanish keyword phrases? Well, you know, you don’t really have room in your backend search terms to put in 15 phrases of Spanish keywords. No, you’ve only got like, you know, 250 characters. So what you can do is go to the listing, go, go, go to your listing once you make it, all right? Once you make your listing and this is kind of like in the future, but again, right before you launch your product, and then go to the flag at the very top of the Amazon page. Now I’m talking about this in the context of USA and Spanish, but, but this could be Amazon, Germany, and we could be talking about English keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
You find it could be Amazon, France, and you found Italian keywords, right? This is the same principle, but anyways, on the USA side, change your listing to Spanish. And then what I would do is I would click on the import listing to scribbles, which is listing Optimizer, like, right, it’s, it’s right there on the Chrome extension, and it’s going to import the, the front end of your listing into in the Spanish version, you know, since I just changed the version to Spanish, which is what Spanish speaking people do, they change Amazon’s interface into Spanish, and instantly it translates the listing. I’m gonna pull that Spanish translation into scribbles, and then I’m gonna have that list of 10, 15 keyword phrases into scribbles. And remember when you put those phrases in the scribbles, it shows you the full phrases and it breaks it down to the singular keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to check, it’s going to instantly show me where I am where if I have those Spanish keywords in the translation, I didn’t make the translation, Amazon makes a translation, alright? But what happens sometimes is, is even though it translates your whole listing, right, it doesn’t use the exact phrases, you know, the correct phrases that maybe people are searching for. So if you have more than 10 Spanish keywords, this is what you do to go in there and see if there’s keywords that you already, that Amazon is already translating for you. Because if that’s the case, you’re probably optimizing enough, you’re probably relevant and you’re definitely indexed, right? Of course, obviously you can check if you’re indexed or not, but you, you’re probably relevant, right? But if, if those keywords aren’t in phrase form or some keywords are missing altogether, that means you’d probably want to put those individual keywords into the backend of your listing when you are creating it.
Bradley Sutton:
All right? Step number 24, that was a little bit out of order right there on 23. We’re, we’re going back to the listing optimization stage right now. Remember I had two buckets of keywords that we’ve been talking about these last two episodes, the main keywords and the supplemental keywords. So now those supplemental keyword phrases, it could have been 200 phrases, it could be 300 phrases, whatever. I know I can’t put all 300 phrases into my listing. So what I do is I put those into Frankenstein and then I click on remove duplicates. And what it does is it extracts all of the unique words that make up those 200 phrases that I want to get indexed for. All right? So this is important to understand that don’t try and put all the phrases into your listing, you know it’s not going to fit.
Bradley Sutton:
So go ahead and put it in Frankenstein and first extract all of those keywords on the individual level. Now, this is something that I’m always asked about, and I’m gonna tell you since I made this slide, it’s actually changed. All right? So how does the Amazon algorithm work for listing optimization? Here is a level of importance, number one for indexing. All right? So if we’re just talking about indexing, which means being searchable on Amazon doesn’t mean ranking indexing how Amazon ties your listing and makes it relevant to a keyword so that you’re in the Amazon index. Number one is special features. We’ll talk about that in a couple of seconds here. Number two is title number three used to be subject matter, but as of about nine days ago, subject matter is no longer existing in Amazon front nor back ends. And actually, you know, I have found that bullet points are actually ranking higher now than generic keywords, which is the for artist, formerly known as backend search terms, so that it goes special features, title, and now bullet points, it’s next, then generic keywords and then description.
Bradley Sutton:
So that’s for indexing. I’ve tested this a lot lately. I just tested this like literally last night on a live training I did for Serious Sellers Club members. And definitely bullet points is ranking faster than even generic keywords these days. Now for ranking, ranking is different. Ranking means like what gives rank juice. Like if a keyword is in phrase form in a certain part of the listing, which parts of the listing give the most bang for your buck, right? Number one title. The new number two is going to be bullet points. Number three is going to be generic keywords. Number four description. And the last would be special features. Special features does not help too much when we’re talking about indexing. And just to show you about how amazing special features is here’s somebody in the Helium 10 members Facebook group who, who said, Hey, shout out to Bradley for the tip of putting keywords in special features.
Bradley Sutton:
She writes I had two products with great conversion, great seo, and they would not index on my most relevant high volume keyword For three months. I opened several cases with Seller central, nothing, only after I put it in special features field boom became page one, positional one. So this special features works. I just tested it out literally last night on a live call. And on the live call there was a keyword that I couldn’t rank for, or that I had in the listing emo in the coffin shelf listing, and it wasn’t it wasn’t indexing for it all right? Even though I had it multiple places, put it in special features before that call ended, like 10 minutes later, we were indexed for that keyword emo that Amazon had previously refused to index me for. All right, next step, step number 25 is I have two lists of, of keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Remember, I have those top or main keywords, which are I have in phrase form all or phrases, you know, that should be anywhere from 10 to 30. And then I have a whole bunch, you know, maybe 100 or 200 individual keywords that, that were taken from my supplementary keyword list. And now I put all of those right here in into listing Builder, right? It’s super, super important that you do it this way and not just put all the phrases. All right, so now this is my keyword bank and listing builder is 10 to 30 phrases and maybe 50 to 300 individual keywords. Step number 26 is then go ahead. Hey, start with your title, optimize it for your main keywords, your canonical url, you know, get your listing really optimized. And then don’t forget, you have got to put those emotional trigger points we learned about in the last episode that you had taken from the customer reviews.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, one thing that you can do if you have the diamond plan in listing or in Helium 10, you can actually, if you, if you have writer’s block or you’re not confident with confident, I was about to say you’re not confident with your English level, yeah, I’m obviously not confident with my English level either. I can’t even speak English here. But if you’re not confident with your English level, go ahead and have the ChatGPT AI help you write your listing inside of Listing Builder. If you put your keywords and you put the kind of vibe you’re looking for, ChatGPT can kind of start your listing out and write it for you, and then you can tweak it to, to how you want it. But that really helps with writer’s block even for me sometimes. Alright, so again, create your title, make sure it’s optimized.
Bradley Sutton:
If you have multiple keywords, guys, if you have multiple keywords that were some of your top phrases, try to see if you have different roots of each other and get those in a title. The number, even though you have 30 keywords, that was your top you have 30 keywords, that was your top phrases. Can’t put 30 f keywords in your, in your title. So, so try to find the most relevant one. You definitely have to get in there. All right, so like for a coffin shelf, duh, it’s gonna be coffin shelf, right? But then what you wanna do is see if there’s a possibility to nest keywords together. So maybe one of the keywords was coffin shelf, maybe another keyword or a small coffin shelf. And another keyword is coffin shelf decor. Coffin shelf might be my number one keyword. And those other ones were main keywords, but maybe it’s all the way in the bottom.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m still gonna put those in the title because if I put the keyword small coffin shelf decor, I get three keywords for the price of one. I have got coffin shelf, small coffin shelf, and coffin shelf decor, if those were three of my keywords. So try to find those kind of things in order to get into the title. Alright, step number 27 is make the rest of the listing with your customer mind. Use main phrases, then single keywords. So try and get all those phrases that were your main ones into your listing, and then work on those single keywords in there. You know, you can use humor when it’s possible, and that’s even something you can put into ChatGPT to, to make it humorous if that’s appropriate for your niche. But make sure to speak to the customer’s use cases and problems the product solves, their fears that it might allay, and things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Really make an emotional connection, especially when you’re writing those bullet points. Don’t forget about those niche themes that we learned about earlier in the last episode, where you want to, you know, use niche themes in order to kind of analyze the images and, and your image strategy. And before you even make your listing, you can, you know, set it up in helium 10 Audience which is powered by PickFu in order to maybe get some feedback from customers on if they like your main image. I like, especially if you have like two or three main images that you’re not sure which one you should go with, then that’s really going to, you know, let you know what customers like. Another thing you should do before you even get, you know, the listing fully ready is create your a plus content, right? And then activate the translation A+ Content.
Bradley Sutton:
Don’t be using it to try and rank for keywords or index for keywords, because I haven’t had enough tests where I can show it has an effect. Like I’ve tried to put keywords that I’m not indexed for and I don’t have in my listing, and I put it in different fields in a plus content a hundred percent of the time does not index me. But the one important thing is that you need to make sure that you have the Spanish translation active or whatever marketplace you’re in, go to the back end where after you get your, your a plus content approved, there’ll be a button that says Create language variation in America. The language variations would be Spanish and a Hebrew, I believe. And this is important because what happens if you don’t have this? All right, well, lemme just show you what happens if you do have it, if you do have it activated, like here, I’m showing you for, for those watching on YouTube, I’ve got on the left the, the a plus content for our coffin shelf.
Bradley Sutton:
All right? Looks pretty good, right? And then on the right it’s our Spanish a plus content. So that’s, if somebody changes the flag to Spanish, just like I showed you, changes the language of Amazon, this is how it’s going to show up. But take a look at this coffin makeup shelf, all right on the left, they’ve got a really nice looking a plus content right here with their coffin shelf. They’ve got a lifestyle model, et cetera, but they never activated their Spanish translation. So look what happens on the right side. If somebody changes Amazon to the Spanish version, their description and a plus content completely disappear. So, you know, is that gonna, you know, tank a hundred percent of their sales? No, but that just means that, you know, their conversion rate might go down by 20% or something for Spanish speaking people because they don’t have this a plus content activated for Spanish.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, the next step, I’m gonna talk a little bit more about indexing and ranking. All right? So again, the difference between indexing is you are potentially searchable for a keyword ranking means that you are actually showing up in the search results in those, in what Amazon displays, which is usually seven pages. Now here’s what could happen, and this is why you’ve gotta do this step number I’m not even sure what number we’re on now, like 30 or something like that, but is to check indexing for all of your main and secondary keywords. So remember those main keywords that were like 10 to 30 keywords, take that full list, paste them as is, as phrases into Index checker, and then take those 100 individual keywords, paste it right there on the next line of index checkers so that everything is there and you are going to run index checker for it.
Bradley Sutton:
All right? And Helium 10 is gonna tell you, are you index? Did Amazon index you for these keywords? Now, here’s the thing, you are gonna find that even though sometimes, sometimes, even though you have the keyword in your listing, you’re not indexed, here’s a product that I did, a test product that were coffee socks, and you can see all of these coffee related keywords and even Mother’s Day related keywords I was not indexed for, despite me having it in multiple times. Now, here is why that might happen. Of course, it’s gonna happen if, if it’s like branded keywords or, or keywords that you don’t have the rights to advertise for or something like that, right? But, or if you don’t have the keyword in your listing, it’s like, duh, that’s why you’re, you’re not indexed. But in this case, think about what category these socks were in.
Bradley Sutton:
They’re in the, what is it, fashion category or clothing category to Amazon. These coffee related keywords might be completely irrelevant. They’re like, why would a piece of clothing need to rank or need to index for the word coffee? So what happens in this case, this is why you have to go and use that special feature sometimes to, to make sure that you’re relevant or that you get indexed for this keyword. So it’s very important. Don’t just assume because you did the greatest keyword research in the world, thanks to Helium 10, you’ve got the greatest listing optimization in the world, thanks to this podcast. But just because you did all that, that every single keyword that you put in your listing, you’re gonna get indexed for. Make sure to run this check with index Checker. Alright, the next step here is all of those top 30 keyword phrases, or like I said, maybe it was 10 or 15.
Bradley Sutton:
Add those all to keyword tracker. All right? This is, again, before you even start your listing that make it active, add them all the keyword and turn on Boost. Boost is that function that allows you to check 24 times a day what your ranks are, because this is super, super important. Once you start doing that Maldi honeymoon launch strategy, you know, and you’re in the honeymoon period, you want to know are, are you at the very top of the sponsor ranks? Are you improving your organic rank? You’re gonna know that as if you have boost on, and you are tracking these keywords from day one. The other thing to do is set up Helium 10 market tracker. This is not to be confused with Market Tracker 360, which is an advanced tool for like, you know, eight figure sellers, but the regular market tracker that you, that you have in your platinum or diamond plan, add your product there, add your main competitors, and four, three or four very, very specific, very, very specific keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
All right? I made the mistake one time when I was setting up my coffin shelf niche that I put the keywords coffin shelf, which is right, but then I put like gothic decor and like spooky accessories. What happened was then Market Tracker started spitting me all these like new keywords that could be my competitors, but it really, it wasn’t because all I consider my competitors are actual coffin shelves, right? So this is important to do that. If you are using Market Tracker, you only put the most super, super hyper relative or hyper relevant keywords to your product. So that when, what market Tracker is gonna do is it’s going to start recommending to you like, Hey, do you want to track this other coffin shelf? Or, Hey, did you know that there’s a new coffin shelf that is entering your niche? And then you’re also gonna be able to, to start tracking your market share.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is something I would say that, I don’t know, 75% of Helium 10 users are not taking advantage of. This is literally what you should have going in your account from day zero. That means before you’re even in the MALS honeymoon launch strategy or launch period, you need to get market tracker set up. Next step is make sure to activate the SKU. You know, once you, it’s live in inventory management. All right? So your FBA sku, if that’s gonna be your main s skew, go to Helium 10 Inventory management. If you have platinum, you’ve got this, this is for USA customers. If we have more demand, we’re gonna go ahead and get it for European customers as well. But this is really important so that you make sure that you are not going to miss out on, on your, you’re having the right inventory in there, right?
Bradley Sutton:
It’s gonna tell you when to transfer from your warehouse. It’ll tell you when you need to order more, but because this is a brand new product, the Forecasting Algorithm inside of Helium 10 that you’re gonna use, this is again, Helium 10 Inventory Management. A lot of people don’t even realize we have full inventory management. I’ve been using this for years already for all of my brands. You are gonna choose the exponential algorithm because you don’t have enough history yet for the sales. Now, you know, if you want to, you can just change it to seven day velocity or 14 day velocity. But again, Helium 10 Exponential Forecasting Algorithm is going to forecast things out based on recent sales. Now, once you’ve been selling this product for a year, that’s when you change it to what’s called the additive forecasting model, because now it’s gonna look at your like 12 month history in the seasonality and things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Another step here, again, before you even launch the product or before you go live, make sure to activate it for Helium 10 Alerts. All right? Because what’s gonna happen, as soon as you get product into Amazon’s warehouses, sometimes they might immediately change your dimensions to something wrong. And so you wanna be able to know if Amazon does that, so you can take care of it right away. And then also see if hijackers jump on your listing at the beginning or if you start getting some bad reviews. So again, takes one click, go into helium 10 alerts, activate the activate the alerts for that new FBA SKU. Go into Helium 10 Follow-up. This is for any level of helium 10 platinum diamond or above. And s set up the automatic request or review. Alright, I, I don’t do anymore the custom emails. You know, I know a lot of people like those because you can do things that maybe have better conversion rate, but no, all you have to do is you go to a request, a review and seller feedback template, make a new one, and then select the request a review template, all right?
Bradley Sutton:
And then, you know, I like to make it wait a certain number of days before I send it out or after it ships, I’m sorry, before I ship a certain number of days after I ship a product for when they’re gonna receive the notice. If you’re selling supplements, you don’t want them to get a note for a review, like right away, you know, they’re not gonna have enough time to, to know if they want to give you a review and if, and probably it’s gonna be a bad review if they give it to you right away. So what you want to do is you wanna set that date if you have a supplement to like 22 days after it ships or something like that. So that’s at the end of that 30 day window that you have. But maybe you’ve got a product that you knew that people use immediately and are immediately gonna know if they like it or not like it within a day of receiving it.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, for those people, I might go ahead and put, Hey, you know, show me or send this, you know, seven days after shipping or six days after shipping, send them a request for review. And once you set it, you can forget it. It’s always gonna go ahead and send to all of your customers. More bonus tips here, all right, this is something I haven’t talked about on the podcast before, but have somebody purchase your product potentially at your list price to give you the best chance to get a strike through pricing. All right? This is what you can see I did a few months ago when I was launching those socks, is I wanted the, the price to the retail price to show as 11.97 and my product was gonna be 9.97. But I’m also doing, you know, in the Maldives honeymoon launch strategy, which, you know, we talk about in other episodes and we’ll talk about again in episode 500, is I wanted to have a, a cheap price a cheap price to start 497.
Bradley Sutton:
So in order to do that, I set a FBM listing or or it could be I’ve been FBA listing live for like one hour or 30 minutes just in, just for it to go live on Amazon. And then they, I had somebody buy the product at 11 point 97. I only need one person to buy it. And then what happens like 48 hours later eat when I put my sale price at 4 97, I’m gonna have a strikethrough price on 1197, and it’s gonna show a big red letters here of 58% off. All right, guys, there you have it. That’s my new Bali blast or Bali Bachelor party, whatever you think. You guys let me know if this even needs a name or which, which name you like, but I’m gonna call it Bali Blast for now. This is the Bali Blast method on Amazon pre-launch.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, we went over about what, 36 steps on how to get your product ready to make sure how to give it the best sendoff of its single life. You know, the best send, how to give it the best bachelor or bachelorette party so that you can be ready for that wedding day, which is your launch date, and then your Maldives honeymoon period, which is that, you know, precious first, you know, month or so of time and you know, where you’re, you’re utilizing our launch strategies. But all of these steps are super important because if you just use the Maldives strategy for launching and you didn’t do these steps, you’re not gonna be successful. I’ll tell you that right now. These are vital to give you the best chance for success when you do launch your product, guys. All right? So let me know in the comments below what you guys think of this.
Bradley Sutton:
Again, two episodes here. Make sure to check both of these give it to your team to review so they can make sure that your next launch is gonna be using these methods. All right? Don’t forget coming up episode 500, toward the end of the year, we’re gonna, I’m gonna give you guys my latest updates on the Maldives honeymoon strategies. I’m gonna try and go to Maldives and film a special, that’s a special number, 500 episodes of the podcast. And then we’re gonna go into my latest launch strategies. But if you wanted to see what’s working for launch you can check out episode four. I think it’s like 400 or 400 to one in the second half of that. And that’s like what I’ve been using earlier this year for Maldives honeymoon launch strategy. But anyways, guys, I hope you enjoyed this two part series and I’ll see you guys in the next episode.
Live from Bali, Indonesia, Bradley shares his top strategies that have to do with Amazon pre-launches. This is to prepare your Amazon brand for a great launch and honeymoon period. There are a lot of steps that lead to your Amazon launch, but these groups of strategies put a close to the product research, keyword listing, sourcing, and listing optimization stage of your Amazon journey to now skyrocket your new brand into epic launches! Let’s go ahead and hop into it.
In episode 466 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:
- 01:46 – A Strategy To Help You For Before Amazon Launches
- 02:37 – What Makes A Bachelor Party Really Cool?
- 04:08 – Bradley’s Amazon Dad Joke
- 04:50 – Check This On Your Main Keywords
- 06:44 – What Is Title Density?
- 07:41 – Checking Your Competitor’s Strength
- 08:54 – Explore Bundling Options
- 11:29 – Identify Your Top-Selling Child Item
- 12:46 – Identify Main Topics From The Reviews
- 14:14 – Identify Pain Points From Reviews
- 15:56 – Check The Opportunity Explorer
- 16:40 – Analyze Your Competitor’s Image Strategy
- 19:37 – Preparing Your Keyword Lists & Bradley’s Keyword Research Strategy
- 22:21 – Keywords That A Lot Of Sellers Miss
- 22:29 – How To Get Opportunity Keywords From Helium 10
- 25:46 – Brand Analytics And Helium 10 Data
- 28:04 – Checking Off Amazon Keywords
- 29:24 – Find Sales Peak Days Of Your Competitors That Are In Your Niche
- 30:06 – And Corelate That Day To Brand Analytics
- 31:47 – What Is Bradley’s Time Machine Keywords?
- 33:48 – Bonus Hack: Checking Historic Keyword Ranks
- 36:57 – Stay Tuned For Part 2 Of This Episode!
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
All right, guys, I’m here recording this live from Bali because I’ve come up with a new strategy on how to get ready for your Maldives honeymoon launch. It’s my pre-launch Bali blast strategy. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think
Bradley Sutton:
You wanna know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for. Maybe at the top of page one, you can actually find that out in seconds by using helium ten’s keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for eCommerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro, h10.me/cerebro. Don’t forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast, discount coupon SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.
Bradley Sutton:
And as you can see, if you’re watching this on YouTube, I’m here in Bali, but the Amazon collective mastermind and it’s really amazing. My first time in Bali, really incredible. And I was inspired to go ahead and talk about the strategies that I talked about here at the Bali Conference and at the Billion Dollar Seller summit, most of which actually have to do with pre-launch. Alright, so I think you guys, you know, know about the Maldives honeymoon launch strategy. It incorporates, you know, a lot of pre-launch strategies, but I want to kind of like separate it out like how to get ready for an epic wedding and honeymoon, right? Maldives honeymoon in real life is potentially to have an epic bachelor or bachelorette party. I never had one. I didn’t, I didn’t do that. But, you know, I’m sure many of you have, and, and some people I read actually go to Bali for their bachelor party.
Bradley Sutton:
See the B theme here? So I’m like, you know what? Let’s just make this easy to remember. Let’s call this like the Bali Blast method. All right? You guys don’t have to call it that. It is what it is. It’s a strategy that helps you get ready for a good launch. All right? So you don’t have to call it the Bali blasts. I might not even call it the Bali blasts. I’m just throwing that out there cuz I’m here in, in Bali right now. But think about what makes a bachelor party really cool. Again, I don’t know because I’ve never, I’ve never even been to one, let alone had my own. But I would assume that hey it, it’s meant to be kind of like your, your last hurrah really set you up for you know, not missing your single days, right?
Bradley Sutton:
You’re ready to move on to the next phase, which is, you know, married life and first of course the honeymoon. Alright? So that’s kind of like the thought process behind this strategy too. Alright? It’s, we’re here in Bali, think of a bachelor party. And what I’m doing is I’m trying to set up like completely put a close on the initial, you know, product research sourcing and listing optimization. Like, how do we put a close to my previous single life or before I had a product and now get ready to move on to that. All important, you know, merry life starting with that honeymoon period because it’s not just about, you know, the, the honeymoon period. And the Maldives Honeymoon strategy isn’t just about, you know, doing the right PPC, you know, during launch and setting your launch date in the future and things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s all important, but there’s a lot of steps that lead up to the launch that will help make sure that you get off on the right foot for your launch. So let’s go ahead and hop into it. One thing I was doing guys, when I spoke at different events is I was doing some Amazon dad jokes and I’m gonna give the one that I gave, I don’t remember where I gave this, but it was the one that was the hardest for people to understand. All right, so let’s see how fast you guys pick this one up. All right, so here’s an Amazon dad joke. I was doing product research and I was trying to validate an idea I had for people to put loved ones ashes into a glass urn. All right, a glass urn. So my question is, you know, is this a good opportunity?
Bradley Sutton:
Did, did I validate this? Is this a good opportunity? Well, the answer is remains to be seen. Think about that for a second. You didn’t get it. Glass urn, remains to be seen. You know, the glass is transparent, all right? So it’s remains, you know, ashes to be seen. All right guys, don’t worry. This is not an episode about Amazon dad jokes. Let’s go ahead and hop right into the strategy. But before I do that one bonus strategy I mentioned this to the elite members a couple months ago or about a month ago, and I talked about this on my tour, is something interesting that you can notice on your main keywords. So if you go to your main keywords, especially in like the home and kitchen category, look at the search results and see if your competitors have this kind of bold black letters underneath the title, alright, underneath the title.
Bradley Sutton:
And if they do it’ll say sometimes, like, you know, here I’m looking at a Tesla thing I did, I see solid and it says geometric. And what happens is some sellers, they don’t know about this field and, and they just have like gibberish in there cuz probably cuz they were trying to fill up their listing you know, with the flat file and like, look at this one listing here. It just has a bunch of gibberish, looks like they’re SKUs, says Halloween show, 1790, all one word, right? This is something that you could fill out. This is the pattern field. All right guys, so this is the pattern field, and if you fill it out, it can give you potentially some extra ranked use. And at the very least, what it can do is it just sticks out on the page. If you have like your main keyword there or something that’s kind of sticks out on the page as opposed to just like random gibberish like some of these competitors have, you can see I was doing a Tesla scene for a, a bat math.
Bradley Sutton:
So or a bat bath mat, say that five times fast. And then I just go, went ahead and threw it into this pattern field and within like two hours it was already there showing up on the main page. So there’s a strategy in itself. Now, if we’re thinking about pre pre, pre-launch, it actually starts all the way back when you’re trying to validate your product and maybe you’ve already decided on it and you want to decide on what are the main keywords. And once you decide what those main keywords are, the first step into having a successful pre-launch is take a look at the title density of your main keywords. Alright? So your title density for those who don’t know, it’s, it’s a field that’s in Helium 10. And basically this is how many listings on page one have the exact phrase that was searched in phrase form.
Bradley Sutton:
So if I search coffin tray and Helium 10 says I’ve got a title density of nine, that means there are nine listings on page one that have the keyword coffin tray in exact phrase match. And this is important because it’s going to give you an idea of how difficult or how easy it might be to launch. All right? So the bigger the number, that means the harder it is to get to page one. The smaller the number, you know, potentially if it’s a lower search volume and the title density is zero or one, theoretically from day one of your launch, you could already be on page one because that’s how much emphasis Amazon puts on the title. So that’s something important to think about. Check your title density, that is step one. Step two, analyze your competitor’s strength. All right, this is important because when we’re talking about how hard or how easy it’s gonna be to get to page one, it’s not just about the title density, but how strong is your competition.
Bradley Sutton:
So what you do is what I’m showing here on the screen, throw all of your listings into lists or your competitors’ listings into listing analyzer and take a look at at their top keyword phrases, and it’ll show for the top keyword phrases in this niche where they ranked the last time helium 10 checked. And then you’ll see, like, look at this, this guy is a strong one here because look, he’s got, he’s ranked number one, ranked number one, ranked number three, ranked number six. However, this other main competitor in this niche, he’s only in the top 10 on one keyword and everything else, he’s like on the bottom of page one or middle of page one. All right, so now you know, hey, this com other competitor who’s at the very top of the page, he might be a little bit tough to work with, but this other guy, I can definitely take him.
Bradley Sutton:
You might reason. All right, so again, listing analyzer, go in there, see what kind of search volume top 10 search volume that your main competitors have. All right? The lower it is for some of them, that means that’s the competitors that you’re gonna probably easily be able to beat. Another thing I wanna talk about is explore bundling options, not just as something to add to your listing or to your product. I mean that, yes, that’s definitely something that you can do. You know, maybe you see that people are buying a coffin shelf and a skull together, right? So maybe you’ll be the first one to have a coffin shelf with skull together. Of course, that’s an option, right? But take it a step even easier. Use Black Box product targeting. Enter in your competitor’s ASINs and then filter for frequently bought together.
Bradley Sutton:
This is gonna show you what has been frequently bought together over the past, like 30 days or more that Helium 10 has detected. And sometimes you might find a product that’s like seven or $8 or even $6. And basically what this means is this, this could potentially be a product that you could source for like 30, 40 cents. Like one of the ones that was showing up here is, is spooky stickers. You know probably you could source some spooky stickers for like, what, you know, 25 cents or something like that. But if you have a history that your competitors are selling their product, and then the buyer at the same time is buying spooky stickers on their own, because you can see it in frequently bought together. Now what you should do if it’s really cheap, just go ahead and buy that product, maybe even in a smaller quantity if it’s a little bit more expensive, and then stick it into your product costing you 25 cents each.
Bradley Sutton:
If it’s really small, like stickers. And don’t advertise it. Don’t even advertise in the listing, right? I mean, you could advertise in your listing, but I prefer that for like, you know, more impressive bundling opportunities. But here’s what happens if you don’t advertise, and this is a strategy that, you know, Toma Rabinovich has, has been teaching for, for a while now. It’s part of his like six star method, and I’ve seen this myself out, out in the wild. But what happens is now your customer gets the product, they open it up expecting whatever they bought, say it’s a coffin shelf, but then all of a sudden they have these spooky stickers that customers like them, like, now what does that mean? That means it’s like a pleasant surprise, and it gives, it makes them like double 2x, 3x, maybe even 4x more likely to leave a positive review than if they were just happy with the product by itself.
Bradley Sutton:
And you could see this, there’s a couple of coffin shelf listings out there where somebody was bundling, you know, some stickers in it, and you see a, a decent number of reviews mention the stickers, like, Hey, you know, it was so nice to, to have these spooky stickers or whatever, whatever it said. So this is a something that costs you like 20 cents an order maybe, but could potentially increase your positive review velocity. The next step for Bali Blast, all right, your pre-launch setup is identify the top child or top selling child item. So this is only if you guys are trying to launch for a product that has multiple variations, and Helium 10 is obviously showing you the same sales for each one. Well, that just means that’s how many sales it has overall. So the way that you could kind of have an idea of which one is selling the best, so that you don’t have to buy one of each color and launch for each color is you run a review analysis on the listing and then hit product variations.
Bradley Sutton:
And then you’re gonna see the breakdown of the reviews. Usually one child item, it’s the one that is kind of like the star child item and has all of a big majority of the reviews. Like, like this I think is a letter board. I’m looking at the black coffin letter board has 77% of the review share. Number two is purple with 10%. Everything else is like less than 7%. So if this was me, I’m like, all right, I know if I’m just starting off I’m cool with maybe just getting the black coffin shelf, maybe the purple one to start off, and I’m not gonna worry about those other colors. Imagine if you didn’t have this visibility and you’re, you’re like, all right, let me order 500 of each of these colors. You would obviously be in a bad way for your inventory.
Bradley Sutton:
The next step we’re going to go in, number five is identify main topics from the reviews. This is going to be useful for your listing optimization later on. So the way you can do that is with that same tool, review insights, hit review analysis, all right? And then see what are the top phrases that are showing up. And then start digging into what people are saying about the top phrase. Like for example, that coffin letter board one of the top phrases is for Halloween. So what I would do is I would click on that and see, alright, what, how are customers using this for Halloween? And then I’m going to actually make sure to make that one of my images. Like let’s say the use case or what you saw in the reviews is, Hey, I put this in front of my house for Halloween to advertise what candies I have.
Bradley Sutton:
I don’t know, I don’t even celebrate Halloween. I don’t know what, what people do for this. But let’s just say that’s what people are saying. Well, now what I would do if this was my product is I would put that as one of the pictures, let, like maybe in front of a house that looks like it’s decorated for Halloween and the exact use case that people are using, I’m gonna make sure to put that in my image and maybe even the first bullet point, this is something that is not gonna show up in your keyword research, right? You know use for Halloween for, for what candies I have, you know, that’s not a key word that people search for. It’s not gonna show up in Cerebro, but this is a way that you can, like really again, start from day one, your Maldives honeymoon launch with a little bit leg up on the competition.
Bradley Sutton:
Next step, we’ve gone through five so far, number six, still talking about reviews, identify pain points from reviews. All right? So what I would do in that same tool on my competitor’s listing, I’m going to, from the all reviews page, all right, from the all reviews page, I’m going to see what are people complaining about. And I do that by sorting or filtering right here, one star only reviews. I could go one star or two stars and then look at this. I I’m seeing here people are saying, Hey, the letters fall out, letters are junky. Letters are hard to stay on. Alright? So again, this is something that is gonna go into one of my images. I’m gonna really show how, hey, you know, our letters don’t fall out. I’m gonna put that in the bullet points. All right? This is not a keyword. You would not have found this if you didn’t analyze the reviews.
Bradley Sutton:
You know, one little bonus tip is I like looking at the all questions as well right here inside of Helium 10 review insights. And I wanna see what are the questions that people are asking about my competitors listing? Now here’s the benefit of that. Basically the questions section is telling you what your competitors have been missing from their listings. Does that make sense? Cuz think about it, if it was clear, may, maybe it’s not even missing, but it’s just not clear in their listing. If it was clear or if it was in the listing, would somebody need to go in and figure out how to actually ask a question? That’s somebody who is super interested in buying the product, right? And they even know how to find the question in an answer section on a page, and they couldn’t find the answer they’re looking for.
Bradley Sutton:
So that should show that it’s obviously not as obvious as the seller probably thought they were when they made their listing. So that’s something that you can, you know, get some extra insight as well. Another way you could look into review and kind of sentiment is check Opportunity Explorer and enter the ASIN and in product Opportunity Explorer, under customer review insights, they have like another cool way to kind of get some sentiment about the reviews and Amazon is even experimenting with some like ai different kind of ways to look at that as well. But that’s, for those of you who might not have Helium 10, you know, first of all, shame on you. Go ahead and sign up for Helium 10, six months, 20% off discount code SSP20. But if you don’t have Helium 10, you’re not gonna take advantage of that offer.
Bradley Sutton:
You can still get some sentiment of the reviews by going into the opportunity explore. Number eight, this is an important one. Analyze your competitor image strategy. So don’t just go in and, and, and give a whole bunch of, of instructions to your graphic designer or your photographer based on whatever they think you should do for your listing or based on whatever you think is the best image strategy. You want to look at what your competitors have been doing. Like, especially if you have competitors who have been selling pretty, pretty well, you know, for six months, maybe for a year or something. Take a look at their image stack tho those of you who are Amazon sellers, I’m talking to you right now. You have multiple products, let me know if you have a product that has been on Amazon for more than six months or a year.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you have the same images right this second as you did from day one? If your answer is yes, shame on you. You, you’re a terrible Amazon, I’m just playing. But seriously though, you’re, you’re not doing very good. Alright? I would say that 90% of you who listen to this podcast and, and meet that criteria, your answer was probably no. I’ve changed my images over time. Now, let me ask you, why did you change your images? All right? Maybe you guys were doing a pick food test and saw that a different image might have worked better. Maybe some of you were using manage your experiments AB testing on Amazon, and saw that a different image worked better. Maybe you were reading the reviews from your customers and saw that people were confused about a size or something, and so that made you update your images.
Bradley Sutton:
But anyways, you have updated your images based on what the market has been telling you. Well, guess what? Your competitors who have been selling the product that you wanna sell for six months a year or more, they’re prob they’ve probably gone through a few iterations of images and what they have come what they have come to is a stack of images that’s been working best for them. So instead of you having to sell for a year and you having to figure out what is the best image strategy, kind of go off of what the competition is doing. And historically, you know, the way that Tomer and I I learned it from him, you know, we’re teaching this strategy is, hey, go to all your competitors listings, copy their images one by one, throw it into a PowerPoint, give it to your designer and try and see if there are like trends like, hey, every second or third image is an infographic that has the size of the product.
Bradley Sutton:
Or man, look at this. Every single competitor in this coffin letter board niche, they all on all of their images. Keep writing different interesting letters that actually have messages on the letter board that’s kind of marketing the product, right? Well go with this niche theme. You don’t have to do that. If you have a Helium 10 listing analyzer and you have the Diamond plan. If you have the Diamond plan, you hit the button that is media comparison, and within three seconds you are gonna see all of your competitors listings all laid out on one page where you can see these trends, you could see their strategy, what’s working for them, download this as a PDF with one click of a button, and then talk it over with your graphic team and they’ll be able to help you out with that. Let’s go on to the next strategy.
Bradley Sutton:
But before we do that, I’m gonna talk about preparing keyword list. All right? The next few slides are gonna be all about how you do your keyword research and which kind of keywords you are going to have. The way I like to do it, and you, again, I I like naming things guys, you know, Maldives honeymoon, Bali Blast, Bali Bachelor party, whatever. I have these two buckets of keywords and my personal name for these keywords is just real simple, no fancy name here. Top phrases and supplementary keywords. You do whatever works for you. What I say when I mean top phrases I is, I’m looking for between a max of 30 and 40 keywords that come from the following categories. Number one, the niche’s top keywords. And I’m gonna, there’s gonna be a slide about that. Number two, opportunity keywords. Number three, potentially off Amazon keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
Number four, brand analytics keywords and number five, frequently bought together top three keywords. You might not understand what these are cuz these, again, this is Bradley’s names, you know, for them I’ll, I’m gonna explain each of them in detail. The next bucket I call supplementary keywords. And my supplementary keywords are my keywords that I’m only gonna have the individual keywords, not full phrases. So this is kind of not necessarily without limit, but you know, it could be 200, 300 or more. And my number one is gonna be time machine keywords. I’ll explain what that means. That’s another Bradley name right there. PPC, keywords, opportunity explore keywords, top two page keywords, Amazon recommended keywords and long tail keywords. All right, so let’s go ahead and go into the first one, which is identifying the niches top keywords. We are on Bali strategy for pre-launch number nine.
Bradley Sutton:
This is super simple guys. You guys hopefully have been doing this for years, right? Go into Cerebro, throw a, a random product as the first one if you don’t have your own product yet. And then five to 10 of your top potential competitors that you are going to be competing with. And you just hit one button, guys, one button in Cerebro and it’s called drum roll please. Top keywords. All right, so just one button and it’s gonna show you all of the, the keywords that these products have been ranking for. I wanna pull about 15 to 20 max keywords from here. So I might have to fool around with the competitor rank average. They’re ranking competitor filters in order to get my top 15 keywords, but I’m looking for the ones that are searched for the most, where almost all of my competitors are ranking for and they’re all ranking high.
Bradley Sutton:
I don’t think I need to go into too much detail here because it should be obvious why that is a list of my most viable keywords. The next one though, that a lot of sellers miss in my opinion is opportunity keywords. All right? Opportunity Keywords are keywords where only one or two listings are ranking highly for a certain keyword out of your list. Now, I want you guys to, we’re gonna talk about this for a second cuz it’s important you understand why this could be a valuable keyword. If I were to ask you why, what would you say? And if you say, well, if it’s opportunity, well yeah, that’s, duh, that’s why I call it the opportunity keywords. But why is it an opportunity? We have to understand this, to understand the value of why this could be a golden keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
If I’m selling coffin shelves, my main keyword is gonna be coffin shelf it might be coffin bookshelf, well, whatever, right? It, it’s like that’s what the product is. That’s my main keywords. It doesn’t matter if all of my competitors are ranking for it, that is the most important keyword for my product. I’ve gotta rank for it. But I want you to think about this. Let’s just pretend for a second that out of your top 10 competitors, including you, all of you guys had the same number of reviews, the same price, very similar function, right? When somebody is typing coffin shelf into the search results and they land on that page and they see 10 very similar coffin shelves, obviously that’s not the reality, but, but just work with me a little bit on this. Basically, you technically have a one in 10 chance of getting that sale.
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s just say that they can see all 10 at the same time. Maybe they’re not looking at the mobile browser where they only show top three or something, right? And the reason is because it’s all the same and they were looking for a coffin shelf and all 10 of those products meet what the criteria of what they were looking for. Now here’s the thing, let’s take, and again, I’m not saying that’s bad, that’s obviously the most important keyword for your niche. But let’s take a a more generic keyword like gothic decor. Now, if you go to gothic decor, maybe that’s one of the opportunity keywords, meaning only one of your coffin shelf competitors is ranking for it. If there’s only one that’s in the top 10, first of all, you know that to get in the top 10, there’s a subsection of customers who are searching gothic decor who end up buying that coffin shelf, otherwise it wouldn’t be in the top 10 if it’s, if it’s a decent search volume keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
So by definition, you know that there are some customers who type gothic decor, but either A, they’re really looking for a coffin shelf, they just didn’t know that keyword, or B, they’re kind of just shopping randomly, but they’re the type of customer who maybe would buy a coffin shelf if they saw one on there, you know is this gonna get a lot of sales? No, it’s gonna get only a fraction of the ones that are coffin shelf. But here’s the thing, if that customer who is searching the keyword searches it, and they are the type of customer who’s either really looking for a coffin shelf or would buy it. Now if your product was only the second one on there in the top 10, compare with another, you know, the one who was already on there, you have a 50 50 chance, not a 10% chance.
Bradley Sutton:
Like, like in college of you have a 50 50 chance of getting the sale potentially more if you’re ranking higher. So you see why this is a valuable set of, of, of keywords, opportunity, keywords, one of my favorite ways and you know, Helium 10, one of the few tools that you can do that with just one click of the button just hit opportunity keywords and it will give you a list of those keywords and I would probably just pull like, you know, some of the top ones from there. Maybe a maximum of five or six depending on relevancy. Number 11 is I like to look at brand analytics and then compare it to Helium 10 keyword ranks. I can do this manually. If I didn’t have helium 10, I guess, you know, I would just go into brand analytics and look at the main keywords, and then I would look at the keyword ranks just by, you know, looking on Amazon where, where it’s ranking.
Bradley Sutton:
But you can actually do both of that in one tool, and that’s in cerebral or maggot. If I have the diamond plan with Helium 10, I can go anywhere into brand analytics. And what I’m going to be able to see is if I see the top three clicked for an item or for, I’m sorry for a keyword on the right hand side, I can see for the month what were the organic and sponsored rank averages for that month for the product. And here’s the reason why this comes in handy. You can see that here with some of these some of these listings here on this page. But what happens is sometimes it’s not always, oh, I have to be organically ranked at the top or I have to be organically ranked at the top of the page and sponsored rank high.
Bradley Sutton:
So I could see maybe a keyword where consistently the top couple clicked keywords. Maybe they, they weren’t ranked organically high, they were only ranked sponsored high. Guess what? If you look at the keyword coffin shelf and you’ll see that the Helium 10 coffin shelf is one of the top ones on there, well, you are actually going to see that our organic rank is only like 10 or 15. Our sponsored rank is one. So I could see that just with one click, I can actually see that right here inside of Cerebro. And so what that means is now I can take this information and plan my launch strategy. I’m like, you know what? I don’t necessarily needto be at the top organically for this keyword. I can be one of the top click ones if my sponsored rank is at the very top.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is a very valuable tool inside of Cerebro that I think a lot of you Diamond members aren’t using, but check brand analytics, which comes directly from Amazon, who were the top three click clicked, and then compare it to where they were ranking organically and sponsored to have an idea about what your launch strategy is gonna be for that. All right, the next one that we’re gonna go on is number 12, which is checking off Amazon keywords. This is only gonna be applicable if you are in a newer niche where there’s nobody that you can really kind of look or there’s not enough people to look at their keyword history on Amazon or in Cerebro. But there is some history on Etsy. What you do to do that is if you find a product that has some good history on Etsy and you wanna just see if there’s maybe some keywords that you haven’t thought about, go to Etsy, find one of the top sellers on Etsy of your product.
Bradley Sutton:
Go to their product page. On the very bottom, you’re gonna look at explore related searches. That’s a section that is on any Etsy listing. If the seller has filled it out, what this is is what the seller is telling Etsy are their main keywords. Maybe they based it off of you know, what keywords have driven the most sales for them. Maybe they base it off of you know, where what’s keywords brought them, sales and PPC and Etsy, whatever the case is. This is like looking at the most, like if, if Amazon sellers had a part of their listing where it says, all right, what’s your top seven most important keywords? It’d be like being able to look at that section. You know, a lot of people don’t realize that’s what this explore related searches is. So that’s a great way to look off Amazon for some important keywords.
Bradley Sutton:
The next step is number 13, find sales peak days of your competitors that are in your niche. All right? So you can do that by looking at any BSR chart. All right? So if you’re using Helium 10 or you got the free, even the free Helium 10 Chrome extension, you’re gonna be able to do this. Go to any listings page, scroll down to where the BSR chart is, and then look at where the big dips are. Remember the dips in BSR, that means the lower the BSR number, that means the more they were selling, and you can actually see this on a day-to-day basis. So I’m gonna look for the exact day of when they had a peak. All right, so that’s number 13. And and that kind of goes right into number 14, which is now correlate that day that you found in step 13 to brand analytics.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so again, I love brand analytics. I always have, I’m gonna, let’s say I found in their BS r chart that on July the 14th of 2022, they had a killer day of sales. Well, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put July 14th into brand analytics. I’m gonna make it daily, the reporting range, and I’m gonna put for top click products, whatever my competitor’s ASIN is. And then what’s gonna show up is now what were the keywords where they were the top three clicked, or they were one of the top three clicked and potentially purchased for that exact day. And I can now kind of reverse engineer what were their main keywords that resulted in them having one of the best days of sales for them for the year. Do you see how this could be beneficial? You know, when you’re just doing your regular keyword research inside of Cerebro, I mean, it’s totally fine.
Bradley Sutton:
It’s, it’s, it’s great keyword research, but that’s showing what’s going on right now. What if one of your competitors has fallen off in the last 30 days? What if they were outta stock for a couple months and they just came back in a stock? Well, they might not even be ranking very highly for all their keywords. This is a way where I can go in and see when they were ranking the best, when they were selling the best, what were the keywords on that day that were driving some of the sales for them. And then boom, right now, in July or June or whenever this is, even though I might be looking back at at November or October, I’m gonna be already have in my listing these main keywords. And again, we’re, let’s go back to what we’re talking about. Bali Bachelor party, the Bali blast.
Bradley Sutton:
We’re talking about having a pre-launch, you know, getting your listings set up to make sure you have that successful marriage period or that successful honeymoon period. This is one of those ways that you can do that by making sure you have the best keywords that were, that were historical. I could also do this for months, like maybe they had instead of just an exact day of when they just had a, like a blip maybe for some crazy sales for one day. Look at what months they had the best sales. Like here’s a BSR chart that I’m looking at and I can see, wow, July, they had a killer month, maybe October or November, they had a killer month. Overall in, in this case, what I like to do is I like to run the Cerebro time machine for if you’re a Helium 10 supercharged plan owner or an elite member, you’re the only ones right now who have access to time machine, but throw that competitor’s listening into Cerebro just like you normally would.
Bradley Sutton:
And then hit the historical analysis button. I call it time machine. I think in Cerebro it’s called historical analysis. And what you’re gonna see there is you are going to go ahead and see for that month, I can click on any month in the last two years. And then I’m gonna, it’s kind of like being able to see Cerebro at the time of, you know, whatever month I’m looking at. And I think it kind of goes without saying why this could be beneficial is because now all of a sudden I could see, you know, they were crushing it in, you know, September of last year. Maybe it’s a seasonal product and now I’m in February. Well, if I’m looking at Cerebro in February of a product that is seasonal and is really crushing it in September, am I gonna have the full keyword strategy, the correct keyword strategy?
Bradley Sutton:
No the keywords that are bringing themselves right now in February, if it was February right now that’s not gonna be the keywords that’s gonna be their top keywords for the year. So using this time machine is really a great way to go ahead and get some information there. Let’s do maybe just one more. I think I’m gonna have to like split this into two episodes because we got too much good information here. But the next step I want to talk about is just a quick bonus here, and this is checking historic keyword ranks. So this doesn’t even have a number here in the steps, but a lot of people don’t realize that you can actually add your competitors ASINs into keyword tracker in your, in your Helium 10 account. It’s not just your products. You can put anybody’s products in there and you think another, a lot of people also think that, okay, I can start tracking their keywords from the moment that I put in their keyword rank, right?
Bradley Sutton:
No, that’s not the case. Yes, you can, you’re gonna see it right from that moment, but you can, if it’s a, a keyword with decent search form, you’re gonna be able to see what their ranks were going back a year, going back potentially even two years. So let’s say through these steps like, you know, steps 13, 14, 15 or whatever you, you saw which keywords they were ranking they were getting sales from maybe which keywords they were highly ranked in Cerebro, throw those keywords, throw that product into keyword tracker and then wait like maybe one hour. Or actually you don’t even need to wait, wait one hour, wait like 10 minutes and then click on the historical chart. You are gonna be able to see everywhere where they were ranking day by day, week by week throughout the last two years for a certain keyword.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is key again, I would say 95% of sellers are not doing this, where they’re checking at like almost a daily level the history of how their competitors were ranking. Here’s another, you know, thing that you can get from this. You can go back potentially to when they launched their product. Let’s say they launched their product in the last two years. You can almost redo their own Maldives honeymoon or their own honeymoon period to see what keywords did they focus on. How, how long did it take them after launch to get to page one for their keyword, you know? So this is like kind of a little bit crazy what you can, what you can do here. As far as reverse engineering. The other thing that you can do when you were looking at this historical keyword ranks is again, you can see where where they were ranking organic and sponsored.
Bradley Sutton:
Like for example, if I saw in brand analytics from step 13 that this, this product was ranking highly for coffin shelf, or not ranking highly, but getting sales from coffin shelf, well, I can see in both their organic and sponsoring for this keyword, they were positioned one or two for both organic and sponsored. So now I know like, man, for this keyword coffin shelf, if I wanna be the top seller, maybe I have to be ranked one and two if that’s what I was looking at. But look at this other keyword coffin decor that this competitor was ranking highly for. Look at their organic rank was like between two and four. So again, man, I gotta be top of the page, you know, I’m looking at the historical keyword ranks, but then look at their sponsored rank. It is like going from 20 to 15 back to 23.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s like on page one or two. Or not even, I’m sorry that, that’s like page two or three of the search results. So now all of a sudden I know, hey, you know what, for that keyword, I just gotta make sure I’m ranked organically because it looks like my sponsored rank is not necessary for me to be one of the top three clicked. Alright guys, that’s gonna be it for this first edition. I’m gonna have to, I don’t even know if I have time. My flight is in a few hours here. I’m gonna see if I can maybe record part two of this for you guys. But anyways, I’ll figure it out. I’m gonna come back with about 15 or more strategies for you guys that are all about your pre-launch, your pre-Amazon launch. Call it whatever you want. I’m calling it my Bali Blast or Bali Bachelor party. But these are the strategies that you need to take in order to get your listing ready for that Maldives honeymoon launch strategies that we’ve talked about a lot of times. So, hope you enjoyed this episode. Stay tuned for the next one. We’ll see you there.
In this episode of SSP, we speak with two guests. Rod Johnson, Co-Founder of BLK & Bold specialty beverages and Andrea Marquez, Host of Amazon’s This is Small Business podcast. We explore the journey and story of Rod’s Amazon brand, from small business to a big brand that’s thriving inside the Amazon platform. Andrea also shares resources and programs inside Amazon like the Small Business Academy, Black Business Accelerator, and more! Don’t miss out on this episode where our guests share all their tips, strategies, and common factors that will lead your Amazon brand to success.
In episode 465 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Andrea, and Rod discuss:
- 03:43 – Rod’s Backstory
- 05:01 – Andrea’s Backstory
- 06:10 – How Did Rod Get His Start In Amazon?
- 08:00 – Hosting Amazon’s Podcast: This is Small Business
- 11:31 – Checking Out Rod’s Amazon Brand & Story
- 13:56 – Developing The Brand Story & Mission Before The Product
- 17:38 – Amazon Services & Programs You Should Know
- 19:30 – Free Resources From Small Business Academy
- 20:39 – Listen To The This is Small Business Podcast!
- 21:16 – How The Black Business Accelerator Helped Rod’s Business
- 23:57 – Rod Johnson’s Tips For New Amazon Sellers
- 25:00 – Common Factors Andrea Sees Successful Sellers Have
- 27:19 – Promoting Their Brand Through External Traffic
- 28:31 – Let’s Talk About Their Brand’s Logistics
- 29:10 – Bradley Doesn’t Like Coffee?!
- 30:38 – “Support Small Businesses”
- 31:20 – Bradley Walks Rod Inside The Helium 10 Suite Of Tools
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got our first seller on their show who’s never even used Helium 10 plus the host of a podcast that is fully run by Amazon itself. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you looking to learn how to sell on Amazon? The Freedom Ticket Course made by Kevin King is one of the most popular courses ever created for Amazon sellers. It’s got over 90 modules and 40 hours of detailed step-by-step training to help get you started on your entrepreneurial journey. Now, this course costs $997, but Helium 10 actually covers that cost of the course for any Helium 10 member. Find out why tens of thousands of students love this program by going to h10.me/freedomticket. Don’t forget that if you do, sign up for a Helium 10 account. Don’t pay full price. Use our podcast discount code SSP10 to save 10% off for life. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sut. In this is the show that is actually a special show here cuz we’ve got Amazon themselves, another podcast, but literally from Amazon here on the podcast and we’ve got another Amazon seller.
Bradley Sutton:
So I’m so happy that we are, are here’s only the second time we’ve ever had somebody from Amazon on the podcast. And we’ve got thousands and thousands of listeners, and so you can kind of like flip the script a little bit. Now we’re gonna put Amazon in the spotlight, but we’ve got an Amazon Stellar who doesn’t use Helium 10 for the first time ever potentially on the show. This is great, to talk to somebody who, who’s had to scale up on their own. And we’ve got somebody who talks a lot to other Amazon sellers due to her podcast. So Andrea and Rod, welcome to the show.
Andrea:
Thank you for having us. No pressure on the Amazon side.
Bradley Sutton:
None. None at all.
Rod:
Thanks for having me.
Bradley Sutton:
Now Rod, you just said, while we are off air here, you’re from you’re in Des Moines right now?
Rod:
Yes, yes. The company’s based in Des Moines. And I have my business partner to blame for that his life choices.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So that was my second question. Is that where you were born and raised, or I’m assuming not then?
Rod:
No. Born and raised about 30 minutes outside of Chicago in a small city called Gary, Indiana.
Bradley Sutton:
And then is that where you went to like high school?
Rod:
Yeah, yeah, born and raised there and then eventually traveled south to Bloomington, Indiana, where I earned my bachelor’s from Indiana University.
Bradley Sutton:
So you’re a Hoosier?
Rod:
Yes. Hoosier. Hoosier through and through.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Through and through. All right. Andrea, what about you? Like, where are you right now, and then where did you grow up?
Andrea:
I am right now I’m living in Houston, Texas, and I am a Texas girly. I was born at the border of Brownsville, Texas. Lived on the Mexican side of it till I left to college at 17. So I’m Mexican American at heart, very daughter of a two immigrants. And, but at the same time, I’m a Texas girly, so I’m a little bit of both.
Bradley Sutton:
Tex-Mex. You said you went to college at 17. Where did you end up going?
Andrea:
I went to New York at Columbia University for my undergrad, which was like a huge culture shock for me coming from a relatively small city/town. And then going to this like the epicenter of like, everyone lives there almost.
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s switch back to Rod here. What was your main, like, like first career? Like what did you study there in college and then did you actually use that, as soon as you got out?
Rod:
Yeah. so I studied criminal justice or at least that’s what the paper says. But I started my career out actually in fundraising. I got a job on campus working for our call center, aka interrupting people’s dinners, asking them for–
Bradley Sutton:
You’re one of those huh?
Rod:
Absolutely. And it was better than working in fast food or working as a server, like, I can sit down and I can run my mouth. This sounds like the perfect job. And ultimately–
Bradley Sutton:
And nobody can throw the food right in your face or anything like that.
Rod:
There we go. And then just continue to use those skills that, that I acquired in undergrad to build a professional career as a fundraiser for different academic institutions as well as hospital organizations. So, I had an opportunity to or a ton of opportunities to speak with people from all walks of life and talk about how these different institutions really propelled their personal and professional lives. And you know, presenting them with the opportunity to invest in people to have that same experience was, was pretty rewarding.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Excellent. Excellent. And Andrea, what about you? Did you enter right into your field of study right away?
Andrea:
Not really similar to Rod here. The paper says I studied a double major in political science/international law, but I also double majored in theater directing. So I feel like at the end of the day, it’s all theater, isn’t it? I feel. So, but that took me to journalism. I think that right now what I’m doing is much more tied to my master’s degree than my undergrad, but it’s, it’s all the same. You learn how to tell stories.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. So is this kind of like working for Amazon, your first entry into like the e-commerce side of things?
Andrea:
Absolutely. My background was much more into nonprofits, so this was very new to me. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. All right. So interesting, interesting. I love hearing that because the perspective of somebody who doesn’t hasn’t been 10 years and in e-commerce and might be already biased and jaded of certain things is always a fresh perspective to have. Now, Rod going back to you, how did you get any, it’s one jump from your major to what you ended up doing. It’s another jump to go into selling products online from fundraising. So where did that segue happen?
Rod:
Yeah as rewarding as that fundraising career was I just really reached a point where I had to take some self-inventory and ask myself, am I being fulfilled on all fronts and really at the most important fronts to me. So while I’m connecting these people back to their passions, my passions weren’t necessarily being addressed. And that was helping people who had similar circumstances to overcome that I did. So to that point my friend that I grew up with in Gary, Indiana was having those same conversations, right? Where it’s like, is this the end all be all for me? Do I want to continue to use my skills to grow someone else’s dream? Or can I use that to leverage something that’s really important to me?
Rod:
And you know, we were throwing a few things back and forth to each other, and what we realized is that we could use something that fueled us to fuel those passions, and that thing was coffee. So as you know, that idea became more and more of a reality the easiest, or rather I say the path that had the fewest barriers of entry was going to e-comm, right? So you can have your brick-and-mortar space and you can have a profound impact in your community or you can make your product and rather our social impact mission more accessible to millions of people by way of e-comm. So it was intentional and really it was the path of least resistance that led us there.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. Now, Andrea, were you hired at Amazon for the podcast or have you been doing other things there?
Andrea:
I was hired specifically for the podcast, and it’s very nice to hear Rod again, cuz he was in one of our first episodes of season one. He believed in us before we had even launched of this is small business, and I solely dedicate my time here at Amazon to telling small business owner stories.
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s talk about how this got started. When did it start? What was the kind of like the thoughts there at Amazon of why they needed something like this? And if you can just talk a little bit about the history and then you just mentioned it, but if you can mention again, the name of the podcast so everybody can take out their phones and make sure to subscribe to it right now while they’re listening to this one.
Andrea:
Yes, of course. So the podcast is, This is Small Business and it’s hosted by me. And we produced, this is Small Business because we understood that as an aspiring entrepreneur. And Rod, maybe you can also talk to this later, but like, there’s a lot you’re learning along the way. And the more I talk to small business owners, the more I realize how it’s a lot of things are new and you have to learn a little bit about everything. And especially if you’re someone who’s starting their first business, you, you don’t really know what you don’t know, right? So we wanted to make sure that we had something inspirational, but also easy to listen to and on the go. And that’s why podcasting was the best way to go for us right now. And I think that this is small business serves us two things. So it’s an accessible educational resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners, right?
Andrea:
But I think it’s also a great way to celebrate and highlight small business stories, which before I started working on this, I feel like we didn’t hear about a lot of these stories. We hear more about like, these bigger brands that have made it and like, have become household names, but a lot of the small business owners who are in this journey, they wanna hear from people who are either going through what they’re going with through right now or are have just passed that. Right. And they’re barely starting to learn what it is to build a small business. And so on the podcast, we of course cover hot topics and challenges that small business owners face every day. And then we end every episode with key lessons that I think all small business owners can use on their journey.
Bradley Sutton:
I like it. I like it. All right now. Yeah. Rod, what would you think, this is obviously not your first podcast because you were on This is Small Business first. Like, some people are reluctant, I think to kind of like tell their story and then it’s really funny. Like, I’m not sure how involved you are with the Amazon community, but it’s really weird that I mean, in the outsider’s opinion I’m not an outsider, but like when I tell this to other people, they just don’t understand it. Like, a lot of people at Helium 10 here work or don’t come from an Amazon background. And what’s really weird to them is that Amazon sellers, they’re so private, a lot of them are private. Like you have you know, a party of 300 Amazon sellers, 290 of them don’t even want you to know what category they’re selling because they think that maybe they’re gonna get attacked by listing hijackers or something so that’s, that’s kinda like a, a little culture shock in the Amazon world.
Bradley Sutton:
But you, you’re pretty much open with your brand. Like did you talk about it with today on her, on her show?
Rod:
Yeah, absolutely right. I mean we are in the for-profit business, while I have a nonprofit background you know, black and Bold exists to make a profit and participate in community economics, and the only way that we are going to welcome more people into that ecosystem is to drive our passion to of helping kids in need is to talk about it. The thing that’s most authentic to us is our story. You know, we know that there are others that can relate, whether it be our background, whether it be our entrepreneurial journey and dealing with the turbulent times that are inevitable. And the successes that come along with it, we, we felt as though that was it needed to be heard. That’s what inspired us to even jump into entrepreneurship where other people’s stories, right. You know, generically you can point to something like a Shark Tank and you hear all of these entrepreneurs that have amassed some success in their relative, their communities and they’re looking for that boost. That’s inspiring, right? That’s the American dream. And we wanted to participate in inspiring the next generation of business owners and just career professionals.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Now speaking since you are open to it, lemme just share my screen really quick for everybody to see. I’m looking at one of your listing pages right here, and you talked about your story and like you’re literally using the brand story section on an Amazon listing and a lot of people don’t. You have got here meet the founders and you talk a little bit about your goals here. You know, like you know it says you create this company with a desire to unite coffee and tea lovers worldwide. I’ve got my tea here, by the way. I’m not drinking coffee, but I go coffee sometimes. And then it says, the common interest of investing communities specifically for youth.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, sometimes I think Amazon sellers out there who do have a brand story or decide to kind of like weave in a story here. They start with the product first and then after a while they’re successful. Alright. Alright. Let me go ahead and start talking about the founders and let’s talk about our mission, but I could be wrong here. It seems to me that with what you’re saying here, like you, you almost had the mission first and the story first, and then you kind of like develop your brand around that. Would I be kind of on the right path there?
Rod:
That is 100% accurate. You must have our place bug essentially. But yeah, that’s what we did. It was certainly mission first and the product is more of a vehicle to help elevate and, and propel that mission. And like I mentioned we just look at our own daily habits. We drink coffee and tea. I traveled a lot for work meeting with different donors where do you set up shop when you’re on the road? In a coffee shop. You go to a Starbucks, you go to someplace that has cheap wifi and you get your work done. And I had a, a real affinity for the, the, the community the coffee community and how welcoming it was.
Rod:
And we’re like, that’s gonna be the, the vehicle that, that drives this social impact mission. That’s, that’s really core and keen to our DNA. So yeah, you couldn’t be more spot on by saying it was mission first and then coffee. So as our company continues to grow, we don’t talk as much about our story, that that’s our foundation and it is more about the product experience and how there are differentiators between us and other indie brands and other more household names and we’re getting great response, right? We’re getting even deeper affinity from those that are already in our community and they’re telling other people and is just continuing to grow in a real organic and rapid fashion. So I think that we’re looking in hindsight to choose the right path to get those people that are lifelong fans.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Now, how much do you think that’s helped you? I see that you have, you’ve got your own website too. I’m assuming you might have social media out there, or ways to communicate with your customer or even on Amazon, like, like do you get messages from people where it’s like, Hey man I love your story, or really resonated with me, where you kind of get the vibe. Like, I bet you that at the beginning they probably had three or four different coffees they had to choose from. They had no idea what your brand was, but when they, they started learning about you, they’re like, you know what? I’m gonna go with this one. You think you could say that there’s a certain percentage of your customers that’s definitely resonated. Maybe that’s the reason they’re even your customer?
Rod:
Absolutely. Right. So there, there are many reasons why people rock with our brand, right? Whether it be because we have a great product, it could be the fact that we give back to the community. But one thing that certainly is also true is the fact that there’s a relatability between us and our consumers, right? We didn’t come from coffee. Pernell and I, my business partner just had an affinity for coffee and tea. In fact, I didn’t even drink coffee before starting the business. So similar to you, I would have it every now and again, right? I was more of a tea guy and being vulnerable, if you will, even if that’s vulnerable. But being vulnerable and sharing that and, and letting people see how we were able to learn as we built this business that is something that people you know, stop us and tell us about all the time. Whether it be when we go to a farmer’s market or if we’re at a conference or wherever we are and people are familiar with our brand. You can guarantee that someone says, Hey, this, this inspired me. Thank you. Because I too didn’t know a lot about coffee. I’m intimidated by walking into a coffee shop because I don’t know what’s the difference between a light, medium, and dark roast. And because you were–
Bradley Sutton:
I don’t know what’s the difference. I’ll tell you that right now.
Rod:
I can nerd out if you want me to, cuz I’ve learned so much in the five years that we’ve had our business. But you know, that just being more human and not performative. I think that’s always gonna resonate and cut through the noise.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now switching back to Andrea, like I was just looking at Rod’s listening here, I saw that he’s part of the black-owned business program, and I actually had somebody from Amazon. See, I can’t say that you’re the first person from Amazon here on the podcast because she came on here before, and I’ve actually had some of my listeners in my network who are part of this and talked about the benefits. Now everybody knows about FBA and everybody knows about PPC and stuff like that. But what are some other things that Amazon provides that you think maybe have flown under their radar, some of your favorites?
Andrea:
Yeah, so there’s a lot, and through my conversations with Amazon sellers, I’ve come to learn about a lot of new ones. So shameless plug, I will say this is small business. Listen to us, we are a great tool and resource and we’re not just educational, but we are inspirational. As Rod has mentioned, we tell great stories like Black and Bolds. And I think, for me, it’s pretty cool to be able to help small businesses tell their brand story because it really changes the game in terms of being memorable and having loyal customers. And then going back to what you mentioned with the Black Business Accelerator, that’s also a very exciting one that I’ve learned about a lot because a lot of our guests on the show are part of the Black Business Accelerator, and they have very tailored programs and an experience for each black-owned business that’s part of it.
Andrea:
So they have financial assistance through credits and cash investment opportunities, which is great. They have business education and coaching, and then marketing and advertising support. So I highly recommend it if you’re a black-owned business. And then the last one I will say, which is fairly new, and that’s also why it hasn’t been heard of that much yet, but it’s the Amazon Small Business Academy. And the reason I’m super excited about this one is because it’s a one-stop shop and you can get a bunch of resources from it regardless if you are selling in the Amazon store or not, and everything is free. And I mentioned that because a lot of people can’t believe that the Amazon Small Business Academy has all of those resources for free. And what you do is you get on the site, which is www.smallbusiness.amazon, and you take a free self-assessment. And then based on that self-assessment, they figure out where you are in your business journey. And then they choose a learning track specifically for you. There’s live and on-demand training, there’s Q&As, there’s events, and podcasts as well, including that this is small business podcasts and there’s more coming soon as well. So highly recommend for anyone wherever they are in their small business journey.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, I think everybody, I’m sure your podcast is searchable on any podcast player like Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or on a computer and you want to take, gets a visual look at some of her episodes, I found it at smallbusiness.amazon.com and then you click on that podcast. Now I would probably recommend, even though I haven’t yet, that’s the first one I’m gonna do. The very first episode that I’m gonna listen to of yours is episode seven here. Cuz there’s this good-looking gentleman and his partner here, we’re on this podcast.
Andrea:
Yes. One of our favorite.
Bradley Sutton:
I heard they have a good story, Rod and Purnell here. Now switching back to Rod, like one thing I’ve learned about the black-owned business program is, it’s like you start getting an Amazon rep that you can’t call, like you’ve got some issues and something stuck with a listing or they might call you and say, Hey, like, I noticed you’re not using the brand story. What are some of the benefits that you have experienced by being part of this program on the Amazon side? Like how have you been helped that maybe if you weren’t part of this program, you might have been stuck or might have been harder at least to fix or figure something out.
Rod:
Yeah. So I’ll double-click on what Andrea has said. That’s just having a program that’s tailored to where you are in your journey and having someone that is invested in your success, right? So we meet with our person rather frequently whether we’re initiating those calls or he’s reaching out to say, Hey, have you thought about this? Here’s a new program. Here’s an opportunity to be among other sellers. It’s a plethora of resources that we otherwise would have no knowledge of, right? So again an earlier statement was, you don’t know what you don’t know. And we’ve been able to peel back a lot of the layers of Amazon by way of participating and the Black Business Accelerator. So much so it’s been so helpful that Purnell, my business partner actually now sits on the advisory team for the Black Business Accelerator. So just by way of staying connected and trying to find additional ways for us now to be helpful for earlier stage small businesses you know, that, that, that opportunity presented itself. So again, we love it and we want to continue to be a part of both ends being resourceful a as well as using the resources that are within it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Cool. Cool. Now, I don’t have access to your numbers, but using Helium 10, I can kind of see the estimated number of sales you’re doing and you can see how many reviews you’ve got. You’re definitely doing, you’re definitely, I would call you successful on Amazon. So there might be listeners out there who just starting out and are wondering what are, if you had to think of maybe two or three things that, either a specific thing, like a specific strategy you’re using or just a mindset kind of aspect of things that has been a contributor to your success. What, what kind of advice would you give to newer sellers out there?
Rod:
Gosh, that’s such a loaded question.
Bradley Sutton:
Putting you on the spot here.
Rod:
Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways whether you know, you think about the storefront itself and the image and the message that you want to be conveyed as soon as someone is introduced to your store. And that’s something that I don’t think you should go by the wayside. Think you should play a lot of time and intentionality to make sure that your images and your descriptors again, tell the story that you want for your brand. In addition to that we were not afraid and are not afraid to advertise on Amazon. There are a lot of different ways that we’ve been able to use that strategy or use strategies within the paid ad function to welcome more people into our ecosystem. And that’s also something that people, I think, shy away from. But there are resources out there that can help guide those that may be a little bit more novice and throwing up hate at it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. What about you, Andrea? You know, you’ve talked to a number of sellers yourself due to the podcast. Any traits that they have or, or common themes or like this is what helped them get to where they are apart from what Rod mentioned, I
Andrea:
Think one of the things that we cover across episodes that I would tell small business owners or aspiring entrepreneurs who are barely starting out. If you don’t have a strong why, you’re only gonna get so far when you try to communicate what your brand stands for and what your vision is to your customers. So I think that in order to be memorable, to connect and to inspire, have a strong brand story, understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and I think through that, you will inevitably be able to bring along the right type of customer for you for a lifelong journey. And it doesn’t matter if you change or not. And as an example, one of the small business owners I speak to actually talks about how they had to completely rebrand, change the name of their business, and a lot of customers had a couple of issues with that because they were so tied, it was part of their identity almost, that it’s like taking part of their identity away. And that’s because they had such a strong brand story. It was more than just a name. It was more than just a product. It’s who you are. So if I could tell that to any small business owner, it would be that have a strong brand story. And then the second thing tied to that is to choose carefully who you surround yourself with. Who is part of your team, because that will have a lot to do with how successful your business ends up being.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Now going back to Rod, are you sending outside traffic at all to bring them to Amazon? Like I just assumed that you had social media or do you send most people to your website or what’s your outside, obviously, the biggest advantage of Amazon is you’ve got this existing traffic, a bunch of people who are already searching for these keywords related to your product and you can take advantage of it. But we know Amazon loves outside traffic too. So how are you getting new eyes to your listings?
Rod:
So we’ve been fortunate enough to build a couple of subscriber lists, whether it be email or SMS. And at given points, whether it be around Prime Day or other promo times, we’ll send or send out communication letting people know about those opportunities that exist on Amazon. I don’t have a direct breakdown as to how often that happens, but it’s again, in alignment with our promo strategy. That was something that we didn’t do at first. In full transparency, well, we would only drive to our website or to our brick-and-mortar retail partners, but we recognized that we wanted to make sure that we give our consumer base as many opportunities as possible to shop our brand. You know, we have a lot of prime customers that exist within those two subscriber lists. And we wanted to, again, present to them and give them, an option that otherwise they probably didn’t know about.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Nice. Now, do you have your own warehouse too, like where you fulfill, like off Amazon or everything you use like the FBA inventory even to fulfill your website sales, or?
Rod:
So we use FBA we do have a manufacturing facility here in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s grown from my friend’s garage to about 33,000 square feet where we will produce a manufacturer and package all of our, all of our goods, and then we send them to Amazon for them to fulfill those orders there.
Bradley Sutton:
Nice, nice. Everything made in the USA?
Rod:
Well, coffee there are only two states that actually grow coffee. Fun fact California and Hawaii. Coffee otherwise is grown in places that are close to the equator, right? So think about Brazil, and Columbia.
Bradley Sutton:
I don’t know anything about coffee. So like, that might be an ignorant question here, but like you, like you, I’m a tea drinker mainly. But I do drink coffee, but it’s only for the caffeine. So like, like, I actually don’t even like the taste of coffee, but sometimes I’ll drink coffee, so.
Andrea:
No, no. That’s unacceptable.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, no. You see, that always offends the die-hard coffee fans, is it?
Andrea:
Weren’t you a coffee drinker Rod, or, yeah,
Rod:
I wasn’t. And I certainly, that pendulum has swung dramatically, right? So instead of my chai or my green jasmine, I have traded it in for a nice fruity aromatic light roast from Ethiopia.
Andrea:
Good job. Good job.
Bradley Sutton:
Side note, Ethiopian food is my favorite food, even one step above Mexican food. But so Ethiopian coffee, I’m sure I like it too. But anyways, one more thing to offend on here. When I drink coffee, because I don’t like the taste, I dump two scoops of protein powder into each coffee just so I can have a completely changed taste, but I don’t think that’s like diehard coffee. People would probably get upset at you.
Rod:
Oh yeah. You, you’re giving them heart palpitations right now, my friend.
Andrea:
That sounds awful.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, Andrea, we better go back to you. Parting words for you for our audience. Words of advice, strategies, anything that you could share with everybody.
Andrea:
Support small businesses just in general. They not only are so incredibly passionate and I have the honor of being able to tell their stories every day, but they have great products just all around and they’re very personalized and they really think about the customer journey and how they can help you. And when you buy the product you’re getting a good quality, well-thought-out product. So do that. And then obviously just do some research on all of the Amazon resources offered if you are an aspiring entrepreneur or an early-stage business owner, because anything you need there is something out there to help you, including, obviously this is small business.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Now, normally at the end of the podcast, I do like, like I just, like, I just did and I was asking about y’all’s strategies, but I’m gonna do something completely different since, since Rod says he’s not using Helium 10. Let me just show you just some of the power here of what we do. While you were talking, I just ran one of your, like, I’m assuming this is one of your top sellers right here. Cause it comes at the top of your, your storefront here, and then I can instantly see where all of the keywords you are ranking for organically. And so I could see right off the bat that, hey, you’re doing excellent like, on your branded terms here, like people are, are searching black and bold coffee black and bold just by itself is has some search volume and you’re ranking high.
Bradley Sutton:
You’re actually ranking for even competitor brands here. But what’s interesting is you know, like there’s not a lot of like, generic keywords that you might be. So what would be cool is that like, I don’t know too much about the space. I know there’s like death wish coffee and other ones like that. But imagine being able to look at this now, like, hey, go to your competitors’ listing and kind of reverse engineer where are their sales coming from. And so you’ll be able to do that by seeing where they’re showing up for in the organic ranks. I could see where you’re, where you’re doing some sponsored ranks like you’re, you’re definitely targeting your own brand. I could see your position three on that one. But bold coffee you were showing up there.
Bradley Sutton:
Not very highly, but you could just instantly look at any of your competitor listings and see and kind of like reverse engineer their keyword strategy. Cuz like I said for me, one of the biggest benefits of Amazon is you just got so much traffic that like 15 years ago, you had to pay for all these eyeballs to come onto your product. You gotta pay cold traffic to come to your listing. With Amazon, you don’t have to worry about that because there are just millions of people already shopping. So it’s like finding out what are the keywords that are relevant to my product, are people searching for? And then what’s driving the sales of my comparison? So I’m gonna hook you up with like three months free of Helium 10 and get you started so that you can start doing some research, maybe optimizing your listing a little bit more, maybe targeting some new keywords you haven’t before. And let’s see if we can increase those already good sales that I can see from here. How’s that sound?
Rod:
That sounds amazing. And it’s just in time for as we are celebrating or just celebrating our fifth year anniversary yesterday, right? So I’m gonna receive that gift.
Bradley Sutton:
Fifth-year anniversary, gift anniversary for Black and Bold Coffee. And then in exchange, all I ask for is, I noticed that you’ve got some kind of Matcha, something, I saw it on your website and some of your keywords here. That’s my weakness right there. I don’t care about Matcha any, I will eat Matcha. I just spent three weeks in Japan. I had Matcha things that I didn’t even know existed. I don’t think it was a Matcha coffee yet, but there’s definitely Matcha tea. I know. So you’re gonna have to hook me up with some of that. How’s that sound?
Rod:
Bartering is my middle name. So sounds like a plan.
Bradley Sutton:
There you go. All right. Well, I appreciate both of y’all coming on the podcast today. And I’m about to go binge-listen. Is that a word? Binge Listen?
Andrea:
It is now.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m about to binge. All right. We’re gonna make that trendy right now. I’m gonna go binge-listen to This is Small Business Podcast with Andrea here, and I’m about to partake in the black and bold. Just to make Andrea happy. I’ll you’re gonna have to send me some coffee too. Some black and bold coffee too. And I’ll try and have it unadulterated with protein powder. 871584518
Andrea:
Try it just alone Alone. Okay. And then you can add maybe a little coffee if you don’t want it that strong. I mean, sorry, little milk if you don’t want it that strong, but keep away. Let’s separate the protein powder and the coffee.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. I’ll try my best. But thanks guys for coming to the podcast. It’ll be lovely to like, maybe reach out to y’all in 2024 to see what’s new.
Rod:
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Andrea:
Thanks for having us.
Prime Day is an excellent opportunity for Amazon sellers to boost their sales, gain exposure, and connect with new customers. In this SSP episode, Bradley unveils his never before shared strategies and techniques to help you prepare for Prime Day. We will also provide insights from three successful Amazon sellers who have achieved remarkable results, including the 9-figure brand Solo Stove! Our panel of guests share their game plans and tips for Prime Day success, giving valuable advice on PPC campaigns, sales strategies, and simple ways to maximize sales during this event. Whether you’re a seasoned Amazon seller or just starting out, this blog offers valuable insights to help you make the most of Prime Day and boost your sales.
In episode 464 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Kseniia, Mike, and Nate discuss:
- 02:25 – Have Brand Analytics? How To Check For Top Performing Keywords
- 03:46 – Check For ALL Of The Keywords A Product Was Ranking For
- 04:04 – How To Check Your Historic PPC Budget Utilization
- 05:45 – Making Bulk Changes To Your Budgets with Adtomic
- 06:52 – Utilize Adtomic Budget Rules
- 07:45 – Try To Determine Competitors Sales: Organic Or Sponsored Search
- 10:37 – Find The Keywords That Converted For You In PPC Last Year
- 11:57 – Check Your Sales Heat Maps from Last Year
- 13:08 – Check Your Competitor Price History
- 14:08 – Check CPC & Keyword Ranks BEFORE Prime Day Last Year
- 14:11 – Check CPC & Keyword Ranks DURING Prime Day Last Year
- 15:18 – Let’s Welcome Today’s Guests
- 15:41 – Nate Barnard From Solo Stove
- 16:35 – Mike Kim 7-Figure Amazon Seller
- 16:57 – Kseniia Reidel 6-Figure Amazon Seller
- 17:19 – Solo Stove Is Making 9-Figures In Sales Annually!
- 17:57 – How Many Sales Do They Make During Prime Day
- 18:46 – How Does A Big Brand Go 30x On Prime Day?
- 26:39 – Leveraging Adtomic For Their Prime Day PPC Campaigns
- 28:50 – Kseniia’s Gameplan For This Year’s Prime Day
- 29:42 – Nate And Solo Stove’s Gameplan For Prime Day
- 30:13 – Mike’s Gameplan For Prime Day
- 31:03 – Kseniia’s 60-Second Tip
- 31:28 – Nate’s 60-Second Tip
- 32:44 – Mike’s 60-Second Tip
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today, I’m gonna give you guys my top strategies on how to prepare for Prime Day. And we’re gonna listen to three sellers out there who have been crushing it as Amazon sellers, and including one who was a nine figure seller, who had a 3000% sales increase on Prime Day. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
If you’re like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don’t have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me, allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I’m managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic For more information. That’s h10.me/adtomic. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. This is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, guys, we’ve got a special episode today because we are getting ready for Prime Day. All right, so Prime Day is coming up and for some sellers, this is one of the biggest days of, of sales for the year. So we obviously kind of like want to know what do we need to do to get ready for Prime Day, at least on like the advertising and maybe keyword analytics side. What are the things that we can do in order to make sure we put our best foot forward? So I’m gonna be giving you guys my top tips, and then later on in the show, we’re gonna invite three different sellers on here who are at different stages. You know, we’ve got a six figure seller, a seven figure seller, and a nine figure seller. A couple of them were able to 530000% x 30,000, 3000% x Their pri, their regular sales on Prime Day one seller was actually down on Prime Day.
Bradley Sutton:
So we’re gonna learn what mistake that he that he made and that he’s gonna correct this year so that you guys don’t make that same mistake. So, but first, before we get into that, let’s go ahead and get into my top strategies. How many people have brand registry who are currently selling on Amazon? All right, so what does that mean? If you have brand registry, you have access to search query performance and brand analytics. So what you can see with search query performance, I’m gonna want you guys to go back and take a look back at the week. All right? So go back to either your brand or the ASIN level as you can see on the screen. And you are gonna go to the week of 2022, July 10th, all right, because that was the week that Prime Day was. And then you are gonna sort this list of the keywords by search funnel purchases and sort it by ASIN count.
Bradley Sutton:
What that number means is you are, you now have a list in descending order of the keywords that generated sales during that week for Prime week, all right? You’re gonna be able to do that in brand analytics as well for your competitor. So in search, career performance is mainly for your own products, but then take your top competitors, throw the ASIN into brand analytics, and then again, go to the week last year from when Prime Day was, and then see where were your competitors. One of the top three clicked products during the week of Prime Day. Next strategy here, check for all of the keywords a product was ranking for. So if you’re a Helium 10 member, you can see the difference here of when you’re looking at brand analytics. And then when you’re looking at Cerebro, Cerebro is taking a whole month of information.
Bradley Sutton:
So you wanna look at the historical trend of prime month instead of Prime Week Brand Analytics, Search Query Performance is going by week in Cerebro. We’re looking back in a month. So you’re gonna put July, those of you who are elite members, you can do this. You want to go to July, 2022, and this is gonna show you all of the keywords that you and your competitors were showing up for in organic and sponsored ranks on average for the entire month of July. You’re gonna want to take a list of those keywords. Next strategy, check your historic budget utilization. So what you wanna do hopefully you were downloading your reports during Prime Day last year for all of you who are new sellers, Hey, make sure to download your reports this year so you can have it, because you might not be able to see it in Seller Central all going all the way back one year, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Cuz you can only see usually a few months of information. So make sure to download your information. So if you did that or in Adtomic, you can go back a year or even two years to see what was going on with your advertising. You can’t do that in Seller Central. So what you wanna do is, like, right here, here are the, I put Adtomic to the two days of Prime Day last year, and I could see that my budget on one of these campaigns was $30 a day. I only spent $50. What does that mean? That means I obviously didn’t hit my budget on that campaign, but there’s a couple other campaigns, as you can see here, that I clearly hit the budget and we even went a tiny bit over the budget. So this is gonna give you an idea about, hey, you know what, for these products or these campaigns, I better keep an eye on this.
Bradley Sutton:
I might want to think about increasing my budget during Prime Day this year. Now, once you make that decision, you can actually make bulk changes to your budgets. Or maybe you’re just like, you know what, I wanna make sure I don’t run a budget on any of my campaigns. All my campaigns are super profitable. I just want to bulk change for Prime Day this year. So what you’re gonna do is right before Prime Day, the day before Prime Day, you can go into Helium 10 Adtomic and then select all the campaigns you want to increase your budget and select bulk actions and so just with one, a couple of clicks, you are going to be able to change all of your budgets. You can do something very similar in Seller Central. That’s the in the advertising campaign manager right there on the right hand side, there’s an option where you can select multiple campaigns, and then you can do a bulk edit adjust budget.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, let’s say you don’t want to do it. You don’t wanna have to remember to turn off your budget. So all of those is gonna change your budget. Like maybe you’re doubling your budget, right? But after Prime Day, maybe you want to go back to what it was. If you don’t wanna have to do another bulk edit, well, maybe the tool that you can use, it’s actually something in Amazon Advertising and Seller Central, it’s a Budget Rules. This is fairly new. A lot of, you might not have seen this before, but if you go into your Budget Rules and then select settings, you can actually schedule certain budgets. You can pick a custom date, or you can choose the date of Prime Day. You can also do this during special holidays, like you can see there. You could have done this on Memorial Day as well.
Bradley Sutton:
So that’s if you want to not have to worry about going back and changing your budget, but the only drawback on this is you can’t do it in bulk. You have to do this kind of campaign by campaign. So there’s pros and cons of each way. Let’s keep going here with some more strategies. I showed you guys about the top performing keywords I showed you guys about checking for the historical keyword ranks of a product. Now, take a look at this one. You wanna determine if your competitors were getting sales from organic or sponsored search, all right? So for example this is what you want to do, get your top competitors. So hopefully you did the other steps first, right? So get one of your top competitors. Now go into Helium 10 Keyword Tracker and put their ASIN in your Keyword Tracker.
Bradley Sutton:
A lot of people think Keyword Tracker is only for your own products. No, no. You can track any product on Amazon, yours or not, in keyword Tracker. And then you can actually see the historical ranks. So remember in the previous steps either through through Amazon or through through Helium 10, you’re checking what keywords were driving sales for you and your competitors. You know, maybe you found that in Search Querey Performance for you. Maybe you found it in Brand Analytics for your competitor. Maybe you found it for you or your competitor in Cerebro historical data. Add those keywords and their products into keyword tracker. And guess what? Even though you, you weren’t tracking those keywords back then, guess what we probably were. If this is a keyword that was at least like viewed and had a search volume of like 1000 or 3000, we were probably tracking it even way before you.
Bradley Sutton:
So what you’re gonna see is you are gonna be able to go back in history in keyword tracker, you click on the graph, and then you click like all time or one year and then zoom in at the very day level of Prime Day last year. Guys, this is like, I hope your mi your minds are being boggled right now, guys, because this is mind boggling stuff of what you guys can do. I mean, people can’t do this. Who, who do Facebook ads and stuff like that. It’s not as easy as just like a couple clicks. Like, like we’ve made it here. So you, you can see where was their sales coming from? We already determined through our other steps, competitors were getting sales from his keywords. Was it from organic sponsored or both?
Bradley Sutton:
Take a look at the top one. I know it’s hard to see if you have a small screen, but that was a keyword coffin shelf. And this is one of the competitors, right? You can see that they were getting sales from both placements. Look at that. They were organically positioned, one and two, and they were sponsored rank fluctuating between like two, pretty much they were one sponsored rank there as well. But take a look at the bottom keyword there. I did the same thing to this competitor’s listing, and one of them, the coffin decor, they were at the top of page one, so they’re probably getting their sales from the organic rank, but look at their sponsored rank there. They were on page two, so they were probably not getting any sales from sponsored rank. So this is gonna give you some crazy amounts of visibility to understand exactly how your competitors were making sales from search.
Bradley Sutton:
Was it from PPC? Was it organic? Was it both? So super cool stuff here. Let’s keep going. Find the keywords that converted for you in PPC last year. Take a look at the screen here. I have Adtomic going. You, you’re not gonna be able to do this in Seller Central, unless, like I said, hopefully you downloaded your reports last year, but if you were selling last year and you were using Adtomic, go in there, set the date range of Prime Day and find all of your profitable keywords. Like here, I put, hey, I wanna look at the keywords that had less ACoS of less than 40% and had at least one PPC order it. I’m just pretending that that was my, my my kind of like breakeven point and then now instantly I’m gonna see all of the keywords that drove sales in PPC for my product.
Bradley Sutton:
And then what I’m gonna want to do is I need to put these keywords into Keyword Tracker to make sure that I am ranking highly for these keywords still. Now, it’s important that you get an early start. Like whenever Prime Day is gonna be, if your organic rank is low, you’re not gonna increase your organic rank in a couple days if you wait until then. Start now with, with perhaps trying to increase your organic rank by having some aggressive PPC to hopefully get your organic rank up so that by Prime Day you are already there at the top of the page. Only a couple more strategies here, and then we’re gonna have some cool interviews. But another Helium 10 tool is Inventory Heat Maps and Sales Heat Maps. So go into Helium 10, go into the profits tool, and then under inventory heat maps or under Heat Maps go to Sales Heat Maps.
Bradley Sutton:
Go to the Prime Days in July of last year and take a look at where your sales were. Look at that top screenshot there. That was one of the coffin shelves and you can kind of see those bigger circles are showing where the sales were at the time. Where my heavy duty sales were. Now what you’re going to want to do is you’re gonna want to look at your inventory heat maps now and make sure you have enough inventory distribution. I’m looking here and not, I had a lot of sales last year in the Washington area. You guys see that there in the northwest. But look, now I barely have any inventory in Washington, so I’m probably gonna want to send more inventory to Amazon and hope that they’re gonna distribute it a little bit more.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is another thing that you can be doing in the weeks leading up to Prime Day to make sure you have enough inventory distributed around. Another one you can do is check your competitor price history. Like did they lower their regular price or did they have a sale price going during Prime Day? You can actually do that. Go to any of your competitor listings. And then with that Helium 10 chart right there that has a history of their prices, what I want you to do is you’re gonna click on one year or all time and then take a look at Prime Day last year, go to July of last year, and then you could see. Look at this customer. Look at this coffin shelf. They lowered their price down, it looks like $3. They lowered their price $3 down during Prime Day.
Bradley Sutton:
So now I’m like, you know what? Maybe they’re gonna do that this year. I kind of have a heads up on what their strategy might be, and I can like at least have a few days to think about, Hmm, what about me? Do I want to have a similar strategy? Should I lower my price $3? You have this visibility on even your competitor’s price history. Next one here is check your cost per click and keyword ranks on your main keywords before Prime Day last year. Lemme say that again before Prime Day. So now the next step after I do that, and I write down those numbers, take a look now, do the cost-per-click and keyword ranks on those main keywords during Prime Day. So look at that date above, I changed it to July 12th and July 13th of last year. And take a look.
Bradley Sutton:
Those bids are 66 cents and 68 cents. So now I know that, you know what, during Prime Day, my cost per click actually went up a little bit more than 10%. So now I’m wondering, well, wait a minute. Did I lose keyword rank or did I maintain keyword rank right there at the bottom? I maintained sponsored rank on number one. So with this information, if I was selling last year on Prime Day, now I know, all right, for this year, I’m going to need to potentially make sure that I have enough room in my cost per click and my target price to allow for a 10% increase in cost per click so that I don’t lose my organic rank. So there’s another tip. So now guys we’ve got a special treat. We’ve got some real life sellers these are not professionals. These are not Helium 10 employees here. You know, these are, are not service providers trying to get your money. We’ve got some real life sellers here. So let’s go ahead and invite them to the stage now. Nate, Kseniia, and Mike. Nate, how long has your company been selling online and and what’s your company?
Nate:
I’m with Solo Stove. We’ve been online for about 13 years. Myself, I’ve been in the Amazon space for a little over five years.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. Now before I hadn’t really heard of of Solo Stove. I probably have, but I guess didn’t register. But it’s funny, after I started finding out about Solo Stove I was telling this story the other day. I was looking at my American Express credit card portal, and it gives like special deals on like Reebok and Nike and Disney and stuff like that. Like, Hey activate this deal and you can get extra points for your Hilton credit card, blah, blah, blah. Well, the other day it was Solo Stove on there, so I’m like, man, Solo Stove is legit. Solo Stove is definitely a legit brand if they’re coming up in my American Express offers. All right next up that new face to us here is Mike. Mike go ahead and introduce yourself and how long has your company been selling online?
Mike:
Hey, I’m Mike. I’m with Hemlock Park, and we’ve been selling for just about three years now on Amazon. And we had make organic candles in-house and do everything in-house. The team of five people.
Bradley Sutton:
I love it. I love it. Super unique making stuff in-house here in the USA. And then just in case nobody has seen her podcast before. Kseniia, same question for you. How long have you been selling online?
Kseniia:
I’ve been in Commerce for four years, I think, and the two years with the current brand.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Now going back to Nate like, I kind of gave a little bit of a tease that you guys are not exactly newer sellers. You’re a heavy duty company. What’s your approximate gross revenue? Yearly and and which marketplaces are you selling?
Nate:
So we are worldwide nine figure business. And so domestically outside of our website marketplaces are Walmart and Amazon domestically. Then we have a handful of other marketplaces in Europe.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent, excellent. Nine figures, guys, I’m in the Czech Republic right now in this hotel that has bad internet and things are glitching a little bit. That wasn’t a glitch right there. You heard that, right? Nine figures that is amazing. Let’s go to Mike. Same question for you. What’s your approximate gross revenue yearly and in which marketplace are you selling in?
Mike:
We’re doing seven figures. We’ve had two X growth year over year for the past three years, so hopefully that keeps on going. And we’re on Amazon and then also Fair Wholesale, which is a wholesale distribution marketplace and then those are the two.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Now Kseniia, what about you? Leticia probably knows, but for those who didn’t hear your podcast, what’s your approximate or gross revenue and are you only selling in Amazon USA?
Kseniia:
Only Amazon, US and Canada, and I was very close to seven figures last year.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. Definitely you’re gonna have faith that you’re gonna hit it this year. Now Nate, the I think from the company name, we can kind of figure out what kind of products you sell. But, but what, what are some, some of your top sellers?
Nate:
So our flagship products are smokeless fire pits which we offer in three different sizes. And then most recently we have a tabletop fire pit that’s good for like s’mores marshmallow roasting for the kids.
Bradley Sutton:
I’d imagine that leading up to like Memorial Day, 4th of July, like those kind of holidays, you get some spike in sales?
Nate:
Yeah. we get a pretty good spike Memorial Day for sure. We’ll get a little bit in July though, because a lot of our product is kind of springtime related. Most of our sales actually happen quarter two, quarter four and then quarter three is relatively dead. So Prime Day is a big deal for us because it keeps us alive in July.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I bet if we looked at their Sales Heat Maps, I was showing you guys like maybe during December might be a little bit rough in those states where there’s rough winters. Now Mike, you are in Nevada, I think they don’t know nothing about rough winters out there, but then again you know, I’m not sure if parts of Nevada I guess get gets cold, but you said you were, you make candles in house, so like how in the world did you start that? Like, was this a hobby before? Like I’m thinking of what was, what was the girlfriend on the office, how she tried to do her own candle making business?
Mike:
Yeah, it totally was a hobby at first. And I just wanted to make all natural products. I used to make ’em for myself and as gifts. And then a friend said like, do the farmer’s market with me. And I was like, all right. And then when the pandemic hit and I got laid off, I was like, maybe I can turn this into an actual business. So that was only two and a half years ago, and now we’re doing seven figures. So that’s been amazing. It’s been an amazing experience.
Bradley Sutton:
That is absolutely awesome. Very inspiring. Like, you don’t have to worry about things getting stuck in customs and new import taxes. Cause because you’re making the stuff in-house, huh? I love it. I love it. Now Kseniia, like, last year, thinking back to 2022 Prime Day how, how did you, how did your brand do in Prime Day? Like maybe, like if you were to take your daily average before Prime Day, and then what Prime Day actually was, what was the comparison?
Kseniia:
It was about 5x the normal daily revenue, I would say.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow, that’s pretty impressive. Would you say that was successful or you think you could have even done better, or what?
Kseniia:
Well, it was the first Prime Day with that brand, so I think, yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I’d say that that’s pretty impressive, you know 5x. So, so those of, again, going back to all the 50% of the people on this call who said this might be their first Prime Day we’re not trying to say, Hey, anything less than 5x is gonna be a failure, but just to show you the potential of what could happen on, on a, on a Prime Day for you. What about let’s just go reverse circle here. Back to Mike, what about you? What was your Prime Day how was it leading up, and then what did Prime Day end up being for you?
Mike:
I would say last Prime Day, I would’ve been happy with even two x, but we were actually down 20% based off of an average day, and we realized that we did everything right except for not making the right deal. We were only 10% off, and that was our offer. We had all our PPCs and campaigns and everything wasn’t place, but our deal was only 10% off, and our competitors were 40% off, and it was our first one. So the learning experience, and we’re like, your deal is only as good as your actual deal. So that’s what we learned. So this year we’ll be 40% off to compete with everyone else, and I think it’s gonna be good.
Bradley Sutton:
There you go, guys. Like, like I said you guys know how we do it on the podcast too. We keep it real. It’s not just all rainbows and unicorns here. So we got, somebody said that she was 5X up, and then we have Mike who was actually down. So again, that could happen. And so what’s important though is, is Mike didn’t just give up and say, all right, I’m done with Amazon. I had a disastrous Prime Day. He clearly was able to do the research and see why, and determine why he was down. And now he, he’s pretty much ready to go for this year. What about you guys? Nate, how was your Prime Day compared to the days leading up?
Nate:
Yeah, it was pretty good. Our lead up time, the lead out time versus Prime Day, we saw about a 3000% or 30x on Prime Day itself.
Bradley Sutton:
Guys, you see, we just got nonstop things where you must be thinking Nate’s glitch in here, but that was not a glitch. He literally said 30. But anyways he said 3-0 guys 30 times that I just can’t even wrap my head around that. So like, what was the one thing that, like, why, like was it your deals or does your competitors not know how to do Prime Day? Or how in the world can a brand who’s already big go 30x on Prime Day?
Nate:
Yeah, so I mean, there’s a number of different factors that, that play into it, right? Obviously. we have a relatively high organic search ranking. So because of the product, because of the fan base that we already have it’s a product that people are looking for. On top of that, we give the second best deal of the year on Prime Day versus Black Friday. And so major discounts and then just a really good PR campaign off Amazon just to make sure that the word gets out and it’s an opportunity to buy some of our most popular products. On top of that, I have a really robust advertising strategy.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Now what about you, Mike? You talked a little bit about what didn’t work. Did was there anything, was it only the deals or did you kind of, like in retrospect say you want to do something different on the advertising side at all, or inventory side, was there anything else, or pretty much just that deal is, is gonna make the difference for you this year?
Mike:
Yeah, I think it was really the deal. Like if its only like, really, we were next to all these ads that were like 40%, 50%, 60% off, and ours was 10. Like, honestly, like no one was gonna buy ours if they’re looking for a deal. So I feel like that really killed it from the start. It was like a non-starter, basically. Yeah. so this year that’s what we’ve learned from. And there’s been other times that like Mother’s Day and Q4 is our best times, and we’re like, what can we take away from those really hot times for us and apply it to Prime Day? So that’s kind of what we’re using. And kind of like what you mentioned in your presentation about identifying those keywords historically that were good and using for Prime Day.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. What about you Kseniia? Like, like what, what do you think was some of the biggest factors in, in the, you being able to get up to 5x?
Kseniia:
So I’m in a very small niche, so what worked for me is I had about 20% off coupon. And I would say probably two weeks before the Prime Day I was trying to rank on the maximum amount of keywords. So on the Prime Day I can utilize the organic ranking and not overspend on PPC because everybody knows that the bids are much more expensive on the Prime Day itself. So that worked for me.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Now going back to Nate, you guys use, that’s why I’m worried. My, my Adtomic, this is actually not Adtomic. This looks like the Adtomic, this is actually a minor league baseball team from Albuquerque, but it looks like I really close to our Adtomic logo. So I decide to wear this hat, but how are you guys, Nate, there at Solo Stove leveraging Adtomic for advertising just in general, and then what are you gonna be doing in it for Prime Day prep?
Nate:
Yeah, so in general, we leverage Adtomic quite a bit for search term analysis monitoring our ranking for our core keywords and then identifying top performing campaign strategies in the market there. In addition to how we’re gonna be preparing for it for Prime Day the big piece this year is gonna be making sure that we have budget rules in place so that we have healthy budgets, we’re not running out of anything just because we want to make sure that we’re taking advantage of every piece of traffic possible during the day.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. And Mike, you also use Adtomic. What have you been using it for lately and what’s your plans for Prime Day?
Mike:
I think my two most useful uses are automating keywords, like identifying keywords. And also the big one for us is adjusting campaign budgets. We have over a thousand live campaigns and I’m the only one that manages it. So with Adtomic, I’m able to semi-automate that to keep our a cost around 20%. Without that, I was spending like 15-20 hours a week doing it manually, which is insane.
Bradley Sutton:
You yourself were, you were the one in charge at for ppc? Oh, my. That when it becomes more real for sure.
Mike:
So that was the game changer for me after I discovered I had to use that, I was like wow. So that was huge for me, so.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Alright, so that’s cool. We got a seven figure seller, we got a nine figure seller using Adtomic and, and, and we’ve got smaller and bigger and in the middle sellers too, using Adtomic myself. You use Adtomic. I’m only a six figure seller these days because I’ve been letting some of my accounts slip. People aren’t as interested in coffin shelves, I guess, as, as before, but I digress. What about what what about you Kseniia, what is your plan for advertising and promotion this year? Now that you had a successful Prime Day last year, you kind of know what worked and didn’t work. What’s your game plan for this year for either PPC or, or sales or coupons, stuff like that?
Kseniia:
Well, I think I’m gonna do the same thing as I did last year because it worked. And, but in addition to that, I’m also updating the images and A+ Content, so I’m making sure that listing actually converts the most that I can get.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent, excellent. Do you have premium A+ content yet, or do you just have the regular A plus content? Yes,
Kseniia:
That’s another thing I’m working on right now.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Well, what’s yours, like, are you gonna do video at all or just like have–
Kseniia:
Already have videos? Yes, I have videos for each of my ASINs. I have videos, but yes, I just got access to the Premium A+, but that’s what I’m working on right now.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome. Nate, what’s your, what’s your game plan this year? I mean, a huge brand like you, like we could just do a whole show probably on it, but, but gimme some, some highlights of, of what you think is really gonna pay dividends for you this year for Prime Day.
Nate:
So again, around ads, we’re looking at the historics of last year and just making sure that we’re identifying the keywords that worked well. We’re also gonna be adding more prime specific campaigns related to deals, clearance sale basically things that historically people have searched for on Prime Day. This like, just like you showed earlier
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent. Excellent. Mike, same question for you. Game plan.
Mike:
So like I said, I’m gonna be competitive with my actual discounts and lightning deals and deal of the day. And I think in addition to that, like identifying the keywords that performed last, last year and yeah, just putting those all into action and increasing our ads spend about 10% over an average day.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Excellent. Excellent. All right, so this is some, some, some strong game plans here now. So my last question Ksenia knows all about at the very end of, of, of podcasts, I ask for a 30-second or 60-second tip. So do you have any general tip or 30-second tip, or take all the time you need Ksenia what’s your strategy that you can leave with or the audience with for could be about Prime Day. Could be about advertising general, anything you want.
Kseniia:
Well, everybody kept talking today about the competitive price and the PPC, but I would also add to just pay attention to optimizing the listing in terms of a plus video and images. So making sure you will take the maximum advantage of the Prime Day traffic, so you’re listing converts I would like to add that.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Cool. Excellent. All right, Nate, what’s your what’s your tip of the day?
Nate:
Yeah I’ve worked with dozens of very large brands and, and smaller brands over the years with, with Prime Day and, and Amazon in general. And Prime Day is a very special day. You’re not gonna get traffic like Prime Day, pretty much any other day of the year outside of maybe Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And so my tip is always obviously do what’s best for your business, but do as good of a deal as you can to separate yourself from your competition. And then take advantage of the three pieces that Amazon uses that Brett announced earlier. Like posts, Amazon Live feeds, things like that. Do everything that you can to utilize every tool to your power to capitalize on the traffic in that day.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now no pressure, but I save the best for last here to, to Mike because I, I pretty much am gonna come, go on record and guarantee that of these three, the one who’s going to do the best on Prime Day compared to Prime Day last year is gonna be Mike. Okay. Because Kseniaa was already at 5x I don’t know how you can improve 30x, but negative 20% were, you’re gonna be the winner this time, Mike, because you’re gonna turn that around today.
Mike:
I don’t know until we gotta that last part.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, Mike. So what’s your strategy for the winner of the best, most improved player on Prime Day? What’s his strategy?
Mike:
My strategy is well, I guess, and advice is to apply for those lightning deals, deal of the day as soon as you can. Like I did it like three months ago. I think it’s too late to do it now. And once it’s accepted, if you have an account manager at Amazon to get it pitched, to be promoted on like a feature deal on Amazon, I think that would be huge. And if you’re gonna do Prime Day to make the most of it and go in, go all in and do every possible program an offer they have.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. when you say rep, are, do you have like a SaaS core rep or which kind of account manager do you have?
Mike:
Yes. I have three SaaS, launchpad and Handmade. So pretty much anything we qualify for, we’re doing it
Bradley Sutton:
I love it. I love it. All right, cool. All right guys. So you know, we can maybe look for Mike’s products and, and Nate’s products. Check out their Prime Day deals. We already know that they’re gonna be doing some discounts on there. Look out for a 30 or 40% discount, I guess, on mics if you want, if you want some nice smelling candles that are you made in the USA. And then if you need some, some, some stoves for grilling this summer or some grills. I can’t, I was about to say some grills for Sting. No, that, that’s my dyslexia there. But anyways buy some Solo Stove too, and you get some American Express points to add it. But Kseniaa and Nate and Mike, thank you so much for coming on here and, and sharing your knowledge. I love bringing just re regular Amazon sales. You guys are not here to sell anything. You have no agenda. You’re very generous for coming on here and spending your time and sharing your secrets, your wins and losses and so we are very appreciative of that. And thank you guys, and wish you the best success for Prime Day.
In this jam-packed episode, we cover all the latest news in the E-commerce space like the return of Amazon Seller Fulfilled Prime, the difference between indexing and ranking, and more!
Join us as we catch up with Jana Krekic, renowned expert in international market expansion, as she shares her latest tips and best practices. In this power-packed episode, Jana discusses the growing relevance of AI in our industry and addresses concerns about its potential threats. She delves into the challenges faced by AI tools when it comes to translating texts and emphasizes the enduring importance of the human touch. Jana emphasizes the crucial role of translations when selling to foreign marketplaces and highlights the significance of translating your main image. Stay ahead of the curve as Jana reveals the trending international Amazon marketplaces and prepare to be intrigued as she unveils her groundbreaking new service, AMOR. Don’t miss this insightful SSP episode that will revolutionize your approach to global expansion!
In episode 463 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jana discuss:
- 01:55 – Catching Up With Jana Krekic
- 03:10 – Is AI A Threat To Jana’s Business?
- 04:41 – The Problems Of AI Tools With Translating Texts
- 05:29 – “The Human Touch Is Still Important”
- 08:24 – You Need Translations When Selling To Foreign Marketplaces
- 09:41 – Translating Your Main Image Is Important!
- 12:14 – Trending International Amazon Marketplaces Right Now
- 14:43 – Difference Between EU Sellers And US Sellers
- 18:46– Talking About Jana’s New Service – AMOR
- 24:53 – Having Your Own Website/Domain And Benefits Of SEO
- 27:35 – Optimize Your Titles For Amazon Mobile
- 29:37 – Jana’s Healthy Habits And Habits Outside The Grind
- 30:10 – Include Turkish Keywords In Your Listing’s Backend
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we talked to the foremost expert in the entire world in international marketplaces, and she’s gonna give us all the latest on what’s the best practices for expanding outside of our home marketplace. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you wanna see how your listing or maybe competitor’s listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you wanna compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other. Maybe you wanna see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings. You can do that and more with the Helium 10 Tool Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And going to the other side of the world today we’ve got Jana back with us. Are you in Serbia right now? Home and Serbia right now?
Jana:
Yes. I’m home in Beltway and Serbia. That’s right.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent, excellent. Now guys, we’re not gonna go too much into her backstory. I got some notes here from Mhel, our podcast coordinator who looked up when she’s been on the podcast before. So, like her origin story, first time she was ever on the podcast, if you wanted to look it up, go to episode 99. And then she was back again in 229, and then she kind of had like a, a preview episode that she did with her husband Lazar last year you know, before Sell and Scale Summit, and that was 356. But, but now she’s, she’s back here by herself. So kind of like the third time really, the other one kind of didn’t count, but back up for the third time. Jana, how’s, how’s it been going? How’s 2023 been for you so far?
Jana:
2023 has been actually pretty, pretty good. I would say 2022 was not the best year, honestly. And I think a lot of sellers and service providers have been affected by various issues we’ve had the last year. But I kind of feel like this year, like everything is kinda going back to normal at least when it comes to sellers and service providers and software tools and all that. I think it’s been overall a very good year for us.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, lemme ask you just right off the bat here you were on the show last year, but AI wasn’t even a thing last year. I think the, for, for the average person who might be just watching on the sidelines, they might think agencies like yourself translation very human based agency. Like, oh man people like YLT must be scared they’re gonna be irrelevant. Yeah. Because now we can get just AI to do whatever these agencies and listing optimization places and translation places did. But is that the case? Are you, are you having to fire 90% of your staff because now you are irrelevant in 2023? Or what’s the real situation?
Jana:
Well, I mean, I had to disappoint everyone, including Kevin King who approached me at one of the parties in Vegas who was like, Jana, are you, like, are you guys done? And I’m like, well, that’s a great conversation starter, Kevin. So yeah we’re definitely not done. And actually, like, we’ve been working with very big enterprises this year, including Nestle and a lot of their supplement brands like Vital Proteins and Solar Vitamins, Crocs national Geographics. We’ve been just like working with a lot of the very big brands. We kinda focus more on enterprises now. And what we’ve seen is that they still trust us, but I’ve actually, cause I’m really of course interested in that, and that is definitely going to affect the future and also like what we are doing.
Jana:
But just not as of like right now. And five months ago I’ve tested a couple of best Amazon list INTEGRION tools. And at that time, I tested Copy Smith what was it? Percy Copy Monkey Jasper and Power Listing. And none of these tools were great for translation. They were okay when it comes to like the listing creation because all these tools, like all the AI tools are now created to create something outta nothing. And I think they’re great, like for them to get like a topic. And then they have like the whole storytelling is like all up to them, but it comes to translations. The problem was that if I’ve if you were to give the text, like, let’s say not do like a product listing with a title and the bullet and so on, the AI tool would only take certain portions of text and then translate it as it wants and create something completely different that was not in the original listing because this is how AI was programmed to think outside the box and to create completely new content and not to focus and improve the already existing one and to localize it not even like, use the keywords and other things.
Jana:
So I would say that I think the developers are definitely focused on creating something outta nothing and not just like focusing on doing the content improving it, localizing and putting keywords in it. I don’t think they’ve focused on that yet. So that’s why I think you still have like the like the human touch is still very important. And when it comes to translations, it’s still how it was. I mean, you can use Google Translate or you can use gt, but you’re gonna get like a mediocre translation with no localization and no keywords at all. Sometimes, like if you even like asking like, could you use the keywords like from Google, like they would use it, like something that you would get from Google AdWords or like Google Trends, and this is how they would embed them, but this would not be anything that’s like kind of Amazon friendly.
Jana:
And from this point, like us using AI tools would not help us because if we were to use it, we would have to dedicate twice as much time to fix it and to make it like an Amazon style according to that Amazon style guidance, then to create something that would work. So for now we haven’t found something that would help us. Of course, I would wanna integrate as soon as there’s something out there that will make our lives easier and will speed up our work. But for now, AI tools are not focused that much on the translations. I think they’re more into copywriting and just as I said, like doing like articles, PDFs, doing your slides doing bunch of other amazing things. I’m a big fan of ai. I use a lot of prompts and to help myself on like a daily basis and also like create pictures and stuff like that. But when it comes to translation, I would say that it’s still not dead advanced or advanced at all.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now you know, I think you’ve been on here a while. People understand that you do deal with translations, but I think the tendency might be that people think, Hey, yeah what I would need a translation company for and rightfully so, is to, to make my listing, like, Hey, I’m selling in Amazon, Germany, and now I want to go to Amazon USA need to make it in English. And we shouldn’t just use Google Translate, but I was looking at your website today and it’s kind of like, you don’t really realize nowadays how much different things you need translation for. So not only is there the listing, but there’s a plus content, and then there’s the ads like it’s not gone are the days where it’s just, Hey, let’s throw in our you know, just a PPC or targeted keyword and target a product.
