Serious Sellers Podcast: Learn How To Sell On Amazon FBA & Walmart

#587 - How to Scale 6, 7, & 8 Figure Amazon Brands

What if you could replace your corporate salary with millions in e-commerce sales? This inspiring episode brings together Robert Gomez, a former senior finance manager at Microsoft turned successful e-commerce entrepreneur, and Kseniia Reidel, an aspiring Amazon e-commerce star. Robert reveals his transformative journey from the corporate world to achieving over $10 million in sales on Amazon and Walmart brand called Kaffe. Kseniia, on the verge of hitting her first seven-figure mark using Project X methods, shares her innovative strategies and experiences in scaling up an Amazon business.

From facing the challenge of declining sales due to over-dependence on a single product to launching new product lines in Walmart, Robert and Kseniia provide invaluable insights into the world of e-commerce adaptability. They discuss the critical importance of diversifying product offerings and successfully managing logistics during peak seasons. The conversation underscores the significance of strategic retail placement and the rewards of being flexible in the ever-evolving online and retail marketplaces.

We also delve into the game-changing benefits of hiring Virtual Assistants (VAs) for essential tasks like product research. Learn how effective VA onboarding can propel business growth and the impact of diversifying sales channels beyond Amazon, including Walmart, Faire.com, and even TikTok Shop. With strategies for maximizing profit margins and leveraging social media for brand growth, this episode is packed with actionable insights for anyone looking to thrive in the competitive Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce landscape.

In episode 587 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Kseniia, and Robert discuss:

• 01:08 - Amazon Seller Stories - Catching Up with Kseniia Reidel & Robert Gomez
• 10:17 - Dependence on Declining Kitchen Appliance Sales
• 10:24 - Navigating Brand Pivots and Retail Success
• 20:32 - Walmart Retail Expansion Success Story
• 22:52 - Product Expansion and Virtual Assistant Hiring Success
• 26:17 - High Margin Product Strategy Growth
• 29:01 - Product Launch Strategy at Walmart
• 36:55 - Amazon Seller VA Time Management
• 40:01 - Exploring TikTok Shop for their E-commerce Business
• 41:12 - Retail Expansion and Product Development
• 44:04 - Brand Expansion Strategy Discussion

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got two guests back on the show who've never met each other, but they've both been on here before Robert, who's generated over $10 million of sales with his brand on Amazon and Walmart, and Kseniia, who used Project X strategies to launch her first product, and now this year she's about to hit seven figures for the first time. 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 enter in 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/audience.

 

Bradley Sutton:

forward slash 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 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 back on the show Robert for the second time, Kseniia for the third and a half time. We had her on a little Prime Day special here. But welcome back to the show, guys, your first time meeting each other was today. Right, you had no idea who each other was.

 

Robert:

No idea.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I love doing that. I love bringing different sellers who maybe under other circumstances, might never have known each other. So it's really good to see that people from all walks of life have success on Amazon. Now, if you want to get the backstory of Robert, his first episode was on 448. So we're not going to go too much into his backstory here. Maybe we'll touch a little bit on it, but 448 is a good one to see his episode. And then Kseniia has been on. I think her first was episode 320. And then she was back on episode 441. So we're really close to Robert's episode there, talking about how she 10X her sales from that first episode today. I'm not sure what we're gonna completely know about. We're gonna catch up, completely know about. We're gonna catch up with them might be up, might be down, but hey, we keep it real here. We're not here to make it seem like, uh, everybody who comes on is gonna 10x their, their, their sales. That's not why we brought her on the last time. But uh, let's see, let's see what happens. So, first of all, Robert, you know, like, like I, you know, the one thing that maybe people who listen to your episode, uh, that stood out was how you were still working at I don't remember it was like Microsoft or something like that for years and years, even though you were already a successful Amazon seller and that you had just around. That time finally was like, all right, I'm going to quit the day job. So you know, you have a couple of years maybe under your belt not working for the man, as it were. So how has that been?

 

Robert:

How's that transition been from so long being like the corporate world and stuff and now being your own boss, kind of I think last time I was on was around that time that I had just quit or was about to quit or something. But yeah, I was at Microsoft for a few years. My background is in corporate finance and I started Amazon, kind of like a side venture, back in 2017, 2019. I launched the current brand that I have, but I sort of held on as long as I could, had a whole team and everything, before I finally quit. And around that time was when we were going into physical retail and we had got our first sort of big contract. So you know, it was kind of just time. The amount of time it was taking, the amount of efforts it took to execute that program just had to do it.

 

Robert:

And it's now been a little under two years and it's amazing, I mean just the fact. I mean I love I was there for a reason, you know, and corporate served this purpose. You know, I think I'm always able to say that I used to work for Microsoft and that's kind of level setting very easy to tell somebody. But at the same time, obviously it just wasn't for me. From the day I joined Microsoft, I already knew that I wanted to quit. I already had the Amazon business and everything. It was just, you know, really just the golden handcuffs, as they call them. But yeah, haven't thought about going back any single time in this past year plus. So, yeah, thankfully, you know, any day that I get to do this has really been a blessing. It really doesn't feel like work.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What would you say were the effects of it as far as on your Amazon business? Like having more time to focus? Like, did it stress you out more? Was it the opposite? Were you able to take care of things that might have slipped into their cracks? Were you able to scale faster? You think? What were the differences on that part of things?

 

Robert:

It's hard to quantify it in that sense. But basically you know the role I had at Microsoft. I was a senior finance manager. My team was in the west coast at the headquarters, but I I'm based in the east coast, so it wasn't the amount of necessarily time it was taking. Quite frankly, you know, I had a pretty sweet sort of setup where I didn't take a lot of time right, and that's what made it even harder, because the more you get paid and the less you kind of work.

 

Of course that just sounds like a dream, right, if I just, you know, mentioned it to friends or just talk to people about it, like what are you doing? What are you thinking of putting it for? But it was just the mental sort of real estate, the real estate it took in my mind, even if I only had one meeting that day or two meetings that day. It was just kind of thinking of like oh, I have that meeting coming up, or just like I have to do this, or the feeling of like not giving something.

 

Robert:

My all you know I'm kind of like all or nothing type of guy and so like just having to, like almost feel fake in the way that I showed up to work and it's. They still thought I was doing a good job. You know we had reviews and I was kind of doing OK and good on them, but internally I just felt terrible, you know, and then I just felt like if I could focus all the time, you know, on Cafe, it would unlock a lot of other things and it has, you know, like it has allowed me to get the team into more of a rhythm in the way that we run meetings and run cadences for certain product development, for sales, et cetera, whereas before it could have been interrupted at any given moment, right, because basically I had a job so I could always take that backseat.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So yeah, it's been a ride, All right. Interesting. I think that's something that Amazon sellers out there, once they hit a certain level if they were working, you know is like a universal question All right, at what point do I do I, you know, give up the steadiness of income and the reliability and the insurance and things like that and go, you know, you know, focus solely on my, my Amazon business? For the people who already are out of out of the, the people who already are out of the corporate world once they start their Amazon business, well, they're just all in from day one, kind of, so they don't have that option. But I think the answer is it's different strokes for different folks. You're probably waiting the longest, more than anybody I've known, wasn't it like, even after you started your, your amazon business? Like a good three, four years um?

 

Robert:

yeah, it was about ready to get multiple seven figures at that by that time yeah, yeah, um, we had sold a total of uh, maybe like 12 million or so, um, before I quit, and we rolled, I quit, we rolled out 4,000 Walmart stores and then I quit, basically yeah he was still rolling out 4,000 Walmart stores with his product.

 

Bradley Sutton:

He's like you know what. Yeah, I think it's time now, but that just shows you that's not the wrong choice.

 

Robert:

There's other people who wait after one month, and they're ready.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's not necessarily the wrong choice. It's whatever works for you.

 

Robert:

There was no room for error. If I messed any of that up, not only would I need a job I would be way in that way, so there's one way to look at it but also the focus was there. That was my full time job. You know, I always say Amazon was my full time job, and then I had kind of a side side job in corporate.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So now going back to Kseniia, first of all, I'm not sure you know I don't remember the kind of things we talk about all the time. My memory is so bad. But then you know, Mhel gave me some notes this wasn't on there but before you started on Amazon like I do have in my notes here that you were doing like selling collectibles on eBay from Russia and things like that, but at any point, while you were doing Amazon, did you also have a day job or you were 100% your e-commerce business from day one?

 

Kseniia:

100% e-commerce.

 

Bradley Sutton:

A great contrast I didn't even plan that, but is perfect. It is to have a. To have the contrast here now. I remember one thing that was, you know, kind of like the highlight of your old episodes is is the way that you discovered uh and launched some of those first products that brought you success was like using the project x uh method. So that brand that you started back in you know 2021, 2022, whenever it was uh are you still selling that brand today, the successful one?

 

Kseniia:

Yep, still selling. I've had to change a little bit the product line and expand it but, yeah, the first product since from which one it started still there, still selling. It was exactly three years ago, actually, in August 2021.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, okay, perfect, perfect. Now, the last time we talked back, in 2023, uh, I think some of your closing comments about your goals was hey, you wanted to kind of like focus on, on building the brand a little bit more. I mean building the brand in the figurative sense, not, you know, not just expanding their products, but like actually building a, a brand. And how, what did you do to try to do that and how has that, those efforts, worked out?

 

Kseniia:

Well, the first thing I want to talk about is what happened after last we talked. Is that in 2023, I lost like 40 percent of my sales? Wow, let's keep it real here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's keep it real Well, what was it an attack or just you know the competition? Did you make a huge mistake or what? What happened? Uh, did you make a huge mistake or what? What, what, what happened?

 

Kseniia:

yes, I made a huge mistake, totally my fault, because when I started building this brand, this brand was focused on accessories for a kitchen appliance, and what I didn't think about is that my sales are going to be totally dependent on the sales of that kitchen appliance. Under no, no, no circumstances I can sell more accessories than the appliances sold. And so what happened is, in 2021 and 2022, the appliance sales were growing and they were doing a lot of social media, so my sales were growing, with me not really doing anything, like I didn't do any social media for my brand. But in 2023, from the beginning of 2023, for whatever reason, their sales started dropping like every month, less and less and less, and by the end of the year, I think they also lost like 40 or 50 percent of their sales and your sales were 100 reliant on theirs, yeah, the same. And anything I was trying to do. I tried to do social media, I tried to do Google ads at an agency, but nothing really was just a waste of money, basically because their product wasn't selling, so my products were not selling and my brand was 100% focused on accessories around that kitchen appliance. Wow, okay, so like I had eight products, I think, by the end of 2022. And they all were related to that kitchen appliance.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting, interesting. And so then you're like how do you pivot from something like that? It's like you know, your whole concept of your brand is around this one thing. And here you are trying to build your brand, but then like, wait a minute, this is not the direction I need to keep going, or else I'm going to keep going down yeah, I spent several months on trying to think about what to do about it.

 

Kseniia:

I was like, oh, do I just dump it all and just start it all over? But then, like I had a patent pending for two of the products because they were selling really well and it was really my like design idea that I totally made from scratch, I was like I don't really want to dump it because, who knows, maybe like next year, their sales will go up again, you don't know. So I was thinking about it and I just decided to expand into the products that not a hundred percent related to this kitchen appliance that but can be used by the same people but also can be used by other people as well. So kind of exit the sub niche and get in a little higher niche. So they're still all related, but now I'm not tied to that kitchen appliance.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, did it help at all that you were in that niche already to launch these other products? Were you able to market to your existing customers at all, or was it almost like starting from scratch again?

 

Kseniia:

No, the first product that I launched after that was not 100 related to the other brand um was made for I actually got the idea from the customers of that brand, but it was also being bought by all other people. So and sometimes I see that the um, some of the purchases that are made, they're made like two products bought together yeah, the one for the brand and not not for the brand. So the first one kind of easy, and then I started expanding a little bit more outside of the something totally not related to that brand.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay all right. All right, we're going to come back to you because I want to uh, double click on a couple of those things you're talking about. But now back to Robert. You know you had mentioned how, in in around the timing of the last episode, you're launching Walmart and there are thousands of stores. Um, I would assume you know we're here in in august that it's been over a full year now of Walmart store sales. So how would you, how would you say that that's gone? Like what kind of gross sales we talking about just in in stores on Walmart, and are we only talking one skew?

 

Robert:

Yeah, so we launched, uh, maybe, yeah, 16 months ago or so, with two skews uh right away. Basically, one of those items was the intro offer. What they call that at walmart is basically the the cheapest option of that product at walmart right, in this case a coffee grinder, and from the time it went live it just started really selling. Just basically, we could see from the data like Nielsen data, which is like official retail data, not counting Amazon and e-commerce we could see that our product was the best-selling grinder in the us, like across all retail points, just because of that walmart placement, right like. So, imagine walmart being, you know, the kind of highest volume retailer and you're the cheapest in uh or the intro uh pricing there, so that that, you know, had what was kind of like a big boom.

 

Robert:

Uh, struggle to kind of just make sure you know, basically keeping up with their projections were a lot lower than we actually did end up selling. Uh, and you know I kind of had already predicted that we would sell, about you know, more than they predicted, just cause that product did well in any other channel that we put it Um, and so, yeah, just kind of stabilizing that right, so making sure that through the holidays.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I would always remember your uh, remember your Instagram post.

 

Robert:

You would be going around to Walmart’s all over the country you're on vacation stuff and go to the shelf where your product is and look it's empty, like we're sold out, like it's a fly, literally flying off the shelves yeah, so that's what was happening, you know, and so because it had one facing, meaning it's on the shelf once, instead of like having two, two of them and it would sell kind of fast enough that basically it wasn't. It wasn't able to maximize what it could do, right, because it wasn't available fully right. So we were missing, you know, maybe 20, 25 percent of sales there until, like, the Walmart kind of system catches up with it, like, uh, their forecasting system, um, but yeah, it's basically uh, it's bigger than an amazon business, uh, it's a high seven figures kind of deal and we're counting wholesale costs, so like not the actual retail, so it kind of would be bigger. And the thing with Walmart there is, you know it's compared to amazon it's huge. You know, like it's guaranteed you're a vendor, there's no middle sort of person there and just you know they place every week orders for 42 distribution centers, so like, basically every week we get 42 orders and it goes to other distribution centers, and then this May, so basically a year later or a little before that, they launched one additional item, so they added one more to the two and now there's three. And I also went to another line review for next May to hopefully add a couple more items. So it's just kind of working on the retail side there, but separately.

 

Robert:

I was actually in Puerto Rico yesterday. I was, as I was telling you, meeting with the Walmart Puerto Rico team because they're rolling out, uh, basically a whole section of like 15 items, um, like they're, they're actually like taking up a whole section, um, and that, you know, even though there's not that many stores in Puerto Rico, it's a, it's a huge kind of way of proving it out, like you know, hey, you know, we did this over there. How about, you know, over here, right, right, two other retailers in the us, and that's kind of where the strategy is. So certainly ups and downs, you know it's not always, uh, rainbows and butterflies, as they say. Uh, that side of the business is great. That's what we've been focusing on for a while. But, uh, there's amazon as well. Not such a pretty picture there, but we're still going at it strong, obviously we're gonna want to uh, you know, uh listen to your story on amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But just going back to the Walmart you might have said this in the last episode but, like I said, I forget things how was it that you even got into Walmart before? Did you start to sell on Walmart.com? Did a buyer at Walmart take notice of you because you were crushing it on Amazon, amazon? You know that's probably the hardest thing for somebody who's interested to get in Walmart brick and mortar is getting on the radar of the buyers and actually getting you know in a media unless you'd, like you know, win a contest or do that uh open call or something like that. But how was it that you were even able to get your foot in the door with Walmart?

 

Robert:

Yeah, so a little combination of a couple of things you mentioned, but essentially we have a broker, okay, and a broker, what a broker does, and it wasn't the first broker we had, by the way, and we have one for Target we have. You know, these brokers kind of charge a single digit percentage of sales if they ever sort of get you in the door. Some charge a monthly retainer. In my opinion I wouldn't go with those. You know, the ones that are like serious in my opinion more are the ones that charge you a percentage only if they ever get you in the door, right, um, and so we had tried one. It didn't work out. I mean, it's the same as us reaching out to the buyers, which we had also done, you know, and they don't really reply. You know, like all these retailers at least the, the biggest retailers they have once a year kind of reviews, right. So if you kind of get invited to the review, then maybe you they'll review your product, but that has to do with whether they're wanting to change whatever they have on the shelves, whether they're open to whatever you have, just like a lot of different things. Like the most common thing to happen is that they don't change anything on the shelf Right If it's kind of working or. You know, their jobs depend on the performance of what's on the shelf Right. There's not unlimited amounts, so they're very picky on what they select in. So that's why it's kind of like an uphill battle to get into the retail shelves, and more nowadays that everyone's pushing for conf right. If anything, they'll tell you oh, go try conf first. That's just kind of like a cop out to say like we don't want you on the shelf at the moment.

 

Robert:

So how it worked with us is basically we had worked with a broker. It didn't kind of work out, just no motion there, and not to their fault. But another broker reached out and said hey, you know I can try to reach out, and he did, and it was regarding our coffee grinders and they basically said you know, you can come to Venville to present it at our line review in June of that year and they had seen the product on Amazon. So yeah, I think we were bestsellers or just doing really well compared to other things they had on the shelf and they invited us for that one product and of course when we went I presented other products Right. So you have like 30 minutes. You set up on a table and it's like go, go, go, and after that just kind of I thought it would be like a lesson learned sort of like. You know, maybe come back next year like a good job. You know, at least I learned how to do this thing. But they came back with, you know, questions that led me to believe that they were really interested, like, hey, you know, would you be able to like fulfill a large number of stores if we allocated you that? And, and you know, I just said yes, you know, I never.

 

Robert:

Even that was our first retailer. You know, usually they try you out with a hundred stores or you maybe get into another independent retailer and then you kind of work your way up. But it was one of a weird case where our first retailer was, you know, every Walmart. So it's kind of like you have to learn how to execute the biggest one first, and so now we feel confident that any other retailer, it's kind of like it'll be okay. You know, capacity, volume, just processing the orders. It was a beast at first but yeah, that's how it worked out. Okay, cool, a long sales cycle.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, Interesting, interesting. Now, switching back to Kseniia, you know, like in the old you know I remember some of your other products the way you would kind of find and or launch was, you know, like through Facebook groups and things like that. Like, are you still using that method to like? You know now that you kind of are going a different path, like, is this Facebook play a role, or how are you finding where the needs are to launch these new products? And then, how are you getting the initial eyeballs on your product once you do launch?

 

Kseniia:

Yeah, the first one that I launched after switching of being the accessories for other brand that was also from a Facebook group. That also was from the same people. But then after that I realized that I need to find a VA finally, because it was only me before that and it got kind of hard when I got to like almost close to seven figures.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Remind everybody what you did uh, you know to do that so they can kind of have a for those who didn't hear the last episode, so they can have a picture of your strategy here so before, uh, I was finding product ideas, I was on the Facebook groups for that kitchen appliance and I would just see what customers say.

 

Kseniia:

Sometimes, a lot of times, because it was a new brand and it was like, basically no accessories for this kitchen appliance they would just say, oh, have anybody, anybody seen this product or this product that we can't find anything like this on amazon? We really want it and I would go like Esty or eBay, I don't know. I check Pinterest and I would see people try to make it themselves from, like I don't know, pieces of wood or something like that. So I realized, okay, well, it's great, then you check the search terms and people actually searching for this product, but there is no options available on Amazon. So that's how all the other products before were and then.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So what did you hire the VA to do? Just start, you know, just be in all these Facebook groups and Reddits and stuff like that trying to get information, or what are they doing?

 

Kseniia:

no, the first thing that I did when I hired her, I told her she needs to learn the Project X.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Nice.

 

Kseniia:

I gave her the Project X because I told her that's exactly how I learned how to search for products. So the first thing we did is that she watched the whole Project X Love it. Because I wanted her to learn how to find products, the way how the Project X was done. Not starting from the product itself, but let's say starting from the product itself. But I'll say started from the keyword. Yes, so searching for the opportunities and not searching for something that already exists, and you'll be surprised. I think it's in two months I don't remember how many she actually found, but the one that we're actually going with in two months it's like 10 or 15 products, something like that that's already passed, like we're getting the samples.

 

Robert:

Oh, wow.

 

Kseniia:

So that's just not the product ideas. That's actually what we will be launching.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's awesome.

 

Kseniia:

So yeah, she's really great Okay.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How did you find her? I think that's another thing that people wonder about is hey, how do I find good VAs who are actually going to produce, Like, did you go to a service? Did you just put a notice up, or?

 

Kseniia:

I just went on a website. I forgot how it's called like jobsph or something like that. And yeah, I just did a post that I'm looking for a VA with like a specific requirements and I actually did like a an attention test, let's say so. I put it a note and in the middle of the resume and tell them that's how they should name the email when they reach out to me. And you'll be surprised, out of maybe a hundred people or more that reached out to me, maybe like five only actually read yeah the joke post and they put it the and that was like the first test and then they did a task trying to find a product.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So hey, there you go, Robert. There's a tip for your, your next hiring thing. Like uh, dude, that's a good test to weed out half of the applications right there. I like it. I like it, okay, cool. So now you know, now that You've launched some products that kind of are not reliant on that one appliance, what do you project? Is your sales going to be by the end of this year on the trajectory you're going now?

 

Kseniia:

Yeah, I think we will definitely hit the seven figures this year, so it should be better than so. So far, the best year was in 2022, when we got very close. I think it ended with like nine80,000 or something like that, and I think we should be more. Yeah, it should be more this year.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, awesome Congrats.

 

Robert:

You got to buy $20,000 worth of goods at that point. Yeah, just at the end of the year just like buy your own product.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Come on, I mean you got to hit that number, but hey, that's good, you're going to do it without having to game the system like that this year. Awesome, Robert. Amazon. Let me look at my notes here. In your first year I saw you did $2 million on Amazon. You had grown it to like $4 million, which was pretty much Amazon.

 

Robert:

Only If we were just to take the Amazon, not the Walmart. Are you up down? We're probably slightly down. I would say maybe 15% or so, 10 to 20. Part of that was our own doing. We had to prioritize. If we ran out of stock, it's not going to be at Walmart stores, it's going to be at Amazon, and it's happened a couple of times and know, and that's kind of affected. We had a really kind of high margin sort of products that we've launched and one of them did extremely well and we just haven't been able to keep it in stock because it is a new item to our supplier. But, like as an example, we launched it basically like month one, with no reviews, you know, just like our branding and running ads. We did almost like a quarter million dollars of sales and it was profitable, which is crazy. You know, usually we're used to losing money, you know, even after a while sometimes, uh, but you know that kind of like margin. There's certain like we're basically focused more on things that make margin, you know, or things that will basically help us push sales through our website, through other products, or things like that, like our hero, where we include an insert card and they're able to buy other accessories from us. But yeah, certainly, strategy slightly changed.

