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

#580 - Reddit and Exit Strategies from an 8-Figure Amazon Seller

Have you ever wondered how to conquer competitive markets without relying on PPC? In our latest episode, Melisa Vong, a Serial E-commerce Entrepreneur & Investor, returns after nearly three years to share her journey of exiting two successful brands in the beauty and supplement niches using innovative strategies. She dives into her unique approach of utilizing Reddit for Amazon sellers and stresses the importance of a diverse product catalog. Melisa also unveils her rapid product launch methodology, which employs extensive A/B split testing to constantly refine and improve her tactics.

But Melisa's entrepreneurial flair doesn't stop there. She takes us on an exciting detour into the world of escape rooms, revealing how her Amazon-selling success funded this new venture. Melisa talks about why she chose to become a franchisee instead of starting from scratch, and the benefits of partnering with an established brand to manage logistics and technology. She opens up about the investment required and how a side hustle turned into an unexpected career opportunity at the franchise's head office.

We also explore cutting-edge marketing strategies for e-commerce, including the use of Advite.ai to monitor Reddit threads for promotional opportunities. Melisa highlights how personalized branding can set you apart in crowded markets and discusses innovative tactics like Google redirects to drive external traffic to Amazon listings. Tune in for a wealth of practical tips and inspiring entrepreneurial insights, and find out how to connect with Melisa online to keep the conversation going.

In episode 580 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Melisa discuss:

• 03:47 - Success in the Competitive Supplement Market on Amazon
• 10:12 - The Impact of Creative Marketing
• 11:37 - Franchise Escape Room Side Business Discussion
• 13:43 - Potential Partnership Opportunity With A Game Company
• 18:11 - Melisa's Passion Project
• 22:26 - Innovative Marketing Strategies for E-Commerce
• 22:30 - Reddit Strategy
• 26:23 - Label Variation for Product Packaging
• 28:21 - Enhancing Customer Engagement With AI
• 30:40 - Heat Maps Strategy
• 32:18 - Targeting Dog Breeds for Marketing
• 33:29 - Networking and Escape Room Fun

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we've got Melissa back on the show who's going to talk about how she's exited a couple of brands. She's had success in competitive niches without even using PPC. She's got a cool Reddit strategy for Amazon sellers and now how she's using her Amazon income to start an escape room business. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello, everybody! And welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. I just had somebody recently on the show. I forgot who it was, but I was like man. It's been like forever since you've been on the show. It might be a record. Well, whatever it was for him or her, you have broken that record because I'm looking at my notes from Mel here and the last time you were on the show was 2021. So almost three years in between I've been trying to get you back. Melissa, you're just so hard to get a hold of. You're such a busy, busy boss lady. Anyways, how's it been going?

Melisa:

I know. I'm so sorry it's been a while but I'm excited to be back and thank you for your persistence and your patience with me. You know what they say the fortune's in the follow-up. So there you nailed that. But I've been awesome, you know, keeping busy not just Amazon, but kind of just dabbling in different worlds, and it's been fun, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about some of that stuff. You know I follow you vicariously a little bit through Instagram. It's kind of interesting to see some of the things that are going on your side. We're definitely going to dive into that. But if anybody wants to get more of Melissa's backstory, we're not going to completely rehash it here. Check out episodes 111 and also episode 302. All right, so episode 111, episode 302, you could learn a lot about her history and actually, one of the, were you in the? I don't think you had exited at the time in 2021, had you exited that? Was it a supplement brand or a beauty brand that you were doing back then?

Melisa:

So I exited a beauty brand and then also the following year exited in a supplement category, so still currently selling in supplements. I think when we last spoke, we did close out our exit.

Bradley Sutton:

What kind of beauty products was it?

Melisa:

So it's like natural and organic skincare. So things like castor oil. I know we've talked about it a couple times in previous so it's like vitamin c serum skincare. You know, moisturizers.

Bradley Sutton:

I'm all into that kind of stuff. As I get older, you know, like I've been, I've been going like I got it here on my desk been going heavily into k-beauty products. I got these products called Be Wants and it's funny because I always talk about collagen peptides on my podcast and stuff right, this is like collagen lifting cream, collagen essence toner the secret to looking like I do when I have a 23 year old daughter. So there it is Korean beauty products. That's the secret.