Bradley Sutton:
But you’ve got copy that you have to do, like on your sponsored display ads and your sponsored brand ads and your sponsored video ads. You’ve got your brand store, your packaging, chat bots, if you use it follow up emails your website. And I’m, I’m looking at all this stuff. I’m like, oh my goodness. Yeah, there’s like, there’s like a really a lot more involved nowadays when you want to sell in another foreign language marketplace. Which of these is the second most common then when you just say as a the second and third most common after just like, Hey, let, let’s get our listing up on another platform.
Jana:
Yeah. Well, I would say like, when it comes to content, definitely, like the title Bullets A+ Content, it’s the most important one because this is like your content, it represents brand, your products and so on. But main images now that could be localized according to the country you’re selling are very much important. And especially now, like if you go to Amazon, you’ll see that the title is moved to the left. So like they cannot emphasize even more on the main images. And a lot of times these images are left in English and they’re not translated to any other language, which is a very big mistake. Because like we had also like a really great case study where we could trace and follow like the changes that made like big impact, just like putting German language on main images really made a big difference.
Jana:
I think they had 60% increase in conversion and I think like 65% or 70% increase in profit. So that, that was really, really impressive. And they’re like a bunch of other brands that can tell you that, that actually when they change the language or the main image that they kinda like spike the conversions even, even more because I think that a lot of people still don’t speak English. And you know, like the Harvard Business Review says that only 50% of people speak English. So you’re basically targeting every other consumer instead of like every single consumer out there. And just like those main images are very important because sometimes people will not even go through listings if they don’t understand what’s on the main images. If you’re selling beauty products or supplements and people are like, not sure about these ingredients, oh, there’s a grammar error.
Jana:
Well, I’m better not like drink this collagen, I maybe like take another one. Cause I’m not sure if they’re doing a good job. And people will judge your listing, especially in Germany. They’ll judge your listing, I’m sorry, they’ll judge your product according to your listing. And also they had like a brand, it had like fantastic content keywords. And then fifth bullet they said, we’re offering German support 24/7, 365 days a week German support, blah, blah, blah. Local like speakers. And that fifth bullet was full of grammar errors. And then people would be very suspicious about if you are telling the truth in the rest of your listing. And if you are legit, as you say, and also like from all of the international marketplaces, Germany still is the marketplace that gives out the most refund. So you really, really have to be careful about the content and about what you say and how you present your brand and your product, because Germans are very picky. And then when they see something is weird, they might move on to the next listing. You know, that’s something that I’ve noticed. And that happens quite a lot.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. Now, just in, in general you, you have probably the most experience than anybody in the world as far as different marketplaces and every time I’ve, I’ve had you on this show, I’ll ask you, Hey, what are the, the newer ones or what are the ones you think people are sleeping on? And you’ve talked about Amazon, Japan, and then there’s a couple European marketplaces that before they even launched people were already, you know really trying to hit you up for translation. So you, that you knew there was a lot of demand now we’re in the middle of 2023. There hasn’t been too many in the last year that, that Amazon has opened, but what about just either Amazon marketplaces or other marketplaces.
Bradley Sutton:
What’s trendy now outside of the normal USA, Japan, Germany, you know marketplaces. What are having some meteoric is that, wait, how do, how do you, what’s the word I’m looking for? Meteoric. Is that a word? It goes like a meteor. I don’t know what you said. Meteoric. I, I need translation for English cuz my English is isn’t is not great, here’s why it was good to have a translator. But what are having some like really big time rises in the marketplace world these days?
Jana:
The Meteoric rise?
Bradley Sutton:
Meteoric there. Thank you for help with my English.
Jana:
I think I think a lot of people have unfortunately been disappointed with the two new West marketplaces, Amazon, Poland, and Sweden. And honestly, like when people ask me, Jana like, what should we do next? Should we do Polish? Should we like Sweden? What should we do? I mean, yes, you can like do translations for those marketplaces, but like, do you really wanna spend your money like running PPC ads that are not bringing any sales? So I would say at this point, like to forget about Amazon Poland in Sweden, because Amazon has not been pushing them a lot. They haven’t focused on these marketplaces enough. Like Amazon Netherlands is a small one, but it’s doing better now, much better than two years ago when I think I last talked about it because they’ve been like focused on it. They wanted to push out bull.com being their main competitor at the time.
Jana:
But now what we’ve seen is that a lot of sellers that did translations, they’re now choosing allegro.pl instead of Amazon in Poland. Because Allegro is bringing them some results, Amazon Poland isn’t. I’m still expecting really good results from that marketplace. I just don’t know when is it gonna be the time that Amazon is gonna say like, okay, like now we’re gonna focus on this one. We’re gonna push this marketplace and we’re gonna like, you know make people earn money on it because that’s why people are there. But I would say that Poland and Sweden are definitely out for me if you ask me like where to sell in Europe, but what’s been very interesting is the Italian marketplace. And then if you like go through like a Bloomberg reports and all the other business reports, you’ll see that e-commerce has skyrocketed during last year and this year as well.
Jana:
Now Italy is also like a very small marketplace, but people seeing amazing results with selling in Italy. And I think that a lot to do with this was Covid and just like the shopping habits that obviously permanently changed in Italy that were not that big of like e-commerce shoppers, but now they ob obviously are. So that’s why we’ve seen like a really, really insane growth in Italy and a lot of sellers and brands wanting to go there and like try to like see how the products are gonna do. So I’ve seen Italy being very really successful, which really surprised me. I was not expecting that at all.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I mean that’s one of the, the OG European marketplaces
Jana:
Like open the shadow on like all of the other. I would say like of course UK, Germany, Spain, France, but Italy is like, nah. Like if you have something that you think is gonna go big in Italy or just like, like the Italian marketplace, then go for it. But apart from that, I would not ever get my hopes up, like on what if it was like selling something in Italy, honestly. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Now you have more interactions with European sellers than me, but I’ve been trying to interact more with, with sellers from Europe. And one thing I’ve noticed, which is kind of goes against maybe a stereotype that I had was I thought that, hey, all the European sellers, they just go ahead and, and open up in all marketplaces. And that’s not the case at least in my experience, like there’s like one like, yeah, I sell in the UK and that’s it or I sell in Germany, or maybe they sell in two marketplaces. Is that kinda like what you see too, where it’s not just, oh yeah, once we sell in Europe, we’re just gonna go ahead and open it up in all whatever, eight marketplaces or whatever it is now?
Jana:
No, you’re absolutely right. That is absolutely not the case. And one would think that, oh, since you’re in Europe, why not? Why not do all like some marketplaces? But a lot of European sellers are actually focused only on the bigger ones like the UK, Germany, France, and then they would sell in the US and then they would sell maybe in Mexico. But you know, like they would not sell on all European marketplaces. I would say that they will almost, in 90% of the cases they would sell in e the US and they would sell like on bigger marketplaces in Europe, but not on all of them for sure. And what is very also typical is that they would not only sell on Amazon, they would sell on in France, like in see discount, or they would sell, like on land of, they sell fashion, they would just like sell on all the different, like marketplaces.
Jana:
They are available in Europe in the countries that they wanna sell in, but they would definitely not expand to all of the Amazon global marketplaces. So that’s what we’ve seen that’s quite, quite often, but what I’ve seen is that US sellers are like, okay, let’s try two marketplaces in Europe and if it’s working, let’s go and do all of them. This is what I’ve seen happen. So like the majority would be like, try out one or two marketplaces and if it works, let’s just, let’s just like spread ourselves like everywhere. But Europeans are kind of more, I don’t know, like they’re more careful with that. They just don’t go like you know, like all in with their expansion, their product. But now I think it’s becoming easier for let’s say UK sellers to sell in Europe and also to get the products out to Europe via Netherlands because like if you were to register the number that has to do with like import export in, in the Netherlands, then you would not need to register it anywhere else and you could distribute all of your products across the whole Europe.
Jana:
And I think not a lot of people and sellers know this, but basically you can get everything done in the Netherlands and ship the products also like via Netherlands to Germany, which was quite known back from last year. But what people dunno is like that the import expert issues could be all done in the Netherlands for like twice less time than you would get, like you would need if you were to do this in Germany or in other countries. And you can just like ship the product everywhere in Europe. That was very helpful when I talked with some of the UK sellers. We had like a small mastermind when I was in London. So that’s what, this was what some people were using. And this kind of speed up the process when it comes to selling from uk to Europe, which I found very helpful.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now is this like when you’re trying to help sellers understand where there might be opportunity, is this kind of tie, does this kind of tie in with you had a new service and I like, I like the, the name of it. It was AMOR was the name love in Spanish, but that’s obviously not it’s, you’re not giving love workshops, even though of course you, you, you and your husband are the, the Amazon couple the famous Amazon couple who got married from the industry. But what does AMOR stand for?
Jana:
So AMOR, it means basically spreading the love internationally cross border for your product. So basically a more is an acronym and stands for Amazon Marketplace Opportunity Report. That’s what stands for. And I thought it was quite appropriate to have the little AMOR with his like bow and arrow and spreading love and shooting those arrows across Europe and other global marketplaces. I came to the idea, like to just kind start the service because I’ve got like so many questions about like, where should I sell next? Like what’s the next big thing for me? And then I would always answer like, well it is a million dollar question. And then I was like, well, what if I can help them? Like I can’t answer it, but what if like, we can kind of help them with some of the things that we are really good at.
Jana:
And that is like content and keywords, a little bit of the market research and a little bit like asking the audience what audience feels. And I just think that a lot of people just forget about like you know if you do everything right, if you do the due diligence the way you’re supposed to, one important factor is will people buy it? Will people like it? Cause we’ve had a seller that was selling a product and he does everything. Well, the, the pictures like everything was just great, but the audience just just didn’t like it. So I went to my team and to my German team and asked them like, look, so this seller hasn’t had any success, like zero. I dunno why, like, maybe you, you can tell me something. You guys are all Germans. And then all of them told me like, we would never buy this product.
Jana:
It’s very not German. I’m like, really? And all 14 of them said the same thing. And I was like, huh, how interesting. And who knows how many more products would be like that. And they’re, they’re not gonna be successful because the audience doesn’t think it’s interesting or a good fit. And I also don’t think that selling internationally is for everyone. I don’t think all brands should do it just because you saw that your competitor is doing and Amazon tells you to do it, and you wanna kinda like you wanna maximize a profit, you wanna exit your brand. But I don’t think it’s a good idea for everyone, honestly. I mean, this goes like you know, against what we do, but I’d rather be fully transparent, like as you said, like this is a no BS podcast and I just think that sometimes it’s not a good idea for you to try and sell in Germany or UK or Mexico just because you’re gonna have not, you’re not gonna have a good roi or sometimes things will not go as you planned.
Jana:
And all this to say that brands do not do any due diligence, like at all. They’re just like, oh, well there’s a lot of sellers and a lot of buyers in this like, particular marketplace, let’s do it. And they never do any due diligence. And that is most likely because their team does not speak the target language. Then they use Google Translate to find keywords and, and so on. It doesn’t really end well. And like just by using, let’s say Helium 10 Black Box, like they can find and see the revenue of the competitors. They can see, like, they can compare the percentage of what the competitors are making, what the target place versus what they’re they’re making on their home marketplace. And then see if it pays off. Also like sometimes the pricing is higher in Germany than it is in the us but this is all that can be compared.
Jana:
And you can do it on your own, but out of certain reasons. Like brands just don’t do it. But there are like a lot of tools, like as I mentioned, like an helium can that that can help you with the due diligence for for your product. And just like having the product discovery also, like also in so essentially you have the, the, the product opportunity, which also shows like the percentage of like how much opportunity your product has. So like all of these can like become like one big all these are the basic pieces of the puzzle you cannot put together and then figure out like, oh, okay, so I should do it or I shouldn’t do it. Also, like if you don’t wanna wanna do polls, you can go to like Facebook aspect groups and just ask people like, Hey, would you buy this?
Jana:
Or like for instance, like in order to get more people, you can just ask them. You can just ask them like, would you or somebody you know buy this? Because maybe they would not personally buy it. Cuz they’re not into like, I dunno, skiing or snowboard equipment, but maybe like their cousins or their best friends or their coworkers are like real like snowboard junkies and they would love to have this product. So you kind get ask access to more people than, I don’t know, like 100 that this group has. So there are like so many different ways how to get the idea, data, numbers, comparisons, competitors and see how they’re all doing before decide to expand. Because honestly it costs a lot of money and a lot of your time. And especially if you have like a goal saying like, I wanna exit my brand in 12 months like you really kinda wanna focus on what’s important for your brand. Brand.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Yeah. Alright, good to know. Yeah, I think people nowadays definitely due to the economy inflation in many countries and competition, people are more conscious about making their money count and having the best TOI. And sometimes it’s not just, Hey, let me just go ahead and sell in every marketplace that I can because it takes an investment. You gotta, you gotta buy more inventory, you gotta pay companies like yourself to, to translate their, their, their listings. You gotta run customer service in different languages and potentially do different packaging and it’s not, it’s not cheap to be in all these different, different marketplaces.
Jana:
One thing I really wanted to say, like a, it’s not a, a marketplace, but you should definitely have your own website. Like you should sell on the website as well, like outside of Amazon. And also like, there are like so many ways how you can how you can scale your website also with help of SEO. SEO is my bread and butter obviously, but I’ve been in e-commerce for about 15 years and I know a bunch of like different things. But driving traffic to your website, like your Shopify website should be very, very important to you. But there are so many cool ways, I’m just gonna mention one and I’m gonna mention, and it’s called Leveraging old expired domains. How you can actually like purchase an old expired domain and all the traffic that this domain had and put all of the content that was on the website to backend WordPress content of your website.
Jana:
And you’re gonna have bunch of traffic that this previous owner paid bunch of money for and you’ll be able to, to like drive certain audience to your, to your website. Of course it has to be something that is pretty similar with your brand or in the same niche. So you don’t buy, I dunno, like a politicians web domain and then make it for your pet brand. But there were like a bunch of examples like that politician, British politician called Nigel Farage. He was the head of the Parliament Union and the Brexit movement and all that. And he stupidly let his name domain drop, his team just forgot about it. And then there was someone who found out about it. There’s a website called spaz.io where you can see the domain names expiring we’re about to expire and somebody clicked renew.
Jana:
And externally it was an SEO guy. And he then later published an article in newspaper saying what he did, and he thanked him for all the back clicks, which include backlinks from BBC, YouTube, Daily Telegraph. And these are some domains that you cannot buy with money. You know, like there’s a certain limit to all that. So I’m just saying that there are like so many cool things that you could do with your workshop, so you can also leverage it that way. And there’re just like bunch of other things how you can manipulate. It’s blackheads just like taking advantage of something people dunno about. So I also wanted to you, I think having your web shop and focusing on it is really important. And I know that Amazon sellers really don’t know a lot about SEO and Google, and this is something that can drive a lot of traffic to you and you don’t have to pay fortune to run advertising on Google for that either.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Good stuff. Good stuff. Now you’ve been giving us lots of different strategies, but instead of just one 30-second tip, let’s just take the last five, 10 minutes here and talk about just specific strategies, you know could be with seo, could be with translation, could be with watching great TV shows like Breaking Bad
Jana:
The best TV show ever.
Bradley Sutton:
Check on anything. Go ahead. Yeah,
Jana:
Yeah. Also you can brush on your Spanish by watching the show, so it is kind useful. Very,
Bradley Sutton:
Very true.
Jana:
It’s basically bilingual show, so I support that. But when it comes to translations, but we know this is basically maximizing on the keywords in the first 60 characters of your title. A lot of people forget about the mobile version of the website on Amazon which only shows first 60 characters. And a lot of people go crazy and wild with the keywords, like at the end of the title, just don’t put enough of the most important ones in the first part of the title. And I say like, you should definitely do that, if not because of like the mobile version. Cause a lot of people also will purchase products on their phones and people forget about it. They tend to forget a lot. Especially if you have like a really, really long brand name, then you couldn’t really wanna think about if you’re gonna like play with it or not.
Jana:
There was the one brand that we did, it was eye patches and then it had like the wordplay eye, like your eyeball, like Eye love it cause it’s an eye patch. And that literally took the whole first 60 characters of their title. And in the mobile version, it didn’t show any of the keywords. So that had to be completely redundant. We completely dropped the, I love it because also like in German and for Germans, it did not sit well, like too much English never work, works amazingly well for the German audience. So that is my tip when it comes to the title. And just like the mobile versions for Amazon. Cause brands really do not think about it a lot.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. All right. Interesting. Interesting. So before we get to your next Amazon tip, what are your health and wellness tips? You know, like what do you do? Like, I would like to think that I know because I watch your Instagram, but you, like me, travel is one of your like, hobbies of when you need to get away from the business. You know I was watching your guys’ Instagram story of like, Hey, I was just there. Hey, I was just there. Like, like it, it was fun watching you, your your guys’ long trip in Japan, but travel, what else do you and Lazar do to kind of like, when you need to get away from the, the regular day-to-day work?
Jana:
Well, I just really like to go to the spa. I think that that is like something I really care about a lot. I think going to the spot, just like going to the pool, doing the infrared saunas just relaxing like a deep relaxation and basically without listening to any podcast, just like being like sitting in silence really, really helps me to unwind and just get back my energy.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, now back to what one more perhaps e-commerce tip of the week.
Jana:
So like when you do a keyword research in the US and then you get a research full of Mexican keywords because of the Hispanic population, which is normal because there was like a very, very big number of that population in the states. And then of course you’re gonna include some of these keywords in backends and they’re gonna search for your products in Spanish language. And then a lot of people who expand, they don’t think that they’re gonna be that sort of possibilities for other languages as well in let’s say Germany or England or France. But we’ve found out that, for instance, in Germany, there’s a very big population very big Turkish population. And then a lot of times when you have products that have to do anything with food, you’re gonna have a lot of Turkish keywords actually.
Jana:
And a lot of people are searching for those products in Turkish. Because you don’t know this language at all, you would probably think that like the listing results are probably a mistake or there’s like misspelling or like what sort of word is it that is probably Turkish and you also would want to include it in the backends because they have a very big search volume and none of your competitors are ranking for that. We double checked and for a couple of those problems that we’ve done, none of the competitors were using any of those Turkish keywords. And every single keyword had couple of thousands of search volumes. We found out that using Magnet and Cerebro and they all showed the same very big search volume and none of the competitors are using it.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Interesting. Okay, that’s a good one. All right, well Jana, I’ll be seeing you at, at different conferences potentially this summer. It’s always great to link up with you and, and talk about Serbian sports with Lazar too. A lot of course because of the Denver Nuggets is on a lot of people’s mind these days, Thank you so much.
Jana:
They’re winning it. They’re taking it.
Bradley Sutton:
Yep. Thank you so much for coming on and look forward to having you on this show next year for the fourth time. And let’s see of course, that is, if you’re still around, unlike what Kevin King might think.
Jana:
Yeah, I mean hope we’re not done till 2024. We’ll see
Bradley Sutton:
All right, we’ll see you then.
Jana:
Take care. Bye.
In this episode, we welcome back the dynamic duo, Shan Shan Fu and Schrone Hardeman. These two amazing Amazon sellers have been making waves in the industry with their strategies and success. In our exclusive interview, we caught up with Shan Shan and Schrone to find out what they’ve been up to lately. They shared insights into how Schrone keeps his profits steady and how Shan Shan’s brands are performing today. Additionally, they discussed a lot of PPC strategies and tips. Schrone also addressed the common fear of overspending in PPC and shared his best tips for new sellers. Shan Shan highlighted the importance of networking in her business journey and discussed the challenges faced in selling inside women’s clothing categories. The “Tripe-S Crew” is back and ready to inspire and empower sellers once again, so stay tuned for more groundbreaking strategies and achievements from this dynamic duo.
In episode 462 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Schrone, and Shan Shan discuss:
- 01:26 – Let’s Welcome Back The “S Crew”
- 02:14 – What Is Shan Shan & Schrone Up To These Days
- 04:03 – How Schrone Keeps His Profits Steady
- 07:39 – Diving Into The Market Share Inside His Category
- 10:26 – How Shan Shan’s Brands Are Performing Today
- 13:06– There Are Two Types Of Sellers…
- 14:14 – The Amazon PPC Math Technique
- 19:11 – Dividing Your PPC Into Two Cycles
- 25:23 – “My Student Has A Fear Of Overspending in PPC”
- 28:38 – Schrone’s Best Tips For New Sellers
- 30:14 – How Networking Helped Shan Shan’s Business
- 31:25 – Problems In Selling Inside Women’s Categories
- 32:55 – “The Opportunity Is Disguised As A Setback”
- 33:57 – Benefiting From The “Taylor Swift Economy”
- 35:15 – How To Reach Out To Schrone Hardeman
- 35:22 – How To Reach Out To Shan Shan Fu
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today, we’ve got some former guests back on the show to talk PPC strategy and more. Now, both have inspired others on previous episodes with their story of how they became Amazon Sellers. One was a military veteran turned six figure seller, and the other, an immigrant to the United States, who recently has had her clothing line featured along the likes of Louis Vuitton. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you know that Amazon sometimes loses or damages some of your inventory? Usually they reimburse you for this, but sometimes they might miss things. That’s where Refund Genie comes in. What Helium Ten’s Refund Genie does is we go check out your reports and see if Amazon owes you any money, and then we give you the reports that you need to submit to Amazon so that you can get your money back. If you haven’t run this, you can have hundreds, if not thousands of dollars that Amazon might owe you, especially if you’ve never used this before and you sell a lot on Amazon. So, to find out more information, go to h10.me/refundgenie. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.
Bradley Sutton:
We’ve got a couple serious sellers back on the show, and I like to call this show kind of like the, the Triple S show. You know, like at Helium 10, we’ve got tons of, of S’s everywhere. First of all, this is the Serious Sellers podcast. We’ve got the Serious Sellers Club. We had Sell and Scale Summit. You know, to go along with that, we’ve got Sean Chan and Sharan Triple S. I’ll almost start wearing my Triple S sneaker today. I got my s hat, I got, I got the, the s logo here on my jacket. This is actually the logo of the DJ Slushy who makes our opening for the podcast that little song that you guys hear. So we’re just all about the s today. How’s it going? My Triple S crew?
Schrone:
Yeah, it’s great. What’s going on with you, Bradley?
Shan Shan:
Hey, Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m doing just great. Awesome. Now, you’re still in Texas. I see you there on the famous the famous sofa there. Shan Shan, didn’t you move recently? You’re not in California anymore, are you?
Shan Shan:
No, I left San Francisco and now I’m in Miami/New York.
Bradley Sutton:
I think everybody from California is moving to to Florida, and I dunno about New York. I don’t hear about much people moving to New York, but but Florida for sure, Texas, a lot of people are moving to. Whereabouts in New York? I used to live in New York back in the day.
Shan Shan:
Oh. So there’s a thing called Snowbird, where you live in New York in the summer and Miami in the winter. So I don’t have a place place, but I have a sublet at the Upper East Side. So, yeah, just I’m actually hosting an e-commerce dinner tonight at Soho House. So trying to penetrate this e-commerce world in New York, which is quite robust.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool, cool. All right. Now we’re not gonna go too much into everybody’s backs stories. This is actually between them, about the third or fourth time they’ve been on the they’ve been on the podcast now. The last time they were on the podcast, they were actually, you know, they’ve been on the podcast by themselves before, but the last time I had them on together and that was the first time they had even met each other. That was episode 344. So if you guys want to catch up with what they were doing a little over a year ago, then check out episode 344. But I said, Hey, let, let’s bring them back. You know, it’s been a year. Let’s see what exciting things these individuals have been doing. And, and not only do they still sell themselves, but they also, have branched out more and more to, to helping other sellers. And so, like, I like talking to people who are in the industry like that because they, they sometimes you know, come across a lot more things than just if we were working by the by ourselves. So let’s start with Schrone. First of all, how how’s your own business been going the last year? So kind of steady, we down, we up, what’s going on?
Schrone:
Okay. So a revelation came about, you know, after the the Great Depression called Covid, you know, where everybody was quarantined me being in the maternity area and the people having nothing left to do but procreate. So I had a boom during the covid and didn’t realize it was because of Covid. So last year, the last two years I’ve had a drop, but I’ve been steady. And the reason I’ve been steady is because of how I maintain my profit. The way I do profit is I use the previous year’s profit for the current year’s salary. That way I can never go under, you know?
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Schrone:
So for the last two years, I’ve been pretty much steady at a decrease from 2021.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So your profit then is steady, but your revenue is maybe down a little bit you’re saying?
Schrone:
Right. I’ve dropped from about 450,000 a year to about 300,000 a year.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, did you suffer, like on the inventory side, like maybe you didn’t plan for that, or, and thenyou suffered a little bit extra inventory, or, or how did that work out for you?
Schrone:
So, yeah, because I did not recognize it was a boom for me. I did pre over order. So hey, some of the troubles that you gotta overcome is access inventory, and I currently have about 1500 units in my garage next door.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now for you I know you’ve had like different variations of your products. Didn’t you launch like a separate line, or, or is it still pretty much you have one product and just a whole bunch of different variations?
Schrone:
So last year, I launched a premium version of the same product that I have maternity bills. Okay. It’s a little bit more expensive and it gives the, the mom a lot more support. That launch has been slow, but it has not been a failure. So I’m waiting on that to pick up and move with that. But it is a premium version of the same product with more colors and more sciences.
Bradley Sutton:
Have you looked into expanding the brand out or possibly starting another, another brand, or you’re kind of just like happy, happy where you are right now since you are profitable and plug it along?
Schrone:
So the, the purpose for me to start my whole business was to support my family. And by the grace of God, I’m doing that right now. And I this may sound weird to a lot of people, but I do not have high ambitions of becoming rich. Right. I’ll take it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take it. But I don’t have high ambitions of becoming rich. I am very happy that I’m able to take care of my family and that’s where I’m at right now.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Okay. Interesting. Now you know, for your niche, I’m not sure if you’re using like the regular market tracker or not, but like, have you been, been checking, like, are you keeping kind of like your market share, but just, you know, the size of the pie has gone down? Or your slice of the pie gone down in addition to the whole entire pie?
Schrone:
So my, my biggest thing is finding out why. So when I dropped in salary or dropped in revenue, I had to discover the why. And in that process I did find out that the whole category dropped. So it was definitely an economic reset, if you will, instead of me just losing profits. So everybody across the board dropped about 30% down, dropped down about 30%. So as far as ratio of the pie, I still have that being one of the top five sellers in my category. But everybody has dropped.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, sometimes when, when you’ve got mature products, you know, and I say mature, like, like you’ve, you know, you’ve, you’ve been there about three, four years. Now, you know, like if there’s a successful niche out there, a lot of people kind of figure that every single time it’ll just get saturated with sellers from factories, you know, be it, be it from China, be it from India, be it from wherever and you’re not gonna be able to sell anymore at a decent price. And, you know, I’ve actually had a couple of, of smaller niches where we’re just got, you know, to the point where it wasn’t profitable as much. Now, you know, you’re still plugging along, you’ve kept your slice of the pie. So has that not happened, or you haven’t gotten involved in any price wars or how come you are still selling the same product that, that you were, you know, three, four years ago?
Schrone:
Yeah. So that, that was a major concern for concern for me about two years ago. We did have a rush of new sellers, possibly from factory, and they were selling at half the price. And I was thinking like, I have two options. Stay strong with my integrity of the value that I see from my product or succumb to what the category is pushing towards. Well I’m thankful that before that happened, I found my category before that happened and the process, or the time before it happened, I, I gathered six thou almost f almost 6,000 reviews. Which gives me the social proof to keep my prices where they’re at. And I have not raised my prices or lowered them for five years, and I’m still able to sell based off the strength of my brand.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Cool. Now let’s switch to Shan Shan on there. You know, similar to Schrone, you had a product that was kind of boomed also by, by Covid, you know, like masks, I remember way back in the day. But you know, you, you, you, you saw the writing on the wall a long time ago and were already pivoting away. What about you, the la the last, the last couple of years? Like, how, how have your brands been doing lately?
Shan Shan:
Yeah, so the last time I talked to you guys, my face mask sales, which was my first product was tanking. And I had to desperately get a new sustainable product category up there before it totally tanked. And I did it, I tripled sales from my non mask products since last time I saw you guys. But the face mask went to zero. Cause face masks went down, but everything else went up. It’s still, there was an overall increase, but not by a lot. But it showed me that your sales can triple and if it can triple this year, I’m on track to at least double. And then some fun things have been happening. New York Times reached out and asked me to send mys to a Ghana to a fashion shoot in Ghana where I was going to be paired up with like Louis Vuitton and Chanel and all the big brands on their big winter accessories feature. So the, so in it’s hilarious, in the, in the feature says Louis Vuitton dress, $5,000 Chanel sweater, you know, $2,000 and millennials emotion types $15.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s something you’ve always been good at that, you know, for those who don’t know, like two episodes ago when we, we first did her fullback story, that was how I how she got on our radar is I actually saw her on kind of TV as it where it was like CNBC or, or one, one of these shows did a special on her story, and then she had mentioned Helium 10 in there, you know, using Helium 10. And I was like, but you seem to like have this magnetism towards getting featured by, by big media here.
Shan Shan:
Thanks. Yeah, it’s an honor. And and I guess, you know, what I came out of that is, hey, fashion that’s edgy for millennials and Gen Z can be affordable too. So that was fun. And now I live in Miami and New York and trying to build a community with other e-commerce founders in the area as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Now last time you, you were giving us some, some, some cool strategies about how you kind of like do your product validation on Etsy. Are you still doing that where you try and launch first on Etsy and then hit some certain numbers before you go to Amazon? Or are you just doing both simultaneous or what’s your strategy, your marketplace strategy these days?
Shan Shan:
Yes. So I realized that there’s two types of sellers in this world and I’m gonna really simplify it. Their sellers are very conservative and they just expand within their existing successful niche. Just like little variation changes here and there, and it’ll succeed and it’ll make more money, but it’s not gonna make that much more money. Then there’s sellers that go really hard on one product. They launch one product and put ton of ad spend and ton of capital in it, and just like, fingers crossed and succeeds. And sometimes it does, and it catapults. But that, that requires high capital. It’s high risk. So I couldn’t figure out which one I wanted to do. So instead I decided to do both, and I launched simultaneously more women’s clothing, which is arguably one of the toughest categories. And then I also decided very recently to launch in non clothing categories as well. And, and we’ll see how that goes. It hasn’t launched yet. Next time I come back, Bradley, I would love to tell you how that went.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Let’s I know both of you guys have, have a lot of strategy or a lot of, you know, opinions and things behind this next topic, but I wanted to talk a little PPC. So let’s start with Schrone. Now you mentioned something in our group chat you know, kinda like, I guess one of your own terms, but, but it’s something that that could apply, but you said PPC math, you know, so that’s not exactly a common term. You know, that that’s common in the Amazon industry, but, but I kind of like the sound of it because it’s like, all right, good. Well, we’re gonna talk about something some a little bit unique here. So, so what do you define as PPC math Schrone, and how does
Schrone:
That help you? Right. So yeah, that is something that I coined and it’s very, it’s once you know what it is that aha moment, right? Because when I’m in the Helium 10 Facebook groups chatting, and I see people that say, you know, my budget has gone in the first three hours of the day and I got this, that, and the other, they don’t understand why. And they think, and the first thing they say is, competitors are clicking my ads. And that is not always true. You know, I’m not saying it’s completely false, but it’s not always true. And then I say, well, here again, why does that happen? And when I coin PPC math, I, I tend to teach my students that you have to be mindful of how much budget you spend, how much the average click is per keyword or product target that you’re, that you’re targeting, and what is the strength of the search volume for that keyword that you’re looking at, or category that you’re searching in.
Schrone:
And when you put all that together, you can find out exactly what’s gonna happen. So here’s some quick math. I I think I can do it in my head. Let’s say you have a category or a campaign that has one keyword in it that has 30,000 searches a month. Okay? And, okay, stay with me on the math here. Check me on the math. So if I divide that 30,000 by 30 days, that’s 1000 searches per month, I mean, per day, excuse me. Right? The average shopper is gonna shop, and this is a number that I made up around 14, 15 hours a day, somewhere between 7:00 AM and, you know, 9:00 PM and then you got, you know, on the average, right? So if you divide that thousand searches per day by 15 hours, you get, I don’t know, let’s do some outrageous math and say you get a hundred clicks per hour.
Schrone:
So if you got a hundred clicks per hour, and you’re targeting that keyword that produces a hundred clicks per hour, and that keyword is according to Amazon, expensive at $2 a click, that’s not expensive, but you get what I’m saying, right? Yeah. So to to gather all those clicks at the top spot, you would need at least 200 bucks per hour, right? And our budgets are like, you know, for some campaigns, 30 bucks a day, 40 bucks a day, and if you get in the top spots and there’s a hundred people per hour clicking that, if you do the math and the frenzy of it all, you’re going to get clicked out. And that’s just one keyword that you may have in that 15 keyword campaign. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And when people realize that, it’s like, oh, I don’t have enough budget for this $2 average cl keyword that gets a hundred clicks per hour based on the numbers. And that’s where you decide to figure out what keywords you really want and how much you can afford and what to expect from it, especially in your position, because, you know, the first page, the top half gets about 90% of the clicks.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean, so then in that situation, let’s say maybe you can’t afford to keep that budget higher. Do you just go ahead and run out of budget on that at 10:00 AM and, and be cool with that, or, you know, if it’s profitable or, or you try and do something else.
Schrone:
So that’s the thing. If it’s profitable, hell yes. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, it, it, you never quit something that’s profitable.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Just making sure, you know, people do some crazy things out there, <laugh>,
Schrone:
If, if, but you gotta figure out if it’s profitable. If it’s just draining your profits and you know you’re wasting your money, then sure, decrease the bid or x the keyword until you’re able to, to afford it. But if it’s profitable, let’s go forward. Three hours a day.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Shan Shan, let, let’s switch back to you now. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but are, are you not working for a PPC agency now since the last time that we that we talked?
Shan Shan:
I used to so I spent a year working with Trivium. Okay. And I talked to over a hundred Amazon sellers every day about their business. But currently I, I just work on my brand.
Bradley Sutton:
So then I, but I would imagine though, in the year, you know, wor you know, when you’re not just focused on your own brand you, like you said, you’re talking to so many people that your eyes were kind of maybe open to, to a whole bunch of other a whole bunch of other things that, that, you know, were going on in the PPC world. So what about you for the last year, either your own brand or from all these conversations you were having, what, what kind of, you know, insights, new insights did you get into p c or, or unique strategies that, that you’ve got?
Shan Shan:
Yeah, so I hear a lot about people not able to scale. They have their, their PPC is basically just going like this. And one strategy to scale is to divide your PPC into two cycles. So in cycle one, you focus on impressions. That’s where you train Amazon to bring you as much relevant traffic as possible. And a lot of the sellers I talked to would basically have Amazon throttle them by having really low budgets, like $10 per campaign per day. But you shouldn’t do that. Instead, you should have a hundred dollars per campaign per day, not because you’re actually gonna spend a hundred dollars, you’ll manually manage to add, spend yourself or, or somebody else will. But if you put a hundred, Amazon won’t throttle you. They won’t make a judgment and say, oh, this is a small seller, so we’re only gonna give her a tiny pie piece of the pie.
Shan Shan:
So one, teach Amazon not to throttle you and get as much impressions as possible. Then cycle two, you focus on profit, that’s when you cut down on ad spend, remove all the wasted spend and try to get your a cost as low as possible. And when you do that, the benefit is one, you only have one goal, so it’s easier to measure. And two, if you do it successfully, what will happen is it’ll goal like this cycle one, cycle two, cycle one, cycle two, and it go up in an upward trend because it’s not confusing for Amazon. If you try to do profit and impressions at the same time, you’re adding as you’re cutting. It’s confusing for Amazon as opposed to really just helping them help you scale up.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Now that’s you know, that, that’s something that I think, you know, sometimes people are scared and that’s why I ask you know, Schrone about that, because, you know, sometimes it’s, it’s a matter of you, you gotta, you gotta raise the, you gotta have high budgets just as seemingly sometimes, you know, get, get Amazon to move on on some things, but it doesn’t always mean that, that, you know, that’s, that’s what you’re gonna hit. So without hitting the budget, so how else are you, are you controlling your, your spend? Are, are you just talking about like, like do you, what if it does, what if it does start getting a little bit outta control and, and it’s not profitable at the beginning? Like, like how do you draw the line where like, obviously none of us wanna lose money, but, you know, hey, my plan is to do about 50 bucks a day, so I’m gonna put my budget to a hundred.
Bradley Sutton:
And of course, you know, may, maybe it just does, you know, $50 a day and, and I’m, I’m good to go. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve hit my goal. But what if, you know, especially in a newer one where it might get a little bit outta control, you know, like, what, what do you do in order to, to make sure that you stay profitable? Because, you know, you can’t, you can’t really control Amazon all, all too much. They can take your, your, especially if we’re dealing with broad campaigns and, and auto campaigns, you know, they can start getting going wild with you, with your, with your placements
Shan Shan:
A daily attention be on it every single day, which is hard for a lot of people who have second jobs because you’ve got to remove any keyword that hits a certain threshold. And because, you know, at that point, this is not a winning keyword. So, for example, for me it’s $7. $7 if there’s a keyword and it hits $7 worth of clicks and it didn’t get any sales, I kill it forever. It’s gone from all my campaigns. And so just be ruthless, you know, and I found that, you know, it’s fairly consistent when it’s a key word, specific keyword word. Where it gets tough is abroad in the auto campaigns right there, you’re gonna have so many key words that you’re not gonna know. You know exactly how to control it. So in that instance, you know, I just, it’s kind of similar.
Shan Shan:
I just ruthlessly cut broad keywords after certain thresholds. If it doesn’t get enough sales, if I spend $30 on a broad keyword and it doesn’t get any sales, then I kill it for a certain amount of time, say four months. And then I, maybe I’ll bring it back if, if in the past it’s seemed to be a success, cuz it might be a seasonal thing. So you can kind of cycle through. But I wouldn’t keep spending on a broad keyword or phrase or exact that keeps wasting money. I only spend on the ones that are winning. And yeah, you might lose some keywords that would’ve eventually got well, but in my industry, in women’s clothing, I don’t have the luxury of margin.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Cool. Now switching back to Schrone. You know, with the coaching and things that you do, you talked to a, a lot of people, a anybody over the last couple of years like has some other kind of like, inspiring story or like motivates you, you know, like I, I think that that’s what a lot of us definitely thrive off of is, is like hearing other people’s stories. And it’s, sometimes, sometimes it’s more exciting to see somebody you know, thrive, you know, even than your own success. Sometimes any anybody’s stories stick out in the mind or like, somebody started here, now they’re here. Or anything like that.
Schrone:
I have a student who was fear driven and their decisions were based off of how scared they were to make that leap. To make that jump. And one of my hardest things is being a transparent coach that I am is showing them your flaws and as well as your successes, your failures, as well as your successes to see to tell them that it’s gonna be okay if you keep pushing forward and you keep pushing forward smartly. One of the things that we went over was her, her, her, their fear of overspending on PPC. And the way I got her to, well, it’s Ahi, so I’m a, I’m gonna use her. The way I got her to commit to ppc was to give her an understanding of what PPC actually is. Her concept of thinking when she came in is, if I throw money into advertisement, I’m gonna get sales.
Schrone:
Right? And my, I had to break it down to her and I said, that’s not entirely true. Right? The purpose of PPC is exactly in its name, prices per click. The purpose of it is to get you clicks your listing. The purpose of your listing is to convert that viewer into a buyer. So if you’re not, if you’re getting clicks, then your advertisement is working. If you’re not getting sales, then your listing isn’t converting that viewer into a buyer. So when I brought that to her attention, she was getting all the clicks that she wanted, but she wasn’t getting the sales. So now we transition to her listing as to why aren’t, why isn’t your listing converting that viewer into a, a customer? Right? And it’s social proof, and we fixed on that stuff right there, but once she understood that, then she wasn’t afraid to spend money because she now knows that she’s spending money in advertisement to get the clicks to bring people to her listing. Right? If, if the pur, if the sole purpose of advertisement or PPC particularly was to get sales, then you would have a buy now button on the search result page. But we don’t, so the purpose, yeah,
Bradley Sutton:
You never know. Amazon’s been testing so much stuff, you never know what the, that that search results page, oh my goodness, there seems like there’s something new on there every day, but hey day, right? They might’ve just heard you and come up with a new idea there. Hey, I hope so. No, I I’ll follow you, I’ll follow you here.
Schrone:
Yeah. That the faster Right. We can get a viewer to buy, I’m awful. Yeah, right. But once she realized that, then she realized that her money for advertisement had a, a bigger purpose mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and now she can focus her attention on fixing her listing. And sure enough, two months later, she was getting more sales.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now what about just general strategies for yourself, for your students? What are some new unique things that maybe we haven’t talked about on this podcast about, you know, you, you, it could be about PPC since we’ve been talking about PPC. It could be about launch, could be about your image strategy could be about other marketplaces, whatever you wanna talk about Toronto. What, what’s some unique quick hittings tips that you can give our listeners out there?
Schrone:
Oh, so I think the best tip that I can give any seller out there that I’ve given my students is understanding as much as you can about the next step before you take it. That being said, when, when you apply that concept to product research we like to use, I like to use Helium ten’s x-ray tool to get as much information about the category as a whole before deciding to sell in that category. And there’s a lot of different data that you could pull from Helium 10, particularly the x-ray tool that will give you an understanding of how much money that category brings in and how much your slice of the pie is going to potentially become. You know, I work off the law of averages as a st as a, as a, a foundation or baseline for what you could do in there, because I believe everybody’s at least average, right? You can be at least average. And if you can accept the numbers at average, then you can hit that as your standard and then excel beyond that. So my tip to all, all the listeners out there and always my students is learn as much as about learn as much as you can about the next step before you take it. Especially if the next step requires you to spend a lot large sum of money.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Shan Shan, what about you? Si, similar question as far as the first one I just asked Schrone is, is, you know, in dealing with, you know, talking to so many sellers, a a as you, as you have over the last year, any inspiring stories stick out in your in your mind?
Shan Shan:
You know I recently joined a forum called E-Commerce Fuel and I, I’m all about building community. I’ve been hosting dinners in happy hours in San Francisco, Miami, and New York. And through my networking I have really learned a lot of the strategies, the tips that I wouldn’t have learned elsewhere. And I wish I had been more engaged from the beginning. Cause I would’ve saved myself a lot of mistakes. So really my tip is just to get engaged. You know, reach out to me if you wanna join my dinners reach out to me if you’re female and an e-commerce founder, cause it’s an underrepresented group and we’ll help each other get there because you know, Amazon’s always changing, you know, they, they screw me a couple times over the last year, but with some help, you can always get past it.
Bradley Sutton:
I think you had mentioned you had alluded to something that happened to you on, on the negative side in the last year. That’s probably what you dressed alluding to now, but I didn’t get details on it. So what, what was that negative thing that happened to you?
Shan Shan:
Yes. The reason why women’s clothing is one of the worst categories is sizing. And women tend to return way more than men. Men buy something and just like never return it, but women return everything. So 20% is low for return rate, which is astronomical for regular am Amazon product. So if you’re dealing with 20% returns, how do you make profit? Right? and with sizing, I’ve, there was some products where you know, women tried on and it didn’t fit them and they would give it a bad review and complain. And then Amazon saw enough complaints that they just took all my inventory from that number one best seller and moved it to reserved and said, you know what? You have to upload a size chart and and then we’ll release your inventory. One inventory go on is very bar for ranking, right?
Shan Shan:
I know warning about that. And when I upload the size chart immediately, because I, you know, want my product to go back up, it took them over a month, two months for me to move their, the reserved inventory back into standard available inventory. So Amazon loves to throw these curve walls, and what I learned is that I have to diversify. I can’t just have one best seller. I can’t just have one product line, women’s clothing, you know, I need to have other types. So one of my favorite mantras is sometimes a opportunity is disguise as a setback. And that was a setback. I lost a lot of sales from that one main bestseller, probably half the sales from that product. But from that, I was more motivated to launch other products and hopefully double or triple my sales next year. And it wouldn’t have happened if Amazon didn’t screw me a little.
Bradley Sutton:
There you go. Sometimes a a good thing can come out of a negative thing. Now, you know, I was just looking at your, your storefront right now. I see that your, your, your pattern tights I is selling like, I don’t know it looks like, you know, 10, 20, 30 units a day, sometimes even now. How come those took off? Is this the one that a, that that Amazon had had shut down? Or why do you think that this product is doing, you know, better than, than your other product lines
Shan Shan:
Partially due to Taylor Swift. So there’s a thing called Taylor Swift Economy right now. I had one pro, i i, I keep launching products every year. You gotta keep launching products to, to stay on top of it in women’s clothing. And some of the products look similar to what Taylor Swift would wear on in concerts. And Taylor Swift has filled hotels in the cities that she’s been at more so than like, major sports events. She has driven economies, she’s kept people spending like, I think they call a Swift, swift economy or something like that. And yeah, some of my products sales just went up suddenly because, hey, Taylor Swift is promoting it and all the girls want it. So I didn’t even know about that. And that kind of made me realize, you know what, I should really keep an eye on stuff like that, you know? Is there a huge celebrity that’s wearing a certain look? Is there a big cultural event happening where everybody wants this type of design? Because if I had known, I would’ve doubled down on those products. But still I got to ride the wave.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Cool. All right. Now, Schrone, like if people wanna reach out to you find you on the interwebs how can they do that?
Schrone:
amzpowercircle.com, all one word, amzpowercircle.com.
Bradley Sutton:
And Shan Shan, how can people reach out to you on the interwebs?
Shan Shan:
You can add me on LinkedIn Shan Shan Fu or you can email me hello@millennialsshops.com millennial shops with an S at the end. And reach out to me if you want to get some PPC help if you want to join e-commerce field and you want six months free and you’re a female, or if you just wanna connect and come to my dinners.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Well it’s been great reaching out you know, to you guys. I hope I to be able to see you in person, you know, soon again. I think last time I saw you, Schrone, was probably at Sell and Scale. Yep. Last year and Shan Shan, were you at sell scale or when’s the last time I saw you might have been at a Prosper, a previous Prosper show.
Shan Shan:
Prosper. You were dancing to Mark McGrath.
Bradley Sutton:
Ah, yes, yes. I was a Prosper show, I believe. Okay. So hope to reach out to you guys. I’ll be going to New York later on this year, maybe Florida. So I’ll, I’ll see. I’ll see you over there. And Schrone, I know it’s, it’s tough to get you on an airplane sometimes, but, but hopefully I’ll be able to see you soon as well.
Schrone:
Yeah, man. I’m there whenever you need me.
In this episode, we continue our conversation with Norm. He also takes us through his journey as an Amazon Live influencer, revealing strategies for successful influencer collaborations and the key to boosting brand visibility and increased sales. Do you want to be your own brand ambassador? Norm addresses the common challenge of finding the right influencers, highlighting the pitfalls and misconceptions surrounding influencer marketing on Amazon. He also walks us through the process of signing up for the Amazon Live program, ensuring you have all the information you need to get started. Gain a deeper understanding of how influencers can impact your brand and learn best practices for successful collaborations. Also, Norm shares important information about the New FedNow Service Program, discussing its potential impact on online businesses and how sellers can leverage it to their advantage.
In episode 461 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Norm discuss:
- 01:31 – The New FedNow Service Program
- 02:49 – Diving Into Norm’s Influencer Challenge
- 05:23 – Norm’s Amazon Live Page And His Tips
- 11:52 – How To Make Money From Amazon Live Videos
- 15:17 – How To Sign Up For This Program
- 19:01 – Finding Influencers: Many Brands Are Not Doing It Right
- 23:36 – Understand The Process Of Influencers On Amazon
- 26:00 – Norm’s Gift For Our Listeners
- 29:05 – How To Find Norm Farrar In The Interwebs
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today is part two of a two-part episode series where we’re talking to Norm, and he’s got some eye-opening strategies about having to do with being an Amazon influencer, doing Amazon lives, and understanding how the whole system works at a level you’ve never heard before. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think
Bradley Sutton:
Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image, or Amazon changed their shipping dimensions, so they had to pay extra money every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me/alerts. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. What else can you tell us?
Norm:
Another thing, there is a new program that I only became aware of it just recently, and it’s another game changer for e-commerce businesses, and that is the new FedNow, have you heard about this?
Bradley Sutton:
FedNow? No.
Norm:
Check it out.
Bradley Sutton:
Maybe I have, but I just don’t. It’s ring a bell. It’s
Norm:
It’s a platform that the government is implementing in July. They were gonna implement it a little while ago a couple months back, but they decided not to. But this is for money laundering, and now this service is starting in, I think it’s either the beginning or the end of July, and it is gonna change the way that we do business on the internet.
Bradley Sutton:
Is this related to what, you know, Amazon was having everybody re-verify their information recently like sellers had to like reprove who they were? Or that’s completely unrelated.
Norm:
I’m not sure. I probably might have something to do with it, but I’m not sure.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s interesting.
Norm:
So if you’re listening and you’re an amazon seller, e-com seller, do any business on the internet, you wanna dive into FedNow. It’s gonna change things.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. There’s a couple, another tip for us. Now, you had sent over a message before, you’re doing some kind of influencer challenge, and that’s all you said. So like, what does that mean? What does an influencer challenge?
Norm:
Well, you know, Kelsey, you’ve been on the podcast, so Kelsey’s my son and, and my kids every year give me a challenge of some sort. Usually it’s, you know, lose weight or something. This year we were talking with Gracey Ryback, she was at a Mexico event. And I said to her, I wish I was like you. And she goes, well you are. You’re an influencer. I said, I’m not an influencer. And you know, I have like no zero followers for product influence. And so my kids came back and they gave me a challenge on the podcast, said, oh, why don’t you become a product influencer? And I said, oh, God, I can’t, that’s too much work. And so anyways, I said yes, which was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
Norm:
And so the challenge was get to a hundred thousand followers by December 1st, so zero to a hundred thousand followers. And what we’ve done is gone out, learned to be an influencer, and really trying to show Amazon sellers what they need to look for. What are some of the pitfalls? Do they wanna be their own brand ambassador or do they wanna do a side hustle and can you really make money at it? So it’s taken a lot of work. And we’re doing three times a week, Bradley Amazon lives for 90 minutes to two hours.
Bradley Sutton:
Let me follow you.
Norm:
Oh, good.
Bradley Sutton:
Hold on. Lemme go to.
Norm:
It’s called Lunch With Norm Deals.
Bradley Sutton:
How do I go? Is it amazon.com/live, right?
Norm:
It’s forward slash I think it’s just–
Bradley Sutton:
That worked. All right. And so I’m on browse, like, where is their search? Let’s see. Gracey’s the only one I follow actually on here. Let’s see. Alright, Lunch with Norm. I got, I’m gonna, let me just show my screen here to the people watching on YouTube later. So how do I find somebody on here? Alright, I think I found it here. I just typed in Amazon Live LWN deals. And then I recognize this right here, right here.
Norm:
Oh, there we go.
New Speaker:
The results, click here and voila, learn. Launch With Norm Deals, big beard, bigger deals. I love it. Give you a follow. Let just take a look also. Okay, hold on. This is something I was curious about. So these little one, one minute videos here. Yep. What are these? These are not Amazon Lives.
Norm:
Gotcha. Okay, so this is what a lot of people don’t realize. If you don’t, and I’m gonna just back up and then I’ll tell you about this. Everybody who’s starting out in Amazon, you have to fill, you have to have that slide deck filled, six images and at least one video. And I’ll give you a reason why. If you don’t put that one video, it could be the simplest video out there. You’re missing out because people like myself that I learned, if I’m an influencer, if I’m registered with Amazon Influencer, I can create a shoppable video, which will make me money. So just to give you one example. I showed an espresso machine. Somebody asked me to review this coffee here. Okay, so it’s espresso coffee, and I needed a machine, so I needed to buy one. I went out, I bought one, and I said, well, since I have this machine, I might as well do a video on it, a one minute video. So I did, and within two weeks, 50 of these machines sold. And then after that, another 20 have sold. So I’ve sold 70 of these, my espresso machines.
Bradley Sutton:
When you say I’ve sold, that’s because like you left like a video, but it’s not your listing, right?
Norm:
No. So what happens is you’ll notice that if you have a video and you can see this quite a bit, so as long as you have one video on your listing, so in your product listing, your slide deck you have a product video, you have a demo, anything that you put there it will allow Amazon’s algorithm to pick up the shoppable videos that influencers have done and they place them. I don’t have any say on it, but they place them on the listing. And people get this mixed up, you’ll see the related videos underneath and you’ll see a lot of people there, but those for the most part aren’t influencers. The people that are influencers usually, like they do a nice job. All I’m doing is, Hey, this is a Coke, can, I just bought it.
Norm:
This is why, this is how it opens. I enjoy the taste. I can’t promote it. And it’s all done. All I do, my little spiel is I shoot from my beard down and I just use my hands and that’s it. It’s just nobody sees my face. In fact, when I do any, I do I do beauty products. Yeah, there we go. So I do bu beauty products, and if I do usually do a beauty product, and then they do have to see my face, I put a beauty mask on and you know, I’ll do it that way. So it’s just a little, it’s fun. But these are things that I learned that I would never really have known about until I took this challenge up. So it’s good for my brand to know it because if I didn’t have that listing when I launch, that’s part of my launch. I’m gotta have, I don’t even care if I go to Animoto or Canva, put up something cheap, a slide just transitioning, just something. So the algorithm will pick up and put the influencers videos up there. And this is where a lot of people aren’t talking to influencers. You know, they’re not doing it well.
Bradley Sutton:
How did this work? I’m still having trouble understanding the process here. This, this coffee machine, did you actually buy this? So you bought it and then you recorded this video. And I’m assuming you already had your own influencer or Amazon Live account. Now you posted this video as a review, or you hit on the listing itself. You add video,?
Norm:
So if you type in my espresso, it’s a real, it’s a horrible video, but people liked it.
Norm:
I don’t even know if there’s a search, but where
Bradley Sutton:
View my storefront? Wait, that’s not it. Yeah. Oh yeah, maybe it’s here. See Ethiopian coffee here. I see a bunch of knives.
Norm:
So if people come and they buy, like somebody just bought a hundred dollars knife I get a commission for that. There’s the beauty mask. I use.
Bradley Sutton:
How can you even fit a beauty mask on you? Wait, I don’t, I don’t see that coffee machine. Oh,
Norm:
There’s probably–
Bradley Sutton:
Did I pass it?
Norm:
There’s probably a page button.
Bradley Sutton:
Maybe I passed it here. Well, let me just pick one of these other ones. Yeah. Cause I’m assuming it’s the same thing. I like Ethiopian coffee, so let me, let me click on this. Oh, I think that is,
Norm:
That’s Kelsey that did that one.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So then I see here’s the product down here. Yep. So let me go to their listing. Okay.
Norm:
All Right. And guess what? And so, so you, you bought this product or they sent it to you, or what? Yep,
Norm:
They sent it to me. Here it is. Right here. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
They sent it and then you went, or your son went to this listing. And then, let’s see. Lemme see
Norm:
If I can find, Nope, we didn’t do
Bradley Sutton:
Anything. Nothing. You didn’t do anything? Nope. How did this video? Yeah, see, here’s your video right here at the bottom under videos for this product. Now
Norm:
Go up and go up
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Norm:
To their page. Okay. Or the product listing and guess Okay. They have a video there. Click on the video. Let’s see. And you’re gonna see right there,
Bradley Sutton:
There it is. Related videos. Yep.
Norm:
That will never Okay. Come up if you don’t have, like, you won’t see the, you see all the other videos that were down there?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah.
Norm:
Mine is the only one showing because I’m an influencer.
Bradley Sutton:
So you, this video you uploaded on your own, like, like influencer whatever you call it, portal. I, I guess you could say I uploaded it and then you tie it to the asin.
Norm:
Yes. So when I uploaded this video, so I created a video and we upload it and it gi it gets an affiliate link attached to it. And so anytime that anybody watches that video for 30 seconds and they go and buy, then I get a commission from it. And what what was really interesting is that there’s, there’s different ways to make money. You’ve got your Amazon Live, which for me takes a lot of work for okay, return. Well very little return right now because I, I, the followers have to build up. And then you’ve got the shoppable where you can do 20, 30, 40 shoppable over a weekend, post them and immediately start making cash immediately. So the trick for shoppable videos is that you have to follow the guidelines and you get three attempts. If they, if they, the first three videos that you upload, if they get rejected three times, you’re not gonna three strikes and you’re out.
Norm:
Yeah. Yeah. So you gotta know the guidelines. And then once you do that, once you’re approved, you can upload these videos, you can do a bunch at a time. In fact we just were we, Amazon even reached out to us to go and become, it’s part of their, their new influencer challenge where that coffee video that you just saw, Kelsey did it. It’s more like a TikTok video. And if they select it we, we can do up to 50 videos if they select it over the next month or two to show you get 50 bucks per, and they, this is the new style they want rather than just a finger pointing. They want more of that. Tiktok look like you would have an inspire. So then there’s, then there’s just the affiliate program where you can have your wishlist.
Norm:
So there was a lot on what you were just looking at. You saw a lot of videos. But there are wishlists that if Mother’s Day coming up, I’ll have a wishlist with videos or images that I want to promote. And if anybody clicks on that and buys anything, then you get a some money. Now, one of the things I was really skeptical about because I literal literally started with zero followers. I had followers on the lunch with Norm side. You know, those are Amazon sellers or E-com sellers. Sure. But on the product side, who’s the old guy? You know, who, who’s, who’s this guy? Yeah. And I had to start building up and building up and building up, and it’s gaining momentum, but can I make money at this? And I could only do this so long. I’m not doing this full-time, but can somebody make money doing this as a side hustle?
Norm:
And my conclusion is yes, and it wouldn’t be bad money. If, if you’re dedicated to doing this and you, you can get people to send you product and you want to do these videos, or if you buy products, like, I’ve got two Mevo cameras, a Sony camera, I’ve got these ring lights, I’ve got the Sure mic. I can take any of these products and upload a video now that I’m registered as an influencer. And if the algorithm picks it up, that Sure mic, let’s say it’s three or 400 bucks, I get three or 4% of that. So anyways, it,
Bradley Sutton:
So wait to, to sign up, like, like at the very bottom here, it says, are you a brand interested in live streaming? Learn? How is that step one or a step one signing up for the Amazon affiliate program? This
Norm:
Is, this is one of the reasons why man, it is confusing to sign up. So the first thing that you should do is sign up for an affiliate account. Okay? So get that affiliate account you know, get your list going, and then you can sign up for the influencer program. Now if you don’t have a social media following you know, and I don’t know if that’s a hundred or a thousand, but if you don’t have that, that social media following, or you don’t have websites that are going to promote products, cuz they’re gonna ask you for that, then it’s probably not a good thing to do right now. However, there is a tip, there’s a little trick. If you want to go and buy an Instagram account, maybe in the pet niche and you’re selling pet products you could, you can use that to show Amazon that you have 10,000 followers.
Norm:
It’s very easy to do. You can go, there’s a bunch of different sites that you can go to. But that’s, that’s one way that you can do it. And then you can start doing all these videos. Now it’s a slow start and you should be doing items that are a hundred dollars plus. Most of the items that I have right here, I’ve got, you know, some of the stuff behind me, some beauty products. The coffee here that I, I it was 85 bucks, but I, I just to get some videos out there, I’ll do anything from 20, $20 down, even though I make a couple of pennies on it. It was more to prove a point what I can do. But right now, if I were to spend more time doing it, if I did an eight hour day, you could be making a hundred, couple hundred dollars a day and at the end of the month, like let’s say over three to six months getting out there, if you could do it you, I can’t see why somebody couldn’t be making thousands of dollars a month doing this if it was something that they liked to do.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean, the reason I’m asking a lot of these questions, first of all, I think I might, I might go ahead and try and do that challenge no way I can get a hundred thousand followers by December or anything like that. So more of a, just a personal challenge. But you know, like if somebody’s just getting started, like getting like some relatives started in this and then they would be like your first, you know, like, you know, generating some UGC for you and Yeah. And potentially, you know you know, he helping you launch, you know, he helping you launch some of your products or, or get some, some traction on it. But this, yeah, this is just interesting. So which, which, did you buy a social media account or did you use your, your lunch with Norm?
Norm:
Yeah, so what I did Instagram or I created a website I think you can still see it called Lunch with Norm Deals. I put, or l w n deals if you want you know, that’s the short form. And we created a website. We created some social media and we got the buzz going. And then from that, we got, there it is. Yep. Then you could just go into all deals and you’ll see,
Bradley Sutton:
Can see it here. Yep. Okay. Oh, wow. This is a pretty good looking website here. There you
Norm:
Go.
Bradley Sutton:
And then this, this like, but, but they’re not checking website. They want you to have a social media presence. Yeah.
Norm:
Or if you have a website like this you know, it shows that if you’re going to have a product, that you have an outlet to go and you know, use it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Norm:
So let’s, like that you just checked there we go.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. You’ve only got like 92 followers. This is not like they needed a thousand or anything for you to
Norm:
No, but
Bradley Sutton:
To get started. Just, just, okay. Yeah.
Norm:
So with that one I didn’t use as this is what I was gonna do. I used which account was it? I think it might have even been lunch with Norm. So, you know, I had thousands of followers there. And so that was a no-brainer. I got, I got accepted. So here, so now the, there’s a bit of a a journey if people wanted to follow it. I’m doing it on TikTok, although I’ve paused it for a while because I found that TikTok, the algorithm didn’t pick it up, so I thought I’d just focus more on the shoppable. But how can a brand, because so many brands are not doing it right? There’s a lot of information about influencers out there and going out and finding them, and it’s a very arduous, tough task. It doesn’t have to be, there’s lots of ways to use influencers that it doesn’t have to be that tough task. And as you can see, you can hire these people, you know, hire me send me the product and, and I’m just joking, but send me the product and
Bradley Sutton:
Well, I’ll send, I’m gonna send you a coffin shelf. I want you there. I wanna
Norm:
See all, I’ll do that.
Bradley Sutton:
One of our coffin shelves,
Norm:
You know, all of these products, I’ve got probably 350 products in this house right now.
Bradley Sutton:
Now is it just because of what you’ve done in this short time now sellers are, are seeing what you do and they’re, they’re just like hitting you up and saying, Hey, can I send you the products?
Norm:
Yeah, a lot. A lot are. Yep. So like what I’ve done is I’ve, I’ve put together something and it’s a presentation. People want to, to get, and I do this for free by the way. So I don’t charge anybody for going live on Amazon. I don’t charge anybody for a shoppable video. So a lot of influencers will, but because I’m doing this just as my challenge, I’m not charging anything. Yeah. We pay for the paid advertising to drive the traffic. The only thing we say is where we will charge is if we sell something. So if those, the my espresso coffee machine, if they sent me that, then they would owe me 10% of the gross of the sale. So it’s not a big
Bradley Sutton:
Deal. And that’s in addition to your affiliate commission then? Yeah. Yeah.
Norm:
That’s in addition to the, so
Bradley Sutton:
You can make like what, 30 bucks on 30 bucks
Norm:
More?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. On the, on this one. Okay.
Norm:
Yeah. So well on the, my Espresso, it’s not a very expensive machine, it’s 79. So I made, okay, I’d make $8 per plus the, the commission. So but that if I have, so here’s the other side that I did not think about the sponsored brands. I have people sending me brands right now, and they’re paying me like a thousand, 2000 bucks to show their brand.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow.
Norm:
It’s crazy,
Bradley Sutton:
Huh?
Norm:
I’ve got people every day not every day, every week. Now that’s, I’m getting a little bit better known that are approaching me for Prime day. Hey, what will it, what will you charge me to show this product on Prime day? We’ll give them a price.
Bradley Sutton:
Like on, on a live or, yeah,
Norm:
On a live, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
On Amazon is, is the only place we are doing this stuff. Or you’re also like Gracey, you know, doing stuff on your Instagram and, and other, other places. Yeah.
Norm:
So a again, we held back on doing all this other stuff because it was getting pretty pricey, and I thought, let’s wait till we get the followers, let’s wait till we get the products. We get the system down and then we’ll start to really boot this out, and especially on YouTube. But I’m, I’m leveraging other people’s customer base and I think that, I don’t think it’ll be a problem to do this. So, you know, your wooden coffin there, we can go on an Amazon Live, you’d be on with me and we could talk about the, the brand, you know, the overall brand. So it’s more of a podcast interview than a shopping. And that’s why, and I’ve been bringing on a lot of beauty brands and look, you know, here’s some old bald-headed guy with a big long beer drinking out of a Harley Davidson mug interviewing, you know, this person about retinol, you know, serums or vitamin C serums and what it can do. And, you know, it’s, it’s just a different angle.
Bradley Sutton:
Fascinating. I mean, I heard from Gracey that you were doing something, I didn’t even know that was what this, it was part of a challenge or anything. Yeah, I just thought that you were doing some experiments. It started with her. That was the thing. So super cool. Yeah, this is awesome. And, and like I said, you know, I, I don’t think every single Amazon seller podcast listener who who’s out there is like, Hey, I wanna be my own influencer, but I think it’s important to understand this process. Yeah. So you know who you’re dealing with, you know, put yourself in their shoes and like I said, hey, get some family members to start. This is great, you know, this is great. You know, side hustle stuff and, and just having somebody close to you who’s in this process, I think it’s gonna help Amazon sellers a lot.
Bradley Sutton:
Understand, you know, all these different avenues. I mean, in the last, you know, I thought I knew, so I had Gracey on, I’ve interviewed her, but I didn’t know about the, you know, the whole process of, of signing up to be a having a affiliate and then separate is the influencer thing, and then separate is the livestream thing and bringing people on to interview. And, and I had no idea there was like, you know, influencers had their own portal where they would upload the videos. I guess I just figured that all those videos you would see is when people go to that page and, and hit upload video. But yeah, you know, like your, these videos you know, since it’s an influencer, they were able to get into the as you know what, as a matter of fact, I swear I thought it was a mistake, but I think I’m gonna look up my coffin shelf really quick. I almost wanna say somebody might have done a video on our coffin shelf, and now I’m going to see, like, I am not sure, but I swear I saw something and I have been meaning to look at it again. Cause I know I have a video on there. Yep. There you go. There it is. Right there. Yep. So that means, that means this is an influencer on his own, got our coffin shelf, it’s under related videos.
Norm:
There you go.
Bradley Sutton:
There. And now it’s showing up here. All right, thank you, Doug and Nikki he said, how cool is this? My, my review? I wonder if he’s a podcast out there. So how would he know that catchphrase right there? But here, here he made a large coffin shelf video. Okay, well see. Like fascinating stuff, norm. Fascinating stuff. Now, completely switching gears before we go, you actually said that you prepared a gift for one listener. That’s up to $500 of value. Tell me about it.
Norm:
So this is completely different, but when we’re sourcing from China Chinese use HS codes, and we know that in the US we need an h t S code. These are the harmonized tariff codes. And what’s happened is people pay way too much. Just, and I’ll give you an example, my soap. So I make soap, and I was paying 17%. Okay? I looked into it and I found out that under natural soap I was paying 17% and I thought I knew my stuff. Then after lobby, my partner at HONU comes over and says you know you could probably get a better, a better deal. And okay, well, you know, what kind of deal can you get me? How about zero, I just saved 17%. And we did, we reclassified it as Castile soap because it was an olive oil based soap.
Norm:
So no lying, you know, we don’t wanna lie, that’s the last thing. But I know just recently we took these signs and they were just quarantine signs you know, the big yellow like aluminum quarantine sign. And what ended up happening is AF Lobby found it as advertising, and it went from 25% plus 15% down to, I think it was next to nothing. I think it was zero. They saved $15,000 bringing in the product. So this is what I, I have, it’s called the tariff terminator, because if he could do that for me, I thought, oh, what we, what could we do for others? And typically what we do is we, we’ll charge a $50 fee upfront. If we can save you money, great. If we can’t, well you’re out 50 bucks, but if we save you money, the, it’s, it’s another $450, but you’re on the winning side. So what I said is, look, one of your, whoever, whoever wins this will do a tariff terminator. You, we won’t charge you a penny, you get the full thing. Usually 80% of Amazon sellers we save a lot of money for.
Bradley Sutton:
So to basically this tariff terminator to expensive tarrifs, you can just say Hasta la vista, baby.
Norm:
Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing and I’ll make sure,
Bradley Sutton:
Sure, that’s a Terminator reference for you young folk out term who are I was aging myself with that there.
Norm:
So the other part to this is that there’s a report that we can provide saying, look, if you move from China over to Korea for cosmetics, you’ll get X. If you switch from a wood to a resin or to an aluminum, you’ll save x. And so there’s a lot of options that are also provided in this report. So there you go. It’s called Turf Terminator.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Well for this, and, and you know, your podcast and everything else, like, you’ve got a long list. I, I feel like we need a link tree right here. But how can people find you and, and reach out to you on the interwebs?
Norm:
Well probably the easiest way is you can always listen to the podcast Lunch with Norm. And that’s every Monday and Wednesday and Friday, and that’s live. So you can listen for my bloopers or you could just check me out the on the web. And if you search me, just search Norm Farrar and you’ll see a beard guy. I
Bradley Sutton:
Love it. I love it. All right. Well, norm, we got two for the price of one two podcast episodes for the price of one here. So I appreciate it. As always, you know, that’s the reason why you’re back here four times is you bring nothing but value to our listeners. So we really appreciate it and look forward to seeing you at one of these upcoming events soon.
Norm:
Fantastic. Thanks for having me back.
Welcome back to The Serious Sellers Podcast! In our latest episode, we had the pleasure of hosting a special guest for the fourth time. Norm Farrar, a seasoned expert in the Amazon industry, joins us to discuss some exciting topics and share valuable insights. Tune in to discover what Norm has been up to lately, including his strategies for getting Amazon or E-commerce brands into retail stores and the latest strategies in marketing your brand inside Google Business Profile. Is your brand or product ready for retail? Norm delves into this question, providing practical advice and highlighting the importance of being prepared before taking the leap. Additionally, he shares his experiences and candidly talks about the challenges faced when dealing with certain buyers in the retail industry. Norm also brings us up to speed on the latest developments with Google My Business and Google Business Profile. Find out what’s new and how these tools can enhance your online presence and increase visibility for your brand.
Make sure to stay tuned for Part 2! It’s an episode you won’t want to miss!
In episode 460 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Norm discuss:
- 01:09 – Another 4-Time Guest In The Serious Sellers Podcast!
- 02:52 – What Norm Been Up To Lately?
- 03:36 – Getting Amazon Brands Into Retail Stores
- 07:34 – Consider Independent Retail Stores
- 15:33 – Is My Brand Or Product Ready For Retail?
- 20:46 – “Some Buyers Are Jerks”
- 22:30 – What’s New With Google My Business / Google Business Profile?
- 30:59 – Norms Healthy Habits & Hobbies Outside The Amazon Grind
- 32:52 – Make Sure To Upgrade To Google Analytics 4
- 34:04 – Stay Tuned For Part 2!
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today is part one of an information and strategy packed two part episode with the Beard Guy, Norm. Now, in this first episode, he’s gonna be talking about how to get into retail stores in order to get up to three quarters of a million dollar purchase orders, and also the latest with Google Business Profiles and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium Ten’s Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton. This is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And now, I believe, if my math is correct here, for the fourth time, I think you’re only the second person who has ever been on the podcast four times. Cuz you know, we have a guest once per year and we don’t bring everybody back. You know, it’s by popular demand, you know? So Norm, I’m pretty sure Kian was the first, but now the second person to ever be invited back total of four times, Norm Farrar. How’s it going?
Norm:
It’s going great. What an honor. Four times
Bradley Sutton:
Love it. I love it. I don’t know. What’s that? Three times that trifecta. Four times. Is there a word for that?
Norm:
I don’t know. Lucky?
Bradley Sutton:
I like it. Well, my dad always says better lucky than good sometimes, right? That’s right. So guys, we’re not gonna, you know, since he’s been on here before, we’re not gonna go into this full backstory. I took the liberty of writing down his old podcast number. So if this is your first time you’re hearing Norman, you wanna learn more about him very first time he was on the podcast was episode 80, so make sure to check that out. You can get his backstory. And then in episodes 211 and 327, like I said, about one, one per year. He was sharing a lot of good tips on, you know, Google my business and Amazon Post what it was just getting started off and press releases. And so, you know, last time we talked about Google Business profile, and I’m sure we’re gonna be talking about some, you know, things that are up to date there, but tons of information in those episodes. So make sure to, to give those give those a listen at your leisure. But anyways, we’re here now in, in the middle of 2023, and we want to see what’s been cooking, you know, for you. So, so how’s, how’s the last beer? The last beer? Yeah. Have you been drinking a lot of beer? Norm doesn’t drink at all. Last beer he drank was probably never, but yeah. How has the last year been for you?
Norm:
It had its challenges. You know, Amazon’s not always acting the way I want it to. But, you know, you have to learn to be resilient and you have to find different channels, and, and that’s what I’ve been doing. So I have been exploring Walmart quite a bit for the last two years. Carrie and I have been, you know, talking back and forth about that getting heavily into retail. So now retail, what do
Bradley Sutton:
You mean by retail? Like, like, like brick and mortar or Yeah,
Norm:
Yeah. Getting into bricks and mortar. So not literally, but you know, trying to get the brand on. Yeah. And
Bradley Sutton:
You could sell brick and mortar in brick and mortar, I guess you like, get a product in Home Depot or something, but that, yeah.
Norm:
I guess you could. So no, it’s, it’s been great because I’ve been learning just a process on how to go and approach all the big box stores as well as the mid and the independent retailers and have seen, well put it this way, you know, when you have a single purchase or, you know, a weekly purchase, okay, you might sell a hundred, a couple of thousand, whatever it could be. Well, you get a purchase order from Costco or from Walmart, whatever. They’re talking, well, I showed one we were on the cruise together, the online sellers cruise. I showed one that I picked up the day before I left, and it was $279,000 for this one buyer.
Bradley Sutton:
This is one of your products or like a client’s product or?
Norm:
No, I represent a few brands. So this is one of their brands that were on the marketplace. And sometime in the last seven days, there was another one that I just showed. I showed up for 710,000.
Bradley Sutton:
Hold on l let’s take that quarter of a million dollar one. Yeah. Walking back, was this originally an Amazon? Only brand. Okay. So, so they’re an Amazon only brand. What they reach out to you and like, Hey, we’re interested to get into retail, or you were looking at their account like, Hey, why, why don’t we get this in retail? Walk us through how this happened.
Norm:
Okay. So I talk a lot about retail. And so one of these Amazon brands a good brand, I reached out and, you know, asked if I could do anything with them with the brand. And I said, yeah, this is what I can do. I’ll introduce you to a bunch of retail buyers. I’ve got a enough experience and a big enough database that if anybody is looking for pretty much any buyer in and all the main retailers, I could pretty much do an introduction. So what I started to do was create these emails, craft them so they were worded properly help guide them with their with their catalog. So you wanna have a wholesale catalog to show the buyer. So just got them retail ready. And then it doesn’t happen all at once, but it could happen in the first month.
Norm:
It could happen in three months. But all of a sudden buyers start to get in. We got one today from the toy the senior brand developer dev, the senior brand manager in toys at Walmart saying, Hey, do you have any toys that you can introduce us to? So, yeah, we just, we take those and we ship ’em over to the buyer. Then the buyer it’s their prerogative if they wanna respond back to the buyer or not, or to the seller. If they do, they’re, they’re just dealing directly with them. So yeah, we’ve got quite a few brands into the retail market recently.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I mean, that’s what I’ve always been, been preaching. You know, before Helium 10, I was working for a company that was mainly in retail. And you know, I, I’ve said this story a lot of times, but I’m always proud of myself. Yeah, I brought their sales from like one to 3 million, but that’s nothing compared to, you know, they’re, they’re in every Walmart and, and every retail store. And I, and I got them into like a bunch of grocery stores and the POs dwarf, what is going on on Amazon. If you think about, hey, there’s 4,000 Walmart stores, you know, each store has to have, you know, quantity on the shelf. And so, you know, each store is buying a few cases of the product. You can do the math about the kind of numbers that that show up. So, so like that takes kind of like special people like yourself. I know, like, you know, my old company, we used to use brokers and stuff cuz you, you can’t just like go knock on the door of, of Walmart or Kroger or something like that and say, Hey, introduce me to your buyer. I wanna, I wanna show this to them. So like, you know, how have you, how did you get to the point where you, you actually can go in and do that?
Norm:
Yeah. One of the things that you know, we do preach is that if you want to go and use a distributor, by all means go ahead. Because they have this grouping of retailers that they’re already in. So if they’re a toy distributor or supplements or whatever it is that’s a fast track, you pay a little bit extra for that. So if you do have the margins that are built in, then great. When I first started working with distributors, this is when my family owned manufacturing companies, so we would be working with them and, and we had all the margins that we needed to build were that were built in. So we made a nice little profit, but to do it on your own, these are just, we’ve just searching the internet, trying to get into different buyers.
Norm:
Linkedin does a great job, but more importantly, you can knock on a buyer’s door. But if you don’t set up and talk the lingo one of the things I would recommend is learn the, the language of retail. And if you can do that, that’s great. If you come off that you’ve never done this before and you’re a hack, well, they might just put you in the other pile. People that can, that, that come retail ready, they have the proper packaging, they have the right catalog, and their emails are properly written then you’ve got a chance and that’s going direct. And again, I’m not, I’m, I I’m not even naming my service. I’m, I’m just telling people this because I, if they’re gonna do it and they wanna have a chance, they’ve gotta look professional. And another big tip is that when you get that buyer and they do send you an email, if you’re gonna wait more than 24 hours, forget it.
Norm:
You’ve gotta get back and forth to them. And one fear that I’ve seen a lot of sellers in Amazon have is that, well, one big one is cash flow. I’ll talk about that in a sec. But the other one is how do I, I I only have so much inventory, and if they want to have a container load, which will never happen on your first order, but if the fear is, oh, they’re gonna order too much, it’s gonna kill my Amazon listing, that’s gonna go down the tubes, and then I’m not making that much profit on the other, and I don’t even know if I can get all the inventory to them. So what you can do is when you, when you do get that initial po you can talk to the buyer, they know that first of all, you’re gonna get a test po, then you’re gonna get something that’s probably more regional, a few more stores, then it’ll spread out, and then it’ll spread out.
Norm:
But during that first time you can let them know that you’ve, you’re gonna create better retail packaging or that your product, we just ordered enough product from China, it’s gonna take a month to get here. There, there’s no problem, there’s no problem with that. So anyways, those are just a, a few tips. And then cash flow, you gotta be careful. Sometimes I tell people if they really want, or if they’re really cautious about cash flow, which you should be you can always go to independent independent not grocers, but retailers. I, I live in a small hick town, you know, more cows than people. And we have a pet store independent, we have the variety stores, we have all these independent stores in town. They’re still, I mean, they’re not dead. Some people think they might smell funny, but you can go and approach these people and say, Hey, you know, I have this really great soap, and if they wanna be a little bit different than buying Dove or Irish Spring, and they want a natural soap, all how much is a case?
Norm:
So you give them a case, or your minimum order quantity might be two cases. And guess what? They pay with a credit card, a credit card. Now what I found, if you do have a bit of cash flow and you work out all these terms with your, with the buyer, okay, right at the, during the contract, and you, you know, if it makes sense, great. If not, don’t be afraid to negotiate. They might come back with what’s best for the chain. And you come back with what’s best for you and you’ll, you could meet somewhere in the middle.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So, you know, should I be at like, at a certain level before I even start thinking about this? Or, you know, maybe I’m still newer on Amazon, but I’ve got like rock solid pricing. So I’ve got decent profit margins, I’ve got amazing packaging, retail ready packaging you know, I might even have products stored here at my own warehouse or something. Like, am I ready to go? Or do these buyers wanna see some kind of, so, you know, online history, whether it’s on walmart.com or amazon.com before they, they can see you. Like, how much does that help? Where you can show like your, your, your resume, your your product resumes. Like, look, I’ve been a best seller on Amazon, or I I’ve sold $1 million in the last year on Amazon. Like, how much does that matter?
Norm:
It really does depend. Like for Walmart, for example, I know this for a fact, like to get onto the Walmart marketplace, they’re looking for seasoned sellers. So they’ll look at your Amazon or they’ll look at your Shopify and bring you over. Now the great thing about going onto the marketplace, they have bees basically pitch fest twice a year. And if they see that your online product is selling, you could get invited to it. But if you want to get down there in front of Walmart and you’ve got a really great product, same thing. As long as you can get in front of the buyer then you might have a chance getting in there, going online for any retailer. Think of it, all these retailers right now have online marketplaces for the most part. If you’re in the pet business, well maybe pet value if you’re target, target.com is actually fantastic platform if you can get approved for it.
Norm:
But you can check out all of those and get onto those marketplaces. But if you want, you can target it. I’ve seen, I wouldn’t say new sellers probably should probably stay away, but mid-level to advanced sellers. If, if you can show that you’ve got a good product, it’s well-branded. And this is, you know, we’ve talked about this before, just making sure that your branding is consistent and Walmart wants you to have this community, this brand community that they’re trying to build. Well, this is just another level where that retail purchaser or that buyer wants to make sure that you are, your, your brand is consistent with whatever that store is, right? If it’s not, they’re, they’re just gonna pass you by. So if they can go and take a look at your Amazon listing, they see that you’ve got, you know, really great images you’ve got great reviews.
Norm:
It’s priced accordingly. And then they go to your Shopify store, and then they might type in a couple of keywords. See if you pop up or your brand name and you’ve got some social media presence, you might have an influencer or two. All of this adds up to being authority. The more authority that you have, the more trust and more trust equals sales. And that’s the same thing with a buyer. They don’t want to have a fluke. They’ll take a, they will take a gamble on you, but you better have the brand or that look to support it.
Bradley Sutton:
So how know when I have enough? You know, like, is it a revenue? Is it a more like a longevity thing? When do I know my resume is ready to go?
Norm:
Yeah, you, you can try it out 50 grand a month, a hundred grand a month, and they’ll come back to you and they’re gonna ask you those questions. So you know, what is, what are you generating right now? What’s your gross revenue? What’s your top line? They’re gonna ask you that. And in fact was it chewy? I think I was working with Chewy and they just came back and they said, okay tell me your costs. Well, I don’t want to. Yeah, well, if you don’t so they’re trying to work out the profit margin, right? So you know your cost compared to what you’re selling it for. You know, what is your manufacturer’s selling retail price? And if you have map, which is your, it’s basically the minimum amount you’re gonna allow them to sell it for.
Norm:
Well, if it meets the if it meets their range, then it might, might be okay, maybe you have to change a few things. Maybe you have to change your pricing. We’ve talked about perceived pricing before. And maybe with just adding better packaging and making it for the packaging ready for retail, because there is, there will be changes to your packaging. Like, let’s say, oh, I’m just trying to see what do I got here? Okay, Macha Tea right there. Macha Tea. Well, is it gonna sell like that or is it gotta be into a box? Or does it have to have a hang tag, a clamshell? It depends. And you might have to get different packaging for different retailers. And I’ll give you a great example. Costco, they want bigger, better Products. Well, if you’re gonna go in with, you know, it’s not gonna happen.
Norm:
Yeah. And when I say this, this is a very small package of Mati because you can’t see it, but if it’s a much larger version of this mati tin, then that’s fine. But just that’s one of them that you’re going to have to change for for the store. The other thing is I’ve got into very well into the Dollar General type stores, you know, used to be a dollar, now, $2, whatever it is. Maybe it’s $10 by now. But anyways, those types of stores don’t require the same thing. Like they don’t require the same type of packaging. But you still have to go through the same process. And for those people who don’t necessarily have a, a big dollar item or something that’s that’s in that dollar range, or you, you know, maybe you, if they’re, if you can sell, like, I don’t even touch this at all, but if you’ve got a smaller dollar item and you can sell it over to Dollar General or any of those types of brands or stores, and that might be perfect for you. I did sell e eva foam like cosmetic wipes for women, okay? And we actually, we did the private labeling for cvs, Ecker, Walmart, target, we, we got the whole group of them, same foam, but in do the dollar stores. It was a lot less than if you went over to Target and bought it. It just, the packaging looked a little bit differently.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Now, the, let’s go on the flip side. The ones who have been rejected is there, is it just, you know, it’s not like, you know, they’re gonna accept every single product. And sometimes it’s just luck of the draw maybe. But, but anything stick out in your mind about why somebody you brought there might have been rejected, like a specific reason that, you know, maybe you can save somebody the trouble or, or somebody can, you know, hear this and all right, well, I better, I better make sure I have this in order before I go present
Norm:
First research the the retailer. Because if it doesn’t line up with your brand, mm, forget it. You know, there’s a lot of different pet stores out there. There you might have a, a boutique style of a pet product, and you’re going to a pet store that is, you know, is very price conscious and it just doesn’t line up. I know, again, going back to Walmart, if you don’t line up with their their brand, the Walmart brand, then you’ll be rejected. Now that doesn’t mean, and, and maybe you don’t have enough sales. So if you go to a Walmart buyer, so you, you know, now you’re talking back and forth, they like your product, but you just can’t support it. You might get rejected, but that doesn’t mean you can’t reapply. The worst thing I’ve seen is when people go into these buyers with big time egos, oh, I sell X on Amazon, whoop d do, that’s nothing.
Norm:
That’s a one time order. You know? And they might have a big ego and then they get rejected, and then they show they get resentment. And you know, you, you can’t do that. You, you have to go in and come in with a business tone, regardless. Even if the buyer, some buyers are jerks, you know? And that’s the other thing, by the way, you might be dealing with this awesome, really awesome buyer that you get along with. Now, back in the day, I’m an old guy. I could go and take that buyer out at Walmart. I would go and I could buy lunch, you know? Yeah. Depending on the retailer. There’s no way you could do that. Nowadays, you can’t do that. So if your personality aligns with that buyer and your product does well, there’s, you know, two check boxes, but all of a sudden you might have just a jerk. Sure. But they know what they’re looking for and they will, you know, they’ll let you know what they’re looking for, and you might think you, you know what they’re looking for but they know your category, your niche much better than you. And some just double barrel you. And you just, you you get deflated and you shouldn’t because in six months that person will be on a rotation out of the system.
Bradley Sutton:
I remember dealing with that and yeah, you know, like you can strike out a couple times, but hey, he just takes one. You know, who, who doesn’t want a $750,000 po? So, you know, you’re not gonna get that from Amazon. Alright, well that’s interesting stuff. We, we might circle back a little bit there, but you know, the last couple times on the podcast, and actually you’re the only one I’ve ever had on to talk about this, but what’s new with Google My Business? Because like you’re probably the expert of the world in the Amazon world, at least on this. I don’t hear anybody talking about this. So what can you educate us on?
Norm:
Oh my gosh. So I love so now they’ve changed everything, and this is why I thought it might be something to talk about is it’s now called right across the board Google Business Profile. So first of all, some people are gonna say, where do I start with that? Well, you can go to business.google.com or if you go up to those nine icons that you see in the top right and click on it, you’ll see it under profile, and then you can just register and you can get started. But the, what the main advantage and it’s always been is that Google loves people working with Google products. And Google Business Profile is one of those tools that puts it all together. So the more that you fill it out, and by the way nine out of 10 people that I talked to say, you can’t do this with brands wrong.
Norm:
You can absolutely do this with brands. You answer the wrong question and they’ll say you can’t do it. So there is a question that you have to answer when you get verified to get verified. And one of them is do you leave your office? Okay, or yeah. One is, do you leave your office or I forget the exact wording, but the other one is do you ever leave your office? Something like that. Well, if you and I would check the box, I don’t leave. My office is not a retail store. Well, chances are you’re gonna get denied, rejected. What you, if you attend a trade show that’s leaving the office, okay? So if you’re going to an event, you know, one, one of helium tens events, well guess what? Your brand now, and you can get approved easily.
Norm:
They’re approval process is almost immediate. Now they have five different types of approval where you only used to have two a mail-in card or a phone. Yeah, it was a phone call before and the phone wasn’t really working at Google during the pandemic, so you had to wait two or three weeks for the card. But anyways, what you can do with this is so cool let’s say you have a Shopify store with an Amazon store. Maybe you got approved over at Walmart. Well, you can, with Google, you can open up a category or a brand, you could put your product line under there. So when you have multiple brands, let’s say you can put multiple brands in your Google profile under your company, and then one image, you have one image that might be that mache tea.
Norm:
Okay? You’ve got that Matcha and you’re selling it over on Amazon. Well, that link goes over to your listing. The next pitcher goes over to your store, the next pitcher to Shopify in your next over to whatever you want it to go over to Walmart. And 100% in the second that you click submit, this is indexed. The second that you do that, it’s a shoppable link. And if you do this properly and you put in the proper keywords, just describe it. Or if you put in metadata, it will help it will just help in the rankings. Now, the more information that you’re putting, let’s say we talk about this and we have a blog article on our website. We can take those blog articles and post it from Google into Facebook or into other social medias sites.
Norm:
Or you could take it from Facebook and point it over to your Google business. All it is, is Google will provide you with a link. Every time you do anything with your Google profile, you get some sort of lift, you get more ranking. And I’ve used this for years. Every time I’ve done a press release, any type of blog article, any type of repurposing. So if I’m on TikTok or if I’m doing whatever on any social channel, all I’m doing is they’re gonna ask you when you first start, what website do you want this to point to? Not for the images, but what website is this about? So if I put that, it’s for this web, like x, y, z Matcha Tea that’s your anchor URL. So if you put that anchor URL information into a press release, a blog article, a post, anything that will be related to your Google Business account, and voila, it gets indexed immediately.
Norm:
It you take a little bit of time and just go over. Now Google just reset everything. If you go into Google Business profile. Now, it used to be very intimidating. There was tons of tabs on the left hand side that you’d have to fill out. Now there’s eight. And you open it up and you’ll see the eight different tabs. This is where the command center is, and this is where you can post and post and post 10 minutes a day and you are going to skyrocket. Now, it’ll take a bit of time, cuz Google’s gotta, and you wanna be consistent, but 10 minutes a day, we did this we got an event coming up where you’re gonna be, oh, you’re gonna miss it this year. But I, I’m gonna be talking about this and we, we took two brands, brand new, never been on Google business at all. And I was asked to talk about this three, four months ago. Within the last three months, they’ve had a thousand clicks on their website to buy. That’s not bad.
Bradley Sutton:
They have the Amazon other ones too or everything? The only one they put in their profile was the website. This
Norm:
Is just online sales off of a Shopify store.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow. A thousand clicks.
Norm:
A thousand
Bradley Sutton:
This is not paid at all. This is organic.
Norm:
That’s the beauty. So right now, it it’s all free. It’s been free forever. And this is why I can’t, like, I really don’t understand why people aren’t doing this. And when you put those pictures up, those are shoppable links that you can find in the carousel. And if you’re paying for, I shouldn’t say this, but cuz I know Google’s gonna, if you’re paying for Google shopping, you’re wasting your money because you get the same thing when you do it for free with Google Business Profile.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, there you go. So guys, hope you, you know, might need to rewind that to, to, to get, to get the full, the full benefit there. But something that’s pretty easy sounds like to do. And, and who doesn’t like the f word of free? But like you said, if somebody had done the old Google My Business, Amazon or Amazon, Google might have deleted some stuff. So they need to go and redo their store or?
Norm:
No. And so all the information that you had, all the photos, any posts that you’ve done those are all, it’s all still there. And by the way, if you have an event, so let’s say any type of event, Google will weigh that event with the keywords in it a lot higher than your typical post that you put out. So people will see it through Google My Business and it gets indexed.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow. All right guy., I mean, see, I told you Norm always brings some unique stuff to the show. Before we get back into your, you know, some more strategies. Here, one thing I’m doing this year is I talk a lot about healthy habits. You know, be it physical health, mental health and hobbies, you know, people to what they do to get out of the regular rut. You know? Like myself, you’re no spring chicken either I believe you’re above 40 like me. So what about you? First of all, what’s your main hobby of like, Hey, I need to just get away from podcasting and e-commerce and stuff. What’s your go-to thing? I love cigars. The license plate said.
Norm:
There we go.
Bradley Sutton:
So cigars.
Norm:
Yeah, that’s that’s my vice. I don’t drink. You know just if in the afternoon I take a break sometimes if it’s nice out, we just start to get some nice weather here and just like to sit out and have my cigar.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Now what about, you know, physical health as far as, you know, do you have any special foods you’re eating? Special routines exercising.
Norm:
You know what, I let everybody else do that. I figure if you’re gonna save 20 years, going out to the gym I’d rather not. And, you know, just knock off 20 years off of me, so I don’t have the hassle of going to the gym.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, hey, I mean, you must be active, you know, it’s not like you’re just sitting in your, in your office all day long, you know? No,
Norm:
No. Like we we’re on a nice park and so we got the lake in front of us and I’ll go out okay. And do my thing around, like, just walk around the lake once in a while. That’s about it. Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s it. I don’t go to the gym. Okay,
Bradley Sutton:
That’s good. That’s good enough. Like, like another reason not to live in the city, you know, that’s a little bit more difficult to do. You’re living in, you know urban area, but a nice nice little thing. Benefit of living in the countryside. All right. Now let’s just do some, you know, you’ve given us some longer strategies there. Let’s do some quick hitting strategies. They don’t have, have to be about Google wine business or they don’t have to necessarily be about the other stuff you we were talking about like retail, it could be about anything you want.
Norm:
GA4
Bradley Sutton:
What is that?
Norm:
Have you heard about that?
Bradley Sutton:
Sounds like a video game.
Norm:
Okay. So it would probably be a really good video game. This is one of the biggest game changers in on for the internet that we’ve ever seen. And it’s gonna be happening in July. And if you do have Google Analytics and you don’t migrate over to GA4, which is Google Analytics four and you can just you know find it on Google and you can do it yourself or you can get a team to do it for you. But anyways, you’ll lose all 100% all information that you’ve had, any type of analytics and you’ll lose it. Keyword research everything. So they’re coming out with a completely different system now and they’re giving you until July before they just hit the button and everything changes. So it’s gonna change the way searches are done, the relevance of searches it’s gonna change everything. It’s gonna be the biggest game changer that we’ve seen from Google in a long time.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. All right, so there’s one thing, guys Google that if you don’t know about it, and if you guys have been doing some research, and you don’t wanna lose it, make sure you take action. Alright guys, I’m gonna pause it right here. I wasn’t planning to do this, but this episode started getting even better than it already is and we just started going on. I thought I was about to end it right here, but he comes out with some stuff that I had no idea even in existed. So I was like, let’s extend this out. So we’re gonna pause this now, and then tomorrow if you come back, you’re gonna hear the next episode where we get all really deep into the whole Amazon influencer and affiliate program and Amazon Live and a whole bunch of cool stuff. So I’ll see you guys tomorrow.
In episode #459 of SSP, Steve Simonson joins us on the show to talk about artificial intelligence and which AI tools Amazon sellers should start using. Let’s discover how AI can revolutionize your Amazon FBA business as Steve shares his insights on tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and more! From automations, systems and SOPs creation, image creation, branding, marketing, and email campaigns for your Amazon brand. Make sure to listen to the very end as we explore the impact of AI in the Amazon-selling industry, learn practical tips on how to utilize this new technology, and how to train your ChatGPT by using powerful prompts.
In episode 459 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Steve discuss:
- 02:13 – How Did Steve Get So Passionate About Artificial Intelligence?
- 05:00 – How Should Amazon Sellers Use AI Tools
- 06:15 – Text-To-Speech AI Tools
- 07:19 – Tier 1 Tool To Automations & Systems
- 12:55 – Using AI Tools For Image Creation
- 17:57 – AI Features For Branding And Marketing
- 21:00 – How AI Improves Your Email Marketing Campaigns
- 23:09 – How To Improve Your ChatGPT Prompts
- 25:48 – Common Mistakes People Make When Using AI
- 31:11 – Steve’s Healthy Habits & Habits Outside The Amazon Grind
- 32:51 – Other AI Tools That You Should Be Using
- 36:12 – How To Reach Out To Steve Simonson
- 37:07 – Steve’s 60-Second Tip
- 39:26 – Catch Steve And Bradley In Amazon Events
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’re gonna bring one of the Amazon industry’s foremost experts on artificial intelligence. He uses so many different kinds of software, so he’s gonna give you guys all of the best AI tools that you should be using to help your Amazon business. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you wanna be able to sync your listings that you create in Helium 10 to your Amazon account in one click, including being able to sync subject matter, which you’re not able to even edit. Now, in most listings on Amazon, you’re gonna want to use Helium 10 Listing Builder. Make sure to find out how to use Listing Builder by going to h10.me/listingbuilder. That’s h10.me/listingbuilder. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got somebody who’s been a serious seller for years here. Steve Simonson, back on the show. How’s it going, Steve?
Steve:
It’s going great. Yeah, I was just wondering. I’ve definitely put up some serious numbers, but I’m quite irreverent. So sometimes not always serious in the boardroom.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Steve:
Serious numbers. But also I like to crack a joker too.
Bradley Sutton:
And that’s what we like. So if you we’re not gonna go too too much into Steve’s backstory, if you guys want to check that out, episode 38 is a good one to see some of Steve’s backstory. But I brought you on because I’ve been seeing you pop up a lot and you’re good at email marketing too, and you’ve been marketing to me for some webinars and stuff that you’ve been doing lately on AI and that seems to be all the rage. And I’m one of the ones who hasn’t really completely, you know, dove into it, you know, and like, let it take over my life. Like, I, I see some people, I definitely see the advantages. I see the disadvantages, you know, sometimes too with relying too much on it. So I was like, you know what, let’s bring an expert on, and let’s just talk about, I mean, first of all, like how you got passionate about it. Like what was it about cuz you know, it’s not like you’ve been doing AI for 10 years, you know, you have a lot of specialties, you know, be it sourcing and, and logistics and, and a lot of different things. What made you so giddy about, about the the AI phenomenon? I guess
Steve:
<Laugh>, giddy is a good word for it. Well, if you look back at my background and likely in episode 38, we talked about my fascination or love for systems. Like I’m a huge systems guy. The system runs the business. The people run the system. This is right out of the E-myth. So my thoughts are like, how do you make great systems? And for more than a decade, probably nearly 15 years, we’ve been using some levels of machine learning. This is a precursor to AI. Machine learning is like, Hey, take all of your reviews and detect the sentiment of those reviews. And then the ones that are positive, try to extrapolate some of the keyword, like make a word cloud out of the, you know, positive sentiments, or the same with negative sentiments.
Steve:
So you can use machine learning, and you train it to, this word is good, this word is bad, right? It’s very I would say boring and takes a long time, and it costs a lot of money. But when you have, you know, lots of call center call records, or lots of reviews or lots of, you know, inbound data that is more than a human can do, machine learning makes sense. So from my perspective, that history of, you know, how do we make the, the bots do more work? That’s always been part of my DNA. And so, frankly, in November when Open OpenAI kind of started making a bunch of noise, we said like, I don’t know if this is a beanie baby fidget spinner thing. Like, is this just some fad or is this real? And frankly, I was skeptical. I’m like, how could it be? But after a couple weeks, I’m like, you know, this is not the invention of the automobile, right? And mass, you know production capabilities. This is not the pc, this is not even the advent of the internet. This is like fire man discovers fire, or man invents the wheel. That’s how pivotal this is for humanity. For better or worse, the trains on the tracks to use a historic metaphor, and we better get on board or get outta the way.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So, I’ve had a few people on here talk about, you know, some of the basic things that can be done. You know, like you mentioned it before, that was the, probably the first thing that people thought to do is, hey, let’s take Helium 10 review insights and let’s download the reviews and let’s, let’s try and get a sentiment here. And, and other people have been using it to get like, you know, maybe some different brand ideas or heard of a couple people do it for potentially even product research. But now we’re in, you know, June of 2023 what are some maybe next level things that people should do outside of just these these basics here?
Steve:
Well, the, the first thing is there are many ways of viewing AI. And I tend to look at it in tiers, right? So tier one is the basic tier that we all start with, which is, how do I use this tool? Right? There are many ways to use technologies. And the first is, you know, it’s like, I’ve got a nail. Where’s a hammer? Right? You don’t wanna use a screwdriver to try to hammer the nail. So find the best tool for the job. So, some of the things that I love to do and this may be fun for you, Bradley, just this past week, I calm my voice, and then we started having transcriptions of various things that I’ve written, tried to be, you know, read in my voice and the intonation. It’s not perfect just yet, but it’s so close that you’re like, oh, in six months, this is gonna be pretty amazing.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s crazy.
Steve:
Yeah. So that’s elevenlabs.io, If anybody wants to check that out. Spectacular. And by the way, they have, they’re actually so good at reading. Their bots are not like the, I won’t throw people under the bus, but there are many people who use text to speech tools that are very robotic, and they don’t read with any level of, I’ll just say humanity.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah.
Steve:
If you go to 11 labs and you go to their podcast, it’s now, by the way, one of the top 50 on Spotify, at least in the business area. They’re having their bots read, like old out of copyright things like Alice Wonderland or old news articles from 1899, and the different voices they select are amazing. And you can then start to say, depending on your line of business, obviously for a podcaster like yourself, lots of applicability, whether it’s cloning your own voice or reading, you know, the thing in a new voice. Many fun things you can do with text to speech. Really extraordinary.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Interesting. You just mentioned one I’ve never heard of. Everybody now has heard of ChatGPT and, and MidJourney, and maybe, you know, we can probably talk a little bit about that if you have some strategies there. But what are a couple more things that, you know, have maybe flown under the radar for, for most Amazon sellers that, that you think are, are useful?
Steve:
Well, one of the things that excites me the most is the idea of taking that tier one tool and turning it into a an automation, right? So an automation would be, so as an example, we have the ability to create SOPs that write themselves, right? So you just go to a screen, you type in, you know, how to add an item to Amazon Seller Central, or how to create a new class in QuickBooks. You click the magic AI button, and it literally writes the SOP for you, right? So that’s a tool high use, right? If you need the hammer nail, let’s get the, get the big one out and, and it, it takes that blank screen and destroys it. Like, that’s the worst thing is the blank screen. But level two is things called Auto GPT, or Baby AGI these are types of terms you may start to hear.
Steve:
Lang chain is another thing where you can actually stitch together conversations, which allows more contextual referencing of the AI, and I won’t bore the details unless we get into it. Or vector databases, which allow a lot more scanning of you know, internal data sources. So imagine everything at Helium 10, all of that knowledge baked into one Vector database, whether it’s videos, audio, text, right? You could even have, you know, word and Excel whatever you wanted. And then this thing, you can just chat with it about what do I need to know about Helium 10 internal or external, or the tool, or, you know, an individual product extraordinarily powerful. So Baby AGI has now several iterations, and AutoGPT will take that tool, that hammering process and turn it into, gosh, I’ve got a little bot that’s running around doing this for me, without being a API driven, without being Zapier driven.
Steve:
It’s just like, Hey, go in, check this inbox, and then, you know, start to create replies. You can put in a human layer of validation if you wish, until you feel comfortable with it. But at a certain point you’ll go, yeah, this thing is just gonna go to, you know, this software, it’s gonna grab these stats, it’s gonna add ’em to this, you know, database or spreadsheet, and then it’s gonna carry on with its life. Eliminating a lot of this what I would call low value add work. And that’s that it means the people can be augmented and their capabilities extended into more value add work.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Interesting. Now, you mentioned, you know, systems, and then you also mentioned the outset here of what you were just talking about you know, the SOPs. You know, this video you had sent me about I think it’s called, SOP Box you, you had this like kind of cool flow where I’m assuming that, hey, this is like, Hey, I’m an Amazon seller. I need to, to make sure that I’m not the only person in my company who knows how to do this. I hire, you know, staff instead of, you know, taking a full day to write out you know, some crazy PowerPoint with a million screenshots that for, for every single process that we do, you found a way that that can kind of like, make this a, a quicker process. Can you walk us through fir first of all, tell us what that program is, and maybe walk us through a sample, a sample process that we could create?
Steve:
Yeah. So first it is so exciting to me because like I say, I hate the blank page. And really every time I’m at an event and I talk to sellers and they talk about some problem, often it’s, you know, HR related or something broke, or some system, you know, failed. And I’m like, well, where’s it written down? Well, you know, I made a video about it, or, you know, I haven’t got there yet. Like, the original sin is the, the lack of creation, right? And so we want to, we want to eliminate that and allow people to document with simplicity, like super easy. So literally just about anything that is public facing. And, and by the way, this works on the, the ChatGPTs or even Bard to a lesser extent, Bard is not quite as sophisticated at this moment, but it’s coming for chat g B t quick.
Steve:
You can just type in, you know, how to add you know, an item or how to delete this or how to do, you know, whatever function you’re trying to do. And if it’s a public facing documentation, there’s a high probability the system will just give you a step by step process. We take it a step further from that documentation, and we add process, and we say, you know what? If you’re closing your books once a month, that’s a checklist of eight or 10 steps. Let’s link the, SOP what for the new people who don’t know what, how to do it, but the existing people, they just need a checklist and they need to be reminded. So we set recurring schedules that becomes, you know, so document and then process. The operationalization is where the payoff is. Now you have accountability. You’ve made life easier for everybody who works in the company because all of these processes can be shared amongst, you know, the entire company and assigned to individuals.
Steve:
So the payoff in management, and for founders, we, we often lose sight of this cuz we’re like, it’s in my head, I, I see how it should be done. The payoff is accountability, like reports that show, yeah, here’s what happened. Here’s how productive, here’s the variance on this task between team members or between, you know, each individual day. That is it’s a powerful thing. So systems are so necessary, especially as we head into times that are maybe uncertain financially. We gotta get tight and we gotta have our processes down. So having this kind of baseline is really important in my opinion.
Bradley Sutton:
What about imaging? Like, what are, you know, be it MidJourney, be it, be it something else. What can Amazon sellers do? Cause when some of these, like DALL-E first came out, you know, like, you can’t even make a human face. It was like a months, it reminded me of the goo the Goonies movie. What was his name? The, the guy, the, Hey you guys from the Goonies. You know what I’m talking about. But that’s like how, how the, you know, when it tried to create humans, that that’s how it would look. But where are we now here in the middle of 2023 with how Amazon sellers can use AI on the imaging side? Like, like, are we at the point where we can go ahead and start creating some lifestyle images or, or perhaps even parts of a plus content or, or creating Amazon post? Where, where are we at
Steve:
For sure? We’re not a hundred percent there, but we are, well, on our way. within a year, almost everything that you do, you can do with the AI assist, right? Obviously you need your product to be able to be, you know, some base photography that is going to then be inserted into lifestyle or, or what have you. But the complexity and the geometry that has advanced just in the past, you know, six weeks is unbelievably good. And the, the level of complexity there, there’s still errors. Let’s not kid ourselves, but sure. I’m always of the, I like to look ahead, right? What’s coming, because if that trend, and, and this is again, not a Beanie Baby trend, this is a life is changing trend. If that trend is gonna get better and more sophisticated, I’ll get good at it now.
Steve:
And then a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, I’ll be well poised to maximize it. And I can say unequivocally, whether it’s MidJourney or stability AI, these are diffusion engines that are exceptional and for sure for social content, you can make spectacular images, certainly lifestyle images. And by the way, you know, sellers forget that, you know, we think the star of the show is the product, right? That’s, yeah. Because we’re egocentric or, you know, we just wanna make the sale, right? And that’s fine mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but the customers couldn’t care less about our logo. They couldn’t care less about really the product you know, how it looks. They want the benefit that the product gives ’em. So imagery should be, you know, the, the product is a, you know, I use this, and then I felt like that.
Steve:
And so that’s where you want your imagery to, you know, start to move to that emotion that, you know, evoking of, you know what, I used to hate going camping, and now I have this particular you know, tool or, you know, tent or whatever the, the product is now my life is, is pleasant. So I’ve got this beautiful sunset photo of, you know, a tent over, you know, the mountainside or whatever it is. All of these can be created. Text to image is spectacularly powerful. We use MidJourney constantly. And when it comes to Amazon posts or any social, I would say spectacular results in fact, my, my one of my kids, my son is starting a business and they’re going to have, you know, basically an entire AI setup to create multiple daily posts that are kind of brand-centric.
Steve:
So you train the AI about your brand, here’s our values, here’s our product selection, here’s all the things about it. And this is a really important part of the framework, by the way, in ChatGPT, if you train your brand or train a conversation about your brand, and then start asking the, the the AI about your brand and say, well, you know, what’s a good elevator pitch for this brand? What would be some good target markets for this brand? What’s a good avatar within that target market? You can then start to realize, oh you know, this particular avatar, they don’t care that my teapot, you know, is made of stainless steel, grade number 39, whatever, they care that the tea comes out hot, right? Yeah. And I have a pleasant morning. And so you make that the focus and AI is well equipped to deliver all of that and much more including you know, photo studio level replacement, frankly.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. What else? What’s some specific things that, that somebody, like, somebody listening to this right now, you know, without having to go and, and, you know, learn how to do something for one week, but they could literally hop off this podcast, sign up for something, you know, and then within one hour they’re gonna have this result. Like what should an Amazon seller right now do? Like which one should they, should they start with right now? Should it be ChatGPT? And then can you give them like, some homework? I want everybody listening to this like, to take what Steve is gonna tell you. And this is something that can bring your Amazon business value and, and it’ll, you’ll be able to do it within one hour of listening to this. Is can you, can you, I’m putting you on the spot here.
Steve:
Oh, no problem.
Bradley Sutton:
Can you think of something?
Steve:
Absolutely. So let’s talk about, so every seller should be building a list, an email list, right? This is something that it’s a little harder to do on Amazon, but with the, the right methodology and, and certainly, you know, broadening into other channels, you can get an email list regardless of how big that list is. You do not need a 10,000 or a hundred thousand person list to start interacting with your customers, right? So it doesn’t matter if it’s 50 or a hundred or 500, let’s get that thing going, but use the AI to get smart about it. So one idea, right? And I like to RnD stuff Bradley, you’re probably familiar with the term r and d in the traditional sense, which is fine, which means research and development. In my world, it means rip off and duplicate.
Steve:
So let’s get to it. That’s how we do it. So, okay, the first thing, you can go to ChatGPT and just type in, you know, what are some well known effective frameworks for email marketing, right? Instead of us writing the emails, let’s get some frameworks, and it will bring back things like ADA and BAB and Pass, and it’ll explain what those are, which is essentially like, Hey, we, you know, ADA’s, attention, interest, desire, and action. So when you say, I wanna write an email in the ADA framework, it’s going to follow that framework, right? And that, that gives you, you know, kind of the, the baseline. Like, how are we gonna structure these emails? We’re gonna use one of the, the blueprints that we’re familiar with. The second is, you know, hey, what’s a good target audience for, I, I like to use the example of garden hoses, right?
Steve:
Who are customer audiences for garden hoses? And it will tell you, Hey, you know, you got your people who own homes, they’re homeowners, right? You got your garden enthusiasts, you got your, you do it yourselfers and you know, pet owners and commercial customers. It’s going to tell you the types of customer segments. And as I mentioned earlier, a great idea then is like, well, what’s a, a great customer avatar for a garden enthusiast? Give me, gimme that avatar, and it will give you chapter and verse, you know, here’s a name, here’s an age, here’s, you know where they’re located and what’s their occupation? And, you know, what are their interests? What are their goals and challenges? And this is a really important point about marketing. We get, I would say distracted by the simplicity of search term sale, right?