 

Robert:

Within Amazon, advertising basically just kills a lot of the margins, but we see it as a brand awareness exercise as well. We have a lot of products on the roadmap that are higher margin and just kind of like uh, you know, complementary products and stuff that you know I think it's a survival of the fittest on amazon. You know, thankfully, we have always tried to open new channels. You know it wasn't just Walmart stores, you know, for a while we've done all the dot coms, you know, even as vendors like Target dot com, Walmart.com, Macy’s Home Depot, fair dot com If anyone out there listening, maybe I'll save it for the 60 second tip. But Fair dot com, yeah, just, you know, all the channels start adding up, you know, and those are higher margin than and where you don't have to run ads and stuff.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So how are you dealing with the year of the fees? It seems you know Amazon, you know 2024 new inbound fees and low inventory fees, which it sounds like you probably hit because you keep running out of stock, you know, on some items and refund fees and stuff like that. Like how have you been able to maintain your profitability? Or have you been able to maintain your profitability, you know? Have you had to raise prices or what's going?

 

 

Robert:

On no, we just, we have not maintained the profitability, it's just straight. But not on amazon wise. You know, thankfully, the retail side for us just, you know, pays the bills and more. You know thankfully. But uh, we see amazon, as hey it's, it's tough for everybody. You know, thankfully we have another side of the business that it's actually our priority and you know we're still focused on Amazon. But we didn't keep the profitability. Necessarily we can't always just raise prices because we are basically selling on a lot of other channels, so it disrupts a buy box potentially and it's just one of those things where we just have to optimize on the ad side and just straight up, not focus on some SKUs that are, you know, kind of loss leaders or could be loss leaders.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now I'm looking, I'm just looking with Helium 10 here on your store page with X-Ray, and I see actually you know there's a number of products here that you've launched in the last year. Like I see it, says March of 2024. I see another one here, June of 2024, this coffee scale with a timer. Why, somebody, that's gotta be a serious person. You're weighing your coffee and you got a timer on it, but whatever. So there's all these unique products.

 

Kseniia:

It's at Walmart.

 

Robert:

So that product is at 3,000 Walmart stores. Wow so wait, hold on stores. Wow so wait, hold on, hold on.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It just says you launch this in June. So does that mean that you actually launched a product on Walmart before Amazon? I love that. You see, I keep trying to tell people that exists. Some people say, oh no, Walmart is the opposite. You can expect less sales unless you get into the stores. But there are definitely people out there who launch on Walmart first. But anyways, my point was I see at least four or five products here that were launches here. So obviously you're actively, you know um, trying to expand the brand, you know. I asked Kseniia the same question how are you finding these, these new opportunities, like? What are you doing to, like, do your market research to say you know what? This is the next product we're going to try.

 

Robert:

Yeah, so a lot to do with I mean doubling down on what works, for example, the categories that are working. We introduce either variations or new models if we see fit, and then we get a lot of feedback from retailers and pitches that we do to retailers. So we're in line reviews all the time with different retailers and they tell us we like this product, we don't like this product, or potentially, I think we launched maybe like 20 or 15 or 20 espresso sort of accessories, the scale being one of them this year, and that was from, basically, feedback from a Walmart buyer saying, hey, you know, it'd be nice in the future if we have some espresso tools you know that's kind of a trending category, or whatever. And we sort of said tools, you know that's kind of a trending category, whatever. And we sort of said you know, yeah, we have those kind of coming anyway. Yeah, you know. And then we went and looked for those. So we you know I have a lot of products that I've already tested and stuff, you know, every, basically everything. We're a coffee brand, so anything around the coffee categories, you know, are sort of constantly keeping my eye out and our factories also like innovating with us. Um, but yeah, it's, it's.

 

Robert:

It's a lot of prototyping for retailers, rather than launching on amazon and seeing if it works and then sort of uh, then going to pitch to the retailer. So it's a lot more capital efficient, just sort of prototyping things or final sampling and then uh, sort of having them available on your catalog and then if a retailer wants it, then of course you go to mass production, you go kind of bigger on that and double down on amazon um, but yeah, on the amazon side for us, you know one thing that you probably wouldn't see on the numbers there, but we're we've been working with a 1p partner where we basically have a lot of margin on but we don't necessarily account for the sales through our account, you know. So, like our item wouldn't necessarily show that but it says sold by amazon. So there's some. We just started that as of like a month and a half ago or so, uh, and it's been kind of working really well, um, certainly making a lot of profit, and they're selling uh as dot com, as amazoncom. So that is sort of how we're mitigating the risk, just sort of looking for ways where we're able to keep profitability, because you know categories that need our products. You know our brand fits in well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now one thing. The last question for you, before I go back to Xenia, is I don't know the specifics, but I used to supply Walmart to other companies I've worked at. But it's not like they pay you a month in advance or even they pay you up front. There's different terms that Walmart needs and then when they're ordering what? 50 units for 4,000 stores or 20 units for 4,000 stores everybody can do the math out there. We're talking a sizable chunk of change. How do you manage cash flow when you're almost having to front Walmart and some of these other things like and have such a big business with so much turnover? How do you have the capital to sustain, to keep it, to keep it going?

 

Robert:

yeah, that's the part that hasn't been easy for sure. You know, financing environment altogether has gotten, you know, tougher for everyone. You know, obviously, the higher interest rates and stuff. I just bootstrapped this so of course even harder right, and I'm in a sort of categories that are, you know, some would say commoditized, unless you have like strong brand but you definitely are competing against legacy brands that are sold by amazon. So basically a lot of competition in that way. Um, so, to scale it, it's not like I had extra sort of profit margins to just dump around and make mistakes and sort of, you know, go everywhere. So it definitely took some, you know, strategic there, partnering with the.

 

Robert:

I would say the biggest lever is our supply chain terms. You know our supplier terms are almost unheard of when I tell even you know bigger, much bigger sellers. Obviously I've taken on debt, you know, um, and that's been helpful, you know. You know decent amount of debt, but the largest chunk that allowed to scale at that point has been the supplier term. So think of uh, you know, usually you pay your suppliers maybe like 30 deposit and then the 70 maybe when the goods goods arrive at the US. You know if you're lucky, you know if not when it left China. We pay 15% deposit and then we don't pay the 85%, sometimes until 90 days after the goods arrive in the US. So basically, we sell it to Walmart.

 

Robert:

Walmart pays us in 55 days and then we go and pay our supplier essentially. So at any given time we owe our supplier so much money that it also makes a relationship so that we basically don't have to. We do, uh, at least once for all we don't have to do inspections on containers because they're not going to mess it up. You know, if they mess it up, we owe them so much money that it's in their best interest to not. You know, uh, so it keeps that relationship always kind of lopsided in in this way and, quite frankly, is the cheapest financing.

 

Robert:

You know that that one can get right. It's just basically your supplier taking on the brunt of it. So at some point earlier this year, yeah, like because of the terms with Walmart, basically Walmart owed us like maybe a million and a half dollars or something, which is crazy. You're like, okay, in the next 55 days every they're going to be paying some amount. But then we also owe the supplier like hundreds and hundreds of thousands, and then over there, this and then you have to order another container because you know Walmart's going to reorder and they're not telling you that, but if it's on the shelves they're going to start reordering as soon as it starts trickling in. So it's just a huge risk really. But when it's Walmart stores, I mean you just have to take it. You know I always said I'm either going to make this thing, you know work kind of do it big or leave a huge hole in the ground of where it was once. But it's business. You know, I try to remove the outcome from me. You know me, or my sort of self-worth, I guess

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, Kseniia, a similar question to you is you, as a smaller up-and-coming seller, how have you been able to deal with all the new fees? Have you changed your strategy about how you send stuff to Amazon at all, or anything else like about how you send stuff to Amazon at all or anything else, or are you just kind of like you know, just taking the new fees and raising prices, or how are you dealing with it?

 

Kseniia:

Well, generally when I did the product research before and now we look only for the products that look at like 40% profit and obviously that was the profits that I had in 2022. And after all the fees, it just dropped to like 23, probably percent, 23, 25%. I'm very careful with PPC right now. I'm not trying to overspend on it Plus on the storage, so I'm basically storing for free the products in China after they're being manufactured, so I'm saving money on that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I think this is interesting. A lot of sellers are kind of like maybe in your shoes right now, maybe just by themselves, or maybe they have one or two VAs. Tell me, how many hours a week are you putting to your Amazon business? How many hours a week is your VA doing? And then what are you guys doing? How does your week look? How do you break apart the responsibilities?

 

Kseniia:

So actually I hired the first VA in April, I think and I liked so much that I hired a second one, like a month ago. But she's only responsible for like social media because we started doing TikTok, uh and a lot of like UGC content, um. So the first VA she does a full time, so 40 hours um a week, and the second one is a part-time for now because I don't know how it's gonna go, because I don't think all the products are fit for like TikTok are you doing TikTok shop or just like promoting?

 

Bradley Sutton:

yeah, TikTok shop. Okay, how's that.

 

Robert:

How's that working out for you?

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'll go back to the employees or the time management one, but how's TikTok?

 

Kseniia:

Well nothing really. Yeah, we just we just started like three weeks ago, I think four weeks ago ago. So she's reaching out to a lot of influencers and through the affiliate program, through TikTok, so I don't know how many she probably reached out to like 200 a day or something like that. So some reply, some don't. So we've just been sending out some sample. I think we only got like one video or something like that yet posted, so not much yet.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, one employee is specifically doing social media for you, including TikTok shop, and the other one is she just doing the product research, like you mentioned before, she has other tasks for you as well.

 

Kseniia:

Yeah, so the first one. She initially was hired specifically for product research, but then we got to the point where we got so many products that we found but there is not too much money, even though I've taken out the loan, but still there is not enough Like. But there is not too much money even though I've taken out the loan, but still there is not enough like. I don't feel confident yet to get like a huge loan. So we still have to launch like one or two products at a time. I can't do like go and launch all 15 at the same time, because the problem I ran into maybe six months ago is a launch product and it became. It started selling a lot better than I expected to.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So cash flow. Same thing we're talking about with uh, with Robert there, yeah yeah, of course.

 

Kseniia:

Well, at the moment where I started losing sales, obviously I didn't have any profits. So that's the moment when I had to decide what I'm gonna do if I'm just closing it all down or am I taking a loan. So I decided to get a loan and start launching new products, and then it got better. But also I use a lot of credit cards just because I get points. I figured out the right credit cards to use because I travel a lot. Then I honestly don't remember last time I paid for a ticket. It's all always done through points.

 

 Bradley Sutton:

So how do you, how are you paying your suppliers with a credit card? Cause not all, not everybody, knows how to do, how to do that.

 

Kseniia:

Uh, so I just do it through Alibaba, but I negotiated a terms with them where they covered Alibaba fee, so I'm not worried about that. Okay, cool, but that way I get a bunch of points every month.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, because I know you and your husband like to travel a lot too. So you're saying all those are. Are you business class on everything too? Most of the times, but not for the short flights.

 

Kseniia:

Okay cool, cool for the longer ones.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, Robert, as I'm talking to Kseniia, she was talking about TikTok shop. Here I'm looking and I see you're on TikTok shop too. So how, how long have you been on there and how's that been working for you?

 

Robert:

yeah, I think we maybe, uh, earlier this year or something like that. Um, again, we have, uh, there's certain products that we know work a lot better for TikTok shop and we see it. You know, there's a concentration on a few products basically that work very well there. You have one of them pulled up. We just had inventory issues on those products. Basically, those products are really hot, kind of everywhere we put them and we really haven't been able to push as hard as we can on TikTok shop, but certainly everywhere we put them and we really haven't been able to push as hard as we can on tiktok shop but certainly are gathering a lot of affiliate content.

 

Robert:

Um, and sales are starting to come in. You know, uh, we see it as a big kind of big potential there. Um, certainly so. We're. We're reloading on inventory on those and, and for those that didn't know, uh, fulfilled by tick tock, I think basically, and for those that didn't know, fulfilled by TikTok, I think, basically they're subsidizing shipping. So you essentially make more margin on certain products as long as you get them above a certain threshold. So, yeah, it's one of the channels that we're focusing on. That's newer, okay.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know we talked before about your goals. So, like what are your goals now for the future of your brand, now that you have like a different direction than the last time we were talking? Like what are you trying to accomplish at the end of this year other than hitting seven figures? What's next year look like for you?

 

Kseniia:

We're just going to try to launch as many products as we can. Our goal is probably two to three products every couple of months, so like a product a month. So that why we try to develop um. At the same time we're developing like five products, because you never know how it's gonna go um and, of course, do more social media, do more content, just to, you know, to get the, the brand name out there. Uh, we just started doing Shopify, like a month ago or no, a week ago, I think. I just started working on a website um.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Are you launching any other platforms? Obviously you're on amazon. You're on TikTok shop. You just said you're on Shopify. Are you on Walmart?

 

Kseniia:

or other places. Not yet, not yet.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But yeah, I'm thinking about going there too, as well, now you've got an inside connection at walmart if one of your product takes off somebody who can help you out here, Excellent. What is your favorite? Helium 10 tool, Kseniia or function of a tool.

 

Kseniia:

Probably the audience. That's the one that I use all the time. Is it called audience?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, the split where you ask the questions to the people and say, how are you using that Like for your images, or just for product ideas, or what are you using that?

 

Kseniia:

honestly for everything, for both for the product ideas, for the images, because I just think it's so easy. You know, when you're thinking about like the product we find, then I usually do um, like the drawing and uh, 3d you know the 3d image of the product that doesn't exist yet. Then usually all my products are like, really designed differently. That's what's on the market right now and I just upload the image there and I see what people say and ask them would you buy this product? And if you wouldn't buy this product, why not? Or what would you change in this product? And sometimes I see the things that I didn't even you know, I didn't even think about that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So you're launching just the 3D rendering and just asking a question on that image, or you're launching it like, or you're launching it, you're putting it in a poll next to like existing products and asking them, or which one are you doing?

 

Kseniia:

I'm doing both. Actually, the first I just do the rendering and ask them would you buy this product? And if you would not buy this product, would you change like, how would you make it better for you? And then sometimes I also compare it to the other products that on the market and ask them which one would they buy? Interesting and a lot of times I do the changes on the product based on what the people say.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, I think it's important. I mean helium 10 audience, which is, you know, uh basically pick fu inside of Helium 10. I think is slept on by a lot of people. But that's, that's uh glad to see somebody's similar questions. To close out, uh, before we get to our final 30 second tips to Robert, like what's, what's your goals for the brand this year, next year and beyond?

 

Robert:

Yeah, so we're. We're really just doubling down on retail. We have a line reviews with different retailers. We're attending different trade shows, not like Amazon trade shows but like actually exhibiting. We did our first one in Chicago this year that had brought a lot of leads to basically regional retailers and all these new doors where we can just increase our distribution Within Amazon. Just continue to execute our roadmap. You know, basically double down on the products that are working and like higher margin products, but basically just doubling down on what's working. The brand, the angle of like being a go-to coffee brand versus legacy brands, that kind of just focus all over home, all over kitchen yeah, it's really, you know, seems to be really hitting a nerve with retail buyers. So that's kind of where we're going.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Nice, nice and your favorite Helium 10 tool for you or your team.

 

Robert:

Keyword Tracker. I use the Keyword Tracker a lot, market Tracker the original one. So those are my top two and that's because I have a lot of customization there. And I would say, to answer your other question on what could have maybe some improvement, although I like the interface a lot, is the profits. I think I talked to the team already but maybe there was some delay there with the advertising numbers being posted and so, like you know, profit being a tool that you want to look at almost like real time, you know, as opposed to like a few days back. But overall, you know, I love Helium 10. We use a lot of the tools the follow up tool, the you know I hadn't heard of the audience one we use PickFu from time to time, same thing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It literally is PickFu just inside of Helium 10.

 

Robert:

Yeah, I didn't know that you guys had integrated like that. But, yeah, a lot of tools that help us keep an eye on the business, a lot of the notification stuff, the daily like keyword tracker emails that we get. You know, we really do use all those things Awesome.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So now you know. Robert and Kseniia have been on this podcast for a while, so they know what's coming up next. What is your 30 or 60 second tip? Let's start with Robert.

 

Robert:

So my tip revolves around retail or going into retail. But first I want to talk about a channel called Faire like fair with an E at the end, dot com. To those who haven't heard it, especially if you're selling on Amazon or already on e-com, it's essentially a marketplace for independent stores all throughout the US, Europe, whatever, just sort of mom and pops, coffee shops, just any sort of stores that wants to source goods for their store, and it does really well for us. We've sold six figures through there, high margins, and we get pictures all the time from random friends and things like hey, how is your product that's in a random coffee shop in the middle of random city? Or just like in this little store, I saw your products. So you get actual feedback on what your products look like on the shelves and which products actually sell, Because those products, even though it's going to be a little store, it's going to be on the shelf, so you're going to see which products turn and why they do or do not turn, and that will kind of build up your first book of customers that are actual physical retails. Right, there's a lot of reorders on there and it's just a great way to get your feet wet into going to retail go ahead, you know, into going to retail.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So that's my tip there. Okay, cool, all right now. Now over to uh Kseniia. What is your uh 30 or 60 seconds? Uh tip or strategy for the sellers out there?

 

Kseniia:

I want to talk about the product development. I want to say that never stop product development. Uh, always have multiple products and a development at the same time. Um, even if your budget allowing launching only one at a time, because there is always going to be something that's going to go wrong, like the samples might not be made according to the drawings, suppliers might take a lot longer time to make the sample, or your packaging can get lost in the mail. So, and if something goes wrong with one of the products that you're developing, you always will have another options what to launch.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Cassini in the past. I know she kind of flies under the radar here, and that's why I love having people on the show. They don't come here with agendas, they're not trying to. You know like I'll have professionals, no problem. You know people who have agencies, people who do want to make a name for themselves no problem with that at all. I get good stories. But I also like having people on here who, who, hey, they're not on here for promotion, they're just trying to help other sellers out here. So, Kseniia, I know I don't even have to ask that that that she doesn't even have a you know any website or LinkedIn for people to reach out to. But, Robert, I think you do so like, if people want to, you know somehow find you on the interwebs out there. How can, how can they locate you?

 

Robert:

Gladly, we'll connect. I love just talking to sellers and helping in any way I can. I always learn as much as I give away at least. So gladly please reach out. LinkedIn would be fine, Robert Gomez, just search for me and glad to chat.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Well, Robert and Kseniia, thank you so much for coming on and sharing what you guys have been up to, and we definitely want to reach out maybe in 2025 and maybe not together, because I like introducing people to new ones, but maybe we'll connect you with other sellers out there. But thank you so much for coming on and wish you the most of success in your e-commerce journeys.

#586 - AI tools & Remote Management Strategies for Amazon Sellers

Join us as we welcome back Steve Simonson, a renowned expert on sourcing and leveraging AI technology for Amazon sellers. This episode is packed with insights on a wide range of topics, from managing remote teams to the innovative use of voice AI in customer service. Steve shares his experiences over the past year, highlighting the rapid advancements in AI technology and how his team has been integrating these updates into their processes. We also discuss effective strategies for managing remote teams, emphasizing the importance of building management skills, fostering online collaboration, and maintaining team morale through regular communication and celebrations.

Listen in as we explore the evolving role of AI in enhancing workflows and customer interactions, particularly for Amazon sellers. Steve sheds light on how major companies like Google, Amazon, and Meta are advancing AI technologies, with mentions of Meta's open-source Lama model and Amazon's AI applications like Rufus. Despite ongoing concerns about AI accuracy, Steve assures us that issues like hallucinations are gradually diminishing. We discuss the successful deployment of AI chatbots in customer service and the growing importance of AI in managing brand websites and internal company processes, with specific resources within the Helium 10 software highlighted for deeper insights.

We also address the challenges facing Amazon sellers, including new fees, profitability issues, and competition. Steve offers reassurance by drawing parallels to past economic cycles and emphasizing persistence, sharing insights from Jeff Bezos' relentless approach. Additionally, we tackle the complexities of modern supply chain disruptions, offering practical tips for short-term problem-solving and long-term strategies such as resourcing and nearshoring. Finally, we highlight the significant opportunities that AI presents for small brands, encouraging businesses to embrace AI tools and look forward to upcoming events like Amazon Accelerate in Seattle.

In episode 586 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Steve discuss:

• 00:00 - Managing Remote Teams and Leveraging AI For Amazon Sellers
• 03:53 - International Team Leadership Reflection
• 10:27 - Emerging AI Tools for Ecommerce Sellers
• 16:05 - Accessing Freedom Ticket for Amazon Sellers
• 19:09 - AI Video Creation for Beginners
• 20:46 - Leveraging AI for Listing Generation
• 22:56 - Navigating Challenges in E-Commerce Business
• 28:24 - Talking About Retirement
• 31:29 - Navigating Supply Chain Disruptions
• 34:09 - Enterprise Software and AI Integration Advice
• 35:32 - Small Brands Embracing AI Opportunities

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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 Steve Simonson back on the show, one of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to leveraging AI for Amazon sellers. He's going to talk about a wide variety of topics, such as running remote teams, to sourcing, to voice AI that can actually be your customer service rep. 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 POs 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. 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. You know, here at Helium 10, I don't know how this happened but we have a lot of S things. You know, we've got the Serious Sellers podcast, we did the Sell and Scale Summit. Now we've got Steve Simonson here and so I did have a hat with an S. This is actually a unique minor league baseball Sacramento hat here, but we're trying to keep the S theme together here. Steve, how's it going?

 

Steve:

Boy, I'm well, I love it. The alliteration does not stop. That is really impressive. If you look closely at my forehead, you'll see a giant S carved into the forehead. So everybody, get out your inspection equipment. But it's there, you can rest assured.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it All right, guys. Well, this is not the first rodeo of Steve here. He's been on the podcast before, so if you want to get back into a little bit more of his backstory and different things, some of the episodes he's been on is episode 38, episode 459. And we're going to talk a lot about AI today because I think that's what Steve is known for and that's what his module on Freedom Ticket is also about. But before I even, I just wanted to just see what you've been up to like the last year. It's been a year or so since you've been on the podcast. How's the back end of 2023 and 2024 been for you?