Bradley Sutton:

Now that, you know, beauty products and supplements are cliché as far as the most difficult things to break into. And then, of course, oh, maybe you, you know, somebody might say, oh yeah, she had a beauty brand. Maybe she started when it wasn't so, it wasn't so competitive, way back when, and that's how she was able to exit. But right after that, you said you went into supplements and were so successful. What's some of your secrets?

Melisa:

Yeah, obviously everyone kind of thinks that supplements is this weird and uncharted territory and it really is. It's a whole different ballgame in terms of how competitive it is, but from not just a black hat, you know perspective, because there are a lot of things that people will do to try to bring you down and it's unfortunate. But sometimes it's just about having a very wide catalog and just having you know a number of different products rather than just relying on one cash cow because then if you only have like one, really you know one real cash cow product that's bringing in all the money, if it goes down, then you're kind of screwed. So we kind of had to move quickly when it came to launches. So it was just speed to market. Just every quarter we were launching you know three, four new products, just consistently. And that gave us a lot of practice on launches and figuring out okay, what's working, what's not working. So we were able to kind of figure out and do a lot of AB split testing and see, okay, now we have like an actual template that we can work off of.

Melisa:

And supplements is one of those easy things where really you don't have to reinvent the wheel, it's really just slapping on. You know a label on a bottle and branding does pay a big. You know it's a big part of it in how you can differentiate yourself. But one thing that we did even now because we're still in the supplement space, so even though we sold that company moved into a little bit more of a niche supplement space. So now we sell gummies in particular and I also sit on the board for another company, which is like pharmaceutical crafted supplements. So a little bit more niche where it's like multi-ingredient formulations, so you can no longer just launch single ingredient products anymore and think you're going to rank for those super high volume keywords now we're relying-

Bradley Sutton:

Let me launch a vitamin c or some vitamin d and crush it.

Melisa:

Yeah, no, like you always use the example of collagen right there you no one should ever go into the collagen market these days. Even you know, five years ago it was very, very hard to break into collagen. So rather than focusing on collagen, we focus on solutions. So things for hair growth, things for, you know, hair, skin nails is also another big keyword, things like that. You want to go after more of those long tail keywords, but ones that target specific problems that people are having. So that's kind of what we've kind of shifted into, and then also doing things that you know are kind of following a trend as well.

Melisa:

So, for example, you know, there was that whole big craze it still is a craze where people are taking semi-glutides which are like Ozempic, you know, Manjarono, things like that for weight loss, and obviously with that comes a lot of side effects. So we were able to create a custom formulation that targets and helps with a lot of those side effects. So that really helped us gain a lot of traction because no one else was doing it. So we're creating different solutions for these problems. That kind of became more popular and more in, you know, more searched. So if you pay attention to different trends, keywords, things like that, sometimes you can get ahead of the trends. So, rather than trying to arrive a wave that's already dying, you're almost positioning yourself for the wave before it happens, and that's what any good surfer knows.

Bradley Sutton:

Something crazy. I don't remember if it was your beauty brand or your supplement brand, but you were talking about. At one point you were doing like 400 K of sales a month and you were not using PPC. Now, was that for the beauty brand or also for the supplements? You weren't doing PPC.

Melisa:

For both. Yeah, we never really focused too much on PPC. We did have a little bit for the beauty brand, but for supplements in particular, we focused on velocity, because if you can sell at a slightly you know lower price point and remain competitive, still making a profit. Our goal was not you know the amount of profit we're making per product, it was how much we could actually sell, how many units could we actually get out the door. Because not only that, we get more exposure to the customers if someone buys a product once, it's easier to sell to someone again rather than trying to sell to a new person. So we make it very easy for people to purchase our products because they're affordable, right. So not only that, it's negotiating with your suppliers.

Melisa:

We now have brought on our supplier as a partner in one of our brands, so we have the best terms. We have net 90. We don't have to pay them and it's basically until most of our stock is already sold, which is it puts us at a huge advantage compared to some of our other competitors, right, where you have to pay for it upfront, before it even gets sent into Amazon. You know, Amazon takes like four weeks sometimes to check in your inventory, depending on the season. So things like that definitely make a difference in helping us remain competitive. But the reason why we weren't needing to spend on PPC was because we were riding the wave of other people spending big marketing dollars to educate our customers for us and we just had to make sure we were positioned next to them.