Steve:
That kind of the Amazon method. But as we all evolve and make no mistake whether, whether or not we think we’re evolving, the marketplace is evolving, right? And the sophistication of our competition is evolving, by the way, your competitors that used to struggle with, let’s say, you know, native language in the, in the home market, whether it’s German or Spanish or English, they no longer have that problem because AI is really good at language. Really good at language. So literally, you can type in, let’s just use Mandarin as an example. You can type in, you know, what is the English way to make, you know, actually do all the conversation I just mentioned Mandarin, and then say, now write an English email that accomplishes as objective. So really, really high use case across the world. So anyway, once you have that avatar, then you might say, okay, now give me a logical email sequence over the next six months to take a cold lead who is a garden enthusiast and meets this avatar, and then turn them into a rabbit fan.
Steve:
And it will literally give you a six month plan, you know, month by month, you know, week by week, here’s what we’re gonna start doing. And then you start creating emails for each of those parts of the sequence. And, and obviously the next thing you can simply say is, you know one of the things I like to do is I like to learn from the great. So I would next say something like, who are the 10 top direct response marketeers of all time, right? Technically they’re marketers, but I’m a Disney fan, so I call ’em marketeers, but it’ll come back with a list like Dan Kennedy and David Ogilvy and Claude Hopkins and, and all the greats. And then you just pick a voice and you go, you know what? In the voice of David Ogilvy, write a cold email for the introduction to my brand.
Steve:
You know, we’ll just call it hose guy from the founder, you know, Luke Skywalker, and use the BAB framework, and it will write that perfectly even if there’s a small, you know, edit here or there, it’s far superior than the average output that I’ve seen. So that’s kind of an RnD case study. And by the way, you do the same thing. Give me 10 email headlines with emojis, and now you have everything, right? You’ve got all of your emails, you’ve got all of your planning, you’ve got your avatars, you’re, you’re now a marketing, you, you just became a CMO or the bot, the AI became the CMO.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. I like it. Alright. What else can you, can you talk about? So like some, some, some of this stuff I’m so new, I don’t even know the questions to ask because like, I’m not even sure what’s, what’s possible. So like, everything you’re telling me is all education to me, as I’m sure it is for much of our audience. So what should I be asking? Like what should we be talking about here along these lines of ai?
Steve:
Well, I’ll give you two things. There’s one is that I like to say it’s all in the prompt. So if you conjure up your favorite Happy Gilmore scene, it’s all in the prompt. It’s all in the prompt. He had a funny scene. And my, my message to you is that the more sophisticated your prompt is, the better your output is. So, and when I started programming computers when I was 12 years old, the seventh grade teacher said, garbage in, garbage out. They taught us the acronym giggle. And so if you have typed in prompts and you got garbage back, it was probably a garbage prompt, frankly. So how do you advance the prompt? And the answer is, you just start thinking about it as a formula. You know, like, Hey, please generate this type of content, right? Twitter post for my target audience, right?
Steve:
Whether it’s an avatar or a general audience that highlights the benefits of my blank and encourages them to take this whatever desired action, right? So it’s, it’s a formulaic approach to prompting, and this, this applies to anything, you know, can you create a you know, email or blog post that addresses the common pain points of a garden enthusiast and positions my hose guy product as the solution. The best part of this, and I, I referenced it earlier, but I wanna be sure you guys are clear about it. If you create a conversation in GPT 4, that conversation thinks back or remembers all the prior parts of that conversation. So each conversation, you start, you should be appending with a mission. You know, AI is just a giant auto suggest. It actually has no intelligence. The more, just like on Amazon or Google, the more characters you type in, it keeps trying to fill in what it thinks you’re going for.
Steve:
And that’s all AI is. It’s a giant auto suggest. So the more in the prompt you’re extending, the more precise and the more deliberate those results will be because you’ve given it more to work with. And the more you consider that auto suggest is, is not actual intelligence, it’s just kind of a database of knowledge, and it’s, it’s on a bell curve, like, like anything else, right? The fringe data’s ignored, and it’s delivering the bulk of what it considers the available data, not it, it can’t score whether it’s right or wrong. Yeah. It goes, most people say this. So if you have a, a product that goes against the, the flow, you may often get bad replies from from ai, but does that help you kind of see where I’m headed that way? Yeah,
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Speaking of bad results, speaking of hallucinations and different things, what, what are some ways to prevent this? What are some some common mistakes that you’ve seen people make with AI where they probably get frustrated? Oh, this is useless, but No, it’s, it’s because you’re the useless person. You’re the one who’s doing something wrong. So like, what are some common mistakes of newbies who are getting into AI and how can we avoid them?
Steve:
Well, it’s funny because I have this conversation frequently because people have used it once or twice, and they’re like, e even myself, I, I had it, I just went to chat GBT and I said, give me a bio for Steve Simonson, and I might have even included the word entrepreneur. And it came back and it said, you know Steve’s a founder of, you know e-commerce companies and a speaker and an author, and went on. And I’m like, okay, so far it’s not terrible. Although the author feels a little weird. And then it gave the birth date, it’s, which was wrong, every part of it. And then it gave two books that I had written, which I have not written, nor do the books exist. And it gave me some lifetime award from some organization that although I’ve heard of the organization, I’m unaware of receiving such award.
Steve:
So that that prompt was not enough. Now, the more I augmented that prompt with certain details, it got better. But my message to most everybody right now is the hallucinations exist not because of things that we can control. It’s just because the data set is so large and not yet well refined. The more an individual conversation becomes granular and precise, like you could say, no, that is not right. Stop using that information again, just in this conversation. Here’s the facts, then it will use those facts. But it does not like permeate through the rest of the internet, right? That’s not how it works. Yeah. So I, I would encourage people to be patient. I would say that like doing a prompt, which is like a linear thing where you type in something and the thing comes back to you. Amazing stuff.
Steve:
By the way, there’s a site, forgive me because I don’t remember the exact address, but there’s a site, you can just go have conversations where you speak into your computer, and then the bot speaks back with the personality and voice of these celebrities. So there’s John F. Kennedy, there’s Elon Musk, and they really are different conversations. John f Kennedy’s, you know, polite very political, right? Elon Musk, I ask it like, what are your hobbies? And it’s like, you don’t have a better question than that. Come on, I’m a busy guy, right? So, yeah, yeah. Crazy, crazy iterations of, you know, these, these personalities that you can train. And one, one that I wanted to share with you, Bradley, in terms of a workflow, and it, I think it applies to any marketeer, okay? So anybody who creates content for video purposes or for audio purposes, you have a big library or potentially have a big library of audio content.
Steve:
And by the way, it doesn’t matter if that content is in French or German or Spanish or Urdu or any number of other languages, you can take using a, an open AI tool called Whisper. You can take that content in with transcribing and effic efficiency and effectiveness that is beyond compare. There, there are a lot of transcription tools in the past that flatly sucked, right? They were 90 mm-hmm. <Affirmative> percent, and that was better than nothing. But this is like 99%. And if you go to the Whisper examples, you’ll hear a guy in Scotland speaking in English, and I can barely understand the guy, and I certainly can’t understand all his words, but they, it nails it. There’s another guy speaking in French, and it nails it all to English transcription, by the way. Even a K-pop song that they, they transcribe and it, it shows you both the Korean and English words and it transcribes it.
Steve:
So this tool called Whisper takes all of that audio content, makes a transcription of it. Now you’ve got that in your database. You put that wherever you store your files, and now you can say, you know, write me a blog article about that. Write me a summary of that, you know, maybe if it’s a a longer complex thing, write me an ebook outline and then write me an ebook about that. You could also say you know, write me a blog in English. Write me a blog in French, write me a blog in Spanish, right? And, and really powerfully take what I call industrial scale marketing content and make it into a workflow. And by the way, we’re, we’re all about putting that in our system. So we, we don’t have to do this individually, we just drop files like wisp the whisper function. We drop a bunch of files in a folder, and it will then run the transcriptions, and then we can go in and say, I wanna run summaries or blogs or e-books or whatever off of all of these files. And that’s the way I want you guys to think, right? It’s always a workflow. What’s the input, what’s the processing? And then what are the potential outputs?
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. I’m gonna ask you you know, for your 60-second tip in a little bit, and, and also get your top favorite AI tools that people don’t know about or people are not using. But before we do that, something new I’m doing on the podcast this year, and you know, I ask all the guests you know, me having health issues last year and, and, and having to be more you know, top of mind and people having mental health issues, you know, during covid and stuff. Like, I ask all the guests, what are you doing to like, stay mentally and physically healthy? Like, what’s your habits, if at all? What’s your hobbies, when you, your favorite hobbies for when you want to, you know, step out of the daily grind of, of work?
Steve:
Well, it’s so I’ve also had a little bit of a health run in you know, a few years back. And the, the moment somebody tells you have stage four cancer, you kind of wake up and go, oh, yeah, I’m not a fan. I I basically just said, you know I don’t feel it. I don’t have any problems. I’m gonna carry on and do what I gotta do. Luckily, after a year or so of chemo, I’m basically clear, and all the people ask me all the time, they’re like, well, how did that change? Or How did that, it’s like, it didn’t change me, per se, but it made me more grateful. It made me more aware of our own mortality. Like, I didn’t, I didn’t wanna die yet, and I wanted my death to be random.
Steve:
Right. And I, I wish everybody to have a random death knowing that you’re marching towards this particular deadline, not awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I, you know, I love to get out and I you know, when I work out, I like to listen to podcasts. That’s a hobby. Cool. Every Friday night I play Battlefield 4 with my brothers and friends. Anybody wants to jump on the Xbox? We love to shoot each other. And it’s a complete disengagement. There’s no way to think about anything except running for your life and not getting shot or even worse, stabbed by your friends. And then they replay that animation over and over, over. So I highly recommend some sort of thing that disengages your brain, cuz even at night, my brain is still going full tilt.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, cool. Cool. All right. Now what about your, you know, top three outside of ChatGPT, MidJourney, the ones we’ve mentioned today? You mentioned a few more Whisper and others three more that people should maybe go, go out and take a look at, see if there’s something there that interests them.
Steve:
Well, I definitely, again, for people, especially when you’re trying to create content or take existing content and leverage it into other areas. So for example, long form YouTube content, you can use an AI called Munch that will then break those and make ’em into shorts, and it will even, you know, break in and put in the the appropriate wording and allow you to, you know, select different break points. But mo it’ll start with an automation. It’s like, here’s what I recommend. So Munch will actually take that long form content and start creating social media shorts or TikTok style real style videos, great tool. Another one similar in function called opus.pro. My friend Jamie Davidson told me about Opus Pro, and it’s similar to Munch, but it actually comes up with a score. So you can go to opus.pro, put in a YouTube, and it will, you know, take maybe 10 minutes to process, depending on the length, and it’ll come back and it goes, this score is the best and here are what the highlights are.
Steve:
You know, here’s the hook, here’s the action. And it’s quite amazing. And again, for me, leveraging existing assets is hugely important. I mentioned elevenlabs.io. I wanna reiterate that using voice, having voice read in a hu more human way, ironically, from written content is extraordinarily powerful. So imagine using ChatGPT to create blogs, but you might even say, you know, I want this to be a narrative blog that’s gonna be read aloud, and it will then modify the format, and then you have that voice read it. You could again, start a podcast like ElevenLabs did their podcast is doing really well because it sounds, well, mostly it’s a novelty, I’ll be honest with you. That’s why people are listening now. But it sounds real enough that people don’t feel like they’re being tricked. And as long as the quality content is good, you know, it, it’s adequate, you feels good to listen to it without being tricked into it, dealing with a bot.
Steve:
Honestly, there’s so many. The other one I mentioned earlier, but II should reiterate is AutoGPT, this will, this will change the world when it matures a bit. So I, I mentioned SOPs and having the idea of having an SOP written for you or having a checklist written for you that’s cool. But having the AutoGPT, where you can just go into that SOPand you go, you know what, I’m gonna make this a bot driven function, and then the bot just reads the instructions and goes and does it, you know, based on how granular the details are, that’s, that’s where we’re heading. And so, AutoGPT,s not necessary for people to try to deploy on their own, but certainly something that they can I, I think get some benefits from if you follow. Cool.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Now, bef before we get into our, your your 30-second tip for everybody can you, you know, I’m sure people have many more questions or they might wanna learn more from you. How can people find you on the interwebs out there to, to perhaps reach out to get some more help on this?
Steve:
Yeah, I think the best way you know, is if they go to the, the Twitters I think that’s how they call it, the Twitters. I’m at Steve Simonson that’s also me on YouTube. I think it’s also me on Instagram. I don’t get into the social media as very often because I’m just, I don’t have the time frankly, or the interest. But I, you know, anytime somebody finds me, whether it’s on messenger or WhatsApp or you know even YouTube or Twitter, then I try to, you know, I try to help entrepreneurs. Like, I love entrepreneurs, not like people say they love cheese pizza. Like, I love entrepreneurs. I want every entrepreneur who’s really risking it all. I want to try to, you know, help them and pay it forward if I can.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. I love it. Love it. Alright, 30-second tip strategy for everybody.
Steve:
So my, my primary strategy would be to go in and train a ChatGPT four conversation by copying and pasting all the MidJourney documentation. So essentially you go to MidJourney, you find the documentation, you copy and paste that to, let’s just say a text file. And then you go to ChatGPT in a singular conversation and you paste each of those training points. You then find some of the, the best prompts that you can find on the MidJourney Discord, which you can see the format of some of these prompts. They will, you know, they’re public unless you click the stealth mode, which I like to use that’s a secondary inside tip. Use stealth to avoid the secrets, but for all the people who are doing it in public, take your best prompts that include things like cameras, filters, shutter speed, lighting settings, environments, and then structure a couple example prompts, copy and paste those in as well.
Steve:
And then you can take a, a basic prompt like Baby Penguin and it will ChatGPT will turn it into like a, a mini paragraph of just deliciously rich, descriptive prompting. And you paste that into mid journey and your level of outputs will be absolutely superhuman. And that’s, that’s you know, that was one of our first blueprints that applies not just to mid journey, but to anything, you know, train that conversation and then keep, keep going back to it. You type in a simple, let’s just call it human prompt and a superhuman prompt comes back
Bradley Sutton:
Marvel or DC superhuman?
Steve:
Well, you can decide, I’m not decide the religious war over here. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
That, that’s some fighting words for some here. Okay.
Steve:
Right.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Well, well, Steve, this is, this has been great. I guess next time I don’t even have to bring you on the podcast. I’ll get your voice clone and ask it some, some questions if it’s been trained properly. And then we can, we can have Steve Animals every week without even you physically having to be here. So but, but thanks, you know, seriously, thanks, thanks for all the, this information. I’ve learned a lot and I’m, I’m gonna be, shoot, I’m, I might try and use some of that to start transcribing our own podcast cuz we’re paying this other service that I think is too expensive. And so, like, you might have just given me some some great tips there, but I think, I know everybody’s got some great tips. So thank you very much Steven, and we’ll definitely be in touch and I look forward to seeing you at some of these events. This summer we’re going to Bali and you’ll be in Puerto Rico too for a Billion Dollar Summit, correct? Man, we’re gonna be following each other all over the place.
Steve:
I dig it. Yeah. Well, we can do this AI stuff live and it is spectacular.
Bradley Sutton:
Love it. All right, we’ll see you there.
Steve:
Take care.
In this episode, we cover the latest news in Amazon and Walmart. We dive into Amazon’s small business report, listen to an inspiring interview, and check out a cool Insights Dashboard feature.
Join us in this episode of SSP, where we listen to the stories of two Serious Sellers Club members, Sean Lonergan and Dana Midkiff, two highly successful Amazon entrepreneurs who have made their mark on the e-commerce world. Discover how they found success selling in Amazon Europe and selling handmade products across multiple marketplaces, making nearly 8-figures and multi 7-figures a year in their respective Amazon businesses.
Tune in to learn their unique strategies and insights in this inspiring episode filled with wisdom and actionable advice.
In episode 458 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Dana, and Sean discuss:
- 01:41 – The Serious Sellers Club
- 02:11 – Sean Lonergan’s Backstory
- 05:09 – Selling A Garlic Press As A First Product
- 07:21 – Dana’s Backstory
- 10:34 – Started In Etsy 10 Years Ago
- 12:39 – Finding Success Expanding To Amazon Europe
- 16:28 – Making Almost 8-Figures A Year
- 17:43 – How To Get Into Amazon Handmade
- 19:37 – Selling Handmade Products In Multiple Marketplaces
- 21:52 – Making Multi 7-Figures From Handmade Products
- 24:37 – Unique Strategies From Sean And Dana
- 27:37 – Are Handmade Products A Good First Product?
- 31:06 – Sean and Dana’s Favorite Helium 10 Tools
- 32:26 – Healthy Habits And Hobbies Of Sean And Dana
- 34:31 – How To Reach Out To Sean And Dana
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got two sellers from opposite sides of the world who both have sold multiple millions of dollars online but in completely different ways. One started with the most cliche Amazon product ever, and now mainly sells actually on Amazon Germany, and the other produces all of our products and sells in the Amazon handmade category. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think
Bradley Sutton:
Helium 10’s got over 40 tools for e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know how overwhelming it might seem to try and figure out how you’re gonna learn how to use everything, or maybe even to know which ones you wanna get started with. So for a completely free course that’s gonna guide you through learning everything you need in order to become a Helium 10 expert, visit the Helium 10 Academy. That is h10.me/academy. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a couple of serious sellers from the Serious Sellers Club here with us for the first time on this show today, we got Sean and Dana. How’s it going?
Sean:
Yeah, very well. All good from this end?
Dana:
Same. Doing great.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent. All right. Well, I never at least as far as I know, I have a bad memory, but I don’t think I’ve ever talked to you guys in person or had one-on-one calls or anything. So we are gonna just completely learn about you guys from the Scratch. You know, this all came from a post I did, and we have a private Serious Sellers Club Facebook group, and that’s where we have six, seven, and eight-figure sellers. And, I was like, Hey guys, I’m looking for some new people to come on the podcast. You know, just, by being in this club, I already know that they have verified revenue with Helium 10, otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to be in the club. So I didn’t, I don’t have to, I didn’t have to do too much of a background check here. I was like, you know what? The background check we are gonna do live on the air. So let’s start with Sean. Where are you all calling in from right now?
Sean:
I’m in a city called Alicante, which is about three hours south of Madrid.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Yeah. I’ve heard of I’ve heard of that. Have I been there? I’m not sure. I’ve been to Madrid, Barcelona, you know, many times, but not sure if I’ve been there. I know that they have a good soccer or football team down over there as well. Now, where were you born and raised?
Sean:
So, I’m originally Irish, and I spent the first half of my life living there. And then I moved to the UK and spent quite a few years there. And I’ve been in Spain since July 2020.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Did you go to university in Ireland or UK?
Sean:
No, I didn’t. I was always one of these kids that university just wasn’t for me. I couldn’t wait to get outta school. I love school. So I was very lucky. Well, when I went to the UK I got a job with the US Bank, Citigroup, and I was with them for about 25 years. I quite enjoyed working there and moved up the ladder. So and then I left the city and started a domestic cleaning business.
Bradley Sutton:
What prompted that? Just looking for something different than corporate life, or?
Sean:
Yeah, I mean, corporate life became very much of a tick-box exercise where you were just constantly making sure that you are compliant with everything and it was a very slow mover for obvious reasons. And I was sort of counting down the days to retirement, and then I thought, you know what? This is wasting life. So one day I just decided that’s it, I’m gonna go and so I didn’t spend any time thinking about it. And I asked for redundancy and they said no. So I begged them for redundancy, and they give it to me. And I started a cleaning company for a couple of years, and that was quite difficult, but it was a good introduction to business. About 18 months into that, somebody introduced me to selling on Amazon, and I thought, this is ideal for me. It ticks all the boxes. So I started my first business, I think in 2016.
Bradley Sutton:
And was that in Amazon USA? Europe?
Sean:
Yeah. I mean, I was one of the Amazing Selling Machines, ASM, I think it was. And it’s like I didn’t know what I was doing. My first business wasn’t very successful.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m assuming that from what you’re saying, you’re not still selling that same product, that was your first no, no. Can you tell us what it was then?
Sean:
Yeah. I mean, my very first product was a garlic press.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you serious? It almost sounds like I was setting that up, but I had, I literally had no idea, but I just had a feeling it might be something cool. A garlic press. Like that would be like, if I was like, yeah, I was selling collagen peptides and over there. That’s classic.
Sean:
Yeah. It’s a slightly different model to what’s available, and it did okay. But it was never going to go crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And then I, but, but
Bradley Sutton:
You learned from the experience. I’m sure.
Sean:
I learned about branding because I had several different products under the same brand, which of course, is the absolute wrong thing to do. I also, you know, was a bit unlucky in the sense that a few of my shipments got lost coming from China, and I never got reimbursed for that. And that really didn’t help the cash flow. So I had a lot of headwinds. But the most important thing was that you know, I learned a lot and everything I learned then I use, we were using in the business that I have today.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. We’re gonna come back to you a little bit, but that’s we’re gonna pause right there 2016 and, and garlic presses. Dana, what about you? Where are you calling us from?
Dana:
I am just south of Louisville, Kentucky.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Excellent. I actually just have a new hat of an I don’t have it here with me, but if I think there’s a minor-league baseball team around there called the Louisville Bats or something like that. Yeah. And I got the hat because it says LB like our listing builder tool. So like the next time I do a listing builder video. So anyways if I visit that area, you’ll have to take me to one of those. I love minor league baseball and, and just random sports at different things. Anyways, we’re not here to talk about that. But is that where you’re born and raised? And saved your whole life? And what about you? What about did you go the college path or did you enter work? Or what did you do after high school?
Dana:
I very much went the college path to the extent of becoming an accountant. I actually got my CPA license, so I did that extremely difficult test. Did it all, did taxes and audits for many years.
Bradley Sutton:
Where did you go to college? Where did you get that training?
Dana:
The University of Louisville.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Hold on. Is that the Cardinals? Ah, there we go, guys. See, I’m doing good with my sports teams today. All right. So, so actually started working in the field that you went to college once. Yep. Sounds like that should be normal, but like nine times outta 10, I think people can say that. And what about you? Like what brought you out of that field? Or what made you start thinking about e-commerce?
Dana:
Yeah, so I mean, the world tells you to fit that box. And so mom wasn’t a 25 year journey or anything. I had been in it at about seven years, but I had a family at home, and if you’re familiar with anybody who’s done and worked in the accounting world inside of taxis, and like, I negotiated my way into 60 hours a week for that timeframe, where everyone else had to do way more than that. Like that was my, Hey, I’ve got kids at home, can I only do 60? And it just year after year, that just became it. It just, I felt like there was something that I could have more control over. I didn’t, that’s not really why I started to make my craft, but it quickly became like, okay, if I decide to do this I could have a little more control over when I work and when I don’t. Or I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m still working, but it’s under my thumb. And so it was a gradual, I’ve been in business for 10 years, so.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So 10 years ago you started to make this shift. Now, was it something you started in the beginning, just you know, like in those few off hours, out, out outside of those 60? Or did you, you know quit cold Turkey and just like, oh no, said I’m gonna start something new?
Dana:
No, it was the majority of my business until I quit until I actually quit the corporate grind. I did both for four years overlap. So until I quit, the entire business was built between 9:00 PM and midnight. My employees were all moms and we were all friends. And as soon as our kids went to bed, we all came to my basement and made products.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Like others you know, all these husbands in Louisville are like, where’s her wives going at 10 o’clock? And now I’m going to my friend’s house in the basement. Sure, you are, but you guys actually were.
Dana:
What’s more questionable, cuz we work with a lot of glitters also, so you would come home at 1:00 AM and it’s like, all right, I swear we’re working.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Okay. Now you said at the beginning, like, wait, what, 10 years ago, was Etsy a thing 10 years ago? Yeah. Okay. So you started on Etsy and, and going to local places. How, how did you guys decide like, I guess what we call an Amazon nowadays product research? Like, like how did you decide on your first products? I’m assuming it wasn’t a garlic press, but like how did you decide what you would produce and why did you pick it? Like how did you know there was demand and stuff like that?
Dana:
It was, honestly, it’s a totally different conversation when you talk to somebody who crafts. And I hate saying craft cuz like, that’s not what I do. I run a, a stupidly large business. But it’s, it’s, you don’t usually approach it like doing product research, it’s usually like, Hey, this looks really fun. And then a bunch of people are like, Hey, I wanna buy that. And then it just kind of becomes a thing. So it’s less of knowing where you’re going first and, and more of, okay, this is becoming a thing. So it’s a whole different conversation when you talk to somebody who’s kind of sourced and done all their research before they ever drop a dollar. I was just going to Hobby Lobby and buying a bunch of stuff and seeing what happened.
Bradley Sutton:
And it was fairly profitable for you from the get-go.
Dana:
Yep.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Now, what year did you decide to give Amazon a try?
Dana:
Well, I won it on Amazon for a long time, but we don’t really fit the mold of that. And so it didn’t really become a thing until they opened Handmade in October of 2015.
Bradley Sutton:
2015. All right.
Dana:
When they opened that category and I was one of the first ones there. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Now before then. What did you get your sales up to, like on other platforms? Out outside of Amazon?
Dana:
We have multi-six figures between all of our other avenues. But that was a lot of grind. Some of it, I mean a large portion of that was Etsy. But it was, it was in person, it was wholesale, it was all kinds of avenues.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. And it was like, it was a company that was run by you and all your other mom friends that you were Yes. You’re referring to there. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. All right, let’s switch back to Sean now. So 2016, you made the garlic press, probably didn’t make too much money if at all, but learned a lot and what did you pivot to? And like, you know, I’m assuming you actually like, Hey, you know what? I need to find a product that’s not saturated, or I need to, you know, figure something else out. But I definitely like this Amazon thing, so, so tell me about how 2016-2017 worked out for you.
Sean:
Yeah, I mean, I think looking back on it I didn’t really have a plan. I probably had my head in the sand a little bit and sort of hoping that sales would pick up rather than, you know, just facing that it’s an issue and you know fighting it head on. But I tried some other products and again, they had you know, they didn’t do very well. I mean, I expanded to Europe as well and you know, that basically, you know, kept me going, but it was never going to take off. So it was just by pure accident. When I was on a forum, I was one of the few sellers on there that was selling in Europe, and most people didn’t know how to navigate VAT in Europe and, and so forth in the various countries.
Sean:
And I had done quite a lot of research on that. And a lady from Slovenia contacted me and said, she was selling in the US as well with her brand, but she wanted to expand Europe, but she needed some help with registering in the VAT and so forth. So I helped her and then she said, you know, is there anything I can do to help you? And she helped me. She’s basically a superb designer. She has an eye for detail that no other human being on earth has. And she started helping me and then, you know, we both became very familiar with each other’s businesses. And then in 2018 five years ago tomorrow she said, you know, defensive doing something together. And I said, yeah, why not? And we found a product and it was just for the UK very quickly.
Sean:
We found a product very quickly. We sort of estimated that we would get 30 sales a day globally in the whole year round. But the product just took off immediately and with no PPC, no reviews, no advertising. And you know, after I think about eight months or something, it was doing like 1200. Well one day I did 1200 units a day in Germany. It was very different to our competitors. And she had another business, which then she exited that business and we worked on this full-time. And we found that her skillset and my skillset were the complete opposite. And you know, the designing the product, picking and images, videos, and everything, she took care of all of that. And I did the logistics, the ranking, inventory, and so forth until we got to a stage where, where we couldn’t cope, we had a couple of VAs that were a bit of a disaster because they’re very task based as opposed to showing initiative. And in the middle of 2021, I think it was, we decided that we would either sell the business or we would expand by investing in getting some good people on board. And we took the latter and the business then took off. And that’s sort of where we are today.
Bradley Sutton:
So what was your best year since now you’re doing this joint venture with somebody else, like, was it last year? Was it 2021?
Sean:
No, we’ve doubled every year.
Bradley Sutton:
So 2022 was your best year? Yeah,
Sean:
So I mean, our year-end is the end of May, so we were like 120% up in the last 12 months.
Bradley Sutton:
So if you combine all your marketplaces, and gross sales, what was it about in dollars, roughly?
Sean:
How much in dollars?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah.
Sean:
Oh, the total, I don’t know, but we did get up to a million dollars one month. So I would say seven or 800,000 maybe over you know, balance to balance out over the year per month. So
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So getting closer to eight figures in other words.
Sean:
Yeah, I mean, one thing we did was like, we had a lot of stockouts and it should, as you know, kill you, but by bringing somebody on board who knows exactly what they’re doing we haven’t been able to stock for one product for the last 15 months, I think, and that’s made a huge difference.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Sean:
So, and you know, launching in the US as well as we’re starting to gain some traction there.
Bradley Sutton:
Is Germany still your number one marketplace revenue-wise?
Sean:
Yeah, Germany’s by far the biggest okay. Germany and the US is a distant second, and then maybe France and the UK are probably next, so.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Cool. Now back to Dana here. Why don’t you let everybody know what are the requirements for Amazon Handmade? You know, like, like, I can’t or maybe I can, you know, like with my coffin shelf, you know, could I technically get on on Amazon Handmade, or what do they make you sign or what is the terms of service of being able to list your product in Amazon Handmade?
Dana:
Yeah, so it’s a juried category, so you have to like, fill out an application. And so part of that application is stating whether or not you make your products or what percentage of the products are made by you. So you can, like I have people who ask me all the time, they’re like, well, I have a laser machine cause my laser’s the one who’s actually cutting it. And I’m like, okay, that still applies. But you have to verify or when I say verify you have to answer the question as to how many employees, basically they wanna know how big you are because they kind of don’t want you to be too big. It is a small business category, and when you get to the place of needing 50 employees or whatever it would be to produce your product, it’s no longer handmade.
Dana:
And so they do some verification inside of some accounts periodically. I’ve never had it done on mine, but I coach a lot of other people who sell handmade, and if you have an item that you’re selling in handmade that’s easily reproducible with Chinese sellers or something, they’ll get that question a lot. Where they will basically have to do a video call with Handmade and show them they wanna see you in your workspace and your scenario to prove that you’re still supposed to be in that category. So there’s no real rhyme or reason, but I’ve seen enough people go through it to see that some of the categories inside handmade that they will kind of pinpoint just to make sure it’s not somebody who’s gotten in who ha, who shouldn’t have.
Bradley Sutton:
Now are you still continuing to sell on Etsy and other platforms as well?
Dana:
We do. We’re a brand in general, so we do a lot on Shopify. Any traffic that we drive ourselves is all done through through our own website and stuff. But Amazon’s a big piece of that. But yes, we still sell on Etsy. We still sell we do some wholesale and then we do a tremendous amount of traffic to our own webpages and email lists and stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
And then so how do you choose what to do now? You know, like, I know you said, you know, 10 years ago it was just kind of random but what’s your process now for deciding what you’re going to make and then also for all your products? Does it just automatically go to all the platforms? Hey, we’ll list it on Etsy, we’ll list it on Amazon, we’ll list it on Shopify, or some things are on some and some are not another, what’s your basic MO there?
Dana:
So we put it on all of them. And what we sell is very seasonal based, so we sell holiday items. So for Easter, we put up Easter items for Christmas, we put up Christmas items. And so it’s, I’m telling you, the conversation is so different than people who are like, Hey, Sean’s, like, I have one product and we have it all under one brand. And I’m like, well, we’re literally gonna finish up five different new designs today, and they’ll all go up on all of the platforms today. And it’s all underneath that brand. So we’ve learned kind of what styles our customers like and stuff, but it’s a constant production of new designs. And then because on handmade, the majority of the items we do FBA, but like, it’s not a requirement to kind of sell inside handmade.
Dana:
It’s not the way that everyone necessarily approaches their handmade business. I do, because I’m now kind of in the Amazon world but a lot of the people who come into handmade to start with they’re selling on Etsy. And so they make the items, they send them to the customer when the customer orders it. And so they just transition their Amazon business to fulfilling themselves. And so that’s, that’s what a lot of it is for people. So we just kind of listen to what our customers like as far as the styles go, but we still produce and, and send a lot of the items here from our warehouse.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. Now, what about you? What was your peak of sales in the last few years? Was it, was it last year before, and then how much about was it across all these different platforms? I know I’m not sure if you have that number handy, but just rough estimate.
Dana:
Yeah, so our biggest year was 2020. What we sell is handmade products are over a hundred dollars. So it was very based off of and we only sell on the US market. So it was very influenced by people who were at home and they wanted their items that they could just shop online and they had an extreme amount of, kind of extra income. So that drastically affected us inside of 2020 specifically. But we still do multi-seven figures a year.
Bradley Sutton:
And you’re producing all of these yourselves. Is it still you in the same group of people, or?
Dana:
It is. Yeah. So we did because I did kind of become an Amazon girl and learned that world. So I kind of do both pieces and dip my toes into both sides. We do sell supplies and other items related to what we make. And so that is a contributing factor to kind of the large piece of it. But we’re still over seven figures just for the handmaid side for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
Now to be in the millions of dollars of sales you know, I’m assuming this is not obviously something you’re doing from nine to one o’clock in your basement, right? So like what kind of operation are. Have you had to get a warehouse you know, hire full-time employees and things like that, or?
Dana:
Yes. So you asked about like, starting and how we decided what we were gonna make If I would’ve done it again. Yeah, I would’ve started with something smaller, but what we make actually classifies us in the oversized category. So we are in the growth of expanding into 10 years of business it doesn’t fit in my basement anymore. It’s a lot of space that it takes up. So, yes I quit my corporate job in 2017. That year we moved into a warehouse. We’ve since moved into a different warehouse. And so we have a couple of employees on that supply side where that’s just kind of fulfilling orders. And with that as well, we do Shopify, we do Etsy, all of that. My whole business is not meant to be just an Amazon brand type thing. But we do have, it’s seasonal, as I said. We make like Christmas items, we make Halloween items, et cetera. So we will be heavier in staffing during those periods, but we try to run between 7 and 14 people or so throughout the year.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Dana:
We are actually making the handmade products. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Now we’re going to just go back and forth with just some unique strategies from both you you know, things that, you know, not any Amazon seller can or online seller for that matter, can just say, Hey, yeah, we do millions of dollars a year. You guys have achieved that. So, you know, looking back, like what are some things that, you know, some strategies you could share that you think you’re a little bit unique on? I mean, almost anything about the handmade is something unique because not many people do it, you know? So let’s start with Sean, like give us one strategy, you know, 60 seconds or less. Something unique that you guys are doing that’s helped you achieve this level of success.
Sean:
Just two things. One is staff, having good staff. The second thing I think we’re doing is we manage our ASINs at a very low level. So we know exactly every day how each level, how each ASIN is performing. And we have an internal tool that’s, I can look at ’em within 20 seconds. I can see how the business is performing if there’s any trends that we don’t like. The other thing that we do quite well, I think that a lot of people don’t really take much notice of is our numbers. So we’ve invested a lot in making sure that we know exactly what our numbers are and exactly what profit margin we have on each product. And if there’s a product not performing cause that happens then we just get rid of it. So I think that’s what separates us from a lot. But I think having good staff is definitely the most important thing.
Bradley Sutton:
Dana, what’s a strategy you can give us? Something that you think people can learn from?
Dana:
So again, coming from a different world, the people that I’m dealing, in trying to launch the handmade side, those are my people. Those are my conversations. I love having and in that mindset or in the conversations with those people, it’s shifting their mindset that they are a legitimate business. And so that’s a lot of times what my story has done for them is proving to them that they can be kind of whatever level that they want to be. Which is why, like, I love having conversations with people in the Amazon world who are not approaching business the same way that I am. And they, they look at me and they’re like, oh, like you’re legitimate. Like you’re actually making things. And I’m like, yes, that is what we do. And so speaking to those people they struggle to realize that their business could become kind of whatever they want it to be.
Dana:
A lot of them are really stuck in the mindset that, okay, if I made $10,000 this year, that’s a win for me. And I’m like, okay, that’s great, but if you buckle down and you do something different or break the mold cuz there so many of ’em are like, I don’t wanna do Amazon, I don’t wanna do Amazon. And I’m like, okay, but if you do, look what could happen. So just push yourself outta your comfort zone a little bit and whatever your business is made you comfortable in doing maybe there’s something else out there that’s different that could help you be more than you dreamed it could be.
Bradley Sutton:
What’s your launch process like Dana look? Like are you doing the similar things, any private label seller is, you know, PPC and try and get visibility and get to page one? Or is there something unique about selling and handmade that’s different than non handmade?
Dana:
Well, depending on kind of the, the saturation of which handmade category you’re in I don’t have to do a whole lot of work to get on page one of the category that I’m in, in handmade. So handmade is a main category, but then it has all the subcategories. So you can have t-shirts, you can have mugs, you can have Tumblrs, like, whatever that might be, but it might be a subcategory within handmade. So we don’t necessarily approach it the same way because we’ve created so much brand recognition and just, we, we have a lot of products out there that kind of dominate the category in general that we’re in under handmade. So our approach is different. We do PPC but it’s not necessarily to get one item to get traction. We are approaching a launch which is funny cuz no one in handmade calls it a launch. That we make a product, we take a picture of it we list it and we’re only making the one until we turn around and get more orders for that same one. And then for us, if it’s kind of proven itself, that might be something that we turn around and send into FBA. But it’s us creating the one getting great images of it and just adding it to our entire catalog. And just rising the whole tide of the whole business.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now what about somebody who’s like, you know what, I don’t necessarily want to be making stuff, you know, for years in my basement or, or this is not you know, the exact career path for, for producing my own products, you know, but at the same time, I don’t have 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, $8,000 to invest in a product you know, from China. Is, is handmade a good way if I, if my budget is low to at least get my feet wet in the game and start building up capital? Or is it kind of risky to do that if you don’t have experience? What would you suggest to somebody who’s out there who’s like, who definitely wants to sell on Amazon wood handmade, be kind of like that gateway drug potentially for them?
Dana:
I mean, it could be you have to have a passion behind selling your product or making your product basically. It’s not a thing or a category that you approach of, Hey, I wanna be in on Amazon. What thing can I make? That’s not usually the kind of conversation that I have with handmade sellers. It’s usually that they love what they’re making and they, they make it really, really well. The conversation that I have to have with a lot of people when they’re trying to decide if Amazon as their next route is, are they ready to take on what that scale might look like? Because if they, if they turn around and get increased orders, 200-300% of what they’re doing now, just to start out within those first couple months, a lot of ’em are like, okay, no, I’m not sure I could handle that. So the conversation’s just, it’s different. I’m not usually speaking to someone who says, Hey, I wanna get on Amazon, is handmade the right place? But it’s, it’s an avenue that yes, if you get into it and you catch the bug, which is kind of what happened with me. I sold in Handmade, and then we turn around and, and branch into other pieces outside the handmade category. But that’s not usually the approach for anybody in that category.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now last two questions for each of you Sean, first of all favorite Helium 10 tool and how you use it.
Sean:
I guess, you know, the keyword ranking tool are used most.
Bradley Sutton:
Is that one of those metrics that you’re looking at when you’re looking at the product’s health? Like how it’s ranking on keywords or
Sean:
Yeah, I mean that’s what we’re looking at right now. I mean, we’re working on. I’m getting data getting other data on our own tool. It’s just an internal tool. But yeah, I mean we, we use that and we use it. I mean, my favorite one, which I can’t even remember what it’s called, it’s the one whereby you can split up all the words into individual words.
Bradley Sutton:
Frankenstein.
Sean:
Is it Frankenstein? Yeah, I have great fun with that too. So yeah, we use Helium 10 all the time.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Dana, favorite Helium 10 tool on how use it?
Dana:
Listing Builder. I use Listing Builder to just to give variation cuz what we sell is, I’ll have Christmas items and so if we’re selling 50 of the same, it’s all the same keyword, you know, so making sure that they’re, that they’re varied or I can use that easily to kind of mix it up.
Bradley Sutton:
Last question is like I always talk this year about people’s hobbies and what they’re doing to get the, out of the, you know, 9-5 or for entrepreneurs, sometimes it’s 9-9. We, we get, you know, like we, we always need to have something to take us away from our daily grind. So, so Sean, what are your hobbies? What are you doing to make sure that you’re mentally and physically healthy?
Sean:
I mean, I, I’m a huge sports fan, so and I play a lot of tennis and pedal out here. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of Paddle? I’m not, it’s you, you will do. It’s apparently it’s, it’s starting to gain some traction in the US. But I’ve never heard of it before. I came out here, it’s a little bit like, I think you have pickle ball. It’s a little bit like that. And you know, and that the weather here is fantastic. You have sunshine, I think 320 days a year. So it’s quite good. But, but also I love what I do. So I don’t feel as if it’s a job that’s important, you know? So I don’t need to get away the way I did when I was in the corporate world. Yeah. That’s it.
Bradley Sutton:
Dana, what about you?
Dana:
We are still in the process of kind of figuring out that balance but me and my husband have gone into short-term rentals. So there’s a lot of kind of travel associated with that of launching Airbnbs and that side is kind of fun learning something new. But to get out of, that’s a piece of the get out of the 9-5 grind. But I also coach on handmade at Amazon. And so just that education world of not necessarily having to trade time for money is kind of the end goal. But I love, like, still growing this and, and managing my team. I don’t make the products anymore, so it’s more just helping brainstorm what, what the next step is and that kind of thing. So like Sean, it’s, it feels nothing like the grind that I used to do. So it’s a different activity that lights my heart on fire and when it stops lighting my heart on fire, then I’ll figure out what’s next.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, Dana, if anybody wanted to reach out to you on the interwebs to learn more about, you know, what you do or, or hit you up, is that possible? And how could they do that?
Dana:
Yeah, I run a Facebook group that is Handmade to Amazon. And it has my name in the Facebook group, so that’s the easiest way to find me. I’m in there loving on all those people and teaching them to actually take their craft as a business.
Bradley Sutton:
So what is the Facebook group’s name?
Dana:
It’s Handmade Amazon – Dana Midkiff.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Got it. And Sean, what about you? You want to stay private out there or are you down with people are reaching out to you on?
Sean:
I Don’t mind. I love to talk to people too, so I guess they can get hold of me on the Serious Sellers Facebook page.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, they can’t get in there. Like LinkedIn or any, or just, maybe they can.
Sean:
Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn, so. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Or if they find you on a tennis court, they’re in Spain. Exactly.
Sean:
You can, as long as they don’t interrupt the match, you’re fine.
Bradley Sutton:
There you go. All right. Well it was nice getting to know your stories and you know, next year maybe we can have you guys back on the show, and let’s see what you guys have accomplished in 2023. It’s definitely an interesting year so far. So I’d love to catch up to you guys next year and see where you’re at.
Sean:
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Dana:
Thank you for having us.
In this episode, we welcome back Burak Yolga of Forceget to talk about the dynamic realm of shipping and the supply chain. Dive into key topics and latest updates such as Amazon warehouse space bidding, China manufacturing, 3PL service rates, optimizing Amazon fulfillment, shipping methods comparison, international logistics, freight forwarder fraud prevention, leveraging HS codes, global freight prices outside China, and other exclusive insights and strategies from Burak. He also shares his top money-saving strategies that you can utilize on your next international shipments. Tune in now to stay ahead of the game!
In episode 457 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Burak discuss:
- 02:09 – What’s New In The Shipping Industry In 2023?
- 04:00 – Bidding For Extra Space In Amazon Warehouses
- 06:30 – Updates And Issues On China Manufacturing
- 09:40 – Current Rates For 3PL Services
- 11:11 – Sending To Multiple Amazon Fulfillment Centers
- 12:45 – UPS Shipments Or LTL Shipments?
- 15:13 – The International Shipping Process
- 17:15 – How To Make Sure Your Not Getting Ripped Off By Freight Forwarders
- 23:25 – How To Use HS Codes Properly To Save Money
- 25:30 – Freight Prices From Other Countries
- 28:40 – It’s Time To Visit Your Chinese Supplier
- 30:11 – Burak’s Healthy Habits And Hobbies Outside His Daily Work
- 32:25 – Learn More About Shipping Inside Freedom Ticket 3.0
- 33:00 – Burak’s 60-Second Tip
- 35:00 – How To Reach Out To Burak Yolga And Forceget
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got back on the show. Somebody who knows all there is to know about freight forwarding warehousing and much more, and he’s got some tips that could save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think
Bradley Sutton:
Black Box by Helium 10 House is the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world outside of Amazon itself. We have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces, from USA to Australia to Germany and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might wanna get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me/blackbox. Don’t forget, you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got for the second time back on the show, Barack from Fork. How’s it going, man?
Burak:
I’m great, man. Thank you for having me again. Now,
Bradley Sutton:
Where are you at right now? Are you in Miami or where are you?
Burak:
Yes, I’m in Miami after so many different Amazon events this year, you know, January, February, March, finally back to Miami. And then a little bit enjoying the time and weather.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, it’s good to have you back. We’re not gonna go too much into your backstory. Let me, let me give everybody the the podcast number that you were in before. So if you guys wanna find out more about Brocks origin story go to episode 324. So h10.me/324. Let’s just hop right into it, you know, now we’re, we’re in the middle almost of 2023, you know, kind of covid is a thing of the past, you know, even China’s opened up now again, but what, what are like the main kind of topics in the shipping industry? Prices been pretty steady? Any predictions you have? What’s going on here in 2023?
Burak:
I think, you know, 20 21, 20 23, we had 2021 and 2022, we had so much conversation about you know, shipping prices, the delay, the congestions, and so many people had really good sales numbers, actually. So they brought lots of inventory in, and as suddenly with inflation, things slowed down. Right. So mainly last two years we talked about, you know, the congestions in Los Angeles part. Some of the containers had to wait maybe two, three months until it was you know, off the dock and then, you know, delivered to the destination. But recently what we were talking about is mainly cash flow inventory management, which is part of the supply chain, which is part of the international logistic, which is part of the successful Amazon sellers because you know, last two years they, we had so much money in the market, so people could go and borrow as much as money they want with a very low interest rate, and they brought loss of inventory.
Burak:
So since the sales is down, a lot of people cannot move the inventory. So they start liquid liquidating, they try to get back some money, and then I think re restructure so many different things. So I think shipping is now also in our company, we’re trying to put everything like, you know, puzzles together, not only the international shipping, but now we have different layers like inventory management, international shipping three pl and the last mile lower to Amazon. So now it seems like getting more complicated because it’s not only about finding the cheap prices or trying to book in advance now, it’s about like how you manage your inventory and how you manage your money.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So now, you know, it’s been a couple months since that new inventory kind of system has gone live in Amazon, the one where you kind of like get a heads up as far as, you know, when you’re gonna be outta space. You know, that was one thing that I think a lot of Amazon seller complained about the last couple of years, is they could go to sleep on Sunday and have maybe, you know, 5,000 units of storage available. So hey, all right, Monday I’m gonna go ahead and make my order your or my inventory transfer order and send in. They wake up Monday morning and it’s like, no, you are a 10,000 units overstocked. You can’t send any units in. So, so Amazon kind of like, we’ll give you more of a heads up, but at the same time, there’s this new whole system where if it does seem like you’re gonna be out, you know, you can do some bidding for, for extra space, maybe you’ll get money back. So it seems like it’s complicated thing, but you know, since you, you store a lot of product for, you know at your three pls for a lot of Amazon sellers, what can you say about how this has been affecting your customers, if at all?
Burak:
Actually you’re right. It seems Amazon also thought maybe this is not very, it’s not really fair to, you know, go to overnight, and then the next day you wake up and then you cannot even send, I mean, you have so much overstock, some items are not selling well, but your best selling items is almost run out of inventory. So they’re not, they don’t used to go like single by like SKU by SKU. They are looking at your overall performance, but you might have some products has been sitting there a long time, and then, you know, you’ll have like a really best one or two SKU running, so you had to query, or you had to take it back that inventory is not selling. So it started, it costs you a lot of money. So that’s why I think last six months to one year, whenever we go to the events, I mean, you also do a lots of you know, in-person events like big events like Prosper.
Burak:
Now we are gonna meet actually next week in Irwin for the LA workshop. So, so many companies, they had confusion, but right now it’s even kind of getting worse because they, they think that they can kind of make a strategy, but they don’t have the right prediction because still the market is not very clear what’s going on, like, you know, the buyer strategy buyer’s expectations. So it is very hard. That’s why so many people are more cautious right now to place the larger orders. And you know, we have so many friends now traveling to China. The main private label production is still, you know, dominated by Chinese manufacturers. And even they complain so much that they don’t have enough orders. And last two trees, we saw so many fan manufacturers, they moved out of China to go to countries, like I’m talking about not the buyers, but actual the factory owners in China, they start opening like another plants like in Vietnam, Thailand say, avoid this, you know, the tariff additional 25% China tariff.
Burak:
But now even those companies regret big time because now they have additional plant that they cannot fulfill the order. So I think this is causing both seller and supplier side, like some problem with the stability. So this is causing brands to make you know, planning issues like inventory management issues. And it’s not anymore like, you know, I think we all talking about this, and it’s not anymore just to put your brand on a product and then ship it to Amazon seller, that is over, right? You have to do so many different. Amazon is also encouraging to become like a brand for the sellers. Like, you know, they encourage outside traffic, they encourage other type of new advertisement changes. They encourage sellers to use the influencers. Basically Amazon, Amazon is also changing. Its its business model. Absolutely. That’s why they started this new product called like a w d, which is Amazon warehouse distribution.
Burak:
So you can store some of your not good selling product instead of like fulfillment centers. You are kind of storing them in a different location and Amazon transfers it. Obviously some people test it, it’s not the best operation rise because, you know, there’s so many legs between the fulfillment centers, AWD or the inventory management systems are not a hundred percent accurate. So a lot of sellers, they have this kind of problems, but Amazon is also trying to change their business model. And, you know, the other big brands, other big marketplaces are also coming into the market like more aggressively. You know, we think we’re talking about like, you know, Walmart they become like very active in the events. They become like really active. But more importantly other e-commerce size, like TikTok, they’re talking about like, you know setting up like a bigger marketplace for third party sellers to be more flexible.
Burak:
So similar to Shopify. So I think they’re giving, there’s gonna be some change in the market. Obviously, like, you know, it’s very hard for the end users to change their habit to buy on Amazon. And now, you know, also, like they change their refund policy. So now not everything is like a hundred percent free to return. So I think this is gonna change some of the different things because the Amazon fees have increased so much for the sellers. So people start looking into the new marketplaces or new solutions, like how they can reduce the cost. Shipping costs went down, absolutely, but then, you know, the, the sourcing prices are higher. Three pls are very expensive, especially in California area. So I think people save in one part, but then their cost still increase. I think eventually.
Bradley Sutton:
What is the current going rate for like three pls? Like as you know, for somebody who’s never used one before out there the basic, the basic fees are probably, you know, per pallet storage per month. And then also like, you know, in and out fees, like, you know, there’s, there’s checking in your shipment and then, and then maybe, you know, the, the fees to actually prepare the shipment and send it to Amazon. What are, what are the main fees now in 2023 that a seller needs to keep in mind if they’re considering using a 3PL?
Burak:
In, in California, you’re looking at PT per month storage fees, something between 30 to 40 US dollars. Oh, wow. Yeah. And you know, one of the, one of the, the things actually increase, like the pallet supply fee, actually the buying the physical pallet, 40×48 40 inch times 48 inch pallet, we used to pay before covid $5, $4, even $6 sometimes for great B and C, like the pallets are also like a different quality, but regular size, like not overweight, we used to pay like five to $6, maximum $7 during the covid. We start seeing the numbers like 20 to $25. So that rate stay there and square feet in California, you know, you know that it’s just really expensive. The labor cost is very expensive. So this, this adds up, you know, not only storing but inbound and outbound and so many times.
Burak:
Amazon is also, if you have even a full container. One of the issues that we see recently, Bradley, is that if you have a full container order to Amazon, Amazon generally don’t allow you to send them to one fulfillment center. So it means that you need to have a prep center to bring the container in, unload it, palletize them ship to three different Amazon fulfillment centers. This cost is really high. So if now you wanna deliver a full container from channel to Amazon, if it is in the west coast, you’re looking at include everything, you know, the custom clearance, the interest, the ocean freight and track is around $4,000. But we had a case that Amazon asked the seller to separate the sh three different location. It cost them at the end like 10 to $12,000. So when the sellers, I think we were gonna do like a one maybe tip, you know, for the sellers how to, how to save money.
Burak:
They, they prefer, they, they should be using a location close to where they wanna ship them. We know when you create like a ship from when you create a shipping plan in your Seller Central Account, they’re asking you ship from address. I recommend sellers not to use their, their supplier location in China. If it is overweight, oversized, it’s definitely giving you the East coast. But if it is a regular product, it might give you more than one place. But people can contact us and get our location information in Los Angeles, and they can use their ship from address our location, Los Angeles and Amazon might give them a location nearby. So this could help them to sell, save some money.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, you know that’s actually caused a lot of issues. I heard lately the, the new send to Amazon flow that even even LTL shipments, you know, not even using the, you know, like UPS partner carrier, but even LTL shipments, you, you used to create it and it would all go to, to one location. Are you seeing that more that since that new send to Amazon went live that Amazon is making sellers send to, to multiple, multiple warehouses more now than, than they have in the past?
Burak:
Yes, absolutely. I think one of the reason is also they, they see that, you know, the running the business in California is really getting expensive. So I think they wanna like move more like a Midwest or like Texas area. However, you know, the 40% of the entire United States import comes through Los Angeles port, so it’ll never change. You know, the shipping to Los Angeles now costs like 16, $700 versus New York is like 3000. So you’re looking at like 40% higher. So Amazon is changing that. Yes. And one of the issues that we see is with the Amazon partner carriers, they’re they have just so much to handle. So they miss so many times the pickup appointment. So if you book like an, I mean, UPS is really expensive if you ship what we realize is in our company, if you are shipping anything within California, 300 kilogram is the optimum kilogram that you should be using ups.
Burak:
So if you have anything up to 300 kilogram, it’s still okay to use the UPS and the check-in process is much faster. If you have anything more than 300, 400 kilograms, if you have anything more than like two tree pallets, yes, LTL shipments, are fast cheaper. However, there are a couple of problems in here. Number one, the, the transit time, the transit time, by the time the carrier comes and picks it up from the, the 3PL on delivers. It’s not a direct truck. So it means that they take from, they collect the pallets from different location, they bring it to distribution center and they ship it into Amazon. So there’s no timeframe that it’s currently. So, you know, we are already middle of the year, so lots of companies are actually planning their fourth quarter orders from China or domestic or from South America, Turkey.
Burak:
They, they already consider what to order from China. But also when the shipment comes in, it’s very important to send products to Amazon in the right way so it can check in very fast. So, you know, so many times when we do even the Freedom Ticket 3.0, when we record that, I explain in one of the episodes the international shipping process. So many people, whenever they request the price from China, they only ask what is the transit time between port to port? But so many people, they forget that there’s a long process from the time we contact the supplier, get the shipping documents until we pick up, until we load container, it takes seven to 10 days. The same store. When the shipment arrives to the destination port, it takes three to four days to clear the custom at the destination waiting.
Burak:
The containers become available in the terminal, and Los Angeles port still has a problem. We sometimes cannot find an appointment to go and arrange the pickup. So a lot of people who are not in the industry, maybe they think that, what do you mean with making the appointment with the terminal? So you cannot just show up to it like a container terminal saying, Hey, where’s my container? It doesn’t work out that way. You need to track every day the status of the container. If it becomes available, then we need to make an appointment. When are we gonna go pick it up? So sometimes it takes seven to 10 days until the container becomes available. By the time the container comes into our warehouse, we, we do the prep center, send it to Amazon, it takes another 15 days. So, so many people, they think that, oh, I have enough time.
Burak:
So one of the questions we always hear, when is the best time to book my shipment? We always talk about like, you know, two weeks prior, one week prior at least. So they can save in that time that we are planning this international shipping better. So as I mentioned, we used to talk only about international shipping time because, you know, the main problem was like, oh, it take three, two to three months to, you know goes from one port the airport, but now they’re like more other elements coming in such as the new way Amazon is shipping services like LTLs used to go one location. Now you need to use the two different, three different locations LTL. So this is like really hurting people’s budgets, honestly.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Now speaking of budgets and, and, and shipping costs and things, you know, like I know if somebody books with you got very upfront pricing, very transparent, you know, I’ve used you for multiple, you know, Project X, Project 5K shipments, but, but whether somebody’s going to use Forceget or whether somebody’s using, you know shipping company they find from Alibaba or, or maybe their supplier finding, let’s, let’s talk some strategy here about how a, an Amazon seller can make sure they’re not getting ripped off. You know, so like, what are the questions they need to be asking? What are the red flags? You know, like, like I remember one time I showed you how there’s this one company without even knowing the, the invoice price of, of the shipment was already giving, like, you know, quotes and things like that. Well, that’s a red flag because how in the world could they give you know, a door-to-door price when they don’t even know what the invoice, you know, of the products? What are some red flags? What are some red flags people need to watch out for? What are the questions that sellers need to ask? What are some things that they need to kind of like make sure about, to make sure that they’re getting a, a good deal in shipping?
Burak:
Honestly, we always talk about like, do not use your suppliers freight forwarder in the same way. You will not use your freight forwarder to source product, right? Because it’s not their core business. So they can help you maybe with that one day, but eventually when you face a problem with the quality problem or you know packaging problem, you are not gonna go and complete your freight forwarder. You need to have the direct relation with the supplier. So same thing, whenever you have any issue with your shipping you know, maybe the product is damaged. So you need to like have the direct communication with the freight forwarder. I think one of the things, what we see is right now that is with us custom, what is going on right now. I mean, if you’re selling in US marketplace last two, three years, there was like a huge volume coming from the Asia.
Burak:
And because of the covid, the restrictions, the map, like we didn’t, I mean the US custom didn’t have maybe enough sources to have the regulate all this common shipments because the volume was almost like double, right? So this year in, in like 2022 December, we received a new regulation from c from the custom border protection that every invoice needs to have the product picture and every invoice needs to have product material. This was not a requirement in the past. So this is exactly what you mentioned. Like if you, if the freight forwarder doesn’t know what’s the product, what is the material made of, what is the HS code, how they can actually give you all in DDP price because they don’t even know what’s the tax rate. So the rat flag is one of them is, I think you should be asking the freight forwarder if they’re NVOCC licensed, which is like official international freight forwarder license, that they’re responsible.
Burak:
You know, in USA when you work with the freight forwarder only based in China, if you have any problem in the custom, if you have a problem with like product loss damage, you’ll not have any authority to go and actually looking for your money, right? This is number one. I think number two, so many freight forwarders they’re asking, they’re charging you insurance, but they never share the insurance policy. If you wanna ship something, the insurance is cheap, you should edit like 20, 25, $30. Sometimes it’s only, it’s less than 1% of the cargo value. If they’re asking you the insurance, ask for the insurance, yes, but collect your insurance policy. If there’s something happens, then they’ll be like, oh, you know, we forget to do the insurance because insurance is something they can do backwards up to third days. So if something happens, you have to like deal with that, that’s important.
Burak:
So I think the MUCC license is one of the most important thing, your insurance policy and upfront payments you should deal with negotiation with, negotiate with your freight forwarder that at least ask for the payment when the shipment arrives to the destination port. So many times we saw like cases that people come to us and say, Hey, my freight forwarder wants to charge me the destination port charges cuz they said there’s an extra fees, this and that I paid upfront. So if you pay upfront, you don’t have any power to negotiate because you already paid, let’s say 2000 and I asked like another 300, $400. And also I think like, you know, the social proof and then the, the reviews there’s so many like non-name companies that you should be careful about. There’s one thing that also I always mentioned, like people’s like private label products are like your baby, right?
Burak:
You probably band night, you work on your product with your supplier, you pay the deposit, you take the pictures, and then when it comes to finally after two, three months when it comes to the shipping, you’re like, okay, yeah, you can just ship my product. But I think that you should be like more careful because either you might delay your launch if product get damaged or, you know, get lost or it’s delayed or you have to pay extra fees or you might be running on of inventory in one of your best SKUs. So there are a couple of things that you should be careful about, and I think there are like more information now about training. You know, what is the best way how to ship from Alibaba if you’re a new seller. If you’re a larger seller. Now, I think when it comes to shipping from China, it’s more about like payment terms and, and then the right, right tracking, I think digitalization is getting important in the industry that manages supply chain.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, you know, we’ve been talking some, some strategy and you’ve given some tips about, you know, saving money when you have a shipment to try to try and, you know, set your origin address. What are some other strategies and tips, you know, whether it’s about utilizing 3PLs, whether it’s about shipping, whether it’s about taxes, any, anything at all. What are some strategies some more strategies that you can give sellers that will help them save money or potentially make money even?
Burak:
Right, I mean, in first get we ask, we actually provide free audit free international shipping audits. So if people send us their, like previous shipments, we can give the code, we can match them if it is possible, or we can tell them how the freight forward can offer such price. I think one thing that people should be careful about the HS codes, HS code is one product, HS code is if people don’t know that it is every single product has a special code that is globally registered in the customs. And one, one of our customer, we recently had this issue, they order doormats and the HS code the factory uses in the export documents in China should be different than the one you use it for the import. So one of them has 25% tariff, and that is 7.5% the tariff.
Burak:
So imagine the amount of tax you’ll be paying if the, the shipment is worth of $50,000. It’s almost like eight to $9,000 different. So you can always ask your freight forwarder or supplier if there’s an alternative HS code. Most of time suppliers don’t really tell you the difference because they wanna use the high HS code for them to get the tax refund in China. We talked about that in the last time, you know, when we were in Las Vegas, but so whenever the Chinese manufacturer, they have a finished product, they can get the VAT back from the government in China. So they’re using, so Chinese products also has domestic different tax value. So it could be 5%, 10%, 15%, they always use the higher tax to get the money back from government because they do export. But when you import the new country, that HS code can have a very high tech. So that’s why whenever you collect, especially if you’re shipping a full container, ask your freight forwarder, ask your supplier to look for an alternative HS code so you can really save money on the duty and tax and which can create couple of different dollar difference in your lending cost. So I think this is the one thing that you should be focusing on checking your, excuse me, checking your HS codes to see if there’s any alternative.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. You know nowadays people are, are wanting more, I would think to like maybe diversify where they get their products from. So what can you tell me? Let’s say I’m selling in the USA. What, what is the difference of pricing about for if my suppliers from China, or if I’m shipping from India perhaps Vietnam is maybe number three, I think more popular. What I hear about, you know, Pakistan what are the differences in pricing that, that you’re seeing on freight from each of these locations? Is China the cheapest because of the volume that that happens? Are the other places getting cheaper? What’s going on?
Burak:
Actually, that’s a very interesting question. We, I had this conversation one of the members was asking about they wanna ship from India, but then when we calculate the shipping cost, it was not a full container. It was less than full container. And because China has so much bigger volume for the shipping versus India, the shipping cost is much cheaper actually from China. And because in China, like MUCC licensed freight forwarder like us, we can consolidate different cargo into one container so we can read and lower the cost. In India, such service doesn’t really exist. So that’s why we need to ship each seller’s cargo individually. So their extra charges adds up, such as origin fees in the destination, port fees, the, the logistic fees. So when we did the calculation, even if they find the product a little bit cheaper, the freight went up almost 30 to four, 35%.
Burak:
So I’m not saying don’t go, don’t look into India of first just do that, but make the freight calculation before you place the order. So in that case, the person already placed the order from India, alternative Chinese supplier, then at the end they ended up paying actually more for the landing cost. So planning is great, but same thing we see with the Mexico because the truck fees from Mexico to US is not cheap at all. So that’s why so many people, they try to source from Mexico, they go look into the states, yes, it’s great. Maybe they can scalable, you know, the supplier is also the size of the supplier. I think Bradley, like, I mean, you know, sometimes you work with a supplier in China and you wanna expand to Shopify, you wanna expand to Walmart or it’s a great idea.
Burak:
You should be expanding to Amazon, Canada, for example, you’re not selling it yet, or Amazon, eh, has great programs now to do the cross border like globalization. And they want you to go to different marketplaces. They give you, they make your life easy now. And if you wanna expand to these markets, then you will maybe have like more volume. But you need to make sure look, you know, where is your where’s your source? How are you gonna ship it? Do you have enough money? All these things are like really important. So before you go start sourcing, make the calculation of what’s the freight cost, what is the HS code from that? So maybe you buy something from China, it has 25% tariff, like, but you go back to India, it has 0%. So even if you pay 20% more to your product plus the shipping, you still save like 5%.
Burak:
And I think it’s a really good idea. And since China has opened big sellers, Elite sellers, Elite members, they should go back to China, discuss with you know, suppliers, what happened. Cause China, like Chinese suppliers, they had very tough lost three years. They had very strict code restrictions. They couldn’t travel outside of China, they couldn’t go to the trade shows, you know, the people like buyers couldn’t go to China. I think it’s very important to rebuild the relationship. Even if you cannot travel to China, if you buy like 50,000, a hundred thousand dollars, you know, per month, you should invite your supplier to come and visit you. So you can sit down, renegotiate the prices, see what else you can add your, you know, production line. Amazon comes up with lots of different new features like, you know, frequently added, frequently returned so you can actually see what you can create with your supplier and that can help your business and ask for better trade terms.
Burak:
Like better, better pricing. Not anymore, like anyone’s paying 30% down 30%, you can easily get like 10 to 15% down payment and you break down into like another 30% to 40% before shipment and then remaining maybe one month after delivery or upon delivery so you can get better terms. So I highly recommend if you’re selling like above like $57,000 per month or even buying that much, you should go to China and visit your suppliers. Just see what’s going on in the market and then try to add a couple of other suppliers in the market. Everybody is hungry right now for more business actually.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Alright. Well we’ll get into your last couple of strategies in a little bit. But you know, something, I’m doing this year on the podcast is ask a lot of people their, their health habits. You know, like health is my theme for, for this year. And when I talk about health, it’s not just, you know, physical health, but, but mental health too. So one thing that I always highlight is hobbies. That’s why at the beginning of, of all these podcast videos, I show my main hobby, which is traveling, you know, around the world. So first of all, what are your, your hobbies? You know, the things that you do to, to kind of like take yourself away from you know, your, your day-to-day work and, and relax your mind. And then what are some of your physical health habits that, that you’re also doing to, to keep healthy? You
Burak:
Know, like people like us who live in a very big time zone difference with our main office, China, like 12 hours, it’s very hard to slow down, but that’s something I also start to feel like, you know, with the events, the Amazon events, you go travel a lot, you always stay in the hotels. I think the sleep is something really important, especially for men. Men’s health, men’s mentality. I actually start to listen more TED Talks, you know, like they are short 20 minutes, 25 minutes. You can learn lots of different things. I love CrossFit. I’m very lucky. I live in Miami Beach, so lots of people dating that I could work like 1:00 PM go to the pool, but it’s not really happening. I generally have like 7:00 AM, 7:00 PM thing, but I go workouts, I have a motorcycle, I get some air.
Burak:
I’m actually thinking to get a bicycle. I think I like doing outdoor stuff. It’s very important. And man, we spend so much time with our phones and computers. I try to disconnect from my phone at least 30 minutes before I go to bed. That gives me like, you know, a better, maybe I go for a walk a little bit. I try to read a little bit more. I always had the excuse I travel too much. So, and more importantly I I I start cooking. I like actually disconnect with a glass of wine or a beer after the workout. Do like meal prep? Only the downside is the dishes, but.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes. Little bit less DoorDash, a little bit more home cooking is also I think very healthy there. Okay, interesting. Now, now guys, I if you wanna get more info on, on the A to Z of shipping and all the terms and everything you need to know you know, Burak mentioned it, but, but check out week six in Freedom Tickets. So, so if you’re a Helium 10 member, you guaranteed you have access to Freedom Ticket. Go to week six. There’s multiple modules in there where he goes everything from, you know, international shipping, step-by-step and, and freight quote breakdowns and FBA packing requirements and this and that. Anything you need to know, you know, it’s right there in Freedom Ticket. He did most of the modules there, but maybe something that’s not in freedom ticket or something that’s that’s new in the last, you know, couple months or just something that you think that sellers need to be aware about. What is a strategy or a 60-second strategy or tip that you can give our sellers? You know, you’ve given us a number of them already in this episode. Is there anything else you can, you can do to educate us?
Burak:
The one thing comes to my mind that we don’t really speak in supply chain on Amazon is the digital tracking. I think that’s gonna be the future because if you don’t know when your shipment is gonna check in you cannot really manage your PPC budget. You cannot manage your coupons, deactivate, activate it. I think you should be find a way to see, have better visibility on international shipping. Not because we are the only company doing that in the industry, but I think it’s really important because every time we go to the Amazon events, people talking about, this inventory issues or they place too much order or they’re short running, they have some products on the water, they don’t know when it’s gonna come to Amazon, they stress out. Same thing like, you know, when I wake up my supplier, my office in China, they’re sleeping.
Burak:
And by the time you brush off like, you know, small things from your table when it comes to sit down and work one or 2:00 PM you cannot really do planning. I think planning is like the most important thing right now. The inventory management and managing your money good. I think having a good visibility on your inventory planning and supply chain is the key to success because so many people are working on the team margins right now this year cuz of the all the price increases. I think that’s the most important thing. I think managing your inventory, understanding, checking how much the keyword search volume increase or decrease compared to last year and what should be the, this year’s orders. I think that’s very important to read in the data and connect the puzzles. So it’s not anymore just keyword research. It’s not only checking the keyword performance, it’s not only the cheap shipping, but I think it’s time to like put everything together and could put in the right s sop for your business.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now if somebody wants to get more information from you or possibly reach out, you know, for a quote for shipping or for warehousing or other services you provide, how can they find you on the interwebs out there?
Burak:
It’s forceget.com and sales.forceget.com. I normally used to, you know, wear my Forceget t-shirt, but this time I changed to Sell and Scale. So forceget.com, they can find us and we have free consultancy 15 to 30 minutes for each you know Helium 10 members as well as the podcast listeners. We love them all and we can do free audit, especially the, you can send us the HS code and we can give you alternatives if there’s any in the custom system.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Well look forward to seeing you at our helium 10 social and elite workshop that we have coming up and then of course at future events. It’s been great to have you on here and we’ll be seeing you soon.
Burak:
Thank you so much, Bradley, for having me here.
In today’s Walmart Wednesday episode in SSP, we speak with Mark Jordan of Vendocommerce, an expert in the field of Walmart selling. One of the key topics we discuss is the struggles that Walmart sellers often face. Mark provides insights on how to overcome them and achieve success with your product launches. From pricing changes and suppression issues to understanding Walmart’s 90-day returns policy, Mark sheds light on the intricacies of navigating the Walmart marketplace. Helium 10 tools have been instrumental in optimizing Walmart listings, and Mark shares valuable tips on leveraging these tools effectively. Bradley and Mark break down listings inside Walmart.com and provide guidance on crafting compelling product details that resonate with customers. Mark also provides a quick yet powerful hack for Walmart sellers looking to elevate their game. Tune in to this captivating episode to discover the secrets on how to crush it on Walmart.com!
In episode 456 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Mark discuss:
- 01:45 – The Helium 10 Project Expansion Series
- 02:41 – Mark Jordan’s Backstory
- 06:11 – Struggles That Walmart Sellers Have
- 08:21 – How To Crush Your Walmart.com Product Launches
- 10:32 – Pricing Changes And Suppression
- 11:40 – Breaking Down Listings Inside Walmart.com
- 13:16 – How To Get The Pro Seller Badge
- 14:50 – Be Aware Of Walmart’s 90-Day Returns Policy
- 18:01 – Using Helium 10 Tools For Walmart Listings
- 22:12 – How To Properly Write Your Walmart Product Details
- 23:19 – Let’s Learn Mark’s Specific Strategies
- 25:09 – Creating A Different Version Of Your Amazon Product On Walmart
- 26:32 – Using 2-Step URLs For Walmart
- 27:12 – When Rich Media Is Available For Regular Walmart Sellers?
- 28:23 – Mark’s 60-Second Tip
- 30:52 – How To Reach Out To Mark Jordan And Vendo
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today’s our special Walmart Wednesday episode where we invite an expert on, and he and I are actually gonna break down some live Walmart listings to see what’s working and what’s not working on them. We’re gonna talk about keyword research Walmart advertising, and even some cool hacks on how to see what kind of attributes your competitors are in. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba, or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you wanna get some more data on? Well, while you’re on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what’s happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you wanna then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Walmart Wednesday show of the month where we do an episode live dedicated to Walmart.
Bradley Sutton:
It’s important, you know, here in 2023, we feel that, you know, more Amazon sellers who are selling in the us start considering selling on Walmart as well, because, you know, we’ve talked about it a lot. We have a new series Project Expansion. We’re actually documenting, bringing an Amazon seller who had never sold on Walmart and showing you the step-by-step. Carrie and Shivali are showing you step-by-step how to get them set up on the Walmart platform. So if you guys want to check out that video series, just go to our YouTube channel after this and, and check out type in Helium 10 Project Expansion, and you’ll be able to see, you know, the step-by-step. They’ve got about four episodes up so far, and they’ll have some more up soon, but if you have not taken the leap yet, we highly recommend doing it. And we also, you know, for those of you already selling on Walmart, and we realize that you guys might have some questions on things as well on how to set up. So every month we invite experts like me. I don’t know much about selling on Walmart, so I couldn’t be able to sit here and do ask me anything. So this month we have an expert from Vendo, and that’s Mark Jordan. We’re gonna go ahead and bring him on to the show. Mark. How’s it going?
Mark:
Hey brother, how’s it going? Thanks for having me.
Bradley Sutton:
Thanks for being here. So where are you at, like right now? Where are you located?
Mark:
Yeah, so I am currently in Miami, Florida. Actually, I just moved here in October.
Bradley Sutton:
Where’d you move from?
Mark:
I moved from Hoboken, New Jersey. Okay,
Bradley Sutton:
So you’re East Coast, all about the East Coast, huh?
Mark:
Yeah, from the East Coast, from Pennsylvania, but was in Hoboken because that’s where the old Walmart e-commerce office was.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, okay. All right. And tell me, where did you go to college at? Was it in New Jersey?
Mark:
So I went to a school called Marist. It’s in Poughkeepsie, New York. It’s about, New York City.
Bradley Sutton:
I’ve got a good basketball team, sometimes.
Mark:
Sometimes, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
I don’t know the mascot there. I always try and know the mascots, but What’s the Marist mascot?
Mark:
The Red Fox.
Bradley Sutton:
The Red Fox. Ooh, I like that. That’s pretty cool. All right. And then what did you study about e-commerce or entrepreneurship or what, what business, what was your major over there?
Mark:
Yeah, so my major is Information Technology and systems. So it was kind of like a IT, Computer Science business related in that realm. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
And then, so how did you get into e-commerce? Did you ever sell yourself or did you just went directly to, to working for agency or how, how did that happen?
Mark:
Yeah, so during college, my kind of, I started with e-commerce a little bit, playing around in college. I created my own lip balm company. Actually, I was ma hand making it in my dorm room, and I used to sell it through Etsy on that e-commerce platform. That’s where I think my entryway into e-commerce. But with Walmart specifically and other e-commerce platforms I was recruited to go work for Walmart e-commerce during the last semester of my senior year of college. And so that’s really where I began.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Now, how long have you been here at Vendo?
Mark:
So I’ve been with Vendo just almost three years.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright. And has it always been for Walmart or did you do Amazon too?
Mark:
Yeah, so I primarily focus all on the Walmart side. We, in the last probably, it’s a year and a half, two years since I’ve been in with Vendo I’ve played a more dedicated role specifically to the Walmart marketplace. So we do also manage, you know, brands and clients. On the one piece side, we’re very connected with the store side, with our sister company team direct as well. But I specifically focus on the Walmart marketplace side.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, just off the bat, you know, like what are some of your most successful clients? Like, how much are they doing on Walmart? Like are these newer sellers or you’ve got some six figure sellers? Are there any seven figure Walmart sellers that you work with?
Mark:
Yeah, great question. Everyone wants to know kind of what the size of the prize on Walmart is, especially coming from Amazon. Most of the clients, so we work with clients on Amazon too. I don’t touch that business, but those clients on Amazon, some of them are doing, you know, multimillion months, right? However, when we come to Walmart and they’re launching from scratch, they don’t have that maybe, you know, brand exposure on Walmart, it’s quite different, right? We’ve seen brands anywhere from probably 1% to maybe 20% of Amazon volume on Walmart. The platform is different. The brand exposure’s different, the customer’s different. So that may give you a little direction there on kind of what we see.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Now what’s one of the struggles that your clients have? You know, is it, is it, you know, how the PPC system, the Walmart advertising is not as advanced yet as, as Amazon, they’re used to a lot more, you know, capabilities. Is it WFS? Are people having problems with WFS? But what’s the biggest pain point you think that, that Walmart sellers are facing these days?
Mark:
Yeah, there’s quite a few. If you’re in any of the Walmart marketplace Facebook groups, people are kind of complaining all day about the different problems with Walmart. Some of the issues, just the portal itself is very clunky. It’s not super user friendly. It has its own issues. Walmart search has a lot of issues. People not being able to find their products and search the Walmart algorithm for selecting items for their product types is really crazy. Actually, just getting onto Walmart being approved can be a whole process in itself. They have a pretty strict approval process, and a lot of times your average seller may not understand how to really go ahead and resolve that. So actually just getting on the platform itself could be, could be an issue.
Bradley Sutton:
I know it was very difficult before for foreign businesses to, to get started on Walmart USA, but I’ve heard that it’s getting a little bit easier. Do you have any foreign clients you know, that, that are based overseas who are having success on a Walmart or is is pretty much everybody? US based
Mark:
I would say everyone that we work with is US based, however, yeah, it has gotten easier to get onto the platform, for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Cool. Now launch these days on Walmart, let’s say you know, I’m not like a Nike or some brand that already has tons of, of branded searches, right? I’m just like in regular Amazon seller, maybe not even a million dollar Amazon seller, you know. But I want to get started on Walmart. You know, on Amazon these days is pretty much all like kind of PPC. PPC only launch, you know, like there’s no more, you know, search, find, buys and things like that. What are you doing for your customers to get on page one for a brand new Walmart listing?
Mark:
Yeah, great question. So, a lot of the brands that we’re working with are typically, you know, disruptive kind of direct to consumer brands who have done well on Amazon and they’re ready to kind of maybe go to Walmart and there could be reasons why they’re going to Walmart. Maybe they’re expanding their, you know, sales channels or maybe it’s kind of something that they need to do to get in store. And so depending on the goal, right, of what we need to do. But the first thing is getting on the platform and optimizing the listings. I know others have talked about this, your constant quality scores and the pieces that break down into that. So super important, especially when you’re transferring over any maybe imagery or copy from Amazon. If you have that already, you wanna make sure that you optimize it for the Walmart style guide.
Mark:
So when you build the items, make sure you go to growth opportunities, you check the dashboard in there and you see kind of what the callouts are. You need to also ensure very, very important when you set up the items that the product type that Walmart selects is actually accurate for that product, right? So if you set up a hairbrush, but the algorithm thinks that it’s dog food, your item is never gonna appear in any of the right searches because the Walmart search algorithm is based on a subset of rules per every keyword that pulls in specific product types. So you have to make sure that you get that updated. That’s also going to affect the type of content that you can actually apply to the listing in that growth opportunity section. So get your product type changed, and then update the content accordingly for the Walmart style guide, super emporium.
Mark:
So things that we do will, we’ll actually vet competitor listings on keywords that are fit for that brand or client will actually look at what the competing product types of already existing page one ranking products are. We’ll go back and make those changes, and then we’ll optimize the listing. Because we work closely as well through our agency partnership with Walmart, we do get a lot of context through the strategic account manager program which are like internal Walmart marketplace kind of merchants on that side, who help us a lot with a lot of our brands and getting, you know, free review syndication applied, getting the brands engaged in some campaigns, earlier flash pick deals or things like that to give the brands a little more exposure from the jump.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now, is it still the case where I cannot make my Walmart listing price even a few cents less than the Amazon, because then it might lose the buy box on Amazon? Or is that not happening as much anymore?
Mark:
Yeah, no, they definitely do read off each other for the buy box. So you do need, you know, if you’re gonna take the, you know, promo promotions on Walmart, you definitely wanna do the same on Amazon and vice versa.
Bradley Sutton:
So vice versa. Can something happen if like I’m doing a prime day deal on Amazon and I lower my price from 19.97 to 14.97, does Walmart get mad if that happens? Like, do they do something too?
Mark:
So we have seen some forms of suppression on Walmart actually for, on publishing it for pricing. There is actually, you might have noticed this on your items tab, if you go to the error, if you see something unpublished, there is like a reasonable price error that can occasionally happen. Walmart is not as sensitive to it as Amazon, but the other reason why you wanna do that too is we’ve actually seen Walmart get a tremendous lift during prime day as well, right? So you wanna make sure you have the deal running as well in case someone’s going on over to Walmart to check the pricing and capture the sale.
Bradley Sutton:
Hmm, interesting. Okay. All right. Now I just want to go live on Walmart and just, you know, find some random listings here. So why don’t you give me like a keyword to search or something here on here on Walmart. Walmart, like something, you know, is like gonna have some, maybe some mature products.
Mark:
Yeah, sure. Why don’t we look at something maybe like mushroom supplements. I know that’s a popular trend.
Bradley Sutton:
I’ve never even heard of that mushroom supplements. That is kind of crazy, but I’m just looking here and the save with Walmart plus badge. Does that mean that for sure that is a WFS product or potentially a Walmart supplied product? One of the two?
Mark:
Yeah, so that one, that would mean that it’s either in WFS or it’s a 1P item, like a vendor manager relationship, or it’s in store.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And then, so that means that people who have that, that membership, they get the the free shipping and it’s two days basically kind of like, you know, Amazon Prime, in other words, right?
Mark:
Yep, that’s, that’s correct. And it could even be like, depending on your location to like a store, if there’s a ship from store capability for an item that’s in store, you may even get it in like one day. But it’s essentially very similar to Amazon Prime. You can actually filter on the left side you can toggle specifically for like Walmart+ shopping. So it definitely, you know, wanna get in WFS as a marketplace seller for the reasons of getting that because people are shopping for two day delivery or quicker, quicker timing.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now I’m looking here, I just clicked on this neutro because they’ve got like over a thousand reviews. And we’ve talked before about review syndication. Maybe they’ve done, maybe they’ve done that a little bit. Who knows, but what, what is this Pro Seller Badge? Like how, how does somebody get this Pro Seller Badge that we’re seeing here?
Mark:
Yeah, so the Pro Seller Badge has four metrics that you have to meet. So you get the badge, it’s cycled out on the fifth and the 20th of each month. So you have two chances per month to get that badge. But it’s based on four metrics. So you have one, which is for overall listing quality scores. So 70% of the trending catalog believe has to have over 60% overall listing quality scores. So things that we were talking about before of checking the product type, updating the content really important that you go deep dive into there cuz that’s a metric that a lot of people will miss. One of the other hardest metrics is you have to have a hundred orders in the past 90 days. So that’s one that, you know, if you’re kind of, if you’re kind of new, right, you’re, you’re gonna have to do some PPC or drive some external traffic to really ramp that up. The other two metrics are related to on-time delivery and cancellation, like and refund defects. So easier to meet with those, but the two others for listing quality scores and then for a hundred orders in the last 90 days are the ones that are gonna require more work.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now another thing I see here is 90 day returns. That, that seems extreme to me. Isn’t Amazon like only 30 days, but Walmart is giving people 90 days to return something?
Mark:
Yeah, 90 days. And you know, I go back to, if you’re in a lot of the Facebook marketplace groups for sellers, it’s been like such a problem. There’s been a lot of fraud with returns and issues with that too, which has been like a real, a real challenge for marketplace sellers. It’s quite frustrating with you know, how hand, how Walmart’s handling a lot of that.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Okay. That’s something to keep aware of. Now, by the way, I was looking just as, as we’re talking here at some of the search volume history of, of like mushroom powder was like peaking a few weeks ago, and then on Amazon it’s like blowing up. Like, and sometimes you see this, sometimes it is like 10X you know, the search volume on Amazon compared to Walmart, but sometimes there might be things that are trending on Walmart. But yeah, I can definitely see why you were talking about this mushroom supplement because yeah, it’s, it’s been, it’s been kind of going bonkers. But anyways, back to this mushroom product here. What about this ad right here? Is this a regular ad that a regular seller can do like, I mean this is kind of like in the space of where on Amazon it would be a sponsored display ad, like under their buy box? What kind of ad is this?
Mark:
Yeah, yeah, you can access, you can access it through the Walmart ad center absolutely. You know, we in-house leverage our partner API for all of our ad management and we’re able to access it as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And then like, on Amazon, I could choose the ASINs I or you know, Amazon ASINs I want to advertise on is this, can I, can I choose, do I use the product ID of other products or is it like auto campaigns where Walmart is kind of like steering where these ads show up?
Mark:
Yeah, I believe that ad is still automatic for now. I’ll have to double check on it, but I believe that one is.
Bradley Sutton:
Now I’m looking here, I don’t know, you know, like if I’m just comparing it to like a Amazon listing this almost, I would think product details is kind of like the, the product description, right? But I’m not seeing like bullet points, like are these bullet points separate or is this part of all the same field down here?
Mark:
Yeah, separate fields. So those bullet points there are what’s Walmart calls, the key features when you’re on when you’re editing the item, that’ll be the key features section for bullet points, everything above that that you see where it’s like very, very long on this, on this product. That’s part of what’s called the site description. So it’s two separate fields. When you’re editing an item typically your site description is your kind of like brief paragraph, and then you have your key features, which is the bullet points. This seller has kind of decided to take the site description and really lengthen it out, which, you know, you can do here. I would assume that if he was to go to the growth opportunities dashboard and look at the listing quality score for that specific site description, it’s probably gonna say that it’s over the maximum requirements for how many characters are supposed to be in there. So that’s something to be mindful of.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m gonna pull him up while we’re talking. I’m gonna pull him up in cerebral because maybe, maybe he’s like trying to get index for a lot of keywords, so I’m gonna run Cerebro on him and see if he was successful or not, but yeah, that it does, it doesn’t seem like a good buyer experience. So, so if this was your listing, you, you would not have made the description like that?
Mark:
Yeah, we, we would prefer to optimize to the callouts that Walmart has in, within the portal.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, wait a minute. Oh, that’s weird. Look at this as I’m scrolling, all of a sudden the ads change right here. So that’s, that’s something different and here’s this sanitary napkin ad is popping up again. Interesting. Now I see tons more like all these different specifications and this why it’s, it takes a lot longer to make a Walmart listing, right? Because like I’m seeing just tons of, of stuff here that you don’t normally, you know, you might not see, and these are stuff that you all have to fill out when you, when you’re creating a Walmart listing, right?
Mark:
Yeah. So when you’re creating the Walmart listing and there are multiple ways that you create a listing now that they’ve added, but there are many, many attribution fields that you can, you know, do when you’re setting up listings or do you know, after the fact? Of course. When you do optimize listings for the content quality scores they’re not gonna show like every single attribute. So you may wanna go back to listings to refill those in. It’s only gonna show the ones that are gonna be scored against, like that specific product type that you absolutely should fill in. But there are many, many attributes that you can go back and always fill in.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, good to know. Let’s see, as I scroll down here, it says similar items you might like based on what customers bought. Now, is this organic or is this kind of like an Amazon product targeting ads where these are all sponsored,
Mark:
That’s all organic right there. If you scroll down a little more in the more items to consider, I think you’ll see sponsored slots in there.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, yes, yes. Oh, you can see one organic, one organic or two organic and two sponsored. Interesting.
Mark:
Yep. So there’s a couple different spots that you can target.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And then the reviews all the way down here at the bottom. Customer. Good grief, they’ve got so many weight, you know, people complain about Amazon widgets. Walmart’s got just as many widgets here. Yeah, this is like the fifth different widget here. More items to explore even. Oh my goodness. Oh, related pages. Oh, I like this. This kind of like, kind of shows what Walmart is thinking is relevant to this listing. So I guess this would be kind of a way to make sure that if you’ve got some random keywords here, that probably means that your listing optimization is not great because Walmart doesn’t even know what kind of product you have. I never noticed this
Mark:
Here. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don’t know if people are even getting to the bottom here. You have to think most people are probably on mobile. I don’t know if people are even getting to this bottom section, but yeah, it’s interesting. There’s a, there’s plenty of stuff going on on the website.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. I see about 200 or so keywords here in Cerebro that was pulled up on where this product is indexed for. And there it is right there. Mushroom supplement. That’s how I found it. That’s, that was the page that we, we found it on and then looks like they’re not running sponsored ads on everything here, but that’s, that’s fine. So like, one thing that’s different now is I see organic rank and sponsor ranked, correct me if I’m wrong, but like, it wasn’t it before where you could only show up once on Walmart, like, like either organic or sponsored, but now you can show up twice on the page in each spot. Is that correct?
Mark:
Yeah, yeah. A long time ago. It used to only be like once but now they’ve changed it a few times how those, you know, searching grid placements are, so it went from like three slots to four slots to having other sponsored slots within the searching grid. Now you can also organically rank at the top. So yeah, a couple of those that are like winning kind of the top of page placement for sponsored, they’re all, they’re also organically ranking pretty high as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Okay, cool. Now here’s another listing. It’s not WFS, no reviews, so I’m assuming it’s pretty new, but somehow they already got to the top of page one on this. Oh, okay. So, so I can definitely see the difference that you were talking about as far as the the product details. They have a completely different strategy, like they went a little bit more hardcore into their, into their bullet points here and then have the description. Would this be more along the lines of how you would have set up a product here?
Mark:
Yeah, so this format with the paragraph and then the key features is what the Walmart style guides calls for.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, good to know. Let’s use some quick hitting strategies, you know, like it could be about launch, it could be about PPC, it could be about you know, listing optimization image strategy, how it’s different, but what are, what are some strategies that you’re implementing for your customers that if somebody’s just starting, maybe they’re trying to, you know, manage Walmart on their own that they can learn from some of your tactics.
Mark:
Yeah, absolutely. So Pro Seller Badge is super important. I know we talked about the couple metrics before, but get into Walmart fulfillment services. That’s gonna ramp up your timing to get, actually get the Pro Seller Badge way, way quicker just because you’ll be able to convert quicker for two day shipping that’ll help your a hundred orders in the last 90 days. You’re gonna have the, you know, shipping time metrics that, that Pro Seller Badge is gonna need. So I would say get into WFS when you can start with a conservative amount when you send in, and then kind of like forecast out from there maybe on a basis of what makes sense. I am pushing the product types hard lately because this affects everything with surge as well. So please audit your product types. And there are tools out there that you can find the, your competitors’ product types, you know, you can’t really see that just by looking at the page, but there are different tools and other methods that you can use to pull the computing product types.
Mark:
So absolutely do that. And then you’ll have to submit seller support cases for it. Super important because if you don’t have it again, you’re there literally will not come up in search. We’ve seen it over and over and over again. So those are two things that are very important. The third thing I would say is external traffic. You know, we can talk all day about running ads and PPC on Walmart, but external traffic is really important as well. And we know this from the Amazon side, right? This affects kind of your keyword ranking, and they’ve taken that feedback. We look at it more from can you, can you get sales from external traffic to really ramp up quickly enough to kind of increase organic rank. You’ll see on Walmart there’s like best seller tags, there’s popular pick tags. Those are algorithmically chosen on products based on conversion during a given period, right? So if you can do page one type strategies and things to kind of ramp up the sales volume, you have a really good chance that you can get that tag on a product early.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you recommend to all Amazon sellers that, hey, just take your Amazon product and put it , that same packaging, same everything and put it on Walmart, just, you know, with Walmart listing optimization, or are there cases where it’s like, you know what, you should maybe make a different version like so that you don’t have to worry about that, that price matching thing? Or maybe, maybe you think something in a different format is better on Walmart or is it pretty much like 99% of the time just go ahead and take your Amazon product, that same exact thing, you know, stick the UPC on it and put it on Walmart.
Mark:
Yeah, great question. And this is like what a lot of brands when they get into Walmart stores do a lot of the time is they, they change up the packaging. They have an exclusive size or something like that because it’s a different pricing model, right? And so, but you have to remember that in-store listing does go on the website. And so Amazon could, could crawl that even if it is the identical product that you were selling on Amazon. So it’s like a yes and no. Should you have your assortment on Walmart to capture the sales from like similar Amazon products? Like yes. Would it be good to create something different for Walmart? Yes, if you can, but I know that’s a lot of extra work on brands. We talk a lot with brands about creating maybe exclusive Walmart bundle of a certain product or something, but there’s cost associated with, with that, right? You have to get a new UPC you have to maybe over box package that to ship into WFS. So it’s, it may not be the right move for everyone to do.
Bradley Sutton:
Isaac has a question. I think we kinda answered this earlier, but yeah, as of now, two-step URLs are not against Walmart terms of service. You know, it wasn’t against Amazon terms of service for like 10 years and then all of a sudden it was, was like, you know, a couple years ago. So that’s why helium10.com/gems, we have two forms of Walmart, two step euros that you can use. One is based on the seller, one is based on the brand. And the last time I checked on those they actually worked pretty good in the categories, especially where there’s not much competition. When is Rich Media gonna be available for retailer? This was something that was available back in the day, right? Like, or they could use services that, that offered it and then they took it away. So let’s take that first part of the question first.
Mark:
Yeah, yeah. Great. Great question. So for Rich Media, for video and for 360 spin on a product, you can access that now directly through Seller Center. You could just need to go through a seller support case. There’s a specific pathway for Rich Media if you want video or 360 spin for like below the fold content and all of that, you’d have to access like a third party service provider. You can’t do it through the portal yet. So there are some different providers on the marketplace website that will host that below the full content. As far as the storefronts being available supposed to be rolled out sometime this year, we do work with a couple brands that have been enrolled into the beta program with it. So we have been in contact with Walmart, have actually submitted all of the details for the brand stores. So I do expect it to hopefully come out within the next maybe three to six months.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Last tip of the day, like, like, you know, we have we always on the podcast ask for our 60-second tip. So you’ve been giving us, you know, tips and strategies throughout this whole episode, but what’s something that you can say in like 30 or 60 seconds or less, that highly actionable that you think a seller should be taking action on?
Mark:
Yeah, a hundred percent. I’m gonna go back to the product type piece. So actually what I was talking about earlier, to find a competing product type, go onto your competitor page, go onto a competing product listing, actually click on the listing and right click on the product and inspect the page source code and search for product type. And it’ll actually show you exactly what the computing product type is. Do that, and then make sure you vet the other keywords, see what other product types are showing up, and go back and submit your seller support case to get it changed. Again, if your product type is not right, you’re never gonna show up in search, it’s a huge, huge problem. But that would be definitely my biggest tip right now for actually getting into search. Cuz I see so many people complaining that can never find their item. And that’s usually–
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s see if we can do that live on this one product that we were looking at, this is something that this guy would’ve done. This guy’s a new one. So you should do this on the, on the sellers who are well established, right? Like the ones who are selling more and have more reviews.
Mark:
Yeah. So j I would say anyone who’s organically ranking, I would say away from the paid, but that one was one that was organically ranking. So yeah, right click and then go to the–
Bradley Sutton:
Inspect.
Mark:
Yeah, view the page source. So actually not inspect, but you wanna view the page source code.
Bradley Sutton:
View page source. Sorry, hold on. So right click. Oh, view page source. Okay.
Mark:
Yeah. So you can do this if you do control F and you type in product type as one word, as one word
Bradley Sutton:
Product type one word product type ID and then it’s right here Dietary supplements.
Mark:
Yep. Dietary supplements.
Bradley Sutton:
Only one.
Mark:
There only ever is one product type assigned.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, there only is one. Okay. So it’s not like, you know, on Amazon sometimes they can be in multi.
Mark:
Nope. There only ever is one product type assigned. So yeah, for that, for that search term, which, you know, we just saw before on the helium 10 using magnet rate, the volume, that’s like the, one of the biggest ones for that category. So that would make sense. Then if you lost a similar product, you wanna make sure it gets put in dietary supplements. Versus maybe, versus maybe getting in herbal supplements.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, that’s a cool tip. That sounds like something that Helium 10 make a little bit make a little bit easier. All right. Well Mark, if people want to a, reach out to you to ask more questions on Walmart or perhaps, get your clients become one of your clients to get some help with their own Walmart business, how can they find you guys on the, on the interwebs?
Mark:
Yeah, absolutely. You can shoot me a email. It’s mark@vendorcommerce.com and mark@Vendocommerce.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. You can shoot me a message there, Mark Jordan, if you find me. But yeah, I’m happy to chat Walmart anytime.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Well thank you for coming on the show and maybe we’ll invite you back in a year or so and, and see what’s new. Walmart’s been adding so much stuff lately that, you know, I’m sure there’s gonna be plenty, plenty new strategies that you, you’ll be able to share with us. So thanks a lot for coming on and we’ll see you next time.
Mark:
Great. Yeah. Thank you so much.
In the world of e-commerce, finding effective marketing channels is crucial. Enter TikTok advertising. Tamara Zeravljev, a seasoned expert, is back with a “different vibe” and invaluable insights to help skyrocket your Amazon sales. Discover the power of TikTok advertising to skyrocket your Amazon sales. Learn how to leverage TikTok campaigns to drive conversions and maximize your business potential. In this episode, Tamara shares her client’s experiences and how they were featured as a real case study on TikTok, providing inspiration and practical examples. TikTok advertising has emerged as a powerful tool for amplifying Amazon sales. By listening to Tamara’s actionable tips in this podcast, businesses can tap into the vast potential of TikTok and achieve remarkable results.
In episode 455 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Tamara discuss:
- 01:30 – Tamara Is Back With A “Different Vibe”
- 02:30 – Getting Her First Client After Appearing On This Podcast
- 06:00 – Helping A Struggling Client Sell On Amazon Through TikTok
- 09:31 – Following The Performance Of TikTok Campaigns To Amazon Sales
- 14:00 – What Is A “Hook” In TikTok?
- 18:30 – Featured As A Success Story Case Study On TikTok
- 20:40 – Strategies That Are Working Inside TikTok Advertising
- 23:00 – How Does TikTok Advertising With Influencers Work?
- 27:20 – How Much Does It Cost To Advertise In TikTok?
- 29:40 – ROI Expectations For TikTok Campaigns
- 31:00 – Campaign Maintenance Strategy
- 33:15 – Tamara’s 60-Second Tip
- 34:30 – How To Reach Out To Tamara Zeravljev
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
Bradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got somebody back on the show who thanks to her first appearance on this podcast, got a client for TikTok ads. And through TikTok, they were able to 10X their sales, and now they are even featured as a case study on the TikTok website. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Not sure on what main image you should choose from, or maybe you don’t know whether buyers would be interested in your product at a certain price point. Perhaps you want feedback on your new brand or company logo. Get instant and detailed market feedback from actual Amazon Prime members by using Helium 10 audience just entering your poll or questions. And within a short period of time, 50 to a hundred or even more Amazon buyers will give you detailed feedback on what resonates with them the most. For more information, go to h10.me/audience. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got somebody who helps sellers from the other side of the world all the way coming live from Serbia. Tamara welcome back to this show. How’s it going?
Tamara:
Thank you very much. I mean, it’s going great. Such like different wife these days, but love it to be here again.
Bradley Sutton:
What do you mean, different vibe these days?
Tamara:
Yeah. so I have my own agency this time. So it’s, it’s a different vibe. It’s you know, working on my own with a small team, doing something different than the other time. So because of that different vibe.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. But you’re still there in around Belgrade area, right?
Tamara:
Yes. Still in Belgrade, Serbia, but moving around, let’s say to different let’s say events and such a things through Europe. So, but still based in Belgrade.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Cool. So if everybody if anybody wants to know Tamara’s the more of the backstory w go to episode 3 32, so h10.me/332. That was the first time we we had her on the show. And you can, you know, find out, you know, a little bit more of her origin story, but it’s actually interesting, speaking of that exact podcast episode, you have got an interesting story for us. So somebody heard you on that podcast and then they reached out to you down the road and that’s the thing, guys. You know, you get on this podcast sometimes you know, it doesn’t just, it’s not live and it doesn’t just disappear after, after it’s live. Like it stays out there on the, the interwebs for a long time. And so somebody reached out to you a few months ago and go ahead and start, you know, telling us tell, telling us the story then
Tamara:
Yeah, you said it right? I mean, it doesn’t go away like it stays for years, I’m sure. Like people are still listening to like, episodes from like a year, year and a half and, you know, more so one of my first clients, actually, the first client that I started with was Brand Marbotic that reached out to me, like after listening our previous episode talking about TikTok, of course. So she reached out to me and I was like, oh, Tamara, are you still working with TikTok? Are you freelancer? You know, what’s your story? Because I see that the podcast is like, from the beginning of this year, but she was reaching out in September last year, 2022. So I was like, yeah, still doing it, blah, blah, blah. And we started to work together, you know, and she talked to me about the podcast, about what she was, you know, listening to paying attention to what she liked about it. So she was really keen to try it on for her Amazon brand.
Bradley Sutton:
In what state was her brand, kind of. What kind of of product was it, et cetera. What, when, when you first started researching that
Tamara:
Them, yeah, so it’s brand from France, actually, it was from France. They are how can I say? Like, they have developed app for io. So for iPad, actually, it was for teaching children how to read or how to count on some fun and active way, you know, to be playful for them with some characters and similar and additional to that app, they have developed like little stamps with numbers and letters. So you can take that stamp and like literally stamp it on your iPad and like learn how to read, make some sentences and words and how to count. So they started to sell that on Amazon, if I’m not wrong, on 2016, 2017, something like that. So they had the struggles since day one. I mean, all new sellers will know how it is at the beginning, but they didn’t find, like in a few years, like five, six years, they didn’t find, let’s say like a bright formula, how to increase their, you know reach on Amazon, how to be you know, better seller to get some badges at least or something.
Tamara:
So they tried TikTok, like at the beginning of 2022. They didn’t know how to optimize the campaigns, how to do it. Nothing was working for them. But I have to say, the product is amazing. Like really App Works amazing product is really nice. Children really engaged with it because it’s really funny. Like you really want to stay and learn if you don’t have like a sense you are learning something, it’s like more playing, but still learning. So they had a struggle for some reason they didn’t know how to optimize the campaign on Amazon. And then on TikTok, so when she reached out to me, the very owner the previous owner of Marbotic she said to me like, they never get that much of a brand awareness and couldn’t increase the sales as they would like to at least little bit, just to be profitable. So at that time in September when she reached out to me, she actually applied for insolvency. So she couldn’t, you know, work anymore with it, but she was like, we’re looking to try it one more time. And she heard the episode and, you know,
Bradley Sutton:
So she was going to go out of business in other words, yeah, like trying to like wind down. And so this was almost like her last last to try and make something out of it then, huh?
Tamara:
Yes, yes. Literally the last step, you know, before she goes you know, totally with the brand, but yeah, we started to work together and I had like with the team, we had some good ideas for her videos because like she had some girl for UGC to create the videos on TikTok for her and the video. So she
Bradley Sutton:
Had her own TikTok account. She had somebody even creating UGC, but like what was the problem? It wasn’t getting you know, views or you don’t, the content wasn’t great or what was the issue when you took a look at what her strategy was before she came to you?
Tamara:
Yeah, they didn’t know how to, like, when it comes to organic, they didn’t know how to reach out to the audience to write users, you know, and when it comes to advertising, they didn’t know how to optimize, right? You know, they couldn’t find a good agency or good freelancer or someone in-house. She really tried everything, you know. So taking overall, the videos were actually great. Amazing. They needed just like a few little things to how can I select, add it, you know, add some hooks for, for example, or to show up the product, at least.
Bradley Sutton:
What’s the name of your new company again?
Tamara:
Add2Ads.
Bradley Sutton:
I see you put it, you threw in a little pun there, I see. They needed just a little bit to, to add. Okay. I got, I got you. You’re already good at this marketing thing. I like it. All right, continue, please. It,
Tamara:
It’s already into my head and I do it. I don’t even notice it anymore. But good. So yeah, we needed to add little bit of Sparkle there. So we helped them with the strategy for organic videos. Like we helped the girl that was doing a UGC, like with little bit for hooks, little bit of how to show product in the first two, three seconds. And the rest of it was amazing, you know, anyways, so what they actually needed was optimization of the campaigns and the right team to do it. So let’s say we helped a little bit with an organic part, and then we start with an advertising. I mean, in September, it was like end of September, I think about we started the campaigns and in about like five or seven days, she already noticed, you know, some results she already saw increase in sales.
Tamara:
Like I don’t know, like now exact numbers, but it was like, she usually sold like about 10 products a day. Then it was 13, 15 in like seven days increased, but she never had that number, even if it’s like lower in the seven days, she was like, I think it’s doing something. So comparing September to October, it was like eight times we increased their sales, which was crazy because I never saw something going, you know, crazy up, like with them and October, comparing to November, actually November to October, like in November we had like 12 times increased it, you know? So it was huge.
Bradley Sutton:
So from like, what numbers were they doing before approximately per month on sales? And also, is this all on Amazon or is this also including like their .com sales?
Tamara:
Yeah, so we never did like.com sales and I think they didn’t have nothing on that side. It was just Amazon. Amazon US actually.
Bradley Sutton:
Amazon US. Okay.
Tamara:
Yeah, it’s US Market, and even they’re from France. They were just selling in US. So yeah I don’t remember the exact numbers of the sales, but as I said, it was like, in my mind as I remember, it was below hundred, and then it started to go like to hundreds, you know, sales, like crazy sales, you know? And the funny thing about it’s that I really always like to mention when it comes to Amazon is we were trying to follow the performance, like how that happened to see what’s going on in the campaigns. And the funny thing is, we couldn’t see anything in the campaigns, because when you’re creating on TikTok campaign, you still need to have Amazon attribution link to follow. Why? Because, TikTok will show you only views and clicks, you know, engagement and just the basic things because Amazon doesn’t allow you to.
Tamara:
So you need to create Amazon attribution link to see actually sales of the product. And we were seeing small numbers there. For example, I remember it were just showing around 10% of the sales, nothing else. Then in like, in second month, it was showing like around 30-40%, but still not a hundred percent that we saw, like from TikTok actually, that was coming. And we were trying to figure it out. Like we, as a team, we had all the access to her Amazon account, and of course the TikTok account, she had it also on her website as well. We tried like some different tools to follow what’s going on. And still, we couldn’t find any tool that will help us to follow what is going on on Amazon. And attribution link didn’t allow us to see a hundred percent of what’s going on. So we were trying to actually turn to Search Term Report and to see actual sales and compare it to the month when we didn’t work. And we even had, like in the middle of October.
Bradley Sutton:
Which Search Term Report are you referring to?
Tamara:
Yeah, like on Amazon Search Term Report, Advertising Search Term Report.
Bradley Sutton:
The advertising, not, not Search Query Performance. Okay, cool.
Tamara:
Yeah, so we were just trying to see there what’s going on, like, because also on Amazon advertising on campaigns, we could see increase in sales, better ACoS, and much, much more sales that it was before. So we saw in a Search Term Reports, like some keywords that weren’t there before. And when we, you know, put them in some like Excel sheet, we realized it was the keywords from the hooks, from the videos that were in the campaign on TikTok. So for example, hook was like I don’t know, funny way to play with your children or, or such a things, I forgot. But it was something with the kids playing and we saw like kids playing keywords with letters and numbers mixing. We never had that, like, well, hold,
Bradley Sutton:
Hold on, hold on. Just, so what do you mean by hook?
Tamara:
Like the hook on the beginning of the video on TikTok?
Bradley Sutton:
So like the the caption. Okay. And so then the caption on a TikTok video was something, and then, so what your, your theory was that, hey, maybe people, instead of just clicking the attribution link, they’re just going directly to Amazon and, and kind of typing that in to try and find this product and then use, were you already targeting that in, in Amazon advertising, or was that just com coming from an auto campaign, or how did you even get that in Amazon advertising?
Tamara:
Yeah, so most of them were in auto campaign. Some were in a phrase in broad at groups because like, it’s a longer story. What we realized, because we were launching the campaigns in US, I was in Serbia, Belgrade, and they were in, you know, France. We had some team in US helping us. We at the end, like, I don’t know how, but it happened to show to one of our, you know team members in US, the commercial, when he clicked on it, he said like he needed to log into Amazon account, and he was like, I’m too lazy to do this now. I don’t even remember my password now. So like, I would naturally, if I like the product, I would go and search for it on my Amazon app, actually. So we realized that not all the users can actually click on it and be immediately through their to, I mean they could saw Amazon page, but when they click on buy it, add to card, they need to sign in.
Tamara:
So for some, they needed to sign in because they were even, I don’t know, lazy or forgot the password, password or whatever they needed to go to their app and actually search for it. And the keywords they’re actually searched for are from the video, the text that was, you know, point out on the video, like hook at the beginning, like, did you know this or try this? Or even we realized, because the boxes, you know, huge was huge for the kids. And we have some video where one of the girls were trying to, you know, pick up the box and it was too big and it was a little bit funny, but you could see the name of the product. It was the Lux kit and everybody were trying to actually search for the Looks kit as well. So I remember that keyword was actually huge, you know increase of sales with only that keyword.
Tamara:
And before that, I mean, we tried that keyword on Amazon, like Lux kit, but never converted because no one knew, you know, the name of the product and brand and everything. Yeah. So also brand keywords increased. No one heard before that. I mean, no one, such a small amount of users heard of Mebo, and it was not trending on the account to see Marbotic brand keyword has converted and sold. So we saw also Marbotics Lux kit, you know, Marbotic kids, Marbotic, whatever, you know, stamps. We saw increase of that keywords that never have sold that much, maybe one or two products per month. It was not a big deal. And then we saw it increase like crazy. So those are like key points that we have discovered and was like crucial for us because we didn’t know how to follow if it’s good or not.
Tamara:
I mean, we saw increase in sales, but we wanted to know how to follow it, what happened, and to investigate more. So I would say really, really helped us to see like a search term, Advertising Search Term Report, and the guy who saw the commercial and told us, you know, about the problem, but when we tested, like we could enter to, to to Amazon didn’t need to, to go to app. So it was, you know, strange things happen, but it still was working. So I think it’s a valuable info to know that about TikTok advertising, like how to actually follow the results. And you know thanks to that we knew what was going on and trying to still push the ads until the end of Q4.
Bradley Sutton:
And then, so I guess it was so successful that even TikTok itself, like found out about this they’re like, what’s going on with this company? And then they reached out to you and even used this whole thing as a, as a case study on website, isn’t it?
Tamara:
Yeah, yeah. At that time I was like talking with you know, TikTok team from UK, and they, they looked at the account that I was working on with team, and they were like hey, this is like crazy campaign, because we see crazy increase, like in beginning of September, nothing almost. And then in October and November and December starting to going crazy. So they were like, are you interested to do case study with us? Like a success story to be, pointed out on tiktok.com, like TikTok for business? And I mean, for sure I said yes. And Marie from Marbotic was also like, thrilled to hear the, to hear the news. So it was amazing story actually. Like, I think if I remember it almost brought the tears, like to me and Marie, because I know her story, how it was and how they struggled for years, and now to have crazy increase.
Tamara:
And then TikTok reaching out to us like, Hey guys, do you wanna do like a case study success story? And I think I was talking to you like these days about it, but it wasn’t real for me and for my team until we saw it live, until we had the link, you know, to see and to really screw it because I mean, we just started with an agency. I had it in my mind for goals for years, you know, to come. And I did it in just a few months. So it is still like I’m still happy to talk about it.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool, cool. Now, what else? I mean, you can’t always just get some amazing case study that gets picked up by TikTok, but Yeah, but what else is going on that you, that’s interesting. You can tell us like things that are working or specific strategies that people can use either in just TikTok advertising or Amazon advertising. You’ve been doing this for, for quite a while now, and it’s, it’s been over a year since you’ve been on the podcast. So what else has happened in the last year or so that you can share with the audience that you think can help them?