 

Steve:

Yeah, it's been good. I tell you it's a very fast-paced world we live in, and particularly as I focus on AI and how we integrate that into some of our enterprise-level software, it is just an endless train of upgrades, like every week somebody's got a new model and some new AI breakthrough has happened, and so we've been really quite busy at trying to figure out how to support these future frameworks within the same context of how can you build it once but allow it to be upgradable. So it's been exciting, it's been fun, but, no, no short of challenges as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Sure, sure, absolutely, absolutely. Now, one place in the last year or so that we caught up was in Bali. We went and spoke at this event and that was an amazing event. So anybody who has a chance to attend an event that Regina organizes, you should definitely, you should definitely try. We even had mud wrestling and everything. And I remember one thing you were talking about there. It's funny. I don't remember what I did yesterday, but then I'll just remember the strangest things or the most random things. I remember you had a big team across different countries and you were talking a little bit about that and it just, you know, across. You know across different countries, and you were talking a little bit about that. And it just got me thinking too. You know, as entrepreneurs most of us we don't have like an office and we've got, you know, in-office employees. You know we might start out hiring a VA here or there, and then you know the team scale. So you know somebody like yourself with experience, you know managing scores of employees at the same time. What are some tips you can give Amazon sellers out there or just entrepreneurs who have remote teams Like how do you, first of all, just what are some tips on managing a remote team where you're not there in person?

 

Steve:

Well, the first thing is it is. It's a skill that you have to learn right. So a lot of us think that somehow management is just built into all of us. I don't believe it is, and I think entrepreneurs are some of the worst at it, myself included, maybe first and foremost terrible manager, but I think you've got to build the skills, and so one of the things that we try to do is find ways of collaborating online that would be similar to an office environment. So, you know, our HR folks will have, you know, birthday celebrations or, you know, have monthly meetings to celebrate everybody's birthday or those types of things. We also have other things systemically that try to help, you know, remind everybody. Hey, celebrate your Wednesday weekly win. Everybody has at least one win every week, so let's share those amongst the company, because there's a lot of people in the company who may not know each other different locations, different parts of the world but I do want to just remind people that the basics really matter, like how you talk to people, you know understanding, you know where they're coming from, do they have the essentials that they need to, you know, perform the job.

 

Steve:

And the biggest I don't know revelation, especially dealing in the Amazon world is everybody expects a VA to be a unicorn. It's like you can do everything as the entrepreneur, so you just think you're going to delegate everything over to this unicorn. That's not going to happen. It's unfair, it's unrealistic and it shows that you're not yet a competent manager. And so my advice is you know, start slow, give very specific, task oriented things that have a beginning and an end, and then you know kind of work up from there and, as the internet says, educate yourself right. There's lots of books. One of my favorites is it's. It's the book name is called it's the manager. People don't quit jobs, they quit managers, and the faster we, as entrepreneurs, learn that, the better off we'll be.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah for sure. Now, speaking of managers, you know, once you get more than a few employees in a foreign location, you know you might make some kind of managerial structure. So for the subordinates, hey, you know performance management, things like that, you know it's probably handled by the manager. But how do you, kind of like you know performance, evaluate the managers themselves? You know, because you don't have really a middleman, they're directly reporting to you. How do you know who's your stars? And then how do you know when you need to take, perhaps corrective action?

 

Steve:

Well, the number one thing that leads our decision making and I recommend this for anybody is data right. Let's start with what are the responsibilities this particular section manager, right? Are they in charge of marketing? All right, how are the leads going? What are the KPIs related to this? And people have a lot of trouble coming up. They ask all the time what are the KPIs? What are the KPIs? And you know we talk about AI a lot. Go ask ChatGPT. Here's the position. Give me a you know, general position description and give me good KPIs and then massage it right. It can't read your mind, but it can, you know, kind of move and groove with the suggestions you give it. So KPIs are absolutely doable. Now, sometimes getting the data is a little harder than you want it to be, but once you overcome that hurdle or at least come up with an alternative, then data should drive those conversations. And the question is like hey, you're doing really well this week. What's going right? Why is this going so well? We want to be able to understand and replicate it. Or hey, you're behind your numbers. What are the challenges you're facing? Maybe they got a bunch of people on vacation or maybe the Google credit card stopped charging. There's all kinds of things that happen in business, but numbers drive decisions and we like to say what's broken in the system, not what's broken in the people. The people want to do a good job In general. If you manage them and you're fair with them, then you're going to find that they want to perform well. They want to do a good job.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm sure we talked about more things. We had a good time there at the Balinese massage. That was my first one. I don't like those rough, those really rough ones. The Thai massages Guys, don't get Thai massages unless you like pain, oh my goodness. But I think they put you and Leo like in a couple's massage.

 

Steve:

Yeah, Leo, and I decided that you have the romantic couple's massage. Yeah, it was lovely.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah like I had my room all to myself and then you're like oh, okay, well, I guess we're going to be here in this room.

 

Steve:

How did he get the room? Although we all had the room with no walls, which is like you know bugs and everything else but yeah, it was pretty neat. I think all of the you know for an hour it was nine bucks or something and it was a joy.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, you can't beat that.

 

Steve:

Yeah, it was a delight.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Can't beat that. Great food and everything else. All right. Now switching back to you know, one thing you talked about there and you've been known for the last couple of years is at the forefront of how Amazon sellers and e-commerce entrepreneurs should be leveraging AI, and so that's something that's changing on a weekly, monthly basis. The last year, what are some of the most notable advancements or differences in the world of AI as it relates to Amazon sellers?

 

Steve:

Well, first of all, you know, last year it was kind of the year of ChatGPT, right, everybody heard ChatGPT and this became a synonymous term with AI. But they're just one company. ChatGPT is led by OpenAI, which is ironically not open now. It's closed source, and over that they kind of led the tip of the spear into this new world of AI. There are plenty of others trying to get things done. Google has tried and has had a couple flubs. Amazon itself is now deploying AI for the customer-facing side, as I'm sure many sellers are recognizing. And then there's so many others, including Meta, which has allowed their stuff to go actually open source. The Lama model, which is a large language model built on, like you know, 400 billion or 40 billion, I can't even remember. The numbers get so insane. I think it's 400 billion data points in the Lama 3.1, which is as good as any closed source or paid service, and that is exciting. Groq is exciting. So there's a lot of these engines coming out. For sellers, what they, in my opinion, should be focused on is like how do I make my workflow today better, right, whether it's my own personal workflow which I use AI all the time, or the work, you know process of my colleagues. And it's really important to tell your team this is not to replace you, this is to enhance you. The AI will not replace you, but somebody who uses AI will replace you if you don't get your act together. Like this is really, really an important message. And so you know, the first step is just how do you improve those workflows, and then there are many other exciting steps coming up down the line. You know almost immediately.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe it's because I'm an old fogey, as it were, as far as adopting new things sometimes, but a problem with AI I've had in the past is a similar one, which I remember you kind of talked about in some of your presentations. How you asked AI last year like who is Steve Simonson? And it had your birth date wrong and it said you had done this when you were some author or something like that and this and that. And so you know like, hey, you know, I guess we call those hallucinations. But then, like, you know somebody even you know we're a year later and I'm still seeing similar things like for example you mentioned the Amazon AI you know there's Rufus and then there's ones that summarize reviews and stuff like that, and some of it's just absolutely useless. You know like, no, yeah, customers love how large this seems and they also love how small it seems. I'm like, come on, like this doesn't even help me. So like, is that an accurate assessment or am I being biased? Like, say, hey, why is it taking so long to fix a lot of these hallucinations, or are you seeing a macro? Uh an improvement on those kinds of things?

 

Steve:

Yeah, no question it is improving. So if you start comparing you know ChatGPT three and a half to ChatGPT four to you know 4.0 and some of these other evolving models the hallucinations are shrinking. They won't go away until there's a large enough data set that is just more robust, honestly. So we should understand that it's still lying to you 20% to 25% of the time, just making stuff up out of thin air, and so that should be a real staunch warning to everybody. When you see the thing, tell you something. In my case it had the several book titles that I had written, that I had not written, and no one's written right. So, like I was very impressed with what it wrote, but it was unfortunately it was not me. So expect that hallucinations will continue, but they will continue to reduce over time as well. So don't use that as your obstacle. That ain't going to work. There's so much positive, good stuff. Now some of it has to do with how you structure the prompt or how you use the ins and outs of the data, and it's certainly not flawless. But you know, every day it's getting better, and I've seen like the voice stuff is incredibly good now and I suspect within, let's say, 12 months, all the early adopters will have on their their brand website. They'll have a brand, you know, a message bot that is completely trained on their stuff, right? So all your PDFs, all your products, all your company policies, return policies, shipping, whatever and it will be able to perform chats better than a human on average, right? And, by the way, this has already been proven.

 

Steve:

This year, a company sent 2 million live customers to their new AI chatbot and it had more first touch resolutions, it had higher customer satisfaction and obviously, the cost was less and it was the equivalent of 700 full-time people. So what we want is we want better customer experience and if you can do that with AI, people will come to expect that to be available. So, early adopters within 12 months, you know, and then other people over time, for sure. Message bot chat, you know, 24, seven live, educated bots about your stuff. We're doing this now. It's very powerful. By the way, the larger your company is, sometimes you need this internally, right? Hey, what's the HR policy? What's the vacation and where it can actually interact and go? Oh well, can I get this vacation off? And it will allow it to schedule and do other things. So very powerful stuff that's coming real quick.

 

Bradley Sutton:

We're not going to go into everything he talked about in our module, but just for those who have access to Freedom Ticket, which is pretty much any Helium 10 member let me just show you, guys, where you can go to see his information. Go into Freedom Ticket 4.0 under the module Product Research and Sourcing. Click on the Power of AI for Amazon. We got you in a very flattering screenshot right there.

 

Steve:

That's actually how I talk. My eyes are closed.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Love it, but, hey guys, he goes in-depth there on how it can help Amazon sellers. But let's just stay on this subject and talk about some specific use cases. I think one of the things that was terrible maybe a year and a half ago or a year ago that has gotten a lot better, in my opinion is images. You know, um, and obviously Helium 10 has integrated some things Amazon has integrated into their advertising. They actually require, um, you know, sellers to have a custom images now for, like, sponsored brand ads and things like that. So if you're not, if you don't have this humongous repertoire of, or a repository, I should say, of, all these images, well, AI is kind of like the only way to go. So what kind of different AI tools should Amazon sellers be using now as far as imagery? And then, what are the use cases that you see most useful?

 

Steve:

Well, the first is the idea of simply being able to scale up your images. Right? You can upscale images with very high fidelity that you could not do in the old days, right? I remember watching shows, you know, maybe as far back as the 80s, you know, and the cop shows like, zoom in and enhance, and it's like anybody's ever worked with photos or videos. It's like you could zoom in all you want. You're going to see giant pixels. There's no enhance available, right? But today you actually can upscale those images. So anybody who doesn't have giant zoomable images, I think that's a lost opportunity and within that module, I put in a couple options that will do that upscaling for you. The other thing is coming very fast down the line is, you know, beautiful room scenes or lifestyle shots. They might be called with your product in the shot itself, and so that gives you just unending abilities to position your product in natural life. You know style images. There's any number of other ways you can do it. You know we use, uh, AI images to make themes, right, so you may say well, gosh, I want to have my I don't know my little travel bag and I want to show it with a, a Washington state theme or a, you know, a California theme, and AI will make beautiful, beautiful background imagery. And there's your social media right. You can just do that for every single day or multiple per day. Really incredible. The ideation that this AI brings to the table, I think, is worthwhile, and the quality, as you said, Bradley, incredibly advanced compared to how it was, you know, even a year ago, especially two years ago. So really, really, you know, images should be a high priority for everybody.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I forgot it was a webinar. I was watching Kevin King. He showed some kind of like I'm not sure if it was released yet, but some previews of different AIs for video and it looked real. I was like, how is this not real? So what is available out there that you're not having to pay thousands, you know? Uh, obviously you can get super advanced stuff and you can make movies and everything you know with it, but something that's accessible to like Joe Amazon seller, um, who could you know, perhaps you know, make make a product video with just uploading an image or a short video and then and then make that into a nice video ad or something.

 

Steve:

Yeah, so one of my favorites for this type of purpose is called Invideo.io, and I believe I highlight it in the Helium 10 presentation. But basically you can either just give it a text prompt, right, and it'll make an entire video for you. You say how long do you want it? What's your? You know, are you going on a vertical short format or a horizontal long video format? Right, so you know, one might be more appropriate for TikTok and the other one for LinkedIn or YouTube. And then you can even upload images of your product or videos that you may already have, and it can incorporate those and it will do the music, it'll do the voiceover, it'll do the pulling in a bunch of videos around it, and it can be very, very effective. And so you'll. You know, we use that every single day to make videos that are mostly good quality. There's a couple little pieces. It's like I basically told my marketing folks. It's like it's more important to have the video and get it out there and show some content and then have the final little you know accent or the little you know relic that's on the screen solved, but in video is very, very powerful, and that's just one example. There are many like it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What else. As far as you know, I think the number one thing for me that even I'm using AI and like even six months ago I probably still hadn't really used AI, but now I use it for almost every single one of my listings is like listing generation. You know, obviously, since Helium 10 has it, I get access to it for free. But hey, you know people, you know you can get free versions of ChatGPT. But that one is really powerful to me because I'm not just for you know, I'm, I'm obviously a native English speaker. I don't need help writing an English listing. But then sometimes I have writer's block and I'm like, hey, let me go ahead and say, hey, make a listing here's, here's my keywords, and I want it like in a funny tone. And then it's not the listing I end up with. But then I'm like, oh, this is a great direction. Let me just, you know, tweak a couple of things. But for me the power is like, hey, I'm going to make a listing in in UK and hey, I need to make one with British. You know English. Hey, I need to make a listing in Spanish. I can kind of speak Spanish, but I'm not a native speaker. So, uh, I can write all my prompts in English and then it'll go ahead and, and you know, make a listing in Spanish what. What are some things that you maybe think that sellers might be leaving money on the table as far as leveraging AI when it comes to their actual copy that they're doing, whether it's listings, whether it's, you know, blogs, et cetera.

 

Steve:

Well, the first thing is I believe that because AI is so new as a tool and a lot of people, myself included, we had negative experiences right. I would generate an image on mid-journey and the guy would have nine fingers right and I'm like so the clear thing that a lot of us said is this stuff is crap, it'll never work, I'm out right. And if you had hallucinations or you had kind of weird images and you haven't revisited it, you're making a mistake. So when you get in there, the next most common mistake is single dimension thinking. Right, you say I need a listing for Amazon for this product and it writes out something that's, you know, relatively generic because you gave it one single dimension listing Amazon, this product. But if you say you know I'm, I want to add a language, like you talked about Bradley, or I want to write this like Dan Kennedy, You know one of the you know very, very best copywriters, or maybe you don't know the name of great copywriters. You go who are the top five copywriters, right, that are direct response copywriters, or who's the best you know, fantasy writers, whatever and then write it in whatever style that you're looking for. So, having a writing style, having an audience that you're trying to reach, is just adding extra dimensions to that. You know, first, single dimension concept right, I just need a listing. No, you need a listing written in a style for a platform to an audience, in a tone, right. And the more of these dimensions you add and there are far more that you could go the more personality comes out of that and that's really what you're looking for. You want the AI to help bring forward your own personality and I highly recommend people add additional dimensional layers and they will have better results.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Switching gears a little bit and, who knows, maybe this conversation will, or the answer might be some version of AI. But you are in, you know you network a lot, you go to events, you talk to a lot of Amazon sellers and I'm sure you have felt the sentiment this year. It's probably, I would say, the most negative it's been in a while as far as new fees and profitability and competition. And hey, now there might be almost like Teemu-ish thing going on where Chinese sellers can sell directly and ship directly and stuff. And so what is your advice to those people who maybe have a little bit negative connotation compared to before as far as selling on Amazon, not sure how they're going to proceed?

 

Steve:

Well, the first is, if they can get on the screen, I'll just pat them on the head. Hey, little buddy, it's going to be okay. So you guys can line yourself up if you're feeling down, and go in for the pat. Listen, I've been around a long time, right? Dinosaur is you know? They're the young upstarts compared to me. So I've seen these patterns happen for multiple generations of e-com. Right, believe me, back in 99, 2000,. It was the glory days. Then 2001, 9-11 happened and it was a nightmare and everyone hated everything. And the dot-com crash happened. And then it got really good again in the mid-2000s and everybody's flying high. And then the housing crisis and financial crisis globally happened and everybody hates everything again. Right and so and again, these continue to happen. And so my, my mission for true entrepreneurs is if you're going to be persistent, if you're going to be in the game, expect ups and downs. Do not play that just straight up line. There is no line that looks like that, even those crazy hockey sticks that you see. That you know from companies there were little iterations of up and down all the way, and I just want people to know that. You know, persistence is really part of the game and you know if you go to relentless.com. Do you know where that goes, Bradley? I do not. It goes to Amazon. And the reason why is because Jeff Bezos said if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you better be relentless so you can check it out right now, relentless.com for anybody out there. That's what you got to be. And so listen, it's okay to. I always say take one lap and go. This sucks, I wish this didn't exist. These fees, this competition, this problem, this whatever. And then get to work and try to solve it or come up with a strategy to get over the obstacle. That's your choice deal with it or get out of the business, and I think serious people have to get serious about business, so they should listen to a podcast for serious sellers. I don't know. There you go.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Double clicking on your little dinosaur comment. You know, if I'm not mistaken, you even at one point kind of retired and got out of the game and then you got back in. How does somebody know when it's time to? You know, I'm not talking about the, you know long sail into the sunset or anything, but hey, it's time to just relax and enjoy life, or no, you know what? I still need something that drives me. You know, because it's not an age thing. You know like, I know people in their late 20s who retire because they've had enough success and they've accomplished what they want to. I know people in their 80s who are still working strong. So how does the entrepreneur get to a point where it's like you know what I'm ready to, kind of like, relax a little bit.

 

Steve:

Well, the first thing is, you know, everybody's got their own context of where they came from and where they want to go. So don't let me project my stuff onto you guys. But I can tell you retirement 1.0 sucked right. It was awful, and it's not a question of you know. Could I do anything I want? Yes, I could, but my friends couldn't come out and play right, and my family got tired of being on vacation. My kids were tired of being on vacation. Now people can go oh, crying me a river. What kind of first world problem is that? But it's still a real problem, right? Because I did not enjoy it. And then I felt guilty, because I'm living a life that anybody would kill for and that doesn't make you feel good. So my brain is not wired to kind of check out. And so retirement 2.0, which I've recently begun testing we're in beta is basically just trying to say well, listen, I don't want to work 80 hours and I don't want to work any hours on things that I don't like. So over time you'll find things that you like or don't like and start positioning even your role within your current company on the things that you like to do. By the way, somebody loves to do the thing that you hate the most. Right, and I had this realization. One of my finest team members she's been with me gosh, it's probably coming up on, you know, 25 or 30 years she loves the thing that I hate the most. So I kept doing the details and very complex Excel sheets and forecasts and inventory and things that I hated doing far too long. When I was able to turn it over to her kind of an exasperation because I'm a terrible manager and I don't know anything. She's like, oh, thank God, I've been dreaming about this and I just couldn't imagine in my own small brain that, like somebody else, would love to do this thing. So remember that there's so many different people. Somebody wants to do the things that you hate to do. So please, the faster you can excuse yourself from the things you hate, get the people who love to do those things and then you'll start to chart. You know, chart your course, whether it is a financial course or a lifestyle course or whatever it is, towards, you know that, that bright future. Me, I, I have to do stuff. My brain will not allow it to stop and you know, that's why I try to spend so much time helping entrepreneurs. I want them to come on vacation with me and let's go play.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's good advice. You know I asked myself this question. You know, sometime of wondering, hey, well, when is it time to? You know, to hang it up, as it were. But I wouldn't be doing what I do if I wasn't feeling, you know, fulfillment and motivation from it. So as long as I still can, I'm still going to keep on trucking. Now, speaking of pre-retirement 1.0, one of your previous lives you were heavy into sourcing and things like that. I'm sure you keep your pulse on that industry as well. What should Amazon sellers these days be thinking about when it comes to, hey, I'm competing sometimes with Chinese factories. Now, hey, there's tariffs, you know, should I be considering India and Pakistan and Vietnam? Hey, you know, shipping prices are fluctuating like ridiculousness, you know, like as if it were still COVID. You know what's some just general advice you can give sellers who are, you know, thinking about those kinds of issues.

 

Steve:

General advice get in the bunker and prepare for war. It is yeah, it's we still the companies I sold, we still have me and my team still have some supply chain responsibilities. So we're interacting frequently in this space and I just got off the call with some sourcing folks I have in Pakistan just before our conversation, and all of the things you just brought up are annoyances. They're just part of the thing. I did not predict shipping getting spicy again, but I did predict some of what I call kinetic action over the last couple of years. We've said the people who follow geopolitics. We've said there's going to be more kinetic action, which is a nice way of saying people are shooting stuff at each other, which is terrible. What that means is these supply chain disruptions are unexpected. The fact that the Red Sea is kind of closed for business is insane. Nobody had that on the bingo card, right. So everybody's going around the South African. I just saw two ships going around the Arctic on their way to Holland. So from China around the Arctic to Holland, and at some point they'll need icebreakers there. So there are unique things and unique challenges that we face, but it's kind of like take a beat, look at the immediate picture. Right, you have your short term. I got a ship product. Now deal with that, overcome whatever the obstacles, pay what you have to, and then think about all right now, in six months, what does it look like? And is there a way I can avoid this, whether it's resourcing elsewhere, nearshoring or onshoring.

 

Steve:

But I can tell you like right now we have a very complex project and I've got people in Pakistan and India and it is very difficult to solve this problem. But that's why there's a moat right, and everybody who's complaining about how difficult or hard or whatever all of those are moats right. This is your advantage. We're, ultimately, most Amazon sellers are not manufacturing the product ourselves. We have somebody else do that. So what value do we add? We add all the value of solving the problems throughout that supply chain and then into the marketing side, like all of that is our value add, and we either add value and deserve what we make or we don't. And we deserve what we make right, and this is a very important point Our value that we're adding is overcoming all of these problems. So guess what? That's why they you know you get paid. You got to deal with the trouble.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, before we get into your final strategies of the day. How can people find you reach out to you on the interwebs out there?

 

Steve:

The awesomeers.com podcast still records videos from time to time and I have a whole founder series directed at folks. Just, it's almost like a little mini course for you. It's free, it doesn't, you know, doesn't take anything to do it. You can find me at parsimony.com just steve at parsimony.com. I spend most of my time on software and AI, trying to smash those things together in an enterprise way, right? So anybody who's doing you know 5 million, 10 million. If you're doing 10 million or more and you don't know what ERP is, you are unnecessarily driving yourself insane. But I recommend not going insane. Systems are better.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Usually better not to. Yeah, yeah, you know.

 

Steve:

I'm not a doctor, I'm just thinking.

 

Bradley Sutton:

There you go, all right. Now, you know, can you give us a couple of 30 or 60 second tips? Could be about traveling, could be about AI, could be about sourcing, anything you want.