Bradley Sutton:

Like direct influencers, or just riding the wave of just like search terms that were generic and those people weren't even necessarily pushing you? Or is it a mixture of both?

Melisa:

Right. The search terms and then also the branded search terms as well. But you know the whole craze with apple cider vinegar gummies, right? So there was that big company that they launched apple cider vinegar gummies. They were the first to do it. They were spending so much money trying to get Ellen, you know, on the Ellen Degeneres show, all these different outlets like paying out the Kardashians to promote this product and they were educating people for us on, okay, this is what this product does.

Melisa:

We just had to make sure we were showing up for the right keywords and showing up for their brand keywords as a cheaper alternative. So even if we could just get like a small percentage of their market share, people are going to try us. Just because we were undercutting them a little bit. They were charging, you know, a pretty high price point at the time and now there's so many different players in the space, so obviously it's kind of like a price race to the bottom now. So we don't currently sell it because that was in our previous brand that we sold.

Melisa:

But that was one of the things where, like, we saw the trend, we're like, okay, they're already spending so much money on marketing, we don't have to spend it ourselves. We just have to make sure that we show up in the right places at the right time because that's what marketing is. It's all about. You know, being there when someone needs something and the more times you can be in front of someone when you know, the time kind of persists because not everyone's going to need to buy certain things at that exact moment, so the more times that you can actually position yourself so that when they are ready to buy and you're there, you're more likely to be able to convert.

Melisa:

Like the cool thing about marketing is not just about how you say something but like there's so many different ways that you can say something. So like if you walk down the street and you see two different coffee shops, for example, right, and both of them have a sign out, one maybe says, like you know, we sell hot liquid from brown beans, and then the other is like hey, our coffee is stronger than your Wi-Fi. By the way, we have free Wi-Fi, you know? Like which one are you going to go to? There's so many ways to say we sell coffee. So it's really cool, because it's such a fun game of finding the most creative ways to say something.

0:11:04 - Bradley Sutton:

I like it. Now we're going to get back to your e-commerce strategies, but one thing, as I was mentioning, I live my life vicariously, sometimes through Instagram, and so I've noticed you know, you've done some side hustles and some other endeavors and investments, which I think is important that e-commerce sellers think about the next step too. It could be, for some, a hobby, like, hey, I've always wanted to do this, but now I have the means to do it because of my Amazon business, or they've exited and now they want to. You know, hey, what else can I get into? So I think it's something that a lot of Amazon sellers aren't thinking about. But maybe, talking about your experiences, you might stir some creative juices.

Bradley Sutton:

But one of the things that you decided to do and I'd like to just get into, like how you came to that was doing an escape room. So was like escape room something that you always like doing yourself, and you're like, oh, this is a passion project. Or were you like, oh man, there's in this area, there's a need for this. I think I can make some money off of it. How did you come? You know, land on that as your side hustle, kind of thing.

Melisa:

Yeah, I love escape rooms. I think, as entrepreneurs as well, we naturally are good problem solvers, so these are kind of like fun problems to solve, right. They put you in a situation where you need to complete all the puzzles and then you have to escape. But it's usually immersed in some sort of storyline, which makes it interesting. So essentially you become like the main character in a little video game and it's a lot of fun. So it's good for team building. We like doing it with family.

Melisa:

You know friends, other entrepreneurs I've met on my travels. I'll be like, hey, like I know we just met, but like, call me crazy, let's do an escape room together. I know it's crazy walking you know strangers in a room for an hour. Anything could go wrong. But some of like the strongest partnerships and I guess relationships I've had are, you know people I've done escape rooms with because you kind of see this different side of them and you work together. You're almost like you know how trauma bonds people. Well, this is like you're in a high stress environment where, like, you need to escape by a certain time and you know, naturally we're all competitive people, we're entrepreneurs, business owners, so it was like really cool seeing people work really well together to get towards a common goal. And then you know some of those people I still talk to today and it's really, really cool.