Tamara:
Yeah, so a lot of actually changed, especially on TikTok. I know more about it because I’m more on that platform. So changed in like how people like to search. They don’t go anymore that much on Google to search for things. I mean, they still do, but not that much as they were. They also go to TikTok app and go to search and search, like, for example, how to fix something, how to do some things, whatever, like to make bad or to dress yourself or wedding or similar. And it helps a lot to users and also to sellers, because when you still go to Google and you search for how to do something, blah, blah, blah, you can see like in one of the first three or four links, you will see a TikTok link. When you click on it, you will go to TikTok video actually how to do something, or trying to find some answer for some topic.
Tamara:
You will see it on Google because TikTok has become now like a search app as well. So yeah, that’s like a major thing that happened since we last talked. So but let’s say also with the influencers, I realized like in the last year changed a lot. We have lot more influencers going now to TikTok rather than to Instagram. And of course along with that, their prices have increased, but we have them more now on TikTok. And that game was changed a lot, like, let’s say fighting between Instagram and TikTok has apps, so a lot more people are there now. A lot more sellers are at a lot more brands. I mean, last year when we talked about it, I think I said I remember like it was still new. Not a lot of sellers are there, especially from Amazon now, we can see the numbers are increasing.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, when you talk about TikTok advertising, can you only advertise your own content, or let’s just say some influencer or user does their UGC, an organic post on their own account, can you send advertising traffic to their video as well? How does that work? I’ve never, obviously never done TikTok advertising.
Tamara:
Yeah, no worries. So there are two ways when advertising the video already posted. So if you have, for example, organic profile on TikTok, you can just link in your like, business account for advertising with your organic profile, and then take the videos from your profile to advertise it to increase, for example, also likes, shares, comments, you know, and everything, followers as well. But you can also have like hire some influencer to post the video about your brand, and then when they post it, they need to send you like some kind of a code so you can implement it to your business account and use their video to advertise your product. So with that being said, you don’t necessarily need to be like present on TikTok to have the videos. You can just like hire the influencers and then advertise their videos to send traffic to your Amazon page.
Tamara:
So like that’s how it goes. But I would always recommend to have both sides, because it’s always good to have to see like what work maybe better for your brand. It can maybe go, you know, similar like a 50-50, but it’s always good to have it from influencers, you know, eyes like someone that is closer maybe to users and from brand side, and you can increase followers, engagement on the profile. A lot more people can see you than recommend and such a thing. So I think it’s always better to use, you know, maximum of it, but if you’re not able to, as you said, like you can use some other’s video to actually advertise your brand.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now I’m looking at their Marbotic TikTok page, and so, you know, I see just tons and tons of yeah, of videos here and, you know, without clicking on it, it seems like mainly like UGCs. So does this mean that like somebody records this, like with the TikTok app or in this format and then they send it to you guys and then you just post it, or they send just a bunch of raw video and then you guys format it to put these like captions and things onto TikTok or what, what’s the process here? Because thi this is, you know, obviously not just, you know, Marbotic company you know, using every employee’s different kids in their <laugh> company and putting these videos up, I’m assuming.
Tamara:
Yeah. So as I said, they had like a girl that was their, you know, UGC like creator for them. They together came up with the strategy. As I said, we helped them at some point, like how to little bit improve it, so the girl was actually filming her kids, some friends kids, you know, like she, she was trying to find out like different kinds of kids. And she was a teacher, actually, she is teacher. So she was filming it like from her perspective as a user. And it is more natural way to show off your product, as I said, like how actually kids are using it, not like fully screened. She were just filming them, playing with it, talking about it like, oh, mom, I really like this one. Can I play with the Marbotic? Or some kind of a things like pulling it out from some drawers, like to play with it. And then she was editing the videos, adding the text on it, like some hooks and post it on their, you know, profile. And we actually used those posted videos on their profile to advertise the product. So it was everything filmed with the UGC, like from their user perspective. And we used that to, you know, increase sales.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, now let’s just say you know, I’m one of the listeners, Amazon company out there. I’m doing, I don’t know let’s just say, you know, $500,000 a year on Amazon currently. So I’m about that level of seller. Now, I’ve never done TikTok advertising. I don’t even have my TikTok account, so I would assume, all right, first step is make your, your, your TikTok account and then now what kind of budget, you know, should I be looking at to, to even get started? Because this is not something where it’s like with Amazon PPC, I mean, if I wanted to, I could just do a $5 a day auto campaign and just have that and who knows, what’s gonna come from it. But I know on TikTok it’s different, like there’s kind of a minimum where it’s like, hey, if you really want to, to have a better chance of success, you can’t just have some $5 campaign. So what, what would it what would it, what would be your advice there
Tamara:
When it comes to budget? Like TikTok platform actually has set minimum that is pair ad group in the campaign 20 US dollars. And with that, actually, I have to be honest, you can run follower campaigns and get, like, if I’m not wrong, like in a month, about 10K, 8K followers but when it comes to traffic campaigns, the budget is a little bit, you know, going up. So something that will bring you some sales, you know, some results, it’s about 70 US dollars per day. Why? Because with the less amount of budget, the advertising, actually the videos that are advertised will stop at some point of the day and you will not use the whole day. So because the US, you know, market is big marketplace, so we need like around 70 to start with. I mean, if the brand has the budget, it will be nice if they can start with the hundred that is like, you know, our always go-to option. But if they don’t, I will say a minimum is a 70. So when it comes to budget, of course.
Bradley Sutton:
And then so, you know, like day one, I’m not gonna get my money back from that 100, you know, unless something crazy happens. How long does it usually take? You know, like, you know, 10 days I’ve already spent a thousand dollars, like by that time, how much should I expect to have a return on investment there?
Tamara:
Yeah, so when it comes to like bras and everything, like, not the same for each brand of course, but in around seven to take 10 days, you should be able to sue at least, you know, little bit going up at least for like you know, one 2% to see something is happening not that much because in the first seven or 10 days, like top in the 10 days, for sure we can collect the audience, we can see how they behaved with the videos, what they liked, what they did, and what they shared, how many seconds they viewed, which video, and then how to turn over the campaigns in which sites to actually optimize, you know, the campaigns. So in seven days, for sure, you can see where it will can go, so you can optimize in that direction, and then from seven day actually to start growing your business on TikTok.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Interesting. Now what’s, what’s the maintenance look like? You know, so, so obviously every month you weren’t 10Xing Marbotics, you know, sales, it gets to a point where it’s like, all right, now it’s like, you know, we’re out there, we’ve got the followers and we just want to, you know, keep bringing some new traffic. So how does your strategy change after the initial, you know, traffic building, I guess you can call it?
Tamara:
Yeah, amazing, amazing question because that’s like a, you know, usual question after some time we got it there. Like you know what? Now actually TikTok is always, always having like some new option. Like for example, what we did with probiotic at some time, we had like some interactive add-on, on the video. It was a display card, we sell like NCE Vita, we have the access for it, let’s try it on because it can, you know, change the game a little bit to see how the people will react. For example, we tried with that. Of course, every new month we have some new bids going on, some user behaviors change. We have some new idea for the video, how to change, you know, approach on the beginning or in the middle of the video.
Tamara:
So we try to change it, you know, in a different ways when it comes to video, when it comes to optimization, when it comes to some new, you know, additions to the campaign. So that’s how we increase it and still going on with it. But I have to say their course as on Amazon as on every other platform like a month where you will see lower sales, that’s normal. Like, for example, January for most of the product. So in January we would usually decrease little bit the budget because the sales will normally go a little bit low, but not that much as it was in the beginning. So still we have those, qoutations with the sales, but how to keep it, you know, and trying to increase each month more and more is changing the game in the videos of course, because that’s like, at least 60% of the successful campaign is successful video and interesting. And then of course, with optimization and new things.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, so just like last time you’re on the podcast, you know, it’s time for our 60-second strategy. So what haven’t you said today that you think something that’s actionable that you can say in 60 seconds or less for our community?
Tamara:
Yeah, I would say if you’re not running TikTok ads, try it out. And when trying out, be aware to follow, as I said, with an attributional link at advertising Search Term Report, follow the performances, like dig deep into it to know if it works for you or not. If not, try out like some kind of different videos, different hooks, try to be more interactive, you know, in the first three seconds and interesting to your audience, show off your product. And I think that that will work.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I think my biggest takeaway is, is what you were talking about earlier about, you know, when, when you weren’t seeing everything in the attribution from, from Amazon, from Marbotic, you, you thankfully had some broad and phrase campaigns and auto campaigns. And then, so taking what that hook is, see, I’m learning all kinds of TikTok language here taking that hook and then making sure there’s a campaign on it, and then sometimes you’ll be able to see the effects just from your Advertising Search Term Report. So I think that’s really interesting as well. So if people want to reach out to you and get more information and, and who knows, maybe be one of the next TikTok case studies that’s picked up by TikTok. But where how can they find you on the intro webs?
Tamara:
Yeah, they can find us on www.add2ads.com or reach out to us on office@add2ads.com. And actually for today, I prepared like a 300 US dollars coupon for all the listeners that will reach out to us. Hopefully just put on the subject Helium 10, and that’s how you’ll get, you know, little discount from us.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on here. I’ll be seeing you hopefully in a few weeks when I go to Serbia and in your languages, I guess I’ll say (Speaks Serbian) thank you for coming on here and let’s see where you you and your agency are at next year when you come back on the show.
Tamara:
Yeah, thank you very much for calling me again, and thank you very much for the kind words and I can say also (Speaks Serbian) and can’t wait to see you here soon. Thank you very much.
Episode 454 of the SSP features Kunal Dattani and Reggie Young, members of the Serious Sellers Club, sharing their incredible stories. Reggie started his e-commerce business while in active military duty, turning a $3,000 investment into almost a $1 million exit. Kunal began by selling diet plans on eBay, eventually establishing a successful men’s cosmetic brand in the UK and making $2 million annually on eBay. They discuss living as a digital nomad, sourcing strategies, launching in the UK and other EU markets, and off-Amazon marketing tactics. Tune in to this inspiring episode for invaluable insights into the world of selling in Amazon and E-commerce! If you’re eager to connect with Kunal and Reggie, we encourage listeners to join the Serious Sellers Club Group, where 6/7/8-figure Amazon sellers and like-minded individuals gather to share knowledge and insights.
In episode 454 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Kunal and Reggie discuss:
- 02:00 – Meet Our Guests, Members Of The Serious Sellers Club
- 02:30 – Reggie’s Backstory
- 03:50 – Starting An E-commerce Business While In Active Military Duty
- 04:50 – From $3K Capital To An $830K Exit
- 08:30 – Kunal’s Backstory
- 10:30 – Started In Ecomm Selling Diet Plans On eBay
- 12:00 – Starting A Men’s Cosmetic Brand In UK And Was Featured In Dragon’s Den
- 13:00 – Making A $2 Million A Year On eBay
- 13:30 – Why Did Reggie Decide To Be A Digital Nomad?
- 15:30 – The Cost Of Living For A Digital Nomad
- 16:45 – Talking About Kunal’s Deals Inside The Dragon’s Den
- 18:40 – “I Realized That Amazon Is The Best Platform”
- 19:15 – Strategy Session From Kunal And Reggie
- 22:18 – Sourcing Things Under $2 Per Unit Landed Into Amazon
- 27:50 – Launching In The UK Market And Into Other EU Countries
- 29:30 – Off-Amazon Marketing Tactics
- 31:25 – Kunal And Reggie’s Hobbies And Healthy Habits Outside The Amazon Grind
- 33:22 – How To Reach Kunal And Reggie Online
- 33:50 – Join The Serious Sellers Club Facebook Group
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a couple serious sellers in the show with really cool backstories. One seller started with a $3,000 investment, and he turned that into a nearly $1 million exit and now lives as a digital nomad. The other seller was a seven figure seller on eBay and even got into Britain’s version of the show Shark Tank. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Want to enter in an Amazon keyword and then within seconds get up to thousands of potentially related keywords that you could research. Then you need Magnet by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/magnet. Magnet works in most Amazon marketplaces, including USA, Mexico, Australia, Germany, UK, India, and much more. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a couple sellers from different parts of the world, actually, today, for the first time on the show Reggie and Kunal, am I pronouncing your name right? Reggie, where are you at right now?
Reggie:
I’m currently traveling through the States. Just got done with Seattle and then heading to Lisbon soon.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Do you have a home base or are you full digital nomad life? Just on the road? Yeah. Yeah.
Reggie:
Digital nomad professional, homeless person. I call myself.
Bradley Sutton:
I love it. I love it. And Kunal, where are you at in the world?
Kunal:
I’m in the United Kingdom in a place called Leicester near Birmingham. Not too far.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So what’s the local football team there then?
Kunal:
Leicester City.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, I was like, wait a minute. That sounds that sounds familiar. Weren’t they the ones who had like Cinderella season? A little while back.
Kunal:
2016 it was.
Bradley Sutton:
I remember that. Yeah. Remember exactly. Okay, cool, cool. Excellent. Now I got turned onto the part of our new Serious Sellers Club. We have this club private community within Helium 10, where it’s sellers who are doing 6, 7, 8 figures. And so I had just thrown something out there. I’m like, Hey, I’m looking for new people to come on the podcast, and these gentlemen volunteered themselves. And so like, it’s, it’s great to have you guys on here. And I know literally nothing about either of you. So what I want to start off with is just getting your superhero origin backstories here. Let’s start with Reggie. Where were you born and raised?
Reggie:
Oh, sure. Yeah. hello everyone. Reggie Young, born and raised in Hawaii. Joined the military when I was 18. My commanders sent me to the Air Force Academy to become an officer, but I wasn’t smart enough, so I had to go to a prep school for like a year. Kept having to start over and over. Really, really was passionate about business after our graduation. I wanted to do like the most business related job in the military. Wasn’t able to do that.
Bradley Sutton:
So you went to the Air Force Academy?
Reggie:
Yeah, yeah. Went to the Air Force academy for five years.
Bradley Sutton:
Is that like Colorado or something?
Reggie:
Yeah, it’s in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Nice place there. I was basically, I never really left campus much. I was always head in the books type of thing. But yeah, I did five years there, became an officer, was a nuclear missiles officer. Was spent like half the time underground, a day and a half above ground, a day and a half below ground. And at that point I was like, Hey, this is not really giving me much fulfillment, so really just eat, sleepp, breathe, e-commerce, drop shipped high ticket, then eventually moved to private label, and then sold my first business about a year and a half ago, and then just scaling sense.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So you exited the military and then immediately went into like being in like online entrepreneur or, or was there, you know, different jobs you held in the meantime, or?
Reggie:
I thankfully had replaced my income about six months before my military contract ended, but I knew–
Bradley Sutton:
So while you were still in the military, you had started selling online, doing different things. Oh, okay, cool.
Reggie:
Yeah, totally. It was like years of just burning all the ships, you know, some success, some failure, the entrepreneurship journey. And then I was consulting for some other brands that ended up exiting. So I had some experience consulting, had some online consulting income options.
Bradley Sutton:
What year about are we we talking about here in the timeline?
Reggie:
So I started Amazon 2015, 2016. I left the military 2020 and exited my business 2021.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. So the business you exited, was it an Amazon business or was it just online?
Reggie:
Yeah, it was an Amazon business. It was a $3,000 investment.
Bradley Sutton:
So you started an Amazon business with $3,000 and then built it up to exit?
Reggie:
Yes. Yeah, it was like, I think my fifth or sixth launch product launch. And then that, that specific product launch was $3,000 invested. And then with the cash flow and the exit, I netted a little over $830,000, which was I believe, a 27,500% ROI. It was like the, the craziest investment return I’ve ever done in my life. And since then I’ve kind of just tried to scale out and
Bradley Sutton:
Are you able to say what kind of product it was or category at all? I mean, if not, it’s fine.
Reggie:
I can say it was like a kitchen appliance accessory okay. Less than, yeah, less than $10.
Bradley Sutton:
So $3,000 for like, what was that, 500 units, a thousand units or what?
Reggie:
Yeah, my landed cost was 45 cents into Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Landed cost was 45 cents a unit. What were you selling air? What was this?
Reggie:
Yeah. It was a really, really small kitchen appliance. But I ended up selling the product. We had over 16,000 reviews when I sold it.
Bradley Sutton:
So what was the retail price for the product?
Reggie:
The retail price, I started at $9. So I had crazy high margins. And then of course, like competition came in, product costs got higher, I increased my product quality costs, my landed costs jumped to like a, like a dollar 50 landed eventually. But yeah, it was just an amazing ride and it made up for all the losses, obviously. It was great.
Bradley Sutton:
Did FBA small and light was that a thing back then?
Reggie:
No, it wasn’t. It was not a thing.
Bradley Sutton:
You were paying just regular regular FBA fees.
Reggie:
Yeah, yeah, it was, and I think, right before I sold it, small and light came out and then gave that opportunity to the buyer as, Hey, this is a way for you to increase margin.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting, interesting. That’s like living the dream right there. So when you sold the brand, was it your whole seller central account that you sold and all the products in it? Was it just that product or, or how did that work?
Reggie:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. When you exit, most people want to acquire the entire account instead of doing like, you know, yeah. A listing transfer. So they say, so I actually sold the entire account including my KDP account with it, which I had made a book during covid that was doing, doing okay. But yeah, you end up selling the entire account which is fine cuz you net a good amount of money and it’s okay to start up another account just under a brand new LLC, new account.
Bradley Sutton:
They took over all the products you had in under the account? But that was kinda like the hero product that, that was doing most of that. What did your annual revenue get up to before you exited?
Reggie:
Yeah, so my, my pricing period was I was averaging about $16,000 a month in profit after everything. And then with that I was able to exit, I think it was like great timing, you know, it was post covid this aggregators were starting to come into this space and it just made sense to take chips
Bradley Sutton:
Off. Was it an aggregate or just a private party that you sold to?
Reggie:
This was a a private party. I had the, thankfully been educating myself for years on how to sell my business. So when the time came I knew exactly like what avenues would make sense versus not. And I was able to exit all cash no earn out. So super, super blessed and thankful.
Bradley Sutton:
Is that when you became a digital nomad or were you, had you already started doing that before? Yeah,
Reggie:
I’d already started. I knew like I knew in 2015 when I was underground that this life wasn’t for me at the time, so I was like, let me burn all the ships when 2020 comes, no matter what, I will be a digital nomad traveling. So it just ended up working out really, really well. And then since then, I’ve consulted for some of the top aggregators continue to do so in helping other people sell their online business.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, let, let’s switch over to Kunal now. Where were you born and raised?
Kunal:
Born in Leicester in the uk.
Bradley Sutton:
So stayed local your whole life, huh?
Kunal:
Yeah, I actually moved to Spain a few years ago. But yeah, ba back here for now, and the plan is to get a Dubai hopefully next year,
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And then, and then what about you? What was your educational journey like upon graduating? I dunno know what you guys call over there? High school, I would say.
Kunal:
Yeah. Yeah. So we, I graduated in accounting. But yeah, there’s a funny story because after graduation I applied for about 20, I think it was 22 or 23 jobs, and got rejected from all of them. And the recruitment consultant said to me you’re too entrepreneurial. Because I was actually challenging the people that are interviewing me couldn’t get work. And it was, it was absolutely nuts because I was trying my best to get work. But yeah, then kind of fell into E-com and never looked back ever since.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So you never did end up working in the accounting?
Kunal:
Never, never. I’ve never been employed.
Bradley Sutton:
I love it. I love it. What was all this happening where you were getting rejected at these jobs?
Kunal:
That was 2011. Okay. Yeah. So I went nearly 12 months without anyone.
Bradley Sutton:
Still living with your, like, family at home, like parents or how were you supporting yourself? That’s the way to do it.
Kunal:
Come from Indian family, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, yeah, like, well, you know, the, the stereotype is, you know, for, you know, I’m half Filipino myself, you know, like Asian families are like, Hey, you need to become a doctor or lawyer or something like that, or Filipinos, like nurses or something. But what, what, what was their mindset when you would get rejected job after job? They weren’t giving you a hard time
Kunal:
To be found third in line in the family? So they weren’t really by the time they got one.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, okay. There you go. If you were the first ward, it would’ve been a different story. Yeah. Yeah. And then, so what was your first entrepreneurial endeavor then when you finally settled into that?
Kunal:
So I actually started playing around with E-com at age 16. So I was selling diet plans on eBay.
Bradley Sutton:
Selling diet plans on eBay? IHow do you sell a diet plan on eBay?
Kunal:
I was the fat kid selling diet plans on eBay because there was an opportunity there, right? Yeah. And yeah, and I was making money. Wel I funded my whole college and university through.
Bradley Sutton:
Selling diet plans?
Kunal:
Yeah. It’s ebook and it was automatically sent to the customer. And yet it is funny, in hindsight, when I look back, you know, these women that were buying this diet plan, they were actually starving because they’re only on like 600 calories.
Bradley Sutton:
So there’s a whole bunch of women in the UK buying a diet plan from a 16 year old guy/kid.
Kunal:
But you have to remember, this was like, you know, 25, 20 years ago, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, 20 years. What are you talking about? Oh, when you were 16. Okay. I was about to say. That’s interesting. All right. Like, you know I, I’m not sure we we’re gonna suggest everybody to start when you’re 16 and selling diet plants where you should only eat 600 calories. I’m not sure if that’s the most healthy thing. At least here in the States, you can get in trouble for doing doing that, perhaps. So then you’re making money throughout, you know, high school, throughout university, and then now come, you know, 2012, 2013, you’re, you’re a full-time entrepreneur. What kind of, I’m assuming you weren’t continuing to sell diet plans at that time? Yeah,
Kunal:
We actually with my brothers, we set up one of the biggest UK cosmetic brands for men. So in beard care which became fairly big. So we did like the Shark Tank equivalent in the UK called Dragons Den.
Bradley Sutton:
Is that like a TV show over there as well? Yeah. And then so you were on the show, like with your brothers?
Kunal:
Yeah, so we did the show in 2018 and then I sold the company in 2020, literally like a week before the pandemic.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. So, yeah, so, like beard oils and things like that.
Kunal:
Yeah, that’s like, there was Beard brand in the US you know, dollar Beard Club. We were, we were kind of the number one in the UK and Europe. Were
Bradley Sutton:
You selling on Amazon as well? Or or was this all just like on a .com website or,
Kunal:
Ebay was actually at one point, like a hundred percent of our business. Then we kind of went on.
Bradley Sutton:
What kind of revenue were you doing on this brand on eBay per year?
Kunal:
Couple of million.
Bradley Sutton:
Couple of million on eBay. That’s crazy. Let’s switch back to Reggie. I picked two good guy. Like, I, I had, I had no idea about anybody’s backstory here. I just knew that they were serious sellers club members, so I knew they were doing, you know substantial revenue. And I was like, say no more. Just bring it on and I’m gonna find out about you guys. On here. So, so let’s go back to Reggie. I’m just curious, what was the inspiration behind deciding to, to be homeless? In other words, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, I couldn’t do it cuz you know, I’ve got family and things like that, or, you know, I, I suppose I still could, but they hate traveling and stuff. But was this something that you’ve always wanted to do? You like traveling or you just don’t like staying in one place, you get restless? Or what was the thought process there?
Reggie:
Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it was, I remember when I got to the point where I had product launch failure after product launch failure, and I was like, considering giving up. I was, you know, I was asking like, what’s my why? And once I internalized my why, I had like, like complete mind shift change, and it was to do what I love wherever I want, whenever I want, surrounded by the people I love. And in 2015, 2016, 2017, around that time, I looked around and like nobody was working remotely. There weren’t that many, like, opportunities to make significant amounts of money online that were like, just “easy to do”. So once I internalize I guess that, that that thought process, that, that became my strong why to, to move forward and become a nomad. And, and I just really, really love it now, being able to pick up and go wherever, whenever I absolutely love it. Work on my own time.
Bradley Sutton:
So how does it work? Do you like set up Airbnbs for like, months at a time? Or do you have a trailer or what do you do?
Reggie:
Yeah, so I’ve done e everything from traveling with two checked luggage all the way from like a small carry on bag and a small roll on. I never really do the whole, like, backpacking. Nobody really does that. I feel like it’s like, where are you going, where you’re not gonna be able to roll a luggage? Like, there’s always gonna be someone that you can either fire, you know, someone to take your luggage for you. So I normally just pack everything up and I’m pretty, pretty passionate about different types of travel gear, so I’m always like looking at what works. But yeah, absolutely love it.
Bradley Sutton:
And how long do you stay in like one place?
Reggie:
One place? I try and stay at least three months. Anything less than that is way too much turnover. So I’m like very big on systems, I feel.
Bradley Sutton:
What is your average per month then? Does it end up like with not counting food, but, but you know, like I mean, I guess, you know, utilities, so all your pain is far as the Airbnb. So like, you’re lodging. What does it come out to a month?
Reggie:
Yeah. I think really it’s just choose your own adventure. I’ve done like the super cheap studio, like kind of rinky-dink all the way to like, Hey, I wanna like, live really nice with the view. So I travel right now with my partner. And I think I would say for most people, unfortunately right now with like the state of the economy, you really can’t find anything for anything that isn’t like, really, really low quality for under like $1,200 a month. I would say it’s like the standard in most, most places for like a one bedroom. So I would say all in, you’re probably at like three grand at least a month to live, like, okay, really, really comfortably. I haven’t cooked in like two years. I literally order everything on, on like Uber and things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
DoorDash and stuff like that.
Reggie:
Yeah, Doordash. So you get, you really get to like Uber everywhere. Uber Eats everything travel, and it makes it really, really nice.
Bradley Sutton:
I just Googled it right now, I’m like, Hey, wait this is a show that’s that’s like pretty legit here. So what were you trying to get on that show, and then what happened when you were on there?
Kunal:
Yeah, so we went in for 150 grand, which is in, in hindsight, again, doesn’t seem like a lot of money now that everything I know now, it doesn’t seem like a lot. But yeah, we got four offers and we took two. So two people call Peter Jones and Te Lavanne. So yeah, big players, they’re worth like half a billion each.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. All right. And then, so this was before the exit, I mean, that wasn’t the exit, like you weren’t exiting and they were buying your brand, like you got the investment and then, and then built it up even more, the brand and then, and then you exited later.
Kunal:
Exactly. Yeah, that’s it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And then, so after that, what do, what did you do? You know, you didn’t become a digital nomad, like, like, like Reggie here. So what did you do upon exit any, any lifestyle changes, buy a house or anything like that?
Kunal:
Yeah, no, I mean, we had, we had a stability already, but for me it was just moving away from the UK where it’s like raining half the year. So we went to moved to Spain for a bit. So love the lifestyle there, but then it was a pandemic, so we couldn’t really do much. So the plan is to still so I came back to the UK for family. The plan is to get out of the UK again next year at some point.
Bradley Sutton:
After that, the entrepreneurial wise, you started another brand or what happened after?
Kunal:
Yes, within, so after I sold the the Beard Care brand, yeah, within a few days, I started.
Bradley Sutton:
Within a few days. You didn’t even take any time off.
Kunal:
I enjoy what I do, so it doesn’t feel like work. So, and then the first challenge was how do I get to a 110K in, you know, in a month or, and it took me three months, and then it was like, how do I get to seven figures? And I did that within just over a year.
Bradley Sutton:
Now this was mainly on Amazon, or were you still doing the eBay things?
Kunal:
Purely Amazon. Like I realized that Amazon is the best platform. If you wanna do it fast, do it on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, interesting. Interesting. What was the biggest differences for you learning Amazon? Coming from 10 years, on eBay?
Kunal:
Am Amazon is the, the algorithm? You know, I think if you follow Amazon’s advice and the main thing probably really that’s is Helium 10. It’s the tools. Like without the tools, I won’t be in the position I’m in right now. But yeah, Amazon it is got more competitive over the years. So I think definitely understanding how the algorithm works using the right tools, having the right communities around you as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Now what are some strategies, let’s talk strategies for the rest of this episode here. What’s some strategies that you feel are a little bit unique that, that help you scale to 1 million so fast and help you build up these other brands? You know, like, I’m not talking about stuff like, oh, I tried to e keep my PPC a cost low, you know, like, everybody knows that. But like, are you doing anything unique? Whe whether it’s inventory, whether it’s PPC, whether it’s your listing optimization off Amazon traffic, what are some of the things that you’re doing that have given you the success that you’ve had?
Kunal:
For me it’s finding markets where, or areas where there’s regulation where a lot, basically you have to jump through more barriers because if you look at how many people are you know, selling on Amazon now it’s really difficult for new brands to come along, but if you jump more hoops, you know, then you can get to market that you can really scale up.
Bradley Sutton:
So like looking for where there’s like a lot of like government regulation or Amazon regulation where not just anybody can just launch a product, but they have to go through a process of like certificates and things like that.
Kunal:
Exactly, yeah, a combination. Because obviously Amazon have become a lot more strict, so go Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
How do you find something, or like what’s your process of finding something like that? Like how do you know if, if it’s something that’s regulated or not?
Kunal:
It’s just time on Helium 10 is just, you know, research and then clicking stuff and then yeah, studying really. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
And then, so that’s how you get into a niche, like I guess the pet brand. And then are try and focus on like a really big hero product? Or are you trying to build, build these brands and have multiple products that are accessory of each accessories of each other, or that one person would buy multiple of?
Kunal:
The, the key at the start was trying to find a couple of hero products to just smash it. But now it’s all about adding accessories other products, you know, that people will buy in the, in the niche and expanding it that way. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
We’ll get, get back to you with some more strategies soon, but Reggie, what about you after your exit? You start going digital nomad and started consulting for different brands. I’m assuming you didn’t start back something within three days, like Canal here, but did you end up starting your own brand again, or is everything you do now for other people?
Reggie:
Yeah, I think it’s important to always have at least one hand as an operator. So I, I have been selling since. Scaling on and off Amazon. And it’s definitely, the marketplace has definitely changed a lot over the, just over the last few years. But the principles are always the same. So I think as long as you’re kind of always learning the principles, learning those fundamentals and applying them, you know, the principles over tactics type of thing end up working out really, really well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And so what are some strategies that you’re utilizing either for, for stuff that you’ve done in your own brand or, or that you’ve seen work for companies that you’ve been working with? What are some unique strategies you can, you can share with the audience? Yeah,
Reggie:
I would say like and they sound very basic, but I’ve helped a lot of sellers at different levels from some of the biggest aggregators to, you know, some of the smallest people just getting started. And I would say at the smallest level, for people who aren’t profitable yet, I love right now the strategy of still sourcing things under their $2 per unit landed into Amazon. And there’s a lot of products you can find like that. It allows you to always be launching. It allows you to limit your downside risk. So I generally look for products that, that’s like my primary requirement. Can I get it landed into Amazon for less than $2? And then I’m hyper-focused on differentiation. So I have a course that’s literally like four and a half hours long, and all I do is talk product research, and half of it is differentiation.
Reggie:
And without having to take the course, one of the easiest ways to become a differentiation like master in my opinion, is suspend the weekend, going to Walmart, Target all your big box stores with like a notepad or your, your phone, look at every single product and ask yourself, what is this product doing better than the product next to it, above it from packaging, from whatever. And you’ll end up with a list, a really exhaustive list. So I generally look at a list like that. When I enter a niche, I really try to understand the niche. And it’s those, again, those principles, if you get into a niche like pet and you don’t, and you realize like, Hey, the pet category right now likes you know, more natural, organic, more single ingredient human grade you know, they, they refer to their dogs as fur babies.
Reggie:
You know, they, they generally like glucosamine, salmon, you know, these different types of things. If you really, really understand and know that, you know the buyer profile, you can create that differentiation that’s needed. You can pull that all the way through from your listing, your photos, your video, and have one cohesive, strong, differentiated product that really stands out. So on the lower end, it’s that low price point. And I’m always watching out for regardless of size variations. So if I’m looking at a, to get into a new category, I don’t want to go and be like, oh, I found the best differentiation, but the top seller can within a month launch that variation and, and, and kind of close me out. So I, I would make sure that it’s not a variation heavy niche or I’m one of the first ones to be able to kind of rank in that area and then defend myself by launching variations.
Reggie:
And then really quickly on the larger scale, very, very basic as well. But on the larger scale, some of the biggest brands their knowledge of Amazon is not that in depth as a seller that’s launched six or seven brands by himself and had to make, make, you know, make the rent work type of thing. So they’re not as in depth on the keywords. One of the things I love doing, and I use Helium 10 as well, is I reverse ASIN of course, easy when I reverse ASIN my competitors. But what I do differently than I fail most people do is I sync, I only reverse a in the top competitors one by one, so I don’t dump ’em in and get a quote unquote skewed average. I dump them in individually, and then I sort by organic position 1 through 30.
Reggie:
And what that does is for some of the top competitors, if I feel like I find, let’s say somebody not even the top competitor, let’s say page two, right? They’re, they’re not ranking they’re not taking up the majority of the sales, but they’re on page two and they’re getting sales, so they’re doing something right. But they probably aren’t, they probably weren’t first to market. Well, if I reverse ace in them and I see that they’re ranked position five for a keyword that all of their people aren’t, I actually can find these keywords early. And what ends up happening for big brands is they’re ranked for these unique keywords like skincare products for women that they didn’t even know about, but they actually can compete on because they have the reviews or or it’s a decor type of keyword, right? There’s all these different things. So finding those keywords on an individual reverse a basis has been extremely powerful, and it keeps me very focused when I’m providing consultations.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So now going back to this strategy about, you know, like looking at Walmart aisles and stuff now, do you pick up product first and then trying and find it in the stores to see what, what they’re doing to set themselves apart? Or are you just like, is that the origin of it? You just start walking down aisles and look for unique things? Chicken and egg here, which comes first? Yeah,
Reggie:
A little bit of both. Like when you’re, when you’re learning high ticket drop shipping, you’re doing the opposite end, which is normally like just seeing what, you know, like what’s your touch list type of thing. I think on Amazon it’s better, generally speaking, to go off of keywords, cuz it, you know, Amazon’s a search platform. So I go off of keyword keyword research and I let my keyword research identify like, okay, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a pet supplement for small dogs with hip problems. Well then maybe that’s, I’m gonna let that secret opportunity there. I’m gonna let that drive my product selection, my product sourcing my differentiation. And then from there I’ll let my differentiation map to the market. Like, I’m not gonna go and make a collapsible supplement bottle that makes no sense. I’m gonna go and source higher quality ingredients or, you know, look at that list that makes sense and apply that to that market.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Going back to Kunal, what are some other strategies you think that has helped you and also that other sellers you think should be utilizing perhaps more?
Kunal:
Yeah. A key, a key thing I do is actually, because I know the USA market is much bigger than the UK I’ll actually look at reviews and products that are doing really well there and bring them into the British market because nobody else is doing this. I found that, you know so you can look at alternative markets and bring in products. Cause one you already know if they’ve got good reviews. Cause we only launched products that are four star and above. We can already, without even launching the product in the market, we can see somebody else has done it, another international market and bring that in. So we eliminating all the risk.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent. Excellent. What else? What was the thought process behind only launching in the beginning in the UK as opposed to, like, from day one, going ahead and doing Germany and Italy and Spain and things like that?
Kunal:
I think the key is, is the language barrier. Now Germany’s a huge market, probably bigger than the uk but again, it’s language doing all your packaging in German, but it’s probably just a bit of an excuse. But now that I’ve dominated in the uk, it’s, it feels more comfortable to do the UK first. But yeah. But now it’s, it’s so easy to launch in Germany because use platforms like Fiverr people per hour at work and get German translators in.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. I mean, what’s involved in it now that you’re getting into Germany and stuff? Like, what’s, are you having to open up a, from day one, like a VAT specifically for Germany, are you going to have to send all of your inventory over or will Amazon, you know, transfers your UK inventory? How does it work in 2023? Because I know, you know, Brexit, you know, years ago had an effect on things and, and I’ve never sold an either marketplace, so I’m just curious what the process is like.
Kunal:
Yeah, so it took Amazon years to catch up. So only about six months ago, they introduced a program where you could ship your stock back into Germany. But Amazon invited us guys to send the stock to the UK and they all do all the transfers for us. But yeah, we needed VAT registration. So we’ve, we’ve got that now. But yeah, we, all we need to do is send the stock to Amazon in the UK in London, and they all trans do all the transfers for us. Okay. But again, it took them two years, right? Two and a half years.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Reggie, going back to any other strategies you’d like to share with the audience?
Reggie:
Yeah actually, I think the state of e-commerce and online now I actually, one of the things I do is I have been doing a lot of off Amazon marketing. So when I, when I start up a brand, one of the things that I’ll immediately do is type my main keyword into Google with the word best. So best, you know, chef knife. And you literally just start going down Google, contacting those people, doing whatever you can to get either a back link you know, or traffic, an affiliate referral. And there’s different ways you can offer offer them to put that in there. It’s like, Hey, you know, are you a part of the affiliate program? If so, I’ll double, triple any commission you have. I will send all post-purchase traffic back to you, and if you make a video, all different things you can do to start building an offline presence which can only help your Amazon, especially now with PPC, it’s just pretty expensive.
Reggie:
So it’s a lot, it’s much more expensive to kind of like mess around and find out the hard way. Learning PPC in in a very, like PPC is just really hard to master. I feel like the way I’d like to explain it is like PPC is, you’re playing chess, like a hundred different chess board games all at once. That’s always changing all the time. So if it’s just your first product and you’re coming in and you only have $5,000, $3,000 or $10,000 and you need to do a $2,000 PPC launch and you don’t understand what’s going on, it becomes very expensive. I’m finding now taking a portion of that budget and allocating that early on to things that directly transfer to an Amazon listing, whether it’s a direct URL with existing foothold traffic. Very, very powerful. And I know Pinterest is something that is definitely on. More people’s minds now have a lot of traffic from Pinterest in the past pinning boards and repinning them. I have a website that does 30,000 page visits a month, and I get a lot of that from Pinterest repinning over and over again.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now something I asked guests, you know, around this year is like, Hey, what are you doing to stay mentally, physically healthy? You know, I say that, and these guys saw me eating a piece of pizza right before I started recording. I’ll call myself out. It wasn’t my choice, but that was what the lunch I was handed. But like, you know, hobbies and, and just physical, physical you know, fitness routine and adult mental health routine. You do anything that you can share? Reggie
Reggie:
I feel like I’ve been through a little bit of the gamut. For me, I realized like after like the third or fourth product failure and like I really hit a really low point, and I realized it’s actually not my Amazon knowledge that’s getting in the way. It’s myself. It’s how I structure my routines, everything. So I started with just like motivational playlists. So I have some motivational playlists that I started with all the way to like, meditation. And then I actually created a journal. It’s just a KDP journal. And journaling, finding some, some kind of iterative process where you’re reflecting some kind of gratitude process. Some kind of like, Hey, let me prioritize my actions for the day. And then let me reflect on those actions, whether it’s people I’ve came across emotions I’ve felt. So journaling’s really, really helped me. What
Bradley Sutton:
What about you Kunal? Hobbies or fitness fitness routines? I think,
Kunal:
Yeah, one, one of the fundamental shifts I’ve had is changing my training in the morning to now afternoon, because I spend all my days just launching products, and it’s quite intense, right? So now, now what I do at one o’clock, I switch off and I go to the gym for a couple of hours and then I get back to work again. But it’s just changing from the morning to the afternoon. And like Reggie said, it’s just the reflection piece for me. It’s like every time I, I always get caught up in the chase of wanting more and more and more and then I have to take a step back and say, actually, what am I doing this for? And it’s for freedom for my family, for me. So it’s always, it is just taking 10-15 minutes a day just sitting down and reflecting on life.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. All right, Reggie, if people wanna find you on the interwebs how can they find you out there?
Reggie:
Sure, yeah. Just type in my name, reggieyoung.com. You can find everything there. Course material and exit advice if you’re looking for it.
Bradley Sutton:
And Kunal like, you don’t have to give information if you don’t want to, but like, if people wanted to reach out to you, LinkedIn?
Kunal:
Linkedin’s best one Kunal Dattani also known as the Lifestyle Entrepreneur.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, Reggie and and Canal thank you for being part of the Sirius Sellers Club. If there’s any Helium 10 members out there who have not even have no idea what I’m talking about, like if you’ve been selling for a year or more and are doing $500,000 of revenue per year, that means you’re eligible to join this exclusive club. So make sure to reach out to customer support to get the link to join. And, you know, it’s completely free to be part of there, but we have a community. We have weekly trainings that we do and sometimes networking. And it’s a cool small group to be in where, you know, you don’t have to worry about there being a bunch of service providers trying to sell you things. It’s just other sellers just like you. So if you’re a Helium 10 member, make sure to join our Serious Sellers Club Facebook group. Reggie, Kunal, thank you so much for joining, and I’d love to reach out to you guys sometime next year and, and see see where you guys are at.
Reggie:
Thank you for having us. Appreciate it.
Kunal:
Thanks for having us.
In this episode, we cover the latest news in the Amazon industry, Shein’s impact on retail platforms, and diving into a most requested Insights Dashboard feature that’s now available.
In episode 453 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley invites a dynamic duo married couple from AMZ One Step, Saddam and Tayyaba. They run an A-Z Amazon agency that has almost 200 employees, with specialties in Amazon Photography and Listing Optimization.
In the episode they discuss best practices for A+ Content, how to utilize the Amazon Brand Story, how using a photography studio in China can be beneficial, how to use different Artificial Intelligence tools, and more!
In episode 453 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley Saddam, and Tayyaba discuss:
- 02:25 – Tayyaba’s Backstory
- 06:20 – Saddam’s Opinions On The Biggest Amazon Changes.
- 08:13 – What is the Amazon Brand Story?
- 08:40 – The Importance of Adds-To-Cart and Off-Amazon Traffic
- 11:58 – Should Every Listing Have Brand Story?
- 12:40 – Tayyaba’s A+ Content Project for Project 5K
- 17:13 – Chinese Photo Studio With All Nationalities’ Models
- 18:35 – How Do You Plan An A+ Content Refresh?
- 20:45 – Does Brand Story Always Need Something About the Owners?
- 23:00 – Using AI and ChatGPT To Help Amazon Sellers
- 25:30 – Image AI App Limitations
- 28:00 – What Should Sellers Be Doing in 2023 For Branding
- 31:25 – Thirty Second Tip on ChatGPT and A+ Content
- 33:15 – How to Contact Saddam and Tayyaba
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a couple back on the show who run an agency with over 150 employees, and they’re gonna be talking about a lot of topics, including brand story, A+ Content, ChatGPT and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you wanna see how your listing or maybe competitor’s listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you wanna compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other. Maybe you wanna see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings. You can do that and more with the Helium 10 Tool Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And back for the third time with somebody different. This time we’ve got Saddam here from AMZ One Step on the show. Now this is, like I said, his third time. Now, the very first time he was on the episode he came along with his sister, Lailama, and then the second time he came on with his business partner, Kamal. And now I was like, you know what? Let’s try something different. Let’s go ahead and bring you on with your wife/employee Tayyaba here. So welcome Saddam and Tayyaba.
Tayyaba:
Hi.
Saddam:
Thank you for being here. Thanks again for having me for the third time. I keep switching partners. So this one–
Bradley Sutton:
He’s talking about partner, Tayyaba’s, like look at like what I keep switching partner.
Saddam:
Partner from a different aspect. Yes, my partner, my family, of course, with my business partner.
Bradley Sutton:
Podcast partner, yes.
Saddam:
Yeah. Thank the company partner. Yep. Partner for life.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, he saved himself on that one. Look at that romantic gesture right there. All right. Now Saddam, you know, we’ve been through your backstory, you know, before, but maybe just a little bit. Since Tayyaba, this is your first time on the show. Were you born and raised in Canada or Pakistan?
Tayyaba:
I would say so I was born in Pakistan. And I came to Canada when I was about eight. I’d say I was raised in Canada, in Toronto.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, did you go to university there in Toronto?
Tayyaba:
I did. I went to University of Guelph. I got a degree that had nothing to do with engineering.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you say Guelph?
Tayyaba:
Guelph.
Bradley Sutton:
Guelph. Okay. I was about to say like, wow, that’s an amazing university name that I went to the University of Wealth, because that’s just what, okay. Guelph. Okay. And what were you studying there? Yeah,
Tayyaba:
I was studying biomedical engineering is what I did. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Good grief. Okay. Crazy.
Tayyaba:
And then it sounds so far off, right? Yeah. Like how did you go from biomedical engineering to marketing and creative leading? But I think anybody who knows me as a person would understand. I’ve always been a very creative person. So that transition just made sense.
Bradley Sutton:
Outta curiosity, like after you got married, like, or even before you got married, was it like determine, hey, maybe you should, you know, come help with the family business? I guess you can almost call it, or cuz you’re there. Now, obviously, I know you’re, you’re playing a role and we’re, we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about that today. But, but wh where did that come up in the discussions? Because I think, I think that’s always a thing when, when I invite married couples on the show is like, who are in business together, it’s always a thing like, oh, is this gonna work out? Or, so when did you g how did you guys come to the conclusion, Hey why don’t you help out with the business?
Tayyaba:
I think some recruiting attempts were made before. Could you admit to that a little bit? Before we got married, it’s a creative agency, right? So I think maybe he saw something at that point I wasn’t really considering switching fields entirely and committing to it. After we got married though there was this convenient position open for a creative lead. It wasn’t even called that at the time. They just basically were really, I think busy and backlogged and at the time it seemed like a perfect fit. So it basically, the job description was product research and analysis of, you know, like the market and coming up with a visual plan of what those seven images would look like for a client. So they needed somebody to basically create like that creative foundation for the photographer, videographer and the designers.
Tayyaba:
And that was something, product research is something that I had experience in. Just any time really that I think I got through my engineering degree was we had semester long design work projects. And so that required a lot of research in the initial phases, iterations. You obviously had to market the product to a certain degree. So I enjoyed all of those aspects and it made sense to me. But really I was drawn to, I had knew nothing about the Amazon space and really I was just drawn to this idea of creative direction and selling a product in seven images. What’s the best way to do that? How is everybody doing that? And how can we do it better and differently?
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Cool. And everything been cool so far? Having your husband has also your boss too?
Tayyaba:
A little bit. We work I think if somebody asks how it works, we work pretty. Like you’re not really involved in my team I would say.
Saddam:
Yeah. Now she manages that team. Yeah. And yeah, there’s layers. So we have the head of ops who’s kind of like her manager, so I tend to take the step back and
Tayyaba:
Yeah. But it was amazing cuz I had an Amazon expert basically at my fingertips. I could get into the Amazon space, so it was a huge benefit to have.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Now Saddam, you know, speaking of the company you guys acquired another agency last year, like how many, you know, worldwide, how many employees are, are you up to now?
Saddam:
So I’ve been saying one 50 and then my HR person reached out to me saying correct yourself. It’s 175 ish. So that’s where we are. I think we are like, there’s still so much growth happening since Q4, like we’ve just been playing catch up with, with the new acquisition and just the uptick from Q4. So I believe by end of the summer we should be around 200.
Bradley Sutton:
The last time you’re on the podcast, I would say is probably early 2022 or something. But in the last year, like what are some big changes that you’ve seen? They don’t have to be negative, you know, like maybe it’s positive, like maybe it’s the addition of, for example, Search Query Performance, you know, wasn’t even a thing, you know, the last time you’re on the, the podcast and, and there’s a lot of things in Amazon advertising that has been added. On the flip side, there’s been some inventory issues, you know, like, like bidding for inventory placement and, and trying to maximize your space that, that Amazon made a a, a big change on. But like, what are some of these changes that, that you’ve seen that you know are affecting a lot of your customers in a positive or or negative way?
Saddam:
Yeah, so what we’ve been noticing is Amazon I think has finally realized that their interaction with the customers on the platform was very transactional. You know, customers would come on the platform, search for the product check out, and that’s it. Right now what they’re trying to do is give a voice a platform to the brand so that they can speak about some of their uniqueness, some of their values and really harness a community. And what I mean by that is you look at brand registry, you know, you talked about brand analytics just a few features added to that brand story was a really good one that got added. A+ Premium Content. Amazon Post is now slowly getting that momentum, sustainability badges, you know, there’s small business badges. So all these things, what they speak about is the landscape now is promoting a lot more diversity in terms of brands. So now you don’t just have those high reputation brands. And then the other brands are pretty much like products. Now they’re giving them a place to voice what they represent. And I think it’s heading in a really good direction where there’s gonna be a lot more engagement within the platform with customers engaging with the brands.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Let’s talk about one of those things. You know, that you mentioned brand story cuz that’s the one that I’m probably least experienced with. I’m not sure, but I think I’m, I don’t even know if I have brand story set up, but what’s the difference between brand story and A+ Content? Cuz you mentioned both of those things. So e either of you can, can answer that.
Saddam:
Yeah. Okay. I can take that one. So brand story is, it comes under the, from the brand section. So you do need to be brand registered for it. And think of it like a mini storefront within your product page. So there’s two purposes it has. First one is people now know that factory in China, that it’s a cookie cutter method, right? People are just sourcing from China and putting it on Amazon. They want to hear more from who the founders are, what the company represents. So within the brand story when you see the start, you see a carousel display and people usually talk about either the brand itself, the mission or core values, or they have like a face to the brand. So who’s behind that? Who’s the founder, what do they represent, who do they speak to, who’s their community? So that way there’s a lot more engagement from customers and then just educating them about some of the other products within that category. So as I mentioned, it’s like a mini storefront where you have, you know, carousel display with hyperlinks and people can click on different products and they can shop around from your brand. They’re not just restricted to just the product listing. So if you can get traffic to your listing, there’s a really good opportunity there to do some cross setting upsetting.
Bradley Sutton:
So then the brand story, isn’t there a part of the listing itself that has a brand story? Like isn’t it above the A+ Content? Or I’m thinking of something different, maybe
Saddam:
It is, yeah. Yeah. So from the brand would typically appear above the product description. And I mentioned on desktop, it’s more, I guess for mobile it’s optimized more for mobile, where you have the carousel display, and we know carousels work really well just by looking at Instagram and LinkedIn, right? So basically it would appear from the brand, it’s like a, a sideway display, it’s like a slider. And from the examples that we’ve seen and that we’ve done with the clients, we mostly either focus on the face behind the, the organization or the company values, and then it goes straight into a few products, like the top products within each category.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now I’m just like at a loss here of where to find this. You said it’s under brand like hold on, let me share my screen here. But like, where do I go even to find this? I’m under the brand page here.
Saddam:
Oh, right, okay. So and you don’t have that on your listing yet, right? Sorry.
Bradley Sutton:
I don’t think so. Like, like, unless, you know, a lot of people are in these accounts. But it could be that I’m not, so like, is it like I know where the A+ Plus content manager is? Yeah, you can, and then here’s brands.
Saddam:
Okay. So go to A+ Content manager.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. I was probably in the wrong place then. All right.
Saddam:
Okay. And so if you do,
Bradley Sutton:
Is it here? Start creating. Okay, so I hit start creating a plus. Oh, there it is right there. Okay,
Saddam:
So you see brand story now there it is, there’s gonna be an additional option that would show up for some people that have access to Premium A+ Content. We can talk about the eligibility in in a second, but this is where you start creating that brand story.
Bradley Sutton:
Ah, okay. All right. Cool. All right, good. Well, you see, like I, there’s so much stuff I should be doing on my own accounts, but you know, since I only have like an hour to spend a week, I haven’t done it as much now. Yeah. I’m definitely going to look into that more So is that kind of like, do you o when you guys offer that service, do you offer it separate or it’s always like part of the package of creating your A+ Content and this, like, do you suggest always doing both? Or is there a case where you would just say, Hey, you know, somebody should just go with the brand story or somebody should just go with the a plus content?
Saddam:
Yeah, really good question. Usually we do it separate because you just need one brand story, either per the, the entire storefront or per category, you know.
Bradley Sutton:
Ah, so it populates to your other products in that brand then.
Saddam:
Exactly. And that one brand story can just go on all your listings, essentially.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Good to know. All right. Now Tayyaba, but before you fall asleep over there let, let’s switch to you. You know, speaking of a plus content, you know, we actually gave AMZ One Step a project, and we’re gonna make a blog on it later on. But you, we had a product under Project 5K that people know about on the podcast. It was like a, kind of like a Charcuterie Board, I don’t even know how to pronounce it, Charcuterie Board. And, and we wanted to kind of like highlight how we would use your studio in China, because that’s, that’s a lot of thing that peoples, I can’t even see, I can’t even speak English. These things that people out there, you know, have always worried about, like, oh, okay, hey, I’m making my product in China, but you know, I live in Canada, I live in the United States, and then man, you know, to have to produce one right away and then like air ship it all the way to AMZ One Step in Canada or my X, Y, Z you know photo studio in the us and then, you know, pay somebody $50 an hour to, you know, to do it.
Bradley Sutton:
Like, it’s gonna be expensive and, you know, too expensive and things like that. And then it’s gonna take forever. Might get lost in customs, but it’s like, hey, if you’re producing your, your product in China, you want to, you know, get some fast turnarounds so you can work in your listing. Why not use a photo studio word that they just send it in one day, probably costs like $10 to, to send. And so we’re like, Hey, let’s try the AMZ one step studio, and then let’s use this opportunity since this was already a product we didn’t need necessarily new images, but you know what, let’s refresh the images and let’s make some A+ Content. So what was I, I believe that was given to your, your team to do so, like how do you, what was your mindset like in tackling it when you looked at the listing and then you’re like, all right, this is the kind of direction we should go, because whether somebody uses you guys or not, I think whatever your mindset was is probably, you know, best practice. So, go ahead.
Tayyaba:
It initially starts with just project research. So we wanted to basically look at what features are being highlighted. There was about a few images, there wasn’t seven, from what I remember, this was quite a while ago. But one of the biggest things was this was not just a regular Charcuterie Board. This was an extra large something like 30 inches across. So already that’s niche, right? Warns people use in a social setting. And if something was extra large it would be used to let’s say in birthday parties or any hosting event where you’re serving more than a few people. So the biggest thing was for lifestyle, we already knew that we wanted to showcase that somehow a hosting social setting. And when we looked at the competitors and did the competitor analysis what we found was there was so many complaints about sizing, whether it basically, it seemed to me that there was miscommunication.
Tayyaba:
They either were expecting it to be one size and it just wasn’t. So we knew that we had to communicate the size of this effectively which immediately meant you guys had a model in the project. And so what we did was we got pictures of the model to hold up the board, and you had a visual reference of how tall an average woman would be versus the dimensions listed, because that alone just let’s say a white background shoot that you would’ve done wouldn’t have been enough because people can’t visualize 30 inches across, right? So that was one approach that we had. Another complaint that we found when we did the competitor analysis was quality was something that was a huge complaint. People were complaining about warping as well as it just not being up to par. And so, because this was something that was a hundred percent natural bamboo, we really wanted to emphasize that. And so we dedicated an entire slide just showcasing the quality, where it was made from, and emphasizing that this really was a high quality product.
Saddam:
I think for the most part what I looked at in the project was the focus was more so the way we approach these projects now Bradley, is we centered around less text and more visual you know, aspect of it. So whether it was calling out sustainability or the dimensions or any of the other ones, I know it was a while back we. Just focus it more on how to communicate that message visually as opposed to just putting so much text. And you mentioned a plus content, the previous A+ Content, not the premium one was so bad because when you’re going on mobile, there’s so much text just cluttered and it just creates a really bad shopping experience for people.
Bradley Sutton:
Lemme show some pictures. I can actually show some that you guys did. You just to give people an idea of the A+ Content. And now the first thing that people notice is like, wait a minute, I thought you just said this was in your Chinese photo studio. This person does not look Chinese. So like, you have like western looking models, I guess if people require that.
Saddam:
We do. And we always make a mention of that whenever we jump on calls, I know people get uneasy asking me that question because I’m not Western, or I’m not Caucasian, but by the way, before you have any doubts, I know this is a question elephant in the room. The models that we have in China or Bali, they’re all Caucasian, or at least we can get models from different demographics depending on your product.
Bradley Sutton:
Maybe I want an African American looking individual, maybe I want, you know, somebody that looks European or, you know, you might not have every single nationality represented, but enough that usually somebody people would get what the vibe that they’re looking for, right?
Saddam:
Yeah. And like beauty and skincare category, sometimes we get multiple models. I know we often get like, weird requests, you know, we want a model without teeth cuz it’s a dental product. So then we have to like, reach out to agencies, but we can always find a model that’s never been an issue.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Cool. Cool. Oh, well what else about you just in general let’s say somebody is already has a plus content and they just wanna update it or, or refresh it. Like are you looking at their, the reviews? Are you looking at their conversion rate or, or how do you decide how to tackle? Because it’s kind of a big project, you know, like to do a full photo shoot, like just looking at these images, I was like, this is not something that, oh, let’s just, you know, snap some pictures here in an hour. I mean, it takes planning, it takes, you know, renting of a space, you know, potentially, so you gotta kind of get it right. So like how do you optimize or what kind of things are you, are you thinking of that you haven’t mentioned already?
Saddam:
So, whenever we look at A+ Content that are already existing, everything has to be purpose driven. We don’t just do it because the listing, it doesn’t look pretty and we want to give it like a revamp. So we look at starting with the images and then if there’s a video there are all the features covered. Have we done a good job with covering everything that needs to be communicated to the buyer? If not, what are some of those components? Maybe it’s like extra details. Usually we find this with tech products, they’re so much information that sometimes it’s preferred not to put them in images and then use a plus content for that matter. Second thing is we look at the q and a section and that’s where the burning questions come up.
Saddam:
And we’re again, with a plus premium content, which maybe we’ll discuss in a bit. There’s now an FAQ model or Q and A module that we can leverage. But those burning questions also need to be answered. And then it all comes down to, do we have more products? Are there more in our product line that we need to talk about? If yes, this is an excellent cross setting opportunity, we can create like a comparison chart where people get educated. Maybe this is not the right headphone for you, but we have something else that has a better noise cancellation function. So it’s stuff like these, and as I mentioned, you know, the whole platform is evolving to create brand communities. So any opportunity we get to talk about the brand and if, you know, the brand itself wants to talk about it and it’s not highlighted in the A+ Content section, we’ll make a mention of that.
Bradley Sutton:
Back to the brand story, now that we kind of got the A+ Content, what if there’s a case where there’s not really some cool story about the founders of the company, or maybe I just wanna stay incognito, you know, like I don’t wanna put that front and center. Like how would you only use brand story to, to, to highlight, you know, some, some cool thing about the owners or about their brand purpose or something? Or is there something else that would go in that section so as not to waste it?
Saddam:
Okay, I’ll tell you a really good story. Okay. So last year I was looking for a supplement company cuz I didn’t want to go out and shop for it. And I came across my protein. I love the brand. I order all my supplements from there. And as I was shopping from there, their prices was were really good. Their product mix was re really good. But then I landed on their sustainability page where they talked about reducing their carbon footprint in the world. And even though I’m not crazy about sustainability, what that showed me is they care and they listen to their customers and they made an effort to solve that issue for them. Right. So if you don’t have a face, if you don’t have anything extraordinary in your story, what do you represent? What are some of the core values that are important to you? Because only then can you connect with your customers. Yeah. Are you a Gen Z that wants to have like a sustainable product line? If yes, talk about that in your brand story. So whatever’s important to you ultimately becomes important to your customers. And you just wanna speak about that. And this is the perfect placement to talk about some of those things.
Bradley Sutton:
As far as in the work sense, how are you using either ChatGPT, Midjourney, or anything like that?
Tayyaba:
Sure. I can start with Midjourney. So that is because it’s probably the least hopeful looking right now. We’ve tried a few AI image generation websites and none of them have really proved to be kind of effective in getting that workout. It’s actually just easier to do the image plan and get the photographer to shoot it. You’ll get an accurate image that you want. But when it comes to ChatGPT, it’s a very powerful tool. So we use it to do a lot of our automation is what we’re finding that it helps with. Will it do the product research for you? Absolutely not. You’re still going to need those Helium 10 tools. You’re still gonna need Xray. You’re still going to be using Cerebroo to find those keywords. And you’re still gonna be, it’s very powerful to use the image analyzer, right?
Tayyaba:
The Listing Analyzer. And so what you can do is you can use those tools to feed it information and the output that it will give you will be entirely based on the information that you feed it. And so when it conducts product research, the product research that it can conduct is those review insights that you’re giving it. And it can very quickly analyze 1000 reviews, something that would take a human being so much time to do, to look through all of those reviews, figure out the patterns, what are the pain points, what are the benefits, how are customers using this instead, you can just use a Helium 10 tool, upload that listing, ask it a bunch of questions that would be relevant to your product research and it can do that for you within a matter of seconds.
Bradley Sutton:
Saddam, how about you? You have any other use cases for AI in the company you can talk about?
Saddam:
Yeah, I think we used Stockimg, we used Pebblely or something. We used Midjourney. They was right for the most part. You know, we tried giving it prompts, but the text to visual prompts, they’re still trying to figure it out. So if you say that I want like an image of maybe an office product with office supplies, it’s gonna create some random weird looking pens and pencils. So it’s getting there, it’s really exciting to see that the, all the stuff that you can do with it, but it’s not there yet. And right now we’re just kind of leading a department so that we’re ahead of the curve and we know what’s going on in that world with the content. Yes, we’ve seen that where we’ve done a lot of automation. So where previously a lot of the time it would take maybe four or five hours of just research. Now it’s shortened that to half an hour, one hour just because we can just feed it that. And I’m still, I haven’t tried out the new tool from Helium 10. I think you guys just came out with one, so maybe that’s like connected somehow with all the backend stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
Are there any image AI’s out there where you can take like, like a picture of an actual product and then do what people, you know, do now is like Photoshop it into lifestyle images or even create lifestyle images from scratch? Or it’s still too like random, like it has to be completely generic. Can you like say, Hey, here’s a picture of this water bottle, you know show it of a woman age 35 inside of a kitchen preparing their kids’ meal, or just some random thing, like is there anything that will then put it in her hands or anything like that? Or you don’t know of anything like that?
Tayyaba:
So of the ones that we’ve tried, there’s stock stock stock img, and that one, basically the premise of it is that you can give it an AI prompt and it will generate a stock image for you. Now, it’s really not the best when it comes to lifestyle, including models, models and hands. I think AI is notorious for being awful at generating accurate hands. And God forbid you ask it to hold something, it would be 12 fingers. But even the simpler ones, right? Like, let’s say infographics is what we started off with. What if we do an amazing sh shot of this water bottle in a mountain ocean scene? Right? Even that with with a website like Pebblely it’s, it’s still a bit struggle of a struggle to get that done effectively and get it done to the level and the extent that our graphic designers would be able to do it.
Saddam:
And we’ll, we’ll send you that name cuz we’re struggling with it, but it’s a good one to start with. Yeah. So if your product comes under the beauty category, skincare supplements, hey, you can bust out like five, six good images with that. Yeah. Yeah. Because what it’ll, it’ll do is take a picture of the product, it will cut it out, put it on like a, remove the background, and then you can give it prompts like let’s say you know, place it on a kitchen counter with flat laid with, let’s say if it’s a supplement for, turmeric, you can put, you know, ar around turmeric or ginger and it will create something really nice for you. But again, with models, it kind of struggles. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Okay. Well, who knows maybe the technology will go there in one day, but maybe just in general, we, we talked about some specific strategies, which I think is important, but, you know, we’re in 2023 as we mentioned, things change every year. Your guys, while you are A to Z your specialty is definitely talking about creatives. And, you know, be it images, be it videos et cetera. What should you know, top two or top three things that, that sellers should be looking at when they’re thinking about, all right, this is gonna be my strategy for my creatives for the next year or so.
Saddam:
If it’s the top two approaches, right? So first of all, we talked about it harnessing a community. Think of your brand as a person, what kind of voice does it need to have? And then your whole creatives approach should be around that in order to speak to your desired customer. Okay? So take advantage of showcasing yourself as a brand as opposed to a product that that’s an outdated strategy. You’re not gonna have much chance of success. And then the other thing is don’t treat your creatives as just a one-time task. Once you create it, once you have images ready, once you have title ready, that’s half the job split testing and optimize, you gotta keep going back to the drawing board. Use helium ten’s audience split test your main image split test your title do it on Amazon as well with manage my experiments because you need to understand your opinion and my opinion can vary drastically, right? Because creatives is very subjective, but that does not mean that the market has to agree with either of our opinions. It has to come from data. So everything that you need to do has to be consciously driven by data.
Tayyaba:
So one approach that we have when we are deciding about how to showcase a feature in an image is, like you said, like you mentioned before, nobody is reading text anymore. And so the more that you can reduce text, the better and how you want to convey the feature has to be seen immediately when you look at the image. If I were to cover all of the text, am I being sold on that feature? Does it make, still make sense to me? Is am I still getting that message? And if those answers are yes, then you’re on the right track for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. This has been great information. You know, it’s been fun hanging out with you guys at, you know, all the way from your wedding. Now at the Sell and Scale, Prosper Shows there’s a video that came out, all of us dance, dancing on the dance floor a little bit in the Helium 10 Instagram story yesterday. I don’t know if you I don’t know if you saw that but maybe there’s a chance for us to hang out again in the future. Hopefully. I’ve been trying to convince Saddam and Tayyaba to go to the Bali Mastermind. So I’m going to this Mastermind, it’s not by Helium 10, but I’m, I’m attending there and I’m speaking there. It’s in June. I think it’s June 18th to 22nd. So there’s a chance that you can meet this dynamic duo in person as well. But if you guys want more information a link to go to that event is at h10.me/bali. So Saddam, and I’m putting you on the spot in there. Can we party again and can you show me those dance moves from your wedding that we were looking at in person? Again,
Saddam:
We would love to, you know, any chance we fell in love with Bali last year. Yeah. And because with Kenji’s team, I think we’ll be going there this year for sure. Right. We just haven’t nailed down the dates, but that’s in the plans. I know you mentioned it once and I’m, I’m really interested. We just have like a new villa there too now, so I’d love to kind of visit that. But yeah, for sure if we’re going, we’ll hang out at our villa. We’ll party there. I’ll show you some dance moves. How about that?
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s do it. Let’s do it. We’ll bring the whole crew back. I think your sisters might be upset if you, if you don’t take them to to Bali again, Lailama’s definitely interested in going to, so I’ll put in a good word for them. All right now, now it’s the time of the show where we always ask our guests for like a our 30-second tip or 60-second tip, something that’s actionable for our user’s table. We’ll start with you.
Tayyaba:
Sure. so if anybody and everybody who is not using ChatGPT should definitely be using ChatGPT. But the thing about ChatGPT is you have to treat it like it is the smartest child in the world. And so anytime you are asking a question, you need to understand what you’re not asking yet. And a great follow up prompt that you can give ChatGPT is what assumptions were made here and, and, or you can ask it what questions am I not asking that I should be asking? And you will get a plethora of information that might have completely gone over your head.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent. Saddam.
Saddam:
Yeah, if you’re like Bradley because we saw his screen share and you don’t have access to A+ Premium Content, the eligibility criteria we know brand registry, you have to have brand story on all ASINs and then 15 brand A+ Content applications approved. The trick is you don’t need 15 a plus contents on different 15 different listings. You can just create iterations of the same A+ Content and do it for just that one listing if you have just one product and you’ll be eligible for A+ Premium Content.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Excellent tips. Thank you so much. Now how can people reach out to you guys, whether, you know, it’s for to help with photo studio stuff or listing optimization? Remember guys, you know, like I, I don’t recommend people I don’t use myself and, and for multiple accounts I’ve used AMZ One Step over the last couple of years. So I highly recommend them. How can they find you guys on the interwebs? Or by the way, they might ask you for wedding planning and dance choreography a advice as well. So what’s the contact information.
Saddam:
Sounds good. No, and thanks for all the referrals and stuff. So our website, amzonestep.com or you can just send us an email at info@amzonestep.com or you can find us on any of the social media platforms, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, just AMZ One Step and you’ll be able to see that.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Happy belated one year anniversary and hope to see you guys sometime this year. Thank you.
Saddam:
Thank you.
Tayyaba:
Thank you, Bradley.
Saddam:
Hope I see you in that same outfit. So I’m looking forward to that.
In episode #452 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Andrew Engle and Huy Nguyen are back. They are 7 figure sellers, but had very different 2022’s. One was up about a million while the other was down a million. We discuss in this episode how they dealt with their wins and losses, as well as a wide range of their strategies including PPC, Insert cards, credit card hacks, ChatGPT, and more.
In episode 452 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Huy, and Andrew discuss:
- 01:34 – Links to Andrew’s and Huy’s Backstory Episodes
- 02:20 – How was Andrew’s 2022 in Sales?
- 03:50 – Andrew’s one Order of 250 Units!
- 04:46 – Huy’s Sales Have Gone Down
- 08:41 – How Do You Deal With a $1 Million Decrease In Sales?
- 11:58 – Andrew Increased from 16 to 60 SKUs in a Year.
- 15:50 – Huy is Consolidating Marketplaces.
- 19:12 – Insert Card ard QR Code Strategy.
- 24:02 – Andrew’s PPC Strategies.
- 28:45 – Success with Google and Bing Ads.
- 30:57 – Huy’s Suggestions for Using ChatGPT
- 33:08 – Credit Card Hacks
- 36:11 – Helium 10 Party at Dave & Busters
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a couple Elite Amazon sellers who do millions a year on Amazon, and they’re gonna talk about not just their wins, but also they’re gonna get honest about their losses over the last year and give us some of their top strategies. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got two serious sellers here, two elite sellers who are no stranger to the podcast. We’ve had them on here before, Andrew, and Huy, how’s it going?
Huy:
Going good.
Andrew:
Going good.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent. Now, let me give you guys we’re not gonna go too much into their backstory because they’ve been on the podcast before. So if you wanna get Andrew’s backstory, guys, go to episode 319. I believe you can do that at h10.me/319. But it was an episode where we had Andrew and his brother on talking about their, their journey as brothers starting Amazon Business. And Huy has been on a couple times. The last time we was on was episode 305. He did an episode with Ankit. They talked about, you know, to together achieving over 20 million in sales between the the two of them. And his original backstory episode was, I believe, let’s see, 190. So if you wanna find out Huy’s superhero origin story, make, make sure to check out episode one 90.
Bradley Sutton:
But we’re not gonna go, like I said, too much into the backstory today because we just wanna see what these guys have been up to. So, first of all Andrew you know, this is the first time I’m talking to you in depth in 2023. How did your 2022 end, what was your wins and losses and, and what, like, how, how do your sales do? So in 2021, I’m looking at your original episode, I believe either you or you and your brother did about 1.6 million total. Was that just you or was that you and your brother together?
Andrew:
So that was just me. I can’t remember what my brother did that year, but yeah, that was just me that year for 2022. Yeah, for all through 2022 I did really good. I think I was, I think my goal was to get 3 million. I thought I was gonna get 3 million in 2022, but I only ended up at 2.4 still.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, yeah, you suck. That’s terrible. It’s like 2.4 million. What the heck?
Andrew:
I’ve still gotta have goals. But yeah, some of that was, I think coming off of Covid when everything started to open back up again, a lot of my stuff is industrial supplies, so things you could get at Home Depot or Lowe’s. So I feel like more people went to, you know, get that online there. And then I also got some more competitors that took a little bit of market share. So I think a little bit of combination of those two things. But for 2023 everything looks good. I’m, I’m 40% year over year, according to Helium 10. So that’s, that’s good. So kinda starting off 2023 pretty good.
Bradley Sutton:
And, and what were you telling me? Like when, when we were we were just chatting here before, before we got started, you just saw an order go through your FBA for 250 units of one, one product.
Andrew:
Yes. 250 units of, I like pulled up Helium 10. I saw a huge, like, spike. I’m like, oh, what was that? And just going through and 250 units of one product is,
Bradley Sutton:
Is that normal? Like, do you have a product that, that people buy in bulk a lot, or this is just like, has never, ever happened before?
Andrew:
Sometimes I get bulk orders, so I have, I’ll sell like, individual units and then I’ll sell like case packs of like, you know, 150 of those units, or like a hundred pack of of those units On this one, I, I don’t have a case pack like that. But yeah, sometimes I do get bigger orders but not, I, I would say not very often, maybe like once a month or something.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Huy, I forgot what you were at in 2021. I think you were around like four or 5 million or, or so or what was your 2021, 2 years ago?
Huy:
Yeah, we were around that mark.
Bradley Sutton:
And how was last year up or down?
Huy:
I can say last year was down, so, you know, I’ll be one of those guests on your, on your your podcast that we’ll share it kind of like the downs. You know, I, I
Bradley Sutton:
Like that we always keep it real here, you know, not every,
Huy:
Everything
Bradley Sutton:
I tell Amazon’s not rainbows and unicorns every 365 days a year. So, so was it down just, you know, due to market, did you, did you like, you know, maybe lose a little focus and, and, and concentrate on some other things? Or just the natural cycle of your products? What do you think happened?
Huy:
Yeah, so we saw in the supplements category, and one of the big things that happened for us is during Covid, right? A lot of things you know, weren’t available supply chain issues as well. So we did overorder significantly just because I think that everybody was just, we had problems you know, with supply chain, we had our manufacturers put out really long lead times. And on top of that, I think that the biggest thing was, you know, like if people weren’t used to ordering online, then now everybody was ordering online, right? So you saw a lot of national brands, a lot of big big brands that are out there. They shifted a lot of their revenue dollars from retail directly into online. And then, you know, you started to see as well, Amazon make a significant push into advertising as well into search advertising.
Huy:
And you can see, you know, like if you look at their financials it became a massive part of their business. So a few years back, people didn’t really look at Amazon as being you know, a leader in the online advertising space, but you saw a lot of brands that were, you know, that had just added Amazon as a channel or weren’t necessarily concentrating on Amazon as a channel start to focus more on Amazon and start to push more of their marketing dollars towards that. And so, you know, like small businesses such as ourselves you know, we’ve been on Amazon for 10, 11 plus years and we’ve had the luxury of not having a tremendous amount of competition come in from, you know, some of the more traditional brands. People were focusing on it. They knew that they had some you know, they knew they had customers there.
Huy:
But then that, I think that a lot of people started to push much heavy, much more heavily into Amazon because they knew that’s where their customers were buying. And and so, yeah, like a lot of people, a lot of the brands that we were competing against drop prices you know, the cost of advertising became significantly higher and there was just much more competition. We’re already in a competitive space to begin with. So I think that, you know, we’ve been playing catch up. We’re not a lowcost leader and we generally don’t wanna play in that game. We’re on the higher end. And so I think that it’s difficult sometimes when we look at our, you know, our cost per click and just our you know, cost to acquire a customer. It’s difficult to play that game in large run.
Huy:
It’s just lose continuous amounts of money in the advertising space competing with larger brands that just push more sales volume and have outside advertising. And, you know, for them it, you know, it’s, it might be more cost effective to acquire that first sale and just push for a higher, you know, just to maintain, maintain brand relevance within Amazon. So I think that a combination of that, and then we’ve also had a few logistical issues that have kind of taken us on a downward path, but we’re on our way to turning that around now.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now 2022 versus 2021. Hey, if you were to put a dollar amount on how much you were down, like, were you down a million, were you down less than a million, more than a million year over year?
Huy:
Yeah, I would say we were down over a million. It’s tough to admit that.
Bradley Sutton:
This is why I wanna dive into that now. As a business owner, cuz that happens probably more times than people are up a million you know, are people down a million, you just don’t hear about it that much because people are too shy to come on podcasts and I’m like, Huy is like, Hey, he’s putting it all out there. But how do you deal with that? Do you have to cut back on other costs? Like, like do you have to lay off staff at all? Or how does a how does a business keep going after, you know, losing that kind of gross revenue?
Huy:
Yeah, I think I’m used to, I’ve, I’ve worked with a lot of startups in the past. You know, it’s been great for us for 10 plus years on Amazon. We’ve been on an upward trajectory. But this is the longest I’ve ever done something. I’ve heard it that way. So I’m used to you know, doing other businesses. I have an entrepreneurial mindset, jumping around doing a lot of different things. So I’m used to the ups and the downs, but it’s one of those things as an operator you just have to be calm, have to take a look at, sure. You know, the things that you can control and things that you can’t control and focus on what you can control. I know it’s very cliche to say that, but a lot of it came down to looking at operating costs, operating efficiency and trying to figure out, you know, what changes can you make in the business in order to operate at a more comfortable margin.
Huy:
We didn’t do any fundraising, so we’re completely, you know, bootstrapped I would say from, from the beginning. But we didn’t lay off any staff necessarily. I think the biggest thing was just looking at all the different platforms that we pay for, all the different apps that we pay for. We used to use a couple of the different, different three pls and we didn’t really, we always wanted to get away from using three pls just because we didn’t have full control. And a lot of times the 3PLs didn’t work out. They made a lot of mistakes and errors. So we took that opportunity to move a lot of our fulfillment in-house. And now that would seem like the opposite, where it might be more cost effective to use a 3PL. But in our case we just crunched some of the numbers and found it more effective to control more of our operating processes. So really a lot of it was like trimming the fat, cost cutting, cutting out a lot of apps that we weren’t using. And yeah, I mean, we were using everything and not that we were using it efficiently. We had just been operating like that for such a long time.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Yeah. So that’s, that’s good. That’s important for everybody to hear. That’s why I was especially excited to have you back on the podcast is, it’s important to understand that hey, you know, in a perfect world, sure, everybody just keeps going up and up and just, you know, have all the subscriptions and all the overhead that, that you want and you’ll still stay profitable. But there’s ups and downs on Amazon. You gotta be able to pivot, you know it’s not like you just set up, we’re just gonna go ahead and pack up shop. We lost money, or we didn’t make as much money as the previous year. Let’s shut down our business. No, you look at where you can, you know, save some money and make adjustments. So that’s really good that you guys did that. Now, back to you, Andrew, I remember in the, or I don’t remember. That’s a lie. I’m looking at my notes from the last episode. My memory’s bad. But you had said that you found your very first product that you sold on Amazon, like using Black Box, and then at two years ago you had, you know, from that very first product you had expanded to about 16 different SKUs. What are you at now? About,
Andrew:
So I’m at about, I think like 53 now. It is really just four main product types, and then there’s different like color and size variations
Bradley Sutton:
And all in the same, all in the same brand and, niche.
Andrew:
Yeah. Yeah. All in the same brand, not the same category, but, you know, you would use, these products are all like industrial products that you’d use.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So now what’s been your strategy, you know, to increase? You know I would say, like I said, more people are probably down that I talked to, were down last year compared to the previous year. But, but you were up, so is it just because you kept launching new products or you had some of your legacy products also still have been increasing?
Andrew:
Yeah, I would say a lot of the growth for me is just launching new products. If I looked at my existing product line from 2021 to now, it’s probably per unit, it’s probably gone down a little bit. Just cuz of, yeah, COVID was over more competitors in space now. So a lot of that was from coming out with new product lines.
Bradley Sutton:
So now one thing that I think a lot of Amazon sellers have a question of is, you know, sometimes you become top in your space or you’re the, the first person your space to really provides something. But then how do you protect yourself from just a lot of competitors, you know, be it from China, be it from other countries where there’s a lot of manufacturing, you know, going in and undercutting you and trying to steal your market. But like, how do you stay relevant? Like how do you stay at the top where you’re not losing your market share to up and comers who just look at what you’re doing and then just try and duplicate it and, and make it cheaper or, or do so, so how, how have you battled against that? Like is it differentiation? Is it unique marketing you think you’re doing? Or what’s going on?
Andrew:
That is, that is the battle, especially in the stuff that I offer because it’s not, you know, IP protected or anything like that. It’s havin, I try to have the best creative, I try to have, you know, I love PPC and online Ads stuff, so I’m always in there trying to maximize the potential for PPC you know, try to just have the best listing. That’s all I can kind of do. And then lately I’ve been, just in this year, I’ve started to talk to, I have some other friends that are in different businesses and stuff, and I have a local like distributor that might be interested in either some of my products or having me source products for them. So now I’m kind of looking into, you know, possibly doing that, which would be, you know, it wouldn’t be on Amazon, but it would be another kind of side source of income that would help.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now that 2.6 million you mentioned, is that all on Amazon USA or is there a Walmart in there or Amazon Canada or anything else?
Andrew:
There’s Walmart. I think Walmart was like, I sold like 20,000 on Walmart last year, so it’s kind of like whatever. But hopefully, I think that’s doing better this year, but I haven’t checked the numbers on that
Bradley Sutton:
Now. Now we, I remember before you have ridiculous experience as far as marketplaces from Japan to all over the world. So are you still expanding or have you consolidated, like to try and you know, just focus on certain marketplaces or what’s your strategy been the last couple of years?
Huy:
Yeah, I mean, we were selling in UK and all around Europe. We were selling in China and, Japan as well. And I’ll be honest we’re consolidating back down to the US and part part of that is that our product is not universal. Meaning that I can’t just take a US product and put it into the UK or Germany or Japan. And in the heavily regulated space, we need different labels. There’s a lot of compliance regulations that we need to go through. So logistically, we just made the decision that we needed to slim down on some of the things that we were doing, even though that we were making some revenue you know, in those other countries. But I think that just, you know, with the cost of compliance and you know, producing unique products for those markets, it was, you know, an easier decision for us to focus on the US market. You know, we expanded, yeah, outside of Amazon, we’re selling on Walmart and we’re selling a lot more direct as well. And that’s kind of been our focus is really, you know, going back to grassroots as a DTC company you know, focusing on how we can actually drive and build customer loyalty through our own website.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now you know, we talked a little bit about the L’S you took last year. What’s some W’s, what’s something unexpected that happened or something that you actually did expect and it actually worked out exactly as you, you had planned? Like a product launch or some marketing campaign or, or something?
Huy:
Yeah, I think a big W for us was that we increased our subscription revenue and you know, we’ve always been pretty focused on retaining customers and customer retention. So on average our subscription revenue has gone up on Amazon, our subscription percentage and just you know, LTV in terms of Amazon subscribe and Save has gone up. And then also looking at our own website, you know, a lot more of that has you know, improved as well. And I think that, you know, most of that is kind of focused on us not being like the loss leader in our product category, us focusing on providing a more premium product, also working with a lot of affiliates. And our affiliates are not just like internet marketers and you know, your typical influencers, but we have a lot of affiliate partners that are actually doctors and healthcare professionals.
Huy:
So when they find a product that works well for them you know, they continue to order from us or recommend our products. And that’s reflected a lot in our reviews online. So we know that a lot of, like providers that are out there you know, they don’t wanna stock a lot of product, they’ll just tell people which products to go buy. And they know that, you know, a lot of people right now are just going out and looking on Amazon, looking online to buy those products. So we’ll offer them a discount code or affiliate commission for them to give to their customers to just go out and order. And we do see that reflected in our reviews where a lot of our products are like, my doctor recommended this to me, or you know, my healthcare provider recommended this, this to me, and it’s worked great. So I think that’s a big w for us is that, you know, just increasing our subscription revenue. But we do suffer on net new because you know, with PPC and just trying to get people for the first time, sometimes they’ll go and look at other products that are much cheaper than ours. So we do require a lot of education upfront and you know, we’ve been doing a lot more of that externally.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you have like inserts or QR codes where you can capture some of that Amazon what’s your strategy there, the, the Amazon customers where, you know, you might not be able to market directly to them?
Huy:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, we’ve used insert cards for, you know, I can’t remember when we first started it, but it’s been many years since we use insert cards. And we’ve tried a variety of different things from free product offers you know, to eBooks and a lot of different things. But now we’re switch, we’ve switched over in the past year or so to using QR codes and just labels instead of insert cards. And part of that is also, it’s just to streamline our packaging a little bit more. But with the QR codes, you’re able to dynamically change the link. And it’s just easier. Everyone’s so used to just being able to scan the QR code now just with Covid and, you know, going into restaurants and scanning menus. So we are doing that. We’re trying a variety of different things. We’re trying to provide, you know, educational content as well as different offers. Obviously the educational content doesn’t resonate or not, doesn’t resonate as well, but doesn’t perform as well as offering a big discount or, or free product. So, you know, we’re continually testing, but the good news is that we do have the resources on the backend to kind of swap those offers out. And since we own all of our unfulfillment you know, we can make changes on the fly anytime.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, you’ve sold tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of units, I’m sure with QR codes and things. Have you ever had anyone flagged by Amazon or gotten slap on the wrist of any kind of insert card or QR code?
Huy:
No, we haven’t. And I think that the main reason why we haven’t is that we’re not doing any of those tricks where yep, we’re asking people for five star reviews. We’re not putting any five star imagery on there. We’re not asking for reviews before somebody claims an offer. And I think that that’s important where, you know, people have a variety of different opinions about insert cards and things like that. It’s just, it’s really like you know, you have to let kind of take a look at it from the customer perspective and Amazon’s perspective. If you make a universal offer, like this is part of your brand and you don’t treat, continue to treat yourself like just an Amazon brand, and I think that you’re gonna be okay and then, you know, just obviously review everything that Amazon’s doing and don’t do the things that they tell you specifically not to do, and then you’ll be okay.
Bradley Sutton:
What would you say is your take rate now on getting, you know, I’m assuming it’s, you’re trying to get the email address or something like for, compared to the, the orders, you know, is it 1%, 5%, you know, 10% of people are scanning and, and opting in?
Huy:
Yeah, I would say, depending on the offer you know, we were, before when we were doing the insert cards we had a, we were getting about a 10% take rate. So, you know, it’s definitely good enough. But one of the things that to consider for my business is different than other people’s business is that you know, a lot of our revenue, probably 40% plus is subscribe and save. So you’re not gonna get people continually coming through. It does vary from time to time, but I think that, you know, obviously 10% is great. We’re happy when we’re getting it, and I think that, you know, that should be something that I hope that’s what other people are getting.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. And then which one is performing? You mentioned you, you, you’ve tried a lot of different things, whether it’s the education or do you do everthing like, I don’t know, you can’t really have a lifetime warranty on supplements or something, but, but what’s, what’s your best copy that gives you the best opt-in rates?
Huy:
I think that, you know, giving a product offer a complimentary gift that’s always performed well. And I think just naturally people want something for free. But we do offer a lifetime warranty on our supplement. So if anybody’s not happy with it at any time, they can always just return it. So it’s, and that’s just another point as well, right? So if somebody’s thinking about this and they may have purchased like a three pack or a six pack or something like that anytime somebody asks for a, a refund or lets us know that they’re not happy, then we’re happy to oblige by that. Yeah. The majority of people do not. So it’s, it’s really something that we don’t find too too much liability in providing that. But yeah, I mean, I think that anytime you can offer a complimentary product a discount it’s gonna depend by category, the educational content, yes, we get a lot of people to come through for that as well, but it clearly doesn’t perform as well as, you know, providing an offer.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Alright. Back to Andrew. Now you know, you saw Huy there is is giving us some good strategies there. So what’s some unique strategies that you’ve been using? I remember the last episode, you, you were kind of tightlipped about it, but you know, you don’t have to give all your secrets away, but what’s some unique things that you think you’re doing that has been the secret of your, some of the secrets of your success?
Andrew:
I’ve really like, as far as like the Amazon PPCs concerned, like I take full advantage of the sponsored display video ads, all the, you know, brand video, like the video headline ads. I really like it.
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s talk about, let’s talk about that a little bit. What’s your strategy like? Like how do you, you know, it’s not just a matter of, oh, lemme just turn this on and boom, I’m gonna be rich. I’m sure you have some kind of specific things.
Andrew:
Well, to a certain extent it is like there’s a lot of people that, there’s a lot of people that don’t use ’em. But I as far as like what some of my strategies are, like for a sponsored display video, you know, maybe I’ll create 10 different ads and some of ’em.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Let people know about what sponsored display video is. Cuz I think, you know, a lot of people know the sponsored brand video sponsored display video was something I believe launched sometime last year. So, you know, people know regular sponsored display ads is just that, you know, some of those ads that came near or show up near the buy box on, on product pages. But what is sponsored display video for those who might not have heard of that?
Andrew:
From what I understand, basically it takes up the same, you know, it takes the same placements as the sponsored display, but it’s, instead of just a, a solid picture, it’s a video and you can put different videos, different headlines you know, little captions and stuff on there. So you can really experiment with different stuff. And if, if I’m targeting one sort of complimentary product, I’ll put a different video and, and a few different headlines in there and test them and see which one’s gonna do best. And then if I’m targeting another type of complimentary product, it’ll be a different video. So just getting really granular in that, in that stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
How do you choose your targets? Like, are you only looking at, you know, ASINs your auto campaign discover, or are you going and like using Black Box or even just looking on Amazon using X-ray or something to find like, you know, targets that you think, oh, like, I think, I think I would do well on this page. What,’s your strategy there?
Andrew:
I do use the, like the black box, like the product targeting for the Frequently Bought Together and things like that. And then Brand Analytics has like the, the market basket or something, or it’s shows the, you know, people who bought this also who bought your product also bought this. There’s one of my products that it’s an industrial product, but I found that people are buying it for like birthday parties too. And so it’s just like really random. So now I’m having, like, I’m creating content that’s like, has that product in it, but it’s like in birthday parties for like birthday parties for kids, you know? So I don’t know. So that’s that’s some of the ways I can.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s the thing that’s important to, that’s important to, to, to, to call out. Like the sometimes your product will, will get relevant for the most random thing. Like, I’m taking over this one account recently that I’m trying to do some case studies on, and one of the main products on there was, I think it’s like an oil diffuser or some or something like that. And if you look in Brand Analytics or search for your performance, and even Cerebro for some reason, there’s just tons of like sexual product related keywords that this thing is not just showing up for, but it’s converting for it. And, and for the life of me, I actually kind of don’t want to know why, you know, I don’t want to think about it too much. Like why in the world are, are, are people buying it for this keyword, but hey, the data’s there, you know, like you would’ve never thought, I would’ve never thought like a oil, you know, essential oil difference. Like what does this have to do with XYZ keyboard that I can’t even mention on air, but it’s like, hey, double down on it. It’s, it’s, people are use products in different ways and you might probably never thought an industrial product would be used in birthday parties, but if you see the data you gotta double down on it. That’s, that’s what,
Andrew:
What kind of a funny story, when I was helping my brother at the very beginning when we were getting him started, he was looking through different products and he is like, I found this rope. And it was like, but he looked at the reviews and it was like, this rope is being used for like, you know, for adult purposes. And it was like, you know, the rope was like pink and purple and, you know, stuff like that. And everyone was saying how soft the rope was and I was like, oh, I see what you’re, what what this is used for <laugh>. So anyway, yeah. Like he ended up not selling that’s not his product, but Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, well what else? Well, we kind of diverted here a little bit from here. Yeah. Your PPC strategy, but, but what else are you doing in, in PPC s unique?
Andrew:
Trying to do, I’m experimenting with different stuff of trying to bring traffic from off Amazon on Amazon. So you know, Google Ads is like Google and Bing ads been playing with that, been playing with like display ads more on Google. I’m finding, you can drive traffic pretty with pretty cheap, you know, click or cost per click and I’m just trying to see if that, you know, if I get rewarded for that or if my rank changes anything like that. So that’s, that’s kind of what I’ve been doing. And then lately I’ve been a one man show for a long time and I have an assistant now who is doing great and I’m looking to just get more of a team set up so I’m not like constantly bearing all the load here cuz I’m, that’s, that’s definitely something I need some help with cuz I have a really hard time like letting go of some of this stuff.
Bradley Sutton:
Delegating.
Andrew:
Yeah, yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Yep. I think a lot of us definitely have that issue. We actually have a opportunity in a couple weeks, you know, we have our elite workshop and Huy is gonna be on this new thing that we’re trying to a, a panel where people can, a, you know, I like providing forums where people can just ask each other questions. Cuz sometimes people get shy, whether it’s online or in person. It’s like they have a question, but they’re like, ah, I don’t want to ask. Or, or they, they’re kind of shy to raise their hand or something. So we try and provide those opportunities. So, so we has graciously agreed to be one of our first panel members ask a seller anything panel that we’re gonna have. Yeah. Are you coming out, Andrew, to the Elite Workshop?
Andrew:
I don’t think I’m gonna be at the Elite one. I’m going to the Billion Dollar Seller Summit though, so I’ll be okay a little bit after that.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. That’ll be our second one, right?
Andrew:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. First one was awesome. I’m really excited for the Puerto Rico one.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, yes. I’ll be, I’ll be there. I’ll be there too. So if anybody wants to get more information than a Billion Dollar Seller Summit, h10.me/bdss, I, I believe is the link. We, any last tips and strategies? You know, like something like a 30 or 60-second tip that you can, you can give the audience.
Huy:
So a lot of people have been talking about ChatGPT and all these different AI tools that, you know, there’s hundreds of different tools coming out every single day, probably more. And I think that there’s a lot of noise out there and people are trying to figure out how to use it. They’re trying to figure out how to use it for themselves and how to possibly replace jobs that they’re doing or their team’s already doing. I think that probably the biggest tip that I can provide is allow and encourage every single person on your team to actually use it. Because, you know, if you’re using it from the top level as a business owner, you may see different things than somebody who’s using it in their everyday life as, you know, working you know, on your business. And we’ve done that as well.
Huy:
So anybody from customer service to operations to marketing, everybody’s been using it and improving processes kind of like the own process that we’re working on. And then those processes are adopted across our entire business so everybody becomes more productive as opposed to just kind of one person. And, you know, thinking about all of the processes within your business. The other thing is you know, along those lines is that don’t always trust information that you get from ChatGPT I find that more oftentimes it’s actually more inaccurate than it is accurate when, when providing information. I know that pre it doesn’t have access to the internet currently unless you have ChatGPT Plus you are able to use different extensions to go in there to give it access to the internet. But just be very careful with the content that you’re putting out there. Or, you know, do your research, play around and figure out how to incorporate into your business for yourself.
Bradley Sutton:
Yep, I like that. I like it. Andrew, what about you? Couple tips.
Andrew:
Yeah just touching on that ChatGPT like AI thing, I’ve kind of noticed the same thing. I’ve, I’ve caught, you know, chat G B T just making stuff up or like lying and I kind of looked into it, they call it hallucinations that, you know, it’s like, oh chat b t makes up these hallucinations. And I’m like, what? So be careful with that. One thing I’ve been trying to do, I’ve been watching exit ticket on helium 10 and just trying to learn more like financially, cuz I, I do think at the end of this year I wanna sell one of my brands. I do have kind of a credit card hack on American Express. They have a credit card called the Plum Card and I never really gave it the time of day in the past, but it allows you to basically have, instead of, you know, you have to pay 30 days after your statement, you can wait up to 60 days after your statement.
Andrew:
So it gives you like more cash flow, it gives you like an extra month to pay. So that’s just kind of something people can go check out. All you have to do is make the minimum payment by the first, by 30 days after the statement and then you can pay the rest off, you know, another 30 days after that. So I put like shipments on it and stuff where I can get, you know, basically just an extra 30 days of, of like credit and the only, the only downside is if you wait the full, the full like 60 days, you don’t get any credit card points, which I love getting credit card points, that kind of stinks. But you do get, if you pay it off, normally you get like 1.5% cash back, which is pretty like standard. But yeah, if you want an extra 30 days to pay stuff off the Plum card from American Express.
Huy:
Yeah, that’s a good tip
Bradley Sutton:
Right, cool. I haven’t heard of that one.
Huy:
I’ll just add onto that as well in addition to the Plum card cuz I was also looking into that there’s a card Parker, so Parker gives you net 60 as well and then you can combine, so you can combine that like you know, this is for people that need funding for operations inventory or whatever it is, giving you that extra 30 days. There’s also the other hack that probably a lot of people have talked about before is that, you know, if you need to pay a supplier with a credit card but they only allow you to use a check, then you can use something like plastic to do that. They do charge a small fee on that, but I think that in combination with just net 60 days on the credit card, you know, allows you a little bit of breathing room.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. I’ve used that a lot of times could
Huy:
Could also be dangerous if you put yourself in a yeah,
Andrew:
Make sure you’re keeping track, you know, always you get hit with a huge bill.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah. Good for you. Yeah, I do that a little bit because of just, you know, funds and also, you know, some travel hacking so I can, if I got a bonus for points on a certain month or something, then that’s why I go every 50 episodes of the Maldives on my credit card points and stuff. So yeah, plastic is definitely something that I think is great. All right guys, well Andrew, I’ll be seeing you in a few weeks at Billion Dollar Seller Summit. We, I’ll be seeing you in a couple weeks here at our headquarters. If anybody else is interested to go, just reach out to customer service. Even if you’re not a Heating 10 Elite member, you can actually pay to go, but it’s, it’s, it’s pretty expensive. I think we charge like six or $700 or something to attend but Elite members can go for free. And then the night before so guys, the night before the Elite Workshop, we are doing a social event, like a little party at Dave and Buster’s. Did you ever go Huy to any of our Dave and Buster events that we did way back in the day?
Huy:
I did. I went to probably the inaugural one where we used to be called like FBA high Rollers or something like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Yep.
Huy:
I do remember we had that big room and all those gold balloons with Manny and Gui, it was a good time actually. And that’s you know, those events actually, I met a lot of people from those events that I continued to talk with and just dm. There’s a lot of conversations that don’t happen in the Helium 10 Elite group like Ankit and I didn’t meet ’em at that event, but I’m just saying that like, you know, there are a lot of conversations that happen you know, once you build a relationship with somebody and that’s a great place because, you know, there’s so many people that have different backgrounds, different stories, and just great place to have conversations.
Bradley Sutton:
All right guys. Yeah, so May 24th, save the date for that. If if you want to go to that one that’s not just for elite members, you know, anybody can go to that one. So reach out to customer service if you don’t know of the if you don’t have the link or actually I’ll make a link right now. Just go to h10.me/irvine, h10.me/irvine. That’s, that’s where it’s gonna be at. And, and be some nostalgic times there because yeah, that was my first ever Helium 10 party too, was at the Dave and Busters there in the Irvine Spectrum. So we’re trying to bring it back to the old school. So I’ll be seeing you there at those events. Huy and Andrew again in Puerto Rico. So thank you guys so much for joining us. It’s great to to hear about both the wins and the losses, you know, that you have had and, and that you guys are definitely both successful Amazon sellers. And I know your inspiration to a lot of people listening out there. So thanks a lot and we’ll look forward to having you both on at some time next year as well.
In this episode, Bradley talks about an Amazon Anywhere Launch, Amazon Europe expansion, and more!
In episode #451 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we bring you another of our TaCOS Tuesday episodes, which is our monthly PPC AMA. This time, we invite Tom Waghorn from Clear Ads for the first time. In this episode, he answered tons of questions the audience threw at him including his Variation listing PPC strategy, defense ad tactics, best practices for advertising during launch, how to use day parting and ChatGPT, and much more!
In episode 451 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Tom discuss:
- 02:01 – Tom’s Journey from 3D Animation to PPC
- 03:30 – Why are my Competitors Crushing me During Launch?
- 08:51 – Which Child ASINS Should I Target in PPC?
- 11:09 – Which Metrics Will Help me Audit my PPC?
- 13:56 – How do I Keep Competitors from Stealing my Sales?
- 16:00 – Should I Target All Variations During Launch?
- 18:10 – If I Remake New Campaigns, Will I Lose Momentum?
- 20:15 – Should we Use Auto Campaigns During Launch?
- 21:20 – How Should I Divide Targets In Campaigns?
- 22:10 – When Should We Implement Day Parting?
- 24:21 – How Should I Allocate Budget To Campaigns During Launch?
- 28:12 – When do you Start Negative Matching?
- 30:53 – How Should I Raise Budgets?
- 33:02 – Can You Use ChatGPT with Amazon PPC?
- 35:15 – Tom’s 60-Second Tip
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a guest expert who’s gonna answer all of your PPC questions, everything from Sponsored Brand Campaigns, to using ChatGPT with advertising, how to do variation, listing targeting, and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think
Bradley Sutton:
Helium 10’s got over 40 tools for e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know how overwhelming it might seem to try and figure out how you’re gonna learn how to use everything or maybe even to know which ones you wanna get started with. So for a completely free course that’s gonna guide you through learning everything you need in order to become a Helium 10 expert, visit the Helium 10 Academy. That is h10.me/academy. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday program TACoS meaning Total ACoS. This is our PPC-centric episode where we bring on a guest each month and we answer questions that you guys, the audience are giving in live to our show. So in this case we have Shivali who interviewed Tom from Clear Ads and he’s gonna go over a wide variety of topics and he’s got some great information for you. So hope you like this episode.
Shivali:
With that, I am going to tell you a little bit about who we’re having on of course. And that is Tom Waghorn. He is from Clear Ads and we are so excited to have them because he is so knowledgeable on all things Amazon advertising. Tom, how are you?
Tom:
I’m very well Shali. Thank you very much for inviting me to TACoS Tuesday. It’s my first time.
Shivali:
Well, I know about Clear Ads through conferences. That’s where I first met you guys. And I might know a little bit about Clear Ads, but I know our viewership might not. So could you share a little bit about, first of all, your experience with PPC as well as a little bit about Clear Ads?
Tom:
Absolutely. So I got into PPC six years ago now when I joined Clear Ads originally people might not know it, but Clear Ads actually started as a Google Ads agency and then we very quickly caught onto the scene of Amazon advertising and how lucrative that was and how easy it was for a seller to set up on Amazon and start getting their products appearing through PPC. So a lot of our business ended up going that way cuz it was a lot more attractive to a lot of the clients that were, were searching for an agency. So I helped spearhead that department with George, our CEO through Clear Ads here. So yeah, I’d love every minute of that journey, which is why I’m still here six years later in the PPC game. It’s definitely not where I started my educational journey. I actually started in 3D animation, but yeah, everyone changed their career path and I ended up doing PPC instead of cartoons. But I’m loving it.
Shivali:
I think that’s incredible. That’s incredible. I mean, before we started this, I was telling you how PPC was such a foreign thing for me, even when I was getting started as an Amazon seller, it was the one thing that caused so many nerves and I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. So I’m really looking forward to picking your brain about PPC today and hopefully providing a lot of value, not just for myself, but for all of our viewers. I’m, I have full faith that’ll happen. So I guess we’ll go ahead and get started. We have Raef hopefully I’m pronouncing that right, he says, I launched my first product two months ago and I’m not getting the sales velocity to rank competitors started after me get to under 20,000 BSR even with a worse listing and price. What should I do? He also continues PPC is costing too much and getting only a few sales even after optimizing the ACoS, which is over a hundred percent. If I negate the keywords that got sales and over a hundred ACoS, I can’t find more keywords. So what would you recommend in this situation, Tom?
Tom:
So first of all, I would take a step back and review your product and review the marketplace. How water down is that market? How convoluted, how busy is that? Do you have a unique enough product that you can actually set yourself apart from that competition that’s taken a big global step back in terms of when you launched your products two months ago? Did you also launch with PPC at the same time or did you wait a period before launching your product with PPC? I asked that because as soon as you launch your products on Amazon, you’ve got something known as the honeymoon period. And that actually lasts around a month and every day through the honeymoon period it’s deprecating and you start off with some sort of invisible rank. Amazon very quickly pushes you off the rank and that’s the benefit of the Honeymoon period.
Tom:
But every day you need to start getting your own sales and improving your rank and improving your sales velocity because the honeymoon period is ending every single day. So what I would do is reevaluate if you actually launched your product during that period, if you missed out on that, ranking boost that Amazon does give you when you launch, you could potentially revisit launching your ASIN again. I know that sounds like a lot of hard work going back to almost square one, but if you can launch your product with PPC, that should help you get that ranking boost. And you’ve also talked about having an ACoS higher than a hundred percent. During the launch stage, I would encourage you not to be too focused on ACoS. Try not to be too scared about even having high ACoS of above hundred or even 200%.
Tom:
Consider what you’re actually paying for in those early stages. Are you trying to launch with profitable sales from the get-go? If so, you’re probably gonna struggle coming into that sales velocity and that rank that you’re after. So I would review what you’re actually spending your PPC money on. Cons consider that that spend should go towards increasing that sales velocity, increasing that rank, increasing that exposure. You are paying for the benefit of having that new exposure and even reviews coming through. Once you’ve got that foundation set up, then you can start to optimize your account and start to see that ACoS come down to 90% to 80% to 70% all the way down to whatever your target ACoS is. Don’t try and achieve and tick every box from the word go cuz it’s impossible to pull every lever and tick each of those targets that you’ve set for yourself and your business and your account in one go.
Tom:
So it seems like the sales velocity and the rank is what you want to go for first. So yeah, try and change your mindset on what you’re actually spending your PPC on. And then your next point was that PPC is actually costing you too much and only getting you a few sales. That’s another reason why you need to reevaluate what you’re trying to achieve with your PPC. No, it’s not always the same. Some people can successfully launch with a sustainable ACoS out of the gate. It depends how water down that marketplace. It’s but yeah, you’ve also mentioned if you negate your keywords that got sales at a hundred percent ACoS, then yeah you struggle to find more keywords. That’s probably because those keywords were the ones that were relevant. You’ve carefully done that keyword research, whether that’s through a tool like Helium 10 or even through other tools or your own search term reports.
Tom:
Are you running automatic campaigns? I know it seems like it’s lazy advertising, just letting Amazon do the work for you, but having those run alongside your manual campaigns is a very good way to constantly discover new keywords and harvest more. Also, it’s worth taking those keywords that you have identified that have got you sales regardless of what the ACoS is and running those through a long tail keyword at tool. So your seed keyword might only be one or two words long. Even putting that into the Amazon search bar using the Helium 10 extension, it will actually auto-complete a lot of those words for you. Try running ads on some of those keywords. Yes, they’re gonna have a lower sales volume lower search volume I should say because they are longer tail keywords, but they should be cheaper and easier to rank for cause they’re likely to be a lot less competitive. Because of the nature of the length of the phrase in that keyword. Once you start ranking well for that, it’s also ranking for the individual keywords and shorter phrases that are in that long tail keyword. So then you can start to introduce those broader keywords that might be carrying higher ACoS for you. And you should see improved results on that. So sometimes it can be slower, steady ways to get there.
Shivali:
We also have Rozina who says, if I have three size variations, bigger being more price, which variation should I advertise on my sponsored product exact campaign? The cheapest or all three.
Tom:
Depends on your strategy. So if you know that you’ve got a far better margin on the bigger product with the far bigger price, which I assume would be the case, then that will be the one I would want to advertise because the keywords are gonna cost the same, but your margins are not better. So you have a $1 per click keyword is gonna give you far better profits if you’ve got a higher ticket price item. But also I would suggest trying to advertise all three potentially in separate campaigns and actually see which gets more engagement. Which of those size variations has a higher click-through rate and which of those has a higher conversion rate? And then I’ll just advertise that one. Cause if that’s how people are responding to your products in the search results and from the listings when they get to that listing, they can then choose if they want smaller variation, a medium variation, or the large variation.
Tom:
Most shoppers are intuitive to know that there are different sizes. They don’t just assume when they search for a product that it only comes in one size and one color. So I would, I would do that. That’s something we are doing for a new client that’s signed up with us to advertise in the UK. They have for some of their ASINs 15 variations. They already had some data with their previous agency and we knew where the sales velocity was coming through, so we just prioritized which of these variations generates more sales. So that’s the one that we advertised. But yeah, generally speaking, the bigger the price, the better your margins are, but it’s just the case of how people are gonna respond. I guess another example is if you are selling, let’s say a cleaning product, I think most households are gonna go for a simple handheld spray. But you could also be selling something that comes in like a big gallon ju I think the general public are more likely to respond better to something that they could actually use in their house rather than the industrial size. So it depends on the need and the niche of your product and how many people are likely to adopt those different sizes. So evaluate that as well, Rozina.
Shivali:
Thank you for answering that question. Now as far as, let’s say somebody already has their set PPC strategy, right? Like maybe they’re doing the variations or they have a catalog of products that they already are very set in their campaigns. How do you recommend somebody audits their campaigns? So I know there’s a lot of different metrics you could take a look at, but what’s sort of that fine balance of maybe understanding that you’re spending too much or when to kind of start fine-tuning it, how to fine-tune it, that sort of thing?
Tom:
Yeah, there’s, there’s a wide variety of things. I guess going to the title of this show checky TACoS. Are your TACoS low enough? Set yourself a target. I think most people go somewhere between 10% and 15%. You can easily find your TACoS by cross-referencing your spend against your overall sales. So that’s not just your ad-attributed sales, that’s all of the sales. And seeing what that percentage is. If it’s too high, then you’re likely cannibalizing some of your organic sales. So if this is a legacy account where you’re in maintenance mode and you’ve got all your keywords sorted, then potentially start dialing back on some of those bids in some of those budgets. I wouldn’t recommend doing that across the board. Test that with one product or even just one campaign or, or a few keywords and see what effect that has.
Tom:
If you still see the same level of overall sales, then pulling back was the right thing to do. If you start pulling back but then your overall sales start declining, then yeah, you still need to keep pushing and trying to get that ranking up before you can see those TACoS come down. Another thing to look at would be your click-through rate. So it’s very easy to settle on keywords that have the lowest ACoS, but try and find some of those little hidden gems that have a really high click-through rate. They’re the ones that people are responding to. They might just not have had the chance to flourish or be pushed further. So there’s always one or two keywords in the campaign that we kind of just leave there. They tick along, they’re not wasting too much money, they get one sale here or there, but try and look at their click-through rate.
Tom:
And we’ve now got access to the search query report through brand analytics. It’s an incredible tool. I still think it’s un underutilized today. I know we, we see it all over LinkedIn, but we live in a bubble. It’s a small portion of people that are utilizing that and talking about it. That will show you how many impressions you get from that keyword from that search term down to how many clicks down to how many outer cards, down to how many purchases. So work backward through that. And then that also guide you to what your realistic bid is for that keyword as well. But find those high, click through eight keywords and start trying to push those more and you might be surprised.
Shivali:
Yeah. Awesome. So the next question here is, what are some ways to try to stop or slow competitors from advertising on your listing and stealing sales?
Tom:
My quick answer is to advertise on your own listing. Yeah, defend your listing rather than just worrying about them going on the offensive. So we also employ those offensive tactics but try and defend them. So instead of in those sponsor product campaigns or even through sponsor brands and sponsor display, instead of just relying on doing your competitor’s research and targeting those target your own listings, especially if you’ve got variations. Going back I think it was Rozina’s question earlier. She’s got three size variations advertise against those different size variations that way, yes, we know that they can click on those different variations within the listing, but if they’re scrolling down the page and seeing those ads for your own products in different parts of the product display page, it’s pushing away the competition and slowing the competitors. It also acts as cross-sell and gives you another chance to showcase to that shopper that you have other products and size variations to show off.
Tom:
You can also show off your complimentary products. So maybe you are selling coffee, that’s a chance to show off your coffee mugs, your coffee machines, and your coffee paraphernalia. It accesses a cross-sell, but the main job you’re trying to do is to stop someone from advertising or listing. So, so try that. At that point, I would say the important metric to track as well would be impressions don’t be put off if those sales aren’t generating sales. The job they’re trying to do is have those ads appear on your page. If you’ve got high impressions on those campaigns, that campaign’s doing its job, and you know your product is appearing on your page. If you get any sales, that’s the cherry on the top. Depending on how many sales, it might be time to evaluate the product that they’re appearing on. If you’re already seeing a few people jump ship from your product A to product B, then they found a more applicable product to them in the time. But if you see a high volume of people jumping from one to the other, then you might need to evaluate the product they’re jumping from as well too.