 

Steve:

Well, one thing, I mentioned earlier that chat bots are going to be a big thing for early adopters in the next 12 months. But I want to call out one of my favorites, bland.AI is a voice customer service tool. And that company is an example of it. I'm saying this concept is coming to a voice line near you, and especially for brands who have the capacity to pay nine cents a minute to interact with customers. You train it on your own data and then this bot can be a sales person for you, a customer service person, and it's really really good. Bland.ai, amazing types of technology. I'm not suggesting this is the only company. There are many and many more.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Is that the one that at Billion Dollar Seller Summit we were waiting for the helicopter, and then you're like here I'm going to call this, Okay, yeah, yeah, I remember that. I remember that it was kind of it kind of blew me away, yeah.

 

Steve:

It's still the great example of what if you could just call a number and talk to a AI like a human, which is the ironic twist, and stop yelling representative a thousand times right, which is the ultimate nightmare. So all the big companies are moving this direction. I think small brands have this opportunity to, in the same way that AI can supercharge you know, a non-English speaker into beautiful English language listings, which should be a warning to everybody. Small guys can do what big guys do, right, whether it's video, voice messaging, AI levels of playing field. That is the most important point. So if you feel scared, if you feel nervous, talk to your friends, figure out those easy use cases, but don't be afraid of it. Embrace the fear and get to it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you so much for joining us. We're definitely going to have you back. You know, unless you're on retirement 3.0 and full launch mode, we'd love to have you back next year to see what you've been up to, and I'm sure I'll be seeing you at an event. Are you going to Amazon Accelerate?

 

Steve:

Yeah, yeah that one. I actually live in Seattle, so a good chance

 

Bradley Sutton:

I know, I was like about to say just maybe walk there, ride a bike or something.

 

Steve:

Yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, well, I'll be seeing you at Amazon Accelerate along with everybody else and thanks a lot for joining us again.

Helium 10 Buzz 8/8/24: Shop Amazon From TikTok?! | Amazon Holiday Fee Increase | Temu/Shein Increasing

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, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.

Amazon to let TikTok users shop select products without leaving the video app
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4137470-amazon-to-let-tiktok-users-shop-select-products-without-leaving-the-video-app-report 

UK TikTok Shop fees rise to 9% from September
https://channelx.world/2024/08/uk-tiktok-shop-fees-rise-to-9-from-september/

Temu, Shein and Aliexpress are attracting US customers in their millions
https://www.techradar.com/pro/temu-shein-and-aliexpress-are-attracting-us-customers-in-their-millions-poll-shows-and-thats-despite-the-fact-that-the-vast-majority-do-not-trust-these-online-chinese-retailers-in-the-first-place

Plan your agenda for Amazon Accelerate 2024
https://sell.amazon.com/blog/accelerate-agenda-builder

Lastly, get ready for Amazon Accelerate 2024 with tips on making the most out of this event by planning your agenda for the conference. Also don’t forget to join us for the Elite Workshop in Seattle. Don't miss out on these game-changing insights on the latest episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10!

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:

• 00:58 - Shop Amazon ON TikTok!
• 03:21 - Amazon Holiday Fee Increase
• 05:26 - TikTok Fee Increase
• 06:06 - Temu / Shein Growing
• 07:45 - FBA Grade and Resell
• 08:29 - Kia Soul Delivery
• 09:58 - Amazon Accelerate Agenda
• 11:06 - Q3 Elite Workshop
• 12:01 - Pro Training Tip: Revamped Keyword Sales Estimation

► 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:

You're going to be able to run Amazon ads on TikTok and users are going to be able to purchase from Amazon directly from TikTok. Amazon has increased its fees for fulfillment in Q4. 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 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-ons and news stories that are going on the Amazon, TikTok shop and e-commerce world and we give you training tips of the week, as well as let you know what new Helium 10 features will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let's go ahead and hop into the news. We don't have as much quantity wise as stories as last week. We had a record 14, but we've got some bangers here today, so let's get into the first article. It's actually from seekingalpha.com. I don't think I've ever quoted that news website, but look at this. This is a doozy, guys. If it is what this article says, it is, but it says Amazon is going to let TikTok users shop select products without leaving the video app, all right. So what does that mean? Sounds like it's just what it says. It says Amazon is teaming up with TikTok to enable e-commerce shopping on the short content video app. All right, so this is actually citing an Amazon spokesperson. So it's supposedly now TikTok users can buy items from Amazon ads that are going to be run inside of TikTok. So they're scrolling TikTok not necessarily TikTok shop, but just regular TikTok and then somehow there's an ad on there and they're going to be able to purchase without even leaving TikTok. Now this, to me, is kind of a little bit mind boggling, because, you know, I would think that TikTok wants to prioritize TikTok shop.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But this is interesting. It recognizes, hey, amazon has got a lot of products that maybe people want to buy from there, and so now it says here this Amazon spokesperson says in app shopping with Amazon, is it going to be available for select products advertised on TikTok and sold by Amazon or independent sellers. So basically, what's going to happen, like Instagram and TikTok and others, is, with these new ads, users of those platforms can link their social media accounts to their Amazon profiles and check out within the social media apps using the payment and shipping information they've stored with Amazon. And I guess this the information which is the original source of this news article says that the social media ads are going to show more details that a shopper would find on Amazon's website prices, estimated shipping times, even prime eligibility. So that is a how cool? Is that? Pretty cool, I think. Like if, if you can now run targeted ads like that would be the key to me. Like is it only going to show up, you know, if I'm doing some kind of sponsored display ad or DSP or something like that, and then and Amazon randomly shows me. Or can I target TikTok directly? Can I target hashtags? You know would be interesting. What effect is this going to have on TikTok shop itself? What will be interesting to like? Already, TikTok users are getting kind of upset with how many you know products come to their feed right From TikTok shop. They're still buying it, but you know, like is this going to flood even more e-commerce and might give people some TikTok fatigue? I guess who knows what's going on, but this was interesting breaking news today.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article that we have going on is actually from Seller Central itself, and it's another week. Another news article about raising fees. But this shouldn't be, you know, like earth shattering or something. This is what happens every year. It doesn't matter who you use to ship, you know fulfillment fees increase. Shipping prices increase a lot of times across the board during Q4. So it's saying that, hey, starting October 15th through January 14th, there is going to be peak fulfillment prices. All right, it's going to apply to all products and it's going to be the same within a specific size band. It says and this is going to apply for, you know, remote fulfillment, multi-channel fulfillment, buy with Prime and more. And it says the fulfillment fee is going to be the same as it was last year, except for products priced under $10, because that is going to have a new fee or a new fee in 2024. Because remember the what is it? Small and light no longer has it and they have something that's for $10 and below.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So I would recommend guys going into seller central and checking out the new like size tiers, like just just as an example. You know, don't think this is something that is going to increase your cost 50% or something crazy like that. For example, let's just say you've got a large standard item I think my coffin shelf is one of those, and it's one point or two to 2.25 pounds I think that's my coffin shelf, I'm not sure, uh. Or if it's two, 25 to 2.5, it's $6 and 5 cents. Let's say I'm paying $6 and 5 cents, now that is going to go up to a $6 and 44 cents. So I mean, that's not nothing, right? You know it's 40 cents per unit on my coffin shelf, all right. So just keep that in mind. That's. That's something that's going to happen.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know, some, some sellers raise their prices during Q4 because they know the conversion might be higher, especially during peak shopping times. But just know that if you don't raise your prices, your profit is going to go down due to these fee changes. So again, check your Seller Central dashboard for the links to the articles that will talk about what size tier you're on and what your price was and what it would be, etc. Speaking of fee increases, TikTok shop has fee increases. It's going to nine percent starting in September, but this is for TikTok UK, all right. So I don't have any new information on am. On USA, remember, I think I believe TikTok UK was actually started before USA, unless I'm mistaken. So that could mean that in us. You know some of these fee increases might come behind, but they were at five percent for UK sellers and it is going to 9% for UK sellers, all right, so take a look at. If you're selling on TikTok UK, uh, make sure to check out this article. If you're selling a TikTok Shop US, don't even. You can just skip over that. It doesn't apply to you yet, but just a heads up for you. Uh, selling on Tik TOK in UK. Moving to other platforms, talking about Amazon, talking about TikTok, we're going all over the place.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Today, let's talk about Temu Sheen and AliExpress. Per an article on TechRadar, it says Temu Sheen and AliExpress are attracting US customers in the millions and this is the funny part and that's despite the fact that the vast majority do not trust these online retailers in the first place. All right, so what's some of the numbers? They polled 4,000 people in the US UK polled 4,000 people in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, and they said that 60% of respondents had shopped on one of these three websites in the last year, with 50% of them shopping at more than one. I am not one of them. I'm not on there yet. 72% of people knew about Temu 55% knew about Sheen. 48% of online shoppers, it says, bought items from Temu, 42% from Sheen and 28% from AliExpress. That's mind boggling to me, like I don't know any American people who know about AliExpress. You know outside of you know us Amazon sellers, right? Some of the popular items is adult clothing for Sheen 57%. Household items on Temu 35%. Now this is the funny part here Even though all of these sales, all these people 50% shopping on Temu right, 94% of these respondents said they don't trust Temu, but they're still shopping on there. That's kind of ridiculous to me. If you don't trust them, why are you shopping on there? So that's kind of interesting to me. Is growing in popularity. Like I told you a few weeks ago, I'm investigating starting selling some of my products on Temu to see how that goes, shipping from US and having a higher price, obviously, than the Chinese sellers. Let's see how that goes. I'll have my results on that in a few weeks. I'm also trying to get Project X up on Temu as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Our next article is going back to Seller Central and it is entitled Give Returns a Second Life with FBA Grade and Resell. I don't enroll in this, or I haven't enrolled in this. I'm wondering if has anybody out there enrolled in this FBA Grade and Resell? Because what it does is it says it grades and relists your return products, allowing you to recover value and give them a second life. It's a set it and forget it system and it's a fee-based so. So take a look at more details. If this is right for you, you know, if you're getting a lot of returns and you don't want to have it come back to you or you want to have Amazon take a closer look before putting it back in inventory, maybe this uh service you know could be for you. FBA Grade and Resell. Do a search on that and your seller central dashboard and you will get information on it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next news article is just almost like a throwaway news article. I just thought it was funny because I probably have owned um more Kia souls than most people Like. I think I have owned eight different Kia souls over the last 10 years. I've got two Kia souls right now. Like for my family, uh, my daughter has had three different Kia souls. All right, so we have. We were a Kia soul family. But this article is entitled I think this is from Bloomberg Amazon is testing speedy delivery featuring Kia Souls, all right. So this is kind of like to counterbalance how much they rely on the flex drivers of souls. I'm doing it, but I don't think it's a matter of, oh, if you drive a Kia soul, maybe you can get hired as an Amazon delivery driver. It's actually the opposite, I believe. It looks like maybe Amazon is going to buy their own Kia souls or something and instead of having a like sometimes flex drivers, you know, like have you ever had your Amazon products delivered by door dash drivers or Uber drivers? Or like random strangers, like pulling up to your life, who's this pulling up to my house? Oh, shoot, it's just an Amazon delivery. All right, those are flex drivers. They're not necessarily Amazon employees, but I guess instead of having to rely on that, they want to have like take it in house a little bit and maybe they're going to be buying a fleet of of Kia souls. Interesting. I used to have a blue electric Kia soul. I don't have it anymore, but look, look kind of like the Amazon blue. I wonder what color these Amazon delivery Kia Soles will have. But now you see a Kia Sole pulling up in your neighborhood. It's probably either me or my family or an Amazon delivery driver.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Last article of the day is an announcement by Amazon saying hey, you can now plan your agenda for Amazon Accelerate 2024. This is the event of the year that you should go to. It's September 17 and 19 in Seattle. You guys have known about that. If you want to sign up, go to h10.me forward slash accelerate. But this announcement is about oh, by the way you know, it talks about seller cafe super important. If you have any issue with your Amazon account at all, seller cafe, set an appointment. You can get it fixed. Most likely, if you're on the right, these guys know what they're doing. If seller central hasn't been able to fix something, I almost guarantee I can't guarantee completely I don't work for Amazon, but I almost want to guarantee that that those seller cafe people can fix it for you. But anyways, the thing that's new is you can now do your agenda. So if you've signed up or are planning to sign up, you want to see what kind of agenda is like. You know when is Martha Stewart speaking, which, which she is and what are the other executives and when is Amazon going to release that? Go to the agenda builder. Mine's not on there yet, but I'm a speaker at Amazon Accelerate myself. So make sure those of you going, you guys put me on your agenda, my speech that I'm going to be doing. We're doing a 15 at Amazon Accelerate and along those same lines for those going to Amazon Accelerate or maybe you just live in Seattle or you want to fly to Seattle, not go to Accelerate just hang out with us.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Any listener of the podcast you can attend our elite workshop for free on the 16th. Space is limited, so this is not unlimited. It's going to sell out. We're capping at like about 100, 125 people, but we're going to have Kevin King speaking there. We're going to have Destiny I 25 people, but we're going to have Kevin King speaking there. We're going to have destiny I'm going to be there. Jeff Cohen from Amazon advertising Uh, we'll, we'll be there. We'll have some food and beverages. It's going to be from one to 6 PM on September 16th. So go to h10.me forward slash Seattle to get tickets. H10.me forward slash Seattle and it's free for now. All right, um, you know, usually you have to pay like 300 bucks to get into these high level workshops. We have rubbed shoulders with Kevin and Destiny and others, but this one for podcast listeners is going to be free, but while tickets remain, all right, it's going to sell out and then I can't guarantee your entry. I'll see you in Seattle, all right?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, let's go ahead and combine our training tip of the week with a Helium 10 feature update. It's not really a feature update, but we revamped and made our keyword sales estimations even more accurate, all right. So this is why is keyword sales estimations an important metric? Search volume, obviously, is great. It's a great way to kind of prioritize your keywords. Why? Because you know, maybe you have 10 relevant keywords. You want to know which one to put in your title. Well, if they're all equally relevant, you're probably going to pick them over the most search form. But in addition, what is the reason you're doing that? Well, the reason you're doing that is because you're assuming that the ones with the most search volume can lead to the most sales. Right, and that would normally and in most situations absolutely be a hundred percent accurate statement. All right, but I said most situations, because sometimes you'll have a keyword that has less buyer intent. What does that mean? That means you know a hundred thousand people are searching it, but maybe only 1000 people are actually buying something after it where you could have a keyword with 20,000 searches and 2000 people purchasing a product because it was so specific that it has a lot of buyer intent. So you can see that looking just at search volume sometimes is not the best way to look at things. Well, Helium 10 has keyword sales estimates and they revamped the algorithm and it's pretty cool because I was just doing some testing on my top two keywords Everybody, everybody right now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Who's seeing Project X and the coffin shelf. What is our top two keywords? You probably know coffin shelf and gothic decor. So take a look here at where this metric is and let me just show you something super cool. All right, so I'm here right now in Magnet, Helium, Magnet, I put my top two keywords, coffin shelf and Gothic decor and, as you can see here, this is interesting. Coffin shelf has 3,900 searches a month estimated and Gothic decor has 15,000, but you would think that maybe is it three times as many sales that Gothic decor has in coffin shelf. No, um, look at this. This is actually kind of crazy. Coffin shelf has 18 keyword sales, but Gothic decor has 147. So actually, Gothic decor has a lot of buyer intent, even more than coffin shelf. The conversion rate from sales to search volume is a lot higher on Gothic decor.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now don't get it twisted. That doesn't mean that Gothic decor is a better keyword. It's not, you know, like Gothic decor. If you look at the people who buy things on Gothic decor, they're buying all kinds of products. They're not really buying coffin shelves, you know per se. Okay, so take a look at this. Um, let me just show you, uh, how accurate this is. Like you can't do this always, but I just. These were the first two keywords I tested, because this is what's near and dear to my heart. Right, I love how Amazon shows data, because when Amazon shows more data, sometimes people say, oh, amazon showing search query performance and brand analytics and this and that, and why do I need Helium 10 anymore? That's like incompetent. I'm like no, it's great, because the more data that Amazon shows, the more you could actually kind of prove that Helium 10's data is correct. So watch this. I went inside brand analytics, top search terms, and I looked first at coffin shelf, right, and this is not something you can do a hundred percent of the time. And, and Helium 10 is not going to be like a hundred percent. Uh, exactly, you know aligned with this, but it's just one of these things that just shows you how accurate Helium 10 is most of the time.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Take a look at this coffin shelf. It's telling you that there were pro, there were three products that had. One of them had 5.56% conversion, one of them had 33.33% and one of them had 5.56%. And then you can add those three numbers up, subtract it from 100% and then get like the remaining amount of conversions right Now. Here's the thing. That's on an actual number, right? So if you put in some random number like 153, and then you took 550 or 5.56%, it might come out to some number that that has like this decimal place, and then you know that, well, it's probably the wrong estimate because it's not exactly like that should be a whole number. So watch this. So I put those percentages here in a Google spreadsheet 5.56% twice 33.3% and the remainder is 55.55% Anyway.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So what did Helium 10 say? Was the sales again 18. So if I put 18 right here and I have this calculation, that goes it. Look, it works out to a perfect whole number here. All right, so the first product, and now I can actually see how many sales did that product have the top three. They had one sale, all right. This one had six sales, this one had one sale. So pretty cool, right? Uh, it came out perfect. Now what about Gothic decor? Let's take a look. Gothic decor we said 147, uh, sales, and then, if you look at brand analytics, uh, we have percentages of 1.36%, 1.36%, and then another couple of numbers here. I put it here Actually they're all 1.36% and that means 95.92% is the other orders. So let's put the Helium 10 number of 147 in here and survey says look at that, it comes out to a perfect number here of two sales, two sales, two sales and the rest of the product 141 sales.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, like I said this, you can't just do this cross-check. It's not always going to line up perfectly, especially when we're talking about, you know, ones where it says zero sales or 50% or something. But you know Helium 10 has other algorithms. That's why we're able to keep so, so accurate here. But now, guys, you know, take a look at that data about keyword sales. I think it's going to be very beneficial for you to look at that number so you can prioritize keywords based on which ones have the most buyer intent. So if you have a Platinum Plan at Helium 10, you're going to see the keyword sales estimate in Magnet and Cerebro. Make sure you're taking a look at that. All right, guys. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Don't forget to tune in next week to see what's buzzing.

#585 - From Mortician to 7-Figure Adult Product Seller!

Erica Greenhalgh's transition from the funeral home industry to becoming a top Amazon seller is nothing short of remarkable. In this episode, we uncover the unique twists and turns of her career, beginning with her early days aspiring to be a dental hygienist, her unexpected entry into the funeral business, and ultimately, her leap into e-commerce. Erica opens up about the struggles she faced, the countless hours she invested, and the pivotal moments that shaped her path to success. With six associate degrees under her belt, her story is a testament to perseverance and the power of pursuing unconventional opportunities.

We also talk about the nitty-gritty details of Erica's journey from a failed business to grossing $200,000 in her first year on Amazon. She shares her strategies for securing wholesale deals, managing a home warehouse, and the art of transforming poorly listed products on Amazon into top sellers. Erica's expertise in navigating the complexities of the adult product category on Amazon offers a unique perspective on the challenges and rewards of this niche market. Her ability to build strong relationships with small brands and address issues like minimum advertised pricing has been key to her success.

Our conversation also explores the broader landscape of e-commerce, from compliance with Amazon's advertising policies to the potential of expanding to platforms like Walmart and TikTok. Erica's passion for her work and her humorous reflections on her unconventional career path make this episode a must-listen. We wrap up with a look ahead, eager to reconnect with Erica next year to see how her journey evolves and the new heights she aims to reach with her innovative strategies and tools like Helium 10. Join us for this engaging and insightful episode that promises to inspire and entertain.

In episode 585 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Erica discuss:

• 00:00 - From Funeral Homes to Amazon Success
• 00:39 - Unique Amazon Seller Stories With Erica
• 06:36 - Transitioning to Amazon Sales Through Books
• 07:24 - From Funeral Home to Adult Products
• 09:47 - Wholesale Account Setup Success
• 15:01 - Growing Brands in Adult E-Commerce
• 16:43 - Sales Goals and Profit Margins
• 21:22 - Product Placement and Advertising Strategies
• 24:21 - Strange Incidents While Selling on Amazon
• 27:47 - Amazon's Advertising Guidelines Explained
• 28:30 - Amazon Strategies and TikTok Opportunities
• 33:34 - From Funeral Homes to Novelty Products

► 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 one of the most unique sellers we've had on. She started off her professional career running funeral homes, then transitioned to selling books online and doing retail arbitrage and now she grosses over $2 million a year selling adult products. How cool, is that? Pretty cool, 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/profits. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Seller’s 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 we've got somebody who's a first time on the show and I actually just met her on a one-on-one call a couple of weeks ago here at you know, if you guys don't know this, you know Helium 10 Elite Program. One of the many benefits other than just you know being able to get training with Kevin King and weekly round tables and stuff? Is you get to book one-on-one calls with myself and Carrie and roundtables and stuff? Is you get to book one-on-one calls with myself and Carrie? And I started hearing about her business and a little bit of her story. I was like you know what? Say no more, because I would love to learn more about this from the podcast. I love just bringing in people who I meet at conferences and other ways who have unique Amazon stories and this definitely, I think, is a unique Amazon story. So, Erica, welcome to the show.

Erica:

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Now, where are you at right now in the US of A.

Erica:

Currently I am in just a Mesa, Arizona, a little suburb of Phoenix. So, we are fortunate enough to have a little cabin up north that we could escape the heat from.

Bradley Sutton:

But isn't all of Arizona pretty hot?

Erica:

No, we're up in the mountains, so we are, we get lots of snow and pine trees and get to enjoy all of that, okay.

Bradley Sutton:

I didn't even realize there was places like that around there. Okay, not bad. Now is that where you were born and raised in Arizona, or you come from somewhere else?

Erica:

For the most part. So, I was born in Tucson, I spent all my teen years in Salt Lake City and came back as a young adult and have been here ever since.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Where did you go to university?

Erica:

You know I have six associates degrees because I couldn't decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. So, I'm a professional college student.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice. hey, before I actually do have a bachelor's degree, but I got it like, oh my God, like 15 years after I graduated high school, just because one of my companies I was working for at the time paid me to go do it. I was like sure I'll do it. But yeah, I have, like from local junior college, I've got like six different degrees. It was. I loved it, it was fun, you actually learn stuff, instead of having to take a whole bunch of just like general ed and stuff like that.

Erica:

So yeah, it was. It was awesome for me. I have dyslexia, I always really struggled in school and so, for whatever reason, learning finally clicked for me in college, and so it kind of became like look, I'm not dumb, see what I can do.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice. Now what? Did you have a theme of what you were taking, though? Like, did you have some kind of goal in mind, like hey, I would like to work in this? Or you just like, hey, I want to learn.