Bradley Sutton:

Now is this something that, like you, 100% did from scratch, or you bought into a franchise or something, or you just started your own brand and built it all yourself.

Melisa:

Yeah. So I am a franchisee, which is, I thought it was the best way to, you know, get into this space, because for me to learn everything from scratch, you know, like, how to program controllers, the logic flow, writing all the storylines. You know the prop building all that stuff. You know CNC, build it like printing 3D printing, all that stuff you know CNC building like printing 3D printing, all that stuff like that would be way too much for me to do as a single person. Sure, I could hire out teams, but it just made more sense to partner with an existing company. So I ended up doing some of their games. I was like you know what? These are really great. There's obviously some room for improvement, as well, which I would be able to take care of on my side for my specific location.

Melisa:

And then, you know, fast forward, they love what I did so much with my location that they actually offered me a job, which is crazy. Now I haven't accepted it yet, so it was like we're still kind of talking back and forth, but it would, you know, consist of some equity in the overall franchise, as well as, you know, a cushy paycheck. So it's it might be a cool thing for me to do or even as a consultant for them but they want to bring me on as part of the head office teams. I think that would be kind of cool and I really thought I'd, you know, have another job again after having a job for what? Eight years, eight-nine years now being self-employed. So yeah, it'd be definitely interesting, for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, for this kind of thing. You know what kind of investment. Obviously there's a franchise, you know fee, and then there's, you know, construction and you know training new employees and getting everything together. So, like how much would I need? I mean, obviously you know I'm in California, it might be different than wherever you did yours, but you know we talking a hundred thousand, 200,000, $300,000 that somebody would need to be able to start an endeavor like this.

Melisa:

Right, so I mean out of pocket, you'd probably need at least $150,000, but it could be upwards of 500,000. Most of it would be covered by like SBA financing in your case in the States because it's an existing franchise. It's a lot easier to get you know that friend or that funding for a brick and mortar business, so that's also the appeal of it as well. So to be able to have you know outside sources or using other people's money we all know how great that is.

Melisa:

But in terms of like construction, that depends on the size of the space. So if you want to do you know, the bare minimum is you need at least 2,500 square feet of space. That's going to provide you with four different games. But if you want more space, obviously you can have a lot more space to work with, but it's going to cost you more in construction. So, depending on the space that you find, if there's already existing infrastructure like it has drywall, it has drop ceilings, the HVAC is already installed, it has bathrooms and you have very minimal to work with your costs are going to be much lower than if you were to work with an empty shell building. So for me, I literally moved into a building that was like completely empty. It was gutted they call it vanilla shell so I had freedom to do whatever I wanted with that space.

Melisa:

And it is very, very, very tall. It has like super tall ceilings. It's like 17 and a half feet tall. So obviously that's a lot more paint that I have to pay for, so it does get more costly, but it could run you, like I said, anywhere from 150 to 500,000. But in terms of like ROI, it just made so much sense because I went to a franchise show, checked out so many different business models the food space. You have all this overhead cost in terms of inventory. You have food costs. You have spoilage right. Food that doesn't get bought, or, like you mess up, you cook it improperly, so there's a lot that could go wrong, whereas this, you build it at once and then that's your main cost. The only thing you have is your rent and then the employees to run it, which really doesn't take that many people to run an escape room.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, that's something I noticed when I did my escape room with my family. It was like two people or one, you know, just the front desk person. There might have been somebody cleaning or something like that. Just thinking from an e-commerce seller's viewpoint, at what stage or what level of person should you say, hey, you know, I mean not necessarily escape room, but just anything you know like this, like what you know. Like hey, if you're making less than a million dollars a year and you're doing everything on your own a hundred percent, don't be trying to think about you know doing this. Or hey, once you get to the level where you've got two-three employees in your business on autopilot, or hey, you should not even think about this unless you hit this kind of you know revenue or profit, or like. What kind of guidelines would you suggest to people out there who might be like, hey, I've always wanted to do something on the side for some more steady income perhaps. How would you advise them?