Shivali:
I see that there are a couple of questions here, let’s get to both of them. Yitzhak says I launched yesterday new products on clothing for women in niche black colors, six sizes small through three xl. Congratulations, no reviews. I run automated PPC and exact broad and product. Should I target all of the sizes or just one?
Tom:
There are two ways you could approach this. You could go all in on all sizes and see which one just gets the most engagement. Or you could do some market research and I guess see which size you think is likely to get more engagement just from the get-go. Our reaction here at clearance is unless we’ve got any data coming from the client previously is to test everything. You’re not gonna know until you test. You could just try one size and it might work, but if you’d tested another size, that might have actually given you more exposure, more engagement, more clicks, more reviews, and then more click-throughs to your other sizes. So yeah, I know that might sound like the easy boring answer to test everything, but that that’s really what I would do until you tested it, you are not really gonna know. But yeah, that does require a bigger budget because you are diverting that through more sizes. I don’t know how many different sizes you’ve got there s through three xl. So yeah, looks say you’ve got six or seven sizes going there and that would be my answer. I dunno if you’ve got any, anything else to add to that, Shivali?
Shivali:
No, I absolutely agree. I think unless there is something similar on the market and you can figure out using maybe helium, tens chrome extension for figuring out in that review insights section, which variation tends to have the most reviews. Maybe you can begin there and figure out which variation sells the most and then start by using that for targeting first. But again, you really won’t know until if you do have the budget for it, then go ahead and test. I would say
Tom:
You could also just test the keywords just running some searches yourself and see what default size has come up from your competitors. That could be another way to do quick some quick market research. Yeah, absolutely.
Shivali:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Dominik says, I started my listings about a year ago and my PPC campaigns are, let’s just say crap, can I make new campaigns or do I lose some historic data to the algorithms? Thank you in advance.
Tom:
You can absolutely make some new campaigns. There’s, there’s no harm in starting from scratch or PPC. Your algorithmic data is tied to the keyword against the product. I don’t think Amazon truly cares. So it’s from that campaign or not? So if you do have some gold within those campaigns from search term reports and lifetime data, just start with those. For anything that’s paused, like even reviewing that data, you might find some keywords that worked for you in the past, try and revisit those. You might have even negated some keywords. Try and revisit those as well. But rather than un negating them within that campaign, leave them negated where they are but introduce them as keywords within a new campaign. That way you’re not disrupting something. I know you’re saying your campaigns are crap so you’re not gonna be disrupting anything but dare I say is working well. But yeah, always try and test it in a new campaign. There’s no harm in trying to do that. So yeah, good luck with that Dominik.
Shivali:
Yeah, good luck. Hopefully, things start looking up for you. We also have Safi asking when we perform an auto campaign for a new launch.
Tom:
Good question. Yeah, that’s quite a hot topic cuz yeah, you’ve got no reviews and you really want to teach Amazon what your product is. Amazon doesn’t know what your product is. It knows what category it’s in, but you need to teach the algorithm that when people are searching for keywords, your product is appearing for those. And so when running an auto campaign, you do run the risk of people coming through with irrelevant searches or maybe they’re close to your product but not quite hitting the nail on the head. So I would still launch them early on, but not necessarily on day one. So come prepared with a number of keywords whether that’s just five or six that truly sum up your product, but you know that if this is the product you want, they’re the keywords that you would search for.
Tom:
Try and rank for those. Try and put some budget behind those. So when people search for those and your product appears, Amazon is now learning that your product is those five keywords. Once you’ve got some traction behind those, then you can start introducing them. Your other campaigns, your broad, your phrase, your product targeting. But in an ideal world, I would launch with exact batch on a selection of keywords that I knew that sums up the product I wanted to rank for. And if I was looking for that product, that’s what I would search for.
Shivali:
Are there a certain amount of keywords that you would maybe put into a campaign and limit it as, I know that when you have a certain budget, then that budget can run out really fast especially if you’re spreading yourself too thin? So is there a recommendation of what you recommend staying between?
Tom:
Yeah, this has changed a lot over the years and very quickly I’ve gone are the days where you can just fill a campaign with a thousand keywords like every keyword under the sun and it just works. It’s very quickly been reducing and I probably wouldn’t put more than a dozen or 20 keywords in a campaign now, but I would also have a look at the search volume of those keywords, even if I’ve got 20 keywords. But search volume-wise, one keyword’s got like 20,000 and the other keywords have got a couple of hundred. I already know where the budget’s going. It’s going to that high search volume keyword and the others aren’t gonna have a chance. So divide your campaign structure up by search volume, not just by match type and product type, but if you’ve got one keyword that’s carrying 20,000, then everything else is a thousand and lower. I isolate that one already cause it’s already gonna swap off the budget and it’s not gonna be a fair test, it’s not gonna be a fair experiment. So keep those lower search and keywords in a different campaign with its own budget. We know it’s gonna be a fair, fair trial.
Shivali:
And what about something that’s a little bit more advanced? For example, day partying ads? When does that become a good idea or when should somebody consider that?
Tom:
First of all, you’re gonna need a tool for day parting. Unfortunately, that’s not something Amazon allows us to do within the platform. I guess for those that don’t know what day parting is, this is where you can tell the system to pause your ads completely during a certain day or a certain hour of the day. I would never recommend having your ads and your keywords completely paused for those periods, but reducing bids during moonlight hours like no one is really looking to purchase with any intent at one or two in the morning. Chances are they can’t sleep and they’re just window shopping. Still good to reach those customers cuz they’re still showing some sort of interest but have your bids reduced by maybe 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, or even 50%. But when to introduce this would when you really see that you are struggling to combat some wasted spend even with thorough optimization, getting those bids down, getting rid of the wasted spend from irrelevant keywords or high ACoS keywords, that might be a time to, to consider day parting.
Tom:
And that might bring us back to our example earlier that Rafi was asking that there are key campaigns and keywords in there with an ACoS above hundred percent that might not be true for every hour of the day. That might just be what the average is. Maybe you’ve got a lot of traffic in on sociable hours that are causing that ACoS to go up. So that will be a time to visit day parting and with the Amazon marketing stream, I know that’s kind of in the beta stages at the moment. It actually gives you a lot more data with day parting. It’s not just you deciding, okay, it’s probably a good time to reduce bids during the hours like 1:00 AM to 4:00 AM the marketing stream actually tell you what level of sales you’re seeing through those hours, what your ACoS is for that campaign or that product or that keyword through those hours. So if you can get access to the marketing stream, that will give you a lot more data and you can introduce that a lot quicker cuz you’ve got a lot more solid data through that.
Shivali:
I see Safi has asked how do we allocate budget PPC budget amongst ad campaigns for a brand-new launch?
Tom:
Good question. I would make sure most of that goes to like what we were just saying, the keyword word campaigns. I would try and launch an exact, because like I mentioned, you want to teach Anderson’s algorithm what your product is and it’s gonna learn that quicker by knowing what keywords people have clicked through and made that purchase from. So I’ll try and allocate more of your budget through to those keywords that you really wanna rank for, you really want to index for and you really want to be relevant to your product. I would have a smaller budget. When you do introduce it for auto campaigns you are always gonna do better keyword research on your own by using tools. The auto campaigns are just gonna kind of fit in those gaps of the nuances, the nest spellings, the yeah, the different nuances within language, whether that’s kind of localized slang words.
Tom:
You are not always gonna find those within your own keyword research. So yeah, I would always try and prioritize the keyword campaigns. I would mostly be launching with keywords and then a selection of competitor targeting. Competitor targeting is gonna give you a better rank increase, but it’s also less likely that you’re gonna get the conversion from a competitor targeting ad most of that is gonna come from you from your keywords, but you’re likely to see a 4X ranking increase from someone jumping from a competitor to your listing and having that conversion directly from a keyword sale, you’re more likely to see keyword sales. So wave that up. And when you introduce sponsor brands and sponsor display, for the most part in my accounts, I’m allocating about 60-70% of my budget to keyword campaigns once, once we’ve got past that launch phase.
Tom:
And then sort of 30-40% across sponsor brands as sponsor display. Hey Zach I see your next comment is women’s clothes niche Walmart marketplace, new product. Which keyword will you run after high search volume or low search? New item, no reviews. I would go with high search volume to start with. That’s what people are searching for. Yes, it’s gonna be more competitive. But it’s ultimately where people are gonna be looking those low search keywords. That’s what I would go after. Once you’ve exhausted your testing on those high search volume, your keywords also it depe it depends on what metric and what KPI you’re trying to track. Are you going after profitability out of the gate or are you just trying to get those reviews that sales velocity that ranking, that exposure. I would absolutely go for the high.
Tom:
If you are more conscious of your margins and your ACoS, then I would look at introducing a lot more of those low search while in keywords but have a lot of them. You can’t just have a few low search while in keywords. Otherwise yeah, they’re low searching for you for a reason. Not many people are gonna discover them that way. So I’d make sure that they’re included. But I’m always introducing low search while in keywords. Like I said, you’ve got your seed keyword, which is the main keyword you’re going for. That might be women’s type or women’s dress site. And then the longer tail version is gonna start to introduce colors sizes, patterns. There’s gonna be a smaller search one for those because you’ve made that keyword more niche, you’re reaching a more niche audience with that, but they’re still valid and it will help you to rank for the individual keywords that are within that longer tail variant. I hope that helps you attack.
Shivali:
Let’s talk about something else. And that is negative matching keywords. Is there a time that you tend to do that? When do you change those keywords over to a negative match?
Tom:
I’m definitely not doing it from day one cuz it’s very easy to respond to a keyword that’s got a very high ACoS and think, okay, this isn’t working for me. I’ll add this as a negative so I don’t waste more money. We’ve talked a lot about launching and ranking today. If you can take a step back and work out what you’re actually trying to pay for, you’re paying for ranking, you’re paying for exposure, you’re paying for the benefit of trying to get more reviews in, it’s not about profitability from the get-go. So I wouldn’t negate from day one. But maybe a few weeks in when you’ve actually got a bit more stability, you know what your ranking is from those first two weeks of the honeymoon period, then you can start negating. Especially if we’re talking about keyword reports at least on a weekly basis.
Tom:
Negate in traffic that is irrelevant. Negate any keywords that talk about a difference in quality. Maybe you’ve got an average household product, but there are key words that would signify maybe a cheaper variant or even a more luxury premium variation. You don’t wanna see that that traffic come through cuz you’re just gonna disappoint the customer regardless of where you are on that spectrum of quality of the product or barrier to your pricing. If you can negate the premium keywords because you’ve got a middle ground product, then do that. You don’t wanna confuse that traffic that is searching for a more expensive variation or even cheaper variation. So start negating those as you see them come up from your search 10 reports. But once you start to hit the maturity, if you do see keywords that are relevant but consistently have a high a cost, maybe it’s because you just can’t be competitive on that bid.
Tom:
Maybe you’ve got a lower ticket price item, let’s say $10 price and some of the keyword clicks are gonna be 2, 3, 4, 5 dollars. Now even with your margins, you can probably only afford a couple of clicks on those before a conversion, before your ACoS is gone on those. So start negating those. Any common themes in keywords that you see that you need to negate, whether it is cheap or premium or luxury? Maybe you’re selling pet food and you’re already selling dog food. Start negating things like cat like straight out of the gate. Add those on phrase because that way you can negate any variation that comes off of that keyword. But when it comes to very specific keywords and phrases that might sing true to your product, add those on exacts negative cuz you know that it’s that variation of your keyword and phrase that doesn’t work and yeah, not those individual keywords overall.
Shivali:
I see we have another question. Mature campaign on Amazon about $2,000 a month spend 25% ACoS. I want to increase the budget. What is recommended on how to match to increase? What are your tactics?
Tom:
First thing I would look at is the budget tab. That’s a very, very new in the last few months tab that we can look at. And it will tell you how often that campaign is in budget and you can set a filter. So set your filter to your target ACoS. I’m guessing it’s somewhere around 25-30% from what you’ve said here that you wanna increase the budget. So I assume that ACoS is sustainable. And first of all, see what percentage it’s in the budget last seven days, last 30 days, year to date. If it’s not hitting a hundred percent, then you’ve definitely got some potential to increase that budget. Now there is an Amazon-suggested budget. Definitely take that with a pinch of salt because they have some wild increases there. I’ve seen campaigns that are in budget 70% of the time and it wants me to increase my budget by a hundred percent, which is crazy.
Tom:
So the same way we increase and optimize our bids, increase your budget methodically and in increments. You don’t wanna double your budget and then see that go from $4,000 a month and then the ACoS shoots up to 50% you’ve just spent to reach no additional audience that is gonna convert for you. So yeah, 2000 is quite a lot. So you probably don’t wanna go with small increments like an extra $10 cuz you’re not gonna get anywhere fast that way. But start experimenting by just increasing that by 10%. See what that does for you. If you see your sales grow and your ACoS isn’t affected too much, then you’ve got a bit more authority to start increasing that by another 200. The higher your budget is, the more authority you’ve got to increase that. But keep an eye on that budget tab cause you’ll very quickly be able to see what opportunities for growth you’ve got there.
Shivali:
Wonderful, thank you so much. Now I see that in our comment section, we have answered all the questions that were asked. So I’ll ask a couple more here. And one of them is ChatGPT I mean there’s been this incredible hype. So do you feel like there’s some sort of incorporation of ChatGPT in PPC?
Tom:
Yeah, I use it. We use it.
Shivali:
Really wait, tell us about it.
Tom:
We use it to help with headline generation for sponsored brands, believe it or not. Yeah, if you run your search down reports and find what keywords or even just look at your targeting reports, find what keywords are working for you and throw that into ChatGPT. Say that you want ChatGPT to give you a headline enter your product title and it has to include your keyword. So include your keyword, include your product title, and if you are having writer’s block that day, it’s a very good way to get those creative juices flowing for new title ideas. I probably can come up with a hundred titles in a week and then I’m just, I hit some all, I just can’t think of any combination for these keywords anymore or this product title. So it can just help Yeah, get those ideas flowing. I don’t think I’ve ever settled on a title that ChatGPT has given me. But it’s definitely given me a platform to jump off of.
Shivali:
You use it as a starting point. Yeah. Sort of for brainstorming, right? Yeah, and I’ve done that for emails. I won’t lie. The emails say a lot. I’m just like, please draft a compelling email for this and then you can always rearrange it afterward and,
Tom:
And the prompt it goes back, you can just get it to reiterate that. So maybe it comes back too formal. You can just say less formal or the same but more exciting or make sure to include the word deal or make sure to include the word soft and it’ll do that and then just put those into a spreadsheet and just split test some of those. Yeah, it’s not very good at calculating character limits. So try and give it a word count. But I’ve also seen people use this for optimizing listings and headlines. So the same sort of thing come up with a new headline including these keywords. My product is a new range of women’s clothing. I’m specifically selling black dresses for different sizes.
Shivali:
So Tom will close off with perhaps a strategy from you. What is your 60-second strategy?
Tom:
I’m gonna keep it on theme with ads cuz we’ve had a lot of engagement in the comments today. So I don’t want talk about my lifestyle. Prepare for any of these upcoming seasonal holidays. No matter, no matter how big or small it is with a decent lead in like with Q4 and the holiday season and Christmas, you probably want to get the jump as soon as you see the other side of Halloween. I know you’ve got Black Friday and Thanksgiving in between. But more and more as we go through the years, people are starting to prepare for these holidays a lot earlier. You don’t have to be aggressive with your bids but just get those keywords out there. Start ranking slowly that way when you get to December, if we’re talking about Q4 and the holiday season, you’ve already done a lot of the work to rank slowly.
Tom:
Yeah, that way you’ve got ahead on your competition when they come in late, you’ve already done the hard work. But the same can be true for those single-day holidays. Like Valentine’s Day work out what the lead time is, don’t start advertising a few days before cuz you’ve missed everyone. Start trying to rank maybe two, or three weeks ahead, not too early because it is a shorter holiday. But yeah, try and come up with a marketing calendar for all of your products based on seasonality and what different holidays you can actually start taking advantage of. Some of them might surprise you. And yeah, Bradley, great point. How can we contact me and Clear Ads? So our entire team is on LinkedIn, so if you search through LinkedIn for Clear Ads Limited, you’ll find most of our team, the people to reach out to. If you want to ask more questions would be someone like myself or Helen or George. If you want an audit and want someone to look at your account or you’re interested in our services, reach out to George Roberts on there. But you can also find us on clearads.co.uk. There’s also clearadsagency.com. So there’s a few websites that you can find us through there. Thank you, Bradley.
Shivali:
Awesome. Thank you so much for being on, Tom. This has been a blast and I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to come and sit down and answer all of these questions for us. All right, we’ll catch you guys next time on TACoS Tuesdays. Bye.
Bradley Sutton:
Thank you so much to Tom and Shivali for that great episode and especially thanks to you guys for inputting all of those questions that you had given during the show. Don’t forget, we do this once a month one Tuesday a month. The next one, I don’t have the date yet, but it’ll be in June. I’ll be hosting that one in full. I don’t have the guest yet, but if you guys have some suggestions for guests, make sure to send them my way and I’ll be doing also a Walmart Wednesday episode next month as well. So I hope you guys found some value in this. Don’t forget, hopefully, I’ll see you guys. May 25th at the Helium 10 Social Event that we’re doing, or, actually say May 24th. You can go to h10.me/irvinesocial. You can actually sign up for the event at h10.me/irvinesocial. Hope to see you guys there in person. See you in the next episode.
In episode #450 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley invites the “Professor of Amazon” Howard Thai back on the show to discuss all things Amazon Algorithm Related. One misconception that’s cleared up is that there is no such thing as the Amazon “A10” algorithm. We go into where this terminology came from and, more importantly, what are the top things to keep in mind for optimization your listing for the Amazon Algorithm in 2023.
Signalytics has been at the forefront of using AI since before it became “stylish” to do so, and Howard talks about interesting things they have been using it for such as doing heatmaps on listing pages to see what buyers do after getting on a product page.
In episode 450 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Howard discuss:
- 02:56 – Is there a Such Thing as the A10 Amazon Algorithm?
- 04:50 – What are Differences of the Amazon Algorithm in 2023?
- 07:10 – Absorbing Keyword Ranking Juice of Competitors
- 08:40 – The Importance of Adds-To-Cart and Off-Amazon Traffic
- 12:10 – What Parts of Listings are Most Important
- 15:20 – Howard’s Launch Strategy
- 19:20 – How to Get Amazon’s Choice Badges
- 22:00 – How Howard is using A.I.
- 25:10 – More A.I. Use Cases for Amazon Sellers
- 26:00 – What are Black Hat Sellers doing in 2023?
- 28:00 – Can You Protect Against Fake Reviews?
- 28:45 – Howard’s Hobbies and Health Routine
- 30:53– Howard’s Sixty Second Tips
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got the professor of Amazon back on the show, and he’s gonna drop a lot of knowledge bombs about how the Amazon algorithm is working in 2023 and PPPC Tips, launch tips, and even AI tips. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you have writer’s block with creating or editing your listing? Would you like to get some help from ChatGPT? Well, make sure to use Listing Builder with AI inside of Helium 10. And with a click of a button, have sections or even your entire listing created by AI using the keywords that you say are the most important. If you have Helium 10, you have access to this already. Go to Listen Builder in Helium 10 and give it a try. Or for more information, visit h10.me/listenbuilder. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a serious seller here back on the show for the first time in a while. Howard, how’s it going?
Howard:
I’m good. How are you doing?
Bradley Sutton:
Pretty good. Pretty good. Now this is you don’t know this person, but if my calculations are correct, this is actually a momentous time because this is episode four 50, and this is the first time in two years since episode 200, or actually since episode one 50, when I have not done every 50 episodes in the Maldives. So like, this is very momentous, I’m here in San Diego at my house and, or I was like, you know what? I can’t keep affording to go to the Maldives every six months. So I’m gonna save that for episode 500. But Howard, we picked a special number for you to be on here, so no pressure.
Howard:
Thank you. I try.
Bradley Sutton:
Now part of that, I’m like, all right, well I gotta do something special, so I’m just gonna I keep telling people that I’m trying to get more healthy and things like that. So I’m on my usually don’t do this, but I’m on my treadmill, my standing desk treadmill here, so I’m gonna try and lose some weight while we listen to and learn from Howard. So Howard, actually before the pandemic, didn’t you most of the time live in China?
Howard:
Yeah, before the pandemic. I moved to China in 2009. So I stayed there like until like 2020, 2020, I believe it was February 2020. And then I kind of had to evacuate China so that I can do a mastermind in Kabul San Lucas.
Bradley Sutton:
I wanted to have you on here cuz you know, you’ve always had like special insights into Amazon algorithm and things that go into ranking and things. And one thing that was really upsetting me lately, cuz it hasn’t happened for a few years, but then all of a sudden you would see all of these kinds of posts out there whether it’s LinkedIn or whether it’s blogs and people talking about, oh yeah, Amazon has released the A10 algorithm and it’s changed and, and this is what you need to do. I would think that a lot of people follow, like are putting out wrong information because you tell me, is there such thing as the A10 algorithm?
Howard:
I don’t there’s nothing n no such thing as an A10 algorithm because the algorithm is actually nine characters, so it’s A9, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. So talk about how the A9 algorithm, like how that got kind of like-named because it, it’s not like Amazon in their documentation says, oh, there’s such thing as the A9 algorithm, but how did sellers come to call it like the A9 algorithm?
Howard:
I don’t think it’s sellers. It’s actually from Amazon itself. If you go on to a9.com, you’ll see that it should be Let me try it right now again, just I’ll kick myself in the face. But, if you go to a9.com, it should go directly to Amazon itself. And then amazon.com. So that’s what it is. A9.com is actually Amazon.com when it is forwarded.
Bradley Sutton:
Because it was the name of the company that they bought who like made the algorithm, I believe it was called A9 and it actually had its own website before, but now yeah, you’re right, like it forwards to Amazon. Now, now Amazon, throughout the years, of course, just like any software company, of course, updates this algorithm here and there. But have you heard of anything like major in the last, few months at all about the algorithm?
Howard:
Oh well, A9, well, the algorithm, right? For Amazon, it’s always changing here and there left and right because they are maybe testing things or they’re actually putting more weights on special signals we call it here. So there’s a lot of things that they try to kind of adjust to get down to a better customer experience.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Now before I remember, you would speak at different events and you had some special insight into some of the things because I think the most common thing that everybody knows, and it’s just like a no-brainer that has to do with that how Amazon search algorithm works is, hey, if somebody searches for a product and then they buy it that’s gonna help the algorithm. Like because Amazon is in the business of trying to make money, so obviously they want to prioritize in the search results, the products that make the most sales, but it would be erroneous to think that it’s only sales that influence the algorithm. What are some of the things that, you know with your knowledge and your experience and your context, you can tell us that are other factors that go into how Amazon ranks products and search results?
Howard:
So Amazon does a lot of you know, they look at a lot of different signals on how to rank keywords and well in the very beginning, right? When you have a honeymoon period and they will actually go in and look at your keyword sets and what people are actually buying from that keyword to your listing. That’s one of the basic things. But in reality, like people, they’re also looking at things like if they landed it on, someone searched a keyword, right? Let’s say keto or something like that, and then they land in on your competitor’s listing, right? And from that competitor listing, they actually go in and buy your products under the related stuff or the sponsored stuff there. You’re actually your keywords juice, ranking juice, you actually absorb the keyword ranking juice from that competitor, we call it relevancy, right? From that particular competitor. So it’s like, kind of like you’re, you’re like absorbing their powers, absorbing their keywords into your listing.
Bradley Sutton:
Sounds like something out of like Marvel or DC Universe movie or something. Alright, well, what else is like one thing that I never could understand I would hear it talked about by you and others is like, oh yeah, add to carts is so important. And to me that just seemed ridiculous because I’m like, me, I guess I’m the weird one, but like me as a buyer, when I search for something on Amazon and I add it to my cart, I check out like I buy it. But when Amazon started releasing more data like Search Query Performance and different data points, you could actually see that the majority of people aren’t like me. They like add things to their cart and then maybe they don’t buy it for a few days, or they add like 10 things to their cart and then they choose like one of them that they’re actually gonna buy. And so, like, that’s why I could never understand like why people would focus on add to cart or why Amazon focuses on it. But, but Amazon is looking at that, right? And then that also would go into their algorithm.
Howard:
Yeah. add to cart is very important. They consider it as two things, right? One of ’em is in order to get your Amazon choice batch. The other one is, it’s called an expected conversion. They expect a certain amount of add-to-cart will lead to a certain amount of conversion. So the more add to cart, the more possibility or expected conversion they expect. So they, so with that said, they would have a collection of data points that will tell you, Hey, these people add to cart, let’s go and retarget them through email marketing through when you get those emails, you say, Hey, why is, why am I getting these emails that I was looking at? And it looks like it’s, I haven’t been looking at this. I haven’t been actually buying this, but then they’re actually giving a discount, a 20% discount or whatnot just so that I can come back and buy it. You know, like things like that you could see like it’s kind of how Amazon targets retargets them through that cart.
Bradley Sutton:
Yep. And then also what have you found in your experiments and like maybe research just from what you’ve heard about, about offsite traffic as far as for the search algorithm like there, there, there’s been debate out there, like if somebody makes a keyword search in Google, clicks on an Amazon product and the search results, can Amazon actually see what they search for on Google and thus helps their rank juice a little bit for that keyword? Or is it only looking at the canonical URL that somebody has clicked on? But what’s your best advice as far as like, like Google and other search engine traffic, how that can help if it can help your Amazon ranking?
Howard:
So from what we’ve been seeing throughout a lot of data points that we have, Google is the most relevant for the keywords, right? Amazon can actually track those keywords that are coming from Google. Other platforms like TikTok and others, aren’t able to track those keywords as much. So it’s really relevant that if you’re coming from Google, then you would be actually getting more priority on those keyword ranking juices because Amazon wants people to come from Google because they want to make sure that they’re the first choice in product search engines.
Bradley Sutton:
So interesting.
Howard:
So they give you the best customer experience for those people and they wanna make sure that the ones that people who actually come from Google will actually find the products that they really want. It’s just like how like you go on Google and you found, there’s a news right article that just came out as not, not saying something bad, but like there’s some like in Los Angeles, there’s a shooting this and that. So when you type in Los Angeles shooting the things like most currently will be actually coming up on the search warrant results. So if that, if those products that are the most that go from, comes from Google to Amazon and they actually create a purchase, those are like the most relevant relevance for those keywords. So like at Nike had just had a new shoe how would Amazon know which shoe to present is? Yes, it’s new, but this current event kind of thing will, will kind of push over to Amazon based on Google.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but like, I’ve seen like a devaluation of the search terms like back or backend search term back in the day, it’s always title number one was the most important to Amazon algorithm, and then it would be like the backend search terms, and then maybe subject matter is kind of tied. And then after that, maybe bullet points and last would be description. But I’ve noticed in a lot of listings in some categories where not only is it not prioritized what’s in the search terms, but like 30% to 50% of the keywords that you only have in the search terms are not even index anymore. And ever since they made that change from like backend search terms and now they call it generic keywords what kind of things are you seeing as far as what parts of the listing that Amazon is prioritizing as far as the algorithm goes? Or what are you guys focusing on when you do optimize listings for keywords as opposed to what you were just talking about, like the images and things.
Howard:
So we, try to do the following, right? It is very important to have the f the initial keyword sets in there, right? So you don’t actually need to change the listing anymore. That often meaning like putting title, different text in there, different keywords into the title and stuff like that. Cuz it doesn’t really hope a lot. You guys can test it yourself. If you guys been like putting a product up for a while and then just change the title, put the most important keyword in the title in the very beginning, you’ll see that it doesn’t matter if you put whatever you put on the, on the title it’s not gonna help too much anymore because like we said before, it’s all about relevance, right? What actually get purchased and from what keyword plus the what when you search for something and like we talked about like they go to a competitor’s landing page and they eventually buy yours.
Howard:
It’s all about what the AI thinks, meaning what the AI thinks is relevant because like what you, you said we’re superpower, right? Using that particular AB testing and height mapping. How do we make it someone buy our product over someone else’s, if they land on their page, then on a competitor, and then you go in and get purchased at add a cart and purchased, you’re gonna absorb their keyword juice. That’s how they’re actually finding more new keywords. So you don’t have to change your listings that often anymore if you’re doing it correctly.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. How are you how are you launching these days for like your customers products? Like wha are you mainly just using PPC or every launch? Are you trying to incorporate outside traffic or what’s your go-to launch strategy these days?
Howard:
Okay, so first, a normal way to find the keywords we go in and we look at the top competitors. We grab all the keywords that they’re ranking on the top competitors. For the top competitors, there’s just say 10 of ’em. And we would actually find all the keywords and find which one is actually getting the most sales. And then we just put those on the title. A normal way where we do the listing optimization, right? Then we go in and we go do PPC, right? PPC, we do it in two ways, as we talked about, right? One is the normal product sponsored products. We go do exact search keywords with the rest of the, like like using our ai, it goes in and does the keyword to actually rank the product. That’s one.
Howard:
But then we go in and do product targeting. Remember I told you like whoever, whatever we’re landed on and then we actually like the top ASINs or something that we go in and purchase and they purchase our product. We actually get more keyword ranking juice from all their keywords. So when I’m targeting a keyword, first thing I do is I go in and I do the normal, exact, broad phrase, all those and autos and stuff like that to get the particular ranking for those keywords. You know, the, we called it query groups, right? So the query groups are there already. So now then we go to Helium 10 we search on Amazon, right? We search on Amazon and we say, let’s say coffin shelf, right?
Howard:
Coffin shelf, and then you get all these different ASINs in there. So we go into the and get the first two page of ASINs within that keyword, and we stuff it into the product targeting side. When you stuff into the product targeting side, that means when you have a higher chance to get sales related to that keyword, because eventually a lot of people are going to be looking at the first two pages for that keyword. And we’re gonna actually be under their product display page like the, the related, the sponsor, the highly ranked or what, whatever it is all those we will be in there. So the probability of us looking into getting ranked will be higher for that keyword from going from the regular search results or all the way to someone else’s product as a page. Then it comes to us. So we’re trying to be all over the place and absorbing as much of keyword juice coming from those.
Bradley Sutton:
I like that because I never thought about it that way. Like, like I do something similar, but I guess for a different reason. But like, let’s say f you’re targeting all of them, that means if they type in coffin shelf, even if they pick somebody at the bottom of the page, they click on it your ad comes up, but now my ad is gonna follow them around Amazon in the future because I was targeting their ASIN. And so like if I’m only targeting like two or three or four of the top sellers, that means I’m only gonna get, I’m only gonna get to follow that customer around Amazon for if they click on those three. But this gives me a little, a bit of wider reach and sure, maybe they don’t purchase it right away, like just because they saw my ad on the page, but now there’s gonna be more chances for, for them to click on my product because we’re gonna follow them. That’s a cool strategy.
Howard:
Yeah, that also helps with the add-to carts, the clicks, and also the Amazon Choice badge.
Bradley Sutton:
Speaking of Amazon’s choice badge what are you, I mean, what else are you doing to, to kind of help with that and or make sure that you, as I say this my device is gonna turn on, but, but, but trying to get Alexa to like make, make sure your products maybe show up in Alexa’s voice searches.
Howard:
Well, for Alexa, voice searches is mainly Amazon’s choice, right? So to get the Amazon choice, you will need to make sure that the customer that buys your product is actually doing a lot of research about this. Remember how you said in the very beginning, like when people are like adding to cart a product after a certain time, they actually go back and buy it, right? They have this intent to buy it, but maybe they go in and add your product to the cart and then they go, Hmm, I need to do more research. I need to find out if this part product is actually what I want and it has the specs that I want. So it goes back and looks at all the competitor’s reviews, all the competitor’s specs, and there’s page nation coming on. There are people clicking on these pages’ reviews that Amazon’s tracking.
Howard:
On the competitors where that actually has a good ranking for that particular keyword. They actually, you could see that they’re doing a lot of research. They’re outsourcing, Amazon’s outsourcing the work to these customers to help us, help them find out what is actually a good Amazon choice for this keyword. Because they’re actually going through the page Na page Nation and going through all the keywords within the exact reviews for that particular product. And then they might go hop back out and go look at another product and then look at more reviews and then, and eventually, they say, actually, I think I did a correct choice. The first product that I did put into my cart, it’s actually really important. It is really a good product and I’m gonna buy it. So they calculate this based on a lot of different ASINs or a buyer sessions, and they calculate and they do some and the average of which one is actually a really good fit for the Amazon choice. And then they calculate from there on. So every three days they switch out, they recalculate the Amazon choice, and that’s how you see Amazon Choice comes in and out on things.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, so now I read your blog sometimes and I know you’ve got a lot of experts on your staff about AI and that seems to be all the rage. So what are you guys doing with AI? I mean, you, you guys have been working with AI for even longer before became trending, but like for ranking with AI or listing optimization or just business? Talk AI with me for a little bit.
Howard:
A lot of things that we do in the very beginning, ever since we created this company is 2019 or it’s Signalytics AI, right? So we, we actually did AI before AI was cool so what we were working on, which we already have something already is you guys have it too, the AI listing builder, right? From the AI listing Builder, it goes in and creates a listing to and it goes through the process of like heat mapping and, and so on from building it after it builds the listing and looks at it, then it will go in and say, How is AI ranking products compared to before? So we, we found out that you know, like there’s scores on Amazon when you’re like on a product on honeymoon, you can kind of tell that it’s very sensitive on ranking, right?
Howard:
So if your product is going in and you can and you’re ranking, if for some reason you get attacked right? By negative reviews so when you get attacked by negative reviews, you can see automatically at that particular couple hours, you’ll see that your ranking drops like crazy. It might not be because of your ranking your score or whatnot. It’s because Amazon has a positive and negative signal to it. If you know that they, they see that, hey I’m giving you all this trust, I’m giving you all these impressions, but all of a sudden you’re giving me, you’re telling me that your product is not good because you’re getting, start starting getting a lot of negative reviews, you know? And then of course it looks at the percentage of negative reviews with your ratings and ranking and review ranking rating.
Howard:
But then all of a sudden, the most recent ones is always going to be the one that’s gonna decrease your rank or your ERPs on organic. So that’s what we see negative, a lot of negative effects. And they give you scores. They have like scores, like on the first page, how many reviews that you actually have on there, that’s not, not so good. You know, like threes, twos, ones, and then they kind of calculate a score and that’s how they kind of help using AI to de-rank you. And that’s why you’re getting attacked all the time on refuse.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Okay. What else? How else are you guys using AI or how do you think sellers should be using AI? Oh
Howard:
Well, we use AI to actually look at what Amazon’s looking at in their AI, it’s like an AI against ai, right? We feed ’em the dataset and then we see what results come out of it. Like, so regarding another thing is like deals like you, you, you can see that from all the data sets that deals is actually really important for the algorithm to learn to see if you’re actually a good fit for these keywords. So the more deals you have, the more impressions you will get, and the more of course chances that you are showing Amazon that your product disaster is doing well. Yeah. So that’s something that we use.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now you mentioned like just all of a sudden getting attacked with bad reviews. You know, Amazon in the last two, or three years I’d say has definitely cracked down more than in previous years on Black Hattery. You know, like they shut down so many accounts what was it, like a year or two ago, and cracking down on review groups and making it harder for people to potentially sabotage listings and hijack and different things. But here in 2023, what are some of the common things that you’re still seeing that sellers need to be on the lookout for as far as what Black Hat sellers are doing to attack their competition?
Howard:
It’s still the same thing. It’s all about the reviews there are people still out there doing reviews that are going to be hurting the, the com the sellers, right? So yes, maybe before it was a hundred percent of the people who are doing reviews, let’s say 2019 let’s say, or 18 whatever, there’s no like checking on the algorithm what actually is working or not. They’re not suppressing any reviews or anything like that, but the more you’re getting closer and closer, the review rate is getting less and less based on like, maybe bots leaving reviews or sock puppets leaving reviews. So it’s getting less. Right now it’s probably like 20-30% of the people out there that are trying to leave your review is actually sticking, there’s still a percentage of that. But getting it off is another thing. So getting off, we have in the back end, what we have for our clients is we actually can detect which reviews are fake and which one is real with an algorithm that we have. So then we can actually help submit tickets to see which ones are actually fake to Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. All right. So, but, and so there’s no real way to protect yourself against that? You just gotta kind of be on the lookout. Or what would you suggest to sellers to maybe mitigate some of the effects of that kind of stuff?
Howard:
I talk to Amazon often and they say that it’s hard for them to co-relate which one’s real and which one’s fake unless you have some kind of proof. If you have some kind of proof, submit it and they’ll see what they can do with it. But this is the hardest part of doing Amazon is getting those fake reviews.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. All right. We’re gonna ask you in a little bit what’s your 60-second strategy or 60-second tip of the day, but before we get to there like me, I’m right here on my treadmill and you know, as you know, I love traveling. So like I’ve always tried to ask guests in 2023, Hey, what are you doing for hobbies? For me is traveling. What are you doing to keep your mental, physical health good as an entrepreneur? Me, I try and get on my standing desk, treadmill, play basketball outside, and stuff. What about you? What are some of your hobbies and what are you doing to stay mentally and physically healthy in 2023?
Howard:
Me trying to stay mentally healthy is trying to learn new things. Like I’ve already probably done, since 2009, right? So that’s why like 13, 14 years now on Amazon, I’m trying to learn new things. Cause everything on Amazon is pretty much the same. There’s not much to learn. So I’m trying to learn new things like internet marketing affiliate marketing and other things to help our company to boost it up to another level. So I think learning is, is what’s kind of keeping me sane because, or else I would’ve been like doing something else already. Like everyone else right now, all you can see like all the top sellers are probably doing other things like Airbnb and other things like that. So I think learning is what I could say. It’s what causes me to still be sane.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. You still gotta do some stuff, though. That’s not work-related though. I think you gotta have some hobbies or fishing or golf or something.
Howard:
Well, I do. I love fishing. I love it, okay, there we go. I love fishing, I love eating, I love watching movies and traveling because there’s, there’s a lot of food and stuff involved in traveling. So that’s what I like to do. And I, I don’t, I like, I like working too. Actually. I work like maybe I would say like 14 to 16 hours a day. Just, just so that I’m out of the house sometimes.
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s go to our 60-second tip of the day or 30-second tip, whichever you want. What’s a strategy that you think sellers can utilize right now that will definitely help them?
Howard:
Well, I would really, really look into protecting your listing page. Like from what I just said before regarding your listing that people can actually absorb your keyword ranking juice. You wanna protect it as much as possible, right? So we call it CRO on your product listing page, conversion rate optimization on it. It’s making sure that you have all three or four tags you have, like the save tag, the green or the orange, and the red tags as well as try to make sure that you have the save or what do you call it? The strike-through price. It kind of helps, right? It is not just that one thing, but a combination of a lot of things to do it right. Also, I mean, you could get Amazon choices even better, the more Amazon choice you got, that you are actually the Amazon choice for that category, right?
Howard:
And also maybe like, have some kind of accessories bundles or optional items that you can have on the side. But you do need to get an account manager, but account manager, you can get it for free now. But if you guys need someone, contact me. But if you want and then all the bundles and all the things, so people and the new models, the new models are important because when people scroll, they’re gonna can’t find any of your competitors until they scroll two very, very on the bottom right. If you have any variations if you have other similar products, make sure that you include it on your product display page and make sure your EBC is good if you, oh, I’m sorry, A+, but premium A+ actually guys, premium A+, as long as you change it a certain amount of time.
Howard:
You don’t need to have that much A+ content out there. You just, as long as you modify it, edit it, and modify it and edit it within this how many times do you need? I think it was 15. I forget how many times do you need to edit. Do you get it? And then you automatically get the A+ premium. So you don’t need to do 15 ASINs, just the same listing. Edit it, update it, edit it, update it, and then you get your A+ premium.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, I love that. That’s a good tip I didn’t even know about. All right. Well Howard it was great to have you on here. I’ve burned 300 calories and, and walked 1.5 miles on this treadmill during this. And, and I know you’re going back to China soon to visit. I’m gonna see if I’m not sure if I can make it, but this time I’ll take you to my treat in Macau. And for the rest of you guys, if you wanna reach out to Howard just go ahead and go to Signalytics.ai.
In this episode, Bradley talks about Alexa AI Update, Pinterest / Amazon Collaboration and Amazon Search Glitch.
In episode #449 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Sharon, and Elizabeth chat about all they have been up to, including massively successful TikTok Shop campaigns, and even starting side hustles like wedding planning businesses!
Despite her success, Sharon has been struggling with motivation to focus on her Amazon business. However, instead of giving up, she has been exploring the idea of starting a new business venture after her time with Amazon. In addition, Sharon’s Amazon brand was making an impressive $1.7 million in 2022 while running on autopilot.
In episode 449 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Sharon, and Elizabeth discuss:
- 02:57 – What Are Elizabeth And Sharon Up To These Days?
- 04:15 – Joining Amazon’s Black Business Accelerator
- 05:56 – Losing Motivation To Focus On Her Amazon Business
- 09:16 – Starting A New Business After Amazon
- 12:15 – Still Making $1.7 million in 2022 While On Autopilot
- 12:56 – Building Her Brand In TikTok Shop
- 17:05 – Getting A Million Views On TikTok
- 22:18 – Close To $6 Million In Sales In 2022
- 22:48 – Using Amazon Skills For A New Business Venture
- 35:26 – Healthy Habits & Hobbies Outside The Business Grind
- 41:46 – Elizabeth’s 60-Second Tip
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today, we’ve got two of my favorite guests back on the show, and they’re gonna talk about a lot of things they’ve been up to, such as starting brand new offline businesses, and also being able to have a TikTok shop that did a hundred thousand dollars worth of sales in less than two weeks. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
You wanna know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using helium ten’s keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro, h10.me/cerebro. Don’t pay full price. Use our podcast discount code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a couple serious sellers back here on the show. I think this is like their third time. And two of my favorite guests we have here on the podcast, Elizabeth and Sharon, the dynamic duo. I’m not gonna say who’s Batman and who’s Robin? They’re both Batman and Batwoman. We’ll just say like, you’re the top of the top, both of you. No, no, Robins here. But anyways welcome back to the show. It’s great to have you guys back.
Sharon:
Thank you so much for having us, Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Now we’re not gonna go completely into their backstory, guys, because they’ve been on the show before. So write this down. If you guys have never heard of them before, they’ve got, you know, some really inspiring stories. Their first episode was episode 206. So find out how they were able to 30x their income of what they were making in Nigeria before moving to the States and before selling on Amazon. And then check out episode 317. You can do that h10.me/317. And then you can find out how since that first episode, they were able to scale their sales from 1.7 to 6.4 million in 2021. So now I don’t know what they’ve been doing completely over the last few months. We keep in contact a little bit here or there, but I’m gonna find out with you guys how their 2022 was and what’s going on here in 2023.
Bradley Sutton:
So first of all right before we started talking, I had to stop Elizabeth. I’m like, she started telling Sharon about something. I was like, no, no, no, I wanna record this. I want to hear about this, you know, live from you. So the first thing I’m gonna ask you, Elizabeth, is you mentioned that you are part of the black-owned business program at Amazon. I actually, you didn’t know about this, but I had a podcast episode all about that. But can you tell me, like, what kind of benefits do you get from being part of that, that program?
Elizabeth:
So I do have an account manager that has manages 10 other accounts, including mine. Nine other accounts are including mine. So it’s more like a personal approach to account management that Amazon is offering. Small business owners, black business owners. I do have calls within every week to kind of go over my accounts, help you know, point me in the right direction, you know, talk about strategies on how to scale my business and stuff like that. We just started having these calls three weeks ago and it’s been so helpful, to be honest. So if you have the opportunity to register your business as a small black-owned business, you should definitely take that advantage because I know this type of personalized account management, Amazon charge premium fee for those and for them to give us for free is unbelievable. My account manager, I just believe is like maybe the one of the best, I don’t know.
Bradley Sutton:
Can you gimme an example of something that maybe you or he was able to help for you or you did as being part of this program that maybe, like before you wouldn’t have been able to, to do it, can you give like, maybe one example?
Elizabeth:
Well, mostly, but some of my products are like in the bachelorette party decoration niche. And I do have a lot of issues with like adults flagging and stuff like that. He’ll tell me, you know what, just call, just gimme a call. Like, I have this number basically on speed dial.
Bradley Sutton:
Phone number. You can actually click get him. Oh wow.
Elizabeth:
I’m not reaching to any what do you call it again? Selling support extension. Nothing like directed to him. I’m like, Hey, you know, I have this issue. I’m like, hold on Elizabeth, let me hop on this. It’s gonna hook in like an internet ticket for me. And that’s like over, like, I cannot under read that.
Sharon:
Wow. That’s amazing.
Bradley Sutton:
Sharon’s about to sign up right now.
Sharon:
Not adults, but keeps betting the adult flag. So I would definitely love that.
Elizabeth:
Yeah. And you know, he called me up, I was like, cause mine did expired cuz I registered like two years ago. It did expire, but at that point I wasn’t getting like, no personnel follow up, nothing. So I was like, you know what, maybe it’s not just for me. He called me and told me, Hey, I’m going to send you a link to register directly free of child three years license for the small business certificate. Like, he did that all for me. So like, I don’t know, maybe they, yeah. I’m definitely going to hook you up. It’s really cool.
Sharon:
All right. I like it. Now let’s switch back to Sharon. We keep things real here on the show, and I remember, I, I don’t know if it was last year or sometime you were telling me that, that there there were times last year where maybe you were neglecting a little bit or maybe your Amazon business or not as motivated as before. Am I just completely confused or was that you?
Sharon:
That was me. Absolutely.
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s talk about that. Vecause this is real.
Sharon:
So from the second half of last year, I just started getting like bored pretty much of Amazon. I do a lot of PPP C coaching personal students come around and I do, I teach PPC in my PPC clinic. So I have small meetings, it’s like a small group where I just like meet with students and then check their PPC account. We meet every week, right? So I just started getting bored and in September I’m like, okay, maybe it’s this PPC clinic that’s overwhelming me maybe. So I told other students do not renew because it’s usually like monthly. I took the whole of September of and half of October. By the second week of October I resumed PPC clinic, but I was just still not motivated. And then I have been trying to sell one of my brands, actually, I don’t know if you remember from our last meeting, so maybe that was part of it. I don’t know what was the problem, but I had all these I can’t accounts tied together in the same seller, central account, all those brands. Oh. And I was trying to sell one of those because I figured it, it had grown to a point whereby I didn’t feel like I could grow it any further by myself. So, so
Bradley Sutton:
You’re talking about one, you have one seller central account, and then you had started your own multiple brands, different private label brands.
Sharon:
And then two of the brands, we are doing much better than the other three brands. And it has gotten to a point where I believe that this brand had so much potential, it would be better off if I just sell it out that one brand so I can focus on one and sell the other one, which was good. I already connected with somebody I met, I think I met a company through the Helium 10 marketplace or something like that, forgotten what it’s called. And we were already working, but unfortunately the buyer or wherever they said they were gonna, they would need it with the seller central account. I’m like, no, that’s not gonna happen because I have all the brands and then Elizabeth or like Sharon, they want seller central account, open a new seller central account and migrate this brand before you sell.
Sharon:
I’m like, why didn’t I think of that? So I started that process and it was just being a headache because this was a product that was selling a lot. So I had thousands of inventory in my old seller center account. I didn’t wanna pull it because that would mean stopping sales and stopping revenue. So I had to wait to sell it true. And not other products were selling somewhere slow, somewhere fast. And I was trying to move to the new one and I ran out of stuff as the bestseller and just everything was going on at the same time with me just being done with Amazon that September, October. Then in November I just started a new business altogether. And that even then made, that was more interesting to me like,
Bradley Sutton:
Like an offline business, right?
Sharon:
Totally offline. Yeah. Like event the corridor, I’m an event designer, you know, it’s, I just started a luxury event rental business in November.
Bradley Sutton:
So like you use the money you’ve been accumulating from Amazon and then now you were able to start another business because you had this capital. I like it.
Sharon:
So I moved the capital that I had, I was using to, I would’ve used to like build my Amazon business. I move, and if you know about the luxury rental business, it needs a lot of upfront capital. So I put a lot of funds out of Amazon to just start this new business. And that again, took all my time and all whatnot. So as a matter of fact, only in the last two weeks did I finally, I think I should take a look back on Amazon and I’m just trying to get back into the grind.
Bradley Sutton:
I mean, you have like maybe virtual assistance or staff who are like managing inventory and things like that and Oh yeah.
Sharon:
I did not shut down my Amazon business because at the end of the day, Amazon was then like, my job. Sure. And then this new business was my side gig. Does that make sense? You know how we still have to go to work even though you don’t like the work, but you need the money. So, of course I continued managing my Amazon, but I would not do the extra stuff that we needed to do that put us above. I was like, I would go a week. I would not log to seller central, for example. I would only go there to check, do I need to send in more inventory for something. If there was any customer service thing, my VA team would handle it and all they would just message me.So I was not doing, so from September up to now, I’ve not been doing anything above and beyond. I have not taken any classes like to educate myself listening to any podcasts. I’ve not been active in any Facebook group as much. I have just been more focused on the wedding design business.
Bradley Sutton:
How’s that business going?
Sharon:
Actually, it’s going good. Basically, some of our Instagram posts and I was like, oh, that looks so cute.
Elizabeth:
Doing a good job, Sharon.
Sharon:
So, but in the last two weeks, I kind of feel like I just suddenly had space in my head come back to Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you ever finish that migration of that one brand out? Or It’s still in, so you’re still waiting to deplete the inventory from one?
Sharon:
I’m still waiting to deplete the inventory from there. Okay. And all the best sellers have been depleted, so that’s good.
Bradley Sutton:
So did you start on the new account, the replenishment of the best seller? I thought you like, just let it run out or something completely. Okay, that’s good. Yeah.
Sharon:
So immediately I opened a new account. The next order I created, I sent it to the new account.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Cool. What did you end your 2022 in sales, would you say roughly?
Sharon:
Funny enough, it was almost the same or slightly higher than 2021. I think I ended with about 1.7.
Bradley Sutton:
1.7 million. Okay. And then even that’s with it almost being on autopilot for like the second part of the year.
Sharon:
Yes, and in 2021 I had a Covid product that was really helping.
Bradley Sutton:
Ah, okay. Okay. And then without that, so that must mean you had some other products that, that increased in sales. Cause obviously that Covid product wasn’t doing well last year. Okay. Really cool. All Alright. Elizabeth’s falling asleep over there. So we gotta pair some attention.
Sharon:
All over the place?
Bradley Sutton:
Elizabeth, did you start some side hustles too or what was your 2022 like?
Elizabeth:
2022 no side hustle. It was all Amazon. Amazon by itself for me was like a lot, just because I have a lot of multiple brands multiple brands that I’m dealing with. I think about four different brands. So I was mostly growing out more brands within the Amazon space last year and this year I’m looking more into like the off Amazon part of the business actually, TikTok, which that’s another story for another day. But yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
So, for those you know who haven’t heard your other episodes. You’ve been very successful in getting like sometimes like viral products and you get inspired by TikTok originally. Did you also have some of that last year as well? Were you, or what was it last year or was it the year before where you had a, a few products that just like did crazy numbers, like a million dollars in a month or something like that?
Elizabeth:
Yeah, yeah. That was two years ago. And also last year same thing happened, of course. I wouldn’t say back to back, but it can happen like maybe twice a year. I could find those kind of products on TikTok or on Instagram. That would do crazy numbers. But of course like anything that’s viral, it has like a peak and then oof it slows down cuz every other person can see that product. You know what I mean? On Helium 10, thanks to you guys anyways. Thanks. But no thanks.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Well, but being the first to it, you know, still, you know, you get the most reviews and, and there’s, there’s something to be said about being the first now. You mentioned other marketplaces. So what marketplaces are you selling on now total?
Elizabeth:
TikTok.
Bradley Sutton:
So the TikTok shop?
Sharon:
I never completed my TikTok shop.
Bradley Sutton:
TikTok shop. Now how do is TikTok shop, is it its own marketplace or is it like pulling from Shopify or something? Nope,
Elizabeth:
It’s own marketplace. Oh yeah, you should definitely try it out. So last year I found out that TikTok did have a shop in marketplace, but that wasn’t in the US it was in just Indonesia and the UK. And when I heard about that, I’m like, that’s really interesting. I tried to open a TikTok shop in the uk, which I did. It was very hard. But yeah, I found a way around it and I did I put in my product the first day I got a sale, I was so excited. I was like, yay, this, you know, seemed nice. But to be honest, the reason why I did open the UK one was just to kind of get ahead of the trend, kind of understand it, digest it. And so when it comes to the US I’m like already a pro in it. I’m not trying to find, oh, what am I supposed to do here? You know what I mean? So that was the reason. And unfortunately for me, I then quickly realize that with TikTok you can only ship within that marketplace country. Like the country. Exactly. So you can ship from the US to the UK, you can ship from China to the UK, you have to be in the UK to ship to the customers that purchased your items, if that makes sense. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Yep. Yep.
Elizabeth:
So I had to cancel that order and I’m like, you know what, okay, maybe this is not for me. But, you know, and then when I got the invite to that the US marketplace was open on I think they were doing like the better stage. I got the invite, I was like, you know what, I’ve been waiting for this. I got that email, I believe at midnight. I was about to go to bed actually. And then my husband just saw me, you know, cuz I was so hyper when it comes to things like this. He saw me pick up my laptop and I run, I started doing, I was like, babe, this could wait tomorrow. I’m like, Uhuh, I don’t want them to change their mind.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Wow.
Elizabeth:
But wait, long story short we started posting, I posted a lot of items. Well, I’ve moved all my items on there.
Bradley Sutton:
Hold on though. Like, until then, did you already have a TikTok account for your brand that you were just like posting content to? So it’s not like, oh, that you just randomly got this invites because you had a already a TikTok account and they’re like, Hey, do you want to join this program for TikTok shop?
Elizabeth:
I had a TikTok business account.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes.
Elizabeth:
Registered
Bradley Sutton:
For, for just one of your brands? Or was it like one account that you used for to promote all of your brands?
Elizabeth:
No, one of my brands. Okay. That’s my main brand. Okay. So when I did get that, I was like, oh wow, that’s cool. You know, so I put in all my products that I know that bestsellers and then there’s this TikTok live and you know, stuff like that. I started posting videos and boom, one of my video went viral.
Bradley Sutton:
You yourself or did you hire like an influencer or what?
Elizabeth:
To me, cuz I have UGCs, I don’t know. Maybe that’s another topic.
Bradley Sutton:
I like all these topics.
Elizabeth:
I don’t have UGC content creators that I work with. Almost like my sister do almost like a mini agency that she does like a UGC content creators. She’s also a UGC content creator and she has like group of friends that do the same thing. And then you produce content for e-commerce business and stuff like that.
Bradley Sutton:
So then you took some UGC that you created and then you, you posted it to your account? And then it like linked to the TikTok shop. And then you said one of these videos went viral. So what, what does going viral mean? Like how many views or whatever did it get
Elizabeth:
It was crazy. It went like 3 million views. Wow. And yeah I’m just recalling.
Bradley Sutton:
No ads. It was all organic.
Elizabeth:
Organic. And I’m just recovering from the sales and everything else. And that’s why you saw me on that vacation. Cause I had to run away for the weekend cause it was so crazy. Anyways. and unfortunately, unfortunately for me, I could only get 200 orders maximum a day because you have to be on like a probation period. And during those probation period, you can’t, they’re not gonna give you more than 200 orders a day. So I was selling out on my 200 space before I wake up in the morning. Can you beat that on TikTok?
Bradley Sutton:
It’s okay. How, how is it set up? So like you get a sale there, like how, what is the fulfillment? Like is it pulling from your warehouse or you, you’re doing it yourself or you’re tying it to your Amazon inventory?
Elizabeth:
So for me, I was fulfilling myself at the time because I did not expect for it to go viral. You know what I mean?
Bradley Sutton:
So every day you’re doing 200 shipments from your house?
Elizabeth:
Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Or should I say your husband is he helping?
Elizabeth:
Was like a whole family thing. My husband, my kid, my two year old, she was stopping the stuff and the being taking it to the UPN and stuff like that. So it was really crazy. So imagine posting something three days prior and then on the fourth days, like boom, 200 orders before you wake up. When I saw it, I was like, is this a glitch? You know what I mean? It was crazy. And then all my inventory ran out of, I think we sold about 2,500 units of the item until I ran out of inventory. And when I did the momentum, of course load down because when they click on the product, it’s saying sold out. And you can’t click from Amazon. It’s not allowed. You have to fulfill from the warehouse that is tied to your store. So how it works. When you upload the video you can link like a little icon to the video. So once when they watch the video, they just click on that link and then just purchase the item like right from the video literally. So it’s the, the conversion rate is still a little low obviously. Cause with 3 million views and selling 2,500 units is still relatively slow.
Bradley Sutton:
What was the retail price of the product?
Elizabeth:
It was $32.99. And guess what? I charged shipping with $5.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay So, that’s like almost a hundred thousand dollars, including shipping a worth of.
Elizabeth:
Oh my gosh, Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
Ah, my goodness. Sharon, look at all the, you see Sharon, are are you re are you feeling revitalized about e-commerce yet Sharon?
Sharon:
I’m on my second screen right now, I’m on TikTok shop.
Bradley Sutton:
Accepting that beta invite, I hope.
Elizabeth:
Now it’s not invite only. You can just go on there, join
Sharon:
The email, I could not find it. I just went on Google and I’m literally on seller us.tiktok.com and right now I’m verifying my business information. I ain’t no joking.
Bradley Sutton:
You see, guys, I apologize. I forgot where you live. Sharon. But the Texas In Texas, yeah. I apologize to the wedding community there. You might be a little bit late in some of your wedding supplies. Cause Sharon is now revitalized in, in e-commerce with the black business program and now with TikTok shop. Okay. Wow. All right. That, that’s pretty cool, Elizabeth. So like what did you and your 2022 sales about?
Elizabeth:
It was close to 6 million for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright. Close to 6 million. And, and so that’s on Amazon. And then probably, you know, not much, you know, TikTok I know is new for you. Yeah. Are there other market places that you are on? Like were you selling on Shopify or Walmart or anything like that? Yeah, there
Elizabeth:
There was not left coming from those medium to be honest. 99.99% was from Amazon.
Sharon:
Yeah, me too.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. All right. Let’s go back to Sharon here. If you, if I can take you away from your TikTok registration. Talk to me about how you decided on the business, because I think this, this is what you did last year is something that is on the, a lot of seller’s minds. You know, they, they get a lot of money from Amazon. They’re like, Hey, I could just put it all back into Amazon. I could start other businesses. I could do like Bradley and do like sports cards and NFTs and things like that. But I think a lot of people, you know are intrigued by starting their own offline business. So like what, was it something you’ve always wanted to do or did you just do some like research and to businesses or how did you come?
Sharon:
I always loved events planning. Not just event, but wedding planning and party planning and just everything. Parties, I love parties, but the fun for me ends when the party starts, my social battery is like this. I don’t go to parties. I enjoy planning it. And then I wanna sit down and watch you guys enjoy the party.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Sharon:
At that point, my social battery is just off. So in my church, I’m very active in my church. All the youngsters that are getting married is always, Hey, aunt Sharon, my wedding, we’re planning this person’s wedding. So I’ve always been doing that and stuff. And then last year one of my youngsters friends reached out to me. She was like, Hey auntie, I’m getting married. I’m like, congratulations. Thinking she was inviting me. She was like, yeah, well you’re gonna plan this. I’m like, no, I do not plan weddings anymore. Because in 2017 I was actually the official wedding planner for her brother. I’m like, I do not plan weddings anymore. I do not have time. Amazon is taking all my time. She was like, oh no, I see you’re planning my wedding. You know, and we got talking. I’m like, okay, here’s what I can do for you.
Sharon:
I can coordinate. Just pay me to coordinate. But for the planning itself, don’t pay me just go planning. But if you need any help along the way, I’ll do it. As long as it doesn’t involve me physically doing someone. So in getting that, I started getting excited again in about weddings when I’m discussing with her. And just the whole planning really got me excited. And that was when I was able to pinpoint it, like, wait a minute. It’s really not every part of wedding planning that I love. It’s just a design part. I don’t care what your dress looks like. I don’t wanna follow you to your dress rehersal. I don’t wanna go taste the food with you. I don’t care. I just wanna know what a food looks like when it’s plated. I don’t care if it’s gonna be chicken or fish.
Sharon:
I don’t care if it’s sweet. I don’t care if it’s too soft or too hard or whatever. I just care about the presentation. And that was when I’m like, this is the part that really interest me. And then when we got to the part of planning had decor and renting of luxury furniture, it was a new I did not, I was not aware. I guess I was, but I just did not know the, how it was about that part. Like, wait, I can actually niche this down to the part that I really do care about. And then I just told him and her fiance, I’m like, guys, look, I can sauce this inventory. Would you guys give me the job to provide a luxury furniture for your wedding?
Bradley Sutton:
So she was the fist official customer for your new wedding.
Sharon:
I guarantee you that you would see it in January. Your wedding is in April. In January you would have it because of my experience with China shipping and all that, it was so much easier for me.
Bradley Sutton:
So this is stuff that are you reusing it or you rental buying it just for one event? So rental. Okay. I was about to say, yeah, that would be kind of expensive to, so rental expensive. Cause So then did you have to get a warehouse for this style ?
Sharon:
I still have a warehouse now.
Bradley Sutton:
You didn’t have it for Amazon before?
Sharon:
My Amazon, I was using my garage other, now I finally just got a space. But for my Amazon, I was using my garage. But for the wedding business events, the locks is the name. It’s I got a warehouse because the first container that came was a 40 foot container and then some less than container here.
Bradley Sutton:
40 foot container of wedding supplies.
Sharon:
Think about your dining chairs. And I have two, 240 of those. Just think about that.
Bradley Sutton:
You invested a couple dollars into this. Wow. Okay. Now, now did you set up the business? Like did you use like the LLC from your Amazon business? Did you set up a completely separate entity?
Sharon:
Separate entity? I up a brand new LLC straight up to SO. Uhhuh, just so that I have all those set out right from the beginning. I literally registered with IWA and went to get accredited as an accredited event designer. So I’m just doing everything.
Bradley Sutton:
And then like did, did you hire employees? You just doing it with your, your family for right now or? Oh,
Sharon:
Right. Ah, my kids are too small. They can leave to finger. So when we do have events, I have, I, they’re not employees, they’re like contractors because the last event I did, I had 12 people working. I cannot afford that for full-time staff. Yeah, they’re contractors. I bought a box truck, and then the one,
Bradley Sutton:
How much did the box truck cost? I’m trying to buy one myself.
Sharon:
It’s a very old one.
Bradley Sutton:
No, that’s my style. Like I want an old one.
Sharon:
Okay. Okay. I actually got it off of Facebook Marketplace.
Bradley Sutton:
How much?
Sharon:
I got it out of Facebook Marketplace, it was 6,500, but it needed some repairs. So everything came out about 10,000. So it’s an old box truck. But it is working.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you gonna put like some fancy logo on the side?
Sharon:
Not yet. I’ve just had a lot going on, but I plan too.
Bradley Sutton:
So let’s say things go as planned. You continue to build it up for this year. Like what would you say, what do you think you would profit from this business for this year? L like this, this wedding business
Sharon:
Versus Amazon or on its own?
Bradley Sutton:
No. Just by itself not on its own.
Sharon:
Honestly, I don’t even know how to calculate that. Just because of the capital investor. Yeah, because remember furniture is upfront capital. So I don’t how to calculate.
Bradley Sutton:
How much gross revenue then? Like what are doing a month, like how many event, yeah.
Sharon:
Hopefully it gets better. But as of right now, I think I’m maybe about 70-80,000, I don’t know.
Bradley Sutton:
70, $80,000 you’ve, you’ve done so far? Yeah, in a couple, a few months. Okay. Hey, that’s some good revenue there. So, so guys out there you know, once you get into Amazon, that doesn’t mean that, oh, my whole life is revolves on Amazon. Oh no. So some, some people, hey, some, some people are and that’s, that’s totally fine. But, but for those of you who, who have like a itch to do something different, well yeah. That’s one way you can use your, your Amazon money is go with your passion, you know, so that’s something that Sharon’s been passionate about for a while. And yeah, it’s always cool to make money about what your passions are, and that’s another
Sharon:
What you can do for ree. You can make money of. That’s my mantra.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright. Going back to Elizabeth now how many videos did it take until that one went viral? Like, is it one out of 100 go viral, one out of 10, one out of 50? What would you say?
Elizabeth:
So, I honestly think TikTok portioning videos that are linked to product that are from TikTok shop my own opinion. But it was a third video that I posted that did, went viral.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, good grief. Wow. That was pretty fast. Now what is do’s? Cut pn orders that go through the shop.
Elizabeth:
So right now they have a lot of promotions going on that they offer both the sellers and also the buyers for the sellers. I believe there’s zero fee for the first 90 days. That’s for the sellers, right. And then for the buyers, they’re giving them a 30% discount for their first order and also all shipping.
Bradley Sutton:
Hold on. So that $33 that you got plus shipping, TikTok was not taking a percentage from there?
Elizabeth:
No.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh my goodness. Sharo is even faster now. Registering right there.
Elizabeth:
They were not checking. And just because say like the product that I have on Amazon that is selling for $32 on TikTok, it’s like the first order that they make, they only paying $20, $21
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, is TikTok subsidizing you? Or that’s coming out of, so it’s not like you are only getting $20. Wow, okay. Yeah. My goodness. I wish Amazon would do that. Okay.
Elizabeth:
To somebody from TikTok and the person was telling me that TikTok did, am I saying this meaning not, okay, so let’s just scratch out.
Bradley Sutton:
This is fascinating to me. Now, now here’s a question. That product that went viral or the video, let me rephrase that. The product that was in the video that went viral, do you also sell that on Amazon? Did you see any increases on your Amazon sales for that product after that TikTok video, even though it was going to TikTok shop? So then probably it’s sold out. So then what people are doing is like, oh, let me see if this is on Amazon. So how did that, how, like, were you the only seller of it? Did you have competition at the time that this video went viral on Amazon? Did you have competition for it?
Elizabeth:
There’s a lot of competition.
Bradley Sutton:
So, how was it that they were still buying your product? Like were they searching by the brand, do you think?
Elizabeth:
So it’s on my TikTok page and on my TikTok bio, I do have the link tree that has all my products on there. So they just go in there, click and buy.
Bradley Sutton:
So how much would you say it increased on Amazon? Like what were you doing before the video went viral? Like, you know, like hundred orders a day, 50 orders a day, and then how much was it after? So that, you know that, oh, it must have been from this period.
Elizabeth:
It was almost like 30% lift. And so for sure.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. So how long is this probation period going to last for, for you where you have that limit of 200?
Elizabeth:
It’s 60 days. Okay. Painfully so, but they do have an exception when you sell certain amount of units and then you have a certain amount of ship through rates, tracking rates and stuff like that. Then you can request for early access to like the full thing.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Yeah. What are you using to fulfill the orders? Like me at my warehouse here or my house? I use stamps.com. Like do you have like a thermal label printer? And are you using a, a software in order to, to print like the addresses and everything? Or are you buying the postage directly from TikTok? How does that work?
Elizabeth:
So initially I was buying from I was using my Shipo, but I just switched to like the TikTok shipping thing method. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
So it’s kinda like how Amazon works if you’re fulfilling your own. You can buy it at a slightly discounted rate, the Yeah. The shipping and then print out the labels. Okay. Yeah. I’m assuming, you know, you and your, your husband do not want to be, you know, shipping 300 products a day. So what’s your like, longer term plan as you scale this TikTok out for fulfillment? Like, are you opening a warehouse? Are you gonna use a three pl or are you gonna just keep doing it yourself with that two year old to work?
Elizabeth:
At the moment, we do have a big garage. It fits like a eight car garage that we have over here. So the thing is, you know, we had to pull a lot of inventory out of Amazon to be honest to the house, just so we have enough units to, to fulfill. And so we’re just putting things in place. I do have one person that you come, I think six hours a day now to help with you know, just getting everything organized and in preparation for the next video that might go viral. You know what I mean? So I do have one person coming to help with fulfillment, cuz that’s going to take a lot of time away from Amazon and I don’t want that.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Okay. Alright. Last two questions for Sharon now. Something that we’re doing, we’re doing more this year. My theme of the podcast is also about like mental and physical health I think is important for entrepreneurs. Like, actually today is, is the one year anniversary from when I died for like 10 minutes and had my heart attack. So like, that’s why like this year’s my anniversay guys.
Sharon:
A year ago already.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, a year ago today. Like, exactly like, I even did a, it’s crazy. I was looking back and like, I remember like, I was doing a, I did a webinar that day and I had no, I have no remembrance of doing that webinar. I remember like when I woke up after being in the hospital, I was like, oh man, I remember I was supposed to do a webinar. I must have let the company down because I wasn’t available for it. And I look on YouTube, I’m like, there is me. I was like, I was like, that’s not me. I don’t remember this at all. Wow. But anyway, so, so, so Sharon, you know, like I’m sh you know, I I think I think part of what you were talking about, I think actually probably was good for your mental health. You know, you’re getting burnt out on Amazon, just so like you were able to go into doing something you know, to doing something else that, that gave you fulfillment. What else do you do for like, hobbies or maybe physical habits you know, special supplements. I don’t know what, whatever you want to talk about. Let me know.
Sharon:
So I am very active in church. I’m not a very social person like miss traveler right here. But, I’m very active in church and that’s pretty much what I do. I’m really close friends with my husband. We have a good relationship and we are both home buddies. We don’t go out. So I wish you could see where I am right now in this office. By the way, we just closed on this house. So in this office, this is my section and that’s his section and we’ll go to work from here.
Bradley Sutton:
What about physical health then? Because the, I think your situation’s very similar to me and, and my problem was, especially when we were remote, I’m here. I mean, this is my office, this is my podcast studio, but it’s in my house. And like I, there was times where I don’t get up, I don’t go to the gym or I don’t do anything because I’m just like, Hey, this is so comfortable, I’m just gonna stay my desk.
Sharon:
Actually one of the things that encouraged me to start this business, because my husband, when I started my husband, I was like, this is very physical. Like, are you gonna be able to do it? Because guys, I was weighing over 300 pounds.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh wow.
Sharon:
So I said I was gonna do it and like I said, I took the course. I plant so many things, and part of the things I plan in order to be successful in this business was I had a gastric bypass.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay.
Sharon:
On February 13th, I had gastric bypass. So it’s almost three months now and I’ve lost almost 50 pounds.
Bradley Sutton:
Wow. Very nice. Congratulations.
Sharon:
I haven’t been doing exercise though, but I’ll get there. I plan to actually, because now that my body, my muscles have been used to carrying around so much fat and now they don’t have that, so they’re gonna go to sleep and they will get weak.
Bradley Sutton:
So now you’re gonna be carrying around dining tables and chairs and stuff.
Sharon:
No, but for real though, I have to now actively challenge my muscle by going to the gym. Yeah. Otherwise, even though you look smaller, you’re gonna be weaker. So I just learned that. So now you gotta tell them. So don’t go to sleep. And actively train you now. So that’s the way I’m going to, but to be honest, that alone has really helped me mentally and just physically and, and because I have so much more energy than I had before.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, that, yeah. I need that back. You know, I’ve probably gained like 60 pounds in the last three years, so I’m definitely the last year I’ve been working on getting that off. That’s alright. Excellent. Excellent. Very nice. Elizabeth same question to you. Sounds like you’re into travel from Sharon, making fun of you. Where did you go last weekend for like your de-stressing after that TikTok hundred thousand dollars?
Elizabeth:
Well, I just had to splodge and it put over Vita trip. It was nice. Just a three day trip Mexico. It was nice.
Bradley Sutton:
Next time you wanna do that, let me know. My parents have a house in Malan, which is very near, or this kinda like, not near, but like, so you can stay in our house over there.
Elizabeth:
That’s pretty cool. Yeah. Putto Vita was really nice. Weather was wonderful. We had like a really stressful weekend and then we decided to treat ourself on like a private, you know, little yacht moment.
Bradley Sutton:
I thought she was gonna say private jet. I was like, whoa. Okay. Elizabeth is really next level. Yeah. We took a private jet to Mexico. Okay. No private yacht. That’s just as good now. See us is cool. I like using splurge.
Elizabeth:
Yeah. It was like, I was, I was just putting the back of my mind. I’m like, yeah, TikTok pay for this. Tiktok pay
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, exactly.
Elizabeth:
So yeah, so yeah, you know, we like to travel and for us, you know, this business has really given us the opportunity to have that kind of lifestyle that we travel at least once every three months for sure. You know, and I know without, you know, having this type of I wouldn’t call Amazon a passive income, to be honest with you, because we do put in a lot of work, especially when you get to a certain level of sales, I would say. So, yeah, so travel is my thing. We are foodies. We like to explore when it comes to food and stuff. So yeah, that’s what we do for fun. I do go to the gym once in a while, although I have slats for the past couple of weeks. But I think I’m gonna get back in there because mentally for me, when I drop the kids off from school, I just head straight to the gym and then that’s how my days get started.
Bradley Sutton:
I like it. I like it. All right. And now last one for you Elizabeth you’re a 30-second tip of the day or 60-second tip. It could be about Amazon, it could be about PPC could be about TikTok, product research, TikTok shop, whatever. What would you say is, is your strategy for everybody out there?
Elizabeth:
Keep posting that content because you never know. Cuz in the beginning for me having the TikTok store, I mean the TikTok what do you call it again?
Sharon:
Shop
Elizabeth:
Not the shop. The, the account was just for posting product. It wasn’t even about the sale. Yeah. But the consistency from my posting was what gave me like, the initial edge of joining TikTok shop. And that’s what, you know,
Bradley Sutton:
What is your consistency or what’s your cadence?
Elizabeth:
So I do post every day for sure. I post every day.
Bradley Sutton:
How many followers do you have now?
Elizabeth:
I have about 5,600 followers. It’s not a last one, you know,
Bradley Sutton:
So, so from an account that only has 5,600 followers, that was the account where you had that 3 million views? Okay. Interesting. Wow. I like it. Yeah. All right. Well ladies, it’s always great to have you on the show. Very inspiring stories. I always get a lot of, you know, Facebook or Instagram dms with, you know, people are like, oh, wow, that was so inspiring. So like, you know, just know that, you know, keep on doing what you’re doing because you’re inspiring a lot of people out there. And it’s inspiring me. Like I can’t lose 50 pounds in, in three months. I wish I could. I I used to back in the day, I could do that when I was younger, but, but those days are gone. But by the next time, here’s my pledge. By the next time Sharon I have you on, I should be able to say hopefully I’ve lost like another 40 or 50 pounds, so, okay.
Sharon:
Hopefully, I’ll get more.
Bradley Sutton:
I’ll try and get you here. Yeah, I love it.
Sharon:
Still have a lot to do.
Bradley Sutton:
And then Elizabeth I think, you know, you’re well on the way to eight figures your first eight figure year. So look forward, look forward to that this year. So, so guys, I hope to see you soon. You know, one of our Elite workshops, you know, maybe in May if you guys can come out here, and then if anybody’s getting married in Texas, do you have like a website we can out your new business, Sharon.
Sharon:
Actually, eventsdlux.com.
Bradley Sutton:
I love it. I love it. All right, so if you’re in Texas and you want to really have a luck, luxurious wedding. Hit up Sharon, although she might take some time getting back to you because now she’s going back to TikTok and Amazon.
Sharon:
Yeah. Thank you Bradley.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, well thank you so much and we’ll be seeing you soon.
Elizabeth:
Thank you.
In episode #448 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Robert chat about how he grew his Amazon and retail brand to over $4 million in revenue while working a full-time job. Robert shares his backstory and how he got into entrepreneurship at an early age. He then talks about how he transitioned into e-commerce and eventually started his Amazon brand while still working his day job as a consultant and now, senior finance manager at Microsoft. Robert also shares how he got started in the coffee niche and how good supplier terms and building a good relationship with them helped his business grow. He even managed to reach $2 million in sales in his first year! Despite having a full-time job, Robert managed to run his Amazon business successfully and with the help of agencies for other aspects of his business. His ultimate goal was to get his brands into retail, and he shares the process of getting into 4,000 Walmart retail stores. Robert also talks about lightning deals and a new emerging marketplace called Faire that he uses to market his products and get them into mom-and-pop shops across the country. And as for his goal for 2023? You’ll have to tune in to find out!
In episode 448 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Robert discuss:
- 02:02 – Robert’s Backstory And His Early Start In Entrepreneurship
- 05:48 – How He Got Into E-commerce And Amazon
- 08:32 – Working A Day Job While Starting An Amazon Brand On The Side
- 10:22 – How Robert Got Started In The Coffee Niche
- 12:20 – $2 Million In Sales In His First Year
- 14:13 – How Good Supplier Terms Helped His Business Grow
- 14:50 – Building A Good Relationship With Suppliers Help
- 15:58 – Running His Amazon Business With A Full-Time Job
- 18:52 – Working As A Senior Finance Manager In Microsoft
- 20:26 – Reached $4 Million In Sales In 2022
- 20:56 – Leveraging Agencies For Other Aspects Of His Business
- 23:06 – The Goal Was To Get His Brands Into Retail
- 23:45– The Process On Getting Into 4,000 Walmart Retail Stores
- 25:10 – Lightning Deals And Other Strategies Robert Uses
- 28:35 – Marketplace To Get Your Products Into Mom & Pop Shops
- 30:59 – What Is Robert’s Goal This 2023?
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a seller who’s still working his everyday full-time job, but on the side, he’s been able to grow his online brand to over $4 million of revenue. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you looking to learn how to sell on Amazon? The Freedom Ticket Course made by Kevin King is one of the most popular courses ever created for Amazon sellers. It’s got over 90 modules and 40 hours of detailed step-by-step training to help get you started on your entrepreneurial journey. Now, this course costs $997, but Helium 10 actually covers that cost of the course for any Helium 10 member. Find out why tens of thousands of students love this program by going to H ten.me/freedom ticket. Don’t forget that if you do, sign up for a Helium 10 account. Don’t pay full price. Use our podcast discount code SSP10 to save 10% off for life. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got a serious seller on with us today. How’s it going, Robert?
Robert:
What’s going on Bradley? Thanks for having me.
Bradley Sutton:
Thanks for being here. It’s pretty cool that you’re here. We just had some technical difficulties. Made him wait for like 10 minutes as my audio was having issues, but, but he’s a trooper here, and that’s kind of like probably like part of the theme I should say, of what we were gonna be talking about today. Now I remember meeting you at the prosperous show. You know, you came by your booth and I was like, just learning a little bit about you. I’m like, hold on, say no more. Say no more. This sounds like an interesting story. I don’t wanna find out about it with the, with everybody else. So let’s start with your origin. You just told me a couple minutes ago you’re in the Georgia area right now. Is that where you were born and raised?
Robert:
No, so I was actually born and raised in Venezuela. So up to the age of 10 parents moved to the US and yeah, for the majority of, of the rest of so far we’ve been in Georgia, north of Atlanta.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, excellent. Now, upon graduation of high school what, like how long did it take you to learn English as a 10 year old? 10 year old is early enough to pick it up pretty fast, I would imagine. Like me, I’m trying to learn languages now and it’s like impossible.
Robert:
I couldn’t imagine, I couldn’t imagine learning a language. Yeah. So at that age is still early enough that you can learn it pretty fast, ESL classes and all that. But I always say it’s still, 10 years it’s been there my first 10 years. I still remember. And I still speak Spanish obviously just as fluent as as I speak English. So it was definitely somewhat tough. As I remember at those times, but looking back at it, obviously way easier than trying to learn as an adult, that’s for sure. So yeah, did middle school and high school here in the US and then after that obviously college as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. All right. So after you graduated high school, did you, did you stay local for college or did you go to college? What did you do?
Robert:
So I was kind of one of those kids that from early on, I somehow like found a computer, found Photoshop, started doing design and like selling websites when I was in high school. And so I always thought I was gonna be an entrepreneur, but late high school, I basically thought, how,
Bradley Sutton:
How do you sell websites in high school?
Robert:
Yeah. Yeah. So I so I got into one thing led to another, basically selling design, like signatures for like $5 on forums that kind of hustle being a, a 13, 14 year old. And then that led to I saw websites being sold on Flippa, which used to be called SitePoint. And so I, I think I remember one summer I made almost $30,000 selling websites, and my parents thought I was doing something illegal and everything, but yeah, I was always just kind of tinkering.
Bradley Sutton:
$30,000 in a month. You were 15 there?
Robert:
In the summer, but yeah, that felt like I was rich. I didn’t know what to do with that much money at that time.
Bradley Sutton:
No, you were rich. If you make $30,000 as a 14-15 year old, a teenager, that’s rich.
Robert:
Yeah. Yeah. I felt rich. So that’s kind of what got me started a little bit into entrepreneur and stuff, so.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So, so then did you attend a university or, or did just go straight into like doing business basically?
Robert:
I still had good grades in high school. I never really took it too serious I played baseball. I didn’t really like school. I honestly didn’t, I didn’t get too used to school when moving to the US I kind of struggled with it, to be honest. But then towards the end of high school, I figured I shoot, I need to like apply for colleges and go to college and stuff like that. And I was never really thinking too much of it first generation also here in the US it’s not like our parents really knew the, the way to how to apply and all that. I just felt like towards the end of college, I saw more people doing it, so I had to apply to college, and so I did. And so one thing led to another and, and I’d like finance, I like business. So yeah, I went to my undergrad in, in finance, and so that led kind of a, a dual path that I’ve been following ever since of kind of having a career in a corporate route, but at the same time kind of always wanting to be an entrepreneur and trying things on the side. So that’s kind of where the split happened.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So did the website thing like stop being so lucrative, or, hey, if, if I was making $30,000 a month or two months or something, like, I’m not gonna stop that. So like, how, how did you migrate into to kind of more e-commerce and, and selling online?
Robert:
Yeah, so that happened. And then obviously being in high school, you take your eyes off of it, you don’t know what business really means. And then obviously that dried out after a while. And so it was one thing after another kind of trying little projects with friends and stuff on the side. But it wasn’t until 2012, which was basically a couple years after graduating high school while I was in college that I got into Amazon. And yeah, so that’s a whole nother story in itself. Didn’t get into it properly, but that’s kind of where my, e-com journey began.
Bradley Sutton:
What do you mean by didn’t get into it properly?
Robert:
Well being in college kind of not, not having a fully developed brain there. I started selling there was one weekend I found, kind of went online and found this equivalent of like Alibaba back in the day where you could find goods. And I thought I saw some OtterBox cases, not sure if you know what what those are, but those were total hit in the early 2010s. And so I bought a couple, and a couple turned into they sold out and more and more. And next thing you know, a couple months later, basically I had a copy of a lawsuit in the mail from auto products. They caught one of my accounts on eBay. And I had, I was suspended from Amazon and all that, so I didn’t really at the time put two and two together, like private label like this whole thing. I was just kind of trying to make a quick buck likely. And so, yeah, it took many years after that to be able to kind of open a new account and start off fresh as an actual business with my own brand.
Bradley Sutton:
So what year were you talking about when these things were happening?
Robert:
This was 2012 early late 2012, early 2013, that I got banned and went through all this and then back and forth with the lawyers and everything and took a while. And it wasn’t until 2016 that I think I opened a another account. And so like that late 2017 was when I really launched my first brand. So it took, it was a big gap in between there. Obviously my career-wise was going really well. I got some really nice internships. Started my career in finance, did a two year program where I moved around in the US and did all these things. And so ultimately got my MBA and all that later on. But at the time I was still doing consulting. My main client was Facebook actually. So I was out in the west coast a lot and on the side trying to launch an Amazon brand.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, interesting, interesting. Now throughout this tim, you’re still working full-time quote unquote for the man. Now what, what happened with that, that brand that you, you started on Amazon? Like, what was the peak of it? Like, like what kind of level did you get to with that notebook brand? Yeah,
Robert:
So it was kind of thrilling. You know, I had a really great job at this time, I’m late twenties already making six figures. But at the same time, there was this urge to kind of do this on the side. And, and so like, I was trying to do it. I always saw it as ultimately I want this to be a company and a business rather than like a side kind of hustle and just make a couple bucks. So from the get-go, I tried to take it a lot more serious, at least a lot more serious than the amount of cash I had to do it with. But yeah, at first I remember launching basically last days of October, it was holiday season, obviously, and I’m launching a planner, so think of a you know, a planner you write in monthly, weekly it’s undated, so you could kind of use it all year round.
Robert:
But I was launching in the holidays, and I remember the November, December, I think I sold maybe $20,000 my first month in like 20,000-30,000, like in December. So it was like, wow like right away you’re seeing like, that feels like a a ton. And so like, okay, launch more variations and everything at start of, as to start the year in 2018. And so what happened with that first batch is you, a lot of lessons learned there. You know, there was some manufacturing defects, so kind of ruined the reviews right away and had to relaunch to begin 2018. And so basically that whole year was kind of like at the, at that same kind of level, right? So I, I scaled it to 20, 30,000 a month in sales. It was good margins and all back then, obviously no ads <laugh> or anything like that. So it was great, great times, but I really always kind of saw it as like, oh, I need to maybe like branch out into a brand in the home and kitchen space or something that was more like high volume like I saw this as office products may be declining long term. And so like overall I just wanted to, to have a brand I could get behind and, and be in, in a more competitive category.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. So then what was your next step?
Robert:
Yeah, so at this time, mid 2018, I’m still with this first brand. I’m thinking getting to another brand. I just started my MBA, so it was like, as part of my MBA in 2019, early 2019, we were going to China anyways, right? So it was like, okay, I was looking into another brand at the same time, looking for suppliers. So like what I could start and I see like kind of coffee products that’s kind of cool. It’s something I understand. I saw a couple other kind of niches, but like I was kind of set with this one supplier that I had met, and they had this product that they were developing. It was a coffee grinder. At the time I didn’t like their current model it was already being sold and everything, but they had this new model that I really liked.
Robert:
I told them like, no, thank you, but like maybe down the line once that model is finished. So it turns out like it was good timing as well. I was going to China and kind of trying to launch this cafe brand in mid 2019. That’s when I ultimately launched it. So I was in China in March for about a month. So I went two weeks with my, as part of my mba, and then stayed an extra couple weeks at the Canton Fair, met the supplier, and so ultimately decided to, to place a PO to launch this one SKU. You know, it was a coffee grinder, launched it mid 2019 and kind of just took it very serious by that point. I was determined to make it work. I saw it was a very competitive category, obviously. There were already big sellers, not just big sellers, but brands sold by Amazon one piece. And, and I just we took it very serious on the launch and just the branding and everything and, and everything was with the mission, kind of like to get it into retail one day or just kind of look bigger than it was and come out with a roadmap of coffee products. But yeah, that was mid 2019.
Bradley Sutton:
Mid 2019. So 2020 was your first full year with this new coffee brand, and what did you generate in revenue for that, for that year?
Robert:
Yeah, so 2020 obviously a crazy year cuz of Covid. But that year was able to do just about $2 million in despite being out of stock for long periods of time. You know, we were doing $600,000 in a couple weeks and then outta stock for a whole lot of weeks, right. And then on and off again. So it was a roller coaster of a year and definitely a lot of lessons learned there, growing pains, all those kind of words. But really like my second b a I call it was basically covid times and supply chain kind of crisis that were going on. So yeah, that was 2 million, you know yeah, at, at the time. It took a lot to be able to get there because if you think the year before we were doing just barely in, into the six figures, right?
Robert:
I think in 2019 when I had kind of both brands, but the the second one was new. I did maybe half a million dollars or so right to scale from there to 2 million. It kind of sounds easy, but a lot of things have to happen. And one of those things that had to happen was kind of the capital just the supplier terms, for example, right? So like before Covid I kind of had the standard supplier terms where you pay a deposit, which is normally like 30% or so, and then you pay the remaining 70% before the goods even leave China Sure. Before they get to the US right? And so given those terms, I would not have been able to scale at all because I just didn’t have the capital for it. Right. And being a consumer goods product business, you need more inventory, the better your product does, right? And so being bootstrapped that was just not an option. And so I had to negotiate really tough terms with the supplier that really allowed the risk to be kind of transferred to them and quite frankly for us to place bigger POs and be able to scale the products and and so on. So that was kind of 2020. Now,
Bradley Sutton:
Now this supplier was somebody you had met in person though, right? And like had a personal relationship with cuz you had visited them. So like you think that helped with this negotiation?
Robert:
I would say it didn’t hurt, that’s for sure. So I always tell people that are kind of trying to get in the space, you can always go to Alibaba, meet suppliers there and really kind of start fostering the relationship start messaging. But it’s not quite the same as I went to their factory, took a bullet train in the middle of nowhere. You know, he had me out to eat snake I ate snake that to them it’s like something you sit down and share like a delicacy I ate the gallbladder of the snake like that kind of relationship you can’t really do through. Yeah, it was terrible.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s some fear factor level stuff. Fear factor. Exactly. Exactly. I’ll be like, no.
Robert:
Everyone around the lazy susan, wow. Like, here you go the guest gets the gallbladder. So that was something, but that definitely helped. And you know, it’s a smaller factory, right? So it’s the owner, right? So I’m communicating directly with the owner. And so he saw us from the beginning, right? This was our first product. He saw it come from nothing to then, Hey, you’re getting POs and you’re getting all this traction, so we’ll grow our coffee selection through you as well. Right? So that was kind of like key and definitely a huge risk that I’ve seen huge sellers I know personally friends that are huge sellers and they can’t necessarily get those terms with their suppliers. You know, some suppliers are a lot bigger. They just simply don’t take those with their sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. I don’t take the risk of eating snake gallbladder in myself .Hey to the victor of the spoils now, now 2 million, that, that’s still a significant amount regardless, but you are working full-time. So at this point, were you still doing everything by yourself or did you hire a staff, did you have virtual assistants or what was going on here?
Robert:
Yeah, so at that point I had a couple of maybe virtual assistants that I tried here and there, and it was always kind of like, ah, didn’t quite work out cuz maybe they were part-time or this and that, but I was essentially doing everything by myself. Yes. it was basically a one-man show. I had a couple people to help slightly, mainly on like the design part or things that I could do from back in the day, but like, I was just simply not gonna do. But certainly it was a one-man show on anything from sourcing all the way to,
Bradley Sutton:
So like managing your own PPC.
Robert:
Transfers to Amazon, setting up like channels outside of Amazon, setting up the infrastructure for that, setting up. Absolutely everything you could imagine I was the expert at, within the business. And that kind of, yeah, it took a toll on me. Okay. Thankfully COVID meant lockdown. So before Covid I was working for for a, a finance software company doing consulting. So I was traveling kind of a good bit. Like I said, Facebook was one of my main clients, so I was back and forth from the west coast, but Covid kind of shut everything down. And so that allowed me to really I was kind of cruise controlling on the corporate side for a little while at least. And so like this was right when everything was picking up with the Amazon stuff. So it was really a lot of long days and there was not much else to do cuz of Covid.
Bradley Sutton:
So 2020 2 million of sales, beginning of 2021 aggregator’s interest in your brand. What but fell through. What did you end of approximately 2021 in sales? Did you already increase on that 2 million?
Robert:
Yeah, so 2021 was probably toughest year on the supply chain side. You know, still managed with the same selection not really launching any new products cuz it was just so hectic hard to launch products during that time. We did almost 2.6 or so, so yeah, still increased it. The sales opened up channels outside of Amazon. I think that that year did you know, well into six figures, more than half a million or so in sales outside of Amazon, which was great great margins and all. And yeah, overall just got through it.
Bradley Sutton:
What were some of the main the main marketplaces that made up though, those six figures of, of sales? Yeah, so
Robert:
We were on all the dot coms. It took a while to open up like vendor rela, little vendor relationships like target.com macy’s dot com, home depot.com, qvc.com you know, walmart.com, it’s marketplace. But yeah, all the .coms they, they make a pretty even amount of the sales. And we have some like, pretty niche kind of channels like gift gifting kind of channels that are whoa and we just sell a whole lot through. And that’s, that’s great. But yeah, it was always a thought to kind of diversify from just Amazon to kind of an approach to being a company.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Now was it in 2021, 2022 when you got this other job that kind of piqued my interest is what you told me at Prosper? Where you’re currently working now?
Robert:
Yeah, so what had happened was I had quit my consulting job probably I think it was late 2020 or something, right? Cuz I was like, okay, I, this thing is going either well or I’m gonna sell or whatever it is. Anyways I, I didn’t see long term in the corporate world, I’m gonna just quit and focus on this. And I did, I was that way kind of, it was almost nine months the deal didn’t go through. And so you know, recruiters are kind of always reaching out. You know, I had finished my MBA at the end of 20, 20 19 as well, so that was also happening. And mid 2021 I got a couple of recruiters reaching out. One was from LinkedIn and the other one actually was from Microsoft. So interesting enough, Microsoft owns LinkedIn, but I had two job offers for both companies separately. And yeah, ultimately it was a really good offer for Microsoft, fully remote. The team is in Seattle, but I’m here east coast and you know, as a senior finance manager. And so I took that and I’ve been there almost two years now that, that I’m coming around to finally leaving the position. Okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, now 2022. Now you’re working full-time Microsoft, and I’m assuming you’re scaling your business, so like what, what last year? No, that’s not last. Wait, it is last year. What year are we here? I worked in 2022. I don’t even know what year. Like yeah, time is flying by so fast. It’s already like middle of Q2 and 2023. I don’t even know what or when we are anyway, so then what last year did you end your, your sales with? Yeah,
Robert:
Last year was pretty good increase. We did almost 4 million. So that was good to be able to increase that while not necessarily increasing the, the employees or anything. You know, I’ve been essentially a one-man show. I do have, you know about 10 employees now, but really no one handling like the general managing of, of absolutely every aspect. Still I’m that involved.
Bradley Sutton:
So what are your 10 employees doing? So are they full-time or are they like part-time doing little different things here and there?
Robert:
Six or seven are full-time. Yeah, so think of one for fulfillment orders outside of Amazon, right? So we have a warehouse there’s one person that goes every day just to fulfill those orders cuz you know we have vendor relationships, so they pay for shipping, right? So we have to ship some of those products. We have customer service that is handled. We have one for logistics now we have one for obviously design which is very important. And then I think there’s a couple others. But the key thing is I try to leverage a lot our partners like agencies and stuff. So like and I can go further into all that with a new kind of announcement of how, how we’re going into retail and stuff. But yeah, we leverage agencies for supply chain production management, PR, influencers, affiliate management, all these kind of things that if you use ’em correctly, they lead to better than employees, right? Because they’re only in, they’re incentivized to kind of like do well kind of take care of their, their customers.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. So when you say 4 million, is that on Amazon or that’s across that all platform?
Robert:
That’s across all platforms. But outside of Amazon, it was still, it was pretty stagnant from the year before, maybe upwards of, of 600 or so thousand. So it was mainly Amazon over 3 million on Amazon. And then the rest there key thing is like we’re–
Bradley Sutton:
Only Amazon USA or other Amazon?
Robert:
Amazon USA. Okay. essentially with a small amount of SKUs you’re talking about basically 90 plus percent of those sales came from less than 10 SKUs so it’s, it’s a pretty good distribution there. And yeah, I think we’re trending a lot better so in December alone we did a million dollars and so that was great. You know, kind of like iconic moment that you think well, you would’ve never thought, like when starting a business right? Online, you’re, you’re thinking way too small back then. But yeah, that was, that was good. And we’re training a lot better and yeah, a lot of momentum outside of Amazon as well
Bradley Sutton:
So then you also said you got into retail. Talk a little bit about how that happened and then, and then what that process was like. Yeah,
Robert:
So like I said when launching cafe, the second brand I launched the goal was always to try to get into retail, right? So everything from, from the get-go, right? Way before we were even on Amazon, as I’m just thinking of the products, the packaging we were gonna use UPCB everything as small details as using UPC barcodes instead of the Amazon barcodes, right? From way back then, just because if you go into retail, you use the same barcodes, right? Just little things like that working on the packaging so that it’s kind of retail ready, somewhat, right? And, and just like getting certifications for it and just like reaching out to buyers with it. And so it’s been a lot of work. You know, we’ve gotten into a lot of the dot coms as vendors, which is still hard, but it’s not the physical retail.
Robert:
And so like thankfully last year after a lot of work visiting, you know Walmart headquarters a couple times, so we, we went to a line review with Walmart, and so we have a couple of our products now going into 4,000 Walmart locations. So essentially every Walmart in the US. And so that’s obviously a huge deal. It’s been in the works for a lot of months. But we’re finally delivering the products here in this next month, in in May. So that’s kind of an iconic moment for us. It’s awesome. It’s huge. A lot of work.
Bradley Sutton:
So have you seen the PO already?
Robert:
Yeah. It’s huge.
Bradley Sutton:
Is that like a seven, six figure PO? Seven figure PO?
Robert:
Six figures, but it’s only supposed to be enough for one po a couple weeks, so it should be a good time. Wow.
Bradley Sutton:
Mid six figures for a couple weeks of sales. That’s, yeah, that’s why I tell everybody, like once you get into 4,000 Walmart stores, that’s like, you know that that’s bigger than Amazon pretty much. Now I’m looking at your listing right now. So like, like right now it looks like you’re in the midst of a lightning deal looks like.
Robert:
Yeah, perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. Just a lightning deal one day or a couple.
Bradley Sutton:
See, I love it. You don’t even know what’s going on. You got a team who’s managing this stuff now. So is Lightning Deals something that you guys or deals of the day and things like that? Is that something that you guys do a lot or leverage.
Robert:
We do lightning deals, yes. They, they do help a lot. And we ran in trouble with those back in the day because those are guided by your last retail price or your, like your moving average price of what you retail at. So we used to run just like cut our price and try to run a lower price and then that would affect our Lightning deals and our seven day deals, and then we would have to run those deals at almost unprofitable at times back, back then. Right. So it took a while to be able to kind of gain some knowledge there and, and keep our retails kind of mapped out so that we’re able to run the deals at prices that still make sense for us.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. Cool. Now what are some other strategies? You know, so we talked about lightning deals. I mean, obviously you have a well optimized listing these are just the basics things, but you know, frequent Lightning deals might not be something, something that’s a common strategy. So what are some other like maybe unique strategies you think that has really helped you get to this level where you’re at that, that maybe you can share with everybody?
Robert:
Yeah, certainly. I mean, we talked Lightning deals in seven day deals. I think if your product starts to perform well enough, you offer those seven day deals and that’s very important. You gain a lot of traction that week that you run those and obviously helps your organic ranking. We’ve kind of tried it all where we’ve tried everything from editorial recommendations. We try affiliate marketing, right? I think just today we were featured on the Kelly Clarkson show, so like you know, their Instagram has 1.5 million followers and they just kind of gain affiliate dollars from that, so when, once your listing starts to become more popular as well, more reviews, it’s more likely to kind of get picked up in different things, like people running videos, like UGCs and stuff, cuz they also kind of get affiliate dollars from it. Well,
Bradley Sutton:
How did you get on that show though? Like, like did you, was that something you did or they just like reached out to you? So
Robert:
That one was, they didn’t even reach out and yeah, we, we just found out by, I found out through a friend, they were scrolling their feet and saw it and sent it to us. So I, we literally had no clue on that one. Wow. But yeah now as of the past couple months, one of the things that we’re doing more of like I said with agencies is we have a PR agency and so they seek pr specifically like around our brand and, and our story and all that. And we also have an agency that handles influencers and, and affiliates. So they look specifically for like big media publications that are wanting to kind of feature our products and gain some affiliate dollars from it. So it’s kind of one of those streams where it, it can’t hurt but it’s about flowing sales from every direction Google ads, we’ve tried obviously, and, and all these kind of things to create the flywheel.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now you, you’re on a lot of different websites you said and .com and things like that. So I think you would agree with the statement that, hey, start on amazon.com maybe number two Walmart and or your own website to start building your brand. And then obviously with a long-term goal of getting into Walmart stores. But if we’re just talking about online marketplaces, other than what what I almost call the big three is amazon, walmart.com, your own website, what would you say is the next couple of ones that you think give the most bang for the buck? Like are we like talking like Target or something or, or what website you think people might be sleeping on?
Robert:
I’ll give you the obvious ones. Obviously if you can get into Target, if you can get into Macy’s, all those are worth it just for the name alone, even if you’re not selling much, right? You associate your brand with being in those retailers, which not everybody can do. But I’ll give you a true sleeper and I’ll give you the quick story of how I found it. So I don’t know if you’ve heard of fair.com, have you ever heard of Fair? It’s essentially fair.com is a marketplace, it’s a like a unicorn startup. So it’s like huge I think value at like 10 billion or so. So it’s a big marketplace, but for like, think of like for mom and pop shops, right? So if you, if you own like a boutique or you own like a little coffee shop, you need to source goods for your store, right?
Robert:
And so you go to fair.com and, and that’s where you kind of buy them. But I came across because my my wife and I were on a road trip in Cali down the US one, and we stopped at this coffee shop and the coffee shop had like amazing items like all different brands, but they were like really nice. And I was like, wow, there’s no way that the coffee shop owner here is sourcing all these, or private labeling all these just no way, right? And so I, I, I asked the lady that was in the corner, I kind of do an inventory on a pad, like where do you you know, like, where do you source all these? And she said, oh, fair. And I was like, okay, note it. So I just kind of tapped it, went along with my road trip, got home, looked at fair, onboarded in there and essentially you’re selling to like physical locations so that’s the great thing. It’s like we’ve now sold over a hundred thousand dollars worth of products through fair after just kind of finding out randomly. And I get like pictures and stuff from friends from time to time like, Hey, I’m in this random coffee shop in North Carolina and I see your products here. Like how’d it get here? Or like, Hey, what is your product doing in the middle? You know? And so that’s amazing. And, and so like we have over a thousand customers.
Bradley Sutton:
So I mean, not only are getting sales from there, but you know, like customers who are just going to coffee shops and they’re like, man, this tastes good. Or they’re looking there and then they might be going home or just right there going on their Amazon app and looking up your brand. And so who knows what kind of residual benefit it is. I like it. Yeah.
Robert:
And sales are easy to fulfill their, their repeat purchase because you know, they’re buying for their coffee shop or their little store. And so like once they sell it, they’ll buy again. And so yeah, it’s one of those things where it’s it’s a little unlock and it’s, it’s worth a lot more than just the money it brings in, but rather your product having distribution and being out there spreading out your brand. And so that, that’s means a lot.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool. So it sounds like throughout this time you’ve been working full-time, you’ve hired staff though to, to help you, but is is 2023 the, the year that you’re gonna, you’re gonna retire from working for the man and now go all into your business and like, what’s your goals for your brand?
Robert:
Yeah, so it’s, it’s really good timing cuz I’m actually in the process of that, of, of quitting my job. It’s just coincidence that, that I’m on the pod and we’re talking about it. So, yeah being on Amazon, being on Amazon seller a lot of times and most Amazon sellers, like you said, we’re behind the curtain and we don’t care to be behind the curtain. We kind of hide behind our brands historically because who cares to know the, the founder, right? Like but with the whole Walmart thing where we’re now starting to be reached out for press or like interviews and, and just like overall you’re on the shelf. So like the brands kind of need a customer facing sort of name. And so like, it’s kind of the time to, to do it just because it, it’s kind of grown to the point where it also doesn’t make sense to stay.
Robert:
I almost wish my job wasn’t as good and didn’t pay as well or didn’t offer as much. Cuz then it would’ve made it a lot easier to, to quit a long time ago. But it’s allowed me to kind of really scale the team and just kind of go as long as I could before making that leap. So it’s not the first time I make the leap I did quit like I told you back in in the 2020. But this time hopefully it’s for good. And just to be able to fully take care of and run the company.
Bradley Sutton:
Cool, cool. Well definitely want to reach out to you maybe in a year or so and see how retired life is suiting you probably you’ll find that you’re actually probably working more than.
Robert:
Yeah. I wouldn’t say retired life
Bradley Sutton:
When you’re working full-time,
Robert:
Retired life. Yeah, you can word that differently. I would say committed to the game life.
Bradley Sutton:
There you go. There you go. Love it. Alright, well thank you so much for joining us and, and telling us about your journeys. Very inspiring and there’s people out there who, who might be in the similar shoes as you a few years ago. They’re still working full-time and they might have thought, man, I, the only way to scale my business is by quitting my job and just giving it full-time, right from the get go. But I think you’ve proven that, hey, no, there’s, there’s, there’s different ways to do it. You could still scale a business as long as you have good help while you’re, while you’re still in you know a great job that, that you might have, that you might like and find success. So it’s really great to, to see what you’ve accomplished and I look forward to seeing what you accomplished in the next couple of years.
Robert:
Appreciate that, Bradley. I hope I’m able to be back and tell really good stories by then.
In this special Serious Sellers Podcast episode, Carrie Miller and David Milstein of SellCord discuss all things Walmart.com. David shares his expertise and strategies for PPC, seller requirements, launch strategies, customer reviews, and listing optimization. The episode starts with a discussion on the common mistakes sellers make when launching on Walmart and how to avoid them. David also sheds light on the improvements in Walmart’s PPC and how Adtomic is a game-changer for Walmart PPC. You’ll get insights into what new features they should look out for on Walmart, and the requirements to become a Walmart seller, and the common reasons why sellers get denied. David also answers the question of whether gated and un-gated products are the same as in Amazon and whether Walmart’s Brand Portal defends brand owners. He further elaborates on how to get reviews on Walmart and whether supplement selling is competitive on Walmart. So, if you’re looking to expand your Amazon business and sell on Walmart, this is an episode you don’t want to miss!
In episode 447 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and David discuss:
- 02:35 – Common Mistakes Sellers Make When Launching On Walmart
- 06:44 – Improvements On Walmart PPC
- 10:15 – How Adtomic Is A Game-Changer For Walmart PPC
- 11:20 – What New Features Should We Look Out For?
- 18:30 – Requirements To Become A Walmart Seller
- 20:12 – Read Carrie’s Blog On How International Sellers Can Start Selling On Walmart
- 20:35 – Common Reasons Why Sellers Get Denied
- 22:32 – Gated And Ungated Products The Same As In Amazon?
- 24:02 – Does Walmart Brand Portal Defend Brand Owners?
- 26:51 – How Do You Get Reviews On Walmart?
- 31:35 – Is Supplement Selling Competitive In Walmart?
- 33:31 – Can Google Ads Be Used Instead Of PPC In Walmart?
- 35:17 – Should I Launch A New Product In Amazon Or Walmart?
- 37:29 – Watch David Milstein’s Modules Inside Freedom Ticket
- 38:02 – How To Get In Touch With David And SellCord
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got an expert on the show who’s gonna answer all of your top questions about walmart.com, everything from launch strategy to customer reviews, to listing optimization and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think
Bradley Sutton:
If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook, or you can actually go to h10.me/walmartgroup, and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join, you can tag me and carry with questions, and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s our Walmart Wednesday show of the month, where we bring on an expert guest each month to talk about all of your questions that you guys are giving live and also through the Facebook groups on Walmart. So this month we are bringing onto the show David, who’s gonna be talking about, you know, product launches and how they’re different listing optimization strategy and migrating reviews over to Walmart. I mean, I think a lot of us who sell on Amazon, we would love to be able to start off an Amazon listing with reviews already, but did you know you could do that actually on Walmart? They’re gonna be talking about that. So as always, we have Carrie as our host of this special show. So Carrie and David, take it away.
Carrie:
Hello everyone, and welcome to Winning with Walmart Wednesday. I’m so glad to see you all here again on this Wednesday to go over some Walmart content with you today. We have a very special guest today. His name is David Milstein. He is from SellCord, and I actually have learned a ton from David. He actually taught me quite a bit of just the technical aspects about Walmart. So he is a wealth of knowledge, so I’m very, very excited to have him on today. So I’m gonna go ahead and bring him on.
David:
Hey, Carrie, great to see you as usual.
Carrie:
Thanks so much for joining us. I know you’ve got a lot of great info to share, so I’m excited. All right, let’s go ahead and get started, David, because I think we have some good questions to ask you. And then I really wanna get into questions that people have. We get a lot of questions in our Walmart groups, so I definitely wanna just answer any questions that people have. Alright, so let’s go ahead and start with my first question. You know, when people are launching, I get a lot of questions about, you know, launching and people, you know, starting off successfully on Walmart. When people launch, what are some common mistakes that they make when they are launching on their Walmart account in general, or just their first products? What do you think are the most common mistakes?
David:
For sure. So it’s definitely a really big topic. You know, these days you’re having more and more Walmart sellers. By the day it’s the fastest growing marketplace. So everyone jumps on the marketplace and then there’s a common, you know, you make the mistakes, then you learn from it. So what are some things that, that I try generally avoid? A very common thing that people do is they’ll use their Amazon content and just expect that to work. You know, there are plenty of tools that will be able to mirror your content over to Amazon, from Amazon to Walmart rather, but unfortunately, Walmart doesn’t want that. And that’s really going to actually give you problems. I’ll give you just a brief example. Copy is a very common thing. You know, Amazon has these long winded titles, you know, a lot of keyword stuffing, a lot of repetition there.
David:
And using those on Walmart are just gonna cause issues. You know, Walmart themselves, they give you a listing quality score, which you guys should all be familiar with, and they give you some general guidelines on how to get there and we’ll discuss a little bit more on about the listing quality score. But they’ll even tell you immediately if your, if your title’s too long, you should cut that down to 75 to 120 characters max. It does depend on the category and they give you some pretty good information in what to do. But in the end of the day, it is very generic and category specific, so you will have to do more research. But just using your Amazon copy is a big issue that a lot of people have because firstly, your titles are way too long. And then your bullet points on Amazon are very concise and bullet pointy.
David:
You want a nice long description that’s well actually broken down instead of having bullet points, which is maybe what you would do in a key feature, which is a little different than what you would have in your descriptions. Additionally, make sure you put in the work, a lot of people assume that Amazon, oh, I do so well on Amazon. It’s crazy, you know, you see with so many of these sellers, even these eight figure sellers that they put in all this effort into Amazon and they just assume that Walmart, oh, it’s the same thing. You know, I don’t really have to like, I just take my Amazon effort and it works on Walmart. That’s so far from what it is. Yes, there’s a lot of research and you understand your product and there’s so much on the product side and maybe on the fulfillment side that you need, that you already understand.
David:
But the same way that Amazon algorithm is so complex and we need to understand how it works. So too with Walmart, this is a whole complex algorithm that you need to make sure that your content on your listing, not just the copy, but also the images, also the attributes, the category, the category path, the product that there’s so many specifics that you need to audit and make sure are correct. And people that don’t do that, you could have a beautifully written listing, but just having an incorrect product type can cause you to not rank at all. A lot of categories, paths don’t even get selected automatically. Walmart, Walmart will put it in an unavailable status, it’ll be missing and your product’s just not ranking and you’re curious as to what’s going on because your copy looks so good. You have to do the same audit and the same level of work that you put into Amazon, into Walmart.
David:
And what some people are kind of adverse to that because, oh, Amazon makes me my money now, but you have to understand Walmart is a marketplace of the future. And having that understanding that also Walmart’s very much in a growth phase. It’s some, it’s a marketplace that it’s gonna only grow with time. And we’re seeing it grow tremendously compared to Amazon. We’re growing exponentially, right? Just in the past three years, Walmart’s had about 100% year-over-year growth continually in the past three years, cu cumulatively for Amazon, it’s been about 30%. That’s a huge, a huge change. And obviously, Amazon is growing, but Walmart’s growing at such a faster speed that if you think the future, you understand that this is a marketplace that you do have to put your time into and God just throw up your listings and be like, oh, I’m not making sales anyways. Cuz that’s a big mistake. Treat it as a marketplace, give it the respect deserves and that’s what’s gonna help you succeed.