­Erica:

Yeah, from a young age I wanted to be a dental assistant, dental hygienist, so, ongoing to dental hygiene school, I moved out at 17, because you know everything at 17. And I found myself completely broke and not having a clue what to do. I remembered a girlfriend of mine. We took a health science occupations class in high school and part of the class was to get up and job shadow somebody in a medically related field, and she had done a funeral director and in the back of my mind I was like, well, that's cool. But I knew what I was going to do. And I then had an opportunity. I walked into a funeral home that was next to the college, wondering how I'm going to pay my rent, and the gentleman spent about three hours with me. I put my name in a local newsletter and, lo and behold, a few months later I was offered a job at a funeral home as an intern, and also.

Bradley Sutton:

So, then, what you had chosen as your shadow, whatever day was the funeral home.

Erica:

No well, I had chosen other medically related careers. A girlfriend of mine did funeral to done, had job shadowed a funeral director and I always thought that was cool.

Bradley Sutton:

So, this is it almost sounded like you, just randomly. It was kind of getting kind of morbid there for a second. I was like, yeah, I didn't know what I was going to do with my life, so I went into a funeral home.

Erica:

I was like wait, wait, wait, where's?

Bradley Sutton:

this story going here.

Erica:

That is exactly what happened.

Bradley Sutton:

I had no idea what I was going to do.

Erica:

So, I just walked into the funeral home going, well maybe there's an opportunity for a job here, like, let's explore this adventure in life. Okay, so there is a little morbidity to it. There's no family history. There's none of that. So, I fell in love with the industry. I love serving families. I love every aspect of it. It's my true passion. But unfortunately, that job is a very high demand and very high stress, so there's no margin for errors within that.

Bradley Sutton:

So, you started working full time there when you were still in the junior college.

Erica:

I did, yeah. So, I completely did a 180 and started going a different direction in life and worked in the funeral world, had some kids, stayed home for a while and went back into the funeral world. And the funeral home I was working for at the time was a fantastic family run funeral home here in Arizona and unfortunately, the gentleman who had started it began to age out, needed to take care of his wife who was also aging, and the people he left in charge were just cutting corners to make a dime and I really felt that they were going against everything the business was built on. And so, I left there and a former friend business partner of mine was like hey, I'm selling books and shoes on Amazon and making like a thousand dollars a week doing it. And I was like that sounds fantastic. I can sell books and shoes and figure this out.

Bradley Sutton:

What year are we talking about? About more or less?

Erica:

This was back in 2015, 2016.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so almost 10 years ago. Now, I think I asked you this before, but the funeral home did they have a Ghostbusters like a Hurst that you could drive?

Erica:

We did. In fact, my business partner that I started the e-commerce business with we had a custom coach made that was old timey looking. It was pretty sweet. It was Rosewood is the company Rosewood Coach and got to pick out custom colors and all the details and it was pretty awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So, working at the funeral home, you're like, hey, this is not what it used to be, and so I'm open to other ideas. And then you hear about Amazon, and then so your first entry into it was it books, was it arbitrage? How did you just kind of get into Amazon?

Erica:

It was a little of both. So it was kind of getting our feet wet going out and I would buy lots of books off of Craigslist and I had a Ford Explorer at the time and I would load up every ounce of Squarespace in that Explorer with lots of books that I could buy and figuring that out and it was just learning the pieces and putting it together of you know how to find what's what will sell on Amazon, how to find what won't, where your margins are going to be. It was a really fantastic place for us to start to get a full understanding of the Amazon game without a ton of investment required.

Bradley Sutton:

Were you still working at the funeral home and started this, or did you already leave and then now this is your only income, or what was that transition like?

Erica:

You know what? I had left the funeral home, I had about six months of income, and so it was one of those decisions that I either had to make this work and or it didn't, and I had to move on. So, I was just coming off of another failed business. I guess I'm an entrepreneur at heart and always looking for the next. I knew that I was capable of doing more, and so I was a little down. To be honest, I wasn't feeling great about things in life. I had left the funeral home, just had a failed business, and so this was kind of a I have nothing left to lose and all or nothing, and so I made the best of it over six months and was able to more than replace my income at the funeral home and decide to run with it and see how far I could take it and where we could go.

Bradley Sutton:

So, in that first year of selling on Amazon, or first of all, was it only Amazon, or were you also selling other websites? Or we're just talking about Amazon here?

Erica:

I was exclusively Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

How much did you gross in the first year and then profit off of that?

Erica:

I want to say, in our first year and I apologize, I don't have numbers in front of me we did about $200,000 our first year.

Bradley Sutton:

So how much like were you spending eight-hour days, kind of like, or more or less, or.

Erica:

Yeah, I would say about six to eight hours a day and more. A lot of that was figuring out. What's your strategy going to be? Are you going to do online arbitrage? Are you going to do in stores? I would go and spend hours just scanning every possible thing in any store that I could, just to get an idea of what are some restricted products, what are categories that needed gating. And as I began to do that, the first year or so I realized it was a hustle to go out and find that deal, like sometimes you struggled and sometimes it was a complete mess and you would spend days with nothing. It was a complete mess and you would spend days with nothing. And so, we began to look at different wholesale accounts of I'd like to prefer to pick up a phone and just replenish my inventory rather than going out and hustle to find it. And we set up random wholesale accounts with probably 20 different companies, seeing what worked and what didn't?

Bradley Sutton:

What was your line? Like you'd cold call them and then just say how would you get them on board.

Erica:

Well, to be honest, I think that I purchased a course of how to set up wholesale accounts I want to say it was like $1,000 or $1,500. And in turn they're like here's this list, and I think I bought a list off of them and they're like but be prepared to be told no 90% of the time. And I was like, yeah, no problem, I'm willing to make all these phone calls and see where it goes. And so, as I began to make these phone calls, every single person said yes to setting up a wholesale account. Now, I think times are a little bit different today than it was back in 2016 when I did this, but all they wanted was our reseller certificate and bam, we had a wholesale account. And so, then I was overwhelmed by these massive catalogs and I want to say we were selling everything from baby pacifiers to nun chucks and nail polish and everything in between. There was no rhyme or reason between what we sold. Using FBA, so everything was FBA.

Bradley Sutton:

So then, did you have your own warehouse, would you need to get all this stuff in and label it, or you would have these companies send it to Amazon for you.

Erica:

No, I had a card table set up in my bedroom with my computer and my label printer and it was absolutely ridiculous. You know, I'd fill my entire living room with boxes and it was one at a time opening them up, and I couldn't even afford the $8 pickup for UPS to come get it. Then I would load my car and carry all of it in. And it was. You know it was a hustle.

It was an adventure bootstrapping it, figuring it out, you know.

Bradley Sutton:

less labor-intensive kind of than the retail arbitrage where you're actually having to go out so much, you know, at least you could do it from your house and things like that right and no scotty peeler injuries so saved okay and then how? Did that progress? Did you just kind of like transition to only wholesale and cut out the books and arbitrage?

Erica:

We did so we transitioned into wholesale exclusively, and at that time we began to see a lot of these manufacturers had map pricing in place. So minimum advertised pricing. Minimum advertised pricing. So, if your item is supposed to sell for $49.99, I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that it's selling for $26. And by the time I was doing the math, I'm like these people are making pennies and I just couldn't understand this. And so, then I began to speak with our wholesaler more, and they began to tell us how frustrated these manufacturers are that nobody is taking care of Amazon and how upset their brick-and-mortar stores are, that people could go online and find it for less, and how they're losing out on money. And I would also find incorrect information and incorrect images. And so, I began to really pivot our business, seeing a huge hole in the industry between manufacturers and the e-commerce space. And so, I approached these manufacturers and I said, hey, what if you were to give me exclusivity on your product in exchange for me managing it on Amazon? And it's a win-win for everybody. I will do it for free. If you don't like me, you can fire me. I won't make you sign a contract or anything else.

Bradley Sutton:

When you say manufacturers, are these the same people that you were buying stuff from wholesale? And you're just like hey, can I have exclusive? Or were you buying from distributors? And you're like let me find who's the real manufacturer.

Erica:

So, I actually worked as a team with my distributor. I think that there's enough money to be made by everybody. Could I make more money going direct to the manufacturer? Absolutely, but he really opened those doors for me to the manufacturers direct, and so my agreement was you know, I'm going to continue buying it where I get it from in exchange for you know, everybody wins in this situation. So, the manufacturer wins, the distributor wins, and I felt like I came away a winner in that, and so we began to grow that way. we, I only do. I'm to the point now that I only work with brands that have brand registry done so that we could maximize and take advantage of all of the benefits that brand registry offers and it's grown.

Bradley Sutton:

At what point did you get into the adult products? Cause, that's pretty much all you do now, right? It's exclusively all you do, and how in the world did that transition happen?

Erica:

So, we found, as we began to look for local wholesalers because we're limited on funds and we had to keep our money moving we found one of our wholesale accounts was a rubber duck company and my former business partner was like, hey, I think they make a vibrator rubber duck. And so, we then discovered that there was a distributor here in Phoenix and reached out to them and that cut down a huge amount of our lead time because we could go and directly pick it up and we didn't have that extra delay in products coming in, because we were so new that tires were not something I knew to ask for or could get, especially as a new customer. And so, we started working exclusively with a distributor here and they're the ones who were fortunate enough to open up those doors for us directly working with the manufacturers.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, and then so did you like slowly just move everything in that direction because there was more profit, or how did that happen?

Erica:

You know, it became a passion to see these brands grow and I loved seeing these terrible listings with terrible images grow into something amazing watching sales increase. Their sales as a whole increase because brick and mortar stores were willing to pick them up more, without having that competition online and the low price, they said okay, well, as long as online is the same price as us, we're happy to carry it, and so it really builds the brand's overall health really.

Bradley Sutton:

And so, how long has it been now? how many years? Where are your kind of like, exclusively uh in the adult space?

Erica:

We started short in in 2016, so I'm in nine years, so it was right after.

Bradley Sutton:

So, it's been a while now.

Yeah, okay, which year was your peak, would you say. Was it during covid is? Is it every year you're growing, or did you have a peak a couple years ago?

Erica:

I've been extremely fortunate to grow every year, but definitely COVID was a massive peak, so during that time we owned two funeral homes and the e-commerce business. So those who are bored during that time.

Bradley Sutton:

So, you got back into the funeral home business then, after you had left that, yes, oh, hold on I skipped this part of the story.

Erica:

Okay, my former business partner had owned a funeral home in Sun City and we had partnered on the e-commerce business together. But I was the one who'd built the e-commerce business and we decided to open a second funeral home and said well if we're going to do that, let's partner on everything. And so, we did. Unfortunately, about two and a half years ago, we just went our own directions in life and I continued the e-commerce business and he went on his own direction.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. What do you think you're going to end this year sales wise? If you know we're over halfway through the year, what do you you'll end up gross?

Erica:

I think we'll be a little over two million this year in gross sales.

Bradley Sutton:

Wholesales obviously different kinds of profit margins and stuff. What's your target? Profit margins, after all your expenses, of what you're trying to clear so that you know whether you can take on this product or this account. What do you target?

Erica:

Well, if Amazon would quit upping their fees, it would be a lot better. Our goal is around 30%.

Bradley Sutton:

Good Lord, that's a lot. That's more than private label even sometimes, yeah, interesting.

Erica:

yeah it's a niche that really, I think that anybody can go into. I don't know about anybody, but well, it's definitely an avenue that others can pursue. There’re so many small companies out there that really their attention needs to be focused on building their brands and marketing and expansion and growth that if you're able to reach out and add some value and take on this piece to them. A lot of the companies I work with are small mom and pop companies and they've really become family, and that's the part that I think that I love the most is the relationships that I have in the industry, so truly everyone has become family.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, are you still going out there and looking for more accounts, or is all your growth just from growing the accounts that you do have? What can you contribute your growth to?

Erica:

For the most part, my growth, I think, has contributed towards just doing the right thing. I don't pursue any new accounts. I do have people who approach me often and I'm very selective on who I work with at this point.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you at the point now where you know you had said before you only talk to people that already have brand registry. But are you the one who's like making the list, like, like, let's say that you know you've been working with somebody for a year and they're like, hey, I've got this you know, pocket rocket 3.0 that's coming out brand new launch. Now are you the one who's making the listings and organizing the photography and the launch strategy, that stuff, or you just work with okay and the launch strategy that stuff, or you just work with Okay. So, it's almost as if you're running it like a private label ,even though it's not your private label but it's like you're not just buying product and reselling it. You're doing the steps that a private label seller would do, okay.

Erica:

Yeah, so I'm doing all of those steps. These are their babies, so they've poured their blood, sweat and tears into building, grow them the way that they want to see it done. So, I don't do anything that they're not okay with. I work closely with everybody and provide them annual reports. Here's where they're at somewhat quarterly reports. Want to see growth. Here's where we're struggling. Here's a higher level of returns on this product. Let's try to figure out why, and so we really work together in growing this, and so I feel like it's a huge honor and a huge privilege to be given this level of trust.

Bradley Sutton:

Tell the audience about, like, some of the differences of selling in this category compared to, you know, the average category where you know you can pretty much you know, do anything you want. What are some of the restrictions as far as that goes in the adult category?

Erica:

Our biggest challenge is the lack of ability to advertise, so there is no advertising allowed. They are extremely restrictive on images. That's been probably my biggest challenge lately is that I'll have some images published on one variation and they block my images on another variation. Why, who knows? It's Amazon. We don't know why they do what they do most of the time and you know, language is extremely important. There's a lot of words that unfortunately, we can't use in writing copy.

Bradley Sutton:

You know like, obviously there's words that you know adult, words that a non-adult category wouldn't want to use, because then you get classified as in the adult. But you're saying, even if you are in the adult category, there's still limitations on the verbiage you can use.

Erica:

Correct, correct. And we're even behind a virtual black curtain, in that you can go into Amazon and there are listings that pop up who are not listed in the adult category and eventually you get caught. So, I really don't recommend it if you're looking for longevity on Amazon, but in order to even find sexual wellness products, you have to go under health and household and then you can begin to search for them, and a lot of times then even you have to hit sexual wellness to locate items.

Bradley Sutton:

Advertising, obviously, is what brings eyeballs to products, and especially when you launch, you might not be on top of page one right away. So, you use advertising to get to the top of page one and then hopefully, your organic rank increases. But then now, without advertising, when you have newer products like, how are you getting placed on? How are you getting to page one for your main keywords? Are you sending outside traffic? is it just a slow roll that that you know? You cross promote your different products, what's your strategy there?

Erica:

It's a mix between all of the brands. So, some brands um, I have one in particular that they've completely built their entire branding off of social media. So, he has a social media background and it's where he came from and he decided to do a product launch to see, thought it would be fun and see where he would take it, and had a ton of success with that. I have other brands that have been around for decades and so people are very aware of the brand name and pursue it that way, and we'll highlight items within the storefronts. We do some online advertising with different brands, so it's really different between what these manufacturers are looking for across the brand, so it's different with everybody.

Bradley Sutton:

The rest, though, of the whole Amazon journey is it pretty much similar as any other Helium 10 user like you're running Cerebro on maybe your competitors’ listings or tracking your keywords and things like that.

Erica:

Yes, so I'm back, new to Helium 10. It's been a few years and I'm realizing how much my business needed it. So there's a lot of tools and a lot of words and a lot of content, a lot of features that really I needed to get me to the next level, because I've been doing it for so long that you think you know what you know until you get to the point that you realize that a lot of the information that you used to use and used to know is dated and out of date, and so I'm missing the boat and, I'm kind of kicking myself a little bit now, realizing that I'm a little late to the game.

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe you left some money on the table the last couple of years.

Erica:

Yeah, a little late, but then never right.

Bradley Sutton:

Is it now to the point? Obviously, you know $2 million of the products you're not labeling and stuff in your bedroom anymore. So, do you have a warehouse or do you just tell them, hey, put this sticker on your products and then send it to Amazon? How does that work?

Erica:

Yeah, that's exactly what I do. So, I have a couple of warehouses that I work with and they take care of all the fulfillment for me. So, I did seller FBA for a while. I was not a big fan, especially with Amazon's page view requirements and next day shipping requirements. It just got to the point that it was not profitable.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, seller, fulfilled prime where, where you, you have to deliver it to the customer in like a day or two. Uh, and hit those deadlines, yeah.

Erica:

Yeah, I did that for a while and then it just got out of control and unrealistic, so I went back to FBA and it's it. It's worked out well.

Bradley Sutton:

Any horror stories over the last five years you know other than you know. All of a sudden, they shut down one of your listings because of one of the images they don't like, but anything really like where the whole account has gotten shut down, or lawsuits over somebody saying, hey, I use this lotion and it made me amputate my leg, I don't know. Whatever the heck. Anything weird has come up since you've been selling on Amazon.

Erica:

Well, I mean, you always get crazy returns

Bradley Sutton:

how do you even take returns in this category?

Erica:

You're not supposed to. It violates. But somehow, they allow it. But I did have a very sweet lady write me a handwritten letter about how her brother bought her a vibrator and how she. Yeah, about how she appreciates the kindness and thoughtfulness behind it, but it's not really for her and it is not used and she would really appreciate if we would give her brother her money back.

Bradley Sutton:

yeah, that family might have some issues that that should not be the kind of thing you give to a sibling. Okay, interesting,

Erica:

She was in her 70’s and wrote this beautiful.

Bradley Sutton:

now it's even more interesting, oh my goodness gracious!

Erica:

So weird. So, I was like okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, what about on the opposite side, any other funny story? Hey, because of these products you saved my marriage or something, messages like that, or just like something really cool that's happened, like amazing prime day, or you had a product go viral, or anything like that.

Erica:

Yeah, I've had some messages that they're lubed into riven time and so, unfortunately, they suffered severe chafing and they would appreciate if I could deliver on time. This was fulfilled by amazon, not me, but I was like well okay, I don't know what to tell you. I'm sorry that you experienced this. Other than that, you know I've been shut down a few times. Unfortunately, some customers claimed they received inauthentic product or used product, which can never be the case based on how we operate and how Amazon operates. And so, you know, you're down for a day or two, you submit invoices, you're back up. So, as frustrating and as annoying as that is, you know it is fixable.

Bradley Sutton:

I haven't said anything that can happen to any um Amazon seller. Okay, what are you know, other than certain words that Amazon doesn't approve, and I'm assuming that Amazon doesn't necessarily give you the exact list. It's just kind of like a you'll know when you know, but what? What give you the exact list is just kind of like a you'll know when you know, but what? What if anybody else is getting interested in getting into this niche? how do you know what words not to use, like what images for sure you can't use Like what? What are some of the guidelines that people need to know?

Erica:

There are some guidelines within the back end. I think that they're extremely vague, um, but they do not like product images in hands, um, even textbook terms like nipples and footrests and things like that you're not able to use in your texts. The only trick that I've found into finding out what is okay and not okay is when you submit a plus content. So, a plus content then gives you the red flag. Red flag you need to remove this word. But as far as Seller Central goes and writing your copy and it not being published, you just have no idea and you open up cases and you get a very generic response back. Nobody tells you specifics and so really, it's been a trial and an error of what they'll allow and what they won't allow.

Bradley Sutton:

So, you mentioned A-plus content, so obviously, obviously that's allowed in your niche. Other, what about like things like virtual bundles or other things? Is it just that strict advertising, like there's no sponsored product, no sponsored brand ads, no videos? Yeah, video could never work in this niche.

Bradley Sutton:

But videos, but not advertise. Oh, so you have videos like for your listing.

Erica:

I do so. Not every product has a video, but there are quite a few videos that I'm able to post on the listings.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh well, that's kind of mind boggling to me, Like I would think that definitely that would be kind of hard to be able to have a compliant one, but okay.

Erica:

Yeah, welcome to Amazon, but you just can't yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

How about like amazon post. Are you allowed to do those?

Erica:

No, no posts. Um, I'm able to do brand stories, a plus content, videos, and then storefronts and storefronts, are you know? Again, you have to be careful with images and words that you use. It's like anything. Sometimes you submit it to Amazon and they'll say something is wrong with page one, and then you submit it again and page one is just fine and page three has an issue, and so you just go through and kind of whack them all until you get it to where it's okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you selling on other platforms as well, or just Amazon?

Erica:

We do a little bit of Walmart as well, and I just got my TikTok storefront approved, so I'm working on pursuing that as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. So, do you know what's the? Is that a lot is that kind of products allowed on TikTok shop?

Erica:

They are. So, one of my manufacturers that I work with that's really how he's built his business. You just have to. There's a lot of guidelines and rules, so I'm fortunate to have a mentor in this area that's going to be able to guide me on that, because this is something new and outside of anything I've ever done.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, let me just warn you, you, you could potentially get real busy real fast, like, I know people who, within a couple months of starting on Amazon or a TikTok shop, already surpassed their Amazon sales, and I can imagine if that's I was curious, if it was allowed that this would be the perfect product for TikTok shop, because you know influencers, which is what it's driven by like your stuff could definitely go viral. So, okay, you might have to expand out your three-employee team there soon.

Erica:

So, that's, yeah, it's. It's totally new realm to me. So, I we'll see how it goes. What's the worst thing that can happen, right.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, right. So, you referenced that, hey, you're happier back using helium 10 now and that you've noticed already some things that you could have been doing before. What are some of those things I like? What have you know, even though you came in as like an experienced seller and then, not having used helium 10 for years, it's almost like as if you're a new Helium 10 user. So, what were some of the things that have already, kind of like changed up your SOPs on how you how you do things?

Erica:

So, I love your keyword tracking and I love competitor tracking. Those have been huge because I could never figure out what they were doing and I wasn't. That's been my biggest thing. And I also love my ranking on my product page of where am I scoring? You know, some of my listings. I'm like wow, I didn't realize how short I was falling here or copy wasn't displaying, and so I'm going through and re-digging through everything as I go and finding it's allowing me to completely clean up my product catalog and to maximize clean up my product catalog and to maximize every single word, every single image, every single phrase that I'm using to at least optimize where I'm ranking in keywords. If I realize I'm missing out on opportunities of advertising, but let's maximize what I can do.

Bradley Sutton:

What are strategies you think just here, in brief, like that you can say to anybody, regardless of what category they're in? That's really helped you, because it takes a special little something to be able to have a three-person team and manage the number of SKUs you have and scale it to this amount and at that kind of profitability. That's not something that just anybody off the street can do. So, what are a couple of things that you think are working in your favor here?

Erica:

I'm a big believer in always doing the right thing and never chasing money. So, I think when you do the right thing, the money follows, and so, unfortunately, I've seen on Amazon over the years that people try to make a quick dime and you do. You can make a quick dime on Amazon, but it's never works in your favor on the longevity of doing things. So that's my number one thing is to do the right thing even when people aren't watching it. You know, if you don't have manufacturers watching, if you know, no matter who's looking over your shoulder, to never do it to make a quick buck. And the second thing is I think that, no matter what the industry is, go and start having conversations. Whether you go to a coffee expo, find out local expos that are coming to town, and start having conversations with manufacturers and look for opportunities.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you planning to go to Amazon Accelerate in Seattle?