Melisa:

The thing is there's so many ways to make money these days that don't require a lot of, I guess, startup capital. Especially when it comes to affiliate marketing or high ticket sales things like that. I always recommend, if you need to make some extra cash, get really, really good at sales. That's going to be, you know, the biggest skill build and investment that you can make into yourself. But also, if you just need to make cash, like sell for someone who has something really awesome to offer and you can make a big commission from that, right. But if you want to start like an actual, I guess for me this is very much like a passion project because I love escape rooms and it's kind of like I wouldn't say a side hustle at this point because it does require a lot of time and effort, just in the beginning at least. But once you have it up and running for about six months and your staff is trained, you have a manager, you know you could step away. That's why I was able to go to Hawaii. I was able to, you know, be in Hawaii with you for BDSS and take time off and not have to worry and like I'm not there right now, but I have staff there right now who are running it while I'm gone. I'll probably stop in later because we're doing a really cool collaboration with this local influencer. He has like 14 million subscribers on YouTube but we're getting him to do one of our escape rooms so I'm really excited for that but there's like so much opportunity for collaboration.

Melisa:

Anyways, in terms of how much you need comfortably to start something like an escape room or franchise, I guess in general it really depends on the franchise. You know McDonald's, it's going to require you at least a minimum one million dollars, right. Subway's a minimum 500, 000. This escape room very low entry compared to some of these bigger franchises. So, like I mentioned, 150 to 500, 000. But a lot of that is covered by the bank loan. So, as long as you have in excess capital, be able to float.

Melisa:

You know the time during construction. But there's ways to negotiate free rent during the construction period, which is pretty. It's often offered depending on you know the space that you're looking pretty. It's often offered depending on you know the space that you're looking at. If it's been empty for like a year and they want to put someone in it. They don't mind giving you four or five, six months free rent while you do construction, until you're up and running. So I'd say you know you would want probably half a million in assets before thinking about doing something like that, just because, in case something happens, it's always good to have a rainy day fund.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, I think it's funny because a lot of people obviously complain about Amazon and the problems that sometimes it has and new fees and this, you know, screw up by Amazon, or they lost my inventory, but they don't realize. Hey, businesses have trouble, too. So, like you just mentioned your fire thing, but then also, when you got started, did you like even get robbed, like right away, or something like that?

Melisa:

Yeah, we had a break in and, funny enough, a month ago we had another break in, but twice in one night. So it's just a different set of problems, right. Every business is going to have its own unique problems itself. Sometimes I joke, I'm like, oh, maybe I should just do an e-commerce. But I love what I do with the escape room. Obviously, it's very fulfilling.

Melisa:

I get to hire students. I have this amazing work culture. You know some of my employees they'll come to work even on their day off. Like it's so cool seeing that and to be able to provide that kind of and give back to my local community, providing a place of work where people can grow as individuals who can build these different skills. Just from customer service standpoint and, you know, learning the ins and outs of the business and being a key holder, things like that and being in proximity to me, because I have one girl that works for me and she's also kind of in the e-commerce world as well, so she's almost like my little pupil, little protege. So it's kind of cool just having that know mentor-mentee relationship as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice, nice, all right. Now, coming back to e-commerce, you know you won best speaker at Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You did some cool magic tricks. I remember too. But you know, obviously we're not going to rehash the whole entire Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You got to go to Billion Dollar Seller Summit, guys, if you want to get that good data. But I wanted know, like, maybe you can bring out one of the topics you did, maybe either the site map one or the Reddit one, your choice. But what do you think is relevant here in middle of 2024, that on one of those topics that you think that can help our sellers out there?

Melisa:

Yeah, I think that Reddit would be a cool topic of discussion just because it's such an underrated social media platform. Like cool topic of discussion just because it's such an underrated social media platform. Like when you think social media, you don't really Reddit is not at the top of your mind, but it's a really great place for people to do research. So most of your customers are still in their research phase, so you want to show up when they are doing their research. Right, and that's where, if you have all these different threads that you are consistently mentioned in, it's going to be so much easier when it comes time to them actually pulling the trigger to actually want to buy from you.