Carrie:
I’m glad that you pointed that out and I learned a lot of all that stuff from you. And I’ve, I’ve been preaching that quite a bit. Also, I wanted to talk a little bit about PPC and just like some of the impro improvements that we’ve seen with PPC So what are the improvements that you’ve seen? Just, I don’t know, we’ve been working together probably for a year and a half or so, or you’ve been on Walmart for longer than that. So what have you seen as, you know, some of the improvements for pay-per-click on Walmart?
David:
So it’s very evident that Walmart, Walmart does know that PPC is obviously such a huge factor, and if Amazon had the amount of growth in terms of their changes to PPC as Walmart had, it would be like, it’s just not possible. Walmart has made such incredible changes just over the past years that are so, these huge changes. For example, two big ones I like to focus on are second price auction. That’s such a huge concept that like, is such a constant and obvious thing in Amazon was not there in Walmart, and Walmart recognized that and they implemented it and that’s now something that has been running for something like 8-10 months at this point. And similarly at about the same time they did two placements for your organic and your advertising, your promoted placement, your sponsored placement.
David:
And that’s just so beneficial to sellers because previously, like it was very difficult to track your organic rank and you had to turn off your ads and then you had to like use, let’s say you wanted to use day partying to check when things are going on. There’s so many things it was just not conducive to an easy like to, for a solid to have a good time. So Walmart’s been doing such huge changes. Just those two things are such, so huge just on top of all the changes that they, that all the other smaller changes, if you will. I know they’ve added in, in the past year to the self-service platform being able to do bulk operations, which is another huge thing. You know, that previously things were done a little bit slower. I know it’ll take you more time now I do have some suggestions for how to run your ads better, but just it’s great to see the changes that they’re doing and I would still say there is still a while ahead to get to that point where it does become as intricate as and as complex as Amazon’s.
David:
Like there’s no negative targeting, for example, right now in Walmart. And that’s something that potentially that they’ll add in at some point, which could help with some, with how you do some of your strategies. And there’s a lot of things that will come with time. Now, I will say this, if you are looking to sell on Walmart, you gotta advertise. It’s so basic. I would say even as little as a year and a half ago, you would be able to just rank your products well with just good content, which would get you, you know, get you somewhere. And you can make sales like that organically. Even now in some categories, you rank your product as long as you are in WFS have somewhat even a few reviews is fine. And if you don’t have reviews, that’s okay.
David:
Walmart does have review accelerator program to help things out, but as long as your listing has good shipping and is price matched to Amazon, you follow the listing quality score to get yourself to a good place. You could make some sales organically, but if you really understand the potential that Walmart has, throw some money at some ad spend and learn, succeed and fail. Now you could go a few different avenues here. If you’re just want to go very simple, Walmart does have their advertising ad center, you could apply advertising.walmart.com, go ahead, sign that seller, you could fill out the application and use that portal. It’s very nice, has some decent reporting and you could do some work through there, but there’s definitely limitations in what it does offer. What I would suggest is Helium 10 recently launched Adtomic fantastic. If you kind of have a little bit of an understanding with the PPC even if you do have some questions, but you wanna rely, they have a great AI that figures out, it looks at your campaigns, it tells you how to structure them, it shows you what edits you should make to your campaign and it will do what you need to know.
David:
If you’re not so advanced with PPC and you want to kind of just like, I want to run ppc, I don’t really know how to run PPC, you put your products in there, you have a basic understanding and you’ll be able to optimize from there and make sales and that that’s the goal. But for some of the more advanced users, I would definitely head towards Pacvue. It’s a great tool, extremely robust, like it’s something we’ve been using and been being able to work with and have launched thousands of campaigns. We’re able to do so much more work than just the basic self-service platform. Just from the huge list of automation of rules that you could set up as well as well as any sort of just, just bulk operations. So much more than that of the Walmart self-service portal.
David:
There’s so much you could do with the reporting. You could have multiple accounts in there. And I do wanna mention the reporting is huge. You know, if you wanna be able to really grow your PPC as you would, whether Amazon or Walmart, you gotta be able to look at those reports and the Pacvue reports that able to download really clean, you’re able to see. I was just looking at some basic things I’ll give an example here. I was looking to launch Rich Media for one of our accounts, which for those of you that are unaware, this is a great way to help boost your listings conversion rate, which has ads in right now. Videos and feature sets, which is Walmart’s version of PPC in general Rich Media is Walmart’s version of A+ content.
David:
Unfortunately, unlike Amazon right now, it’s a paid service. You can’t just put it directly on your listing to a regular picture, but it is, it is something that you could get on your listing through third party service providers. Now I was looking into doing this for one of the, one of the council manage, and what I want to see is I want to see my conversion rate between not impressions necessary to clicks because the impression doesn’t show you if it has rich media, but the clicks to orders, that’s gonna be the best place where I can see, oh, the lower conversion rate, obviously there’s something in my listing that’s not working and just downloading your report from Pack View, I could see that information and that helps me now determine, okay, here I have a 2% conversion rate, I wanna be better, I wanna get a close a 15% conversion rate.
David:
Let me see if adding rich media for a month. And I test that out and it’s just, that’s just one example you could see. I just identify from there where the problems lie. Oh, I just see that this has a really little conversion rate. Maybe it’s cuz my WFS it’s out of stock and WFS maybe the reviews, maybe I have two bad reviews on it. Maybe the copy just says some very basic three lines. You know, being able to use the data from all these different sources, the reports Walmart gives you, the reports that you could download from an ad platform. Putting all that data together will show you, here are your problems. And in the end of the day with Walmart, there’s no reason your listing shouldn’t succeed. Aside from a very few points, you’ll notice it’s either out of stock, which is a low stock issue, you have very bad reviews, or your pricing is much, much higher than the standard for your main keywords.
David:
And that’s something you should definitely be taking a look at competitive, look at your competitors and see where you fall in price-wise. One reason where you might see a little bit of issues with succeeding is if you’re in a really niche product. Niche products tend to not do as well on Walmart as they do on Amazon. And more generic products do well on Walmart, which is, it might sound bad if you have let’s say a very niche product than brand, but as a seller, the way I would go about it is this actually means that there’s opportunity to make a more generic product who doesn’t wanna sell more generic product. It’s much easier to source. And I could just put that on there. And if I can make sales on Walmart, that’s crazy. I’ll just give a brief example here. If you go to Walmart right now, look up a garlic press, which on Amazon it’s, it’s known to be like the most generic product that everyone is on.
David:
You could see that Walmart ability for you to be able to sell that product. Like you could look on the front page. How many of those listings are under 10 reviews? How many of them don’t have two day shipping? How many of them are overpriced for the market? Like yeah, there are some really hot, solid listings, but you could be on the front page in, in Walmart within, I would say a month or two if you have a quality listing that you put up over there, which just, it’s crazy to show the opportunity that exists there. And with the proper setup for your listings and the proper structure with your advertising to be able to push sales, get some eyes on your listings, you could really succeed.
Carrie:
Yeah, I think that you guys have actually launched some home products, right? And did pretty well. That’s kind of one of your strategies is finding those opportunities on Walmart and just launching directly on Walmart. So that’s, that’s a really good opportunity. All right, so my last question before we get into the questions. What are some things that you think we have to look forward to on Walmart? Any insights about what Walmart might be coming out with soon?
David:
For sure. As we’ve mentioned a few times already, Walmart’s had such crazy things over just the past year, a year and a half, just from the launch of WFS. That’s even been a relatively newer thing that Walmart has. And from when we started, we were one of the first sellers that were g able to get in with the program and then it launched, it was like one warehouse, two warehouse. Now they’re gonna be launching this year. There’s even been some accounts in beta, they called it previously the ICC program. Now it’s the ITS program, inbound transfer service where because WFS fulfillment centers are located all across the US and it’s an algorithm for how they assign you to the warehouse. Sometimes it’s a very high shipping cost to get it there.
David:
So what Walmart has done now is to have these inbound transfer centers where if you send your inventory to their first, it does have a little bit of an extra fee, but it’s definitely worth it and they’ll then send that to the FCS accordingly. So that’s something that is debuting for all sellers starting May 15th I believe. But you might have already gotten to beta and maybe some emails about that. Some other great things which we have heard some speculation about but don’t necessarily have saw launch dates for, which we’re very excited for firstly is the subscription model. We all love our subscribe and save, you know, that recurring revenue is fantastic. We all love it. So the fact that that is something that Walmart’s been hinting and alluding that it’s coming soon, we are super stoked for that. It’s already live with the Walmart business side of things, which just shows like it’s in testing just to see how they could figure it out in terms of whether it’s fulfillment or just internal system structures.
David:
Some other things we’re looking forward to is, we’ve heard some rumors about virtual bundles. It’s something that will be coming to Walmart, which is another great way for, to boost your catalog, build your catalog. You know, right now the way listings work is you need to have unique UPC for every product. So if you wanna sell a multi-pack or if you wanna sell, let’s say two different listings together, you would have to then send it into WFS bundle together with the same with the new UPC. And this kind of makes forecasting very difficult. You’d have to really figure things out with numbers and you might end up having, being stuck with a two-pack or a three pack, cuz that never sells because the single pack on the four pack itself, it just causes all sorts of issues by having to figure these things out right now.
David:
And the fact that virtual bundles is something that we hear are coming is just, that’s a big relief. You know, it lets us really help. Okay, I can have a bunch of new listings live on the platform that will could succeed now and I can just use my old data to see that. So that’s gonna be very exciting. And the last thing I’m really excited for is stores additionally here. We, we believe this is something that will be coming soon the same way we have our Amazon stores where we get to pretty much have our own website within Amazon that beautifully displays our products and so many different ways. I can’t wait to see what Walmart does with that. I’m sure it’ll be amazing.
Carrie:
Yeah, those are some really cool updates. I’m really excited. I think a lot of people will be pretty excited about, especially this subscribe and save a lot of people’s selling supplements or just things that you wanna buy on an ongoing basis that’s gonna be really great for them. So, alright, I think that’s a lot of great content and we do have some really great questions in here. This first one here, it says from Jay, he says, I know the questions will be answered later on, but I wanted to see if you can give some insight on the requirements to becoming a Walmart seller.
David:
For sure, for sure. And Walmart used to be a little bit more restrictive of who they allowed as sellers. This is actually, we, we referenced this earlier about having counterfeit sellers that Walmart sees that issue within Amazon and wants to avoid that. Now they did quote unquote open the floodgates last, I believe last August to additional sellers to make things a little bit less restrictive. But there’s still a business verification process. So you could go ahead to Walmart and now previously it would be that you had to apply and they would get back to you. Right Now you could actually create an account and you go into the business verification and as long as you have a legitimate LLC there’s a couple of other things I would suggest is you wanna have a real website. You don’t want to just have your products only on Amazon and have a legitimate website.
David:
And this is actually a great tip over here. Do not have an application with an @gmail.com that, yeah, like that kind of doesn’t show validity to yourself, you know, and okay, it’s $12 a month, just pay the extra money to get that nice @mybusiness.com and that will just to show Walmart that you’re legit, you’re real company and you’ll get there. Yes, star accounts that I’ve gotten approved with at Gmail. It happens. But this is just something that will help you with getting your application approved because you’re proving that you’re a real seller. So make sure you have all your legal docs in order and you do the business verification. If you are like an international seller, there are some restrictions into which countries you’re able to do that. All that information is, is really readily available and Walmart’s actually really good in terms of communication on that front.
Carrie:
I actually wrote a blog about it. So if you go to the Helium 10 blog, you can see each country the exact requirements that you need. So this is a continuation I think of that question. I am currently an Amazon seller, did three 70k last year with an LLC and applied, but was denied and they not give a reason. So do you wanna give any insights about, you know, if you were denied in the past, what to do kind of to reapply?
David:
So I would say if you applied before August of last year when they kind of got a little bit laxer on who they accepted, the first thing is don’t apply. Again, that is a surefire way to get stuck. Walmart system does not allow you to apply twice. If you do an application twice, it gets stuck and it just makes it impossible to ever come back. Not impossible, it’ll make it more difficult and you’re gonna just leave your account rep with, with much more issues. What I would suggest is just a shameless plug, you could reach out to me and I could help you out with that. But there are also resources within Walmart to reach out to them to have them help you out with checking into your application and see if there’s something that could be done there. But definitely don’t apply a second time.
David:
You want to really reach out to Walmart support. They have a lot of great members that will help you, help you get your account approved if you’re an actually a valid seller. Now, if you did apply more recently and you got denied, there’s probably some reasoning behind that. They’re not just a deny, they’re, they’re accepting a lot more sellers. So if you got recently denied, it probably means that possibly some of your legal documents are not an order. Make sure your addresses aligned from what you’re putting into Walmart compared to your LLC documentation, your SS-4, all that good stuff. You wanna make sure that it’s clean. The second Walmart smells something is off, they shut it down. Walmart doesn’t do nonsense. Walmart needs you to be legit and if they smell that something’s off, they’re not gonna allow you. Cuz they realize that’s very common and people are very shady in this, in this, in this industry. We all know it. We’ve all been hit by different things here and there. Whether our listing’s been taken down for the wrong reason, someone tried to try to do something to us, Walmart doesn’t like that and they’re trying to cut it out as much as possible. So this is kind of one of the reasons they’re denying more accounts and are more restrictive about it.
Carrie:
Awesome. And yeah, I mean, and you, you guys have some more insights as a service, right? Like you, you can help people with that kinda stuff at SellCord.co. Alright. The next question is about gated and ungated of products the same as in on Amazon.
David:
I do mostly focus on the private label side of things. That’s really where I would see a lot of success on, on Walmart and that’s generally the direction of a lot of sellers can take. But in terms of like resale and wholesale, there are a lot of brands that are not as restricted. You really have to do the research and just kind of see, I would just say like this, the main difference between Amazon and Walmart when it comes to these types of listings is look, if it’s a 1P listing on Walmart, cuz if it’s a 1P listing on Walmart, I don’t care how cheap you are, you’re not gonna win that buy box. Walmart is taking those sales cuz that’s just how it works. So if you’re looking to sell, let’s say like Dove soap and Walmart has the buy box sold and shipped by walmart.com, don’t bother.
David:
You’re gonna be able to add yourself as an additional seller, but you’re very rarely gonna be making sales over there. You could pretty much see by brand and if a brand’s selling the products themselves, then probably stay away from it. But if a brand is is being sold by some third party that has like 29,000 seller reviews probably means it’s being sold by some other distributor. And you could probably get in on that in general on this front, a lot of brands are very behind in terms of being on top of their brand portal, but it really is it comes down to the product. But in general, I’m not such an expert when it comes to the retail arbitrage or wholesale side of things.
Carrie:
The next question kind of goes into what you were saying is, does Walmart brand portal defend brand owners? Like, I think brand, what you were kinda mentioning is like one P but maybe you could just do a distinction between 1P and 3P there.
David:
Yeah, sure. So the brand portal has to be maintained at another of the day. You know if you just have an account that doesn’t do anything, you can’t, just having an account with Walmart just shows them that you’re registered. It does help you if you’re trying to do stuff with your listings but that’s gonna act as protection for you. There are are a shorter list of brands that actually have the protection from Walmart to restrict other sellers. But as a standard like just private label brand or even even some of the bigger brands, you have to actually do the work to protect your brand. And this is a very common theme. You know, we see so many listings that are hijacked and that could be as an additional seller on a listing or just taking the content, even sometimes they’ll take the pictures and just remove the branding.
David:
All of these things are cases that you need to be on top of as a seller, you need to go on to Walmart, look up your brand, and you very easy to search your brand. You can go into your listing, click the brand, or you can just type in the brand name. There’s branded searches, there’s regular searching for the brand. And just get those, get those item URLs, go into brand portal, make sure your brand’s registered and just start filing claims away. Go to town. You know, it’s, it’s a great way to take down all these listings and they’re, they’re very quick to get down these hijacked listings. Again, Walmart understands there’s a problem in the e-commerce space that there’s a lot of nonsense that happens and they hate that. So anytime any hijacking is a very common, easy to do problem that people will be facing. So Walmart’s trying to be on top of that to help out sellers to remove these these issues.
Carrie:
I yeah and something else I wanna kind of mention, and I have mentioned this before, is that you need to own your UPC codes. I know back in the day on Amazon, a lot of people were just like buying random third party, I guess UPCs where they would just, you know, cuz you would have to buy in bulk, like 500 or a thousand at a times. So people would sell their extras and then, you know, those UPCs are tied to the brand name that actually bought them from GS1. So if you don’t own your UPC code, then you’re gonna have a lot harder time with the brand portal and the ownership of your listings. So make sure that you own your UPC codes and they have your brand connected to them on that.
David:
Great point.
Carrie:
Next question. How do you get your first reviews on Walmart?
David:
Reviews is a huge strategy. You definitely, it’s gonna help you with your conversion rate. I just do wanna point out, unlike Amazon where sales volume is the number one driver of ranking on Walmart, it’s the conversion rate and there’s two conversion rates that reflects, it’s the impression to click and to click the sale. And aside from price and basic content, the best way to get that conversion is through reviews. Now, how do you get reviews on your product? I’m going to suggest two strategies. You have reviews syndication, which is a free program from Walmart that I don’t know why people are not as into finding it. Maybe they should probably run a promo, Hey, sign up for reviews, indication, maybe send emails. If you have reviews on your website, Walmart allows you to bring them to the program. Two platform for free. This is a free program.
David:
Now you have to make sure that it’s legit and you’re not bringing in only some of your five star reviews. You have to bring in all your reviews to the program. Additionally, you cannot have your Amazon reviews on Walmart illegal. Amazon is against terms of service. They technically own their reviews. Technically you shouldn’t even have them on your website in the first place, but that’s none of my business. But Walmart is not gonna let you take those reviews to Walmart. You could try and they’re gonna say, Hey, those are Amazon reviews, you can’t use those. But it’s a great way if you have reviews on your website, sign up for reviews syndication hopefully you’ll get accepted as long as you answer the case correctly. Don’t, don’t try a lie and try to cheat the system. They’re just gonna shut you down and potentially suspend your as a seller.
David:
No one wants that. And go ahead and bring in your reviews. Legitimately A second program, I would su strongly recommend, this is a new launch from Walmart, which is the review accelerator program. It allows, it’s similar to I guess the Amazon Vine, but I think it’s actually cheaper. It’s where you enroll certain listings. There is a bit of a restriction on what is allowed and there’s up to, you’re allowed to get up to five reviews per product and it doesn’t recommend, it’s not necessarily gonna get you a five star review. This is important to note, it’s just gonna get you a review. Walmart does claim that five reviews on a product increases the GMV by 75%, which I think is that’s pretty crazy. So there’s just two restrictions. You have to have a sale in the past x amount of time, I think potentially 30 days.
David:
And you have to have under five reviews and therefore that will make your item eligible for the program. And it costs you $10 per view that you get regardless of the rating. And the incentive to the seller, or to the customer rather the shopper is that they will get $3 credit towards their next purchase. So Walmart sends out an email to them, Hey ’em, hey some li review and you got $3 credit and you will get up to five reviews per product. It’s a great way, the only thing is it’s kind of a bit of a cash 22 cause you’re like, I need to get sales in order to get into the program, but I can’t get sales cause they don’t have reviews. Advertising is key folks. With advertising you’re guaranteed to get at least one sale as long as you’re not extremely priced. That’s as simple as it is.
Carrie:
That kind of, this is something I was I’ve been thinking about is because when you syndicate your reviews it’ll say, you know, it’s been syndicated by, it’ll sometimes put your website, but then it doesn’t have necessarily that verified purchaser, whereas the Review Seller Accelerator program does have the verified purchaser. Do you think people should maybe just do the paper click and do the review accelerator program until they get five reviews and then syndicate reviews so that you’ll have both? Or what are your thoughts on that?
David:
I think, I think that review syndication is the first stream that you should go through. The reason for that being that you could be a brand new seller and immediately have 500 views on your listing, obviously legitimately, right? And that’s huge. You know, it will help you with that initial conversion and it’s free, you know, you’re, I mean it takes you time to fill out the template on whatever. You might have to go back and forth with Walmart until you get it right. But still it’s free compared to having to pay $10 per review, that’s gonna cop out to about $50 per product. It could, it could start to rack up, especially if you have a larger catalog. I would say if you don’t have review syndication, then push for the View accelerator. There’s no currently no evidence backing that if you enroll your products in Review Accelerator, that Walmart’s gonna try get you a sale because they’re gonna make the few $10 off or the $7 difference.
David:
There’s no data to support that. I mean, if you want to come with conspiracy theory, sure, but I don’t believe that, I haven’t seen this happen, I’ve from many accounts that have enrolled this, it doesn’t increase their sales. The thing that increases sale is pushing PPC and actually having their reviews there. So that’s my, yeah, the verified purchase does help, but having three verified purchases compared to 150 unverified purchases is still 155 star reviews that hits different, and yeah, just to note Amazon compared to Walmart, very different to interview numbers. You’ll see, it’s very rare. You’ll find that Walmart something with five figure reviews, like there’s a couple and those are obviously syndicated or a product that’s been on Walmart for 10 years. You know, that’s just been a really old 1P listing. But for the most part, you’re not seeing, you’re not seeing that many. Even having legitimately 10 reviews could get you. I’ll challenge anyone over here if you could find me a keyword that on the front page, there’s no products that have under 10 reviews. I’m just telling you there’s a hundred percent is like that. So 10 reviews is even a great start.
Carrie:
Awesome. Okay. Supplement selling is very competitive on Amazon. How is it on Walmart?
David:
Great, great question. In general, supplements are the hottest thing in, in e-com. You know, it’s obvious because I guess the cost isn’t so high and it’s repetitive. This customer’s coming in monthly. So it’s still, I would say it’s the most competitive category on Walmart as well. But even though that is the case, I will not say, I’m not gonna dissuade you if I’m trying, as I mentioned before, every category can sell. I don’t necessarily recommend that this is the one if you’re gonna start a brand hit supplements on Walmart cuz there is staunch competition. But, and you’re gonna have to spend money to get in there and stay there. It’s gonna cost you, but I believe you’ll win in the, in the end run. So if you have, if you have the the pockets, definitely do it. I’m not saying it’s nowhere near launching a supplement brand on Amazon.
David:
So if you wanna do it, I would hit Walmart. It’s definitely worthwhile. But I would say there’s so many more generic products that you could get into that just sell. Well, there’s plenty of data out there that shows you which are the best selling categories on Walmart and ding ding ding, next Walmart hack, go to Helium 10 and search volume, look up, search volume. It’s, this is such a simple thing. Just look at the search volume, plug it into Walmart, look how many competitors you have. Look at the pricing. That’s how you do your product research. Just look up the search volume and that’s gonna be your biggest metric to see also just look percentage-wise, Amazon to Walmart search volume. You could see which products will do better. So there’s definitely competition there, but everything pales in comparison to that of Amazon. And I think it’s, everything has opportunity for you to be able to grow.
Carrie:
All right. Can Google ads be used instead of PPC on Walmart?
David:
You can use Google Ads in some way to drive your traffic to Walmart. I’m gonna be straight up here. I don’t have the most familiarity with the Google ads side of things, but I believe there’s capabilities over there. But why are you doing that instead of just use Walmart right now. Don’t try be so oh, I’m gonna be super creative and think of these great ways to get sales to Walmart. Gives you opportunity at Walmart itself has so many things. I wouldn’t say right now is the time to go to these outside venues to get your traffic, to come to Walmart. Focus right now on what Walmart gives you because that has opportunity there. If you’re failing there, then there’s probably some other issue, not your ads.
Carrie:
Something I wanna add here too is that they actually do what Walmart, when you start advertising with Walmart, they’ll put your products in Google shopping. So you’ll see your products like available on walmart.com in Google shopping already. So you kind of already have Google Ads provided by a Walmart for you. So I’ve seen my product when I’ve searched the main keyword on Google already without me running ads. And another thing is that I have run ads just to kind of test it out from Google and it did not help with ranking or anything. Cause I know for Amazon right now, it really does help with ranking when you are sending outside traffic. It’s not really the same on Walmart right now. So I would suggest, again, like David said, to focus on the Walmart paper clicks so that you rank much better with that.
Carrie:
I haven’t seen any, you know, direct correlation of, you know, any benefits to utilizing Google ads. And you already have the Google search with Walmart. So just wanted to add a little few tidbits there and now we can take a few more questions cuz we’re running shorter on time. Let’s see here. This next question, new products you wanna launch. How do you decide where to start on Amazon? There’s a lot of sellers on Walmart. No competition, but too many. Okay, I guess basically the question maybe is where do you start when you’re kind of deciding what products move to Walmart first?
David:
So we touched on this earlier, it’s the difference between launching as a new seller on Amazon and Walmart. I would say it’s easier to launch on Walmart because of not only because of the limited competition, but because generic products succeed. I’m gonna, this is, this is, if you get this and you understand this so you could succeed, generic products do better on Walmart because in Amazon they’re so saturated. You look up the main keywords and they are just flooded with listings with thousands, tens of thousands of reviews and sales. And they’ve been there on Amazon, they’ve been at the top for four or five years. Yeah, if you have the ability to win there, you’re gonna be making a lot of money today. But think of Walmart as an investment over here. You have the ability to take a generic keywords, something like we said, as simple as a garlic press go, as simple as anything, any of these basic home items.
David:
You could sell a utensil set. Maybe that’s not the best thing you could sell in the pet products. You could sell in the baby products. So many of these huge categories which on Amazon people are spending millions, hundreds of millions in ads to, to win on Walmart. You spend pennies and you’re able to win and get to the top of that ranking. You wanna know which products to pick. It’s not gonna be the same as the ones that you’re gonna be picking for Amazon. I would say it’s actually gonna be a little bit difficult to find products that would succeed on both Amazon and Walmart, because Amazon, there’s such a pull to be niche because that’s what differentiates you and helps you get those little small keywords and you can win over there versus all Walmart, those small keywords don’t really have that volume behind it. So you could go multiple ways if you’re trying to have a brand that grows on both, you could just go with the bigger with, I would say Walmart has a bigger potential for the future. If you’re trying to make the big dollars today, maybe take a more niche product and hit Amazon with it. But in the long run you’re gonna end up losing out because you just missed out on a huge opportunity of Walmart in two years when you could be the number one seller for a huge keyword.
Carrie:
Awesome. Well as you can all see, David is a wealth of information and if you didn’t know, he actually is a one of the main stars of our Freedom Ticket for Walmart. He goes through in detail a lot of the technical parts of Walmart, so you know, like flat files and WFS and all kinds of great information. So if you haven’t checked that out, you should, and you’re a Helium 10 member. This is free for Helium 10 members. It’s in week 11 on Freedom Ticket 3.0. So make sure you check that out And otherwise thank you so much for joining David, I think we got a lot of great information from you, so thank you so much.
David:
Of course, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Carrie:
And where can people find you if they wanna find you?
David:
For sure. So I’ll drop my personal email if you’d like over here. You can message me at david@sellcord.co. You could find me on LinkedIn as well, David Milstein look on their SellCord. You can probably find me at some other places as well if you look hard enough. But those two ways would be a sure way to find me and in general find out some more information about us at sellcord.co.
Carrie:
All right, yeah, thank you so much again and hopefully we’ll have you back and, and I’m sure we’ll do some more content with you so you know, make sure you’re all in our Facebook groups and you know, hopefully you’ll have David back and do some more great Q and A sessions cuz he obviously knows so much about Walmart. So thanks again and we’ll see you all later.
David:
Of course. Thanks for having me, Carrie.
Carrie:
Bye.
Bradley Sutton:
All right guys, thank you so much for that and for tuning in and thank you to Carrie and David for that information. Don’t forget guys, you don’t have to wait every month for the answers, just some of your questions, go right into our Winning with Walmart, Facebook group, Winning with Walmart. You can look it up anywhere on Facebook, it’s open to everybody. Hop in there, ask Carrie questions. David’s in there, you can tag him and ask him questions as well. But we really want you guys to have success selling on the Walmart platform. If you’ve got inventory already here in the United States, it’s a no-brainer guys. Make sure to get on Walmart.com and start getting those extra sales. We’ll see you guys next month in the next episode.
Join us in this special Seller Strategy Masterclass with Bradley Sutton. Today, we dive deep into the world of Amazon advertising and how to automate your review requests.
Bradley, who once hated Amazon PPC, but has since learned the ropes and with the help of Adtomic, how he found success managing hundreds of PPC campaigns. Bradley stresses the importance of learning Amazon PPC for yourself in order to gauge the success of your brands PPC campaigns. He also offers his unique features inside Adtomic like, viewing metrics such as TACOS over certain periods of time, as well as seeing your PPC performance by day of week and hour of day.
Bradley also shares tips on setting up PPC dayparting, viewing old PPC data up to years in the past, and instantly seeing if you have search terms you should negative match. He also shares ways to view your PPC performance by product and feed newly found keywords from broad and auto campaigns to exact manual campaigns. Optimizing your PPC campaigns bids is essential, and Bradley shares how to do this in seconds.
Additionally, he offers insights into automating the Amazon request a review process, complete with special time delays and other filters using Helium 10 Follow Up. For those without automation, he also shares how to bulk request a review to orders that you didn’t have automation set up on. Finally, Bradley offers tips on checking your review velocity for your products over time. Don’t miss out on the valuable insights this SSP seller strategy masterclass has to offer!
In episode 446 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discussed:
- 01:50 – Bradley Hated Amazon PPC In The Beginning
- 02:18 – You Need To Learn Amazon PPC Yourself!
- 04:08 – How to View Unique Metrics Such as TACOS Over Certain Periods of Time
- 05:36 – How to See Your PPC Performance by Day of Week and Hour of Day
- 08:30 – How to Set Up PPC Day Parting
- 09:53 – How to See Your Old PPC Data Up To Years in the Past
- 11:54 – How to Instantly See if You Have Search Terms You Should Negative Match
- 14:18 – How to See in Seconds if You Have Search Terms with Unfavorable ACoS
- 15:57 – How to View Your PPC Performance by Product
- 17:51 – How to Feed Newly Found Keywords From Broad And Auto Campaigns To Exact Manual Campaigns
- 24:55 – How to Optimize Your PPC Campaigns Bids in Seconds
- 28:50 – How to Automate The Amazon Request a Review, With Special Time Delays And Other Filters
- 31:41 – How to Bulk Request a Review To Orders That You Didn’t Have Automation Set Up On
- 33:03 – How to Check Your Review Velocity For Your Products Over Time
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today’s another one of our Seller Strategy masterclass, where we’re gonna go deep this time into advertising. I’m gonna teach you how to do day partying and how to manage all of your bid suggestions just in seconds instead of hours. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
How can you get more buyers to leave you Amazon product reviews by following up with them in a way that’s compliant with Amazon terms of service? You can use Helium 10 Follow-up in order to automatically send out Amazon’s request or review emails to any customers you want. Not just that, but you can specify when they get the message and even filter out people that you don’t want to get that message, such as people who have asked for refunds or maybe ones that you gave discounts to. For more information, visit h10.me/followup. You can sign up for a free account, or you can sign it up for a platinum plan and get 10% off for life by using the discount code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.
Bradley Sutton:
And today is another one of our seller strategy masterclass that we do once a month where we go deep into tool use. All right, so this is going to be using Adtomic by Helium 10. Now, whether you use Adtomic or not, these are principles and strategies that you should be using, whether you do your own PPC, whether you’re using another software, whether you’re using an agency, you know, you need to be checking up that they’re doing on this stuff. But this is, this is gonna be important for, for listeners no matter what stage of the game you guys are at. Now, for me, you know, you, some of you guys know my story. I hated PPC in the beginning. You know, when I was launching hundreds of products for my clients before I worked at Helium 10, I was like, hands off on PPC.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m like, I don’t wanna learn this stuff. This stuff is like way above me. You know, like, I’m just gonna focus on launch, listing optimization, keyword research, product research, stuff like that. Somebody else please handle a PPC. And then when I started selling myself, you know, after I started working at Helium 10, I’m like, okay, I need to finally figure out how to do PPC. In the beginning, it was rough. You know, I was, you know, happy to download all these spreadsheets and I didn’t know how to do pivot tables and, and all vlookups and all this stuff. And then finding the campaigns in Seller Central and the ad groups, it was just like a mess. And then that was right around the time that Ads, Helium 10 Ads came out, which is the predecessor Adtomic. And then I was like, okay, finally, now you know, something that helps me learn PPC, make sense?
Bradley Sutton:
And now, you know, I’m running over 200 campaigns, probably closer to 300 now all using this software. So I’m just gonna be going over some of these strategies using Adtomic. I’m gonna be showing sharing my screen, those of you watching on YouTube. But again, don’t tune out even if you don’t use Adtomic, because these are strategies that hopefully you guys are using. And it’s important, I think, in order to run efficient PPC. And, and I’ll, I’ll tell you guys right now, those of you who are newer sellers, if you are one of those people who’s like, oh, yeah, I need, I need a consultant, I need an agency, and you’re new, no, guys, please stop with that nonsense. Very important to understand how PPC works yourself before you ever even dream about outsourcing it. Now, hey, if you get to be too big and, you know, you can’t do everything yourself, of course, you need to hire people, maybe outsource some things here or there, but that’s after knowing how to do it yourself.
Bradley Sutton:
Because think about it, how could you hire somebody and be able to judge what they’re doing and, and their output and make sure that your ROI, you know, what you’re investing to pay this company is working out if you don’t even know what is good PPC strategy and what is bad. So, so anyways, just keep that in mind. Why don’t I have pet peeves I see in the Facebook groups, you guys can do it yourself if, if you’re new, for sure, as long as you have the right strategies. And that’s what we’re talking about today. So like with all seller strategy masterclass, how I do this is I just give you guys like problems to solve and then I’m gonna show you how to solve it. Problem number one, or strategy number one, how to use or view unique metrics such as TACoS over a certain period of time.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, TACoS is something interesting that is not a metric that’s in Seller Central, and that means like you’re total ACoS. So how does your advertising spend relate to your total sales? Right? So, you know, one, the way to do that in Adtomic is on just the dashboard. That’s actually one of the key metrics here is TACoS. And I like comparing different time periods. So for example, right now I’m looking at April one to April 16 here, and it’s 12.76%. And if I just take the previous 16 days, it actually dropped over 10%. You guys trust me, you, you’re gonna see stuff today that are like, what are these numbers, Bradley? You’re you’re PPC skills suck. But no, I don’t suck that bad. It’s just because everybody at Helium 10 uses this account to kind of like do their tests and things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
And so that’s why my ACoS and my TACoS are, are really bad. But anyways, this is just a simple way, guys. Compare what your metrics are, your total sales, your cost per click, your PPC sales over different time periods. It’s important to know how you’re doing, especially if you had a bad month like I did last month. You wanna know if the changes that you’ve implemented are working. So make sure to do that time over time. Next step is how to see your PPC performance by day of week or hour of day. Now, this is interesting. Some people call this like day partying and before people were always saying this like, Hey, I wanna be able to pause my PPC campaigns at the times of day that doesn’t work out for me. And they would like look at their PPC throughout the day and then make decisions based on that.
Bradley Sutton:
That’s completely wrong. Cause that’s not how PPC works. Somebody could have clicked something four days ago at 5:00 PM right? But maybe today at 8:00 AM is when they actually make the sale. Now, you might be looking at your PPC data and say, oh man, 8:00 AM is a great time for me because look at this low ACoS or whatever, right? But no, the actual click happened a few days ago at 5:00 PM So I hope that makes sense. Oh, before, or if you’re just looking at your Amazon data in Seller Central, you cannot base performance by time of day if you’re just looking at it live because of the attribution window. So what we have done in Adtomic is take a look at over time of day or which day of week campaigns are performing well. So I’m just gonna pick a campaign here the large coffin shelf product targeting ad cuz I know that’s like a big spender for us.
Bradley Sutton:
And then take a look, I’m looking here at the last like two, three months, and I can see that, look at this, at 12:00 AM to 1:00 AM 1:00 AM to 2:00 AM I’m spending some decent chunk, like actually for some reason, the highest chunk of sales for the day, or the highest chunk of spend for the day almost. And I’ve gotten zero sales at these times of day in two months. Zero sales. Compare that to, let’s just say here we go at 3:00 PM I’m getting 10% ACoS. Here’s another one at from two to 3:00 AM well, two, 2:00 PM and 2:00 AM sounds like or it seems like it’s a good deal. I’m spending $9 on average and 7% ACoS. So you can see here that different times of day performed differently. So what the fact that I haven’t gotten one sale in all this time from this time period of period of time that would show me that I need to maybe stop something.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m not gonna do ads from 12 to one. So this is important to think about because, you know, you could be wasting money by just keeping your PPC on all day. Now, I’m not saying you definitely are, but, and I’m not saying every campaign has these gaps where like performance is bad, but start taking a look at your high spending campaigns if you have history of campaigns not doing well at certain times a day. So in this one, let’s just say this is true. Like, what, what would I do? All right, so whatever software you’re using, you know, if I have like a time of day where I never get sales, but crazy spin, well, what I’m going to do is I want to make sure to pause perhaps that campaign during that time of day.
Bradley Sutton:
So that’s what I’m gonna do here. You know, guys, click on Schedules in Adtomic and then select the campaign. I selected that large coffin shelf, product targeting campaign, and then I’m picking this timeframe between 12:00 AM and 2:00 AM and I added it right here. And then I’m saying I want the status to be paused. So in other words, hey, pause this campaign from 12:00 AM to 2:00 AM, let’s just say starting on the 18th of April and never expire, and then hit next. And then it’s just going to confirm, hey, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, do you want to pause this campaign during this time of day? Absolutely, I do. I just hit launch and then it is pretty much done. So again, other software has definitely do this. This has been something that only Amazon sellers could do, probably in the last like six months or less, I think is when Amazon opened this up, or maybe a little bit more.
Bradley Sutton:
But this is definitely something you guys should be thinking about to potentially save you some money if you’ve got some bad performance at certain times. Now strategy number four, that was number three. Strategy number four is how to see your old PPC data up to years in the past. So if you’re just going into Seller Central, I think you can only go like six months back. Now, you might have had some great months that you were doing well in performance. You know, like if you’re using Cerebro and you’ve got the Helium 10 Elite account, you can actually look back in history and see where you were ranking on sponsored ads, right? And then be like, wow, look at this month I was just crushing it on sponsored ads, right? So this is important to know that you don’t have access to that data in Seller Central, but if you’re using Adtomic, this is where I want you to go.
Bradley Sutton:
Go to the analytics page and you can select any campaign you want, Or just go back in time to see everything, right? So like, hey, I wanna see what was going on. I had a great month overall in a certain timeframe. Let’s just say, you know, April of 2021, this is like even up to two years ago, April 2021, all the way up to May 2021 and Helium 10 is going to put up that data for you. So guys, this is a great way to look at old performance. Like oh my goodness, these campaigns were actually terrible back in, in these days. But here’s one. My Project X broad campaign was at 20% ACoS. So now I can see what was working for me at that time of day. This is also good, especially for if you’ve got a seasonal product, all right?
Bradley Sutton:
You probably do seasonal campaigns and you want to do a look back at a year, you know, like you’re not, you might not be able to do that unless you have downloaded that in Seller Central. So, you know, like for example, if you have some products that really pop off during Christmas maybe you have some special campaigns at Christmas. Well, I would wanna look back at last year’s Christmas and the previous year’s Christmas to see what my campaign performance was, and then I would use that to gauge this year’s. So that’s a strategy. Make sure to look back at your old campaigns if your software has access to that. Strategy number five here is how to instantly see if you have search terms that you should negative match. So I think you guys know how to do this.
Bradley Sutton:
Just if you’re just downloading Excel files, right? If you’re do downloading Excel files, you’ve just gotta run, you know, some formulas and, and sort it out to have like minimum number of clicks or minimum spend or something like that. And then just try and find it. So if you’re using Adtomic, here’s the strategy of what you should use, and it’s probably something similar in the software that you’re using. I like going to the analytics page, and then I hit search terms. And then what I enter is PPC orders zero to zero, meaning that, hey, this is a search term that has gotten me zero orders, but in the spend field I put minimum $15. Now, this is not just like a one size fits all number, you know, maybe some of you have a different threshold you want to use or whatever.
Bradley Sutton:
I like just doing 15. And then sure enough, I can see all of these keywords here or ASINs where it’s been showing up as search terms zero spend here, there’s a few hundred dollars worth of spend. And so what I would do is I would just negative match these. Now theoretically speaking, I should have caught these earlier if I was doing my PPC correctly. But if you just want to quick, like if this is like day one and you’ve gotta Adtomic or day one and you’re downloading reports, that’s the number one easiest way to save potentially hundreds of dollars is immediately stopping spend where you’re just spending hundreds of dollars potentially, and you are getting no, and because you’re getting lots of clicks, but you are getting no conversion. So now on the flip side, something you guys should probably do is if it’s a very important keyword for your niche and you’re getting lots of clicks, right?
Bradley Sutton:
But no sales, there’s obviously some buyer intent. So people are seeing something in the search results, right? That makes ’em think that they might want your product. So if you got a hundred clicks, there’s buyer intent there, right? Why are they not buying it? So that might be something that you could, you know, try and figure out, but in the meantime, I’m still gonna pause that target negative, match it for now, or just pause if it’s an exact target match just stop the bleed and then maybe on the back end try and figure out, okay, why, why are people not buying this after they click on it? And try to figure that out. And then maybe if I change something, maybe I can go ahead and restart that target. Now how to see in seconds if you have search terms that have unfavorable ACoS.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright, unfavorable. So maybe there are a couple of sales, but the ACoS is just bad. So same page, I go to my analytics page, I go to search terms. And again, you put what works for you, like what you don’t want to see as far as ACoS. I’m putting a minimum 80% ACoS here, And then I could see there’s not that many here. I’m kind of doing the right thing, I guess you could say. All right, so here are some search terms that have come up where, here’s one, I’ve spent $80, here’s one I’ve spent $50 and one of them was 80% ACoS, 140% ACoS. Now, I could do a couple of things here, right? I, I could just go ahead and negative match this. I’m like, Hey, you know, at this ACoS, you know, I’m not gonna make any sales.
Bradley Sutton:
Or I’m not gonna be able to bring this down to, to 20% ACoS, but maybe you were just looking at this and you did one for 50% and your target is 30%. Well, hey, it’s doable. So maybe I just write there, go in and start you know, adjusting those bids down to try and get to my target ACoS. But if you just want a quick snapshot across your whole account of all of the bad ACoS, then this is the, the way to do it. And of course, you can do that if you’re downloading reports, it just takes a little bit more time, just, you know, sort it by the, you know, in your search term report sort it by the, the high ACoS and try and filter those out. Like use a Excel filter in order to see what ones are over a certain spend and over a certain ACoS.
Bradley Sutton:
So that is number six. Strategy number seven is how to view your PPC performance by product. This is something I think you now can do inside of Seller Central as of a couple of months ago. Those of you use Adtomic, just go on the analytics page to the product tab, The product tab and scroll down, it has a list of all of your products. You know, you might have 5, 6, 7 campaigns, sponsored brands, sponsored display, sponsored product, broad match auto for every product. And you just sometimes might wanna see what is going on as far as you’re advertising. Like here, I don’t even know who set this up, but we have this stackable egg rack and the bottom rack, like, you would never buy that by itself, because it’s, it’s just meant to add layers to this stackable egg tray, egg rack that we have.
Bradley Sutton:
For some reason, I was running ads, I gotta shut this off, but I didn’t even know I was running to this one. And of course, look at this, ACoS is 150% for this target. So I’m gonna probably pause this as a as a target. And I might wanna see what are my good performing once here, maybe I wanna see, you know, what, what about buy campaign, you know, so I would just hit this campaign button, and now I can see all of the campaigns that a certain product is being advertised for. And this is important to understand, hey, where is all of this spend? Is $4,000 of spend for this one product. What are the good performing campaigns? And sure enough, the ones that you see that are really bad are the dang test that my product team was doing to ruin my ACoS here.
Bradley Sutton:
But most of the ones that I set up are, are doing pretty good, like auto campaign with 20% ACoS. That’s pretty darn good. All right, so now I can go in campaign by campaign and then see what are the good performing ones and what are the ones that I might need to kind of optimize a little bit more. The next problem to solve here is how to feed newly found keywords from broaden auto campaigns to exact manual campaigns. Let’s talk about this strategy as a whole, because this might be the one of the most important ones I’ve talked about today. And it’s something that applies to everybody. Doesn’t matter what software you’re using, but super important guys that you have a strategy to migrate or at least copy keywords from one campaign to another. Let’s talk about why you’d want to do that.
Bradley Sutton:
So if you are running I always suggest running multiple campaigns multiple different match types of campaigns. So a match type is how Amazon decides what keywords to show you for. If you’re doing an exact manual, what we call performance campaign in Adtomic, that means you, you give Amazon a keyword coffin shelf, and Amazon is only technically gonna show you for coffin shelf, might show you for a plural like coffin shelves or something like that, right? That’s important. Cause like, hey, these are the keywords I know I want to show up for constantly in PPC I want you to just, you know, show me for this keyword right now. Then you’ve got broad and phrase match where, hey, let me enter the word coffin shelf, and then, you know, maybe coffin shelf decor large coffin shelf, red coffin shelf, Amazon will start showing you for all these others, if you have a broader phrase match going on, the broad is very loose these days.
Bradley Sutton:
So you gotta watch out for that. And then you have an auto campaign where you’re just like, Hey, Amazon, take the wheel and you just show me for whatever you think. Now, the reason why broad and auto are good is that Amazon can show you for keywords you are not even indexed for. And if you start getting sales for, you’re gonna get indexed potentially for these keywords that you don’t even have in your listing. So for example, you know, like in an auto campaign, Amazon might show me for gothic bedroom, let’s just say, because whatever the algorithm is thinks that you you know, my coffin shelf is relevant to it. Well, I can’t target that in PPC myself if I don’t, if I’m not index sport and, and I wouldn’t show up in organic search results. So this is the potential for me to show up for other keywords that I don’t even have index.
Bradley Sutton:
Now here’s the thing, when you have the auto campaign going, it can show you for ASINs like on product targeting campaigns. It can show you for keywords. And then what’s important is that it’s just kind of like throw, you know, like, think of a big bucket of water and then they just like throw it all, all over the place. It just sprays all over the place. And then we’re just trying to see what, where, where it ends up this, this water. Well, if the water ends up in this one place that works out really well, you kind of wanna do that purposely going forward, right? So for example, like, hey, they’re showing me for this gothic bedroom. I get like three or four sales, that’s great. I’m like, wow, you found a keyword. Well, I don’t want to wait and cross my fingers and hope that Amazon shows me for this keyword going forward, which is what happens to the auto.
Bradley Sutton:
Cause a in an auto campaign, Amazon could, should be showing you for hundreds if not thousands of different keywords. And it’s not doing it consistently cuz it’s just, just trying to see what’s going on, right? So in this situation, if you have good performing keywords that Amazon has discovered in a broad or auto campaign, you don’t want to wait for Amazon to keep showing you for that. You want to tell Amazon, show me for this ASIN, show me for this search term 24 hours a day if possible, right? And that’s why we have exact manual campaigns or performance campaigns, right? So if you’re, if you don’t have software, you’ve gotta download all of these like maybe every week or every couple weeks and see what you have, like maybe two or more sales on, and then find your manual campaign that it corresponds to and then get it in there.
Bradley Sutton:
Now that sounds like a mouthful, that is because it’s a very tedious and long process. And so let me show you how to do that in Adtomic here. All right, so what we’re gonna do is you are going to go here and set rules up. And this is like the core part of Adtomic, guys is setting rules. So here I’m looking at our egg tray rule set, and I have, as you can see here about five, six campaigns that I’m having all talk to each other. So I’ve got my performance campaign, that’s my exact manual campaign. I’ve got a sponsored display campaign that’s for targeting other products or other ASINs. I’ve got an auto campaign, I’ve got a product targeting campaign. I’ve got a research campaign, which I actually have broad going. And so basically what I do is I put these all into this one rule group and then I say, Hey, under my sponsor display campaign, I put match type ASIN.
Bradley Sutton:
What that means is, is I’m telling Amazon, or I’m telling Helium 10 or Adtomic, Hey, if you find an ASIN a good performing ASIN in your, in the auto campaign, I want you to create the new target or suggest to me to create this new target right here in my sponsor display and in my product targeting campaign, right? Those are two different types of product targeting campaigns. And if I have an ASIN that I know is converting for me, I obviously want Amazon to be showing me for there. Same thing, my performance campaign, my research campaign. If I find something in the auto campaign, hey, let’s test it out in my broad campaign, let’s test it out in my performance campaign. So this is like game changing as far as the time that it takes you to manage your PPC because now all of a sudden, you know, if I start getting good performing keywords, what’s going to happen is that now Adtomic is gonna give me these suggestions and say, Hey, we found this keyword that hit your criteria.
Bradley Sutton:
And by the way, I didn’t show it to you guys, but you also gotta put what your criteria is. My personal one is, I like doing, if it has two conversions, I don’t like doing, if it has one conversion. Cuz every now and then you might get a complete fluke where, where somebody hits something and then they just happen to buy your product like six days later and it has nothing to do with the original ad, right? So I like getting at least two conversions on an ace in or a keyword and under like 40% ACoS because I know I could adjust in the future. And then if, so, what Adtomics is gonna do, as soon as that criteria happens, it’s gonna pop up something to me and say, Hey, you got two conversions, 35% ACoS on this one keyword from this auto campaign.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you want to put this in the manual campaign? You just hit yes or no, and then it automatically does it. That’s it. One click and you’re done. You know, the amount of time that thing saves like that, that literally takes me three seconds to do. It would take at least, you know, maybe three minutes if not 10 minutes just to be able to make reports and fi find that and then go back to seller central, et cetera. If I really like how Adtomic is, is taking care of it, I can actually even put automation on and it takes zero seconds. I just say, Hey, Amazon, add this to, you know, these campaigns, you know, I personally don’t do automation on anything in Adtomic because I like to control and know exactly what’s going on in my PPC and be able to just say yes or no.
Bradley Sutton:
It only takes me a few seconds more. But if you’re just like, Hey, I’m super pressed for time, I just want automation to do it, you can absolutely do that. All right, so really, really important. Now the last strategy for Adtomic, I’m gonna talk about today, and there’s probably like, you know, 50 more that we can do, and these are just some of the cooler ones that I wanted to bring out is how to optimize your PPC campaign bids in just seconds. So another thing that I put as far as my rules and Adtomic goes is I put it like a target ACoS for my campaigns, right? It really goes down to my target level. So I say usually let me just show you guys for a lot of my campaigns, I put the target like 20%, sometimes I put 24%, sometimes I’ll have 30%.
Bradley Sutton:
And then basically what’s going to happen is on these targets that I have, if it’s overperforming or underperforming, and that’s something that’s important. Adtomic is gonna gimme suggestions. So let’s say my target is 20% and I’m getting 3% ACoS, that is not time to just like jump up for joy. You might be like, oh, this is great, I must have done the right thing. If your ACoS is only 3% and you’re maxing out your bid, you’re probably, you are leaving money on the table, Because unless you’re at the very top of the page, you know already which by the way, Adtomic links with your keyword tracker, so you can see where you’re showing up on the page. You know, it’s not, it’s, this is not good because maybe you could be doubling or tripling your sales if you increase your bid and you’d still be under your target bid.
Bradley Sutton:
But so don’t think that if you have this tiny number of ACoS that you are just crushing the game, you’re probably leaving money on the table. So if you have super low ACoS, you might want to increase the bid to test if you can get some wider reach, more impressions, higher placement, right? The flip side is what you more normally think about, Hey, my target ACoS is 20%, I’m paying 40%. Well, I, I need to get that bid down to try and get to my target. And so that’s basically what Adtomic is doing is calculating based on what your ACoS is, what you might need to do. Like for example, here’s a broad match target wood egg holder. My target is 20% and it’s at 44%. So it’s like, hey, drop your bid 13 cents in order to get a little bit closer to your target.
Bradley Sutton:
And so if I wanted to go ahead and do that, I just hit this approved suggestion and boom, it’s done. I don’t have to go into Seller Central or anything. Here’s the one that’s the opposite, good grief. Here’s one where my ACoS is 0.77%. Man, that’s pretty crazy. 0.77%. So in this case, obviously it’s telling me to increase my bid. Who knows, maybe I can get some more play there. Here’s an ASIN one that was only 4%. So again, it’s telling me to increase my bid, and potentially I might be able to get some more play. So this is super, super important guys, that you guys get these strategies done, whether you have Adtomic or not. If some of this stuff I intrigues you and you want to check Adtomic out, go to h10.me/adtomic to get more information, you can add it on to any account.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, even if you have a Platinum account, you can add Adtomic for, I believe it’s $199 a month, but I mean a hundred, what do you value your time at? You value your time at $50 an hour. Adtomic will save you more than four hours you know, a month, guys. I mean, it saves me like probably like 50 hours a month of time. What I can do in Adtomic compared to what I would have to do if I was just downloading reports. Now let, let’s quickly switch over to Helium 10 Follow-up. Follow-up is something that is very, very important, you guys need to be using this goes to all levels of Helium 10, and this is for increasing your reviews, And I guarantee you, 80% of you probably don’t even realize some of these things that you have complete access to without having to pay 1 cent even more, right?
Bradley Sutton:
So number one, how to automate the Amazon request review with special time delays and other filters. Now, this is important because the request review is what Amazon has on their order pages where you just hit the button request review, and then Amazon sends a predetermined message out. This is the easiest and safest way to ask customers for a review because it’s a hundred percent terms of service compliant because all you’re doing is triggering an Amazon message that they have provided as a means to get a review. So it’s like, this is from Amazon. So before we used to have a Chrome extension that would trigger those for you. And when that went away or that, you know, became like not used, people thought, oh, Helium 10 Follow-up doesn’t have that Helium 10 Follow-up is only about doing emails, right? No, that’s not it.
Bradley Sutton:
We are triggering this, and this is what I actually suggest doing. So the way to do it is just go to Follow-up in your account and even like the base plans of Helium 10 have this guys, all right, then you go to email automation. So I’m going to hit here an email automation, new automation, and then this is the one that you guys want to pick. Send a message to request or review. This is not, oh, make a new email so that we can request review when, whenever you read request review inside of helium 10, that’s what it is talking about. It is talking about the Amazon request review. And you add filters here. I like putting this discount of less than 30%. I don’t want a request review going out to customers who have gotten discounts or sales or coupons or things like that.
Bradley Sutton:
I like also doing it by ASIN. You can do it by product name, you can do it by the price, you can do it by the SKU, and then you can put here how long to wait after the order is placed for the review to go out. And then that’s it, it’s done. Like you set this once and then forget it. Literally, set and forget it. And now every single order that is from that ASIN or from that product that doesn’t have a discount and now you have to wait a certain number of times after chips, and then the person is gonna get a request, a review. So this can definitely increase your review velocity. And it’s really good to put this timer on it, you know, because like if you have a supplement, I suggest waiting for like 20 or 25 days after shipment in order to send a request review because somebody needs some time to be able to know if they like the product or not, right?
Bradley Sutton:
So but if you have another product like party supplies, maybe they have a party right away. Usually, people who do party supplies get their stuff like kind of late in the game, right? So you want that review to go out as soon as possible. So that’s why it’s cool to kind of put that delay on there. But guys, that is like the easiest possible thing you can do. You need to set that up, ASAP. Now, let’s just say you’re setting it up now and you’re good going forward because you’re gonna have all of these, you know, request reviews sent out automatically, but you’re like, wait a minute, in the last month I’ve got like a thousand reviews or a thousand orders. I’ve sold a 500 orders, whatever.
Bradley Sutton:
What do I do for all of these? Because the automatic request review is not gonna start until new orders, right? Well, watch this. All you have to do is you’re going to hit orders on your Follow-up page. And you can do this manually too, at any time. Maybe you don’t have request reviews set up for all your products. I go to orders, find the ones that don’t say that they have one, like a message queued or sent, right? Because you know, that’s gonna be for most of you guys. If you’ve never used Follow-up, it won’t say queued or sent for anything, and then you just copy or select all of them you want and just hit this button. One button guys request a review, Like watch, I’m gonna do it for one of them right here.
Bradley Sutton:
You guys can see how easy it is. Let’s go ahead and do this one here, and I’m just gonna hit request review. Do you want a request review for this order and just confirm it? Now, this one I can’t actually do because it’s beyond 30 days old, but you guys can see how, how kind of easy it is. So that’s just a way to bulk request review orders that you don’t even have an automation set up for yet. The last is to how do you check your review velocity for your products over time? How do you check your review velocity for your products over time? This is something that’s important because if you’re requesting reviews, you kind of want to be able to know, Hey, is this working? So first of all at the account level on your Follow-up dashboard, you’ll be able to see all of your tracked product ratings.
Bradley Sutton:
Like, look at this order rating, conversion rate is 16% on all these products, Because I requested 103 ratings and I actually got 11 of them of the 66 orders that were, that were delivered. So 11 out of 66, That’s 16%. And then based on the number that I requested, it’s about 10%. I could see how many reviews were requested, how many message were sent, et cetera. If I want to keep drilling down, I would go here into the product ratings tab. I hit product ratings, and then I could see my products here. Let’s just look at this egg tray one, or this egg rack. All right, I’m going to hit this graph right here. And this graph is going to take me to the details of what’s going on in this products reviews.
Bradley Sutton:
So I could see my average rating. I can see how many five stars I could see in the last seven days, how many ratings I’ve received, how many reviews I’ve requested. Look at this here. I’ve gotten over the last 30 days, six ratings received out of 79 reviews requested. That’s, that’s pretty dang good, right? That’s almost 10% of what I asked for. I was able to get a review, right? So, and I can see, I can graph it over time. I can see my, my review velocity over time. A lot of data here I get, I bet you 90% of you guys didn’t even realize you have access to, but this is something that we all know how important reviews are, and most of you guys are already paying for Helium 10. You don’t need a Diamond account for this, you don’t need an Elite account.
Bradley Sutton:
This is on the base plan, guys. You have access to all of this information. And so it’s just a no-brainer to activate this and then Follow-up, no pun intended, with how your Follow-up is doing so that you can see you know, how your review requests are going. Cuz maybe you wanna, like, maybe it’s not great, your review velocity compared to how many of you reviews you’re requesting. So maybe you wanna move that date, you know about when you actually send the email. Maybe you wanna make it slower, maybe you wanna make it faster, but start experimenting with these guys, guys or have your team do it. All right guys. That’s it for this seller strategy masterclass. We went over Adtomic today. We went over Follow-up. I hope you guys were able to get some benefit. Remember, most of you are using Helium 10.
Bradley Sutton:
The few of you who aren’t, I guarantee you’re probably using another software that probably has similar capabilities, not as great as Helium 10. Obviously, nobody is as great as Helium 10. But whether you’re not, whether even if you’re not using Helium 10, make sure that your software is using these kind of strategies in your business. And if not, yeah, might be time to make the switch over to Helium 10. You know, I rarely give out this code, but anybody who wants to switch over to Helium 10, just use SSP10 and you’ll save 10% off for life. All right guys. Hope you enjoyed this episode. We’ll see you in the next one. Bye-Bye.
In this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we had the privilege to interview Jason McLellan, an 8-figure seller on Amazon. He generously shared insights into his Amazon brand Vitacup, including his launch strategy, coupon strategy, and his use of AI advertising partners. Jason also allowed us to see his listings, storefront, and Amazon activities, so we could all learn from his successes. We talked about his unique strategies like using emojis in your bullet points, checking other parts of his listings, and even shared insights on cool widgets inside his A+ Content. In addition, Jason shared his Amazon Posts strategy, the widgets present on his listings, and how to he uses influencers to boost his brand’s sales. He also gave us tips on how to get tons of reviews for your Walmart listing and why he has 100 different variations in one listing. Towards the end of the episode, Jason shared his favorite Helium 10 tool and revealed a secret that 90% of Amazon sellers are not doing a critical activity. He also offered a 20% discount on Vitacup this coming April 25!
Tune in to this episode if you want to learn from an 8-Figure Amazon seller.
In episode 445 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jason discuss:
- 03:19 – Jason’s Backstory And How He Got Started On Amazon
- 04:25 – $13 Million Dollars In Gross Amazon Sales
- 06:29 – Talking About His Coupon Strategy
- 08:04 – Jason’s Amazon Launch Strategy
- 13:32 – Using Emojis In Your Amazon Bullet Points
- 15:15 – Why An AI Advertising Partner Is Important
- 18:08 – Checking Other Parts Of His Listings
- 18:58 – A Cool Widget Inside You’re A+ Content
- 19:59 – Inspiration From This Brand – Amazon Posts Widget
- 21:24– Influencer And Amazon Posts Strategy
- 23:17 – Getting A Ton Of Reviews For Your Walmart Listing
- 30:03 – 100 Different Variations In One Listing?
- 33:48 – Jason’s 60-Second Tips
- 36:11 – His Favorite Helium 10 Tool
- 38:27 – 90% Of Amazon Sellers Are Not Doing This
- 41:40 – Get 20% Discount On Vitacup
- 41:58 – How To Contact Jason McLellan
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today, for the first time on the podcast, we’ve got an eight figure seller here who is completely opening up his brand and allows us to completely tear apart his listings and storefront and all of his activities that he does on Amazon so that we can learn from it. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Do you wanna see how your listing or maybe competitor’s listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you wanna compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other. Maybe you wanna see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings. You can do that and more with the Helium 10 Tool Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. So, welcome to the show, this is your first time on the show. So what I always like to do is kind of like get your superhero origin story. Were you born and raised around this area, or where do you come from?
Jason:
Yeah. I was born and raised around the Kearney Mesa area, so deep into San Diego. And then over
Bradley Sutton:
What high school did you go to?
Jason:
I went to two. I went to a private school, Claremont Christian. And then I switched over to Madison.
Bradley Sutton:
So Oh, Madison. Yes, I know the, yeah, we played them in basketball sometimes. Okay, cool. Cool. And then did you go to college after that?
Jason:
Yeah, I did. I did my first two years up in the Bay Area, Marin in county at a college called Dominican University, and then I switched, came back to San Diego, went to and finished at USD.
Bradley Sutton:
So you like doing this two year and two year thing throughout your Scholastic career, huh?
Jason:
Not even that man. Like my first like, big job was on the East Coast with Liz Claiborne. So I stayed out there two years and I came back and settled back in San Diego.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Us, you were a Terrero then, right?
Jason:
Yes, I was a Terrero.
Bradley Sutton:
Excellent. Excellent. So what was your major at or your USD
Jason:
The business emphasizes international trade.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And is that upon graduation, is that what you kind of got yourself into, or what did you do?
Jason:
So, the first company I worked with was a candle manufacturer. And ya I was doing some international customer service, and then I was running the logistics after that, and then totally something completely different. Got the opportunity to join Liz Clayborne and I ended up part-time in their vendor manage inventory department and part-time in their business re-engineering, and then rolled full-time into their business re-engineering department. So I was there for two years and did a variety of projects.
Bradley Sutton:
What does that mean? What do you say? Business re-engineering?
Jason:
Business re-engineering was big term back in the late nineties, mid-nineties, late nineties. You’re basically looking at how to make your business efficient. Going through, doing process breakdowns, looking at how you could just collapse steps, tasks writing a lot of SOPs
Bradley Sutton:
Now, how did you get into, what was your first entry into the Amazon world?
Jason:
First entry to Amazon World funny enough is second company after I worked for coming back to San Diego, I stuck in the apparel industry. Then I ended up getting into book wholesale as a, as a buyer. And we were a this was back when Amazon was only booked and they did have some, you know, key strategic partnerships like toys or us and other ones that they ended up putting out of business. But my last probably six months, I inherited into my buying responsibilities. Amazon is a customer, we’re a wholesaler.
Bradley Sutton:
But on the books, on the book side,
Jason:
On the book side, yeah. So trying to figure out missed opportunities and other things, making sure we’re buying accordingly. So I was getting there. When I took over, they gave me their the missed opportunity speed. So I was just, it was amazing, just like the sheer amount of volume of books they were looking for. Huh. And so that always stuck with me.
Bradley Sutton:
Just fast forward to the end. Like what, what did you guys end like last year in sales? You know I can just see in Helium 10, just the first page of your storefront, you know, looks like there’s about, you know, 2-3 million dollars worth of worth of sales there on the first page. And you’ve got like, you know, pages and pages more products. So around where are you guys? What kind of revenue are you guys doing a year?
Jason:
We did almost 13. We’ll do somewhere between 15 and 16 this year.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. So
Jason:
A million to be,
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. So like what was it when you started, when you got there?
Jason:
It was three mils and change. Okay. So it’s been a great, it’s been a great journey. I mean, there’s, I mean, it’s been this crazy journey, crazy experiences. I mean, Amazon is always evolving, always changing, never stays stagnant. So it’s been,
Bradley Sutton:
I don’t tell, tell me a little about the brand though. Like, I know who you know, some major brands are, but was this a brand that is, is in brick and mortar a lot? Is it purely an online brand?
Jason:
No, we’re a mix. So we, we do D2C through our own website. We are in brick and mortar, target, Walmart sprouts since you’re in the area. And some other regional grocery chains. And we’re on Amazon, Amazon, Canada, Walmart, USA as a 3P seller in addition as a 1P.
Bradley Sutton:
I see you have a climate, what did you have to use to apply to get climate pledge friendly here?
Jason:
I didn’t have to apply for anything. It was by the nature of our package design you know, Amazon how we package things smoothing on our ground how we package our ground coffee and the, the compact size, the weight and the dimensions. It just automatically gave it to us. I’m not complaining at
Bradley Sutton:
All. Yeah. Yeah.
Jason:
Badges or badges, they catch attention.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. I like those. I also noticed just here that you utilize 20% off coupons on a lot of your things. So like I, I’m assuming you’ve tested a lot of different things. Discounts and coupons And things and, and this green tw thing and the, this 20% number seems to, to perform best for you?
Jason:
It does. Kind of the, you know, hopefully none of my competitors are listening to this, but I mean, we get a 20% conversion on a 20%, and that’s kind of the math on it. We’ve tried lower and the conversion doesn’t pencil out.
Bradley Sutton:
Hmm. Okay. So, and so this is like an evergreen thing you kind of have on, on o your skews, huh?
Jason:
It’s an evergreen thing. I call it the drug cuz we can’t get off of it. Slowly trying to whittle, whittle down. I don’t we’ve on some things we’ve slowly removed, but for the majority, yeah. You know for everyone who doesn’t have Vita Cup, we’re a functional coffee. We’re, we’re our in functional means that we’ve infused our, our product with vitamins and super feeds. To give you something a little bit more so we’re a premium product within the coffee ecosystem. And so we need to entice the consumer for trial, and that’s what the 20% does. We’re consumable product, so we’re, we’re always trying to build a flow of, of people coming in and moving them from trial to subscribe and save. Because as a consumable product, that’s where they’re really the the money is And how you make yourself profitable.
Bradley Sutton:
Talk to me about your launch strategy, you know, as an established brand and you’ve got so many SKUs and so many customers on subscribe and save. Like do you promote to an off Amazon audience like, Hey guys, we just launched on Amazon. Are, are you just doing launch like a regular Amazon seller who’s starting from scratch, you know, like, you know, doing some discounted PPC or since you’re such a strong brand are you just able to launch at regular price and, and nothing’s, you know, no special campaigns and, and you can get to page one for the keywords that you need to,
Jason:
You know what I’m gonna say is, is thank goodness for the honeymoon period you get on launch I mean if you start, I mean, it’s kind of a loaded question even for an established brand. Sure. Within that has relevancy within the space, in which you’re always launching to. If you start looking at how many paid spots versus organic spots within your organic search. You have, you have to have a PPC strategy there, you’re not gonna succeed even with that honeymoon period because the honeymoon period’s gonna push you up in organic ranking. You might, and you’re gonna have first page, but start breaking down the, the rows. You got sponsored brand, then you got the first four rows of the supposedly search results are all paid. And then the fifth one is organic, and then below that you have more paid. And then you have highly featured, which is all paid to play. And then, so really it’s like when you get that fifth and sixth rows, that’s when you start getting organic search. But how many people really scroll down there? So yes, we launch with a very strategic PPC strategy knowing what keywords that we want to target on. We bake those keywords into the listings title below points A+ content.
Bradley Sutton:
Looks like you have premium A+ content.
Jason:
Yes.
Bradley Sutton:
So amazing.
Jason:
Yeah. So I don’t know if the offer’s still going on, but we, we saw that the if you applied the brand’s story to all of your products, it unlocked A+ Content for you. And we took advantage of that. And I really love it because there’s different components, video and other stuff that you can get.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. I didn’t even realize..I mean that’s how I figured this was premium because I was like, wait a minute, I don’t remember videos being a regular A+ content being a thing.
Jason:
Yeah. What I have to say is you really want the premium A+ content. Cuz it really then goes back down to the how the consumer is searching for product and it’s not desktop. The majority of searches are going through mobile. And if you look at that, I’m not a hundred percent happy of how the layout is, but if you take that look, that same layout on mobile device is so much, the experience is really great.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting.
Jason:
So that’s what you want. You know, we’ve been, we’ve been optimizing our search experience for mobile for probably the last three years. We had a gut before they released the data you can get, get out of business reports on what the percentage of experience was via mobile, via desktop. And it’s been like, and so as Amazon’s releasing this stuff to catch up to that, we’ve been trying to take advantage of it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. I’m just like trying to break, you know, it’s rare that we have bigger companies on here who they, they don’t care about competition because it’s like people there’s not gonna be somebody who’s like, Hey, let me go ahead and start a $13 million here tea and coffee pod brand. So you have nothing to fear here, but yeah, I’d like to take advantage that you’re opening your brand here. So I’m just, I just wanna get behind some of your strategies. So we talked a little about your coupon strategy here. You’ve got great images and, and videos and things. So are you doing these in-house? Are you outsourcing these assets?
Jason:
We’re doing, we’re doing it in-house. I mean, I’m very blessed. So you gotta go back to the founding of Vita Cup. Vita Cup was founded by our CEO, Brandon Fisherman. Brandon Fisherman, before this owned one of the largest, it was 150 employee internet marketing agency in California. He incubated this company Vita Cup out of that company, sold the other company off and focused on this a hundred percent. Coming over with him was the head creative director of that digital marketing agency. So I have my head creative Irene at Vita Cup who’s just a rockstar, is a hundred percent digital marketing experience. And so I’m just very fortunate, like we get a deep discussions on like, what we should do for ads, and then on the flip side, I’ll tell you like, I have her, she’s so in tuned with it. Like, we have the philosophy, you can always do better. She’s like, Hey, you know, what can we throw up and manage by experiments? Or can we run an AB test on creative? Like, let’s try something new. You know, everything’s always continually influx and changing and like, what can we do? Just eek out a couple more conversion points.
Bradley Sutton:
So like, I mean, video editing everything’s in-house,
Jason:
Everything’s in-house. I think there’s a couple services we might use for like, video that we outsource, but layout direction is all done in-house.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Cool. Here we go. Like I know you’re dialed into to Amazon and you have good connections in Amazon too. They, they don’t get mad that you’re using emojis in your bullet points. Like nobody’s ever frowned on that.
Jason:
Let’s not talk about that, I don’t want them watching this. Like, we haven’t been slapped yet. I mean, anytime we do an upload, I know it gets flagged.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, when you upload it, there’s a message that says, Hey, what’s up with these emojis?
Jason:
Yeah. That’s not compliant.
Bradley Sutton:
But it still lets you do it though, huh?
Jason:
It still lets me do it.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. I mean, to me, that’s kind of like the thing, like if you’re in a category where you’re selling white coffin shelves or something, for example, you know, it’s really hard to see on a white background. So, so I’ve noticed that in those categories, like Amazon kind of doesn’t mind overall if you don’t have complete white background where it’s kinda like, you know what, on, in that case, it’s like the worst that could happen is just they, they give you a su suppression, you have to fix it right away, but it’s not like it’s gonna get your account suspended. So I wonder if this emoji thing might be, might be similar to there where Yeah, it’s technically not not you know, compliant, but Amazon knows that in some categories it actually performs better, you know?
Bradley Sutton:
And so they’re like, you know what? We’ll, we’ll just let this slide unless somebody we would agree starts putting a bunch of eggplant emojis or something, you know, on here. But, okay. So yeah, I really like the way you have your bullet points set up here. I see that you are doing some defensive product display ads potentially over here. Yeah. So how do you know, do you just like, experiment with bids to see, hey, what, what, what’s gonna get you the, the position or, or what do you do there?
Jason:
So we, we have partnered and have been partnered for the last four years with an outside AI agency. But we have a very successful partnership, and their AI has, has done this great service and growth over the years. You know, I, I do recommend there’s, there’s only so much you can humanly test especially when you’re, you’re scaling at certain levels. I’d recommend to anyone to really check out an AI advertising partner as a human, like trying to test all those placements, what’s working, what’s not, and then getting rid of the stuff that’s not working. It”s not humanly possible. Yeah. At the scale we’re working at it’s, it’s just too much. So, it’s been great. It’s saved me a ton of time.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Next thing I see, moving down the listing here, definitely using some virtual bundles. Like you haven’t done them all, but like, at least you have this slot here so that it’s pushing some of the ads down. I like that strategy. What made you just do one here? Like one bundle?
Jason:
So it depends. Like some have all five slots. Some have only one. I came up with a matrix on how we were creating ’em, and I looked at visibility and which ones I started aligned to. That would make sense. And then since then on some of these, we’re actually starting to create physical items, bundles, which we’re doing through fulfilled by merchant. And so we’re peeling those off as a virtual bundle. But yeah, some of our, some of our top performing ASINs, they’re gonna, you’re gonna see five come across. And I, we’ve been doing that. I don’t know what virtual rental’s been around since
Bradley Sutton:
It’s been a couple years at
Jason:
Least. Yeah, a couple years. Yeah. We were first introduced to it, I think either through launchpad or SAS. And we yeah, immediately, like it’s free advertising for yourself. You fill up another space.
Bradley Sutton:
No cost per click or anything on there?
Jason:
No. And then some we just started to peel on how we can do through FBM, because then we can start running a little more advertising a little bit. There’s, there’s a little more strategic things we can do to push ’em that we know that that’ll cause more growth.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Again, with the defensive ads, so like you do defensive product targeting ads, and you’ve got the entire row here of products with all your own brand. That’s super cool.
Jason:
Once again, I had to give credit the AI. They have a really great methodology on that
Bradley Sutton:
To be able to check what it takes to get there. Now, you know, you know, obviously you’re gonna have to, you know, bid very high. Are you actually getting conversions in virtual bundles in your defensive ads and things, and is it still worth it?
Jason:
It’s still worth it overall. Our, our whole category, we’re a very commoditized competitive space. And so, and I suspect that the CPC, the bit amount on it is not that much for the virtual. If pure competitor, please don’t target it my ACoS, but I suspect it’s, it’s not that much because we have all of ’em failed. If you look at some other high performing listings, we have a good portion of them fulfilled, but not all.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. What is this you know, just for those who don’t have this or don’t know, like, what, what section is this? You know, people know about description, people know about A+ content, but the from the brand. So where can I go in Seller Central if I’m looking at this for the first time, and where can I, you know, get this kind of cool widget?
Jason:
So that is what they call your brand story, and that’s what unlocked all of our A+ Content during the promotional period. And if I remember correctly, when we put this together you access it through your A+ content section. Okay,
Bradley Sutton:
Cool.
Jason:
And it’s, once again, it’s another piece of content graphic in which you can fill up space, tell a great story, it’s gonna run across all of yours. I think graphic is important for engagement with the in consumer. It allows one more touchpoint to keep them longer on your page from breaking concentration and going, trying to find something else.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Scrolling down here. We already look at your premium or the top part of your premium plus content. You know, the cool video that you have there. Since you have over a hundred products, do you have a rhyme and reason as far as what you choose to be the one that you have under, under this like product grid here, under your featured product section here at the bottom?
Jason:
Yeah. That’s a great question. We actually put a lot of thought into that. New product launches, some of it’s actually gut. But over time we actually update and refine these. We, we start looking under like what’s frequently bought together not just in what Amazon’s showing us, but what we’re, we’re pulling out and hashing through the order files and looking at what people bought together. What makes sense, what do we think that in addition to that, what do you think people are gonna also has a high repeat rate that we want them to introduce them to? So some of it’s partly we know there’s our affinity for it. We wanna highlight something that we know that has used as an advertising spot to promote another, another product that has a high repeat rate, which if they bought purchase, there’s a higher propensity that they’re gonna repurchase it, which will lead ’em to sms.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Excellent. I noticed this is in the unique finds category. So like how did, how did you, I don’t know. Is that on purpose or
Jason:
No, no idea. Amazon bots. We don’t know why some things like that occur. As long as sales aren’t going down, we’re okay.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Makes sense. Inspiration from this brand. So, wait, are these, these, these are your Amazon posts or these, these are from.
Jason:
These are our Amazon posts. Okay. So we’re we’re, we’re a very big believer in Amazon posts we were fortunate to be a beta tester on it. And so we embraced it early on. We saw, well, you know, no idea where the posts actually get posted to. It was all random. It’s still random. We still have no idea. But we really did see that it was a great way to once again, hit a touch point in which we can engage with the in consumer in a meaningful way. And we, you know, we, we enjoy looking at how much we, we continue to grow on followers, and we and so we know customers are actually ingesting the content
Bradley Sutton:
Now how many of these are your, you know, own in-house? I mean, some of these look like UGC, some, some user-generated content here. We,
Jason:
We repurpose a lot of our UGC content for it.
Bradley Sutton:
How are you getting the UGC?
Jason:
have a whole social, I have a small social media team they engage with. We have some brand ambassadors and some influencers. And so we have rights to it. And then we also have some rights through some other programs we participate that they, we participate in that we get the UGC content. And then there’s just stuff that we probably requested that we have rights to. So having engagement with brand ambassadors really helps on the UGC side.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. have you done the what is it called again, you know, now that Amazon Post came first, but then you allowed, you know, Amazon Post allowed you to get brand followers and things, and then isn’t there a new thing, I forgot what it’s called offhand, but now you can reach out to those brand followers.
Jason:
So customer engagement tool.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. That’s the one.
Jason:
. Yeah. So yeah. And that was yeah, we’ve, we’ve participating in that since state one. I love it. Absolutely. Love, love it. If anyone wants to really stay engaged with a brand, they’re, they’re, they really love on Amazon go and click follow. Please go and follow ViCAP and go to our brand store and on Amazon and click that little follow button. We will send out a weekly email. It’ll be highly graphic. It’ll contain two graphic images. And we utilize it to, to not just hit our brand followers, but they rolled out when was the Helium 10 Sell and Scale?
Bradley Sutton:
Around September of last year.
Jason:
So around September of last year, they rolled out three new product groups that you can launch too. And some of them are over the last like 365, you’re people who’ve bought high repeat, and then there’s another, I forget the other segmentation. And, and two of them, maybe three can only hit every two weeks. Brand followers you can hit every week. And so we rotate through it. And, you know, it’s, there a call to action anywhere there that you’re allowed to do? Or is it mainly just kind of informationat with, yeah, so here’s the thing. You can’t have a call to action. Okay. So you have to, so you have to be creative in your wording. Everyone, if you wanna know how to be creative, go and follow me. I need more followers on and you’ll, and start, start reading on our call to action. But you can get creative on it that makes it very terms of service compliant. You just have to td and you have to think about your product. But yeah, I love it. Like, there’s, everyone complains has been complaining, there’s no way for me to reach out to my customers. There’s no way for me to engage into it. It’s very restrictive in what you can and can’t do. Cuz let’s be honest, like over this course of a decade, two decades that Amazon’s been there, I mean, people have, sellers have abused, like there’s a small portion, but they have abused. So they’ve had to put rails on. And it’s always been that way. I mean, from eBay, people, sellers were abusing to try and make a sale. Sure. And a lot of that meth methodologies have shifted over. So I get why Amazon’s done a lot of stuff. I get why they have rails on it, but it would be I, I’m just hopeful they’re gonna start loosening more and more up as they gain a little more confidence in how sellers are utilizing their tool.
Bradley Sutton:
Well for you then, you know, like obviously if there’s a call to action. Like let’s say you’re doing Amazon attribution, you’re doing a off Amazon campaign, you could see the kind of impact it’s gonna have, you know, PPC, you can see the impact, you know, with Amazon posts and the engagements and stuff. There’s not per se an ROI tool where you can see, so how, how are you gauging success and how are you gauging the attention you need to give? Because like you just said, you’ve got this weekly cadence now where you’re sending this out, but like, how do you know that effort is worth it? Like, what kind of metrics are you even looking at?
Jason:
So we look at, like, for Asen, especially on one of the bigger engagement groups, or like, did we see a spike in sales on the product that we’re featuring in there? Is here, cuz we’re always trying to test out different creative. Like, is there a creative, like it popped, okay, what creative was it? Let’s log that in. Next time we send that creative out, did it pop again? Is there certain creative types that the consumer’s engaging more with? Amazon posts, one of the metrics we always have looked at is just followers. How is our followers group growing? And the same we’re doing with live Amazon Live it’s, it’s, you know, have we seen an above average, normal growth in followers when we do an Amazon Live? So there’s, there’s not these hardcore KPIs you can, can like ingest in and how successful it is. But I think if you can grow your co who’s, who’s your consumer group on who’s following you you can track it. I think that’s a good KPI because the broader the group, the more you’re gonna be able to retarget them in customer engagement and the more people you know, are gonna see stuff about your brand.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Are you in charge of your Walmart listings as well?
Jason:
Yes. And we’re continuing to go and try and refine that.
Bradley Sutton:
You’ve got like 7,000 reviews on one of your Walmart. Did you use that one thing where you can migrate reviews over, or, or are these 7,000 actual Walmart reviews?
Jason:
No, we engaged with a couple different companies yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
That are out. The ones that can, can take reviews and wouldn’t it be nice if Amazon offered that?
Jason:
It it would, it would be great. So yes, we’re able to port all of the mortar over. Yeah, we’re still really trying, we’re still young in the in the Walmart three piece space. We’re still how
Bradley Sutton:
How’s sales on Walmart, you know, at the same, you know, 13 million on Amazon, how about Walmart in that same time period?
Jason:
No, I’ll do a thousand dollars a day. You know, so we’re looking at about 30k. But, so it’s, it’s not much. I, I really like the way they’re going. I really equate, you know, you know, history tends to repeat itself. You know, I, fortunately I gotta live between the eBay to Amazon transition and I really see that going on right now with Amazon and Walmart. Amazon’s still gonna retain major relevance, unlike, I mean, eBay definitely has the snitches. I still sell stuff some collectibles. I’ll flip collectibles on eBay, and I think it’s a great platform for that and some other stuff. But you know, Amazon came to all sellers and was like, how dare eBay give you non-US customer support? How eBay hates your sellers, they abuse you. And it was, in the early days, Amazon was incredible. You’d always get someone on the US on the phone.
Jason:
It would like, it would be easy to get through issues. And you know, now Amazon’s become what they scoffed at eBay. You know, there’s only it in the online marketplace. No one has really figured out how to really scale and manage that growth to, to mass. And I think that’s what we’re going through now. And I think it’s interesting that we’re seeing, seeing Walmart at this point in time, really starting to scale up. It almost feels very strategic. It almost feels like, you know, what Amazon did to eBay. And I think they have a huge opportunity to have long-term growth. And definitely we’re starting to invest more time and energy into the Walmart side.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Going back to Amazon, I just noticed one of your listings here looks like it’s got like 100 different variations here. So Yeah. What’s the thought process here? Because that green tea that we were breaking down only has like two or three and a couple of others, and I’m just looking like Yeah. At a million variations here. So like, what was the thought process to have so many here as opposed to splitting some of these out?
Jason:
So part of the thought process is, is we have, we found, and as our catalog’s grown, this has grown, like variating it together people if they click initially, and, and I’ll do like thought process and funneling ’em in. If someone clicks on our listing, they’re like, they’re intrigued about a functional coffee. They’re intrigued about finding some type of improvement that they can get through their day, through their, their morning cup of coffee or afternoon cup of coffee, whether it be our genius blend or slim blend. Our focus blend, you know each has different super foods addressing different needs. It allows them for discovery. They might click in on Genius, but they might end up on focus blend, which is a mushroom and coffee blend. Or they might go towards our extra shot, which is a dark roast coffee with a shot of espresso in it plus some B vitamins, which I’m drinking right now.
Jason:
Like if you need to pick me up, that’ll do. It’s, it’s my afternoon picking. Pick me up for me. And so it allows us, and then I’m gonna, I’m gonna be honest, like it gets us, you know, you look at it, we have 20,000 reviews because of it aggregated together gets us up higher on the bsr. There is some visibility being in the first page of bestseller ranking. People shop that, you know, the closer you can get to the top, the more draft you’re gonna get.
Bradley Sutton:
So yep, you’re number 54 and single-serve coffee capsules. This is where it comes in. Like most of us, or maybe I’m thinking from Helium 10 standpoint, but from most, a lot of other sellers too, like didn’t, like when Amazon changed to give one single BSR for a whole variation because then you can’t really.
Jason:
Screwed. It’s screwed up. It’s screwed up how you guys are scraping stuff, like you’re formula scraping, but like you’re calculating off. Yeah,
Bradley Sutton:
I, nobody can calculate. No, you know, nobody can calculate, you know, overall, like, so, so the, but the number refers to, you know, the, the estimated sales is for everything now put together, but, you know, without looking at reviews, you don’t know which one is selling. But now all of a sudden, you know, you might not have had one SKU that could crack the top 100 in a sub bsr main BSR category right now. Now you’re showing up. So now, but all these variations that you have on this one do you also have standalone listings for like this flavor or something so that.
Jason:
No.
Bradley Sutton:
So the only way I can find this Vita Cup extra shot coffee plus espresso is in this variation family here.
Jason:
Not necessarily. We’re also running PPC against it, so for search and, and we do rank an organic search for each individual one under keywords. So yeah, like, yeah. And then when it comes up, you’re gonna, like going back to, you’re gonna see that 20% coupon, you’re gonna see the total number of reviews, so, and you’re gonna see a great image that clearly says what the product is. Our images are very strategic on how we design packaging for Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Cool. Now this is just a bunch of stuff that I can see, you know, looking at your, your storefront and things, but what haven’t we talked about? Like what are some strategies that you guys are utilizing that you think, you know a lot of sellers, you know, might not, might not be, like, do you have any unique things that you’re doing that we haven’t
Jason:
Mentioned? No, we, I don’t know a lot of the stuff’s. I mean, I can kind of go through some high level stuff that we, we do and, and I think we really take a really hardcore approach is we’ve, we’ve maintained our data since 2017 when the company’s was created. So we really understand our cohorts and how we grow it, and making sure that the customers that we continue to add to it are repeating through that and the percentages is going. And then we really have been focused on understanding what our product repeat rates are. And then you can get into one of our business successes is striking a balance between short, what I’d call short-term revenue versus long-term revenue. You can have a product that is going to, the bids are cheap, has a lot of people searching for it.
Jason:
You can sell that thing all day long, and you can fund a lot of funnel, a lot of advertising money into it. And you can have great short-term sales, but you’re building no long-term revenue because repeat rates is much lower on it. Versus where you have a product where the repeat rate is phenomenal, like people are, the odds are people are when they, like most of the people are gonna buy it, they’re gonna repeat. It might be small, it might be a slower mover, but you’re then we’re fine-tuning our advertising to how our products perform and on that basis, and then still balancing out, we need short-term revenue to grow. And then from that, it allows you to grow. You start putting the people in a funnel to get them into SN s and then SNS is just reoccurring revenue, easy money, that, and then,
Bradley Sutton:
So, so are you taking, you know, like, like most people in groceries and other categories like you take in a loss on your initial paper click, but then un completely fine with it because knowing that you’re making it up on, on the subscribe and save or, or you’re still even profitable on that first, that first touch,
Jason:
You know I would say we are not profitable on new product watches. That’s where we take the loss on building that segment. But at this point, we’re in its established product, even on the first collect we’re about that you know, is beneficial for people?
Jason:
You know, I understand your business and, and the market and what you’re operating. I live in, and we’ve talked about this, you and I offline. Like, live in product Opportunity Explorer and there’s like, there’s a lot of stuff I get to garner from there, and there’s a lot of stuff I bang between product opportunity Explorer, looking at listings and pulling stuff in for the refinement through X-ray when I’m on, on those competitor listings, listings that they’re identified, and then stuff taking in and, and aggregating data through Helium 10 when I’m looking at you know, the reverse ASIN lookup. And
Bradley Sutton:
It’s so product opportunity Explorer, like looking for new potential flavors or, or things that people are, are looking for, or what,
Jason:
Yeah, looking, looking for innovation and also just the ecosystem can change over time on Amazon and just looking at what keywords are being searched. Is there a switch to that? I can tell you on some certain categories that we’ve, we’ve seen different keywords switch over the last year and you know, we were able to, to, to jump on that and, and launch some new advertising to specifically address that. And also to then, excuse me to then further bake those into our, the back end of our listings on, on the search, the backend search terms and some meta places on A+ content and bullet points. I mean, it’s, it’s, you can continually improve. Like there’s nothing about setting and forgetting it. Like you’re, you, you’re always gonna have competition out there who’s gonna try and be better than you. So you better be on your A game and try and be better than them.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, for sure. Favorite Healing 10 tool?
Jason:
Right now, X-Ray Chrome extension. Awesome. I probably use it every day. Like I’m in product Opportunity Explorer every day I’m looking at competitors. It’s very tactical, functional, easy to use. You’re right there. You just, you click on it pops up what I need to digest really quickly is something changing. It’s something I’m wasn’t figuring a keyword that they’re, that they’re probably on. And it gives me, you know, understanding that gives me, I can go out and take immediate action and do something.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Love it. All right. So last thing, like maybe is there something that you think a lot of sellers are kind of like maybe forgetting about or they’re trying, you know, because it’s, it’s too tedious or, or it’s just like, seems like a no-brainer that you think people are, might be leaving money in the table. Like, is there something that you do with like, just general reports that has given you insight and actually made you take action on something that you probably think that 90% of the sellers out there aren’t doing?
Jason:
Yeah, I, you know, I would say the brand analytics report, you got, you got two, you got the search query performance and you got the, the catalog like search query performance is great just to understand what you have relevancy on. First functional coffee, we actually saw some keywords in it that we really weren’t addressing in a functional way. We actually launched a product based off that a couple of years ago. And then second was Cala Performance. Like two days ago. Boss and I we’re like, we had, we had some time and on a regular basis, we’ll go through and look at how can we, once again, how can we improve our performance. We went to Kellogg’s performance. We extracted out large number of weeks data and we to get a trend line on, on the clickthrough rate to see is there are any, if we have products that have high repeat rates, but low clickthrough rate, what can we do?
Jason:
Like let’s review those products on their images, their titles is a coupon, right? Is, yeah. Is, you know, all those different things. Because if you can get someone to click in, it means a whole lot of world. You, you have them and then what you do with them on that real estate that you have on your product page, you need to convert ’em. So it’s like half the battles Get ’em com is, get ’em to click in. So we’re able to make some quick changes and some messaging. We reallocated how some of the wording to make sure that some of the things we’re trying to communicate were in probably in the first 72-75 characters of the title. So that would pick up more on mobile. So since that’s where the majority of the shopping experiences. And, you know, then we’ll go back in about another two weeks and we’ll take a look again, on the CTR end and see did, did that, did, did that work out? Did the CTR go up?
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, cool. It’s this has been cool to kind of you know, I don’t think I, I’ve done something this deep, like as far as like going through the anatomy of somebody’s account or somebody’s listings like this in the last quarter.
Jason:
Hopefully I don’t get any calls from my boss, doesn’t get any calls from our board of directors. You gave too much information out
Bradley Sutton:
Nah, it’s good. I know you as much as he gave out guys there, there’s stuff that we can’t even talk about, you know, that they do. Here that he’s got plenty of his leave. I’m sure they’ll be, they’ll be fine. So this is, this is kind of cool. Thanks for opening it up and, and you know, I know you’ve been offering to me, I guess actually while I was on this call, I shared it in my little group chat with my family, the link to your store, because there, you know, that green tea has intrigued me. And then you had a couple of other ones that I think we might wanna try for whatever reason, I didn’t realize that you guys had pods and the packs too. So I’m definitely going to try some of these products. Everybody else out there, invite a cup on Amazon, follow them and take advantage of that 20% discount that they’ve gotten all their products. Support a local Helium 10 member here.
Jason:
And if you want a great deal, something we just got approval on yesterday April 25th, we’re gonna have a top deal. And it’s gonna be a minimum 30% off.
Bradley Sutton:
And if people want to find you on the interwebs is LinkedIn the best place?
Jason:
That’s gonna be the, probably the only place. Unfortunately.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. All right. So look up or can you spell your last Jason, and then can you spell your last name? Sure.
Jason:
Last name’s McLellan.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, Jason, thank you so much for joining. I’m gonna be inviting you. I know you’re not an Elite member yet. We’ve been trying to get you to see the light, but I might invite you to our next workshop in end of May. And so you can come check out what you’ve been missing out on.
Jason:
Ah, thank you. I appreciate that.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, we’ll talk to you later. Okay.
In this episode, Bradley talks about a new AI feature inside Listing Builder. You can now leverage the power of ChatGPT to simplify the process of creating and optimizing your Amazon product listings.
Welcome to episode #444 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, where Bradley and Lisett Lees of Orange Klik catch up on a lot of topics. Lisett shares insights into the best current strategies with Amazon Posts like the posting frequency, how Amazon Posts works with the Project X products, and other strategies you must be doing today. They also take a quick look into the new Amazon Inspire and how it would affect Amazon FBA brands in the future. Plus, if you’re in Europe this June, make sure to catch Bradley Sutton and Lisett Lees at the European Seller Conference in June! Also, don’t forget to check out the Lisett’s Amazon Posts modules in Freedom Ticket. Tune in until the end of this episode, where she shares more strategies and tips for Amazon sellers.
In episode 444 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Lisett discuss:
- 01:10 – Catching Up With Lisett Lees
- 01:40 – S3 Event Experience & Meeting The Founders Of Helium 10
- 04:00 – What Are Amazon Posts?
- 07:20 – The Best Posting Frequency
- 09:30 – Amazon Post Results For Project X
- 13:45 – What Strategies Are Currently Working
- 16:21 – Check The Amazon Posts Modules In Freedom Ticket 3.0
- 17:00 – Lisett’s 60-Second Tip For Amazon Posts
- 18:40 – Talking About The New Amazon Inspire
- 22:30 – Lisett’s Hobbies & Heathy Habits Outside The Amazon Grind
- 27:20– Catch Bradley In Prague This June!
- 30:00 – More Strategies From Lisett
- 32:50 – How To Get In Touch With Lisett Lees And OrangeKlik
- 33:40 – How To Grab Pizza With Bradley In Europe
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today’s guest is gonna be giving us a deep dive into what’s working in Amazon Post, and we’re also gonna talk about a wide variety of subjects, including an invitation to have pizza with me in Europe this summer. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world We’ve got somebody from the opposite side of the world here. Lizette, welcome back to the show. How’s it going?
Lisett:
Thank you, Bradley. Great to be back here with you to record another episode for the podcast.
Bradley Sutton:
So if you guys wanna check out a lot of information from Lizette, especially about in regard to Amazon posts, which we’re definitely gonna follow up today. Check out episode 288. All right, so episode 288. You can find all about Lisett there, but let’s go ahead and just hop right into it. What have you been up to in the last year?
Lisett:
So, in the last year, actually, I have traveled quite a lot, attended quite a few events which are meant for Amazon sellers or e-commerce sellers. So I would say besides yeah, the regular work I do, it has been pretty interesting year. Definitely busy and definitely looking forward also to the rest of this year’s because some exciting things are coming up for me as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, cool. Cool. Now it was good to see you at Sell and Scale event. Now. It was funny, you just shared a picture with me that I didn’t know you took, but did you recognize the founder of Helium 10 there? Or like you knew who he was before because a lot of people knew to this space they, they think what the Helium 10 they see now, that’s what they know, but like people like us who’ve been around for a while, it was kind of a big deal to see him there at the event.
Lisett:
Yeah, exactly. It was a great moment for me. So, yeah, I indeed went to your conference, which organized last Autumn Sell and Scale, and I had a chance to meet Manny Coats and Guillermo, who are both the founders of Helium 10. Of course, I recognized them, especially Manny because when I started out working with Amazon seller seven years ago I think that one of the first podcasts or ways I learned about Amazon at all was by listening to Manny’s podcasts. So for me, for a girl from Estonia who had never heard about like Amazon, or I didn’t order from Amazon anything, I’m listening to a podcast where a guy is trying to educate and teach me something. And now, many, many years later, I have a chance to meet him in person.
Lisett:
But yeah, I just ran into him in the conference and actually, what I did, I never do something like this. I basically froze in front of him and I said, Manny, you know what? I’m having a total fan-girl moment right now, but I really have to tell you my story real quick. So I kind of like explained all of the stories I just shared with you, and I was like, can we just have a picture? And they were so open to it, and yeah, we had the chats and it was awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
So cool. So cool. Yeah. It was kind of surreal for them too because like when you create something in the beginning and then to see what you know now, it turned into this you know, pretty much the most crazy Amazon event with Gary Vee speaking and just craziness. You know, so many were a thousand people, and it was kind of surreal for them too to kind of see. So that’s really cool that you had that moment. Now you are a big educator in our Freedom Ticket program about Amazon Post, and that was why I originally had you on it, was when the next version of Freedom Ticket had first come out and you did like one or two modules about Amazon Post. But we’re not gonna go completely deep into what is Amazon Post. Like, we took probably 30 minutes to do that on the last episode, but just a quick maybe one or two minute recap just to let people know what are Amazon Post?
Lisett:
Yeah, sure. So basically Amazon introduced this Amazon Post tool to brand-registered sellers, I think in 2020. If you have never used it, then think about it as it’s like an Instagram for Amazon sellers when it first launched, it basically as I said, it’s a way how you can make posts about your products to get in front of customers, and the tool is completely free. So basically it’s kind of a mix between like marketing and advertising. It kind of like, you can access it under the advertising console in Amazon. So we can think that Amazon considers it more like an advertising tool, but as I said, until now, it’s free, and it’s still embedded. So they haven’t done like a lot of changes to it lately, but let’s say when they first launched, there were a few changes in the policies and everything that’s went on a lot. So basically posting images and captions about your products to catch more attention of your customers and yeah, be in front of their eyes. Of course, make more sales.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Let’s talk about some things that have changed in the last year and a half or so that you’ve been on the podcast. But I think Amazon is kind of building that ecosystem more for the brand followers, but isn’t Amazon Post one of the conduits where you can grow your following, right?
Lisett:
Exactly. So yeah, one of the things you can do with Post is that whenever you’re posting customers can actually start following you as a brand. They can also start following you through storefront. I think the follow button there wasn’t originally displayed, but nowadays, and how basically Amazon. How it works now is that through posts you are able to get followers. So now when you have followers, you are able to use the next tools that Amazon have, for example customer engagement tool, which is also relatively new. It’s basically a tool that allows you to send marketing emails to Amazon sellers. Initially, there were like a couple of different templates you could send out. Last Autumn, they introduced like, new ways you can reach out like to the most recent buyers, your repeat buyers, et cetera.
Lisett:
I must say I haven’t had success with those emails yet. The open rate is great, but I haven’t seen many sales coming out of those emails. But as with many new tools, I would say it doesn’t take much time to experiment with it, just try it out, because the faster you kind of understand how the tool works, what are the options, the faster you are in the end able to have some success with it, as we see with Amazon Post, because when you started posting, let’s say, in 2020, basically nobody was posting, you were basically the only one in most categories, and your post would show up everywhere. But now, two years, three years later, we see more brands are posting, you kind of have to compete with content a little bit more. So things are getting a little bit like more difficult.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Okay. Now with that in mind is now I think the first time you were on there was maybe 2021 or something now in 2023, is Amazon Post worth the effort to keep up? And if so, what would be your like, suggested cadence frequency that somebody a brand that’s building on Amazon should follow?
Lisett:
Yeah, that’s a good question. And actually it really like, yeah, a lot of experts like to say about a lot of things. It depends. First thing you have to be efficient. In the Freedom Ticket module, also explain how to set up very easy system, how you can kind of repeat the process all over again or delegate it to your va. So that’s the first step. You have to have some kind of steps to make it efficient. Now, the second thing is you just have to experiment. So you need to start posting and posting quite a lot to get some kind of insights. What kind of post work for your product and which not. Now, how much does it cost? And this word, the effort, it depends like who is basically managing the tool for you. So for example, if you use a virtual assistant with relatively low hourly rates, and let’s say you invest, like even if you start out by investing $50 in budgets for the management part every month. Let’s even not think about like how many posts it could be, because sometimes so posts, you know before, well sometimes some posts don’t perform at all.
Lisett:
So $50 per month. But now, if we would get 200 clicks, for example, which is like real cases, like 200 clicks, two product page per month. So it’s $50, 200 clicks. So basically like one click is I guess like less than half a dollar or something. So you kind of need to calculate those main things, like based on the results you get. But the thing is that the post kind of like has its life, not only when you post it, but it could perform or start performing later. So let’s say we posted something a few months back or six months back or something like this, and maybe the initial results weren’t that good, but now months later it’s somehow.
Bradley Sutton:
Hold on, hold on. You didn’t even know about this because you didn’t share this with me, but Shivali shared with me you were helping the Project X just to do an example like. And this was in looking here June of last year. So this was like almost a year ago. Take a look here, let me sh let me share my screen. But this was one that we had done like in June of last year. And this metrics is only from the last 90 days. So that means it’s only in the last three months. So that means it has to be six months later from when we posted this. And all of a sudden, like one of them just, it seems like it went viral or something. It had like 3000 impression. I mean, who unfortunately I didn’t take screenshots of when we were doing it so it could have been more, but it’s almost exactly what you just said, where six months later, looks like we were highlighting our purple coffin shelf here. Just started going create 140 engagement, 101 clicks to the store, 17 clicks 5,000 reach just completely out of the blue. So almost exactly with what you were saying, you were saying right there.
Lisett:
Exactly. And one of the reasons is actually what, what is also important to like notes, so the post, they can show up in different placements, right. But the main thing is that you as a seller, you can’t really influence where it is. We don’t have a lot of information like how Amazon decides where to and when displays the post you make. So it could be that now after a while, somehow Amazon kind of picked it up, or maybe it was showed somewhere, got some clicks, Amazon thought, okay, it must be relevant with some other things in Amazon. So it pushed it a little bit more to other placements. So that’s the thing, how kind of yeah, Amazon post work, because for example, one thing like we, I think we discussed last time as well, was like, doesn’t matter if you include a keyword to the caption, like, we don’t know. Amazon doesn’t say it it helps somehow, but it’s a good thing, I would recommend to do it. I mean, it doesn’t like yeah, take your time to add some keywords because yeah, as I said, Amazon hasn’t like, confirmed anything, but I think it could be somehow related also how posts show up in the end.
Bradley Sutton:
So then this thing that we’re looking at here is, is kind of like how a preview of how it looks on like a mobile browser similar to like almost Instagram feed or something. But that caption you’re talking about here, I think Alina said that she was doing some testing with, with Keyword Impact. She’s actually one of the ones talking in Prague, I’m not mistaken. We’ll talk about that a little bit later, but this is the I believe this, we’re looking here at the console of how you create your posts and, and this is that caption you’re talking about.
Lisett:
Exactly. Exactly. So when we first those made those initial posts with Shali as well, I told her to definitely include like a keyword and also make a note like what keyword you used to kind of later you’re able to kind of see whether it could have some impact. But I think I listened a bit of Alina’s podcast. So I think they have done some yeah bigger testing with it, so definitely worked to do that.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Yeah. I think actually because of the Amazon Post you had mentioned in the last podcast you’re like, Hey you can’t just paste this, your images from your listing just over and over again, but you gotta have some unique ones. So we actually did a photo shoot with AMZ One Step, and so we got some good coffin shelf pictures, and they, they had it scheduled. And now at the time they had. Shivali told me that you had given them like this spreadsheet of like how to like schedule out your post. So, so is that still similar with like the kind of frequency you think that people should be doing now or are there things that should happen that would change your cadence? You know, you talked a little bit about scheduling, but like, let’s say you have something, they’re not going really well, like as far as impressions go early, you just keep going. And on the flip side, let’s say that one that I showed where all of a sudden one went viral or more go viral, does that make you want to increase your frequency to take advantage of it? Or still you should just pick your schedule and just stick to it?
Lisett:
So what I have done most of the time is just keep going. I know some people, for example, go back and edit the post when they see it’s like not performing well within a week or two weeks or a month, they go back and edit. We haven’t done it. We rather try to post similar thing again. So one thing to note is that you can’t use the same image twice. It wasn’t an issue when the tool was first launched, but now, for example, if you want to post the same image twice, Amazon would just reject the post and say it’s a duplicate image. So we’ll work around it is just to slightly adjust the image by cropping it a little bit or editing or just trying a couple of small tricks to use and then just repost the same image with slightly updated caption as well.
Lisett:
So when it comes down to the frequency, I mean post as much as you once basically, there’s no limits. But the only thing is, what I see now over the years as well, is what Amazon sellers are really struggling with is just having enough images, having enough photos. And I have talked with a few sellers who have been following the Freedom Ticket modules. They say, basically, I think I gave the overview of the spreadsheet in the modules as well. It’s super easy to start off. It’s not a rocket science to just follow the steps I gave follow the spreadsheets and start doing it. I think coming up with captions as well, it’s not so difficult. You have to be strategic about it. So a good thing is always to look at the reviews and comment you get from your customers, or maybe something important from about your product.
Lisett:
For example, I remember about your product, the one thing we highlighted with Shivali was the size issue, because I think you get reviews often about people not understanding what’s the size of the coffin shelf. So when I saw that you did the photo shoot and you included a photo with the model, so the product is visible next to a woman, I mean, you understand how big the product is versus looking at some of the other. Let’s say nice, nice photos, which you have, but I mean, you don’t have any reference like to the size. So it’s a good idea to use this tool also to cover that part.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Good to know. Now another just quick recap. We weren’t doing Amazon Post before you started helping us out with that at all. So we had zero followers for our brand of the Manny’s Mysterious Oddities. And we went, we went to about almost 800 just in just by doing I think it was like two, three months of posts. So if you guys are interested to learn more about Post when we ask Lisett for a quick tip, but for those of you who have access to Freedom Ticket, go into Learning Hub on your Helium 10 dashboard and then click on Freedom Ticket, get 3.0, and then click on week nine, and then you’ll see here her modules 9.07, 9.08.
Bradley Sutton:
So make sure to check those out. Some little UI things have changed here, there since we filmed that, but for the most part, it’s the same. What you learn there is exactly steal what you should do. And so that’s good information. Now, before we move on to other topics here, we usually save this for the end, but you know, 60-second tip maybe on, on Amazon posts that you can share with people on if, maybe if they’re just getting started or if they’ve been doing posts for a while, either way, what do you think?
Lisett:
Yeah, yeah, I can give a tip right away. So as I said the content part is the issue for sellers and usually your team, your VAs, they do what you tell them to do because they are not maybe into photography or creatives themselves. So a good tip for Amazon Post is when somebody’s taking photos of your product when with iPhone, ask them to use the Burst modes, which will make like 10 images in like within a second or two, and just save all of those bursts photos and you basically get from one second, 10 different images. They kind of look the same, but if you spread them out, like for several months, nobody as a customer will notice that it’s kind of the same photo. But for Amazon, it matters. It’s a different photo for them. And if you’re using like a photo camera there’s this high speed continuous mode which you can again use very easy thing, but you just have to ask the photographer to do it.
Lisett:
It’s kind of, you just like hold the button and it’s just like shoots, let’s say 10-20 photos, like within seconds as well. And you get like massive amount of images to work with. So these both tips work most when you have more than one product, because then you’re kind of when you’re posting, you post about Product A, product B, you kind of switch out, because when you look at your whole brand with feed, you want to look it also like nice you don’t want to be repetitive, you don’t want to show the same images, let’s say next to each other. You kind of have to spread it out a little bit.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Now, switching gears a little bit, but something that is newer, and I’ll be honest when this was announced, I was like, I am not sure that this is really going to be something that is gonna be valuable, but it’s, when Amazon Inspire came out, it’s kind of like it almost is, I don’t know how you like Instagram reels, TikTok on Amazon, right?
Lisett:
Yeah, it’s like a video version of Amazon posts. So what I initially thought is that they will actually include the opportunity to upload videos to Amazon posts. So it’s kind of would they would adjust some things and the videos would be like the next step from like, let’s say past years we have been uploading photos. So now the next step is uploading short videos. So that was, where I thought will go. And when I also heard about Amazon Inspire first I was like, interesting. Now they’re doing like something else. So we have now posts for kind of like images and Amazon Inspire for videos, especially now I personally don’t have an access to it yet as a customer. But one thing is when you check out like how it’s even possible as a brand to add videos there or add content, then one of the things they highlight right now on the website is that you as a brand owner can appear there with your products when you use Amazon posts.
Lisett:
So it’s like when you’re now using Amazon posts, those images will pop up in Amazon Inspire. But Amazon Inspire main idea is actually to have videos. And I have heard some Amazon influencers get great content to the Amazon Inspire, and when I heard a couple of videos talk them talking about this new opportunity to great content for Amazon products, they said like even now when they open Amazon Inspire, all they see is images because everything is kind of transferred from Amazon posts to Amazon inspired. There’s no video content yet. So it’s kind of interesting where we are right now, you know?
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And now you can only see it on the mobile app for now?
Lisett:
I think so and only for US customers. And you, you also might not have it. I think they started rolling it out like in the end of December, and they said most US customers should have an access to it, like early this year. So I don’t know if you have yet check your own mobile app if you have access.
Bradley Sutton:
I’m looking at my phone right now. I don’t, I don’t really see it, so maybe I don’t have access. Yeah,
Lisett:
It’s very new and as far as it goes, like how you, again, as a brand owner can add content to it, like video content. Basically it’s just videos about your products where customers again can click and they will be sent to your product detail page. They’re basically three ways. So one, as I say, through Amazon posts, but that’s for now is only images, not videos. Two is when Amazon influencer is making a video and tagging your products. So that’s the second option. And the third option is when customer leave video reviews for our products. So kind of like, I assume I haven’t seen yet, but I assume whenever your products are video reviews by customers, they will also kind of transferred there and automatically displayed, because I think as a customer, you just choose what kind of videos you want to see, let’s say sports, camping, whatever you kind of choose like this, and then you get this sheet of different videos.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now that to me could, could be interesting and that actually could be abused by some I’m already thinking about how some sellers will just start getting people to leave these professional reviews like since they know that’ll come up and inspire. So I’m sure there’ll be like, some terms of service that, some strict terms of service that’ll come out. Yeah. About that. Alright, we’ll go back to talking about about strategy here. But I’m not sure how much you’ve been keeping up with the podcast, but something different that I asked guests nowadays more is, is like some health related things. I had health related issues last year, and I think physical health, mental health is something that as entrepreneurs in e-commerce, we don’t pay enough attention to. And especially during the pandemic and most of us were just cooped up in our house. So you actually were telling me you had a kind of like burnout situation that even led to physical, physical things. So, so talk about that a little
Lisett:
Bit. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So let’s say the first year since like 2016 when I first started working with different Amazon sellers and brands, I was all into it. There was so much to learn, it was exciting. I loved what I did. I loved working with those brands. I was just living it I didn’t take care of myself. Every morning I woke up before coffee. I was already opening Seller Central was at the Christmas, New Year’s Eve, whatever. I was like in Seller Central, basically and that kind of, yeah, few first years went by and then I started to get like yeah, first like health issues, like massive headaches all the time, pain in the eyes. I went to doctors I was already worried I might have some kind of like bigger issue with my eyes going on my neck, my shoulders, like everything basically.