Erica:

No, I'm not going this year, unfortunately, I know.

Bradley Sutton:

Anybody else out there who wants to go. You can't get tickets from Helium 10, but just go to h10.me/accelerate, I think, is the link to go. But yeah, I was about to say it would have been cool to be able to meet you in person over there. If anybody is interested, we're going to have a special event that's normally only for Elite members, but we're going to open it up to a few others. So, if anybody's interested in registering, only register, guys. If you're going to go, use h10.me forward slash Seattle. We're doing an event on the 16th of September, the day before Amazon Accelerate. We'll have Kevin King there, Destaney Jeff from Amazon, Melanie from Avasa. We have a lot of cool speakers and some networking and partying to do. If you were there, you would have been the toast of the town, I think, everybody wanting to pick your brain on your interesting story there. But we'll have to meet up at another event another time. Well, thank you so much, Erica, for joining us and telling us your very unique story. There are some people that you can probably say I'm sure somebody else has done something pretty similar. There's probably nobody who has gone from funeral homes to selling books and adult products. I think it was really nice.

Erica:

I get you coming and going.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, okay. I wonder how many people throughout this had a that's what she said like in the back of their minds, or some puns like we could have had a field day with today's content, but that one was. That's a perfect way to end the episode there, I guess.

So, anyways, Erica, I definitely want to reach out to you next year, have after another year under your belt of selling, to see what new things you've learned or what new Helium 10 tools you're using and maybe did you hit 3 million or not, so look forward to bringing you back on the show sometime next year.

Erica:

Awesome, sounds great, thank you.

#584 - Amazon Search Query Performance & Product Opportunity Explorer Breakdown

Join us in this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast with the inspiring journey with Mansour Norouzi, a former civil engineer who has successfully transitioned to becoming an e-commerce advertising expert in Canada. In this episode, Mansour shares his story of moving from managing residential construction projects to launching his own Amazon brand in late 2018. Listen in as he discusses his discovery of Amazon advertising, starting by managing campaigns for others and eventually partnering with Incrementum Digital. Mansour's experience in launching a supplement brand and more in Canada offers valuable insights into leveraging Amazon data points and successfully transitioning careers.

We also explore the utility and limitations of Amazon's Search Query Performance report. This often misunderstood data can be a goldmine for sellers when used correctly. Discover how Search Query Performance and the Product Opportunity Explorer can aid in ad testing, monitoring keyword trends, and understanding click-through and conversion rates compared to competitors. Learn about the challenges of scaling data analysis across multiple ASINs and the potential benefits of API integration. For a holistic brand view, focusing on top-performing products and key keywords is recommended, and the need for more streamlined solutions from Amazon is highlighted.

The episode also covers optimizing advertising strategies on different platforms, including the nuanced differences between Walmart and Amazon. Mansour discusses the effectiveness of auto campaigns on Walmart and the importance of advanced placement controls for desktop and mobile optimization. Additionally, integrating Amazon data with Amazon seller tools like Helium 10 and conducting market share analysis using Market360 are emphasized for better insights. Finally, we dive into evolving strategies for cost-effective customer acquisition, sharing practical tips and real-world examples that have helped brands improve performance metrics over the past several months. Tune in for an episode packed with actionable strategies and inspiring success stories!

In episode 584 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Mansour discuss:

• 00:00 - Leveraging Amazon Data Points for Success
• 04:57 - Transition From Engineering to Entrepreneurship
• 07:40 - Optimizing Performance With Amazon Search Data
• 11:43 - Challenges of Scaling Search Query Performance
• 18:26 - Analyzing Market Trends for Sales Success
• 19:56 - Understanding Brand Metrics for Amazon Success
• 26:49 - Amazon's Free Visibility Advantage
• 28:04 - Optimizing Advertising Strategies for E-Commerce
• 29:23 - Differentiating Amazon Data vs Helium 10
• 32:30 - Forecasting Strategy for Amazon Sellers
• 35:09 - Driving Cost-Effective Acquisition Strategy

► 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

Helium 10 Buzz 8/2/24: Amazon Bullet Point Change | Labor Day Sale Upcoming | (More) New Amazon Fees

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, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.

Amazon is responsible for dangerous products sold on its site, federal agency rules
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/amazon-responsible-dangerous-products-sold-site-federal-agency-rules-rcna164309

Etsy Is Getting Loyalty Program for Its Most Dedicated Shoppers
https://gizmodo.com/etsy-is-getting-loyalty-program-for-its-most-dedicated-shoppers-2000481536

AWS Outage Hits Amazon Services, Ring, Whole Foods, Alexa
https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2024/aws-outage-hits-amazon-services-ring-whole-foods-alex

Amazon looks to reduce costs to compete more aggressively on price as consumer habits shift
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/amazon-looks-to-reduce-costs-to-compete-more-aggressively-on-price/

Dozens of angry Chinese suppliers swarmed Temu's office, saying they're tired of giving Westerners refunds without returns
https://www.businessinsider.com/temus-office-besieged-chinese-suppliers-protesting-refund-policy-2024-7

New landing page in Sponsored Brands Grow brand impression share goal
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/grow-brand-impression-share-with-new-landing-page/

Scale your message with priority delivery using Prime Video programmatic guaranteed deals
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/scale-your-message-using-prime-video-programmatic-guaranteed-deals/

Harvest high performing targets with Target Promotion, now available for Sponsored Products advertisers in UCM ads console
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/target-promotion-for-sponsored-products/

This episode is jam-packed with news and insights to help you stay ahead in the competitive world of selling on Amazon, Walmart, and ecommerce!

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Bradley covers:

• 00:50 - Amazon Recall Change
• 02:40 - New Bullet Point Rules
• 06:23 - Etsy Prime?
• 07:01 - Amazon Outage
• 07:43 - New Amazon Fees
• 09:50 - Amazon Cost Cutting
• 11:30 - Product Images Update
• 13:22 - On Time Delivery Policy
• 15:42 - Temu Sellers Gone Wild
• 17:38 - Labor Day Sale
• 18:16 - FBA Capacity Fees
• 19:51 - New Sponsored Brand Page
• 21:24 - Prime Video Ads
• 22:03 - Keyword Harvesting
• 24:04 - Sellerfest Online 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:

Amazon is changing its bullet point requirements. There is yet another new fee that Amazon sellers are going to have to pay. Temu sellers in China storm the Temu offices in protest. 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'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 are going on in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. Today might be a first. There's so much news today. I think there might be a total of 14 or possibly more news articles that affect e-commerce sellers out there. So a very abnormal week. Let's go ahead and hop right into it.

Bradley Sutton:

The first news story that we're going to talk about today is from NBC News and it is entitled Amazon is responsible for dangerous products sold in its site. Federal agency rules, all right. So the Consumer Product Safety Commission is classifying Amazon, it says, as a distributor of the product and therefore bears legal responsibility for a recall. You know, in the past Amazon kind of like had this stance where they're like hey, we're not the sellers. It's third party sellers. You know like we'll do what we can to keep customers safe, but we're not the ones who are responsible for it. But now this ruling says that Amazon has to notify customers about and remove products deemed dangerous that it sells through its website. Federal regulators ruled on Tuesday, all right. So basically it's saying that, hey, amazon bears legal responsibility for product recalls, even if they are sold by us. You know, third party sellers. I guess there was a few years ago, three years ago, there was about 400,000 products sold that had faulty carbon monoxide alarms and and flammable children's pajamas, that's. I shouldn't laugh at that. But that's like who? Who is selling flammable children's pajamas? Like what kind of quality control are you guys doing? And flammable hairdryer, and they're subject to this order. But you know Amazon says it's already removed and notified customers about it. But anyways, you know like this might seem like, hey, we're not selling flammable pajamas, what does this have to do with me? But you know if this requires a lot more procedures or things that Amazon is going to have to do, well, you know there's costs that come with that and we might see some of the cost of that. Now, on the flip side. You know, let's say, there are sellers from other countries, like factories that are are selling, you know, not high quality things that are dangerous. Now it looks like maybe Amazon might take a more proactive approach and so you know, hey, this could help Amazon sellers long term.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is going to Seller Central. Spend a little bit of time on this one because this is interesting. I think a lot of sellers are going to find this important and it's entitled Review Updated Bullet Point Requirements to Optimize your Listing. All right, so effective in a couple of weeks, on August 15, 2024,. It says Amazon is updating its bullet point requirements. All right, so we announced this a long time ago, actually, where it was for hardline. Now it says here that the main points is restriction of special characters, emojis and some phrases such as refund related guarantees. Now, supposedly, you know like Amazon a while back said no more emojis, but we haven't seen that policed too much. So now that it's kind of like coming out with it a little bit in a more official capacity, perhaps like could this mean that you know, listings might start getting suppressed, or things like that. Well, let's read on here. Other thing is it says is that one change is you're going to have guidance to help you create high quality bullet points that are clear and concise.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now here's the thing. They're going to use AI to help optimize listing quality. They're going to remove non-compliant content and use AI to generate compliant, high quality bullet points. Supposedly they're going to share these with you for review before published. But again, this is kind of like something like before. We talked about how Amazon has image requirements, we're going to talk about that later and then, if you're not meeting the requirements, amazon could go in there and change your images. They can go in there and change your title, and then you're kind of stuck with that. So, buyer beware now, hey us. Or seller beware. I guess I should say, if you're a seller, who's kind of like towing the line and then using emojis or using things that you shouldn't. Potentially this kind of like policy might state that, hey, you're giving Amazon the right to go in there and put some AI thing or put what it thinks is valid, and in the past, when Amazon does that, you know, be it with images or be it with titles, once that happens, it's like you can't change it back, right. So it's kind of a serious thing Now that article that was in your seller central dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

It says hey, don't put a sense, don't put N a or not applicable or not eligible or TBD or copy pending. Don't do any of that. It says don't use phrases such as eco-friendly, environmentally friendly, ecologically friendly antibacterial made from bamboo I didn't realize. Made from bamboozle. I have a bamboo brand. I didn't realize. Made from bamboo. I have a bamboo brand. I didn't realize that that's not allowed. Made from soy or contained soy. You can't say hey, if not satisfied, send it back. Full refund, unconditional guarantee with no limit, not allowed to say those things. Obviously no company information there, no repetition.

Bradley Sutton:

It says and then you have to include at least three bullet points as far as character limits, as hey, uh, use more than 10 characters but less than 255, uh characters. So something to think about. Like, uh, you might want to do an audit on your listings. Make sure that you're compliant instead of like just taking the chance that you know Amazon might just slap you on the wrist and you can just remove your emojis or something later on. So curious, what do you the wrist and you can just remove your emojis or something later on. So I'm curious, are you guys going to just take this seriously, or maybe think that's kind of like their image requirements where Amazon doesn't enforce it too much, or hey, they've been saying bullet points, no emojis for years and I've been able to get away with it. What are you going to do? Are you going to keep going or are you going to actually change it this time? Let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Gizmodo and it's entitled Etsy is getting a loyalty program for its most dedicated shopper. So this is going to be an invite only closed beta. It's going to cost $5 a month and kind of like. Makes me think of Walmart plus. You know Amazon prime target three, 60, where it's a membership buyer called Etsy insider. So it's not called Etsy Prime, but it's called Etsy Insider and it's going to offer exclusive benefits to buyers. So something very similar perhaps to what you guys know about Amazon Prime is now coming to Etsy. So is that going to increase sales, increase loyalty on the Etsy platform? Will be interesting to find out.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from CRN.com and it's entitled AWS outage has Amazon services, ring, whole foods and Alexa. Um, you know a lot of stuff in this article. Maybe doesn't, you think doesn't apply. But this is maybe what happened. Like how many of you guys out there, I saw a lot of message boards and groups where, talking about a few days ago, the seller central dashboard was glitching like crazy, you couldn't even get into your Amazon advertising, et cetera. So it probably is related to this. So I saw some people saying, hey, is it just me or you're not able to get your data? Well, it's no, it wasn't just you. There was this big outage that even affected whole foods, uh, supermarkets from Amazon. So don't worry, it looks like everything's back to normal. Uh, but you weren't the only one affected, if that was affecting you.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article, back to Seller Central Dashboard, and it's entitled Digital Service Fees Effective October 1st. So guess what, guys? We have got yet another set of fees, but it's not anything huge and it's because of some kind of regulation. So it says the Canadian government recently implemented a DST Digital Services Tax similar to those of the UK, France, Italy and Spain, and so on October 1st, we're going to start introducing a digital services fee to account for DST. Now, who does this apply to? All right, well, this DST rate is 2% in the UK, 3% in Canada, France, Italy and Spain. But it depends on the location of the buyer, the location of your business, et cetera.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you are a USA seller and you only sell in US, all right, so you're a US-based company and you're selling Amazon USA, you're not going to have to worry about any of this. All right, it's not going to apply. But if you sell in Amazon USA but your business is established in a country in which DST has been introduced UK, France, Spain, Canada now the sales in your Amazon USA store is going to apply to this DST fee. All right, so it is a 3% fee in the US store. Now you might be thinking 3%, good grief. Now that's crazy. If I'm already paying 15%, what? It's 18%? No, it's 3% of your Amazon seller fees. So if your seller fee is $2.25, like it is on a $15 item, you're paying only 7 cents more because it's 3% of that 225, as opposed to 3% of the 15. All right. And another example they gave here is if your product is in the UK, uh, that's going to be a 2% fee based on the Amazon fee, all right. So, so make sure to check your dashboard If you're not sure. Hey, is this going to apply to you? Um, you know, if you're outside of Canada and these other places, check the fee schedule in your dashboard for more information. But hey, it's not going to be a surprise if something is coming months from now and Amazon is giving everybody a heads up on it.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article here is from CRN.com and it's entitled Amazon looks to reduce costs to compete more aggressively on price as consumer habits shift. All right, so a lot of this was on their Q2 report. You know they actually had some. The shares of Amazon went down. But whenever you have these reports there's always some interesting tidbits that Amazon kind of like not leaks but mentions, and it kind of can give you insights into what their plan is in the future. And then one thing that Andy Jassy was saying is they're trying to make cost improvements, all right. And the thing that I thought affected sellers is. It says here Jassy said that the company will expand its use of automation and robots, continue to build out its same day delivery network Okay, great so far further regionalize its inbound network and strive for better inventory placement. He says it's going to enable faster speeds, more orders per box, and then here we go Fewer inventory transfers once items hit fulfillment centers. So that's the part that I liked. The other stuff, whether Amazon's using robots or not I don't know how that's going to affect me, but how many times have you had some inventory and all of a sudden it goes into transfer status or reserve status and then a lot of times that's because Amazon's having to move it around to different warehouses. Well, I think this is definitely going to help because the less you know, the more it kind of like you know distributes your inventory in a correct way and doesn't have to redistribute. Well, that's going to. That's going to help. You know your, your buyability, in my opinion, and how much you know units you have available to sellers or to buyers, and then you then it's going to help the shipping times as well. So let's see how this works out, if sellers are going to have an advantage because of these changes.

Bradley Sutton:

Our next article is going back to the Seller Central dashboard and it's entitled Update to how Product Detail Page Images Are Selected. So back in January on the Weekly Buzz, we had talked about how product details pages for hard lines product types are going to start displaying, potentially, images from multiple sellers. All right, now, in the coming months, this article says it's going to now include both soft lines and consumable products types. All right, and supposedly this is going to help increase sales. Um, but you know the they made a couple of tweaks to it since January. All right, they're going to prioritize brand owner images, thank goodness. All right. So if you're a brand registered owner, it's not like you're just going to automatically get your images removed. Um, and they're only going to use Amazon or brand registered sellers content If the required images are missing in the product detail page or to upgrade low quality content.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is what I talked about a little bit earlier, about what's going on, where sometimes, if Amazon says, hey, if you're not hitting our requirements on images, on title, on bullet points, we're going to step in and make necessary changes that we see fit. Now, again, this is the thing that I brought up like seven months ago, back in January. That I thought was super noteworthy, and they're reiterating it here. It says, as a reminder, each product detail page must have at least three required images one with the product on white background main image. One with a product in an environment that's what we call lifestyle images and one with product information such as dimensions or nutritional facts. This is an infographic. January was the first time I ever saw this where Amazon is basically saying you need a white background image, you need an infographic. January was the first time I ever saw this where Amazon is basically saying you need a white background image, you need an infographic and a lifestyle image. So they're reiterating that requirement. Now, you know, like three years ago you never, you only saw the white background image and the rest of the images could be whatever you wanted it. So, so make sure your images, guys, are in compliance.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, the next article back to the seller central dashboard. I mean, it seems like they they just seems like they just spit all these things out back to back to back 're going to have to maintain a 90% OTDR on time delivery rate. All right, I don't know what it was before. I mean, 90% seems pretty reasonable, like I thought it was a hundred percent that you pretty much had to do, but it's recommending that you actually do 95% according to this article. And obviously this does not apply at all to FBA, you know, because sellers aren't responsible for on-time delivery promises. Okay, now another thing is transit time settings. Now, before this September 25th date, on August 25th, the transit time requirements are going to be updated to match delivery capabilities of shipping services. So if you're shipping within the continental US you know that means that's not including Puerto Rico and Hawaii and Alaska you have to have a maximum transit time of only five days for standard and eight days for free economy shipping. Now this is interesting to me because I know some sellers who are doing FBM. You know, including myself.

Bradley Sutton:

You know maybe your initial reaction is like oh, this is going to be a pain in the neck. But remember what was announced in the Weekly Buzz a few weeks ago by Carrie about how Amazon might have like a Teemu-ish kind of like setup where Chinese sellers can ship directly within like eight to 10 days. Well, if that happens, who knows, maybe this is kind of like a protection for those of you shipping for full but fulfilled by merchant domestically, where you're going to have a guaranteed advantage over those Chinese direct shipping where you know the buyer is going to see five days delivery time, all right. So this five day delivery time, it's because Amazon's going to be displaying this as the as the shipping time for the product. And then if the Temu ish ones have like eight to 10 days, well, you, the Temu-ish ones have like eight to 10 days. Well, you know, this might help you know the buyability of your products. There's a lot more information here in this detailed article on your Seller Central dashboard, so make sure to check it out when you can. If you are an FBM seller, if you do 100% FBA, you can just go ahead and forget about that article, as it doesn't apply to you.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, speaking of Temu, this next article is kind of funny. Like sometimes, I think, amazon sellers, you know, like, especially when I read message boards, they get on the same page. They want to complain about the same thing of Amazon. Have you guys ever fantasized about or like thought about, let's all get together and let's like storm Amazon's headquarters not storm it, but, like you know, let's go there and let Bezos or let Jassy know how we feel and see if we can get up a meeting. Well, that might seem comical and like not realistic, but that is like literally what happened in Temu last week. All right, so this is an article for Business Insider and it says dozens of angry Chinese suppliers swarmed Temu's office saying they're tired of giving Westerners refunds without returns. Now, 80 people got in the building. There's like 300 people this article says was protesting and then 80 of them actually were able to storm the building here and they're disgruntled. So I know we're kind of jealous of what's going on with Temu sellers. Man, how could we ever match the prices? But not all is rosy over there. So these Temu suppliers are upset that Temu is trying to recruit US-based sellers and they're also upset about the refund policy.

Bradley Sutton:

So if they ship something from China to the customer and the customer says you know what, I don't like this product, it looks like I didn't realize this. I've never bought one thing from Temu myself, but Temu just returns the money and they don't even have to return the product to the, the product to the customer. So, like the sellers are up in arms about this. One merchant said told this Chinese newspaper that he lost almost all of his profits when he was fined $400,000 for customer refunds and complaints. First of all, holy crap, if he profited $400,000, how much did he actually sell in the last you know a few months? But anyways, this is what's going on in Temu. Don't get any ideas, guys. I don't think if 300 of you tried to storm Amazon Seattle offices that 80 are going to get through. Pretty sure Amazon has got some pretty tight security over here.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Next article, again going back to Seller Central. It's not necessarily a prime day, but there is going to be a special Labor Day sale that Amazon is going to have. All right, it's actually entitled Labor Day sale and this is going to begin August 26th and runs through September 3rd. All right, so right. There's going to be deals that you can offer and these are time bound promotional offers and go to advertising, go to deals hit, create new deals and then select the week of the 26th and then that's going to go ahead and see if you're eligible to be able to have a special Labor Day sale deal. All right, the next article is for the last time, I believe again going back to Seller Central Dashboard, and this is an article about peak readiness and timelines for FBA capacity limits.

Bradley Sutton:

Now a couple important things. Number one a date that you have to keep in mind. It says if you want to guarantee you're going to have the prime badge for black Friday we're looking way ahead you have to have your inventory in the fulfillment centers by October 19th. So set a reminder for yourself. However you ship your inventory to Amazon, you've got to have it in the fulfillment centers by October 19th. Now that's kind of crazy if you think about it. When is Black Friday? Isn't that like November? You got to get your stuff. Don't think that you're going to send it in the beginning of November. You got to get your stuff in there pretty early. And one more thing here about fees and actual elimination of a fee. You know for once. Isn't that nice. It says additionally, to help you simplify operations and manage inventory more efficiency during peak, we have eliminated this overage fee for storage effective July 1st 2024. So if your on-hand inventory exceeds your capacity limit, you are not going to get this overage fee. All right. So that's, how often is it that there's a reduction or elimination of fees? Usually the announcements we we give her are about new fees that Amazon is charging. So that's a nice little welcome surprise from Amazon this week. If you want more information on that, make sure to check that news article in your dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now we've got a few Amazon ads announcements, all right. So for those of you who are doing PPC, we have got some advanced ones, some beginners ones. Let's go ahead and hop into that. The first one from Amazon advertising. They announced new landing page in sponsored brand grow brand impression share goal Right. So what is this? That launch says the sponsored brand grow brand impression share campaign now allows advertisers to utilize a new landing page option in the product collection ad format. So you can select three products to advertise and then that's going to lead shoppers from a top of search ad to a new brand landing page containing these products.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So one of the differences is now this is a new type of landing page that Amazon creates that buyers can land on. So sellers who even don't have a formally prerequisite Amazon store brand store which hopefully you guys have, but that used to be a requirement to be able to advertise some of your top of search ads Well, now you don't need that prerequisite stores to say you can just start this campaign super quick and ensure the brand product discovery experience. So where this is is under your goals when you set up a new sponsored brand campaign, one of the goals is grow brand impression share and now you can choose, once you, if you select that one, the product collection ad format, and then there's a brand new section right here that says new landing page and says pick products to advertise and we'll create a landing page for you here. For those of you watching on YouTube, I'm showing an example of the shoe brand. Who's got one of these set up right now and where this is now available. It's across the board North America, south America, Europe, middle East and Asia Pacific East and Asia Pacific. Next news article from Amazon advertising.