Lisett:
And in the end I understood that I have just been overworked. So all of the issues I had, they didn’t have like a deeper meaning or anything. I just had to have some time off from computer. But how I understood that was that, yeah, I had like a physical injury. I had an injury, I had to have surgery, so it wasn’t directly connected to me or working, but I kind of believe it was like the universe’s way to tell me like, slow down and start prioritizing your mental and physical health. Because also mentally, it’s difficult you are kind of also, they are working with different companies. You have to stand for yourself. Especially, I don’t like to highlight that I’m a woman, but still, like, sometimes most people I work with are men.
Lisett:
So it’s important to kind of have your own back. So yeah, I had an knee surgery, so basically I had to stay in bed for a couple of months. I had to learn again how to basically walk, lift my leg, do whatever. And that was when I started to changed my life totally. I started prioritizing my sleep, my eating schedule. I started to work out properly. So actually the pandemic time for me was okay because I already had the great habits of taking care of myself. So since that year I’m really well, it’s still like a work in a program, like work in progress. I think it always is when you like what you do. But definitely much easier for me to set boundaries not work during the weekends not answer all the emails within five minutes, you know things like this.
Bradley Sutton:
What about hobbies? I ask that too, like obviously mine is traveling and like playing basketball when I can, but what do you do to kind of like take yourself away from, from the day-to-day business when you need a break?
Lisett:
Yeah. So one thing traveling, but as we slightly discussed before starting recording this podcast is that when you travel, it’s still kind of like, it’s like your work with you and you’re still kind of like thinking, especially when you’re an entrepreneur. But one thing that’s yeah, I picked up a couple of years ago is fishing. So when I go fishing here in Estonia, it’s a photo of me from last summer. It’s something I do and I don’t think about anything else than just being in the nature and getting the fish. So my favorite, I don’t remember this fish name in English. But I like to go on the lakes to fish on perch. So yeah, perfect time for me to stay offline and just chill,
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, awesome, awesome. Yeah. So again, guys, there’s a reason why I mentioned this nowadays and in every podcast, it’s my theme for 2023. And it’s something that’s important. The motto here is serious strategies for serious sellers. It’s not just about Amazon or e-commerce strategies, but it’s about strategies to, to keep yourself healthy because you’re not gonna be successful on Amazon if you’re burnt out or have physical issues.
Lisett:
And actually, yeah, what I wanted to ask is that over the years, even like when I first started and had my own issues with health and setting boundaries, I have been always the one who is like talking to sellers to sell them also take the weekend off, don’t work on Friday nights. Like, don’t worry about it. Like there are things which we can’t control, and there are things which are we can’t control. So it’s like I try to kind of like make sure that they also take care of themselves.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, good. Good to know. Good to know. Now you know, I alluded to it earlier when I said Alina’s talking to this event, I’ll be talking at this event in Prague on June 8th and ninth. And, and so guys, if you’re interested in signing up for the event, h10.me/euevent, h10.me/euevent, but tell me about this event, because this is, I think it is funny, I was actually supposed to speak at my first conference in Europe last year, and that was when I had my heart attack like a couple of days before, so I couldn’t go. But, so yeah, I think this is my first potential conference in Europe. So tell me about what to expect.
Lisett:
Cool. Yeah, well, we’re really happy to have you. So yeah, besides working with Amazon Sellers, I’m part of the Orange Click team. So we’re basically like a neutral platform to help experts share their knowledge with Amazon sellers. We have a YouTube channel, but we also organize physical events in Europe for Amazon sellers. And in June we have our biggest conference. It’s a due day conference. We invite experts like you from US and also from Europe to fly to Prague where you are able to share your knowledge in front of, around like 200 European Amazon sellers. I think more or less from like 30 or 40 different countries. And I think the main thing to know about the conference is that throughout the two days, all of the presentations, they’re solely focused on sharing value, giving actionable tips, and just educating the sellers among the audience. So what is kind of like the structure of the presentation is kind of highlight the problem and then kind of show the sellers like how to do it, like how to improve. So the idea is basically when they go back home, there are tons of things they can apply to their business, like straightaway. Like they already have all of the tips. They already have all of the steps. They just go home, share with the team and start implementing everything.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right, cool. So again, h10.me/euevent. I actually starts on the 7th there. There’ll be some activities there that you guys can see more about on the website. I’ll be there in the evening of the seventh and the 8th and 9th. And I believe you know, maybe somebody else from my team might be there. I’m not sure yet, but we’d love to, we’d love to meet you in person now but like you said you at Orange Klik, you deal with a lot of service providers. You deal with a lot of Amazon sellers, and so I figured the the last few minutes here of our podcast, you can just talk about some general strategies, like things you’ve learned in the last couple years. We talked deeply of course, about Amazon posts, but that’s, that’s not the extent of your experience or knowledge, but what are some tips and strategies that you can share that, that have been working with those in your community lately?
Lisett:
Yeah, so there was actually a lot of like technical things. I’m not able to kind of cover from like yeah, like everything. But there are, we have recorded a lot of videos about how to use the Amazon data that Amazon gives out now how to incorporate that you know, with other data that is available from Helum 10 and other tools. There are some great hacks I remember about like sponsored about advertising, like how you can use like text in your custom image when you advertise. It’s normally like not allowed by Amazon rules and you get rejected, but there’s a way how to kind of add it as a text art. So it kind of like blends in with your image. It doesn’t seem like just like regular text overlay and Amazon kind of approves it. So it’s a great way how you can add like your keyword with which you’re like advertising also to the image that you’re using.
Bradley Sutton:
Are you talking about kind of like maybe if you’re selling a printer and then the paper comes out of the printer on the paper, you put it, or this is something different than that?
Lisett:
Basically, it’s kind of like similar. It’s, it’s a bit different, but basically, it’s similar. Yeah, it’s kind of like, and actually not, it doesn’t, like, usually I have heard this about like main images, so you kind of, like, you, you do your main image, you usually can’t add like, additional things. But yeah, I think one company made like a case study where they had like the printer main, main image and then like the paper was coming out and they added like how many papers you get or how, how much you can print. So it was kind of like on the paper, so it felt like part of the product. And as Amazon accepts that, so basically the same thing with this custom image when you advertise your products. So I think it’s a product collection ads, when you have this on top of like search, you usually have like a custom image.
Lisett:
You’re not allowed to add any text, but when you integrate it basically similar way Amazon really accepts it. And the same thing about Amazon posts, because when I first started doing like Amazon Post, like in 2020 I think, one thing, what we actually experimented with was like adding like text overlays, like, hey, like recipes for this thing, or whatever we wanted to highlight. And a couple of months in Amazon started to say it’s not allowed anymore. So at first it worked very well to help like the clicks, but now it’s not possible anymore. Again, using the same strategy, you are actually able to integrate like some text into your images. Like, for example, have like this monkey here, like imagine I make like a photo for Amazon Post, but let’s say on a t-shirt there is some kind of like text chill out or whatever this monkey is about you kind of like, okay you use creative ways how to kind of get this customer attention in not like a traditional way. So it’s, it’s about being creative.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. I like it. I like it. All right. So how can people, if they want to reach out to you or your company to find you on the interwebs? How can they do that?
Lisett:
Yeah, so the best way to reach out to me is via LinkedIn or going to my website, which is my first name and last name written together lisettlees.com.com. Or if you want to know more about Orange Klik, then orangeklik.com is the website and you can find us also from YouTube under same name.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, it was great seeing you in person at Sell and Scale and it’ll be great seeing you in a couple months at the event in Prague, and I hope to see some listeners there as well. So please, if you see Lisett or me at the event, come up to us and, let us know that you enjoyed the podcast or that you heard about it from the podcast episode. And I’ll take you guys out potentially to one of my top five favorite pizza restaurants in the world. It just so happens to be in Prague. Like, it’s the weirdest thing. Like, I remember, okay, I was only there for a couple days, a couple of years ago, and I was like, why in TripAdvisor does this pizza place in the middle of Prague have such reviews, like a little hole-in-the-wall place?
Bradley Sutton:
And I was like, there’s no way that Pizza and Prague is good. Like, like that’s not what Prague is about. And it was named Johnny’s Pizza. I’ll never forget cause I was my son was with me, his name is Johnny. And so, and it was, it was actually really good. I think the guy like lived in new New York for a while or something. But anyways I’m gonna try and organize a meetup at that pizza place in Prague. So we’ll see you guys there and I’ll see you there too Lisett.
In episode #443 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we welcome Tom Wang to share his valuable insights into successful influencer marketing campaigns, Amazon-selling strategies, and his effective health habits. Tom takes us through his Amazon selling journey, how he got started and how he exited his brand with a 7-figure pay day. He also talks about dealing with mental health issues and burnout after his exiting his brand, as well as his approach to getting back into the Amazon grind. Tom provides advice on influencer marketing, emphasizing the role it plays in how it can blow up your sales and stories to back it up as well. He also shares his product research strategy, highlighting the importance of understanding keywords and looking beyond demand when evaluating a product. Finally, Tom discusses his hobbies and healthy habits outside of work, as well as his FBA Masterclass 3.0 course. Make sure to tune in until the very end!
In episode 443 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Tom discuss:
- 01:45 – Tom Wang’s Backstory
- 06:38 – How Tom Got Started In Amazon FBA
- 09:19 – His Amazon Selling Journey From Launch To Exit
- 10:31 – “An Amazon Business Is One Of The Best Businesses…”
- 11:53– More On His 7-Figure Amazon Exit
- 13:40 – Dealing With Mental Health Issues, Stress, & Burnout
- 18:14 – Getting Back Into The Amazon Grind
- 20:35 – Influencer Marketing Strategy
- 27:33 – Tom’s Product Research Strategy
- 31:06– No Demand Doesn’t Mean A Bad Product
- 34:36– You Need To Understand Your Keywords
- 38:05– Tom’s Hobbies And Healthy Habits Outside The Amazon Grind
- 41:51 – Talking About The FBA Masterclass 3.0 Course
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a seller who had a seven figure exit from his Amazon business, and he’s got a crazy story about influencer marketing strategies, how to have an entrepreneurial mindset, and also how to have a healthy mind and body. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you know that Amazon sometimes loses or damages some of your inventory? Usually they reimburse you for this, but sometimes they might miss things. That’s where Refund Genie comes in. What Helium Tends Refund Genie does is we go check out your reports and see if Amazon owes you any money, and then we give you the reports that you need to submit to Amazon so that you can get your money back. If you haven’t run this, you could have hundreds, if not thousands of dollars that Amazon might owe you, especially if you’ve never used this before and you sell a lot on Amazon. So to find out more information, go to h10.me/refundgenie. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a serious seller on here today, Tom. Tom, welcome to the show. I believe this is your first appearance on the show, right?
Tom:
Yeah, yeah, I think I was actually on the AMPM back in the day.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Yeah, yeah. That’s OG days. Who was the host at the time? Was it Manny? Was it Tim? Was Kevin?
Tom:
I think it was Matt. I think I had a conversation with Matt.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, Matt. We’re going back in the day. I love it. I love it. All right. Well, since this is your first time on the show, I’d love to get like your, backstory. So I know you’re in Canada now, but is that where you were born and raised?
Tom:
No, I was born and raised in China. I came to Canada Okay. At the age of 10. So in 2001 with my parents, they decided to immigrate to Canada. And yeah, I was basically we lived in Vancouver. I’ve been in Vancouver for the past 21 years now.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. So did you go to university there or did you just graduate from high school and just go right into the job world? What was that like?
Tom:
Yeah. Funny story about that. So I was a really good student in China. In China, like education was everything. I, and I mean everything, right? Even at the age of six or seven, I remember going to school you know, summer vacations here, just as an example, as you’re a kid, there’s no homework, there’s no projects in China. You are actually bombarded with homework and projects. There’s no really a summer vacation. You maybe get the last week off if you’re lucky, if you finish everything on time. And I remember waking up really, really early. Go to school, stay there for the whole day, go to a tutor after, come back home, do more homework.
Bradley Sutton:
This is like elementary?
Tom:
Yeah. This is like, this is great. Like, this is seven year old. So I think I actually got, looking back in my life, I actually developed a lot of hard work ethic from that. I wasn’t scared to actually put in the work, do the hard work. So, but I came here, I did high school. I did okay. And then I went to university. I actually got kicked out of the first college that I went to. It’s called UVC. And the story behind that is because my grades were so low because my parents were super strict in high school. And then when I went to university, I could live on campus. And I just didn’t go to any classes. And I remember my grades were so low that the counselor is like, Hey, you actually can’t even continue on for the next semester.
Bradley Sutton:
I bet your parents were, were really thrilled with that.
Tom:
Yeah. That was a very interesting conversation. And went to another college. I got kicked out of there. I went to the third college. I got kicked, kicked out of there as well. And all due to the same reasons, and I honestly, like, I hated school, like the stuff that I was learning in school, I’m just like, what am I doing? Anyways, long story short, I finally graduated the fourth college that I went to because it was very practical. Like I remember for our English classes that were actually teaching us how to write cover letters and resumes for our finance classes that were teaching us, like, what is the PnL of a real business for marketing classes. We actually had to do a marketing case study on a real business. So a lot of things were very, very applicable to the real world, which I really, really enjoyed. And after that, I went into the job world, but I didn’t get my–
Bradley Sutton:
What was your degree in that?
Tom:
Sales and marketing.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. And so that was what you were looking for a job in then?
Tom:
Yeah, like sales, like account management. And then I got basically denied by like 15 different jobs, 50 different offers. Nobody wanted me, so up to this point, to be honest with you, I had a very, like, big a chip on my shoulder as for rightful reasons. I felt like my parents didn’t really approve of me. I felt like my friends all thought I was loser and for the rightful reasons too, right? Sure. But I’ve always like, believed in myself, and I don’t know where that belief comes from, because if a hundred people went through the same things that I went through. A lot of people would’ve taken a wrong, like a different path, you know? It would’ve been very easy to give up, but I always had that belief, and to this day, I still cannot explain to you where that belief came from.
Tom:
But having said that, I finally got a job at Yellow Pages selling, like advertising and yeah. Did really well there. I got a mentor, I learned everything about sales. I made like six figures after the first year of college. Wow. But I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. That’s like my life calling. My very first business was in grade three when my dad went to the us, brought back some like big pens, and then I sold them to my classmates because everything back then in China is like made in China stuff. Well, although big pens probably made in China too, but it’s like a US brand, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So that was like my first business, and I just remember like, feeling so rich and I was like, oh my God, I can like, sell stuff to people, without needing a job.
Tom:
I can set my own schedule, I can set my own freedom. So that’s really the first taste of entrepreneurship for me. And over the, you know, my teens, I’ve always had these site hustles selling stuff on like Craigslist and marketplaces and this and that. So first year of Yellow Pages I did well, but then I always wanted to start a business, and I accidentally came across Amazon FBA in 2015 or 16. Okay. When I was trying to sell Hoverboards online. And I couldn’t sell ’em. I just had a very, very hard time selling these hoverboards. And during that time, someone was like, Hey, I can sell these for you on Amazon. And for me, at the time, I was like, Amazon, like, isn’t that a place where people buy old textbooks from like, I didn’t know you can actually sell anything and everything on Amazon.
Tom:
So I watched them work, and the first day he sold three hoverboards. And that’s when I was like, whoa. Like, what is going on here? So that’s how I discovered Amazon. And then in 2017, January, me and my fiance, we launched our brand on Amazon called Sdara Skincare. And our first product was vitamin C Serum, earlier, you were talking about collagen peptides. I would say Vitamin C serum is right up there with collagen peptides in terms of competitiveness. But like, even in those days, it was competitive. Yeah. It was super com But here’s the funny story. So yes, it was competitive, but then during those days you can still buy reviews. It was perfectly legal. Yep. And I just thought, okay, well, I just need to buy a bunch of reviews, seems easy enough. And then literally, like the month before we were about to launch, Amazon was like, Hey, no more buy-in reviews.
Tom:
Yeah. So Mike Tyson says like, everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face. And we just had to like, figure it out, you know? I mean, first month they did like $8,000 in sales, which is like enough for me. I was like, wow, people are actually buying this. And then we launched the second product that just completely flopped. It was a silicon makeup sponge. It was such a fad. We were 2,500 units, and by the time we launched, the entire market just basically died. And then the third product, actually at that time, I wanted to give up. I didn’t want to continue on with Amazon anymore. And then my fiance is like, Hey, no, like, we learned a lot. Why don’t we try one more time? And that time I came across like Anthony Bui-Tran.
Tom:
He made like a YouTube video on called like Balls to the Wall spreadsheet, where he took a very, like, numbers accounting, data driven approach to Amazon. Like, if you order this many units, if you gave away this many things, this is your cost, this is your, like, and then at the end there’s a net profit. I was like, that’s like, wow. Like everything makes so much more sense now. So I would basically just, yeah, meet a lot of sellers, go to some conferences, watch YouTube videos, learn more from my Mistakes. We launched the third product, and then the rest was history
Bradley Sutton:
All right. So fast Forward. I believe you exited that brand, right? .
Tom:
Correct. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
We so tell me about the progression there. Like, you know, you went to ex sales the first year or second year, and then, and then how did you start? When at what point did you decide like, Hey, let me see if I can exit this brand?
Tom:
Yeah. So first year we did like a hundred thousand dollars in sales, probably lost money. Second year we did 1.8 million. And then, sorry, one point, something like that. 1.6, 1.8, and then 3.2, and then four or something. And then we basically sold the brand at the end of December, 2020. Yeah. December, 2020 is when we sold the brand.
Bradley Sutton:
That was in one of the, some of the early you know, people that wasn’t selling brands wasn’t all the rage in 2020. So you’re maybe you’re kind of like a pioneer in that.
Tom:
Yeah, I would say it wasn’t all the rage yet, but there was definitely starting to have a lot of aggregators coming online. I would say we didn’t time it perfectly. Six months later, eight months later, if we sold outta the peak, we probably would’ve made some more money. But never a day goes by where I regret selling the brand. Not because I don’t love Amazon businesses. I actually have my hands in a few businesses, and I would say from my personal experience, Amazon business is one of the best businesses you can start for anybody offers you location freedom, time freedom. You can run a 10 million brand with like 5 VAs. You can travel the world, you can work from anywhere you want. It’s an awesome, awesome business. And one of the reasons why I launched the brand is because, sorry, I sold the brand is because, I always thought of kind of like business, like it’s a little bit of gambling because, you know, there are a lot of things that’s outta your control. And I just felt like if we were to sell the brand, it would be life changing money for us, and we can just pocket that money. It’s like going to the casino with $10 and you are up like $10,000. Like, shouldn’t you like take some money out and like walk away? You know what I mean?
Bradley Sutton:
Makes sense. Hey, cuz now I know you’re back in the game as far as, you know, doing a lot of coaching again and have some cool courses. So we’re gonna talk some strategy in a little bit, but I want, I wanna pause a little bit and talk about this exit. Like, I don’t know if you’re able to say like a approximately how much you know, what was did the, did the exit mean? Like, like what kind of money are we talking about here?
Tom:
Yeah, I can’t say about the money. It was seven figures.
Bradley Sutton:
Seven figures. That’s enough information I need. So seven figures. You know, somebody who’s been, you know, struggling early on, didn’t make even make money the, the first couple years and doesn’t sound like you, you were like extremely you know, wealthy throughout your life. Getting all of a sudden, seven figures. What did that mean to you and how did that change your life?
Tom:
Yeah, so yeah, it’s been a very interesting past couple years, I would say. It’s definitely one of those things where, how should I say this? I think there are, there, there’s so many things I can say about this subject, but I would just say that as human beings, we get used to things very quickly. So I’m sure that all of you that are listening right now, you’ve had some sort of accomplishment in your life, whether that’s a raise or you hit a goal or something that you are just like, man, one day when I do this, my life is gonna be perfect or whatever. And in my case was, Hey, one day when I become financially free, everything’s gonna be perfect. And I would say my life has, my life quality has definitely improved a lot. I would say that money is no longer a constraint when it comes to anything.
Tom:
I would say that it has given me access to a lot of really cool things like coaching and events and trips and experiences and you know, X, Y, and Z helping others, all these different things. So that’s been great. But I will say that money solves money related problems. It doesn’t really solve non-money related problems. And I think in life there are a lot of non-money related problems that people need to solve. For example health, right? I got really burned out to be honest with you. Right after I sold my business a few months later, I got terribly sick. I’ve never been that sick. And I actually still, you know, two years down the road, almost three, I’m still feeling the side effects from that.
Bradley Sutton:
What do you mean by burnt outlet? Like, was it you were having to work so hard, building it up towards the end and then getting ready for the exit that you just kind of like burnt yourself out because of that? Or was it something?
Tom:
Yeah, I think it was a cumulative of many things. I think stress. Stress is a silent killer, I don’t think a lot of people actually understand this, but stress is actually a silent killer. I had a concussion then I had covid toys, I had the original strain. It was just a lot. And I used work to actually distract myself from listening to my body. My arm was hurting, my neck was hurting, my back was hurting. Like everything, my body was giving me a lot of signs, and I would just park my in front of the computer every single morning and do work. I didn’t go to a physio, I didn’t do this, I didn’t do that. I didn’t take the time to slow down to take care of my body. And looking back, my body was giving me a lot of signals that I just took.
Tom:
I was like, whatever. I’m young, I’m healthy. Like, nothing’s gonna happen to me. So, you know, health is something that you cannot buy. I tried, I sold my business. I have all the money in the world, and I went out to the Toronto, I went out to, you know, the states. I saw the best neurologists and doctors, and honestly, no one could tell what’s wrong with me. Like, there was not really a definitive answer. And that actually made me more anxious. So yeah, I had a lot of like, kind of anxiety built up from that. It was,
Bradley Sutton:
Didn’t you say, I mean, just to give people some context as to how serious this went. I remember hearing you talk at one event where didn’t you say like, you wouldn’t even get outta bed for like Yeah. Like days or something crazy like that, or,
Tom:
Yeah. I was so down on myself because you have to understand, like as entrepreneur, I have a very type A personality. I think a lot of listeners can relate to this, and that’s why you’re listening to this podcast, and for any problems in my life, I feel like I can solve. And this is the only problem in my life that I cannot resolve. Doesn’t matter how much resources and money I can spin on this. You know, if my business, my Amazon listening goes down, yeah, I can resolve that. I can hire the best lawyer and whatever, I can resolve that. But in this case, it just wasn’t working. And that’s kind of when I learned how to surrender, because after a year of trying I got into a really, really dark place where I couldn’t work. I couldn’t go to a restaurant, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t see my friends.
Tom:
I couldn’t go to the gym. I couldn’t, all the things that I took for granted I could not do. And a lot of it was mentally it was a mental thing. But having said that, the day that I started getting better was actually the day that I surrendered. The day that I said, you know what? I don’t know what this is. I don’t need to know what this is. I’m just gonna trust that whatever this is, hopefully one day I can get better, but if I don’t screw it, like if this is the rest of my life, so be it. And that’s actually the day that I started getting better which is interesting. So still, you know yeah, man,
Bradley Sutton:
That, that’s a good point that what you said about five minutes ago was like, Hey guys, money can solve money problems. You know, you’re in debt, you get, you get a seven figure payday, that debt is solved, you know, but don’t always look to money to solve non-money things like, you know. Yeah.
Tom:
Let’s say you have, you know, a wife and kids and you don’t spend time with ’em. Do you think your kid will love you more if you just give them like, oh, like Daddy will buy you a new car. It doesn’t work that way. Right. There’s a lot of really, really rich people in the world where, you know, yeah, they had five exits, but they also had five divorces, you know? Sure, sure. And their kids don’t talk to them. And I don’t want to be that person because I think to me life, we’re all just trying to play this game, and honestly, like, we’re all just trying to do the best we can. And I, I, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think none of us have really figured out this life, this game of life, and we’re all just trying to do the best we can. I truly believe that. But I would say before I just thought money was the piece of puzzle that was missing. And once that piece of puzzle has been basically placed I realized there was actually a lot of other missing pieces of the puzzle that I neglected for a long time. And in order for the puzzle to be complete, you actually have to focus on all the other things outside of money as well.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Yeah. All right. We’re gonna get back to a little bit of the mental health thing and what kind of like hobbies and stuff that you’re doing now to deal with that. But let’s go back to Amazon for a second. So you exited in 2020. Now, at any time in the last three years were, did you get that itch where it’s like you were getting like, withdrawal symptoms from being in the Amazon world? Or how did that go for you?
Tom:
I wouldn’t say I got the itch. I would say that no, didn’t really get the itch. I was selling a skincare product line that I truly wasn’t too passionate about. However, the promise that I made to myself was, in order for me to get back into the game, I cannot just do it for the money anymore. There needs to be a greater purpose, and I would love to actually create something that doesn’t exist. And funny enough that you asked me this question because just a few weeks ago, I had an idea that I think not, I think I know for a fact that is going to be an absolute game changer. I am right now in the idea doesn’t exist. It’s an improvement, I’m happy to share the brand with people once it’s launched.
Tom:
I just can’t talk about it right now. But it’s in the pet space and I have a dog. I love him dearly, and I always wanted to create something for him because I think it’s so meaningful. And right now I’m in the process of actually like contacting engineering firms and stuff like that to actually try to create this product. So now the itch is back. This idea is something that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and I actually think that’s always a great sign. It’s when you just can’t stop thinking about something.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Cool. Cool. Now let’s talk strategy. You’ve been through a lot, you’ve accomplished a lot. So, you know, you’re still, you know, in the community and you have a community of sellers, so you can still see what’s going on. Let’s talk about some some both on Amazon and off Amazon, you know, strategy. When I say off Amazon, it could be like accounting things or, or things that help you when you exit. But what are some tips that you can, you can share with our listeners that you think will, will help them either specific, Amazon, you know, it could be a PPC strategy, it could be keyword research, it could be life hacks. Let ‘s just see Tom’s best, best tips. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you could start a podcast with a Tom’s best tips. There you go.
Tom:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think you know, something that worked really, really, really well for us was influencer marketing, because we had a beauty brand. You know, one day, I’ll tell you, tell you a funny story. So one day I woke up at that time, we’re doing about 10 k a day in sales, and then one day I woke up at like 8:00 AM and we are already at 7K in sales. So like, ohy hat’s kind of weird. Okay. and then by noon we are like 20 K in sales by the, by 4:00 PM we’re at $40,000 in sales. Wow. Now, let me ask you this, Bradley, if you are an Amazon seller who’s experiencing such a surge in sales, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Bradley Sutton:
Like, I would’ve thought that, you know, somebody posted something and it went viral or, or something like that, potentially,
Tom:
Right?
Bradley Sutton:
Or the opposite is that somebody’s doing something <laugh>. Exactly. Exactly. So somebody’s doing some black hattery on me. Exactly.
Tom:
Exactly. So that’s exactly what I thought. I’m like, oh my God, I’m stressing out. And I decided to message everybody. And, and the thing is, when I saw the buyer report, it seemed very, very organic. It wasn’t like to the same address or same names or anything like, it seemed very organic. So I decided to email a hundred people, and three people got back to me and I’d say, Hey, like, where’d you find our product? And they said, oh, I saw it on this influencer Instagram. I was like, okay, interesting. So I went on this influencer’s Instagram, I didn’t see any posts about us, but then I went on her story. And exactly like eight hours ago when the sales started surging, she posed a story about our product. And that one story generated about $35,000 in sales.
Tom:
Wow. $30,000 in sales. And I was like, holy crap. So I messaged her, right? And I say, Hey, like, we’re the owners of Ciara Skincare. Like, thank you so much for loving our product. First of all, like, you’ve driven a lot of sales for us. Thank you so much. Like, we bought her something nice and then we also sent her more products. We decided to cr try to nurture the relationship as much as we can. So from there on, we did two things that did that worked really well. First thing is we kept in touch with her. Basically, we tried to nurture the relationship, and we as actually ended up doing more promos with her, except this time we actually paid her quite a bit of money upfront, because we know that she’s proven. So that’s number one.
Tom:
Number two is we actually tapped into our network, because you have to understand all these influencers, they all have friends that are also influencers. Sure. So we tapped into that network, and her type of audience was like, stay at home moms like the Lululemon moms is what I like to call them. Right. All her stories is basically her selling something. It’s like, Hey girls, I saw this. Like, this is a great sale going on at Walmart. This is so cute. It’s 10 bucks. And that’s her thing. She just sells random things. And I guess women just love buying random things, you know? What’s interesting is that I thought because she sells a lot of things, she wouldn’t convert as well because she’s kind of salesy. But what I realized is actually quite the opposite, because she’s, everybody’s following her because of the stuff that she’s actually promoting.
Tom:
So we found like five and six of her friends who do the exact same thing in her network. And we basically created our own influencer team. And then that went so well. In fact, one of our products, it got like a BSR of eight in beauty one time. You know, like eight. That’s crazy. Right. So just every single time that something, you know, maybe bad happens if we got like, suspended by accident or whatever, like delisted what, whatever it might be or a black hat, someone tries to come in and like, get the best seller badge. We just hit up our influencers and it’s like a superpower basically. So I really believe that influencer marketing is such a powerful tactic. And nowadays, I really think that you need to create some sort of off of marketing strategy, right?
Tom:
Some sort of a off of Amazon strategy. And the reason why I would say influencer marketing works so well is because if you run Facebook ads, Instagram ads and stuff like that, it’s hard to make it work unless your product costs, I would say 50, 60, 70, $80 or above, right? If you’re selling like a 15, 20, $30 product after all the costs and stuff, you’re not gonna have much margin left with whereas with influencers it’s much more, it, it’s much better in that sense. And one of the tips I can give to everybody about influencers is that never, ever pay an influencer upfront. So you contact an influencer and they’re like, oh, give us 500 bucks a post. Like always say no, because it’s just way too risky. You have no idea if this person’s gonna convert or not. So what we like to do is we like to just like gift, we just like to give a bunch of like free products away to these influencers. We have a tracker. When do we give them, did they receive it, follow up. Did they like it? If they liked it, did they post about it? If they post about it, did we see a sale in increase in sales? If we saw a increase in sales, that’s when we actually formed some sort of a partnership. So I’m a big fan of influencer marketing and yeah, that’s like one tip that I will give to everybody.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Let me second that guys. So the same thing happened to me. This is even before I, way before I work at Helium 10, I think, I don’t even think this was Amazon. I think we were selling on eBay at the time. Some phone cases. And I’ve told this story before, maybe, maybe, maybe on this podcast, maybe, I don’t know. But we, we had a, the supplier messed up. We, we asked for those transparent phone cases. I don’t know, it was probably for iPhone six. Don’t know how long ago it was. But it was transparent, but it was like gl they, they infused a lot of glitter into it. And, and this, the transparent one was kind of unisex, like, doesn’t matter if you’re a guy or, or, or, or gal. Everybody loved the transparent, you know, iPhone cases.
Bradley Sutton:
And they were like, dude, what the heck is this? This is like, only now we can only sell this to women, right? Like, like all this glitter, and this is so, so ugly. We’re just like, you know, or let’s just, you know, put these 500 units on on eBay and hopefully we’ll sell through and we would sell like one a day. And then one day we woke up and it was like almost our entire stock went out, and I did the exact same thing as you. I was like, what in the world happened? Let me start emailing these customers. What happened? And sure enough, somebody said, oh, yeah, is we follow this one YouTube channel. And she did a what’s on my iPhone video, and it was about like what app she used, but then she was showing her iPhone. She said, oh yeah, here’s the case. And I got this from this seller on eBay, and everybody just organically found our product, and they just all bought it. And then, you know, now that became one of our top sellers, you know, going forward. And sure enough, we did you know, promotion with her. So guys that, that absolutely, a hundred percent, you know, works to do that. Influencer marketing, those are some great tips. What else you got for us?
Tom:
Ooh, what else do I have? This is gonna sound really generic, but like, man, you gotta, you, you just gotta have a really good product, especially nowadays. I think the, the issue with a lot of Amazon sellers is we punch in some criteria. We see a product and we just try to sell that product. I really think that you, you, you just have to solve a problem. You gotta have that wealth factor. You gotta understand the market. And that’s why I recommend everybody to launch something that, you know, and you are passionate about. Obviously it needs to have demand and these things, but if, you know a market, for example, I just got into golf, right? So I know what products are trending in golf. I know what problems golfers have. I know what I need as a golfer.
Tom:
So how I think about product research now is I actually don’t use a lot of tools. I use the tools to validate if there’s demand and competition and stuff like that. But what I’d like to do is I like to see what’s a problem in a marketplace that has not been solved, or if I can do a better job and I actually don’t even care about the reviews that all that much anymore, right? Now, having said that, this is my theory, I don’t, guys, you have to understand I’m launching this new brand and this is a super competitive market in a super competitive edge, but my product and my product’s going to be literally 15 times more cost when it comes to like, people are selling this for 10, I might sell my for 200. Okay. But it’s revolutionizing, it’s something that doesn’t exist and it’s something that’s much needed.
Tom:
So, and on page one, if you a Helium 10 analyze, I’m sure the average review is probably like five. But I really believe that I’m able to actually penetrate this market because my differentiation factor is so much. Yeah. So I think honestly like there’s some stuff that’s just like the basics, right? And something that’s been just going on forever. Like, you gotta have a good title, you gotta have good images, you gotta have sure. Like all that is just so it’s a given now. Like if you wanna sell on Amazon, you, it’s not even a discussion anymore. Like, don’t sell on Amazon if you can’t even do that, right? So I don’t want to talk about that, but what I do wanna talk about is at the foundation, at the core of everything, you know, that’s another thing is about Amazon.
Tom:
As Amazon folks, and I was one of them is there’s a lot of hacks and tricks in Amazon, but the problem with those hacks and tricks is that they only stick around for a little while before the marketers ruin it, or Amazon close to the loophole. I mean, Bradley, how many super URLs hasn’t has been there, like over the past three, four years, like every month something changes. So I just think that those things change. Everybody knows about it, but what you really want to know, what you really wanna do, like what Warren Buffet says, right? Is have that molt right. Have something that other people cannot just come into your castle and start attacking you.
Bradley Sutton:
Tell me about doing that with one of your, I mean, obviously next year we’ll talk about your pet product. And what you did there. But, but one of, I’m sure you, you followed this process with one, if not all of your, your beauty products where it was competitive. So like, tell me the process, like, was it a matter of, of every single one had something that was really differentiating? Did, did you reject a lot of samples and, and stuff like that? Tell me how, how you implemented what you just said in your old brand.
Tom:
Yeah. I would say that we did a decent job. We definitely didn’t do a great job just because skincare is so, so, so competitive. But we did listen to our customers. That’s one thing that we did really well. And for some of the products they’re like, Hey, we want this. We’re like, Hey, let’s just create something for our customers. Actually a interesting story I wanna share with all the listeners as well is, you know, Bradley, this is something interesting for you as well, is just because the product doesn’t have demand right now, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad product. I’ll give you a perfect example. In 2017 or 18, I forget when it was we landed on a product called Acne Patches. Okay. They’re huge in South Korea. Like South Korea Beauty skincare, it was from South Korea at that time. We went on Amazon, I remember doing this. We went on Amazon, I typed in acne patches, like 3000 searches per month. All the all BSR all super high. Everybody’s like, kind of like South Korean type of like looking type of acne patches. And we basically said, you know what? Like, there’s not enough demand on Amazon. Okay.
Tom:
Recently, I think earlier last year, there is a brand called Hero Cosmetics. Their product right now is I think number one in Under Beauty. And their number one under beauty, it’s called Acne patches. So what they did was they got into the acne patch game on Amazon and they rode the wave up. They created that demand, and they caught that wave. And they actually recently sold for I believe 600 million dollars, 600 million dollars guys. Started on Amazon with one SKU. And that SKU, I had it in my freaking hands, dude. I had it in my hands, man. I remember going on Amazon. I was like, nah. Like I don’t think this is it. I was just like, the demand wasn’t there. So something that you guys can take away is just because something’s not there right now, trends are always hard to predict, right? We don’t have a magic ball. Sure, we can see the future, but if you truly believe in this product and you believe that this solves a problem and you’re willing to actually spend a little bit of money on education and you are someone of a savvy marketer, or you can work hard, I do believe that that could be something really, really interesting. And she didn’t have any competitors. She has no competition. And she built this giant business that was sold for $600 million. And yeah, that’s kind of crazy. So yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, I mean the coffin shelf, you know, like what we do with the Project X, there was really wasn’t demand for that. And we saw that there could be demand cuz we saw it trending on like Pinterest and stuff. But now, If you look at the market I mean, somebody at the Prosper Show just came to me and says, Hey, I launched something like, almost as a piggyback to the coffin shelf industry, and, and I’m a seven figure seller now. Wow. And then you look at there, there’s like makeup coffin shelves now, which literally did not exist three years ago. Somebody had the idea to like, oh, they looked at our coffin shelf, like, hey, let’s make something similar, but for makeup. And, you know, they’re, they’re selling thousands of units a month. Yeah. And so yeah, you’re a hundred percent right. Like, like there’s no magic ball that definitely will guarantee you success. But don’t just think that something is not gonna be a home run just because the demand isn’t there yet.
Tom:
Yeah. Another quick tip I can get to everybody is you gotta understand keywords for your niche. Before you even launch a product. You have to understand, you have to do a super deep dive analysis on keywords. Because something that’s really interesting is one of our products was the microneedle derma roller. During that time, there was a lot, and here’s another mistake I made. Honestly, if I did these two things, Bradley, I probably could’ve sold my business for 10x more. But regardless these are good, great lessons. Sure. But one of the things is the Microderm roller is for women mostly who wants to basically, you know, roll on their skin and replenishes and it makes the skin looks plumber smoother, whatever. But somewhere along the line men started using them and they started realizing that it can actually grow their facial hair.
Tom:
So a lot of men have like patches of hair, it looks kind of weird and they want a beard, so they will actually buy this and they want to roll. So the key word, like Dermer roller for beard growth started gaining traction. And what we could have easily done rally is just make like our skincare brand was very feminine, but just make a masculine version. And we have the product, we have the sourcing, we have everything. We could have just made another variation of the same product we could have launched in like less than a month. We have everything just rebrand, different packaging. And now the number one spot for the beer roller is actually doing like six figures a month. So I would say you have to keep doing keyword research and yes.
Tom:
Here’s another thing for sellers that are actually, maybe you have a product on Amazon right now that is not doing so well. So here’s what I recommend. Do a keyword word research on your product. Take a look at if there’s any, what I call sub niches keywords. So for example you know, you can type in like people are selling, like there’s just an example, hoodies, but then some, but then there’s a keyword in there that says like, gray hoodies and it has like 5,000 searches per month, and no one is actually selling like gray hoodies. So you can easily position your product for that keyword. And that way whoever types in gray hoodies, right, they can see your product. And then you own the gray hoodies market within every product, every keyword word I look at as a market. So you can actually own a sub-market of that.
Tom:
It’s just a different positioning really. Yeah. So if one more example is if you sell, you know, if someone says, Tom, I wanna sell like spatulas, I’ll be like, dude, don’t sell spatulas. Okay. Like, just, don’t do it. They’re like, no, Tom, I’m gonna sell orange spatulas because on Amazon, no one is selling them in orange, but I did the keyword analysis and 3000 people per month are actually looking up orange spatulas. Like, all right, you got something there. Right? So you gotta do a deep dive on keywords and then reposition your product to a keyword that no one is really targeting, basically.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. Awesome. All right. Now switching back, you mentioned you’ve taken up golf. What else are you doing for keep your body healthy, your mind healthy physical health? Mental health I think is important. Yeah. And being able to take a step back from whatever entrepreneurship we’re we’re doing. What are some of the things that you’re doing to keep up with that?
Tom:
Yeah. Health wise I would say I get great night of sleep. I go to sleep at the same time, wake up at the same time. I had a aura ring for a long time where it tracks my sleep. I no longer wear it because I got into the routine and I have great night’s sleep, and I sauna about three to four times a week. They say if you are in a sauna that is at least 90 Celsius, which I think is like 140, 150, a hundred, maybe 80, I don’t even know if Fahrenheit. Yeah. It’s really, really hot. If you’re in there for at least four times a week and for at least 20 minutes per session, the chances of you dying from a cardiovascular disease reduces by 50%. So I need to do that.
Tom:
It’s just this, it’s just this like magic pill. Like, hey, if someone says, Hey, would you want to take this magic pill where it reduces your? Everybody will take it with no side effects, would you take it? Yeah, absolutely. So that’s sauna for me, and then I try to eat as clean as possible, but it’s always a little bit tough, tough when you go see your friends and whatever. Sure. so diet, I play golf probably three times a week right now. And what’s cool about golf is that you are just out walking, man, you are walking for four hours. Like, do you ever call your friends and be like, Hey, do you wanna go for a four hour walk? Like, no, you like, that friend will never talk to you again. But golf is like, you’re walking for four hours.
Tom:
I’m getting in 20,000 steps. I can’t really go to the gym right now, unfortunately, because whenever I do my neurological symptoms act up, I don’t know why. So, but I need to start kind of doing some physical exercises where it makes me sweat, but sauna makes me sweat. So those are the things I do for my physical health. And I do believe that physical health, like if you are struggling a little bit with mental health, I think the first thing you need to actually focus on is your physical health. They’re very very connected. So I would say that’s number one. And then number two is yeah, man, right now it’s funny because I’m going through this phase where I tell people like, Hey, I just feel like life is like this puzzle that we’re all trying to place together.
Tom:
And I feel like for me, I have placed a lot of puzzles, like a lot of things that people do want I, I was able to get right. A nice house, a wife and, you know friends and parents. Like, yeah, in the grand scheme of things, I am very, very grateful with where I am. And if I can take myself out and like look at myself from a third party perspective, I’m like, dude, your life is pretty, like, what are you complaining about? There’s nothing to complain. But for me internally, and this is something I need to work on, and I have like coaches that can help me to get through this because I do think it’s a little bit strange, to be honest with you, even when I’m saying this, it’s like, there are a couple pieces that’s still missing and I’m not sure what those pieces are.
Tom:
But I think one of the things I need to do is just like living more in the presence. And also, you know doing what you do, man, like the fact that you go travel, like I feel like you’re in the Maldives like every other week, like every single time I open my Facebook, I’m like, oh, of course. Like Bradley is in Maldives. Yeah, I wanna do more traveling, man. Like, I think traveling is just different cultures, different, you know, senses, different food, different experiences. I think life would definitely need some uncertainty, right? We need certainty, but we also need uncertainty. And I think when you go travel, a lot of it is uncertain. Like the day that you get up, you actually don’t know what that day’s gonna look like right here, you know, I go to the same coffee shop, I play the same, like talk to the, the same people. So yeah, man, like you posting your stories have definitely inspired me to actually go out and travel a bit more, so. Awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
Alright. Well Tom you know, thank you so much for coming on here. Now, I know people might wanna reach out to you on their interweb, so how, how can they find you? And then also I think you have like a new course coming up to help sellers. So talk a little bit about that too. Yeah,
Tom:
So you can follow me on probably my Instagram, that’s where I post most often is @tom.com.ig. So ttom.com.ig. And then my course, yeah, I’ve just been, you know, doing FBA Masterclass, which is my course for the past like four or five years now. And we just launched a version 3.0 with actually Adam Heist. So Adam is now part of FBA masterclass. So super stoked about that partnership. And yeah, I mean, you got me who sold my business for seven figures. Adam sold his business for seven figures, and Adam is now repeating the same process. He’s launching a new brand. I’m gonna be launching a new brand. So we’re, I would say at, you know, we’re, there’s so many ways to do Amazon, and I’m not saying I’m the best Amazon seller, I’m sure there’s sure a lot of other people that are much better than me with bigger businesses, but for me it’s always been about sharing what’s working for me and what’s not. So yeah, that’s a little bit about our course. You can check it out at master fba.com. But yeah, other than that, thank you so much. You know, you’ve been a very prominent figure in the Amazon community and yeah, we are, we all appreciate what you do as well. Like,
Bradley Sutton:
Well, Tom I look forward to next year having you back on and let’s talk about this like groundbreaking product that you have in development. Would love to hear about it.
Tom:
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
In this episode, we cover the latest breaking news on the Amazon and Walmart space. Let’s see what’s buzzing this week.
In today’s episode, we caught up with Vince Montero to talk about the Amazon PPC Academy by Helium 10. Vince, who is an Amazon PPC expert and seasoned marketer, took us through all the chapters of this PPC course and shared valuable insights on how to you can improve your Amazon PPC skills. We discussed campaign setup and strategy, including streamlining campaign creation and optimizing PPC in Amazon. Vince shared what you can learn inside this course and answered all your PPC-related questions like, is it possible to use Chat GPT for your Amazon PPC Campaigns and more! If you’re interested in learning more about Amazon PPC or want to get in touch with Vince, be sure to tune in to this episode. You won’t want to miss out on the valuable insights and strategies shared by this Amazon PPC expert.
In episode 442 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Vince discuss:
- 02:08 – Catching Up With Vince Montero
- 05:07 – Talking About Helium 10’s Amazon PPC Academy
- 07:25 – Breaking Down All Chapters Of This PPC Course
- 09:14 – Tools & Processes For PPC Research
- 12:42 – Campaign Setup & Strategy
- 20:15 – Streamlining Campaign Creation
- 21:55 – PPC Optimization In Amazon
- 23:15 – How To Use Bulk Sheets For Amazon PPC
- 24:35 – Learn To Use Amazon DSP
- 25:48 – Do You Use Chat GPT In Amazon PPC?
- 27:13 – PPC Strategies On Scaling & Generating More Revenue & Profit
- 29:16 – How To Get In Touch With Vince
- 30:37 – Customizing Video Creatives & A/B Testing
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TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a familiar face back on TACoS Tuesday. Vince Monte was back to answer all of your PPC related questions and to talk about some cool things that have to do with sponsored video. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think
Bradley Sutton:
If you’re like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don’t have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I’m managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week. Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That’s h10.me/adtomic. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday show, where we talk about any and all things PPC could be Adtomic related or just Walmart PPC, Amazon PPC.
Bradley Sutton:
We bring in experts every month to answer all of your questions live. And so this month we have a familiar guest coming on the show, the Originator of the TACoS Tuesday program. And that’s Vince Montero. And he’s gonna be talking about the PPC Academy that is available to Helium 10 members. He’s gonna talk a little bit about video advertising and basically answering some questions that you guys had out there as well. So this time Carrie was able to have him live on the show. So Carrie, take it away.
Carrie:
Hello everyone. Welcome to TACoS Tuesday. We have another great guest for you. And I think you all know this guest. He’s one of our favorites and he used to host TACoS Tuesday. So I’m gonna go ahead and just bring him on. Vince. Hello, Vince.
Vince:
Hello. Hello. How are you Carrie?
Carrie:
Good. I’m doing great. Yeah, so I’m just really excited that you’re here and I think maybe people are curious what you’re doing now, where you’re at
Vince:
Yeah. Well thanks for having me on. It was great seeing you at Prosper and we had an amazing dinner together with Yes. With Bradley. So I appreciate that so much. It was great to see all the Helium 10 Evangelist crew. But yeah, I think it was there we were talking about Hey, why don’t we have you come back to the show that you originated as an upcoming guest. And so it’s interesting cuz I’m now with Trivium Group, which is a PPC agency run by Mina Elias. And I’m one of the people that actually, I think when you first thought of the idea, I was like, yeah, you, you should do it. Totally do a PPC agency like two years ago. So, yeah, it’s interesting full circle now that I’m working with him and basically I’m kind of doing the same thing for him that I was doing with Helium 10 at least from the marketing and the training aspect. Not all the behind the scenes stuff as much. So yeah, so now I’m just continuing to do content marketing. You know, I started doing reels for the first time.
Carrie:
So fun.
Vince:
I know. I’m still avoiding TikTok, so they can put ’em there if they want. But yeah, I’m just doing YouTube videos for him at LinkedIn posts. And I actually did continue on TACoS Tuesday with Sir TACoS Tuesday with Vince Montero. So that Sir TACoS was a name that I originated, but from doing the show TACoS Tuesday that I started, what, a year and a half ago? Almost two years ago, I think.
Carrie:
Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
Vince:
I kept hearing people, I’d go to conferences and stuff and people would say Mr. TACoS, right? Cause they would know me from TACoS Tuesday. And then I had to be like, no, that’s Sir TACoS to you, Right? So it kind of stuck. And yeah. So I was thinking about what could I do to keep that going Right? Kind of like my brand I guess. So yeah, so it’s been great. I’ve been able to kind of resurrect that as well and do it for Mina and you know, just looking to build that up and continue to put out educational content and hopefully that a lot of the sellers continue to value.
Carrie:
Yeah. That’s so awesome. Yeah. I know a lot of people will still follow you and we still follow you and are still in touch, so it’s really good. I’m so excited tore hear today too. So again for being here. All right. So we’ll go ahead and get into it cuz I wanted, we wanted to talk a little bit about the course that you put together that I think a lot of people don’t know about, which is a bummer because it’s so depth and really just great emotion. A lot of people you know, ask questions about PPC in particular and so you put together some things. So do you wanna tell a little bit about what you put together?
Vince:
Yeah, so when we were thinking about what I would talk about on this show, it kind of made sense to talk about Amazon PPC Academy, which is a full course that I created with Mina Elias, again, who I’m now working together with on content. You know, we created this full course, almost 40 videos, I think and launched it last September. But there was a lot of other things happening at that time. I think we launched something else in September there’s always big launches happening at Helium 10 which is awesome. Like, there’s so much content, so much stuff, but sometimes you know, things, if they’re not repeated enough times, they kind of get lost in the weeds. So I thought I would take the opportunity to talk about Amazon PPC Academy and show you guys where it’s at, and then kind of cover it and to let you know truly what’s in there and how valuable it is.
Vince:
Let’s pop into the dashboard and I can kind of show you guys where it’s at. And if you don’t see this in your Helium 10 dashboard, then obviously then you don’t have access to it. You need to upgrade. So I happen to be in Adtomic, obviously, this is a tool that I helped build at Helium 10. So I am pretty regularly in this in Adtomic, and I still manage you know, a handful of my personal clients through Adtomic, which has been great to continue to do. But anywhere you are within Helium 10, it’s really it’s the FBA training, Amazon sellers training. So it used to be called something differently, I think it was Freedom Ticket, but that’s when Freedom Ticket was the only thing available as a course. Yeah.
Vince:
So Freedom Tickets are still here. You can still see 2.0 and 3.01 is gone. And there is some PPC content in both of these that I actually did produce and create. But in doing that, it was the basics in both of these Freedom Tickets, it was just for beginners. So we actually do suggest again, if you have access to this, if this comes up on your screen when you click that button that you do actually watch the PPC for Beginners course in Freedom Ticket 3.0, I think it’s week 11 in Freedom Ticket. And that really does cover the basic basics. Whereas PPC Academy is kind of still covers the basics, but it does go into a lot more in detail. There’s, let’s see there’s 15, well, 14 different modules.
Vince:
So I just wanted to go over this really quickly with you guys. So the very beginning after the intro obviously, is tools and processes for PPC research. So obviously Helium 10 is still, in my opinion, the best solution for both keyword research and product targeting ASIN research. So I basically go over how to do, or maybe is it Mina? We actually toggle back and forth, like I do a video, he does a video. So we go back and forth. And the point of that really the premise of this whole course I will say up upfront is Mina kind of covers how to do PPC optimization manually in Seller Central or the Ads console. So everything that he teaches is things that you know, anybody can do if you’re running PPC and basically the things that he uses to manage his PPC clients in his agency which is what he says in this intro video.
Vince:
So, and then I cover kind of more of the Helium 10 focus tools but then also Adtomic. So we cover both things that you can do yourselves manually, which I highly recommend if you guys had not run your PPC campaigns manually. It’s really good to have a really strong understanding of PPC so that when you do start to use a tool like Adtomic, or you maybe go to an agency like Trivium, that you really kind of understand the metrics and what is being done to your PPC campaigns. If you don’t have that understanding, if you haven’t spent time in seller Central looking at your campaigns, managing your campaigns, then you really don’t have anything to compare it against and you kind of really don’t know what, what are your benchmarks for actually improving your campaigns, especially if they’re new.
Vince:
So after these modules, keyword research, product targeting, ASIN research, I basically just go into Cerebro and I go into Magnet and tell you the best practices on what parameters, what filters that we use to find the best keywords using Cerebro to cross-reference ASINs from your top competitors, and then really drill down into what are these top sellers for my most relevant keywords, what keywords are they using to make the most sales. And so having that knowledge and the ability to do that within Cerebro is just amazing. And you can do that and you should be doing that even before you launch PPC. Like, this is something you should be doing when you’re building out your listing. But then those same keywords can be used for PPC.
Vince:
And you know, that listing optimization is key. You know, Carrie, as a seller, you know that if you don’t have a good listing or if your listing isn’t fully optimized, PPC really isn’t gonna help you. So as a caveat to all this, what I really, really would’ve loved is at a beginning module, it was something I had in mind actually before the end of last year, was to create kind of a really quick listing optimization module. Because at the end of the day, if you’re a product detail page isn’t, this is what I say, if it isn’t as good as that means, looks as good, feels as good, or has a better price point to your closest competitor, especially if it’s a brand new product at launch, then you’re not ready for PPC, right? Make sure that even before all these steps that I’m going through, your product detail page looks better, or at least as good, and your price is competitive to your, to your closest competitor that you kind of want to maybe beat right in the marketplace. And then you dive into ppc, right? So
Carrie:
Can I say that that’s same processes for Walmart too, like I just use absolutely Cerebro for optimize my listing, but also my PPC campaigns at Walmart. And I had I started out with a 12 RoAS and now it’s about a five or six, but it’s real. It do, I just do exact campaigns with the, with the words I find on Cerebro and Magnet, and it’s just right to mean you should definitely do your spend that time to it takes me like a long time to do the keyword research, but a lot of people, and a lot of people don’t wanna do it, but it’s the most important, you can find so many golden keywords in Cerbro and Magnet and you can just make so much money off of them.
Vince:
Yeah. Well, it sounds like, Carrie, you just need to watch 2A in this video. Cause we teach you how to do it pretty quickly.
Carrie:
Yeah, well, I do a lot.
Vince:
But for people who aren’t familiar with Magnet or Cerebro, like let’s say they’re brand new, this is a great resource. You just come here and be like, okay, what’s the best practices to use these tools to get the best keywords out of it? And that’s what we cover in both these. And it’s important to do ASIN research. So not only when you launch PPC campaigns, yes, you’re targeting certain keywords to be seen on the search results page, but you also wanna be targeting particular detail pages, actual listings. So that means ASINs, you need to know the ASINs of your closest competitors. You might have an idea of some of them, but you know, we really teach you how to use Helium 10 tools to actually find the best ASINs. So you can create product targeting campaigns as well, so that your ads at launch are seen not only on the search results page, but also on the detail page of your competitors, which is a very powerful placement.
Vince:
So then we go into creating the auto campaigns. This is the foundation of kind of what we suggest as the basics for building out PPC you need to have an auto campaign. So we go into that. We go into all the different targeting levers and what they mean, the close match substitute matching loose matching and then how to rank all those different things. So taking the research you did in module two, actually building out the keyword campaigns, actually building out a product targeting campaign, and then actually building up branded and ranking campaigns too. So at a bare minimum, what this course suggests is an auto campaign, a keyword based campaign, an ASIN based campaign. You should have a branded keyword campaign that simply means a campaign that has your branded keywords in it.
Vince:
So you can start well, so that Amazon will know, hey, this is a brand, this is the keywords for this brand, and start linking them for you. And then your ranking campaigns are basically campaigns that you did your keyword research and you did find some keywords that you were like I really wanna rank for these. I’m gonna go ahead and create some campaigns. So it’s slightly a little bit more advanced. It’s not necessarily like a minimum suggested type of campaign, but we do go into it because this is the campaign setup section and we wanted to include that since that is a strategy that is used by a lot of a lot of sellers. And then chapter four is really me just going into Adtomic and saying showing how our campaign builder works. So by comparison to manually creating the campaigns in Seller Central, you, I go into like what the differences are for the different bidding algorithms that we have in Adtomic and those product lifecycle, product lifecycle stages.
Vince:
I always say product lifestyle stages. Product lifecycle stages are launch, scale or liquidate. So depending on where you are in your Amazon selling journey, if you’re launching, we, there’s an algorithm in Adtomic for that. If you’re just maintaining, if you just wanna scale your campaigns, there’s a bidding algorithm for that. Let’s say your product isn’t selling, or maybe you have a new version of your product that’s coming out, you just wanna get, get rid of all your current products, then you use liquidate, right? And liquidate means just sell the product as much as possible. I don’t care about ACoS any other factor. Adtomic will focus on keywords that sell regardless of ACoS. So really could be powerful if you are launching a bunch of different products to leverage those capabilities within Adtomic. And then I go over the rules and suggestions.
Vince:
So again, another element of Adtomic, basically how to create rules for the campaigns that you’ve built, and then how to use our suggestions to, once you start seeing the results of Adtomic, looking at all your search terms and all your bids and deciding upon do I wanna manually do these? Do I wanna look through them? Which you should do on a kind of a weekly basis, looking through everything and making sure that you understand what everything on the page means. So that’s what that covers. PPC optimization in Amazon bid in budget adjustments. So super important when you’re in Amazon and you’re trying to learn PPC you know, what should my bids and budgets be? You know, how do I optimize these different types of campaigns? And the cool thing I wanna make mention too is that every single one of these modules have different downloads, right?
Vince:
So every single module above that I was talking about, every single module has a summary page. So you really kind of get to see, you can watch the video and everything you see in the video is kind of summarized at the end. And if there’s any graphics within the video, we actually make those available for download too. So for bid and budget adjustments, I believe, yeah. So I have this up on my screen already. Really, so every single video that you look at has this download so you can actually see, okay, I learned there was a lot of stuff that Vince and Mina said. Maybe I was taking notes, right? But we give you a summary slide for every single video. So all the nuggets that are in the videos that we use to create the videos, are actually available for you in the summary slide.
Vince:
So in this particular one, which I thought is super powerful bid in budget adjustments when optimizing choose a seven day period, exclude the two most recent days, right? Because that’s really volatile. Maybe you don’t know that. So having this information just written out in bullet points is super helpful. After the bid adjustment’s made, waits five to seven days to measure to see if its impact and if another adjustment is necessary. If you’re using Adtomic, Adtomic, does that right? And it will show you the results after five to seven days automatically. So I won’t go into detail every single one of these bullets, but again, I just wanted to let you guys know that not only do you have the videos as reference, but you can actually download these, these different summary pages.
Vince:
Alright, so placement bidding adjustments that is essentially in Amazon, like the placement bidding, so top of search placements, product page placements, it’s something that you can really only do. Actually no, I think you can do it in Adtomic now too. But within Amazon, in the campaign setting section, it’s just an area where you can actually toggle and play with different percentages to say Amazon, Hey, I want to be seen more on top of search, or maybe I want to be seen more on product detailed pages. So Mina goes into detail about when to use it, when’s the best time to make those kinds of adjustments, which is super helpful. How to find keywords. Keyword harvesting means looking at search terms that have converted and pull them out and put them into existing campaigns or maybe new campaigns so you can target them directly.
Vince:
Negative targeting, kind of the opposite of that. Looking at your search terms and finding things that are wasting spend maybe spending with no sales or maybe have a super high ACoS or low RoAS. So he goes into detail of the exact parameters that he uses for his clients to make those kinds of optimizations. And then reoccurring optimization processes. So what kind of cadence does he do to manage all these different functions that we’re talking about above. And then again, available in the download is things like this. So you get to really see, and there’s a lot on this page, so I’m not gonna go over everything but you really gotta get to see you know, what Mina explains in the video, kinda spread out on a spreadsheet that actually you can track.
Vince:
So you can say, okay, this is what I need to do every seven days. This is what I need to do every three days, this is what I need to do seven days after that. So you kind of, again, get the framework for everything that he was teaching in the video. And again, this is a slide that is shown in the actual video, but every single slide that is shown in the videos are available for download. So I think that’s super powerful. I know I’m going through this pretty quickly. Are there any questions, Carrie, that I can answer?
Carrie:
Not that I can see in terms of about this?
Vince:
Okay. Yeah. So any questions you guys have about PPC in general for me, we’ll answer kind of when I’m done through with this quick overview. Alright, so let’s see, where were we at 5-A? Yeah, so again, PPC optimization in Amazon. So that’s Mina covering all the things, things you can do in Amazon. And then streamlining PPC optimizations is me talking about Adtomic bulk sheets is, again, Mina. Cause this is manual processes. And this is an area in that I have no experience. I never used bulk sheets. So this is a great way, if you’ve got a lot of campaigns and you’re running them manually, book sheets is definitely the way to go. And then I go into brand registry and PPC. And the reason that we added this here everything kind of above seven and above is kind of, you can do all these things.
Vince:
If you’re a brand, a brand new seller, you’re not yet brand registered and you’re just running sponsored product ads. Now, once you’re brand registered though, you have the ability to do sponsored brands and sponsored display. Very, very power powerful campaigns. There’s tons of videos. I just did actually a bunch of videos specifically on sponsored brands and sponsored display that’ll be coming out on the Trivium YouTube channel. And then nine and 10 are simply me going into detail what they look like in Amazon, actually go in it and say, this is a sponsored brand campaign. This is a sponsored display campaign. So if there’s any question about the product or sorry, the campaign types that’s fully covered in, in these different modules. And then using an analytics dashboard. So this is Mina again, manually showcasing what dashboard that he uses to manage his accounts and the campaigns.
Vince:
And then as well as calculating the cost of conversion. And again, what’s great about these particular modules, and I think maybe a couple of modules above this too, is that Mina uses specific spreadsheets that he’s been using over a certain amount of times, certain macros that are built into it. And those are actually available for download as well in these modules. So if I was to click on any of these, you’d see probably multiple, yeah, three different downloads that are available here. So on this side, yes, I already have ’em here. So this is the dashboard example, right? So again, lots of detail, but he goes over in the video this is how we manually track things and for download, cause I just clicked on the download. And so you guys can see this, this is what it looks like and you kind of just fill it in.
Vince:
And so you can easily track, manually track your, how your campaigns are doing. You know, he’s got everything in here, PPC spend, sales, total sales units that were sold sessions, everything that’s in here that he uses. And then another one that’s available here is a conversion calculator. So again, I just clicked on this, on that previous screen that I showed you guys and you have this available for download exactly what Mina uses to manually track wwhat’s the conversion metrics that are gonna actually then be built in and you should use in order to track is this campaign performing well or is it not? You know, obviously knowing what the conversion is, the conversion rate, and actually being able to track that. What are the trends? Super important to understanding the power of the effect of your PPC campaigns.
Vince:
And then, let’s see, I went all the way to chapter 11, PPC to Influence organic rank. Yeah. So basically this is two different modules that are focused again on Helium 10 tools. One is keyword tracker. And then one is talking about how keyword tracker is now integrated into Adtomic. So you can still use them separately or you can use, just look at the view within Adtomic. But it’s super important to understand the correlation between your PPC and how it’s affecting your organic rank. And then okay, deeper dive into PPC. So within Adtomic there’s really kind of deep dives that you can do into your search terms and your keywords. So that’s kind of what I go over that it’s really only available still within Adtomic. It’ll give you data on like your search terms, and how they’re performing across your entire account.
Vince:
You know, cuz sometimes search terms are from auto campaigns or from broad match keywords. And so you really don’t know without seeing a clear picture, how is this particular search term doing linked to this keyword in this campaign. So there’s a detail page for that with an Adtomic that kind of shows you, and this is a manual thing that you have to kind of look at. So really a powerful ways to do deep dives into your PPC and Adtomic using Amazon DSP that’s last but not least, Mina that again, not an area that I’m a specialist in and DSP, if you guys don’t know what that is, it’s just Amazon’s demand side platform. And all that means is that they have a lot of ways to leverage your ads and lots of different areas.
Vince:
And so Mina just goes into all the different elements that go into running campaigns and DSP from optimizing what the different final stages mean and what they are. And then obviously tracking it how do you know if it’s profitable or not. So it’s very, very nuanced when, when, when we were filming this within the offices, I learned a lot. I forgot most of it, but it’s, it’s really a great way to kind of get a download on what DSP is. And that’s it for the awesome content portion of our session today, guys.
Carrie:
Cool. I mean that’s such a really, that’s an amazing tool for people to learn how to utilize PPC and use that Adtomic cause I get that question so much. So for anyone watching who’s had those questions about how to do PPC definitely go through this course. Also you could go through the freedom ticket stuff first, a little more basic in Freedom Ticket, start off with and then come to PPC Academy. I think this is worth so much and you get it along with your Helium 10 subscription, which is an incredible value. Here’s an interesting question. Do you use like ChatGPT and PPC?
Vince:
Not yet. Only cuz I’m still learning it. What I find that it’s been really useful for so far is kind of breaking down. I think Helium 10 has a tool where you can break down all their reviews, right? What I’m hearing people do is filtering using ChatGPT to filter that out and maybe create you know, new marketing material around that. Like maybe it addresses the negative stuff in there. Or maybe looking at the positive stuff in there and making sure that you can use ChatGPT to write new maybe a new product description. I haven’t chat it myself yet, but actually my next guest on Sir TACoS Tuesday, at the end of this month, I will be talking to a specialist in PPC who is using ChatGPT.
Carrie:
Sounds good. Vince. I’m handling multiple brands as brand manager and I’m stuck at scaling and generating more profits from better performing campaigns. Please suggest your strategies on scaling and generating more revenue and profit, and he said please also share PPC course details. So he definitely shared those details. Those are in the FBA training link when you log into Helium 10 and you can find the PPC course. But Vince, I’ll let you take the other part. I think you, you kind of went over that you can find those answers in the course.
Vince:
Yeah, exactly. So Azim, I wish there, I wish there were simple answers to questions like this. But there really isn’t like you know, every I get asked questions about what’s the ideal ACoS, what’s an ideal budget, and at the end of the day it’s really up to the product, right? And it’s really up to the margins. So if you’ve got really good margins on your product, then you can do a lot more with PPC you can collect a lot more data and then you can scale more quickly. Whereas if you have low margins, you have to kind of do it at an even pace. I mean, it might take a little bit longer but you know, if you’re kind of just stuck, I would say if you’re not leveraging Adtomic yet, do that <laugh>.
Vince:
Yeah. it does come with the Diamond plan as far as I still know. And it’s just the, one of the simplest ways, I mean I still use it guys. I no longer work at Helium 10. I still use it because it’s one of the simplest ways that I can really just dive into what’s happening in the account. You know, what search terms might you find that if you don’t really dive deep might actually work better than other keywords that you’re targeting, finding waste, you know that when talking about PPC optimization, that’s all you’re really doing. Finding the stuff that works and trying to push it up and trying to find more of that, finding stuff that’s wasting spend in no sales or high a costes and, and dropping that down. So that’s really the secret. There’s no secret beyond that. And using a third party tool is if you’re managing all this yourself manually, I think my answer would simply be think about using a tool like Adtomic to actually help you manage all this and you’ll find the data and the information much quicker and easier to then make kind of strategic decisions on what you should do for some of these brands.
Carrie:
Very good. Okay. I mean, this leads on to a good question cause I think a lot of people wanna know exactly how people can get in touch with you and make sure that because I think a lot of people wanna stay in touch and maybe are interested in Trivum groups. So definitely put info down there.
Vince:
Yeah, the best way to follow me obviously is on LinkedIn. You can connect with me there. It’s just LinkedIn or whatever.com/vmontero or just search my name. It’s actually under Vincent Montero. There is a little it says Sir TACoS too. So it’s Vincent Sir TACoS Montero. I built that into my LinkedIn. That’s funny. Yeah, I get a lot of questions, you know people connecting and then asking questions there, which is great. And that always kind of feeds into content cause I’m still creating content. So it’s great to hear from people and get questions. You can find me on Instagram as well. You can search my name Vince Montero, Vincent Montero or at events one.
Carrie:
Thank you for sharing. Jake says, I wonder if you could have a color variation specific video campaign and take all over three spots.
Vince:
Okay, so thank you Jake. Cuz that kinda leads me into another bullet point. So my last TACoS Tuesday that I just recorded what last Tuesday? Yeah. So my Sir TACoS Tuesdays are the last Tuesday of the month. And these TACoS Tuesdays are the first Tuesday of the month. Yes. so last week I kind of went over the top things I learned from Prosper. One of the things I cover is actually kind of, I know Jake’s joking, but a new thing that–
Carrie:
He says he does it on display ads on competing.
Vince:
Perfect. So I don’t wanna say slightly more advanced strategy of what we’re talking about here, but we’re talking about customizing different types of creative and testing those out, which you should be AB testing. So yes, Jake is correct, but what I heard, which I thought was interesting, and I included in my video last week, is look at your PPC data and find some long tail keywords that are making decent sales, right? Long tail keywords typically don’t make a lot of sales, but if you can find some long tail keywords that are making decent sales, typically at a lower ACoS than your higher search volume keywords it can be really powerful because longtail keywords are the shoppers typing in more than one word, typically, I think it’s three or four words to be considered kind of longtail.
Vince:
So let’s say they’re typing in black carry on foldable luggage, right? So let’s say that you have luggage and one of the features is it does fold, but in your creative you don’t have any imagery of that. So let’s say you look at your PPC data and you find all these long-tail keywords with different features and one of them is foldable, right? The foldable features. So foldable luggage. So you see enough sales from that and then you’re like, oh crap, none of my creative or my video shows the thing actually folding. Yeah, right. It may be a, it may be a bullet point, right? So it’s probably in your product description, which is great, but we’re talking about is making sure it’s in your creative, making sure it’s in the intro video or intro to your video.
Vince:
So really customizing your videos and creating campaigns specifically for those long tail keywords. So pulling them out of your PPC, creating their own independent campaigns and just running, you know creative specific campaigns targeted to what those shoppers are typing in exactly. a specific feature. And it could be I’m harping back to the foldable, but there’s lots of different specific features of a product that maybe might not be at the first thing that you think of, but if you do see that enough sales from that, then you’re launching a campaign that already has proven that it will be successful and should be doubly so because you’re using that imagery or that video showcasing that particular feature right at the beginning. And that’s the point. It has to be the first image of a creative or very obvious in a creative or the first thing that you see in a video.
Vince:
Like we were saying before, minimum three benefits and features in the video. Carrie said she just put in five in hers, so it would be the first one. And then let’s say you find another feature, you make that feature the first one. So you can kind of like video, you can kind of, I envision it as just cutting and kind of cutting and pasting, like creating little specific clips and then just making sure that’s the front and then creating a PPC campaign. So you’re really just targeting those shoppers. And it could be scary cuz it’s like additional budget and additional videos, but it will work cuz you’ve already got the PPC data that shows oh no, people are looking for this particular function or feature and it’s selling at a really good ACoS. So you’re capturing all that.
Carrie:
Yeah. Sounds, yeah that’s good information because I really think that it’s such a good opportunity. People are not, not capitalizing on. So those are a lot of good strategies for video ads and just, and creative, general and creative. And so thank you so much for joining us today. I think we have pretty much, we pretty much have run out of time, so I think somebody said it’s great to see you both, Vince, it’s always good to hear you speak.
Vince:
Ah, there I need. Message me on Facebook. We need to follow up after I saw him at Prosper.
Carrie:
Oh, okay. Very nice. Well, thanks again for joining us. I hope you’ll join us again in the future for other TACoS Tuesdays. I think you did great. Good job recapping all the great coursework that we created.
Vince:
Hopefully we’ll see an uptick in people in PPC Academy cause it’s an incredible resource. Again, Helium 10 does a great job of creating good training content and so I’m just here today to make sure that you guys know that it’s available to you. And hope that it helps
Carrie:
Yes, I think it will. And so thank you again for everything and we’ll see you again soon.
Vince:
Sounds good. Thanks, Carrie.
Carrie:
Bye.
Bradley Sutton:
All right guys. Thank you so much Carrie and Vince for that. I hope you guys are, were able to find some beneficial things, especially those of you who are already inside of Helium 10. Make sure to go ahead and get PPC Academy active and go through that course. Really great information that he and Mina brought out there and hopefully some of the other tips that he talked about you guys are able to implement. Don’t forget we do this show once a month. This was the podcast version of it, but we actually, this was recording of what we did live. So if you guys ever want to come on our live broadcast, just look out for the announcement of when it’s gonna go down and we stream it live to YouTube and to our Facebook group. So make sure to come on live and bring your top questions for whatever special guests that we’re gonna have each month. I’ll see you next month.
Looking to take your Amazon sales to the next level? In this SSP episode, we got Kseniia Reidel back on the show, and she reveals how she 10X’d her 2021 sales in 2022! Thanks to free Amazon-selling learning resources like Project X and Freedom Ticket, she was able to start her own Amazon FBA business. Kseniia also shared the tough challenges she had to face and the big wins she had along the way. Plus, you’ll get to hear about how she rewards herself and her family for growing her business to almost $1 Million in gross sales. Do you have the same goals of success for your Amazon FBA business? Make sure to tune in for some valuable advice and actionable strategies from a successful Amazon seller!
In episode 441 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Kseniia discuss:
- 01:39 – Did Kseniia Reach Her Goals For 2022?
- 03:07– A 3PL’s Mistake Gave Her Challenges
- 09:17– Bradley’s Solution If This Happens To You
- 11:11 – How Did Kseniia Reach 2x Her Original 2022 Goal
- 13:08 – Talking About Patents And IP
- 15:39 – Finding Product Ideas In Facebook Groups
- 17:02 – How To Combine Project X Strats With The FB Group Strategy
- 23:55 – From $250K To $1M, What Has Changed?
- 25:44 – How Did Kseniia Reward Herself?
- 26:40 – Kseniia’s Hobbies & Recretion Outside The Amazon Grind?
- 27:14 – “I Almost Got Eaten By A Lion”
- 29:59 – How The New Insights Dashboard Can Help Her Business
- 33:50 – Launch Strategies That She Is Currently Using
- 35:46 – Kseniia’s 60-Second Tips
- 37:41 – Her Business Goals This 2023
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got a seller back on the show who was able to 10x what she did in 2021 last year. And that’s thanks to using some Project X strategies, but also combining that with looking in Facebook groups for new products. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Wanna check estimated sales for products you see on Amazon? Or maybe you want to instantly see how many listings on page one of a search term result? Have the actual search keyword in the title. You can find all of these things out and more with the Helium 10 Chrome extension tool Xray. More than 1 million people have used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray, h10.me/xray. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got serious seller back with us on the show. So if you guys want to check out her full backstory about how she started on eBay and failed with her first product and learned from Project X and Freedom Ticket after that, make sure go to h10.me/320. But Kseniia, it’s great to have you back here. How’s it going?
Kseniia:
Hi. Good, how are you
Bradley Sutton:
Now we were just talking offline about your recent travels to Africa where you almost got eaten by a lion. I heard lions like Russian food a lot over there, but we’ll get back to that a little bit because we also talk on this show nowadays about like what people do in their spare time. And actually my thing is travel, which is why I always include my intro, something about travel for the videos and stuff. But anyways, let’s first just talk about business anyways. And you know, it was about, I wanna say like a year, year and a half the last time you were on the show. So catch me up. How did you end 2022? I think you had given me a goal. Hold on. You probably don’t remember what you told me. Let me look at my notes here. What Mel said you were you were, you had launched your first product, you were looking for a second one or another one, and you were looking to try and get to half a million dollars last year. So were you able to reach that goal?
Kseniia:
Yes, almost doubled it. I think it was like 960,000 by the end of the year
Bradley Sutton:
So that goal, that was too conservative of a goal, I guess. Doubled it. Almost a million dollars for the year. All right. Talk to me about it. So like, was the, the second product also in the same niche? Did it sell more than your first product? Walk me through your 2022.
Kseniia:
Yes. Well all my products are in the same niche and I think last time when I talked to you was at the Prosper show last year, and then I told you a story when the 3PL messed up the shipment.
Bradley Sutton:
Tell me about that again or tell everybody about that.
Kseniia:
Yeah, so what happened is that well so my first product was successful. I found the second one, I just launched it. And that was around March when I launched the second product. And like a couple of weeks after I launched the second product, that was reason 3PL cause, there were still issues with the storage limits. So they send my second product to the shipping plan of the first product. I don’t know how they did that because it’s totally different packagings. It’s not even a variation it’s a different product. And I already had another shipment ready in China for that first product and I was like, what am I supposed? And that’s why I came to you and I was like, what am I supposed to be doing right now? Because I have no idea.
Bradley Sutton:
How did you find it out again? Like how did you realize what had happened?
Kseniia:
They realized after they shifted, I think before I got to Amazon, they emailed me. It’s like, oh, I think we made a mistake. And I was like, what mistake?
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So that’s kind of good. It was before it went live. Okay. And they’re like our bad. How did you end up? What did you end up doing?
Kseniia:
Well, I first closed all the listings cuz I was like, okay, let me think about it cuz I don’t wanna I don’t want ’em started receiving cause it’s not even a different color variation, it’s a different product. So I was like, let me see what’s happening with it. And then I started talking to different people and know I talked to you. And that was like a week after that happened and I talked to other people and nobody knew exactly what Amazon was gonna do cause it’s not like it’s happens often. And so I just decide to remove all the first product from Amazon I decided to remove, I think it was around a thousand units cuz I wasn’t sure if they’re just gonna relabel it and send the wrong product.
Bradley Sutton:
So all the first product and the second product you had to remove because you didn’t?
Kseniia:
No, I knew that they shipped second product for the shipment plan of the first product. So I knew that the second product is fine, it’s not messed up. But the first one was, and I didn’t know what Amazon was gonna do with it. I didn’t know if, if they’re gonna relabel it or if they’re just gonna, and what ended up happening is that when I removed everything, cuz I removed some to my house, so I removed some 3PL and it de it was depending on the warehouse, so some of them treated it so scanned it right and put it on a right shelf. But then some boxes I received when they relabeled it. So on one product there was a FNSKU of another product. So they relabeled it the wrong way. So it wouldn’t been a mess if I wouldn’t remove it all. I’m glad I did it.
Bradley Sutton:
And at that point, how much was that first one selling that, one like per day that you had to stop it?
Kseniia:
I think it was doing 40,000 a month. So what was it?
Bradley Sutton:
So basically every day you’re losing over a thousand dollars because of this?
Kseniia:
Yeah. And I already had a shipment in China, a little being inspected that week for that first product. And I was like, well how am I supposed to be shipping it now cuz I have to remove everything? So I ended up creating a new listing, but then I merged them. I did it as a variation so I don’t lose the reviews. At the same time when I’m removing the first one already, like relaunched under a new listing with the new shipment that I got from China. So I was a total mess. You know me? Having the first success with second product and being so happy and there’s this huge thing comes in that literally like stops everything.
Bradley Sutton:
So then how long did it take for everything to get all right? You sent back the inventory. They checked one by one, relabeled it, got it back to Amazon. Like how long from the time that you realized this problem had happened to now product one and product two are back in Amazon and everything is going again.
Kseniia:
I think three to four months probably. I don’t remember.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh my goodness. Wow. Yeah. That took a long time.
Kseniia:
Well cause they don’t remove it by batches. They removed it by sometimes they would get one unit in a box, sometimes they would get two units in a box. Yeah. So, and in 3PL ended up even charge. They didn’t wanna redo it for free. They were like, well, we’re gonna have to charge you because we get like 2000 boxes here or more in that or whatever. We’re gonna have to charge you.
Bradley Sutton:
I hope you fought that right since it was their problem at the first place?
Kseniia:
Well, I did. It was so stressful. It lasted with them. I’ve been discussing I was talking to an owner for, for a long time because I was like, guys, you did this, you know how much money I lost because of you. So, and then you want me to pay more? And their point was, they wanted me just to wait. They’re like, oh, just wait until we remove everything and then you can start selling. I was like, it’s gonna take three or four months for me to wait. I can’t wait. I need to do a new listing and relaunch with the same boxes but under different listing.
Bradley Sutton:
So basically what you did was that one SKU you kind of had to permanently, or not permanently, but at least a hundred percent close since you never know how many was still left. And then you started another SKU for the same listing so that it would had a different so that it had a different fnSKU, right?
Kseniia:
Yes. And I merged them, so I would have the reviews, so that way it will technically, it’s a different SKU aslo.
Bradley Sutton:
So you actually made a new ASIN, not just a new SKU?
Kseniia:
Yeah, so I made a new ASIN and I made them as variations. Like I put it in like a size variation, so that way it still keeps all the reviews and now actually, because then I had another issue with the same product and now I’m actually using the first listing for the actual variation. So I’m still keeping all the reviews.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay, interesting. Because I think another option for people who something like that might happen is you did, you know what you did was right, you closed the listing because you don’t want any of , don’t know which one was contaminated units or, or units that, that had the wrong sticker on it. But another thing that somebody could do is under the same ASIN, just create a new SKU and then send an inventory because when you create a new SKU, it, it creates a new fnSKU. And then you don’t have to worry about merging or reviews or anything like that. And then you also don’t have to worry about you know, ones of that original you know, FNSKU getting out. Right. You know, the theoretically speaking. But the way you did it is probably a little bit safer, but just a little bit harder. So three, four months, were you able to regain that momentum on the first product or being out of stock for so long and having the listing closed? Did you lose ground to competitors or what happened?
Kseniia:
Oh, I never used that listing from the one I had to close since I started selling a couple of weeks after it happened under a new ASIN, I was still fine because I still didn’t have too much competition. And when I started, I was a second person selling that product and by the time it happened I was still like, I was still the second, still nobody showed up. Couple of months later though, I got a lot of Chinese sellers that copied exactly what I was selling, but at that point it was fine. So.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Now how was it that you were able to pretty much like four x what you did the previous year and even double your original goal, like which product took off so well that exceeded your expectation? Was it that first one or was it the second one? Or did you launch a third one?
Kseniia:
Well in total right now have four products with variations. So it’s eight SKUs in total, but one actually launched this year. So I ended up last year with six SKUs. It was the second product that took off more. But also what happened when I launched the second product and after I had to relaunch the first product, I got a bunch of the Chinese copycats. I covered exactly the same of my first product and you know, they just dropped the price. And so I started losing a lot of sales because of that. So I had to redesign it, I had to redesign the first product that way it’s a bit different. And I was able to file the design patent on both of those products. So I still don’t know how long it’s gonna take to get it, but I file it that way.
Bradley Sutton:
So did you put patent pending on the listing?
Kseniia:
Yes I did. It didn’t stop though. Some people because on my second product that ended up being like the best seller of all my products, by the end of the year, like by the end of the summer, I would say I got like two or three people who copied exactly the same, the product, even the pictures. And I think they just copied my listing, like the bullet points and everything. So I, the first time I was able to remove them because I copyright the listing. So Amazon removed them the first time, but then the second time they relaunched a couple of months later, they were a little smarter, so they just rephrased my listing. They didn’t copy it word per word, so they rephrased it a little bit. So now I can’t do anything about them. They’re still there and until I get a patent I can’t remove them.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Now how much did you pay for the patent? You said it’s two different patents you got or just one?
Kseniia:
Yeah, two.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you use Rich Goldstein or you had somebody else that you used for that?
Kseniia:
No, I had somebody else. My husband is a lawyer actually, and he recommended me an IP lawyer that he knew. So yeah, so we kind of knew him. I think the first one I did it actually had to do with before I launched the second product, so I was kind of a guess, I was hoping that it will be the main seller because you’re not allowed to file a patent if the product is already launched. So when I reached out to the lawyer, I’m glad, like it was already on Amazon, but I haven’t started selling it yet. And they told me, do not start selling it because you’re not allowed to until you file a patent. So I think the first patent was around I would say like 7,000, probably seven or eight, because they had to do search because the first product that they did, it was a bit like not too unique, I would say design. So they wanted to make sure that it’s, it will go through. So they had to pay an agency, couple of thousand for the search to make sure that there are no product, I knew there are no products like that with exact same design, but they just wanted to make sure for them
Bradley Sutton:
That. But then the way you calculated it was like, Hey, yeah, this is expensive, $7,000, but you know, you’re gonna make that up in more sales once you’re able to kick those other sellers off. Is that kind of like why you were okay with paying that much money?
Kseniia:
Yeah, well, because I already learned on my first product that three, four months later after I start selling in the Chinese copycats, they see that there are sales and they’re gonna show up with a price that almost 30-40% less than I’m selling. So that’s why I had to redesign the first product, because that would happen. Because at the same time, there’s like five sellers came in with exact the same product as I was selling. Yeah. That’s why I lost a lot of sales because of them. So I learned that before I launch a second product, I need to go and apply for a patent. Yeah. And I knew that it’s probably not gonna stop some people it’s not gonna stop a lot of people. There’s still gonna be some copycats, but it weren’t as many as with the first product because I put the patent pending on the listing.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Cool. Cool. Now, what are some other good things that happened? You know, like now we’ve been talking about copycat people and problems with your 3PL. So let’s give some people some, some good stories from, from last year. You know, some successes, something that worked out really well for you.
Kseniia:
Well, what worked out is going back to my favorite Facebook groups is we talked about it where I found the ideas because I used the Facebook groups and all my start from the first product and then to all the other product I launched, all the ideas I got from the Facebook groups. So what happened is that, because it’s a community of probably 20 or 30,000 people. It’s not my Facebook group, but it’s a Facebook group of the people who use the product, since I’m selling accessories as a product. So it’s like, oh, if I’m selling like a case for an iPhone, so that’s like an iPhone user group for example. And I see sometimes they talk to each other, oh, that would be so cool to have this product. And I was like, okay. And I constantly read the groups, I see what they’re talking about, what they wanna see, and I was like, okay.
Kseniia:
And I see like a hundred people wanting the same product and I go on Amazon, I don’t see it, and then, then I go to like Etsy or something like that and there is like a handmade version of that product. And I was like, well, I think that’s a pretty good idea. Even though there were no, like with, I think with my third product, there were no exactly search terms on Amazon for that, for that exact product. But I saw people in Facebook group that wanted that product. So I kind of risked a little bit with that. And but I knew, I saw people literally asking for it. And I was like, okay, let’s see.
Bradley Sutton:
So like almost all your products, you kind of did use the Project X strategy of searching off of Amazon for the demand. You just kind of enhanced it further because that’s not something that we did, we, we didn’t think about looking at Facebook groups. But let’s talk about that a little. Let’s talk about somebody else. You know, you already have your strategy down, but like, let’s say somebody else is out there, maybe they don’t have a product yet, they don’t have a niche. How would you suggest to them to find, first of all, Facebook groups around different niches? Or do they need to pick a niche first and then try to find the Facebook groups in order to, to see the ideas?
Kseniia:
Well, I picked the niche first cuz I knew I wanna be in a certain category just because I wanted to have something that I use. And I understand cuz I knew that I’m not gonna be able to tell, if this is a good product or a bad product if I don’t use it, or if I don’t know how to use it or if I don’t understand like, I don’t know sports, so I’m not gonna go in like sports category or something like that. So I found niche first. And when I started using the Project X strategies to find the first product, the keywords, not the product, the keywords. I started down with like two or three categories and when I found it. So when I found the category, then I started going to Facebook group. So like, I would say probably try to look by the things that you’re interested in, because you’re gonna have to spend a lot of time, like I spend a lot of time reading what people say, what they think. And if you’re totally not interested in that category, in that niche, you’re just not gonna do it.
Bradley Sutton:
Hold on a second though, because I mean I used to do Facebook groups like all day, every day, 10 years ago like in search. But I have, I literally now that I’m thinking about it, I literally have not like, looked for random Facebook groups in probably 10 years. So let’s pretend it’s the Project X I’m in the coffin shelf niche. How do I look for Facebook groups? What do I do? I just use the search bar and just type in like a general theme, like gothic decor and then use that filter for groups that, but like, will will just, does that mean the groups that come up it has to have the gothic decor in the title or related groups will also come up in that kind of search?
Kseniia:
Well, I would try with the, like a smaller group that like super oriented in what you’re doing. Like if it’s a goffin shop, go to a gothic decor and it’s, it might be small groups, like 10 or 20,000 people. It doesn’t need to be like a million. Cause the smallers are usually more active. And I think what also helped me is it needs to be, you open a group and you see is it active? Are people posting there every day? You know, there’s actually stuff going on or it’s just totally dead. And it also works with the things that people are very passionate about. So the product that I’m selling, the actual product, not my accessories, but the actual product people are like super passionate about the product. So they’re constantly discussing and with my product, what happened is that, so I’ll tell later I have a launch product now, but some people just buy it and they post it on the group. So every day I open, I see people, oh, we bought this of Amazon and I’m like, cool, that’s my product, so I don’t even need to do anything because people are passionate about that. And especially since they wanted like a certain product for a while and then they finally got it and they’re like, okay, oh cool, we’re waiting for this product for a long time. So like, they keep posting and then people, people in common start oh, where’d you get this? And they start sharing links and stuff. And
Bradley Sutton:
So, so then how you got the idea for your product was just from reading, like just going back and just sitting there and reading and then people just said, Hey, I wish somebody, or I wish there was a product like this, but I can’t find it, or something like that?
Kseniia:
Yes, exactly. Just like that.
Bradley Sutton:
And are you interacting at all? Like are you making posts in there or, or like asking questions or anything like that? Or what, what are you doing?
Kseniia:
Yeah, so what I started doing, well the first, what I started doing with the second product, I again, I saw it there, what people use. And I decided to add something to my product and add a QR code so I can start building the email list. And so I have something that cost me like 50 cents and I put a QR code and I was able, not too many people, but I think I have around seven or 800 subscribers right now. So what I do now when I launch is that I first do the email list email when I launch a new product saying like, oh, I launched this new product and I get, I mean maybe like I got a hundred sales out of 700 subscribers on the first couple of days of when I launched the product.
Kseniia:
So that was pretty good, I think. And also what I do, I make a post in the Facebook group. So I say, oh look what I got off Amazon and I post a product picture of course a good product picture showing how good the product is and, I guess I don’t say that I make this product, but since I’m also a user, I also generally use this product. I use my own products too. I use my own products too, so yeah. I made comments and it was funny because last product that I launched when I did that post about my product and the Facebook group, the guy who started the main, the Facebook group, and actually the c e o of the company that started the main product Yeah. That I’m selling accessories to, he commented from his personal Facebook account that, oh, you know what, we’re coming with the same product couple of months later he was like,
Bradley Sutton:
So he was one of your competitors?
Kseniia:
Well yeah, they started selling similar products to mine, yes.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Interesting. So what’s a big difference going like a quarter of a million to almost a million, what have you had to do differently? Like, have you hired help? You know, do you have virtual assistances working for you? You’re still handling everything by yourself is your husband helping what’s going on?
Kseniia:
Still me just a lot more hours now and a lot more I guess just the feeling of responsibility is totally different because in 2021 I did little bit over a hundred thousand.
Bradley Sutton:
Oh, I was saying a quarter of a million. So you’re almost 10x
Kseniia:
Now. It’s 10x. Yeah 10x. So I mean, the first time when I had actually placed an order for inventory for like 50,000, I was like I’ve never seen a 50,000 on my bank account before, like when I need, and I needed them one time to spend that much money. It’s just psychologically, I guess hard to manage that amount that was the hardest. Also, because it escalated very fast in a couple of months it went from being like five or $10,000 to like 50 or 60 or 70. That was like, cause I was scared at one point. I was like, what if something goes wrong? And I would get stuck with all this a hundred thousand dollars bill from the supplier.
Bradley Sutton:
Have you started taking money out or everything that you’re making, you’re still putting back into the business?
Kseniia:
No, I start paying myself. Actually, my biggest mistake that I made last year is, was with the bookkeeping because the beginning of the year I didn’t know what’s the amount will be of the how much I will sell. You know, I didn’t know I’m gonna end up with almost a million, so I didn’t have a bookkeeper. And by then, end of the year, by like November, okay, well it looks like my like 700,000 by November. So I think I need to hire someone. So the only person I had to hire is a bookkeeper that told me that I’m gonna end up paying a lot of taxes because I didn’t have the right structure of the company because I didn’t expect that I will make so much.
Bradley Sutton:
You’re profitable I’m assuming.
Kseniia:
Yes, yes.
Bradley Sutton:
What, what’s activities, what’s something that you’ve done to reward yourself with your newfound earnings? Did you buy yourself a car or something like that?
Kseniia:
No, no, I didn’t. I don’t pay myself too much. Well, when on pretty nice vacation, I guess in January. But rather than that, no, I like to travel. That’s the main, the main thing. We travel a lot, like we spend the whole summer in Latin America. We’re still working, but still working every day but at least we can because we both work from home so we can travel and that’s what we do. I think that’s the main thing. I don’t really care about like, buying cars or something like that.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Let’s talk about that. We’ll, we’ll get back to the Amazon strategies, but you know, I don’t know how much you’ve been keeping up with the podcast, but maybe you’ve noticed this year, I always ask the guests now, Hey, what are you doing for your mental health, physical health? And I talk about mine. What I do is I like traveling. That’s why we always have different intros here. But sounds like your thing for hobbies and recreation is also travel. Would that be your like, number one hobby, would you say?
Kseniia:
Yes. That’s definitely, I know my husband’s always laughing at me because usually, what I do is we’re on a trip and I already start booking another one while I’m not even back from the one that we’re on. And he’s always like, when is it gonna stop? And I was like, I don’t think it’s gonna stop, it’s not gonna stop. So used to that, well, sometimes I go alone, sometimes he wants to go and he doesn’t want to go. I go with friends or I go alone. So it doesn’t really matter.
Bradley Sutton:
Now speaking of that trip in January, tell us about what your life flashed before your eye. Thinking you’re gonna get eaten by lion king.
Kseniia:
Yeah, I was just telling you that we’re on a safari and we got very close to a lion that apparently was very hungry because it starts circling around our car and licking her lips and kind of looking at me like my dinner, my dinner is here, a couple of Americans here in the car. So yeah, that was scary,
Bradley Sutton:
But that’s the kind of experience that maybe you wouldn’t have had before Amazon or Maybe it would’ve happened to have a lot later. What else is on the bucket list for travel for you guys?
Kseniia:
Well, I’m going to Central Asia next month. And I think also to, I’m going to Istanbul and I mean the place I really wanna go to, it’s Antarctica, but I dunno when that’s gonna happen because a, you don’t really have a good internet connection and I can’t stop working it’s still, I’m not, I’m not gonna be mentally normal when I can’t control every day what’s happening cuz and even in Africa I still worked for several hours a day, but there like sometimes it might be, you don’t have internet connection, you don’t have wifi or something like that. So I was like, I can’t do that.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, that’s a good segue to get back to Amazon. So thinking about that where you can’t since like you said, you’re trying to handle everything by yourself, you can’t really take a day off or, or take a few days off be. So have you thought about that? Like are you gonna try and maybe hire somebody remotely or something like that to help in the future?
Kseniia:
I don’t know. I mean, I, I think about it. I mean, it’s kind of easy right now since I have a bookkeeper, so at least I don’t need to handle that part. I have a lot of freelancers and I have a pretty good list of a checklist of how I launch products, how I prepare launching products. So I do exactly the same thing every time with have freelancers, the same people that I’ve worked with for like, over two years right now. So the same photographer, the same editor. So I kind of know what the result I’m gonna get, so I’m sure and what’s gonna happen. So that makes it easier. But yeah, I don’t know, I’m just, I guess I’m kind of used to not having days off like normal people.
Bradley Sutton:
But you do have freelancers and stuff, so, so that, that’s a start. That’s a start. Have you seen the new Insights dashboard on your Helium 10 dashboard when you log in, like a completely new interface?
Kseniia:
No, I think I had issues with logging in because of that because I think it was updating a couple of, like a week ago or so. Okay. I couldn’t log in and then I didn’t go back to it after that.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. So I mean by the time this episode comes out, I’m sure you would’ve seen it, but basically what it is is kind of like this new dashboard that everybody has access to who has either the old diamond or the new scale, your business plan. But what it does is it’s a little bit, it’s almost like a virtual assistant because it’s, it’s bringing, it’s taking actions and like just giving you the results. So like some people check their keyword ranks every day, right? So instead of that, we’re gonna like, let you know like, hey, this keyword dropped in organic rank. Hey this, this product, this keyword dropped in sponsor rank. You know, some people are monitoring their PPC like once a week instead of that now all of a sudden you’re gonna get a message, Hey, did you know that you spent 60 clicks and $30 on this keyword and you didn’t get any sales we suggest pausing it.
Bradley Sutton:
So it’s kind of like taking actions that maybe you do normally or you hire somebody to do and then we kind of do it in the background and just deliver the results. So with that in mind, and I know you haven’t seen it yet, what would be on your wishlist? Like what is something that in Helium 10 or Seller Central you find that you are doing daily or weekly or biweekly that you would like to see automated? Like if you could just snap your finger in and boom, it’s gonna appear in this new Insights dashboard. Can you think of anything that comes to mind that would save you a lot of time?
Kseniia:
Well, the most I guess I struggle with is the inventory management. And I know there is a way to track it, but I don’t find it very easy to use I guess for me. I don’t know because it’s not, maybe I’m not putting a direct data in, I don’t know what’s happening, but I don’t see, it’s, don’t see it as like very reliable cause the sales changing months to months. But I think that’s the communications that I would like to get.
Bradley Sutton:
That one’s actually already there, but if you don’t have it set up, like you said, if you don’t have it set up right in the inventory management, then it’s not gonna give you the right information. Like we have different algorithms that can actually even track your seasonality if you’ve been selling for more than a year and then tell you like, oh yeah, hey, you’re probably gonna need to order more so you and I should schedule another call offline and then I’ll show you how to do that. But absolutely that, that’s one of the things in Inside Dashboard. What else are you doing regularly? Like something you just mentioned, something that, ah, man, you feel like you could do better on, but what is something that, hey, like this is just my routine, this is what I always do. Either in Seller Central or Helium 10.
Kseniia:
Well, I mean the PPC and I tried doing off Amazon advertising like Google ads didn’t really work for me. So I just do only PPC and since I launched a lot with the email lists and the Facebook groups, that’s makes it easier also. I, it’s not about like doing daily, but I guess it’s about just the way I launched and prepare for products. You know, it’s a list of things I do before I launch. You know, how to send the samples, do like a photographer make a list of the, the instruction, how to take pictures for the photographer. Cuz I usually send them the detailed list of how I want the pictures to be taken, what angles. Cuz I usually do pretty detailed research about what works, what doesn’t works in my niche. So they usually know what exactly to do when they’re taking pictures for my product.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Are you planning to launch anymore soon?
Kseniia:
Yeah, I have one that will be launched. They’re gonna start manufacturing it I think next week. So I mean hopefully in like two months that would be launched. And another one I’m working on right now.
Bradley Sutton:
What, what’s your current strategy that’s been working for like getting to page one on your main keywords and what you’re planning to do for this next product that’s about to come out?
Kseniia:
Well the first thing I that I do is the Vine reviews. That’s the first thing I do you, I usually give away around I think 30 units. That was the maximum that I could do. And I usually get about 15 reviews, 15 to 20 reviews probably from that. Then what I think works the best for me is, of course I do PPC start from start from where I launch. But what gives the most is when I do the email list and I get sales from the day one and usually it’s a lot of sales cuz people start clicking on the email and they start buying and Amazon sees this as like an outside traffic usually, I also use the fill links there to, so that way I get some sale on the, the fees when I do the my invoice.
Bradley Sutton:
What about Amazon attribution? I wonder if that would work.
Kseniia:
That’s what I’m talking about. So for Amazon it looks like, okay, this is this new product that’s been launched today and somehow people start buying it from day one without any reviews and it’s coming from outside of Amazon. So for them it looks like, oh wow and the same one I do when I post the link to the product and the Facebook group. I also use the Amazon the Amazon attribution. Yeah. I guess called. Cool.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Well just like we did last time we have this the 60-second tip. So what’s a 60-second tip or strategy, something that you haven’t mentioned that you think that you’re doing that’s kind of unique that you think other sellers should do? I mean, you talk a lot about unique things today, Facebook groups and email lists and things like that, but what’s something else that you haven’t talked about today?
Kseniia:
Well I think I actually saw the tip here on a podcast, I think it was a couple of years ago and I started using it is about the travel hacking, the credit cards. I just, I think that a lot of people not using it and it just kinda like, I don’t understand why people not using it because when, so last year when I had to start buying a lot of inventory, I didn’t get any loans, but I had to use a lot of credit cards. And when I opened the right credit card I have three times points on the ad spend. I had to buy inventory with the credit cards because when I went from $10,000 to $70,000 sales a month, I need to get money from somewhere for sales not to stop. So I had to lose a lot of credit cards so that way I earned a lot of points. So when we went on a trip–
Bradley Sutton:
Hold on, hold on. Did your suppliers accept credit card or how, how did you know, cuz most suppliers need like wire transfers, but how did you use a different service or how did you use credit card to pay for your inventory?
Kseniia:
I just had to ask them to do the Alibaba, they just had it through Alibaba. So I had to pay for the inventory through Alibaba, but for the forwarder I had to pay with the just the wire transfer.
Bradley Sutton:
Ok, that makes sense.
Kseniia:
Separated and that was fine.
Bradley Sutton:
And then you said you got a lot of points because of that helped you to be able to get business class then?
Kseniia:
Yeah. Yeah. So our trip that we went to in January, that was fully business class and you know, for ticket going there, we paid like $5 and the rest was paid in miles for United first class flight of like 16 hours or something like that. So that was solely because of the points that I earned with my business
Bradley Sutton:
Now what’s, what’s 2023 gonna be do you have a goal of what you’re gonna hit and also are you gonna launch in any other marketplaces like Walmart or Shopify or anything like that?
Kseniia:
No, I’m not planning launch on new marketplaces. I think for now I’m just gonna stay on Amazon just because of product. I sell it not really for like the Walmart type of people who shop there, it’s more for Amazon. My goal is, what I’m really trying to work on right now is a brand, so I’m trying to add the brand story right now. The pictures I decided to take my pictures and tell the brand story of how the brand started. So I think that can separate me a lot from the Chinese copycat cuz they usually don’t do that and I think there’s gonna be more trust. Cuz a couple months ago I started recognizing that people started actually typing in the brand name on Amazon. So there started being a search for the brand name. So I was like, well that’s good. That means that’s where I need to go. Yeah. Because they started recognizing me in that niche.
Bradley Sutton:
Awesome. All right, well Kseniia it was has been great you know, catching up with you. You know, congrats on all your success and, and let’s see, who knows last time you doubled what your goal. So, so let’s see in 2024 when we bring you back on, let’s see how you’re doing. Remember guys, it all started, she learned completely from Project X and Freedom Ticket and now she’s flying business class to Africa to get eaten by lions and living her best life. So you know, you never know what you can get from free education out there. So we look forward to having you on the show again and wish you the best success for the rest of these year.
Kseniia:
Thank you. Thank you. Bye.
Stay up to date on the latest news on Amazon and Walmart. This week, we cover the frequently returned badge, Walmart's new digital store, image issue reporting, and summer events.
In this exciting episode, Shivali Patel shares her personal Amazon-selling journey while working with Helium 10 and how she represented the USA at the Miss Supranational competition. She also shares valuable insights and tips on Amazon and Walmart selling. Learn how to sell books in Amazon KDP, her step-by-step product strategy, and how build your Walmart listings properly. Plus, she also walks us through Helium 10’s Market Tracker 360 tool and how it can be a big asset for large brands and agencies. Whether you’re an experienced seller or just starting out, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to succeed in this industry!
In episode 440 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Shivali discuss:
- 01:25 – Shivali’s Highlights While Working In Helium 10
- 02:20 – Talking About Her Amazon Selling Journey
- 04:45 – Selling Books On Amazon KDP
- 05:30– How To Find Freelance Writers For Your Books
- 07:45 – Step-By-Step Product Research Tips From Shivali
- 09:21 – Finding Chinese Suppliers Here In The US?
- 11:01 – Representing The USA On A World Class Beauty Pageant
- 13:00 – Starting To Sell On Walmart.com
- 15:12 – How To Build Your Walmart Listings Properly
- 17:11 – New Walmart-Selling Content Series: Project Expansion
- 19:00 – The Difference Between Market Tracker & MT360
- 22:00 – A Walkthrough With Helium 10’s Market Tracker 360 Tool
- 32:30 – How To Get A Free Demo For MT360
- 32:45 – Shivali’s Healthy Habits & Hobbies Outside The E-commerce Grind
- 34:15 – Listen To Shivali’s Podcast
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley:
Today Shivali’s back on to talk about her personal Amazon selling journey the last couple of years, what she learned working on a Walmart listing case study. Details on a cool tool that’s exclusively for very large brands and agencies, and even how she represented Helium 10 as Miss USA at an international beauty pageant. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley:
Are you an agency enterprise-level seller or an eight or nine-figure seller and need advanced analytics Market Tracker 360 might be the product for you to get a demo of Market Tracker 360, go to h10.me/360. That’s h10.me/360. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got somebody who’s been helping sellers around the world here for now, just two years, just past her two-year anniversary here at Helium 10. Shivali, how’s it going?
Shivali:
It’s going good. How are you?
Bradley:
I’m doing just delightful. Thank you. Now let’s just, first of all, before we hop into what we’re gonna talk about, which we got a wide variety of topics ranging from Walmart to advanced analytics for large brands and more let’s just catch up with you a little bit, two years you’ve been here. Like what are some highlights from your time here at Helium 10 now that you’ve been here A little bit?
Shivali:
It’s definitely hard to quantify my highlights, mostly because there’s been so many peak moments. I’ve had the opportunity to connect with amazing individuals in the industry, learn a lot about Helium 10 tools and then also just about scaling your business. So it’s been really neat to go from being somebody who was just getting into selling on Amazon all the way into connecting with really powerful people that have achieved incredible heights of their business or even exited.
Bradley:
Yeah, absolutely. Now, you yourself actually decided for a while at least to kind of like stop selling the product that you did have. So I think that’s important that some sellers are just like, Hey, I’m just gonna keep going even though it’s not working out this product got too competitive, but I’m just gonna go ahead and lose money. But what were some of your thoughts? Like what led you to say, you know what, I’m gonna stop selling this product or just sell out and then gonna regroup at a later time?
Shivali:
So when I was first getting into the product I was selling into the category I was selling, there was a really good profit margin. I think it was at about 40% to 45% profits. And that was with a gap kind of built-in case I needed to spend more on ads. And maybe there was some time for inventory storage because I wasn’t quite approved for Amazon selling on Amazon just yet at the time. But unfortunately for me, there were about nine or 10 months, and I think I had talked about this the last time I was on the podcast, but there were about nine or 10 months where I just had my inventory sitting in storage. And so by the time that I got into that field, it was a drastically different landscape. And so I had to make some business decisions of, okay, well, like, yes, I still have some profits left, but it’s not really as great as I want them to be.
Shivali:
And then the competitors, there were so many more competitors, and of course, that changes the entire outlook of your business. So looking at the numbers, and then by the time that I was really starting to sell out of that inventory, I decided that I didn’t want to stick in such a competitive field where I would be losing money day in and day out as much as I love the product, as much as I know it was a high-quality product. And of course, if I had continued throwing money at it, yes, maybe in the long run it would’ve become profitable. I have definitely talked to people in the industry that were like, oh, my product just became profitable and it’s been maybe two years that they’ve been in that season.
Bradley:
That season. Okay, now that’s a little extreme to wait to lose money for two years before profit.
Shivali:
I literally just heard this. Somebody was selling on Amazon and their product just became profitable after two years, which is a really long time. And for me, it’s just not what I wanted to do. So I made the executive decision to stop selling that product, not placing any more inventory for it, but I am in the process of relaunching and I’m quite excited about that.
Bradley:
Cool. You haven’t stopped selling books on Kindle this whole time. You’re still doing that, right?
Shivali:
Yes, correct. Yeah, so I do have a couple of books of my own, but I also publish Ghostwritten books, so books that I have hired writers to write because it’s very much similar to a physical product. Do you find a niche that you could do well in? You get a book written, you make it better, and then you of course get it posted, uploaded, and then advertise or drive traffic to it.
Bradley:
I don’t even know you did that. So like you have an idea of, of something that you think would be good, but since Bradley works you to death, then you don’t have enough time to write it yourself, I guess. So then you actually, like, what do you do? You find a writer and then you tell them your ideas and then they write it for you?
Shivali:
It’s very much like being an employer and finding somebody to do that job for you. So I usually post something on Upwork. You can use Fiverr, but Fiverr I typically use for maybe book covers. Upwork is where you make a job posting and you’ll have writers apply for it. You tell them what you’re looking for. Maybe you want a long-term relationship, which I definitely have had writers, I use time and time again. But also you can do maybe one-off projects and then just input in, you tell them what you want, maybe you provide an outline, you give them some milestones, say, Hey, like, I wanna check in with you after you’ve written X amount of numbers or X amount of pages, and then you’ll take a look, you’ll proofread it, or you can give them kind of input of what you wanna change and then work towards a second and the third milestone, depending on however many milestones you wanna have.
Shivali:
But yeah, that’s how you build out a book without necessarily taking all of your time. If you find someone who’s in a different country, of course, you can do it for a lot less and you’re still paying them the right amount for their work because they’re in a different country. So I do believe in the ethics of that business and making sure that these people are paid for the work that they’re doing. But it’s definitely a lot more affordable for us in the United States, maybe just to get that product out. It’s about the ROI, right? How fast you’re able to write that book and get it published
Bradley:
And impossible to lose money. Or at least I mean, in the production, cuz you’re not investing in any inventory.
Shivali:
Yeah. If it’s ghostwritten, yes, it will be maybe like $200-$300, depending on how long your book is really. But then after that, you can absolutely drive free traffic to it using Facebook groups. You can use websites that already exist. I’ve paid before like $25 just to have my book included in an email listing, or not an email listing, but an email forward that goes out all the time to readers that are constantly looking for new books and it pays off even more, especially if it’s a very niche audience. So maybe if I have a book that’s ins stress management, maybe somebody who caters directly to self-help to a self-help audience, it’s gonna pay off a lot better.
Bradley:
Okay. Now I remember you actually talking about your relaunch of products. You had actually shared some of your ideas with me. Now, what were some of the ways that you were doing your product research? Like how did you approach it? You’re like, Hey, I know I want to get restarted with some private label products on Amazon as well instead of just books. So how do you approach your product research?
Shivali:
One of the highlights at Helium 10 has been learning just how much, how many different ways you can do product research. We have a lot of various tools here at Helium 10. We have of course X-Ray, you have Black Box, you have your Pinterest Trends Finder, you have the reverse ASIN searches you can do on Etsy. Well, I kind of employed all of them, so I went in and it’s a really exciting part of your business, right? Trying to figure out what you really wanna build your foundation in. So I actually did go into Black Box, kind of played around with the filters, made a short list of items. I also went into Etsy, tried to find things that were unique that I think could have some demand on Amazon. I also went into Cerebro, tried to see related things based on what was really appearing inside Black Box.