Bradley Sutton:

It says scale your message with priority delivery using Prime Video programmatic guaranteed deals. I'm not going to go too much into details because probably not that many of you are using Prime Video ads, but basically they launch programmatic guaranteed deals for Prime Video so you can have run of service deals, contextual deals that can go on, like you know top best of TV shows, page best of movies, best of Prime Video originals, et cetera, and then audience based deals. Check the link in the comments below or the description below If you want, if you're somebody who uses Prime Video ads and you can get a little bit more information on this. Last article of the day is an announcement from Amazon Advertising says on this last article of the day is an announcement from amazon advertising says harvest high performing targets with target promotion now available for sponsored products advertisers. So this is kind of like funny. It's like like very similar to what like atomic and another you know PPC software does where you can supposedly harvest keywords from like auto campaigns and move it to a manual. Now I tried to test this in my account and it wasn't working. So like just got a bunch of error messages. But for those of you who aren't using software, you know this is a potential option for you. Um, I'm not sure I can suggest using it yet because I got to see first how the suggestions work. You know, like if Amazon's algorithms was perfect in advertising, they wouldn't we wouldn't even have to negative match keywords because once we get like 30, 40 clicks they would start negative matching itself. But no, if we don't do anything, amazon's still going to keep charging us. So you know that in mind, like I'm not sure if we can, you know, quote unquote just trust this Amazon suggestion thing to move keywords in the right way. But who knows, maybe it's going to be pretty cool thing to move keywords in the right way. But who knows, maybe it's going to be pretty cool.

Bradley Sutton:

But for me it doesn't affect me much because I've been doing keyword harvesting for four years using Helium 10 Atomic. I set my rules and I say, hey, if one of my auto or broad campaign gets two orders at this ACoS or less, I want you to go ahead and move it to this campaign and I could exactly set up the flow. So there's nothing that is coming out here that is going to really affect the way I do things, but maybe for those of you who are just trying to eyeball your Amazon advertising and not even using the search term reports and not making pivot tables and not using software or whatever, maybe this might be a feature that can help you a little bit. So check out your advertising console, go to one of your auto campaigns, go to the ad group, go to the search terms page and take a look there. Does it show you something that? Uh? Does it give you suggestions on what you can move? Uh, it did it on mine because it was broken, but maybe it's working on yours. Let me know what you think and I'll leave a message in the comments below. All right, that's finally it for the news this week.

Bradley Sutton:

One last thing I wanted to give you a heads up. I'm going to be giving some cool strategies at the Seller Fest online next week. So if you want to get free tickets. I think it's free. I'm not sure if it's free or not but for more information, go to h10.me/sellerfest. Even if you have to pay, it'll be worth it. There's going to be tons of great speakers uh, other than myself as well, so I'm sure you're going to get a lot of value. h10.me/sellerfest for more information. All right, guys who that literally made a record? We've been doing Weekly Buzz for four years and this was the most articles, the most news stories in one week that we have ever had. So thank you, guys. For those of you who stuck to the end, let's see what's going to happen next week. Make sure to tune in next Thursday or Friday to see what's buzzing.

#583 - Build An Unbeatable Amazon Brand

Can bold, provocative branding be the key to skyrocketing your success on Amazon? In this episode, we are joined by the insightful Emma Schermer Tamir of Marketing by Emma, as she unpacks the art of building an iconic brand that doesn’t just blend in but stands out in a crowded marketplace. Alongside Kevin King, Emma demystifies the elements of branding beyond mere logos and names, highlighting actionable strategies to boost profitability and customer lifetime value. Using the example of selling water, she makes a compelling case for unique value propositions and effective communication with target customers.

Discover how AI can be a game-changer for your Amazon branding strategy. We discuss powerful techniques for competitor analysis, from examining social media presence to dissecting customer feedback. Emma explains how AI tools can streamline this process, allowing you to build comprehensive customer avatars that include demographic details, emotional drivers, and cultural references. By examining the bold and provocative marketing strategies of Liquid Death, we showcase the importance of truly understanding your target audience and aligning your brand to meet their needs and expectations.

Creating and maintaining a cohesive and evolving brand identity is more critical than ever. Emma shares the importance of continuously updating your customer avatar to reflect the shifting behaviors and needs of your market. She further explores the concept of imagining your business as a person, ensuring that every aspect, from marketing to product packaging, aligns with this identity. Through the compelling case of Liquid Death, Emma illustrates how bold messaging and sustainability efforts can create a deep customer connection. We wrap up by emphasizing the strategic benefits of thoroughly understanding your competitors and customer preferences to cultivate a loyal and enthusiastic customer base.

In episode 583 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Kevin, and Emma discuss:

• 00:00 - Building an Iconic Brand on Amazon
• 02:06 - Copywriting and Branding Expert Interview
• 05:26 - Building a Profitable Water Business
• 13:14 - The Edgy Marketing of Liquid Death
• 14:44 - Differentiating Brand on Amazon With AI
• 18:08 - Powerful Branding Strategies
• 21:56 - Creating a Strong Brand Identity
• 30:02 - Effective Brand Storytelling for Communication
• 33:50 - Elevating Brand Strategy for Customer Connection

► 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

#582 - From Teacher to 7-Figure Amazon & Walmart Seller

Join us on an incredible journey as we welcome Carrie Miller, a familiar voice on the Serious Sellers Podcast, who shares her remarkable transition from teaching to becoming a multi-seven-figure seller on Amazon and Walmart. Born in Florida and raised in San Diego, Carrie attended Pepperdine University with aspirations of becoming a teacher, only to find herself navigating a challenging job market. Despite the odds, she secured a position teaching high school Spanish and even coached basketball, showcasing her dedication and versatility. Carrie's global experiences in Argentina and China add a unique flavor to her story, making her insights into the e-commerce world all the more compelling.

Listen in as we explore her journey working for another e-commerce software company and shifting from customer interactions to creating content and masterclasses for their Academy. Her extensive experience with Helium 10 since 2017 played a pivotal role in her freelance work for various clients. Discover the impressive growth of their skateboard and apparel businesses, which saw significant milestones in 2020 and 2022, respectively. The discussion also touches on their successful foray into Walmart's marketplace and their upcoming venture into TikTok Shop, offering listeners valuable insights into e-commerce business growth and strategies.

This episode also uncovers the lessons learned in product inspections and the importance of targeting niche markets. Hear firsthand about the challenges of receiving a large batch of smeared skateboard decks and dealing with quality issues that impacted product reviews. We emphasize the critical role of thorough factory inspections and having reliable on-the-ground sourcing experts. Additionally, we tackle security risks and challenges on Amazon, including account hacks and listing issues, and share effective strategies for optimizing e-commerce operations. From managing supply chain fees to utilizing AI-powered tools for competitor analysis, this episode is packed with practical advice to help you succeed in the competitive e-commerce landscape.

In episode 582 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Carrie discuss:

• 00:00 - E-Commerce Strategies With Carrie Miller
• 04:07 - Global Teaching and Living Experiences
• 09:35 - E-Commerce Business Growth and Strategies
• 10:04 - Helium 10 Essential Tool for Agencies
• 13:52 - Success in a Competitive Apparel Market
• 18:44 - Learning From Mistakes in Product Inspections
• 19:38 - Security Risks and E-Commerce Challenges
• 24:41 - Success Through Consistency and Growth
• 28:13 - Unique Amazon & Walmart Strategies
• 32:09 - Optimizing Listing SEO Strategy With AI

► 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

Helium 10 Buzz 7/26/24: New Amazon Reimbursement Policy | TikTok Shop Is Expanding | Amazon Is Giving Free 3D Models

E-commerce space, talk about Helium 10’s newest features, and provide a training tip for the week for serious sellers of any level.

Amazon FBA Inventory Reimbursement Policy Update | Helium 10
https://www.helium10.com/blog/amazon-fba-inventory-reimbursement-policy-update/

TikTok Reportedly Bringing In-App Shopping to Spain and Ireland
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2024/tiktok-reportedly-bringing-in-app-shopping-to-spain-and-ireland/

Additionally, we highlight significant updates on Amazon Seller Central. Discover the enhanced Voice of the Customer dashboard, which now includes new performance metrics and multilingual customer feedback. US-based brand-registered sellers can now create free 3D product models using the Amazon Seller iOS app, offering a 360-degree view to elevate the shopping experience. New brand analytics features are also on the horizon, focusing on customer segmentation to better target new audiences and reduce cart abandonment.

Lastly, we explore Helium 10's AI-powered features in the Listing Builder tool, designed to optimize and generate copy and seasonal AI images for Amazon Posts and product listings. Tune in for a comprehensive rundown of these updates and more!

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz by Helium 10, Carrie covers:

• 00:51 - Amazon Reimbursement Changes
• 02:47 - TikTok Shop Expansion
• 04:00 - Voice of the Customer Updates
• 05:09 - Free 3D Models
• 06:42 - New Customer Segmentation
• 07:34 - Pro Training Tip: New AI Features Of Listing Builder

► 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:

Amazon has a new reimbursement policy, TikTok is expanding to even more countries and free 3D models for sellers who have an iOS seller app. This and so much more on today's episode of the Weekly Buzz.

Bradley Sutton:

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 are going on in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce world. We highlight the latest new feature alerts from Helium 10, and we review a training tip of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Now, today, our host is going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away and let us know what's buzzing.

Carrie Miller:

So the first story is about Amazon changing their reimbursement policy. So, starting November 1st of 2024, amazon is going to proactively reimburse sellers for FBA items that are lost in Amazon fulfillment centers. They're going to issue the reimbursement as soon as an item is reported as a loss by the fulfillment center, which you can actually track in the reimbursements report on seller central, and Amazon is hoping that this is going to be a more seamless experience that's going to save sellers time and money by minimizing the need to manually research and file claims for lost items. However, if you as a seller do not receive an automatic reimbursement and you believe that your inventory has been lost or damaged, then you're going to actually also have to file a manual claim when they don't proactively do it, if there's a glitch in the system. Additionally, any removal claims are still going to be need to be filed manually. Also, starting October 23rd, amazon is actually updating their eligibility window policy, so all manual claims must now be submitted with the following deadlines. So, first, a fulfillment center operations claim for an item that is lost or damaged in the fulfillment center must be submitted no later than 60 days after the item was reported lost or damaged. Second, an FBA customer returns claim can be submitted between 60 to 120 days after the customer refund or replacement date. Claims must not be submitted before 60 days to ensure that the customer has time to return the item to Amazon for processing. Third, a removal claim for items lost in transit can be submitted 15 to 75 days from the shipment creation date. Claims must not be submitted before 15 days to ensure the shipment can be delivered back to you. And then, last, all other removal claims must be filed within 60 days of the shipment being delivered back to you. If you want more information, we actually wrote a blog so you can get that link to that blog in our description. So go ahead and check out the blog and it should answer all of your questions in regards to the new policy.

Carrie Miller:

All right, so next up, we have some TikTok shop news. TikTok shop is allegedly, or reportedly, going to be bringing in-app shopping to Ireland and Spain. According to this article, they're basically saying that they're expanding first to Ireland and Spain and have some plans to expand to more countries in Europe. Now, obviously, TikTok is already in these countries, but this is going to be the in-app shopping piece so that people can actually utilize TikTok shop here. And this is after a few months ago. It talks about here and here that TikTok had planned to bring this shopping feature to Spain, Germany, Italy, France and Ireland earlier this year, but they actually halted that because they wanted to focus on the US market. Now there's a lot of uncertainty with the US market, so they probably are going ahead with the expansion to Europe because of that. So we'll see what happens. I think this is an interesting development. It could be some really great opportunity for sellers to everywhere. So we'll see how this goes and you know, just keep your eye on these European countries. If you are a seller and you can potentially expand out there or, you know, maybe some influencers in these countries can start making money selling on TikTok shop.

Carrie Miller:

All right, next up, we have some information about how the voice of the customer dashboard has been updated as well as there are some new translation features. So Amazon says here to show you how your products perform against industry bank benchmarks, amazon has updated some features on the voice of the customer dashboard. The negative customer experience review rate and the NCX return rate show how your product review and return rates compared to the product category benchmarks. This information enables you to track your product performance over time so you can make informed decisions to improve quality. On the listings detail page, you can you to make corrective action and improve your product offerings. Amazon, finally also has enhanced the customer feedback section by now offering it in multiple languages. Previously it was only available in English and now it's available in multiple languages.

Carrie Miller:

All right, we actually have another update to share that was actually in your Seller Central dashboard and that was where it was announced, and it's for brand registered sellers in the US, and that is that you can now create free that's right, free 3D product models using the Amazon Seller iOS app. These models are gonna provide a 360 degree view of your product, which is going to further enhance your customer's shopping experience. So 3D scanning in the Amazon seller app is actually going to be a guided experience and the eligibility actually depends on the type of product is, because not all products are actually going to be good for a 360 model. So you know things like that more like hard products, and so they're going to look at the product category, the physical properties and other factors. So if your, if your products don't appear in the app for scanning, then that's probably wise because they're not actually eligible. In order to get access to this feature on your phone, you're going to need an iOS or an Apple device, and it has to have iOS 17 or newer, and your device language needs to be set to English. So you're going to also find instructions in the app on how to prepare your product for scanning, and a 3D artist will actually review each scanned model for quality and if your status if you basically it says in progress that means they've successfully received a scan, and then, once they've received the scan, it's going to take about three weeks to complete the model and then make it ready for your customers on your listing and it's going to actually just pop up there automatically, so you don't actually need to kind of check anywhere and upload it yourself. It'll automatically populate. So you just want to keep checking your listing to see if it's been populated.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, this last piece of news is actually with brand analytics. Amazon has actually introduced new brand analytics features that are going to help you to refine your segmentation of customers and help you to engage the following audiences. So the first audience is new audiences. That allows you to highlight declining top tier and declining promising customers segments for insights on groups of likely customers who are forecasted to spend less in the next year, and then next cart abandoners to spend less in the next year, and then next cart abandoners. So this audience is going to help you to engage and convert customers who have added your products to their cart and they have not yet completed their purchase. All right, so that is all the news, and you can see there's a lot going on. You know lots of really important information. So if you want to check anything further out, you can find some of those things in your seller central dashboard with some more information. Or if you want to check out our blog on those reimbursements, you can check that out as well. All right, so let's go ahead and get into our training tip of the week now.

Carrie Miller:

This is going to be in our listing builder, ai. We have a lot of really great ai features throughout helium 10 tools, but I wanted to focus on the ones that are in our listing builder because I think they might be a little bit overlooked or maybe you don't even know that they exist. This is one of our listings, this is our coffin shelf and what you need to do is you're going to just scroll all the way down. So we've already written this one and used AI there. But if you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you're going to see where it says Amazon posts, and sometimes you might have writer's block and not really know what to caption your Amazon posts with and you want to make sure that they're optimized. So what we will do is take the keywords that are in the listing here and just the information from the listing, and it's going to help write some different posts for you. So I just hit write it for me and then you're going to see some fully optimized posts come up here. So, for example, we've got here transform your space with this coffin shelf set, perfect for your goth decor. It includes a skull figurine and led pumpkin candle. Okay, so since ours does not include that, I'm going to just kind of I can just edit this if I wanted to use it. So you can basically kind of use it as a jumping off point and you can just start, you know, editing and doing whatever you need to do. You can also hit rewrite it for me and you can get some more suggestions that are rewritten for you right there and you can utilize those or kind of take some from this one and then add it to this one anything that you want to do, but that is a great way that you can get some optimized content for your Amazon posts.

Carrie Miller:

Next, we have how to generate AI images. Now, this is really cool because you can change these amazing backgrounds. Sometimes, especially going into different holiday seasons, you might want to put your product in a different background with a different holiday season. So all you need to do is just upload your product with a white background here and you'll just click browse and upload that and then you're going to choose a theme. So you could choose you know holiday and maybe you know Halloween or something like that, and it will give you kind of a suggested description. But you can actually edit this and do whatever you want to do.

Carrie Miller:

I already did one for you here. I uploaded this coffin shelf here and I chose holiday and Halloween spookiness, and I actually just kind of changed the item, the image description, and I was able to get some of these. Now, obviously, some of them are not perfect, but you can go ahead and edit the description and then hit generate images. Again. It'll generate some images that are different, so this is a really good place to get some of those really cool backgrounds, especially for those stationary products, and help to make your product look a lot more festive for the holidays or anything else. You can choose any of these themes. You can do home themes, abstract, whatever you want, and then you can choose a theme setting once you get over here. So really great cool things in Helium 10. We're always trying to innovate and give you the latest and greatest tools to help you with your Amazon business. All right, so thank you all for tuning in to this week's Weekly Buzz. We'll see you all next week to see what's buzzing.

#581 - Top Ten New Helium 10 Features for 2024

Join us for an exciting episode where we uncover the latest and greatest from Helium 10. We kick off by exploring the top 14 innovative tools and features introduced this 2024, designed to give Amazon sellers a competitive edge. We highlight the platform's expanded capabilities to include the Amazon Brazil marketplace, making it easier than ever to tap into this emerging market through Amazon's Remote Fulfillment Program.

Next, we introduce the powerful Product Launchpad tool, perfect for organizing multiple product research projects. Discover how you can track competitors, get AI-generated summaries, and even change Amazon prices directly within Helium 10. We also discuss the revamped Demand Analyzer tool and updated title length recommendations feature in the X-Ray tool, all aimed at enhancing your product research and listing optimization.

Finally, we explore advanced features like the automation of Cerebro, available on the Diamond plan, and how it can save you time by tracking competitor activities and identifying valuable keywords. Learn about the new AI image generator in the Listing Builder tool, which allows you to create customized product images with specific instructions. We also cover Helium 10's new Listing Builder Scoring System that enhances Amazon SEO by providing a comprehensive score based on keyword usage and relevancy. Tune in to find out how these features can transform your Amazon selling experience!

In episode 581 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 00:00 - New Features in Helium 10
• 01:52 - Expanding Marketplaces With Helium 10
• 03:46 - New Tools for Amazon Product Research
• 08:32 - Helium 10 Niche Analysis and Features
• 13:09 - AI Image Generator in Listing Builder 
• 18:19 - Tracking Competitors' Ads on the Product Page
• 20:48 - Helium 10 New Product Features
• 30:06 - Listing Builder Scoring System Overview
• 30:55 - Optimizing Product Listing With AI

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Did you know that since November of last year, Helium 10 has released 67 new tools and features? Today I'm going to go over my personal top 14 list of the best ones that can make you money right now, including one new tool that's going to make me over $3,000 for me on just one product alone. 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.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What I wanted to do today was I wanted to pick, I tried to pick, the top 10 best ones that can help you immediately as Amazon sellers right now, just from what we launched this year. All right, but I couldn't keep it to 10. So we're going to go to 14. So this, basically, these are my top 14 new features just from this year in Helium 10 that I think can help you guys out and probably apply to the great majority of you. All right, like, like it's not just like, oh, only a few people can use this one or a couple of people can use this, and I think you guys will find benefit in a lot of these, and I want to start going over these one by one here. Number 14 is now Helium 10 works for Brazil. All right, so we have a lot of marketplaces that Helium 10 works in. We have, obviously, Amazon USA, Walmart, Amazon Canada, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, UK, India, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, United Arab Emirates and now Brazil.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So why is this important, though, is what changed on Amazon? Is you guys know about the Amazon North American fulfillment used to be called North American remote fulfillment. Now it's just called remote fulfillment, I believe, but that allows you, if you're selling an Amazon USA, it allows you to be able to just click a button and then your listings go live and are translated for Mexico, and then also your listing goes live in Canada if it qualifies. Well, now last year or early this year, Amazon changed it where now, if you are activate remote fulfillment, you have the option to sell on Amazon Brazil, which is an emerging marketplace in the Amazon ecosystem. So Helium 10 now works for Cerebro, Blackbox, X-ray, Magnet, Profits, whole bunch of tools. So, for example, I entered in this cooler bag my Portuguese is not great, that's what I'm assuming his is here into Cerebro and, as you can see, I get all these Portuguese keywords and some English keywords come up to of where this product is ranking. So, guys, this, the first part of this has nothing to do with Helium 10 is hey, go in and check, do you qualify to go ahead and open up your listings for fulfillment in Brazil? Now, how it works is Amazon will ship from your Amazon FBA USA inventory to the Brazilian customers and you're not having to pay any extra fees or anything like that. So, first of all, get your listings active over there and then go ahead and use Cerebro, Magnet, et cetera, to maybe optimize your listings. Maybe, if you don't like the translation, you might change the translation for the listings up a little bit, using what Cerebro is telling you, and then obviously put in the Keyword Tracker, et cetera. So that's number 14 on the list.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Number 13 was a brand new tool that we launched. All right, so maybe some of you are doing multiple product research things at the same time. Right, if you do multiple product research things at the same time, you might have trouble keeping track of all your projects. Like hey, I'm uh, you know searching this in the home and kitchen category and I've got this one that looks like a good idea. I mean, you might have 10, 15. Well, now you can go ahead and organize all of them in product launchpad, which is a brand new net new tool to Helium 10. Now, this product launchpad allows you to go ahead and start different projects. Like here's one I had started a while back of coffin makeup shelves and gives me like aggregate numbers of what's going on in the coffin makeup shelf niche, what are the main keywords for these products. I can go ahead and add competitors to this. Like, hey, I want to start tracking this product and this product because they're part of the coffin makeup shelf ecosystem, the niche right and then, using AI, it's going to give me kind of like some summaries of what I have come up with in my product research. But the main part of this new tool is to just help you organize all of your projects so that you might want to not forget about what you had done and you might want to come back to it. Like, maybe you decide to go forward with one project, like, hey, I'm going to make this coffin letterboard, but let me save that makeup shelf for later. Now you can go back to your projects and then also add products, add keywords to it and then see if the AI has any other advice based on best practices, on what the future of that niche is. So again, that's number 13 guys, brand new tool that launched this year called Product Launchpad.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, number 12 thing of something brand new is you can change your Amazon prices inside of Helium 10. Let's say you're like, hey, you know what I'm not doing a prime, exclusive discount, but I want to go ahead and change my prices and just drop everything 50 cents because my competitor will now on your dashboard right, I think this might be for Diamond members and up you can actually change your Amazon price for your products without going into seller central. So you just go to the listing section of the SKU, zoom in here. I'm going to zoom in and you can see all of these little price fields. You can actually change your Amazon price right here inside of Helium 10. So that's number 12 in the list of new updates. Number 11 is the relaunch of an older tool that we used to have and now we relaunch is called Demand Analyzer. Let me give you a scenario here. Let's say you're searching for something on Alibaba, on whatever website Etsy, I don't care what website you're on. Did you know that the Helium 10 Chrome extension will work on any website to let you know something that's going on Amazon based on what you input? For example, I was searching at these crazy Alibaba companies that were copying my images for my coffin shelf and I was just curious what other things are these people selling in their Alibaba factory? And I went into this Alibaba factory page and I went to this category of letter boards, right? So, for example, what can I do here? Maybe I didn't know there was a such thing as letter boards, right? So maybe I'm wondering, hey, is there demand on Amazon for letter boards? Well, maybe in the past you thought, oh, okay, now I have to go to Helium 10, uh X-ray and be on Amazon and search letter boards and see what the search volume is. Or I have to go into Helium 10 Cerebro or Magnet. Let me see what are the related keywords. What is the search volume? No, you can actually do that right from here, so I can see here. This is like a pumpkin letter board, like you know, Halloween coming up and then maybe I'm wondering right now hey, is there any demand for pumpkin letter boards on Amazon? Well, let me go ahead and hit that and then I'll type in here pumpkin letter board, all right, and then analyze. Is anybody searching that? No, all right, I got to answer right away. It's something new and cool. But I see that there's an autocomplete says pumpkin, four letter boards, all right. So maybe I might want to look into that more. Maybe what about this one Hexagon letter board, hexagon shaped letter board? Is anybody searching? Oh, okay, there's about 50 people searching a month, but you see what I'm talking about here. You guys can now go on other websites and get product ideas and instantly see what is going on Amazon for that Um, and so I highly, highly recommend doing that when you get inspiration or ideas from other websites. All right, so that was number 11.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go to number 10. This is actually a newish, um, a newish thing that has been updated and this is in X-ray. Do you ever think about how long should my title be? Now, I know Helium 10 has scoring systems and stuff, but it's based on like overall best practices, right? Uh, as I've always trained you guys, I hope you guys follow the training videos. It's not one size fits all as far as what goes best for how long your title should be across the board on Amazon. I've always said look at the niche theme. What are some of the main players in your niche doing on page one, you know? Then you know, hey, if everybody's got long titles, well, it looks like long titles actually are a good thing for this niche. Maybe you're in a niche where there's shorter titles that work better, all right. So now how can you go ahead and figure that out? Well, you can go into X-Ray and then right here at the very top, you see you're going to have an average title character count. You guys see that there? Average title character count of the top 20 products on the page and so you can see in collagen peptides, oh, it looks like most people have long titles because the average title character count is 167. I can put my mouse here and I can see, all right well, of those top 20 products, what kind of distribution I can see. Wow, look at this. 65% of the top 20 products have titles between 180 and 200 characters, right? So I'm like, oh wow, definitely, long titles are working really well in collagen peptides. So if I'm going to start a collagen peptides product, let me go ahead and, you know, maybe put my title out 190 characters or so. Now let's go to the flip side. Let's look at this one accordion. All right, this is the accordion search term on Amazon and take a look here. What's the average title character counts. It's 110 way different than collagen peptides. Let's take a look at the distribution here. Look at that. Half of the listings on the top 20 have only between a 99 and 119. Okay, uh, limit, all right. So almost nobody has longer titles. Most people have you. So you see how it's different based on the keyword and based on the niche.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So this is not new, this strategy of, hey, look at what kind of titles people have. But in the past, what did you have to do? You would just have to kind of like eyeball it, right? Hey, let me look. Ah, it looks like they have long titles, but how, how many characters would you really know? Now you can see the title character count of every single listing on page one to see what your competitors are doing. Next one we are now in the top 10. Number nine I don't have a screenshot of because this is I don't sell in Europe, but Helium 10 inventory management historically only worked for Amazon USA and this year we launched it now for Amazon Europe, and so there's still a lot that we're working on for there, like you know, trying to integrate pan, pan EU uh forms of FBA, distribution and velocity. So, guys, if you are in Europe and please take a test drive of our Helium 10 inventory management, let us know what you like, let us know what you don't like, so that we can tailor it to your needs. All right, so that's number nine. Uh, number eight is not actually a new tool but a relaunch of a feature. You guys remember the Helium 10 Elite program we've had for years, but for over a year it was fully closed, like you could not get into Elite even if you wanted to, unless you were like a Supercharge member, like, like. Elite is actually part of the Supercharge program, but elite as an add-on just couldn't do it for almost a year. Well, we relaunched it this year and it has a lot of cool new features. So, for anybody interested in like a one-on-one call with me, a one-on-one call with Carrie, Elite members can do that once a month. Do you want to meet with other high level sellers once a week on zoom in round tables that aren't recorded so you can talk about anything and everything you want. That's available for a Helium 10 lead. Do you want to do quarterly workshops around the world and be able to learn from a high level speakers? We just finished one a couple a few weeks ago in Spain.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The next one is going to be right before Amazon accelerates. So if you sign up for Elite, you get to go to that one. It's going to be Kevin King as a speaker and destiny with Sean. We're going to have meals and networking and a lot of prizes and a lot of cool things and a lot of learning. Obviously, for those two, um, it's going to be on. September 16th is the next one. That it's going to be, like I said, in Seattle and maybe another one later on this year in Milan, Italy. I'm not sure yet, but we've got those. We've got monthly trainings with Kevin King and expert guests online where you can ask them live questions and you can learn from like high level things that's not normally in like a podcast episode or something like that. You get exclusive first access to tools and then the new price. Instead of having it being a separate Helium 10 plan like it was before, it is now just an add on. So if you've got a Diamond plan, you can just add on Elite for only $99 a month. All of that, what I just mentioned, only $99 a month, and a lot more. There's monthly Zoom calls with Kevin King, there's a private Facebook group. The list goes on and on. So, guys, I highly highly recommend giving that a spin for a few months. Helium 10 Elite if you've got the Diamond program, you can just add it on for only $99. All right, so that was the number eight thing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Number seven is an AI image generator. All right, AI image generator this is living inside of Listing Builder. All right, so you go into Listing Builder, go into any of your listings and then hit generate AI images. And then this is super cool because you just put you know, you upload, like your maybe stock image of something or a white background or whatever, and then you put in your instructions of like hey, I want to see this. Uh, here's an example here. I want to see this product in a cozy, dim and inviting home setting, resting on a table, various natural elements around you and this is a candle, right, and you can see that this is all AI generated, what this came up with. I've done this with my coffin shelf listings a lot as well, and the cool thing about it is you can do this for different Amazon assets. Like, for example, if you are doing a main, if you're doing a main image or a regular image on Amazon, what kind of dimension should that be? It's a square right. You should probably have it 1600 by 1600 at the minimum. Or you can actually do a custom size, like for whatever reason. You have some custom uh image that you want to put on your website or something you can put the custom size Uh. Let's say, you want to do something for Amazon post. Amazon post should be 640 by 640. There is a preset for that. What if it's an A+ logo image, that's actually a banner size image, or it's 600 by 180. You can go ahead and have the AI create an image based on your regular image, but now it's made for Amazon A+ content, and the list goes on and on of different sizes and different things you can have. So I like using it for the Amazon post, especially since in Listing Builder we have an Amazon post caption generator. So, as you know, for Amazon post, you should be doing one per day for each of your products. Well, maybe you didn't take 365 images of your product, uh, you know, when you did a photo shoot. So how are you going to do 365 different images in a year? The answer is with Helium 10’s AI, you can go ahead and create 365 versions of a certain image, and then who wants to write 365 different captions that relate to that image? Nobody wants to do that, I hope, right. So again, you can use Listing Builder AI and it will go ahead and generate as many captions for your product as you want. So now it's kind of like Amazon post made easy. So that's another cool feature that Helium 10 released this year. That's number seven.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now we're getting into the top six. Uh, okay, so top six for new features of 2024 for Helium 10 is Freedom Ticket, all right. So Freedom Ticket is the number one course for Amazon sellers out there and a lot of you who are watching this. Maybe you're already Amazon sellers. That's fine. It's a great refresher course or you could share it with your teams. A lot of bigger Amazon companies use the Freedom Ticket course to onboard their new employees, to train them on the Amazon. It's not just oh, here's how you do Seller Central and stuff. It's like explaining the concepts behind Amazon. We've got tons and tons of modules here. There's about 20, 30 hours of training that we have in the Freedom Ticket and we're constantly updating it. That's a new update too. This is version 4.0. We've made three versions before, from 2017 up until 2021, 2022. And now this is version 4.0. Just film this year in 2024. And every month we're actually adding, with a live workshop, a new module so that you're always guaranteed to have the best information in 2024. For example, some of the things that we just did a couple of weeks ago, we had a virtual workshop on how to set up TikTok shop. That's all the rage these days TikTok shop, right. In a couple of weeks, we're going to be talking about advanced brand building, all right. So all of that is going down inside the Freedom Ticket program. Huge, it takes a lot of work, guys, to make an entire A to Z Amazon course and a lot of work, a lot of money, and so that's a big update that we have Freedom Ticket 4.0. Platinum members have access to it, Diamond members, obviously, Elite members all of you guys have access to Freedom Ticket 4.0. So make sure to take a look at that. So that is number six, all right.

 

Bradley Sutton:                                                                                       

Now number five is another one. Um, that is going back to the Chrome extension. Now, this is, uh, pretty cool. Let me show you guys, what you can do here now. Uh, the first thing is, if you're in the search results of a page, all right. So if I'm in the search results of a page, I can now see the different placements of the PPC, for example, sponsor brand ads. Maybe there's some sponsor display on the end. Now, all of that is going to show up here in line. Before, only sponsored product was showing up. But look at this. You see these little widgets here that say SB. Well, those are the three sponsored brand ads that showed up on the top header. Uh, what about sponsored video? That's going to show up here. Sponsored product is also going to show, uh, up over here. Uh, is so. Does something have Amazon's choice? We'll show that, um, over here. So be looking at that. You can see all the now, all the uh, start tracking all the different placements on the page for sponsored ads. All, right, now what about? If you're on a product page itself? Let's go like, like, maybe your own product page, like, hey, I want to know what listings on Amazon are advertising on my page, right, cause you know there's sponsored display ads here? Uh, there's, there's going to be, uh, this sponsor brand section. Um, there is your, your favorite brands. That comes up at the or not favorite brands, but, like similar brands on Amazon, shows up on the very bottom. All these things are ads writing on your page and you want to start tracking. Say, hey, who is showing up on my page, right? Well, now you can do that by hitting the Chrome extension, going into X-ray. Look at all these ads. So, all the different variations are going to show up here, all the different ads. You know this. This is the similar brands on Amazon. Here's sponsored product, there's going to be sponsored display, so now you can start tracking. I could just download this with one click, export it to an Excel file and now start tracking daily or maybe weekly. Hey, who is bidding for placements on my page? And maybe you want to target them right back right. Or maybe you know track who are the ones that stay there the longest? And hey, those guys might be having success stealing a couple of my sales. I got to figure out what they're doing. That's working right, all right, so that is something that, again, is available for all plans. I think super, super cool. That's why I had it in the top five of new features.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so now we are in the top four. Let me ask you guys I hope that part of your SOP for Amazon is to create or to run Cerebro on your product versus your competitor's product, maybe once a week, maybe once a month or whatever. And the point is, when you're running that over and over again, it's like hey, you just want to make sure, uh, are your competitors not getting sales from keywords that you're not getting sales from? Like, maybe they discovered a new keyword that they're ranking highly for that you're not ranking at all Right. So, so obvious. We've always told you, hey, you should be running Cerebro every now and then. Now, that's all fine and good If you've got one product right. You got one product, five competitors, we're all good to go right. But what about those If who've got 10 products? And having to run Cerebro on those 10 products and your 50 competitors? What if you've got 100 products right? That's a very tedious process. That's almost a full-time job for somebody, but you still got to do it because you got to make sure that you're keeping up with the Joneses, right, make sure that you're keeping up with all their keywords. Well, you can now automate that with Helium 10. All right, so this is the number four coolest new feature that we've launched in 2024 is kind of like the automation of Cerebro, and where that is in your dashboard. I believe this is for the Diamond plan, only so far. The first step is you have to make sure that your main competitors you're tracking, all right. So how you can do that, let me just show you. You go in, make sure that you have your child level set up in your or you're on your child level category here in your dashboard and then, for example, you just hit expand right here, which is the arrow right next to there, and then hit competitors. Now make sure you have got your main competitors right here. All right, these are your main competitors. And now, once you do that, you can actually not only first of all, this is not even this was another new feature, but I didn't even add, it, didn't even make my top 14 lists but you're going to be able to get notifications on hey, is my competitor changing their price? Is my competitor changing the number of variations they have? Are they running a coupon or did they take off a coupon? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You're going to get notifications on that. But the cool thing that this one is this is why it's number four is I'm going to automate the Cerebro.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You go to insights and then I am going to create a new insight and it is going to be a keyword insight, keyword suggestions based on my competitors. And then, once I hit that, I go here and these at the very bottom this are the settings that I could do. I could do a specific product or I could do it across the board. For all of my products. I can say, hey, it's basically a mini cerebral. I can say, hey, I want to look at keywords that are at least 500 search, 400, 300, whatever you want, and then where my product rank is All right. So for this one I would change. I would do two different insights, guys. This is how I have it set up. I would do one insight where it says where my products rank is zero minimum, zero maximum. What that means is I'm not ranking at all in the top seven pages, right? And then the number of competitors ranking for the keyword is minimum one and they are ranked, let's say, between one and 40. So what does that mean? What does that gibberish? I guess that means that basically says hey, Helium 10, run Cerebro on my product and my competitors every day, every week, whatever, and look for any keyword that's at least 500 search volume, where I'm not ranked at all, but my competitors are ranking on page one. Boom goes to dynamite. You're getting a notification whenever your competitors are getting sales for a new keyword. That's basically, in a nutshell what that is. Another one that I would do is I would say where my products rank is between, let's say, 50 and 306, and my competitors product rank is between one and 40. What does that mean? That means, hey, I'm ranking for this keyword, but I'm on like page two, three, four, five, six, seven, but my competitor is on page one. Don't you think that's a valuable keyword to know about this, guys? I can, I could, I could have spent this whole show talking about how valuable that is all right. That right there is enough for Diamond package by itself, just because of the time it saves. Now, if you're a Platinum member and you're wondering, is that worth it for you and you've only got one product, I'm no salesman, guys, but let me just tell you no, it's not worth it. Don't upgrade to Diamond just to get this feature because you're lazy, all right. And if you're lazy, go ahead and you're proud to admit you're lazy and you need Helium 10's help to help with a 30-minute job once a week or a 20-minute job. Go ahead and admit it. We'll be glad to take your money as a Diamond member. But as a realist guys, don't do that. But if you've got five products. We're not talking about a 30 minute job anymore. Now we're talking about a three hour job. What if you've got 20 products? Now we're talking about an eight hours a week job that Helium 10 can automate with the click of a button.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now you can see why. You know, like, how beneficial it is to have Diamond plan based on how many products you have. This is when you're going to need that, all right, so that's pretty cool. That is the number four new feature from Helium 10. Now, uh, here is another, in my opinion, game changer. Now we're in the top three, okay, the top three of new things, and let me just show you. This is like super, super cool, and this is only if you have brand registry, All right. So hopefully you guys have brand registry, right, but basically it's linking brand analytics to the Chrome extension. So now you can see for last week, what were the top three products clicked on that had the most clicks out of any product for this keyword. After somebody searched for this keyword, what were the three products that were clicked on most. This is not some Helium 10 algorithm or estimation. This is literally direct from Amazon, all right, and so you can see here it's going to say ABA most click, number one, ABA most click number two and ABA most click number three. Now the thing that is also beneficial is don't always think that just because it's the number one most click product that it's going to have the most conversions or sales. Like, watch what happens when I put my mouse over the number one clicked coffin shelf, it says CVR 0%. What does that mean? That means that's not conversion rate, that's percentage of the conversion. So actually last week the most click product of coffin shelves got zero order. So now, all of a sudden, that maybe have my creative juices flowing. I'm like, hmm, why are people clicking on this? Maybe they think that's interesting, this product, but then what's wrong with the product page that nobody's buying it. And then I go to the second one and put my mouse over all right, ah, this product was a number two most clicked, but it had 20%. I don't know if you guys can see that there it had 20% of the sales for this keyword. So actually, the number two guys, the one I got to worry about, I'm like man, this guy got 20% of the sales, right. So this, guys, I hope changes the way that you look at search results. It's not just about who's ranked at the top one or two or three. Now, I know in this situation actually hold on. Look at this Is the number one most clicked product, the number one organic position? No, it's not. This is a sponsored placement. Where is this product showing up? This product is one, two, three, four. The number one click product was the fifth sponsored or the fifth organic position. So you can just get so much knowledge and ideas about what's going on in the niche just by looking at these search results that you maybe you didn't have before. Okay, so really, really cool guys. Whenever you're searching on Amazon, take a look for those blue bars that say ABA most click one, ABA most click two, and you'll be able to see that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now we are at number two, and number two is something that might have just saved me $6,000. That's why I put this as the number two new feature. Now here in the Project X account I don't have. I don't have it because not every account is going to have it. But what Helium 10 is doing is we are monitoring all of your products and if we notice you have got a product that is at the border of one of the Amazon size tiers and what are Amazon size tiers? That's like standard size, large standard size, standard oversize, bulky oversize, all those things right. If you are within one inch of one side of changing that, all right, if you are within one inch of one side. Basically, what's going to happen is we're going to send you an alert and say, hey, did you know that for blankety, blank product, if you just decrease the length by one inch, you are going to go from large standard size to standard size. I got one of these notifications in one of my accounts, guys and that one inch. Can you guys guess how much per unit I would save? And healing tends to show me $2 and 75 cents. That's the difference to go from large standard size to standard size or whatever it was, 2.75 per unit. Now do that math, guys. Let's say you are selling 10 units a day of this product. All right. That means that every day, like let's say the next time, you do a production run and somehow you're able to lessen the size of the package by one inch, that means every day. If I do this, which I am going to do. I am going to do it on my next product when I reorder this product. I'm absolutely doing this. I could save $27 a day just with that one inch savings. Now, times that by a full year, that is $3,650. I'm saving just by changing my package and I never would have known that unless Helium 10 told me. So that's what you guys should do, guys, is go into your alerts. This is Platinum, this is Diamond. It doesn't matter what account you have. This is number two, because this brings you like ridiculous amounts of money. Go to your alerts page and look at the very top left where it says overview. Everybody do that right now and you guys tell me if you have anything. I hope that nobody has it here. Like it actually kind of hurts to know that I've been wasting money for this long. Very few people are right there on the border of within one inch, but, like I said, my other account absolutely had it. Take a look under overview, right under, where it says Buy Box. If it has size tier optimization alert, you're going to see it right down here in this section, all right, so take a look. Everybody's listening to this podcast. Everybody's watching this live right now watching this on YouTube. Pause this, go to your alerts page and see if you have one, and it's going to be a game changer for you guys, like that's probably the most valuable alert we've come up with in years. All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now we have come to the number one new tool or feature alert that Helium 10 has created, and that is the Listing Builder scoring system. Okay, so this is something that people have been asking us for years and I've kind of wanted Helium 10 to do ever since I was doing SEO tools for the blogs, when I used to write blogs for Helium 10 years ago, where we had a scoring system where it says based on where I use my keywords right and based on how many times I have it and what's the relevancy, uh, to the niche, um, what kind of impact it's going to have on your score right, and that really you know the higher the score. Theoretically usually it's not a hundred percent. Nobody knows the Amazon algorithm a hundred percent but it's going to give you a better chance to rank. It's going to get give you a better chance to get sales. So, for example, I just create a full listing inside of listing builder for a brand new product I haven't even launched yet, but I create it and listed, but I actually use the AI to help me create it. But now I put all of the phrases in Helium 10 Listing Builder and I can see based on the competitor performance score. This is nothing new. This is actually the same score that you have in Cerebro. It's the last column in Cerebro. But once you put your competitors now I can see, hey, which are the most important keywords for my niche that my competitors are getting sales from. And then I can see oh, shoot, I already dropped off. I was number one a few days ago when I created this listing, but now I can see my score is 194,000. And then number one in my niche is 198,000. So I still have to maybe tweak my listing a little bit more to try and up my score. I could see what all my root keywords are. You've always been able to do that in listing builder, where we show you the one word roots. Now we can show you the two word roots that are showing up, the three word roots and more. Okay, take a look down here. I can actually go to my keyword performance score and see what's going into the score. I could open up competitor comparison and take a look.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, how do people have these keywords phrases in their listings, like, for example, let's look at the most important keywords, which is sorting it by competitor performance score, and I can see here here is a keyword that most people it's actually the most important coffin letterboard. Without a space between letter and board, and I can actually see wow, this product doesn't even have it in their title. They've only got it as a phrase form in their bullets. This coffin letterboard doesn't have it anywhere in their listing. So maybe this is an opportunity. Most of these competitors don't have it. Only two competitors have coffin letter board in their title. So there's an option. This is obviously not an important keyword to my niche. That's why the score is low. But coffin cooler, if I look here, not one of my competitors has coffin cooler in their listing in exact form. So now I, with just in seconds, I get I get insight into wow, if I put coffin cooler in phrase form, I'm going to be way more relevant to Amazon algorithm compared to my competitors. I can just see that at a glance. What if I want to see like, hey, what about? How am I doing on certain root phrases. How about words in my listing that have coffin? Wow, there's 27 words that were important to my niche that have the word coffin in it. How do I have it distributed? Oh, wow, look at all these keywords I don't have anywhere in my listing at all. Maybe I need to put it into my description, I need to put it in my bullet points. I mean, the list goes on and on. Guys, this Listing Builder scoring system is something a team worked on for months. I worked on the scoring part also for months. I created like over a hundred listings and I tested micro changes to make sure. Hey, is this scoring system based on what actually moves the needle for Amazon ranking? If I just put one keyword in a different place, is that going to, obviously, or is that going to instantaneously bring me to page one and get me a billion dollars for the sales? No, probably not. But these little micro changes, these are the things that give you a leg up on the competition that they're probably not doing, unless they're using Helium 10 to really see how they can optimize their listing for the Amazon algorithm, and I've been testing this. Like I told you, I'm launching four new products the last few weeks. All of this worked. Guys Like I'm just crushing my launches, getting to page one for all of my main keywords. Thanks to this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us. Hope this was helpful. Those of you who are Helium 10 Elite members and those of you who are Serious Sellers Club members you get this every week, so make sure to tune in next week. If you're Elite member and you're not getting the invites for these calls, let customer support know. And for the rest of you who are Platinum, Diamond members, you are going to get access to this monthly call sometime in August. So we'll do another one of these sometime in August with a new training tip and a new Ask Me Anything. Thank you, guys so much and have a great rest of your day. Bye-bye now.