Shivali:
Or maybe even if I had taken a word that I’d found on Etsy and put it inside Magnet. There was just, just a multitude of different things that I had employed. And as I went into the validation process, kind of took a look at what the competitors look like, how many reviews there were, are there actually ways to amplify or enhance the consumer experience. That’s when I started to really narrow things down. And then of course you have the profitability aspect where I was looking to see how much it would cost me to source and with all the customizations, would it actually end up being green in the long run? Not to mention I did also attend a show as well. So that was my first time ever going to a trade show and it was a really, really, really exciting experience for me. I remember I put you and Carrie in a group and I was texting you guys like photos of the event cuz I was so excited. But I got to meet a lot of the manufacturers. I actually got to meet one of the suppliers that I had placed a sample order with, which was really cool.
Bradley:
This was here in the United States. You didn’t have to go to China for this, huh?
Shivali:
No, no. Sorry for the lack of context there, but yes, this was in the United States. It was in Chicago. I ended up getting a message from a supplier I had placed in sample order with, and he was saying that their company was gonna be at this inspired home show in Chicago.
Bradley:
Oh, so that’s, that’s how you found out about it. Was from that supplier that you got. Oh, okay.
Shivali:
Yeah, so he mentioned he was gonna be there, and so I looked into it and I’ve been wanting to go to a Canton Fair in China, but I don’t believe that’s on the horizon for me at this moment. So the Inspired Home show was a little bit of a quicker trip for me where I could still experience what it might be like to be in the midst of a bunch of manufacturers and just really have that one-on-one contact. So it was an amazing experience to really sit down with my suppliers and just make that connection in person. I also got to find some additional factories that would be willing to work with me to build a brand new product. And that also comes with a lot of really exciting opportunities.
Bradley:
Okay. All right, cool. So people might think, Hey, to meet Chinese suppliers you have to go to China, but sometimes they come here at different shows and expos. So it’s to something to look into. Alright, now one last thing. You actually got to represent the United States in a world-class beauty pageant. So like, first of all, there’s like Miss Universe, there’s Miss World, and then there’s like, what are the Miss Supernational, which is the one you did, and there’s like one other, like
Shivali:
Miss Grand International,
Bradley:
Miss Grand International.
Shivali:
There are five. Yeah.
Bradley:
So what you did is kind of like Miss Universe, but it’s like a separate what group or something like that?
Shivali:
Separate organization. Yeah, it’s the same way. I always explain it with parallelism to banking systems. You have Wells Fargo, you have BB&T, you have all these different banking systems. They have sort of a similar intentions, but sometimes they’re just different organizations. So for Miss World, Miss Universe, Miss Supranational, Miss. Grant International, all do somewhat of a similar thing, which is to bring together, together really ambitious women and men and they can compete and be offered an assortment of different opportunities that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. I mean, that’s a massive stage with a lot of eyes on it. So it’s really cool to take community work that maybe you’re doing a cause that you’re really inspired about or even just be maybe given modeling contracts if that’s what you choose to do, and just have that platform to really elevate you to the next place that you wanna go to. So yeah, I did Miss Supranational and their whole motto is to inspire and to aspire. And it was really neat. It wasn’t something that I had been working on. I really did wanna represent the United States at an international level, but I didn’t know when it was gonna happen.
Bradley:
It was actually cool. I saw one of your videos there, you had a shout-out to Helium 10. Now you didn’t end up winning, unfortunately, the competition. But anyways you did Helium 10 proudly. Now bringing it back to what we’re here to talk about today. I wanted to first talk about this project that you did with Carrie. We had there’s this hemp case study product that I’ve talked about on this podcast. And other times I’ve shown, I’ve used it as an example about listing optimization and things, but they had never sold on Walmart. And you yourself, your old product, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe you ever sold that at Walmart. So this was like your first kind of entry into selling on Walmart, this little mini case study you and Carrie did, right?
Shivali:
Yes, it was, I was actually interested when I was taking a look at all the numbers on Amazon, on selling it on Walmart at the time, but they had a very different threshold for selling on Walmart at the time. They were looking for study revenue and you had to be selling for a certain amount of years. They were looking for experienced sellers and I think I was still getting started, so it wasn’t really something that was offered to me. Now that’s changed a little bit. They are a little bit more open with their application process and that’s why it was something that I kind of talked to Carrie about and she’s like, yeah, like you should start selling on Walmart. So I actually did apply myself and now with my new product, I’m hoping to send some inventory to Walmart and some to Amazon, which I think will be really, really good because Walmart is an expanding marketplace.
Shivali:
It’s the largest retailer in the world, but it’s also the second largest e-commerce marketplace that you can be on. And with that comes a lot of foot traffic. So with Amazon, you have I think about 1.9 million sellers, but on Walmart, you only have a hundred thousand sellers while the a number of consumers is still both in the triple-digit millions. So you have a lot more foot traffic per seller. And that of course affects your cost for PPC. It affects like how many people are really looking at your listing, and how many people you might be able to persuade with a great listing. And yeah, that’s one of the reasons why I considered selling on Walmart, but also we are doing this series because there’s so much potential for people who are already Amazon sellers to be on Walmart because they already know what to do. They already know how to create a great listing. So now it’s sort of just that transference of skills and expanding into a new marketplace to tap into a brand new consumer base.
Bradley:
Now you mentioned listings I would imagine that, was one of the main differences that you noticed like having experience making Amazon listings, making that first Walmart listing, like what are some of those differences? Because there are some people who mistakenly think, well, I’m just gonna copy bullet point for a bullet point, the title for title, description for description. I’m good to go, but that’s not the way they should do it on Walmart, right?
Shivali:
It’s not, of course, both of these platforms are very consumer-focused. They’re, they care about their customer experience. But as far as how you structure your listings, it is a little bit different. Walmart likes concise relevancy, which means that inside of their title, for example, they do want your brand name, they want your product name, but then also the attributes, but they do want it a little bit shorter. Their bullet points are a lot more concise. They don’t want keyword stuffing, which neither does Amazon, but sure with Walmart, you really have to pick and choose and then cater to the consumer’s understanding of that product. You have to encourage them to purchase. Whereas with Amazon, you do have a little bit more room to I have seen quite a few listings that do keyword stuff, and of course, you still want it to make sense, but Walmart is a lot more precise about it because they will kind of reduce your ranking for keyword stuffing.
Shivali:
So you’ll definitely wanna be more conscientious. They are similar in the sense of Walmart has Rich Media Content as opposed to A+ Content on Amazon, but you have to pay for the Rich Media Content, I believe. And as far as fees go, you do still have the referral fee, the fulfillment fee, and then whatever time you might end up spending to create that listing, and then the inventory you will want to send out to Walmart. So those are really the costs that are involved with Walmart. There are not really any monthly fees with Walmart outside of those, whereas Amazon still does have the 39.99 cents seller fee. Okay.
Bradley:
Alright guys, so if you guys are interested to learn like we highly recommend if you’re selling on Amazon already, you’ve got the product in the United States, it’s a no-brainer to give the Walmart platform a try. I remember Carrie I was talking numbers with Carrie the other day, and, and she’s got one product I, I believe that’s like outselling her Amazon product or the same product on Amazon like two to one. Now don’t expect that, but sometimes you never know. Not only will a product on Walmart sell well, but it might even outperform Amazon due to the level of competition. But at the very least in my experience I usually see like maybe 8 to 10 to 1 Amazon but, but hey, if you’re, if you’re selling a hundred thousand dollars a month on Amazon, it’s like, who doesn’t wanna sit sell another $10,000 a month on Walmart or $20,000.
Bradley:
So give it a try. By the time you guys are watching this, perhaps you’ll see the video series that Carrie and Shivali did go to the Helium 10 YouTube channel and you might see it, I think it is gonna be called like you just do a search for a Project Expansion, there you go. Project Expansion. Also on the last week of Freedom Ticket, we’re gonna have these videos in there. The last week of Freedom Ticket you’ll already notice is a whole bunch of videos from Carrie and different experts like Michael Lebhar talking about Walmart, but now she’s gonna add these videos there so you can see it in Freedom Ticket or YouTube check out project expansion where they took an Amazon product, made it live, send it to WFS, which is the Amazon or Walmart version of the FBA, and it showed the step-by-step process that you guys can follow so that that’s for newer sellers on Amazon, experienced sellers on Amazon.
Bradley:
But let’s talk, let’s switch gears. And you know, a few weeks ago we went to Prosper. I don’t know about you cuz you know, I wasn’t in your conversations with people, but for me this was the most I have ever seen. Kind of like one p very large companies we’re, we’re talking tens of millions of dollars of revenue just like come up to the booth like L’Oreal and like other huge brands usually, the prosperous show in the past, most of the people there, at least in my experience was like smaller sellers or you know, million dollar sellers maybe, but these are like a hundred million dollar brands and they were interested in like kind of like advanced marketplace analytics that then like the regular Helium 10 can offer. Did you talk to people like that as well?
Shivali:
I absolutely did. I mean, especially when you are a hundred-million-dollar brand, you have really big numbers kind of pumping through your business. You want to understand competitor performance at scale just so you can understand your market share, you can understand the individual ace and level performances, understand those benchmarks, and how they’re changing every single day, right? You have new competitors flowing in and outta your market and you need to stay on top of those things to make sure that you stay winning at the forefront of your field. And so we talked a lot about Market Tracker 360, which is our OG market tracker on steroids. That’s always what we’ve, what we’ve referenced it as.
Bradley:
So you understand, what’s the main differences with the OG market tracker then?
Shivali:
Right. So the OG market tracker has more of a set-and-forget-it mentality. When you input, you can input, I believe it’s five keywords and then unlimited ASINs. But then after that you can’t really change those keywords and then you have to go through individually to mass mark products that you do or you don’t want inside of your market view. Now of course that’s great but there’s also not really access to the historical data or trends. If you have maybe fewer SKUs, then yes, it’s something that you absolutely can use and it’ll completely pay off cuz you can understand the competitor’s performance. You can maybe even use it to expand on your product line, find new products that would do well. There are a number of ways to use it. However, if you have a lot more SKUs kind of going through, then maybe something you’re interested in is dynamic tracking and then also a more granular view where maybe you can segment that information out into 1P and 3P sellers.
Shivali:
You can filter it down further into maybe the mid-tier price ranges that you’re interested in. Or even just seeing the revenue by brand year over year, the historical comparisons. You want access to two years worth of historical data and all of those things are possible with Market Tracker 360. So Market Tracker 360 really offers you the capability of mass marketing those products as they enter in automatically. And you can create your market view now with 15 keywords and unlimited ASIN so it’s a little bit more broader and then you could go narrower as you are really trying to figure out what you wanna look at inside of your niche, whether that’s subcategories categories if it’s filtered out by product title contains or does not contain it’s really up to you, but you now have the ability to apply really complex filters to hone in on what you are interested in, which is really, really cool and invaluable.
Bradley:
All right. Now, most of the people who are listening to this show are doing it without video. But you know, there are people who watch us on YouTube. So maybe if you can like, share your screen and give us a walkthrough of some of the differences and some of the insights you can get that are very unique with Market Tracker 360 again. And guys, if you’re newer sellers, don’t completely tune out. You know, this is something that you can set yourself as a goal. You know, there are sellers I know who are doing as small as two, 3 million a year on Amazon, who, who are using it. So this is a great goal so that you can understand the level of data that you’re gonna be able to see once you get a tool like this. But just Shivali keeps in mind that you gotta be a little bit more descriptive when you’re showing it even though you can see it on the video because there are a lot of people who might just be listening to this.
Shivali:
Absolutely. So when you’re inside of your Helium 10 account, you’re gonna go into tools and then click Market Tracker 360, which is the new and improved competitor intelligence tool. You can create a market in the top right-hand corner and when you do that, you’ll be directed to a page where you can like I said before, enter up to 15 keywords and as many ASINs as you want to define your market. Now we do have a threshold of a certain amount of search volume, so there might be a chance that you might click this and then some keywords will show up as red and that’s okay, you can just remove them and then simply kind of just modify that search. You can also select your products to add. So if you directly want to add some products that are already connected to your Helium 10 account, just click select my products to add and it’ll let you do that.
Shivali:
On the right-hand side you’ll see your market composition preview and it’s really just gonna help you kind of define your market at what you’re looking at based off what you’ve inputted. Now, anytime that you’ve already created the market and you go into Market Tracker 360, you’ll see a list of all the markets that you have and when you tap into one of these markets and our creation times are fairly fast, they’ll be created within 20 to 30 minutes of you actually inputting that data. I’m gonna click into a market I’ve already created, which is the puppy backpack carrier for small dogs. Right next to that initial market title, you’ll be able to select date ranges. So I’m taking a look at the last six months, that’s my preset, but this will apply to the entire page that you’re looking at. So up top you see the market performance.
Shivali:
This is based off those last six months cuz that’s what I have selected. I also have our insights board right underneath the area that shows you the top market share. So you see that these are the brands that really are dominating inside of the information that I inputted those keywords and the ASINs. I also have market unit sales and market revenue and how that’s changed from this set of six months to the last set of six months. Underneath that insights board I was talking about will show you brands, products, and categories. When you select one of those tabs, it will divide that information into top performing, fastest growing, and top declining. So maybe this is good for you just to make some broad overview conclusions. Maybe you see that for example you have my baby, the brand is ranked number five for revenue, but it’s also ranked number two for unit sales.
Shivali:
So that tells me a little bit of information about that price point compared to Amazon basics, which which is really dominating at the top of unit sales and revenue. If you go down a little bit further, you have your overall market. Now I will briefly kind of dive into this after I apply some complex filters, but just for now for those of you that are watching the video segment, you can take a look and see that this overall market chart really lets you break down all of this information that maybe you saw on the insights board or even that you have provided based off of the market you created. You can now go into revenue and then group it by let’s say your brand, your product, your me versus competitors or even your 1P versus 3P sellers. So you, this revenue grouped by none is really gonna give you that overall health trend line.
Shivali:
Maybe you’re an aggregator and you’re taking a look at whether or not this is a field that you are interested in exiting from or even just taking interest in. You can see that this is kind of going down a little bit, but overall it’s still up. You can also go into units and group that information by product brand, me versus competitors. Again, a lot of the same information, but what you’re really seeing is your revenue is on your y-axis, and your week, month, or year is on your x-axis. And then these values are are really your group by functions. So you’ll see that reflected in the products table right underneath. If you want to consume this information in a different way, you can digest it however you’d like. But I’m just gonna keep it here on a line graph.
Shivali:
You also have the stacked and bar chart I believe. You can also change that into a percentage if you would like, but I just have it set units grouped by-products and I’m scrolling down underneath that. You also have all your products. Now you’re taking a look at 17,080 products here, but this is the overall market view really with everything that’s dynamically tracking inside of it. So of course dog poop bags are not entirely the most relevant for the puppy backpack career carrier for small dogs. So let’s say I want to filter that out. All I would have to do is go into the filter right underneath the date range that we were looking at before and then you can input whatever you would like. If you want to click three p you can input a specific brand or exclude brands. You can divvy up into categories and subcategories.
Shivali:
Now I already have a filter preset and that filter preset is the dog carrier backpack, $25 to $50. And so the dog carrier backpack was the product title contains a segment of it. And then, of course, I inputted at price range to kind of hone in on the mid-tier market. And that changes my information. We went from Amazon basics being our number one for revenue and for unit sales that’s top performing into this brand. I don’t even know how to pronounce it, there’s always such interesting ones. I don’t know what that is. However, that’s your top performing. I can also take a look at maybe my top declining and you can see a completely different set of brands. Scrolling down, what I will kind of just jump into here because I really love talking about this and I think it’s so valuable for people that really wanna get those really granular competitor insights is going into these singular product analysis pages or even the multi-product analysis pages.
Shivali:
So what I can do here is I can actually select this product and click add to compare. And what it’ll do is it’ll take me to the singular product analysis page. Now this will tell you a little bit about the listing quality score. This listing here is killing it, the one that I’ve clicked into, which is the carrier backpack. And it has a 10 listing quality score. You have the sales insight chart right next to it, which you can pick and choose what information you wanna see between revenue pricing, BSR unit sales and stack it up right next to a secondary metric. Here we’re taking a look at revenue and you can see that there was a drop in revenue, but there was also a drop in pricing, which tells us maybe that it’s not so much the market itself and the demand, but it could just be the pricing itself.
Shivali:
If you go down a little further, you have your market average comparisons and of how that individual product that we selected stacks up to the market averages. And then of course I did when I was actually at the Prosper Show a few weeks ago, I did have some conversations where people were asking, is there a way for me to really track my subcategory BSRs all on one page without having to necessarily individually try to find those niches and look at them? Well, yes you can. You can now go into Market Tracker 360 and as long as you’re on an individual product analysis page, you’ll be able to track all those subcategory BSRs in one graph, which is really, really cool. You also have keywords. Now this is my highlight like I absolutely love this part of Market Tracker 360. I love it even more when there are multi-searches involved and I’ll show you what I mean by that in a second.
Shivali:
Again, if you’re watching the video, so if you’re listening to this on the podcast you will want to either go check this out for yourself on the YouTube page or even maybe you wanna get Market Tracker 360 and try it. But there are keywords here and for this specific product, it’s showing you the keywords that are organically and organically ranked as well as sponsored rank. And that is sorted by the search volume that are doing really well for this ASIN specifically you also have the top search volume trend. So these are the keywords that you will want to really pay attention to. These are increasing in search volume trends. So this is a great way for you to go in and get ahead and you can take these keywords as long as they are relevant to your product. Maybe it’s something you just wanna include in your listing as you are changing and retiming your listing posts.
Shivali:
You also have your top keyword sales and this is cool cuz you can go in, take a look at maybe there is a competitor that’s really dominating your market. You wanna figure out what that competitor is doing and you can do that by figuring out what are their top keyword sales and utilizing those keywords inside of your own listing. If you go down a little bit further from that keyword section, you also have the top keywords over time, which is really a heat map of how this ASIN is rising and falling for different keywords over time. And you can toggle between organic and sponsored for that as well as date ranges for that too. And that will apply to the whole market. So that’s just kind of a brief overview for Market Tracker 360, but there’s really a lot here that you can do with the tool and hopefully this gets you excited about what it can do for your business as well.
Bradley:
All right, so guys, remember if you’re just starting off on Amazon, probably making less than a million dollars a year I would say hold off on this. This is not, you might not be ready for it yet, but it’s definitely something you can have a goal to. But if you work for a larger company or you’re an agency, aggregator, big name Brand 1P, this is something I think that you’ll get a lot of benefit from a lot of companies already have. So if you’d like to get a free demo to see if it’s for you, just go to h10.me/mt360, MT as in Market Tracker 360, so h10.me/mt360. Now last part of this show, what we’ve been asking a lot of our guests this year is like, hey how do you, what kind of healthy habits do you guys have to stay mentally healthy, physically healthy? So what about you? Like, what are the things that you do to keep your body healthy but also your mind healthy?
Shivali:
So I absolutely love the gym. I think you know that, but I absolutely love just maintaining clean habits for eating and then going to the gym just to regulate and decompress. And then I’ve been trying, actually, one of my goals this year was to listen to more podcasts. So naturally, for those of you listening, you’ll want to listen to a lot more Serious Sellers Podcast episodes as well as anything that you feel like maybe there’s a sector of your life you really wanna do better in, find a great podcast, really form that association. You don’t necessarily have to know your role models all the time, but you can definitely get in touch with them through the content that you can zoom. So I love being able to read or listen to podcasts when I have time. Maybe that’s going to the gym. Sometimes what I do is I’ll get on the treadmill and I’ll just put in a podcast and listen while I walk. And it’s a great way to just stay healthy mind and body. I know, Bradley, you’ve been doing a standing treadmill. You’re, you’ve kind of inspired me. I wanna get one just hasn’t happened yet, but, but soon enough we’ll both be in the standing treadmill.
Bradley:
Yeah. Oh, Carrie was the first I think who did it and then I was the second then now. Yeah, you can complete the, the t now you, you actually on the side outside of Helium 10 hours, you have your own podcast now, don’t you? I
Shivali:
Do. I have my own podcast. It’s called Inspire Here and it’s really just about the journey of evolution. So all things that are growth related. I love having people on kind of talking about different things that maybe are philosophical in nature, maybe they’re just growth-oriented, maybe they’re personal. What they’ve done in their own life has really propelled them forward. And so it’s really neat. We closed off 10 episodes. We’re about to start season two, and I’m very excited for all the stories that we’ll share and hopefully all the impact we’ll have.
Bradley:
Awesome, awesome. All right, well thank you again for coming on the show and telling us about the new Walmart projects you’ve been doing your own projects, Market Tracker, 360 tons of great stuff. We’ll definitely be having you on. Now now you’re kind of hosting a show like once every other month for Tacos Tuesday, so we’ll have to bring you back more often. So thanks a lot and we’ll see you soon.
Are you an Amazon seller looking to improve or repair your credit score? In this episode, Lyann Nguyen shares her expert strategies, tips, and success stories for building both personal and business credit. From common mistakes to actionable tips you can do today, this is a must-listen for anyone looking to take control of their credit. So why is credit important for Ecommerce entrepreneurs? As Lyann puts it, “dreams cost money.” Building a strong credit score can open up opportunities for funding and investment, allowing us to bring our dreams to life. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to improve and repair your existing credit score, Lyann’s insights are sure to help. Tune in to this episode and start your journey to better credit.
In episode 439 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Lyann discuss:
- 01:20 – Lyann’s Backstory
- 02:50 – How She Got Into The Technology & Finance Space
- 04:25 – “A lot of my clients are E-commerce sellers”
- 04:30 – How Lyann Met Melisa Vong
- 06:40 – Is Credit Important For Entrepreneurs?
- 07:44 – “Dreams Cost Money”
- 09:05 – Will Your Corporation’s Credit Be Based On EIN Or SSN?
- 11:05 – Strategies To Build Your Personal Credit And Business Credit
- 14:50 – Common Credit Mistakes E-commerce Sellers Make
- 17:20 – Success Stories From Lyann’s Followers
- 20:45 – What Are The Different Types Of Credit?
- 29:35 – How Can You Repair Your Credit Score?
- 29:30 – Piggybacking On Someone’s Credit
- 31:11 – Negotiating With Lending Companies In The Amazon World
- 33:35 – Lyann’s 60-Second Tips
- 37:10 – How To Get In Touch With Lyann Nguyen
► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos
TranscriptBradley Sutton:
Today we’ve got the Credit Ninja who has helped hundreds of e-commerce sellers, celebrities, and other professionals have the best credit that they can. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.
Bradley Sutton:
Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10’s Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got somebody very relevant to the e-commerce world here. First time on the show. Lyann, how’s it going?
Lyann:
It’s going great. Yeah. So nice to meet you at the sellers’ event.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes. Sell and Scale, I think where we first met Melissa introduced us. And don’t me just a little bit about what you do, but I wanna get your, your whole back story. You know, I haven’t asked this before, so like this is your first time in the show, so let’s, let’s get to know you. I just found out a few days ago you actually live in Vegas, right?
Lyann:
That’s right. Yeah.
Bradley Sutton:
Is that where you were born and raised, or?
Lyann:
No, I was born in Vietnam. I’m an immigrant. Moved to California, so the fall of Saigon, which is the biggest war of all the Vietnam War. We immigrated to the US in Irvine. And from there we lived there. And then I went to school there. I was actually pre-med in school and then decided not to go that path.
Bradley Sutton:
Where was this also in Irvine? UC Irvine?
Lyann:
UC Irvine. Yeah. How’d you know?
Bradley Sutton:
That’s an eater>
Lyann:
Isn’t your headquarters in Irvine?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, our headquarters in Irvine.
Lyann:
That’s awesome.
Bradley Sutton:
I work from home now though, so I don’t have to drive at all from San Diego. I don’t have to drive all the way up to Irvine anymore. But very familiar with that local college. I referee sumo tournaments. They rent out what do you call it? The, no, that’s Long Beach, the pyramid. No, that’s, see, I’m gonna get confused. That’s the pyramid is at Long Beach at Irvine. I’m not sure what you guys got for sports center, but anyways, I’m very familiar with the college. You said you went pre-med, but then what happened?
Lyann:
Yeah, so I decided not to go that path cuz it’s such a tedious career. I was cutting up cadavers those dead people and I couldn’t talk to them and I got so frustrated cuz I’m such a social person. I decided to–
Bradley Sutton:
You could talk to them, but they just won’t talk back to you.
Lyann:
That’s true, that’s true. And I can’t help them anymore cuz they’re kind of dead. So I decided to pack up my bags and travel the world and what I found was money rule the world. Learning about how powerful money and access to capital is really intrigued me. So that journey of self finding and searching brought me back to the United States and I decided to get into the finance world that led me into the technology side of finance. So my background is actually technology after I decided not to go into med. And that technology company is a data technology company. You like the word data, right? Data technology company located in Fountain Valley, which is not too far from Irvine.
Bradley Sutton:
I was born in Fountain Valley Hospital. Believe that or not.
Lyann:
No way. I know what that said. Right next to Miles Square Park. Right?
Bradley Sutton:
Well, I don’t remember cuz I was a little bit young at the time, but I assume so.
Lyann:
Oh my God. So we’re like neighbors growing up. And so it’s a credit technology company that, it was during the.com 1998 and during the.com crash of 2000, that led me out to Las Vegas where I started another tech company that handles money transfers. So debit and credit transactions. So I’m in the technology finance space. That’s how I ended up in Vegas.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Now have you ever sold on Amazon yourself?
Lyann:
I have not. I have been buying on Amazon.
Bradley Sutton:
I think we all buy on Amazon. Yeah.
Lyann:
We all buy on Amazon, but a lot of my clients are e-commerce sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
I was gonna ask like how did you meet, like Melissa who’s been on this podcast before? She’s the one who introduced us. Yeah. How did you meet her then? This
Lyann:
Is a very interesting story. So I’m a, I’m the co-founder of Penthouse Mastermind. Penthouse Mastermind is a mastermind event for all young entrepreneurs. So whether they’re an e-com, a YouTuber, a forex trading or a business entrepreneur. We used to do these events in Las Vegas, Arizona, Beverly Hills, and Miami. It’s all over the place. And Melissa was one of the speakers at my event, but I happened to not be at those ones that she spoke at. But when we finally were speaking at the same event in Arizona, we spoke on different days. So I didn’t meet her, I just heard about her. And then we communicated via Instagram, this is what great thing about social media. And I told her, we were supposed to meet, but I spoke and I left, and you came the next day at my event. So we just bonded in that way. And then finding out that she’s an Amazon product developer, I’m like, that’s really like our audience right there. So we kept asking her back for more speaking engagements. But when I met her, I met her at 10x Growth Con, which is, I don’t know if you know Grant Cardone.
Bradley Sutton:
Yes, yes. I mean, I don’t know him personally, but I know who he is.
Lyann:
Yeah. So if you look right here, I’m on an app called Clubhouse, and I’m standing right next to Grant. So we’re speakers on that app. So I’m big influencer on an app right there. So we’re actually speaking on stage right now. And so I met Melissa in Miami at the 10X event. And we just, we just bonded. We just spent time together. And from there she spoke at my other events in Park City, Utah. And anytime there’s a big event like Build Your Empire or any of Dan Fleischmann’s deals, we always spoke at those events. So we’re keynote speakers at these e-commerce entrepreneurial events. That’s how we bonded.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. And then your specialty, because I think it was say like your Instagram handle everything is, they call you the Credit Ninja, is it?
Lyann:
Yeah, the Credit Ninja.
Bradley Sutton:
Credit Ninja. All right. So let’s talk a little bit about that because sometimes I think everybody understands what credit is, and why it’s important in the real world. But then now like, Hey, I need good credit to buy a car, to buy a house, this and that. But now as people transfer from like working for the mankind of jobs, and then now being their own boss and, and running their own e-commerce business, then the need for credit is a little bit different. So first of all, is it as important, more important or what, like somebody who’s becoming their own boss? What kind of credit score? Because I bet you there are people out there like, oh, who cares about credit anymore? Cause now I’m just employed myself.
Lyann:
Yeah. It’s more important. Okay. When you work for somebody else, you still need credit. Cuz if you’re trying to buy a house or a car, which you need to get to work, right? You need to have a roof over your head. You still have to have that personal credit. Now, when you’re building a business, that’s even more important because it’s all about access. Access is my favorite word in the world because it’s access to, number one, knowledge, right? Access to capital. And I’m gonna make a statement that’s gonna really hit a lot of your viewers, dreams cost money. Dreams cost money. When people think about it, I have an idea to sell this stuff, I have an idea to build this, I have a so, so idea. They don’t have the money behind it. So it becomes what’s called a pipe dream.
Lyann:
So having credit is one of the core components that everyone on this podcast has right now, we have one thing that is a lottery ticket. Do you know what that is? It’s just Social Security Number. Everyone that is in the US and in Canada has some type of Social Security Number. And that’s the number that describes your behavior on how you use money. How do you use credit? And that number can either approve you or deny you Sure. For access to capital. That’s as simple as that. If I could say how important it is. So when you’re trying to build a business, you gotta have that foundation to start building it correctly and being really laser focused. Otherwise, you can’t start a business, you can’t scale a business, you can’t sell your business because we all look for exits, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Now I have a question then. This is just something that it might be a dumb question.
Lyann:
Not a dumb question.
Bradley Sutton:
So I think most of us understand that like, hey, we’ve got credit scores, right? And it’s tied to our Social Security Number, like you said. And you know, the higher the number, the more people will be willing to give you a credit card or low-interest car or whatever. Actually, I’ve applied for loans, for example, that Amazon gives or, or lenders give for my businesses, and with Amazon, it’s registered as a business. I think I have a corporation or something. I didn’t handle the details, but yeah, I know I’ve had to give my Social Security Number, but also registered for my corporation is like my EIN number. Now, I’m assuming a company can be based on similar credit, where it’s based on the EIN number? Or it’s always based on the principle owner’s Social Security credit history?
Lyann:
So it’s both. Okay. So when you start out a business, you’re building up your EIN, but EIN doesn’t have anything yet. So the banks are gonna rely on your Social Security Number first. So after you establish some relationship with that Bank of America or Chase or whatnot, then they start what’s called EIN only, which is no personal guarantee. When it’s a personal guarantee, it’s gonna tie to your social. But when you start a business relationship or corporate credit, they want us to see what you are all about. If they can trust you as an individual, after a period of time they start to go, oh, we know who Bradley is, he’s good to go. We’re just gonna put that truck or that box truck or those supply or that line solely on like training wheels. So your training wheels are like your Social Security Number. After a period of time they kick that training wheel out and you are just riding your bike without the training wheel. That’s your EIN or you’re done in Bradstreet. Or it could be your Experian and your Equifax Business Scores. And that’s where you want to go eventually, cuz you can scale bigger.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Yeah. All right. I’m starting my own business. Start of the business on Amazon. I’ve got my corporation set up. I’m my own boss now. What are some strategies on how I can build, or continue to build my personal credit and then start to build my business credit?
Lyann:
That’s a great question. So, with your personal end, what you wanna do is awareness. You wanna be able to track your credit. So the first thing is to get into a subscription credit reporting agency. So experian.com, it’s a paid service. Remember, you’re running a business you need to invest in. The most important thing is your file, your data, right? Your data on credit. So experian.com, you can get all three reports. It’s like $30 a month, but it’s worth it. Remember, it’s a write off for your business because it is for your business. Or you can go to Identity IQ and get a link. I have links there if you guys wanna hit me up, that’s fine. That way you can track all three credit reports. That’s the first step because you wanna see what’s on there. Is your address is correct, is your employment correct?
Lyann:
You wanna clean it all up. This one address, this one name. Don’t have like 10 million names. The more names you have. Now when they pull that, they’re gonna go, why is this person doing aliases? You know, it’s bad. Are they trying to be Jason Bourne one day? And you know, like Frank Abil there next day. So you gotta make sure it’s one name, okay? One address. You don’t have to have your phone number. The less information they have on there, the less mess up they could be. Okay, now you wanna look at all your account. Are there any collections on there? Are there any charge offs? Any late payment? You wanna make sure what does it look like now as I’m starting the business? Then from there you start getting the right credit cards. There’s, you gotta hit the right bank. So hit up Chase first.
Lyann:
Make sure you get all your Chase relationships outta the way cuz they are the most difficult ones. So make sure you sequence these cards right, then you build good history. You gotta make sure the pay on time. Why is this important? When your score is optimized, you can now start getting what’s called business credit cards. So the bank that you’re at, say you’re at Chase or Bank of America, they, you can get business credit cards with those banks, but because your credit score is optimized here, you can start getting business credit card. But here’s the beauty part. Beauty of this is that once this line comes like 20,000 and you start using some of these lines for your Amazon or Walmart automation business, whatever it is, it doesn’t report on your personal. So you can always maintain that optimal 740 plus score because now it’s reported on your business side that debt doesn’t show up. So even though you’re buying supplies or equipment or advertising and all that, it’s on this end. So this was always preserved, you always look optimal. And why I say that is, I just pulled my credit last week. What does that say?
Bradley Sutton:
850. Okay. I’ve never seen that number on mine. I’ll tell you that.
Lyann:
Okay. So this got pulled from my credit union, which is a FICO score. I always look for the FICO score. It’s a perfect credit score. So I’ve been doing this for 31 years from the data side to the consumer side. It’s a long time. I started when I was two years old. No, I’m just kidding. But understanding how the data works and how they report, you are gonna get a leg up above everybody else. So that’s my little tip is starting from the credit, personal credit to the business credit.
Bradley Sutton:
All right. Now I think people understand like the most common things that would negatively screw one over when, when they’re talking about their credit. Like, you know defaulting, just not paying, paying late, things like that. But just what are some other things that especially e-commerce sellers, I’m sure you talked to hundreds of them. What are some of the most common things that you’re like make you face palm? Like I can’t believe you did that. Or like, the most common things that you’re trying to help people to, to, to turn around and not do anymore.
Lyann:
Number one problem is missed payments. Because e-commerce entrepreneurs, YouTubers, I’m gonna do air quotes too busy cuz they’re flying around the world. They’re traveling, they’re digital nomads and they for some reason forgot to make that one little payment. And then it goes into 30 days in 60 days, this is gonna drop their score down anywhere from 150 to 200 points. That’s gonna make them unfundable. So having things on automatic pay is gonna be a tip that I’ll give at the very end, but missed payment is a big deal. Second thing is they’ve maxed out their card without realizing that they almost hit the limit that’s gonna drop their score down. And I’ll give you a tip at the very end when we round up our conversation and also you know, really not paying attention to offers. If they have a zero interest offer and they forget that it ends like in a month and then they forgot about it, then they start getting charged on the interest and they’re like, oh, I didn’t even pay attention.
Lyann:
Of course, we’ll round that up on the tips at the very end. The last thing is really having a reserve. Because when you’re an Amazon seller, a Walmart seller, an eBay sale, a Facebook market, I can go on and on cuz I’ve touched all these different clients. They don’t have reserves. They don’t have reserves because for some reason something unexpected happens, for example, their payment processor maybe Stripe or whatever it is, Cloak, PayPal, they shut them down for something where somebody did a refund or they did a chargeback, then now all that a hundred thousand dollars is held in that fund and they can’t pay their credit card because it’s due array cuz they bought such so many products and so many Facebook ad now they’re in default. So those are the most common problems that I’ve seen because these are the client problems that I see in the e-commerce space. Does that answer it?
Bradley Sutton:
Oh yeah. Okay, good. So those are the bad things. Let’s not make it all doom and gloom. Give me a success story. Something good that like, you haven’t seen yourself sold on Amazon, but, but you know, tons of Amazon or e-commerce people, but what’s an example of somebody who did the right things the opposite of what you just said and thus had some pretty good results based on that.
Lyann:
Yeah. So there’s so many success stories that actually over better than all the negative stuff. So it actually, a lot of people who start e-commerce, if they do it right, they get the right credit cards, they get the right scores, they get the right business credit card, then they’re building out their corporate. So I’m gonna give you one of the success stories is that they were able to scale their business. They were able to get Facebook ads because they have so many different credit cards and different relationships and a lot of them are zero interest. So if they were starting it right and they have a year worth of zero interest card and they only have to pay the minimum time is on their side, they now have the opportunity to scale quickly in a period of a year, instead of waiting for four to five years and with different relationships with different banks, now they can be their own bank and say, well I need Facebook ads.
Lyann:
I’m gonna grab it from this bank. I need to buy supplies. I can go to and get Chase. And that’s gonna be five times points and then on and on. And then they’re able to hire VAs. They’re able to get software like Helium 10 or they’re able to get convert kit that has the way to manage their emails or they can bring in people to do their graphics for their supplies. I mean like this they can buy thank you cards. Coupon cards graphics for their bottle. These are my products that Melissa is gonna be helping me put on Amazon. So it’s not like I haven’t had anything on Amazon. It’s a matter of yet. Okay. So those kind of things are all funded by a credit card, business credit cards, and then you have purchase protection.
Lyann:
So if anything goes wrong, you can call your bank and say, I’m not happy with that product. I bought that inventory. I’d like to be able to deal with it and have that credited and if you can contact them so you have all these insurances and all these points that come out of it. And instead of using money to travel, because a lot of these, they would have to go to China, well they could use the points to pay for their trip to go back to China and book a hotel. And it’s all because they use credit cards instead of cash, a wire or debit card because the side benefit outweighs just using a debit card or cash. So yeah, I mean we’ve had five figure owners go up to eight figure or nine figure because they have access to capital cuz they can scale at such a faster rate. And then they have cash flow through all these different credit cards, these lines of credit and so forth. So all in all, growth is there, access is there, and then being able to pull the trigger if they need a software or if they need a solution, they’re not held back by making that decision. I think that would be my success story for these sellers.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. All right. Cool. Now I’m just getting started and there’s credit cards I know, but there’s lines of credit. Like what are all the different types of credit? Because you know, that C word is not just some people just think it’s credit cards. Some people just think it’s getting a loan from the bank. But, but what are, what are all the different kinds of credit that people should be taking advantage of when they’re starting their own businesses?
Lyann:
So first we have the revolving credit, which is your credit cards. You get a credit card by applying, you put in your information, you put in how much you make, and also your credit score would be computed. So you get a credit card and I could just show you visually, but it could be any of these credit cards, right? I have a whole book. There’s a hundred cards in here. Okay. I owe nothing
Bradley Sutton:
A hundred. Good grief.
Lyann:
I collect cards for a living but I owe zero on them. So when you get these credit card, each one of them will have an offer. You might have to spend 3000 and you get x amount of points, right? So those credit cards you could use, especially in the business credit cards, you can use it for all your businesses. Then when you build a relationship with these banks, they offer you what’s called a line of credit for your business. So it might be a purpose loan. So they might offer you $20,000 to put in your business to buy inventory or to hire staff or so forth. And those come with a fixed amount that you pay every month. So if you get a $35,000 loan, you may have to pay $800 or $900 a month.
Lyann:
And you have to ask them if I prepay, earliest there any penalty. Cuz you need to ask those questions. What have you opened your Walmart store and you did a killer month or two months and you are able to pay this down? Well you should have the option so you don’t have to pay these fees and early termination or whatever it is, early prepayment. So that’s another line. And another thing is these banks also give you equipment loans or American Express, what’s called vendor accounts. So when you have a good relationship with American Express, they give you all these different products and services. The key thing is calling them every month and finding out as a business relationship with you. I already used my credit cards, you gave me a line of credit. Do you have any vendor accounts there that I could use to buy all of my supplies or products that I wanna test? And they would say, well fill out this form and if they’re an approved vendor, you get $50,000 that you could just build directly and we’ll pay them directly and you could just pay us. And so there’s so many different products out there, you just have to build that relationship with the bank to find out what unique product it is. So it’s all relationship based that’s my little tip for everyone. Is that answered?
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now let’s say it is what it is. A lot of us maybe haven’t had the best of credit. Yeah. And we want to turn that around. You know, our, our credit, our personal credit, we’re talking about like, like our and so some of these things we can’t get 30 credit cards cuz we get denied all the time. Yeah. Cuz we got something like I got something on mind. Like I unfortunately got in with a wrong crowd of people and then everything for the company got on some of my credit cards and I was the one on the hook and had to default on them and everything. And so I didn’t have to do bankruptcy or anything. But that stuff has been on my record for a while. You know, other people just maybe had a couple of late payments here or there. And then like you said their score went down 150 points or something. What are some ways that somebody can start building that score back up?
Lyann:
Well Bradley, just understand that you are not the only one. A lot of people are going through that. Whether it’s because of their business, the health, maybe their job got eliminated. So it’s never too late to start. So again, finding out what your credit score is the first step. And if for those people that say, well I can’t afford the $30 a month right now cuz I just barely am making, it’s okay, go to Credit Karma. It’s a free app. At least it doesn’t give you the accurate score because it gives you a vantage score. But you can actually see how many collections are on there. You can see how many late payment, it’s a free app so you can log in and find out and then you have to come up with a game plan.
Lyann:
Okay? First of all, contact these different collectors and find out if there’s a way that you can negotiate that down. But don’t call them unless you have a little bit of money. Other than that you can start disputing it. There’s different ways to dispute on these forms. You can contact the bureaus and actually dispute and let them know that you’re unsure about this or you don’t recognize it. Because how many people forget what they eat last week. If I asked you right now, what did you eat last week? You’d be like, I don’t remember. Well there’s so many credit cards and so many things. So the actually truth is that I don’t recall or I don’t recognize this or this is not me. And then force the bureaus to find out if it’s you or not. Because then it’s on them to figure it out and it’s a 50% chance that they’ll come back and say, oh, we didn’t find anything on it.
Lyann:
And then they delete it. But you have to be diligent on this because the more that you do this, things will start to slowly get off. If you do nothing about this, the score will either stay the same or get worse because you let it fester. Okay. So that’s my little tip for someone is get a free report just, or you can go to annual credit report. You get a free report from the bureaus and push put the box that says I got denied, which is kind of true. You’re not lying. They will send you a report, you’ll see the whole breakdown of all of them and then contact each of the bureaus. I mean, you don’t have any money right now, so you might as well have the time to contact them. And the more things that falls off now your score would get a little bit better. And then the second tip is go get a secure card. I know it’s probably gonna cost you a couple of hundred dollars, but you’re building trust with the bureau again and $200-$300 is nothing to pay.
Bradley Sutton:
Secure Card means that I have to pay up front for it.
Lyann:
So you can go to like, Discover has it you can go any of the major bank, bank of America has it. US Bank has it. Citibank has it go in there and say, I’d like to open a Secure Card so that I can build my credit again. You put two or $300 if you wanna ball out and put a thousand, that’s great cuz then you have a bigger limit. The cool part is you never lose that money. That is money that is secured and they’re building a trust with you over six months. If you have really good payment history, keep those. If you buy it like a pack of gum, pay it off right away. Keep that really low and now it triggers the algorithm. Now you’re gonna have stacking on their positive data and all that bad stuff. The late payment, now it’s gonna be in the background.
Lyann:
So over time those late payments will not affect you as much when you stack on some good stuff. It’s like putting makeup on. If I didn’t have makeup on, you’d probably see my little freckles and all that. Well those freckles are the late payments or the little scars or the little imperfections. It’s putting makeup on your credit report by doing these Secure Cards and showing the system that you are actually having good payment behavior. That’s, that’s the best tip I can have. And over time, when your score gets a little bit better, you can now start applying for those cards. And even if they give you a $500 limit, it doesn’t matter still, those will actually stack on it. Another tip is adding, well, we’re gonna do the tips at the end. So we’re gonna save that. I’m gonna give you some tips at the end. I just want to give you everything.
Bradley Sutton:
A little bit off the wall question. Yeah. go for it. Something I did. And okay, so like I said, I had some credit issues. And so like, I couldn’t even, I still don’t think I qualify for brand new credit cards. Like I’ve tried. I can get caught. Like I don’t have terrible, terrible credit. You know, I’ve bought cars and stuff like that. But for credit cards I would always get denied. So my dad has like, excellent credit. So like I would get him a credit card and then I would put myself as an authorized user. Usually, it would ask my Social Security Number too. Now I know the principal beneficiary or the negative side of it is my dad, like for that credit card cuz it’s under his name and his social. But me as a sub-user if they did ask my social whatever the activity is on that card, whether it’s me buying things or it’s my dad. Yeah. Does that help me build my personal credit back as well? Or it’s only affecting, my dad’s credit?
Lyann:
No, it’s gonna help you. And here’s the key part. If he has cards already in his own name, that’s more effective than opening a new one. Why? Because those cards would be older. So if dad had a Chase card, for example, that was 15 years old and he has great history on it, he adds Brad on there as an authorized user and make sure you call the bank to put the social on there. Okay. So it’s solid. You don’t have to have the card tell dad don’t give me a card at all. I don’t need the freaking card. Yeah. And that history now it’s called mirroring, it’s gonna piggyback on his card. Your data is gonna float from him to you. Your data never goes to him because it’s always one direction. It’s like donating blood. If I donate it blood to you and it’s really good blood, I don’t get the blood back.
Lyann:
You get my good blood. Do you see how it goes? I have to tell these stories so people understand. You don’t need the card and you still got the benefit. It’s called piggybacking on someone’s credit. Make sure you are with someone like your family or someone that you trust. And that dad doesn’t miss any payment because if dad miss a payment because he’s out in Mexico, wherever partying, you will get ding too because now that one month or two month of late goes onto you. See how it goes? That’s a trick though.
Bradley Sutton:
Interesting. Alright. I learned something. I was doing the first half, I was like, I know it get credit, I wish I would’ve known that a couple of years ago.
Lyann:
There’s a little tweak to it. It’s like software. You mean someone can download a software, but if they don’t know the little, little nuances Then how they’re gonna know how to really optimize, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Good. Good. All right. Now in the Amazon world, especially a lot of people, once they start get they get going. They, they qualify for, for different loans and things like that. Lines of credit. Because what a lot of these lending companies in the Amazon world they can actually connect to like your Amazon account and they could actually see like, oh yeah, this guy’s doing like $50,000 a month, et cetera. But whatever the case is, they might start getting offers or maybe I’m trying to seek out a line of credit or a loan, and all right, this company, this bank gives me an offer like, all right, hey, we’re going to this, this percentage rate and this is the time you have to pay it off. Do I need to accept pretty much whatever they offer? That’s it. Or do you think there’s wiggle room? And then if there is wiggle room, how do I negotiate to try and get some better rates?
Lyann:
Yeah. So what you wanna do is take down their information and then call them and tell them, I see that you’re offering this and this and this. The other company is offering me a better rate. Would you match it? Or I can go to the other company, always use one bank against another. It’s the only time I make the statement, it’s the only time that encourage polygamy in the banking world. You gotta have a lot of bank, and the reason for that is that you can always use one bank against the other.
Bradley Sutton:
Sister wives.
Lyann:
Sister wives. I like that. I like that. For sure.
Bradley Sutton:
Sister banks I guess you could say.
Lyann:
Yeah. I mean, interesting. It’s very competitive world and especially the statement that you made is they see what your flow is. They see how much volume you’re bringing in. So you’re like, you know how good my numbers are.
Bradley Sutton:
Yeah.
Lyann:
Do you want my business or it’s okay, I can go and compete. They want your business. So they’re gonna go, okay, well we’re, we’re, we’re charging 9%. We’ll we’ll make it seven. Would that be good? Okay, let me think. Let me call the other bank. Or do you want me to not call the other bank? You gotta be a really walking negotiator every time because it is your business. The lower you can get those rates, the more that you have cash flow. It’s all about cash flow. And it all boils down to access to capital. It all boils down to, you need to have time on your side because these payments come so fast. If you have time on your side to flip it, that’s when you’re able to make money.
Bradley Sutton:
Okay. Very interesting. All right. Yeah. Let’s do some maybe rapid fire. So some 60-second tips here. Atleast one I need, but let’s see if you can do some multiple ones and what’s some quick hitting strategies that people or our e-commerce listeners out there.
Lyann:
Let’s do it. Okay. Number one, you want me to start? We got 60-second tip. First, we talked about keeping track of your three scores. Get cr experian.com or Identity iq. And if you have zero money and you’re broke as no joke, go to Credit Karma, get that account, put it on your phone, monitor that and find out what needs to be done. Number two, fix all your personal information, your name, your address, your employment, your phone number. Clean it up till you have one of each. Don’t have a whole bunch of stuff that would actually help clear a lot of bad data.
Bradley Sutton:
Wait. Hold on. Yeah, on on number two. Where do I go to do that again? I know you mentioned it earlier, but I forgot to write it down myself.
Lyann:
No problem. You can go to experian.com or Identity IQ and the part where it says personal information, you can dispute a lot of that stuff. Or on Credit Karma, you’ll see all that information and then you’ll see like their name, address. The report doesn’t look right, you can contact the bureaus. You can just Google phone number.
Bradley Sutton:
So directly from like these experian.com and these.
Lyann:
So you call them and then they’re gonna say, can you can you send me a get, make sure you get your utility bill because or your bank statement that has your name and your address, you would have to send that to them and a driver license to make sure that that’s your one address. You are not living in 10 different places. That’s gonna actually bump your score anywhere from 20 points to 50 points. Just that one move because it’s data. Number three, spreadsheets get to love spreadsheets and everyone has access to free spreadsheet. It’s called Google. You can set up a Google email and in there they have Excel spread, it’s called Google Sheets, which is Excel. You can create Google Sheets on there. And I want you to put in there the name of the card or the loan, the due date, the reporting date.
Lyann:
That’s the date that re reports to the bureau. That’s really important to know that date. The limit of that credit card or that loan, the balance, how much do you owe on it? What is the monthly payment? And then the last section you wanna put notes. If there was an offer of I gotta hit $2,000 to get $50,000 points and the due date is gonna be six months from that date, that’s a drop debt date. And if you wanna get those benefits of those points, you gotta hit those dates. All the payment. Make sure you pay your payments on time, set it up call, you can log into your account and say, every month on the due date, I wanna take it out from this account. It’s automatic. And make sure the first few months, make sure that it works. So that way the banks talk to your bank. If you miss a payment, you’re gonna drop your score. If you are on time all the time, your score will go up to the 850. Okay? The last one is keep relationships with the bank. Contact them. Bid one bank against the next. Learn how to get notes. Take your notes down and talk to them. Cuz if you negotiate a really good rate, that’s more money that you’re saving to put back into your e-commerce business. 60 seconds. I’m done.
Bradley Sutton:
I love It. Hit it. All right. This is awesome. Now I’m sure we’ve just, you know. Scratched the surface here of, of all that can be talked about and I ask all my questions, but maybe there’s some customers or some listeners out there who have other questions. So how can they find you on the interwebs if they’d like to reach out.
Lyann:
Yeah. So you can go to lyannnguyen.com, which is my name. So it’s Lyann, it’s my first name. Last name is Nguyen. Or just follow me on Instagram. It would be @ninjalyann. I used to have Credit Ninja, but you know how Instagram is, they’re always hackers and stuff. So that’s my new Instagram. But follow me there for tips and DM me the word “list” on Instagram. And you’ll be part of my newsletter. And I’ll keep you posted on all the stuff relating to credit, e-commerce, YouTubeing, all that stuff that’s tied into credit and finance.
Bradley Sutton:
Well, Lyann, thank you so much for your time on this podcast. Definitely wanna reach out to you next year and I’m gonna give you an update on all that I’ve implemented from, from what you’ve what you’ve taught. And I know people will be reaching out to you as well because this is very important stuff. So appreciate your time.
Lyann:
Thank you so much. And I will see you again. Maybe in California, cuz I’m in San Diego a lot.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, let me know and then we’ll get some coffee or something.
Lyann:
All right. Thank you.
Bradley Sutton:
All right, we’ll see you.
Learn the attributes of a high-quality Walmart listing and how to streamline the content writing process using GPT with our expert guest Ryan King.
Looking to sell on Etsy? Tune in to this episode for tips, hacks, and insights from Dylan Jahraus, who has found success selling in this marketplace.
Today's episode features a husband and wife's journey from startup to a 7-figure Amazon FBA business. Learn their tips, strategies, and how they overcame obstacles along the way.
Let's see what’s buzzing this week with Bradley - while on his Japan trip, brings us the latest news in the Amazon space. We also share training resources for you and a keyword research strategy using Xray keywords.
In this episode, Bradley shares his top keyword analytics and keyword research tips for your current products, PPC campaigns, and if you're looking for your next product!
Join us as we bring someone from Amazon and a successful seller to the show to talk about tips, share stories, and programs that can massively benefit your current business.
Today, we will cover the latest news in our industry. From Amazon fee increases, Etsy payment delays, Prosper Show recap, and how to improve your listing optimization process. Let’s see what’s buzzing this week!
In this episode, we sit down and talk with Mansour Norouzi of Incrementum Digital to get the latest tips, trends, and strategies on Amazon advertising.
In this episode, we listen to Lori Barzvi’s inspiring Amazon journey. We also learn all her unique roundup articles PR strategy and how she’s crushing it without using PPC.
In this episode, we talk about the latest news on Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, and the E-commerce world. Plus, learn some PPC strategies and how a free Helium 10 tool can add value to your business.
We're back with part 2 of this series. Join us as we chat with a diverse group of Amazon sellers, each with their own unique journey and success story to share.
Join us for this episode where we invited Amazon sellers from different levels and unique backgrounds. Regular people sharing their inspiring stories and strategies.
Tune in to this week’s episode as we cover the latest news in the Amazon, Target, and Walmart space. We also learn tips on how to get more reviews on Walmart and A/B test your listings using Audience.
Unlock the full potential of your Amazon business with ChatGPT! In this episode, let's learn how to leverage AI for your brand story, listing optimization, and more!
In this episode, we speak with Min Yang of Alibaba to talk about its newest updates, live stream shopping’s impact on E-commerce, and talk about Chinese E-commerce companies entering the US.
Looking to expand your E-commerce business to Walmart? Tune in to this episode with Carrie and Michael Lebhar to learn insider tips on Walmart seller strategies, his insights on the Open Call program, and more!
Are you interested in selling on Amazon Japan? Today, we welcome two experts to share why it’s a big opportunity and their tips and strategies on how to succeed in this marketplace.
Are you an Amazon brand owner looking for a way to exit your business without completely walking away? Tune in to this episode as Paul Miller breaks it all down.
In this episode, we cover the latest news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space. We also share cool resources to find search glitches and training to help you manage your PPC campaigns.
Join us for this exciting episode as we sit down with Amazon PPC expert Destaney Wishon, who answers all your burning questions about Amazon and Walmart PPC.
Today, we are back for part 2 of this series, and we are going to talk about strategies that will help you with keyword research, product research, and how to finds signs of review manipulation.
In this episode, we talk about the latest news in the Amazon and E-commerce space. Amazon’s 4th quarter reports, new features inside the sponsored brands creative builder, and the state of the aggregator space in 2023.
In part one of this two-part episode series, we’ll tackle 20 quick-hitting strategies you can add to your Amazon-selling arsenal to help you level up your business this 2023.
In this episode, we talk to two people who come from crazy backgrounds but now help Amazon sellers get to the next level. Let’s tune in to the valuable strategies that they have to share!
In this Weekly Buzz episode, Bradley covers the latest news in Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space. Tune in for our exclusive interview with Shawn Hart and training tip on how to create Amazon attribution links inside Helium 10!
In this episode, Bradley shares 18 strategies that you need to implement in your Amazon business to get a competitive edge and crush it this 2023.
In this episode, Kevin is back on the show to talk about health and how your Amazon business can gain a competitive advantage through new technology like NFTs and Artificial Intelligence.
Today, we are going to have our first Walmart Wednesday episode of the year with expert guest Michal Chapnik, who answers all of your questions about selling on the Walmart marketplace.
We’re back for part 2 of this series, and in this episode, Bradley’s going to talk about search volume and how the Amazon algorithm calculates it. Plus, more results of his case studies!
In this episode, Bradley shares some information that you haven’t heard about before and takes a deep dive into the state of search volume data from Amazon, Helium 10, and other tools.
In this episode, we cover the latest news about Amazon’s new FBA capacity management system, how to buy pink sauce at Walmart stores, and a refund experience from an Etsy store that went viral.
In this episode, we speak with two veteran Amazon sellers, Chris Thomas and Regina Peterburgsky, on how to stay competitive this 2023. Plus, travel tips, investments, and more!
In this episode, we speak with an Amazon and Walmart advertising expert to answer all your frequently asked questions and learn unique strategies to crush it on your Amazon PPC.
In this episode, we talk about the latest news on Amazon and Etsy. Advertising glitches, buy with Prime stats, award-winning ninja PPC hacks, and how to increase your review velocity.
Today’s episode is another installment of our Sellers Strategy Masterclass series, where Bradley talks about all the best tips to level up your Amazon listing optimization game.
In this episode, we bring back Kian Golzari to the show to share strategies on Amazon product sourcing in China, both in-person and online. Plus travel hacks, Canton Fair tips, and more!
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon, Shopify, and the top e-Commerce trends globally. We also learn about Etsy listings compared to Amazon listings and how to use Xray Keywords.
In this episode, we welcome two sellers to learn about their stories and the unique selling strategies that helped them crush it on Amazon.
In this episode, we compiled all the best strategies that we’ve had for the entire year of 2022. Get ready cause this will be a fun-filled strategy fest!
This episode is part 2 of our special interview with Brandon Young, and we’re going to talk about more Amazon-selling strategies and other updates in the industry.
This is part 1 of 2 in this crazy strategy-filled episode with one of the top Amazon strategists in the game, Brandon Young. We talk about how to scale your team, relevancy strategies, and more!
In this episode, we are going over a lot of strategies that are bound to help you crush it in 2023 if you’re an Amazon or Walmart seller.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon, Walmart, interesting updates worldwide, and an excellent tip on how to automate your review requests.
In this episode, we talk to an Amazon product ranking specialist about the latest strategies, updates, and emerging trends that can impact your ranking on Amazon.
In this episode, we speak with PPC expert, Gefen Laredo of Vendo, to go over all our listeners' top questions on everything related to Amazon and Walmart advertising.
In this episode, we talk about the latest news in the Amazon space, an FBA inventory issue Bradley experienced, and tips on PPC & keyword research for 2023.
In this episode, we’re gonna talk with two podcast hosts to talk about cool strategies and stories that they’ve learned from their guests over the past year.
In this episode, we talk to Anthony Cofrancesco and Ian Sells about strategies for user-generated content and how to optimize your Amazon listings for better conversions.
In this episode, we talk about what’s buzzing in the Amazon, Walmart, and Etsy spaces. We also learn how to check if your Amazon products are being sold in other marketplaces.
In this episode, we go over the top product and niche research techniques that will help you beat the competition when it comes to finding new products to sell on Amazon.
In this episode, we got Janelle Page back on the show to talk about Kickstarter launches, Shopify pre-sales, how to build a brand in 2023, and what Amazon seller skills can give an edge over the competition.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on the recent Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, a special webinar with Neil Patel, and how to use the Adtomic Schedules feature.
Bradley is back with another Maldives Honeymoon episode. For this episode, we’re not only talking about launching methods but also some next-level hacks for you to get ahead.
Today we have two guests, one has sold tens of millions of dollars on Amazon, and the other has helped sellers get tens of millions of dollars reimbursed by Amazon.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon and Shopify. Learn a tip you can use for Black Friday sales, what’s trending in Amazon ads, and how to improve your product research.
In this episode, we review the latest updates we recently launched, including a new game-changing feature for your historical keyword research.
In this episode, we talk to two Amazon sellers on opposite sides of the spectrum, and both are achieving different levels of success in their respective journeys.
In this episode, we cover the latest news about Amazon, E-commerce marketplaces inside TikTok and YouTube, and learn how to use the search expander tool.
In this episode, Bradley goes over some of his favorite serious strategies for Amazon and Walmart sellers from the one and only Kevin King!
In this episode, we speak with Scott and Danielle of Northbound about Amazon exits, the blueprint for a successful premium brand exit, and how you can learn all these inside Helium 10’s new series.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon and Walmart, get actionable tips from a Serious Sellers Club member, and learn why there are no sales estimates for certain products.
In this episode, Bradley is back with another strategy masterclass to show you underutilized features inside two Helium 10 tools you may not know about.
In this episode, we talk to Cameron Berlin-Day of Pacvue about general PPC tactics, discuss features inside Amazon ads like the Marketing Stream and Marketing Cloud, and more!
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon, learn how to utilize brand analytics features inside Magnet and Cerebro, and his best free Amazon-selling strategies for Helium 10 subscribers.
In this episode, we welcome back Selene Dior to talk about the latest on social media and how her strategies helped propel her E-commerce brand to make 7-figures in 2021.
In this episode, Bradley goes over all the latest updates with Helium 10 and how you can use it to make you or save you thousands of dollars on Amazon. How cool is that?
In this episode, Bradley covers the latest news on Amazon and reviews all the latest updates from the Amazon unBoxed conference in New York City.
In this episode, we talk to Yoni Kozminski about one of the favorite topics at the Sell and Scale Summit, how to get started on building SOPs and systems for your E-commerce business.
In this episode, Bradley speaks with Leo Sgovio about his top Google ads strategies and how the ad platform may play a more significant role for Amazon sellers in the future.
In this episode, we talk about Amazon’s new marketplace in Europe, Walmart’s new program for content creators and influencers, and cool tips for your listings and deals for the holiday season.
Today we welcome back one of your favorite guests, Anne Ferris, to talk about updates on her Amazon business, plus some strategies on product packaging, lifestyle images, and breathing techniques.
In this episode, we talk to Josh Hadley to share his story, from making custom wedding invitations to selling $10 million a year on Amazon.
In this episode, we discuss the latest news in Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce. Discuss the latest tips and features of Helium 10 tools to help your business crush it.
In this episode, our guest talks about how they have helped hundreds of sellers increase their E-commerce sales with the help of influencer and affiliate marketing.
In this episode, we welcome three guests to talk about Amazon Singapore, the pros and cons of sourcing in Vietnam, and how to meet Bradley on his trip to Asia.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon, tips from a Serious Sellers Club member, How to analyze your competitor’s images inside Helium 10, and check out a new module inside Freedom Ticket.
For today’s show, we continue where we left off in the last episode to share 15 more keyword research tips and strategies using Cerebro.
In this episode, Bradley introduces a new series to the show where he will focus on top strategies you can use to increase your sales on Amazon.
In this episode, we break down the latest news on Amazon and Walmart. We also discuss Indexing Glitches that might affect your listings and how our tools can help.
In this episode, we’re going to go over all the latest Helium 10 features and why all sellers should take advantage of these to level up their E-commerce game.
What’s now possible now that Amazon is giving hourly data on PPC? Are we able to create Google ads inside Helium 10? We break this all down with resident PPC expert Vince Montero.
In this episode, Bradley recaps all the latest announcements at the Amazon Accelerate 2022 event and what big shifts that you should keep an eye on as a seller on the platform.
In this episode, we interview two E-commerce sellers. They share their stories and strategies on how they were able to grow their business from zero to seven figures.
In this episode, we talk to 8-figure seller Benjamin Webber about his unique product marketing strategies and his best tips on how to build the best E-commerce team.
In this episode, we talk about a big announcement from Amazon and cover the latest news about E-commerce. Plus, tips and information on NetSuite, PPC, and more!
In this episode, we welcome Cara Sayer back and talk about how her sales are now bouncing back after the pandemic, and we learn strategies to connect with your customers better.
In this episode, we speak with a 7-figure seller from Brazil, Antonio Bindi, to talk about his Amazon journey and his unique strategies on product launches, Amazon Posts, and virtual bundles.
In this special episode of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz episode, Bradley breaks down the newest updates inside the Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on the Amazon and Shopify space. Learn about product licensing and 5 Helium 10 features that most don’t know about!
In this episode, we talk to two sellers who live in Dubai to talk about selling on Amazon markets in the gulf region and how one seller scaled up to $250,000 sales without software.
In this episode, Bradley shares his top 30 travel hacks that Amazon and e-Commerce entrepreneurs should be using.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon. We learn more about Walmart Fulfillment Services, Market Tracker 360, and a cool hack for frequently bought together.
In this episode, we welcome back Justin Chen of PickFu to talk about how you can create epic listings with the help of crowd-sourced insights and data.
In this special episode, we talk about what’s working for Amazon PPC, how to get the most out of networking events, and a glimpse into new Korean marketplaces.
In today’s episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon and Walmart. Interview a doctor turned Amazon specialist. Tips about the honeymoon period, Xray keywords tool, and more!
On today’s show, we’ve got a strategy-packed episode from your favorite Amazon experts, and Bradley talks about the latest updates and features for Helium 10.
We speak with two Amazon experts, Mike Jackness and Mina Elias, to share all their latest hacks and strategies that have helped them and others to sell millions on Amazon.
Today, we bring you the latest news on Amazon, Walmart, and more details on the Yiwu lockdown. Plus, we give out massive bonuses for Sell and Scale Summit registrants.
Today, we speak with podcast veterans Chris Lyell and Kian Golzari to share what’s new in the shipping and sourcing space and how to protect your listings against the bad players.
In this episode, Bradley welcomes back Wilfried Ligthart to find out what’s trending in digital marketing, why you should be consistent in social media, and more!
In this episode, we cover the latest on Amazon and its advertising platform. We also talk about valuable tips on exiting your brand and how to use our Inventory Management tool.
In this episode, we speak with Emma Schermer Tamir and Rich Goldstein about intellectual property, trademarks, listing optimization, and how to get the most out of Amazon seller events.
In this episode, we speak with Dana Oren of 8fig about business funding, Fintech solutions, and how their growth platform helped eCommerce sellers 10x their revenue.
In this jam-packed episode, we cover all the latest news on Amazon and talk about strategies for Amazon PPC, keyword research, and brand analytics.
Today, we got two podcasts in one. We’ll talk about two different subjects affecting Amazon sellers, which are product compliance and hiring tips for your virtual assistants.
Today, we take a look back on all of the newest tools, updates, and features that Helium 10 has launched for the month of July.
In this episode, we talk about the latest news on Amazon. Plus some tips on how to differentiate your product and go over one of Magnet’s features.
For the first time in two years, Tomer is back on the show to share his hard-hitting tactics and strategies that helped him and his clients sell millions on Amazon.
In this episode, we talked to Matt Altman to share all the strategies he uses from managing Amazon brands with over $250 million of yearly revenue.
In this jam-packed episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, and Shopify. Learn about product inserts, an Elite seller’s story, and how to do product research on the go!
Today, we are going to speak to two sellers from opposite sides of the world who have sold millions of dollars on Amazon to share their journeys and strategies.
In this episode, we talk to Shawn Hart about his story and the unique marketing principles that helped him reach $153 million in total Amazon sales.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon, Etsy, and Walmart. Talk about retail arbitrage, Amazon posts, how to find the best-selling variation, and a business assistance fund program for Amazon sellers.
In this episode, we speak with Gracey Ryback of Deal Cheats about her story, Amazon influencer marketing, TikTok promotions, Amazon Live, and Amazon Affiliates.
Today we welcome back Matt Remuzzi and Melanie Shabangu to talk about Amazon accounting, exits, and new regulations for the European Market.
In this episode, we talk about the latest news on Amazon, learn how to name PPC campaigns, and a tip on how to utilize Black Box for frequently bought together.
Today, we welcome Carrie and Michael Lebhar to talk about some exciting things happening to the Walmart platform, some new Amazon launch strategies and more!
In this episode, we speak with Michelle Covey of GS1 US to talk everything about barcodes and answer all your frequently asked questions about them.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon, speak with an Elite seller about his journey and tips, and a training tip on how to check if your sales are down.
Today, we welcome the Amazon influencer dynamic duo, Jana Krekic and Lazar Zepinic, to give us a preview of their Sell and Scale Summit topics.
In this episode, we recap all the latest updates, new tools, and features from June’s Bigger Better Launch program.
Today, we cover the latest news about Amazon. Talk about the current state of the supply chain, and share a pro-tip on how to use the Listing Analyzer tool.
The King is back on the show to talk about NFTs, product launches, listing hacks, & how he’s the new host of the podcast that introduced him to the Amazon world.
Today, we speak with Matthew Smith from Walmart to talk about how to get started on the platform, answer your FAQs, and a special announcement that you don’t want to miss!
In this episode, we cover the latest news about Amazon, answer your frequently asked questions, and show you around the Listing Analyzer tool.
In this episode, Bradley talks about everything we don’t like about Amazon, but let’s also review the reasons why we love selling on the platform.
Today, Bradley speaks with Crystal Ren. After years of education started an Amazon business, and within two years, she exited her 7-figure per year company.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Walmart, Amazon, and Etsy. We also talk about exciting updates for the Sell and Scale Summit.
In this episode, Bradley is back in the Maldives to talk about his new launch strategies and the latest updates to all his case studies.
Today, we’re gonna speak with one of the experts in the industry about strategies for Amazon PPC, data points, business reports, and more!
In this week’s episode, we bring you the latest news on Amazon and Q&A with Chinese suppliers about the current state of sourcing and the supply chain.
In this episode, we welcome back Chris Green to talk about everything you need to know on Amazon KDP and tips on using it for creative marketing and branding.
In this episode, let’s talk about the latest news on Amazon and Walmart. Take a sneak peek at a new Freedom Ticket training content and the new Cerebro one-click filters.
Today, we’re gonna talk about all the latest updates to Helium 10 like new ways to find your top keywords, how to analyze your competitor’s listings, and more!
In this episode, we bring to you the latest news on Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify. Plus exciting news as Helium 10 celebrates its 6th birthday this week and more!
In this episode, Bradley goes over all the operations and analytics tools that you need to use inside Amazon seller central and Helium 10 to help you crush it.
Today, we cover the latest news from Amazon & Shopify. Share new updates on Black Box, how to use the Pinterest Trend Finder, plus an exciting announcement!
Today, we speak with social media influencer and 7-figure seller Trevin about his businesses and tips on finding your next winning product, launches, and more!
In this episode, we’ll cover the latest news on Amazon and Walmart. We answer your questions and share a tip on how to analyze your competitor’s listing.
Podcast favorites Schrone Hardeman and Shan Shan Fu are back for updates on their business and new strategies if you’re selling in multiple eCommerce platforms.
Today, we welcome back four teenage eCommerce sellers from SSP #222 to follow up and see what are they up to. Business exits, hiring employees, and education.
Today, we talk about Amazon’s updates on its dangerous goods policy, Buy with Prime, Walmart’s annual report, selling tips, and using PPC for your launches.
Today’s episode welcomes Joseph Wang to talk everything about Amazon strategy, teddy bears, cryptocurrency, dating advice, lifehacks, networking, and more!
In this episode, we speak with Lailama Hasan and Lem Turner about selling tips and introduce two brand new shows that will help you level up your Amazon game.
In this episode, we cover the latest news on Amazon fees and storage. We talk about product liability insurance, and how to create QR codes for your business.
In this episode, Bradley welcomes back Mina Elias to talk about the latest strategies in Amazon PPC and product launches.
What's the difference between Helium 10 search volume compared to Amazon's search volume tools? In this episode, Bradley dives into this topic and more!
In this episode, we cover the latest on Walmart, Etsy, and Amazon. We’ll also introduce a new tool and share a pro training tip about product inserts.
Today, we talk to Mark Casey, a specialist in setting up Amazon listings. He shares his best tips on image selection, A+ content, outside traffic, and more!
Bradley dives deeper into his backstory and shares valuable lessons from his career and life’s success and failures.
This episode covers the latest news on Amazon, Walmart, and Etsy this week. We also welcome experts in ranking and sourcing to share their insights and tips.
Do you think retail or online arbitrage is a thing of the past? Today, we speak with Garry Ray on how he made $2.6 million on arbitrage alone last year.
Elite sellers Jake Paulsen and Ryan Ebel are back with updates and business strategies. Plus tips on applying for home loans and insurance as an Amazon seller.
In this episode, we cover the latest on Amazon and Etsy. Interview a multi-figure Amazon entrepreneur, and show you how to create custom barcode labels.
In this episode, we’re going to get some cool tips and strategies from sellers that we have interviewed live on the recent Prosper Show in Las Vegas.
Did you know that you can easily find a TikTok influencer that’s perfect for your Amazon brand? Today’s expert guest shows you how plus more strategies.
This week, we cover the latest news on Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify. Interview an Elite seller with a unique story and a pro-tip when using our Magnet tool.
TikTok is the hottest social media platform right now. Learn how to utilize it to grow your Amazon business through organic posts and paid ads.
In this episode, we welcome back Meghla Bhardwaj to talk about the latest on selling and sourcing your products in India.
We’re back to cover the latest news on Amazon, Walmart, & Shopify. We talk with an Amazon PPC expert about his strategies to improve your campaigns and more!
Do you still have a day job and aren’t sure how you’ll be able to transition to full-time on Amazon? Today’s guests share their stories.
In this episode, Bradley picks up where he left off and shares his latest tips on how to improve your Amazon listings for better conversions and sales this 2022
In this special episode, we will be dropping some Major News about the biggest upcoming Amazon Seller event this year. You don't want to miss it!
In this episode, we are going to go over the latest and greatest strategies for optimizing your Amazon listings for 2022.
Norm Farrar is back on the show to share his knowledge about selling on Walmart, updates on his pre-launch strategies, and more!
Today, we cover the latest news on Walmart+, Etsy, and new features for Amazon Canada. We also share resources for our Spanish-speaking community and more!
How do you pivot your strategies when Amazon’s TOS changes? Is there value in involving your customers in building your next product? Our guest shares her ideas
Today, we speak with Rael Lowenthal about product compliance, importing, taxes, and logistics for when you’re ready to expand your business internationally.
This episode covers the latest on the Amazon marketplace, Elite seller’s advice to new sellers, Follow-Up’s new product rating tracker feature, and more!
Today's guest gives us the rundown on what's going on with the shipping costs and transit situations now that March 2022 is approaching.
In this episode, we talk to Saddam and Kamal of AMZ One Step on what strategies are currently working to improve your conversion rates this 2022.
This episode talks about the latest on Walmart+, new Amazon features, how to get the best results for your listings, introducing a new tool, and more!
Today, we’ll talk to someone who worked at Amazon for ten years before starting what many consider the “Ferrari” of all Amazon advertising software platforms.
In this episode, we’ll talk about how you can take your Amazon products and start selling them on Walmart.com, plus a new program that can help you do that!
This week’s episode features the latest on Amazon’s massive gains, Walmart’s open call, an AMA segment, and how to find the top keywords driving organic sales.
Today, Bradley talks with a seller who is crushing it on Amazon by learning and executing Freedom Ticket and Project X strategies.
Bradley welcomes to show two brothers who have found success on their very first Amazon FBA product. Combined, they have now grossed over $2.5 million a year.
In this episode of the Weekly Buzz, we cover the latest news about the Sold by Amazon shut down, Walmart’s cryptocurrency, 2022 supply chain updates, and more!
The Rainmaker Family is back on the show to talk about unique selling strategies, mindset hacks, and how they motivate their community through challenges.
Today, we're going to bring back two sellers to share their journey on how they scaled their business from $1.7M in 2020 to $6.4M in 2021.
In this episode, we bring the latest news about the Lunar New Year, new FBA fee changes, updates from our product manager, and the Keyword Tracker for Walmart
Today, we’ll be talking about information overload. How can you really focus on what helps your business with all these content, training, and events?
Saqib Azhar, owner of the world's largest Amazon Facebook group, is back to talk about hiring virtual assistants and a new launch method that his group uses.
In this episode, we tackle the latest news on Amazon’s call me now feature, FBA shipment policy changes, and a summary of the supply chain in 2021.
Lem Turner joins us today to talk about the latest updates on Amazon, Walmart, and Helium that can help you crush it this 2022.
Today, we're going to talk about everything you want to know about Amazon images, product photography, and even 3D imaging.
In this episode, we talk about shipping rates increase, how to acquire more capital for your FBA business, and introducing the new Pinterest trends finder.
In part 2, we continue on where we left off to listen to four and a half more inspiring seller stories on how they overcame obstacles to crush it on Amazon.
Today, we will hear four inspiring stories of sellers from all walks of life. Perhaps, someone, you can relate to on how they are crushing it on Amazon
Today, we talk about record-breaking sales on the holidays, Amazon restock limits, an elite seller’s story, and how you can automate your review requests.
In this episode, Bradley takes a look back at the best thirty-second tips and strategies from 2021.
Kian Golzari is back with some updates and insights on the current situation regarding sourcing and shipping. He also shares his top strategies for 2022.
This week covers the latest news about Amazon showrooms, an Amazon driver's bravery, two new podcasts in other languages, product research tips, and more!
In today’s show, Bradley introduces Adriana Rangel and Marcus Mokros. They are the newest international brand evangelists for our Spanish and German speaking audiences. Both being experienced Amazon sellers, they will share their journey and their top strategies in selling. This episode also features 2022 plans for our Spanish and German speaking community and two new podcasts that will help serious sellers of any level, so make sure to listen to the very end.
Destany is back on the show with another jam-packed PPC strategy session from Amazon all the way to Walmart advertising and much more!
This week, we'll cover news around Etsy, Amazon Grocery, your favorite keyword research tools, and how to use Listing Builder for competitor research.
Today, we speak with a multi-figure seller on two of the largest marketplaces. Listen to his story of success and strategies to help you on your journey.
Today, we welcome back two elite sellers on the show. Listen as they share the lessons and strategies they used to achieve over $20,000,000 in annual sales
This week, we cover Amazon's newest programs to help in logistics, a new segment that answers your questions, and Helium 10's new Amazon Anomaly Tracker
In today’s episode, we will talk about the fastest rising Amazon marketplaces in the Middle East, why there’s tons of opportunity there, and more!
In today’s episode, we speak with a cash flow management expert about strategies that e-commerce sellers can use to keep their profit first.
Helium 10 Buzz is a weekly show that delivers breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space. Plus expert interviews and the training tip for the week.
Today, we welcome back an Amazon seller who has exited two multi-million dollar brands. Listen as she shares her updates, approach, and unique strategies.
Helium 10 Buzz is a weekly show that delivers breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space. Plus expert interviews and the training tip for the week.
In part 2, Bradley shares his thoughts on the latest Amazon TOS updates, more Project X and 5K case study updates, and the latest launch strategies he uses.
Bradley returned to the Maldives to share his new updates on the “Maldives honeymoon strategy” and his different case studies.
In part 2 of this series, our speakers will dive into more product research strategies that will make the biggest impact in 2022.
Helium 10 Buzz is a weekly show that brings us the latest Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce news. Plus more interviews and the ProTraining tip of the week!
In this 2-part series, Bradley and Helium 10’s brand evangelists share their best product research strategies to help your 2022 blow 2021 out of the water.
Today, we speak with Helium 10’s VP of strategy Adam Shahbaz about Amazon trends, the trusted partner directory, and a big event for sellers next year.
Amazon product sourcing expert Jalona Falkner shares her top strategies which include sourcing from a website that many have never heard of before.
Did you know that more than 50% of the money you ever put in your pocket is going to come when you exit your business? Today's guest explains why.
Today, we speak to a seller whose company has sold over 200 hundred million dollars on Amazon. She also shares the strategies she used to achieve that.
Today, we speak with Helium 10's CEO, Bojan Gajic, about data security, the tool's accuracy, and some leadership tips that you can apply to your business.
Wondering how you can increase your Amazon product's conversion rate? Our expert guest shares his serious listing optimization and image strategies.
Today we're discovering the best strategies on how to use social media and influencer marketing to build a huge following for your Amazon brand or product.
In this episode, Manuel Suarez is here to share his serious Facebook marketing strategies to help grow your Amazon brand.
Vince Montero is back to share new updates inside Helium 10’s Adtomic and Amazon Advertising that have recently been released.
In this episode, Lisett Lees talks goes A to Z on how to use Amazon Posts and why it is important for brand promotion and discovery.
Matt Remuzzi of CapForge shares his best tips and practices on bookkeeping and accounting for e-commerce sellers.
Izabella Rittz is back and brought along her husband and daughter to discuss the dynamics of an entrepreneur's "family life" and tips for your Amazon selling business.
In this episode, Bradley shares his unique experiences on his recent trip to Pakistan. We also hear from 3 serious Pakistani sellers with serious selling strategies.
In part 2 of the keyword research masterclass, Bradley dives into the Amazon keyword strategies that will make the biggest impact in 2022.
Bradley is back with 22 Amazon keyword research strategies to help your 2022 blow 2021 out of the water. Welcome to the keyword research masterclass.
Success on Amazon is great, but it won’t always be enough. In this episode of the SSP, we speak to Michael Lebhar about big opportunities in the Walmart marketplace.
Kevin King is back with some words of wisdom on new Amazon product opportunities and some exciting upgrades coming to the tools you already love.
Building your brand on Amazon requires a deep understanding of the tools at your disposal. We’ve assembled the easiest wins for small brands to win big!
In this episode with guest Alexandra Ramirez, we find out how you can get your Amazon proceeds every day instead of biweekly, as well as other money-saving techniques.
E-commerce has become extremely lucrative. It can also be confusing. An expert helps us navigate compliance with Amazon’s rules and regulations.
If you want to catch up with all the latest e-commerce news, this might be the best way. Here’s the most recent “Best of Everything” from Helium 10.
There really isn’t such a thing as a typical Amazon seller. Two entrepreneurs from opposite ends of the spectrum about e-commerce in 2021.
Are you looking to build your e-commerce brand? Here’s a trademark expert with the latest A to Z tips to help you do it!
This big-box store has always had an enormous influence on business, but now it’s taken steps to match Amazon’s online growth. Here’s the latest!
It’s 2021 and an entrepreneur’s ability to face challenges has never been as crucial. A podcast favorite talks about how she’s coaching others to bounce back.
What’s the easiest way to ask your Amazon Customers for a review? Curious about the kind of links to use with your inserts? Here’s the latest!
There are so many ways to be successful selling on Amazon. This young entrepreneur made his first million dollars with wholesale before he turned 18!
Want to quickly reach a very committed audience? In addition to the latest PPC strategies, here’s why TikTok is trending with e-commerce advertisers.
Lately, alternative shipping options have proven invaluable. Here’s a 3PL warehouse pro with an update as well as a Walmart and Amazon comparison.
Episode 268 of the Serious Sellers Podcast digs into some of the most powerful Helium 10 tool strategies most sellers aren’t even aware of!
The Maldives Honeymoon strategy is powerful, but it’s not magic. Here’s how to make sure the rest of your Amazon launch checklist is squared away.
Wondering what TikTok has to do with Amazon or e-commerce? Here’s an expert (with 2 million followers) offering top social media strategies for you!
Our three new Amazon sellers are back a year later with stories (and lessons) from the front lines of e-commerce. There’s something here for everyone!
Together with the Elevate Docu-Series and a Trusted Partner Directory, we’re celebrating e-commerce wins, inspiring sellers, and creating community.
Hoping that Amazon sellers won’t take advantage of your good ideas isn’t enough. This IP expert has advice from the front lines of e-commerce!
Are shipping and transit times going through the roof for you? For e-commerce sellers, the last year has been a wild ride. Here’s the latest info!
Want to crush it on Amazon? Tune in for keyword rank tests, our new CPR 3.0, and how to identify sold products that came from customer searches.
After starting with $5000, in Q2, Bradley Sutton’s initial Amazon product launch has resulted in 300K in sales. Find out how he did it!
Want to live the laptop lifestyle? Sometimes we forget that it’s often the less sexy aspects of the e-commerce business that make us profitable.
Episode 258 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features another “Best of” edition with fresh commentary on some of our most popular written blogposts.
Selling on Amazon? Split testing is the best way to make sure that your message is both powerful and pointed at the right people. Here’s the latest!
After moving to the US from Ukraine, this Amazon seller learned both the easy way and the hard way, what it takes to run a successful matcha tea brand.
If you’re like a lot of e-commerce sellers, Amazon DSP is a mystery. Here’s an A-to-Z summary of how to succeed with demand-side platform advertising.
New Amazon PPC campaigns, amateur product photography tips, and special advice for sellers who want to start coaching. The third time is certainly a charm with Tamara Tee!
E-commerce doesn’t stand still and neither do we. In this webinar recap, Bradley details the recent changes (and additions) to our suite of tools
PPC strategies for a first product launch, the art of product targeting, and cross-country bike trips… this episode of the SSP has it all.
Building an online following is more than just posting content to social media regularly. This marketing expert is giving away all his secrets!
Looking for a great way to rank higher with fewer giveaways? How about combining the Maldives Honeymoon Amazon launch strategy with a new CPR 3.0?
Are you thinking of building an Amazon Brand to sell or expanding to other e-commerce marketplaces? If so, this Shopify pro has some great advice.
Listen in to get fresh strategies from an Amazon expert and you’ll also hear about his office in China and why he’s started investing in sports cards.
Interested in selling on Amazon’s huge online marketplace? These two 7-figure sellers will take you through the e-commerce experience from A to Z.
Want to keep up to date with the latest e-commerce tactics? Here’s a UK Based Amazon pro with clever tips you need to continue growing your business!
The two e-commerce pros behind Project X team up to offer the latest tips and strategies for Amazon sellers looking to scale up their business.
Here’s an opportunity to find out the latest on a new Amazon marketplace from an e-commerce veteran who first reached 7 figures way back in 2015.
Here’s an opportunity to learn new strategies from an Amazon trailblazer, e-commerce software pioneer, and recent addition to the Thrasio team.
Want to make sure that your Amazon product gets noticed? That’s where Helium 10’s new PPC tool, Adtomic comes in. Here’s the latest news!
Can’t decide what you’d like to learn about? Here’s a smorgasbord of e-commerce topics that will help keep Amazon sellers up to date!
E-commerce is expanding around the globe. It’s changing lives, bringing new opportunities, and introducing similar challenges to selling communities.
Researching an Amazon product? The key is to be able to understand buyer intent and identify sufficient product demand. Here’s how to do both!
Amazon sellers know that brand matters. Level up with this branding workshop from one of the best in the game, Brandon Armstrong AKA @BdotAdot5.
It’s hard to know what your e-commerce path will look like. Two friends with completely different entrepreneurial journeys talk about finding success.
Here’s an opportunity to revisit content you’ve missed. We take a fresh look at last month’s most popular Helium 10 podcasts, videos, and blog posts.
Thinking about selling on Amazon? It can be a bumpy road. Here’s a brand expert with tips to help smooth out your online business experience.
The e-commerce world is filled with inspirational journeys. Here’s Shan Shan Fu telling how she found online success with the “Ferrari of face masks.”
Selling on Amazon has the potential to change lives. Here’s a story about how an entrepreneur used his success to take a 365-day working vacation.
Thinking about getting into drop shipping? Here’s Bradley Sutton with a close look at what’s involved in getting set up, and how Helium 10 can help!
Amazon seller, Schrone Hardeman is back on the podcast to talk about how he has navigated the COVID pandemic. He’s a favorite guest for a reason!
Are you looking for a way to build your Amazon brand? Chatbot pro Leo Sgovio offers tips on Facebook, ManyChat, and managing your buyer reviews.
The influence of e-commerce is world-wide. Amazon has expanded its reach, and the ability to communicate is crucial. A skilled translator is the answer!
This Amazon seller achieved what’s become the dream of many. He sold his e-com business, and now he’s jumped into the red-hot trading card arena!
Home insurance, health insurance, but Amazon seller’s insurance? This episode features two e-com insurance pros who’ll tell you why it’s so important.
When it comes to selling on Amazon, the secret to success lies in the details. In this episode, Bradley Sutton shows you how to track your analytics.
The Wholesale Formula’s Dan Meadors brings us his latest strategies and accolades for a Helium 10 tool designed specifically for wholesale sellers.
Want to know how to manage your Amazon business and brand? Here are the latest strategies from Steven Pope, a top e-commerce and marketing pro!
After starting with $5000, in the last four months, Bradley Sutton’s initial Amazon product launch has resulted in 150K in sales. How cool is that?
Amazon sellers never know where great e-commerce advice might come from. It really helps show that success doesn’t care how old (or young) you are!
PPC has quickly become a main topic of conversation for Amazon sellers. Here are strategies, updates, and exciting additions to Helium 10 ADS toolbox.
Looking for a cash stream? Find out more from these childhood friends and e-commerce partners, thriving on platforms like Poshmark and Makari.
Here’s an opportunity to revisit content you’ve missed. We take a fresh look at the last month’s most popular podcasts, videos, and blog posts.
Finding the best product to sell on Amazon may be a lot less complicated than you think. Today’s guest walks us through her social media success.
Don’t have time to get all your e-commerce business done? Maybe it’s time to put chatbots to work for you. This specialist is here to tell you how.
Kevin King is an e-commerce legend. He’s here with top tips and strategies for Amazon sellers and shares stories from a year filled with challenges.
Curious about where Helium 10 is headed in the future? Want to know what we have planned? Our VP of Product is here with a sneak peek.
This is big news! The combined strength of Helium 10 and Alibaba.com will streamline the product sourcing process and save you valuable time.
Have you ever considered using TikTok as an Amazon product research tool? This 7-figure e-commerce seller and coach tells you how to do it!
These two e-commerce sellers used tactics like sourcing in Vietnam and sales to brick-and-mortar stores to achieve 7, and 8 figures on Amazon.
Want to know what’s happening on Amazon? This 8-figure seller brings us strategies using Amazon Posts, press releases, and Google’s My Business.
When Amazon sellers begin searching for their products, they start with China. Here’s why two sourcing experts think that India could be a better option.
These two e-commerce veterans were 7 figure Shopify sellers. Now, they’re on Amazon and are crushing it. Find out how they made the transition!
E-commerce has absolutely exploded in the last year. These stories from everyday Amazon sellers show the many paths to success.
Today’s PPC Talk features campaign strategies for both launch and maintenance. We also discover why this pro uses 1000 campaigns for just three SKUs!
These two best friends are nearing 7 figures on Amazon, making in one day what they used to make in a month. This is their Amazon seller’s story.
Facebook Marketplace strategies, PR tips for the TikTok era, a flight attendant crushing it on Amazon, the “Maldives Honeymoon,” and much more.
30K for a couple of weeks of work? Today’s guest offers tips on using arbitrage and off-Amazon warehouses to level up your e-commerce game!
If you want to be successful on Amazon, you need a good product. Bradley Sutton’s yearly deep-dive product research episode should be your first step!
The world’s largest Facebook group is based in Pakistan. The creator, Saqib Azhar is with us to talk about his country’s rapid e-commerce growth.
Selene Dior became a 7-figure e-commerce superstar without selling a penny on Amazon. She’s back with more Instagram strategies and influencer tips.
Why did Helium 10’s Bradley Sutton fly 30 hours for a solitary one day “Maldives Honeymoon?” A new, cutting-edge Amazon launch strategy. That’s why!
Amazon is a world-wide affair. These two top Australian sellers offer strategies and give us a close look at what e-commerce is like down under.
The e-commerce ecosystem is made up of many different communities. This couple helps theirs with a cool Amazon Facebook Marketplace strategy.
Today, we are talking about a form of marketing for Amazon sellers that has a 99% open rate and a 20% click through rate: text messages!
Are you curious about selling your Amazon business? Find out what’s involved and possibly achieve your biggest e-commerce payday yet!
Most Amazon sellers are sourcing products from the other side of the world. This expert tells how inspections can save you thousands of dollars.
Powerful Amazon advertising software company, Prestozon is now part of Helium 10. Here’s Prestozon’s (Helium 10’s) Ben Aldern with expert PPC advice.
How to use Alibaba to find suppliers, Newegg as a sales channel, the latest on Merch by Amazon, infographics, and a new seller spotlight interview.
Thinking about selling internationally on Amazon? Wondering what the heck is a VAT? These accounting pros will tell you what you need to know.
Amazon seller groups offer great opportunities to share e-commerce strategies. They’ve helped these two Helium 10 Elite members make millions.
This recap of Helium 10’s eight-hour mega-webinar offers cutting edge tips for the upcoming Q4 selling season from 13 different Amazon pros.
This former sponsored athlete and gym owner became a skilled financial advisor to entrepreneurs. She’s here today with important tips for sellers.
Here’s a wild story of a multi-million-dollar Amazon seller who found success after starting with just one dime.
Since 2001, Newegg has been fulfilling orders for some of e-commerce's rising stars. Now they're giving Amazon sellers yet another way to diversify!
An update to Bradley’s "Project 5K" case study launched last year, plus two new projected 6 figure yearly products built from a 5K investment.
This Amazon seller left medical school and professional modeling for e-commerce. By focusing and the basics, she’s thriving. Here’s how she did it!
Amazon Explore is a new way to make money on Amazon without physical products. If youre interested in Brand Registry, there are new rules. This and more in this week's top stories.
A veteran Merch by Amazon seller offers the latest information on outsourcing creative work, intellectual rights, sponsored ads and PPC for Merch.
The “Best of Everything - Amazon Handmade, next-level keyword research, Helium 10 for India and why moms are thriving on Amazon.
Amazon Weekly News brings us virtual bundling, final Prime Day dates, a Webinar, and Helium 10's acquisition of PPC software company, Prestozon.
This PPC Talk episode features the importance of ad campaign history, when to use negative matching, ad spend tactics and the latest on Amazon DSP.
Academy helps you become a certified Helium 10 user by giving you the hands-on, technical skills to master our tools.
Amazon Weekly News brings us the latest Amazon Prime Day rumors, videos now available in listings for more sellers, and information on a new webinar.
Kian Golzari, one of the world’s leading product development and sourcing experts speaks about using micro-influencers and Alibaba sourcing tactics.
Helium 10’s Weekly News brings us the latest on an Amazon hiring explosion, customer messaging best practices, and Inventory Management
This Amazon seller went to Japan after university and now is selling over 500K in Japan alone. Here’s a behind the scenes look at his tactics.
In this episode, two new, UK based Amazon sellers talk about what’s involved in creating e-commerce success in the European marketplace.
This episode features the latest on Helium 10’s new Inventory Management Tool and inventory strategies that can save you thousands of dollars.
Episode 175 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an Amazon seller who’s found success with a foundation of e-commerce skills and Helium 10’s tools.
Episode 174 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an e-com advertising expert with the latest on Amazon’s views on chat flows and review velocity.
Episode 173 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features Helium 10’s Bradley Sutton with a next-level keyword research masterclass for Amazon sellers.
Episode 172 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts a local expert and Amazon seller with the latest on an exploding Indian e-commerce market.
Episode 171 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts a young e-commerce pro who offers great launch strategies for Amazon, Shopify and Walmart.com.
Episode 170 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Aleksejs Leal. He’s a multi-channel e-commence sales expert who’s done 4 million on Mercado Libre alone.
Episode 169 of the Serious Sellers Podcast offers the “Best of Everything” from crowdfunding and sponsored display ads to the free new PPC Audit Tool.
Episode 168 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Vince Montero, Helium 10’s Product Manager for our PPC tool, ADS to discuss exciting new updates.
Episode 166 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features Bradley Sutton with the latest news and Helium 10 updates and releases affecting Amazon sellers.
Episode 165 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an Amazon selling YouTube superstar speaking about diversified income and building schools in Africa.
Episode 164 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features a conversation about how Helium 10’s Alta funding for Amazon sellers will make e-commerce easier.
Episode 160 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts the founder of a consumer products company that acquires and operates Amazon FBA businesses at scale.
Episode 157 of the Serious Sellers Podcast offers the “Best of Everything” from rock star entrepreneurs to Amazon brand registry and new Posts program.
Episode 156 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an Amazon PPC expert with great strategies using new video and sponsored display ads.
Episode 155 of the Serious Sellers Podcast tells of Helium 10 updates such as, Alta by Helium 10; lending for Amazon sellers, and a “learning” Academy.
Episode 154 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts a 3PL pro to talk about warehousing tactics, foreign accounts and launching products for South Korea.
Episode 153 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts a 20-year-old Amazon seller who already has a few e-commerce tricks up his sleeve.
Episode 152 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts a trademark expert who tells how to get a trademark and Amazon brand registry in just two weeks!
Episode 150 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features Bradley Sutton with an e-commerce case study showing him launching 12 Amazon products for $5000.
Episode 149 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an English expat lawyer in Dubai who after a failed first try, is launching another Amazon product.
Episode 148 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Silas from Lego who tells how they use Helium 10’s tools and helps explain Amazon’s Vendor Central.
Episode 142 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts a former Amazon seller who left behind $750,000 in sales to focus on building Amazon selling teams.
Episode 141 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts two eCommerce siblings that are pros at getting your Amazon listings optimized.
Episode 140 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts the DJ, recording artist and entrepreneur Slushii, talking about the many parallels with eCommerce.
Episode 139 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features a “Best Of” edition with a new take on some of your favorite recent podcast episodes.
Episode 137 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an Amazon FBA seller who used PPC strategies and a strong social media following to reach 7 figures.
Episode 136 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Helium 10 Product Specialists who describe how our new Mobile App will assist Amazon sellers.
Episode 135 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts the Hollywood Fitness Expert, Eric the Trainer who offers health tips for home-bound Amazon sellers.
Episode 134 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Helium 10’s Products VP speaking about competitive intelligence and our new Market Tracker tool.
Episode 133 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts a Russian woman who sold her first business at 17. Now she’s a 7 figure Amazon seller and coach.
Episode 132 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features our “Best of” series with fresh commentary on some of last month’s most popular blog posts.
Episode 131 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an expert in training Amazon virtual assistants who offers tips on scaling your eCommerce business.
Episode 130 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts eCommerce expert Kevin King who discusses changes to selling on Amazon and how to keep scaling up.
Episode 129 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features four eCommerce super-stars in a round-table discussion on the Coronavirus and selling on Amazon.
Episode 128 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts the Project Manager for Portals, Helium 10’s new landing page tool optimized for Amazon sellers.
Episode 127 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts a full-time engineer who made a 30% profit with her 180K Amazon business working only 6 hours a week.
Episode 126 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features a “Best Of” edition with a new take on some of your favorite recent podcast episodes.
Episode 125 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features Bradley Sutton with a special report about selling on Amazon and the Coronavirus outbreak.
Episode 124 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an eCommerce marketing expert with tips on branding your business and launching your Amazon product.
Episode 123 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an immigrant entrepreneur from Iraq who speaks about his success as an Amazon seller and coach.
Episode 122 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an expert on Amazon keyword ranking strategies with tactics to help get your products noticed.
Episode 121 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts a shipping expert with a ground zero report on the Coronavirus’s effect on Amazon business.
Episode 120 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Tomer Rabinovich, an eCommerce business expert who reveals a cool new product research technique.
Episode 119 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Justin Chen, the co-founder of the PickFu split-testing platform on how Amazon sellers can benefit.
Episode 118 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features another “Best of” edition with fresh commentary on some of our most popular written blog posts.
Episode 117 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Cara Sayer, who in launching her brand, created a best seller on Amazon and with big box retailers.
Episode 115 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Rob Burns, an eCommerce video expert with advice on using video to optimize your Amazon listings.
Episode 114 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Lazar Zepinic, an Amazon Attribution and brand registry expert who offers tips on PPC advertising.
Episode 113 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features a “Best Of” edition with fresh commentary addressing some of our most popular podcast episodes.
Episode 112 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts a military veteran who tells how he’s grown a Facebook audience to 17K on the way to 200K on Amazon.
Episode 110 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Karen Waksman, an expert in helping eCommerce businesses sell products through major retailers.
Episode 109 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Bryan and Fernando, Helium 10 creatives who offer advertising tips on split testing and ad funnels.
Episode 108 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features another “Best of” edition with fresh commentary on some of our most popular written blog posts.
Episode 107 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Sharon Even, a wife, mother, business coach and eCommerce expert with tips on how to sell on Amazon.
Episode 106 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Dan Meador who offers great tips for those exploring wholesale as a way of selling on Amazon.
Episode 105 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an Amazon inventory management expert with advice to help eCommerce sellers run their businesses.
Episode 104 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Tim Jordan who reveals Project X, Helium 10’s case study that shows a new way to crush it on Amazon.
Episode 103 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features a “Best Of” edition with fresh commentary addressing some of our most popular podcast episodes.
Episode 102 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Stephanie, who after deciding to stop trading hours for dollars, became a six figure Amazon seller.
Episode 101 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Samer Brax, an Amazon seller who uses an eCommerce presence to drive business to his YouTube channel.
Episode 100 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Helium 10’s Manny Coats and Guillermo Puyol, who tell their eCommerce and Amazon origin stories.
Episode 99 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Jana Krekic, the founder of YLT Translations and an expert on translating listings for Amazon sellers.
Episode 98 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features Helium 10’s “Best Of” podcast series, with questions from our Ask Me Anything YouTube channel
Episode 97 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features Helium 10’s Bradley Sutton with a mini-workshop on your Amazon account’s ongoing maintenance
Episode 96 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Ezra Firestone, eCommerce business super-star and CEO of Smart Marketer with digital marketing tips.
Episode 95 of the Serious Sellers Podcast is the second edition of Helium 10’s “Best Of” podcast series, this time it features our written content.
Episode 94 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Ryan Rigney, an expert on Facebook marketing, selling on Amazon and chat bot strategies.
Episode 93 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Helium 10’s Social Media Manager, Cassandra Craven with tips on using social media to rank on Amazon.
Episode 92 of the Serious Sellers Podcast introduces the first installment of our “Best Of” Podcast Series
Episode 91 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Ken Kubec from Thrasio, who tells how Amazon FBA business owners can get their biggest check yet.
Episode 90 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Paul Baron, an expert in the trending field of Amazon advertising and Messenger chatbot integration.
Episode 89 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Trevin Peterson, who after a few challenging launches, became a 7-figure Amazon eCommerce influencer.
Episode 88 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Marcela and Emille, two Brazilian sisters telling stories about their Amazon business journey.
Episode 87 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Jay De Souza, an Etsy expert and print on demand specialist who’s here to tell us how to sell on Etsy.
Episode 86 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Helium 10’s affiliate manager team with an insider look at the business of influencers and social media.
Episode 85 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Steve Howe, who tells Amazon seller stories of life in the product launch fast lane.
Episode 84 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Meghla Bhardwaj, a product sourcing expert with great experience with both sides of the B2B platform.
Episode 82 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features a mini-workshop from Bradley Sutton on Amazon listing optimization and using Helium 10’s tools.
Episode 81 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts 5 Amazon sellers who tell different stories of their path to Freedom Ticket and Helium 10.
Episode 80 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Norm Farrar, an 8 figure Amazon business consultant who offers eCommerce selling tips.
Episode 79 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Kristina Mertens of Sermondo with advice on connecting Amazon sellers with FBA service providers.
Episode 78 of the Serious Sellers Podcast is another Tech Talk with Bojan Gajic, Helium 10’s Chief Technology Officer and features PPC and tool limits
Episode 77 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Rich Goldstein, an expert on selling patented products on Amazon, who offers how-to advice for sellers
Episode 76 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Yev Marusenko from Zontracker, a company that helps start eCommerce businesses using Facebook ad funnels
Episode 75 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Izabela Hamilton, CEO of RankBell, a company specializing in Amazon keyword ranking.
Episode 74 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features Helium 10’s own Bradley Sutton who talks about his own path to Amazon.
Episode 73 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Wilfried Ligthart from Digital Blacksmiths, a Facebook marketing expert who offers social media strategies.
Episode 72 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Andy Slamans with great tips on using Amazon retail arbitrage to scale up to private label.
Episode 71 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Selene Dior, who has built the largest swimwear brand in Vancouver, strictly selling on Instagram.
Episode 70 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Vince Montero, the new product manager of Helium 10’s new Amazon PPC tool, ADS.
Episode 69 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Ian Sells, an eCommerce expert and founder of RebateKey who discusses new product launch strategies
Episode 68 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Kevin King, a recognized expert on selling on Amazon with news of the release of Freedom Ticket 2.0
Episode 67 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Krystsina Uradzimskaya from Terramed, with multi-channel advice on using Amazon’s business model
Episode 65 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Kale and Taylor from KT Nine with expert advice on Amazon product research
Episode 64 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Carabella Riazzo of Dolface with tips on using Amazon Fulfillment to sell on Shopify
Episode 63 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Helium 10’s Barcus Patty who offers valuable insight on Amazon email automation and the sales follow up process
Episode 62 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Zack Leonard from Gembah who offers product differentiation strategies about taking eCommerce product ideas to market
Episode 61 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Kian Golzari, with expert tips on how to source unique private label products from China
Episode 60 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Melissa Simonson from Empowery, a bootstrapped business co-op supporting sellers on Amazon
Episode 59 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Kevin Pasco, an 8-Figure seller who speaks about Amazon branding strategy
Episode 58 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features an Amazon keyword research workshop with Bradley Sutton.
Episode 57 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Elena Saris, who after a counterfeit claim, became an expert on multi-channel eCommerce and Shopify
Episode 56 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Chris Lyell on how to continue making money on Amazon by protecting yourself against infringement
Episode 55 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Jeff Lieber, who gives expert advice on using Amazon video ads and giveaways in your product launches
Episode 54 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Chris Green, a merch by Amazon expert who speaks about Amazon private label strategy side-hustle ideas
Episode 53 of the Serious Sellers Podcast introduces Amazon Story Time with Bradley Sutton. Bradley discusses his early days selling private label on Amazon and the inherent risks of eCommerce business partnerships—which might include double-crossing the Chinese mafia
Episode 52 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Eddie Levine, an industry leader in wholesaling on Amazon and the President and CEO of Wholesale Breakthrough, who offers advice on another way to use your Amazon Private Label skills
Episode 51 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Karina Molostova, a former model and UC Irvine pre-med student who discusses her Amazon Seller experience and offers advice on a successful Amazon Product Launch and other tips
Episode 50 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Paul Miller who speaks about switching careers and how product licensing helped make him a 7 figure Amazon FBA seller
Episode 49 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Anthony Lee, an Amazon private label mastermind and Helium 10’s new Manager of Training and Content who offers tips about learning how to sell on Amazon
Episode 48 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Jim Cockrum, author of The Silent Sales Machine and an internet marketing expert with over 20 years of experience, who offers tips on getting started selling on Amazon
Episode 47 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts an entrepreneurial couple who share their secrets on getting started building a brand and selling private label on Amazon
Episode 46 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts John Hadden who talks about the income tax benefits and other opportunities of life in Puerto Rico for an Amazon FBA seller
Episode 45 of the Serious Sellers Podcast features the 3rd installment of tech talk and hosts Bojan Gajic, Chief Technology Officer of Helium 10 who brings to us Helium 10 updates
Episode 44 of the Serious Sellers Podcast hosts 2 super-young aspiring generation Z entrepreneurs who offer advice in getting started on Amazon FBA.
Episode 43 of Serious Sellers Podcast hosts Mike Zagare, a product launch expert who gives specialized advice on Amazon sponsored products and all things Amazon PPC
In this episode, get tips on using Helium 10’s tools to help implement an Amazon sponsored products strategy and succeed with Amazon advertising.
Know Why attending Amazon seller conferences might be the missing piece of the selling on Amazon puzzle, in this Serious Sellers Podcast episode.
How to make millions on Amazon; in the Serious Sellers Podcast, we receive Amazon seller tips from a seller who has made 6 million dollars selling on Amazon in one niche in just over 4 months
In the Serious Sellers Podcast, 3 new sellers discuss Amazon seller tips and getting started selling on Amazon
In this Serious Sellers Podcast episode, a pioneer of China-based Amazon product sourcing discusses sourcing strategies.
In this Serious Sellers Podcast episode, a top trademark strategist speaks about Amazon brand registry trademark requirements.
In this episode, a top Amazon Private Label Seller shares his wisdom on everything from Amazon product research to a great product launch strategy.
On this Serious Sellers Podcast episode, learn about chatbots for Amazon Sellers and how to stay in the good graces of Amazon’s customer service.
Learn 8 Amazon tricks from Helium 10 Elite trainings, including a hack for Amazon listing optimization in this Serious Sellers Podcast episode.
Learn How to get started with Amazon FBA and hear Amazon business opportunities on this episode of Serious Sellers Podcast.
In the Serious Sellers Podcast, hear Amazon marketing strategy from a millionaire entrepreneur who shares his insights on the future of Amazon.
In the Serious Sellers Podcast episode, get Amazon seller tips to learn how to scale your Amazon business and manage Amazon taxes.
In this Serious Sellers Podcast episode, get insights about Amazon giveaways and advice to help avoid Amazon suspensions with Amazon product launches.
In this Serious Sellers Podcast episode, learn tips on how to sell on Amazon in Europe and hear a proven Amazon product launch strategy for Europe.
With this Serious Sellers Podcast episode, get advanced Amazon selling tips, learn proven Amazon marketing strategy and increases your revenue potential.
In the Serious Sellers Podcast episode, learn how to do Amazon launches without giveaways and the latest about selling products on Pinterest.
Tune into the Serious Sellers Podcast for Tech Talk and learn insights of Amazon sales estimator and updates on email automation tool, Helium 10’s Follow-Up.
In the Serious Sellers Podcast episode, learn little-known Amazon product sourcing techniques for product research and product validation.
In the Serious Sellers Podcast episode, learn how to respond to potential Amazon suspensions and effective ways to stay compliant with Amazon TOS.
In the Serious Sellers Podcast episode, get Amazon seller tips to best use Amazon virtual assistants to help you scale your Amazon business.
In this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, learn how to do Amazon listing optimization with Helium 10’s Scribbles tool.
In this Serious Sellers Podcast episode, hear breaking Amazon news including potential fraud on Amazon and ways to spot Amazon hijackers.
This Serious Sellers Podcast episode has the latest insights on offering an Amazon coupon code when doing an Amazon product launch.
In this episode of Serious Sellers Podcast, learn how to use innovative Amazon product research tactics to find high-potential products in 2019.
In this episode of Serious Sellers Podcast, learn how to use a systematic project management approach to scale your Amazon business quickly and efficiently.
Serious Sellers Podcast EP 16: Bradley Sutton and Paul Rafelson discuss physical presense, tax nexus, and other tax-related worries on sellers' minds.
Serious Sellers Podcast EP 15: Steven Black and Bradley Sutton discuss hacks for getting more customer reviews through social channels off of Amazon.
Serious Sellers Podcast EP 14: Find out how Miranda's small business substantially boosted its profits by selling products on Amazon and using Helium 10!
Serious Sellers Podcast EP 13: Bradley and John Cant discuss how you can acclimate your Amazon business to sell products in Amazon Japan!
Serious Sellers Podcast EP 11: Bradley Sutton and Freeeup founder Nathan Hirsch discuss Amazon drop shipping and hiring Amazon virtual assistants.
Serious Sellers Podcast EP10: Bradley and Sean discuss how studying competitor Amazon reviews, both good and bad, can uncover significant customer insights!
Serious Sellers Podcast EP9: Private Label Movement founder Kevin Rizer shares his thoughts on success, 3PL storage, and dealing with trademarking issues!
Serious Sellers Podcast EP8 - How Australian native Richard Greenup became a 7-figure seller by selling in the American Amazon marketplace!
Learn how Helium 10 tools work, the search volume debacle, and brand analytics in our first Tech Talk with Bojan, Helium 10’s Chief Technology Officer!
Learn how to do effective Amazon keyword research and find relevant keywords using your competitor’s successful keyword strategy.
In this episode, we bring on Helium 10 Affiliate Manager Sean Elias to discuss trending Amazon news stories with Success Manager and host Bradley Sutton.
2018 is over...and WOW, what a wild year it was for Amazon sellers! Now that 2019 is in full swing, sellers need to adapt to the major changes that Amazon made.
Introducing Serious Sellers Podcast, a new take on the AM/PM Podcast formula that will focus on the hard-hitting truths of running a successful Amazon business.