Melisa:

So there's this really cool tool called Advite that we use. That helps us A-D-V-I-T-E dot AI, I believe, and they use AI to basically scrape Reddit and all the different threads and it will actually ping you whenever there's a relevant thread that you should maybe comment on. It's almost like help a reporter out, but like, for you know people, just random people that need answers for questions, and it's usually very unique questions too, like whenever I have a specific problem unique to myself, I always like type in, like, okay, this is the problem I'm having and I put Reddit at the end because I know someone in the world has had this problem before. Maybe someone has a solution. So it's really cool because these threads they obviously live there as like a forever forum and once you've recommended your own product or whatever it is, or your own solution on it, it stays there.

Melisa:

So other people who might have that problem will end up coming back to that thread and you can hit people and it's very evergreen. It's like it's there. It's almost like you posted it once and it's going to be there forever for people to come back to. So that's definitely something you should keep in mind when trying to warm up your potential customers. And if you use Advite, it's going to ping you all of those different threads. Just be on top of posting, contributing, getting that good karma, those upvotes, things like that, and you can even get other people or higher VAs to comment on your behalf on different ghost accounts. And as long as you can show up multiple times, people are going to be like oh yeah, I remember that brand. I've seen it pop up a couple of times. That's the brand I'm probably going to choose because you know so many people have recommended it.

Bradley Sutton:

So now I see you active sometimes in the Helium 10 Elite Facebook group, you know. So obviously you're doing something on Amazon now, but you exited the other brand. Are you still working with that brand you exited, or you went and started another one? Or what exactly are you doing in the Amazon world these days?

Melisa:

No. So we've exited that brand and then started shortly after another supplement brand. Thankfully, we didn't have like a very strict non-compete, so we were able to get into that space and then also dabbling in pet supplements as well. So another cool thing is that we're kind of looking into is customization of packaging, because nowadays, like you, really do have to do things different. Amazon just announced that they're making it so much easier for Chinese sellers to be able to ship their products straight from China. So that's going to change the game a lot. And if you don't have a solid brand or you're not connecting personally with your customers, then you are going to have a very rough time once that starts kicking in and all of your the Chinese competitors are undercutting you. So things like the kitchen industry are going to get really disrupted, like things that don't really have a lot of branding. You know, like most people can't really brand a garlic press. People are just going to buy the cheapest one that they think is going to for them.

Melisa:

But in terms of like supplements, especially things for pets, like it's such a personal thing, like people will spend as much money as they can for their pet. They have the budget spread because it's like their second children really, especially for millennials, right, who can't afford children. Like pets are our new children. But yeah, in Hawaii, actually, Janelle page, she mentioned something in her presentation about Jones Soda Company, how they would let people vote on different photos to put on the bottles. So we kind of want to implement something similar where we actually have our customers, dogs, photos on the bottles of our products. So that's something that we're kind of logistically exploring right now and I think that everyone should be kind of forward thinking like that, if you can to personalize it, or even if you can't, you can, you know, do a lot more blanket. Like for this print run, we're going to feature one of your dogs, so get everyone to post selfies with their dogs, with your product, and that's a good way to generate more content for your company. So doing things like that aren't as difficult to implement, especially if you don't do the manufacturing yourself.

Melisa:

Difficult to implement, especially if you don't do the manufacturing yourself, but with labels nowadays, like it becomes a lot easier, as long as you can get them all printed on the same roll. We do have, I think, our manufacturer for labels. They allow you to have as many different variations of label as you want. Which I think is cool. So if we had even like a hundred different dogs that we like have on this bottle, so we had even like a hundred different dogs that we like have on this bottle, so it's not like a consistent one, but then at least when we do go to retail people are going to see oh, this is the same dog as my dog. Like I'm going to buy that just because my dog is on the product.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, yeah, I like that. I think I always wonder about you know how, when your listing goes down on Amazon, that there's a dog page, that, like I always wondered. It was like are those Amazon employees dogs? Or something like that. It was a similar vibe, I guess.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. That's pretty cool. Now what? What's one thing new you're doing with this supplement brand that's working, and what's one thing that you're not doing? That you did with the other ones because, like you know, the Amazon world has changed off of.

Melisa:

So I guess something new that we've done is, I mean, it has been pretty consistent across all of our brands is just doing like variations of Supreme URLs I know Super URLs and that kind of graduated but we've been doing a lot of Google redirects, so making sure that we have a lot of external traffic coming into our pages because before we weren't doing any of that, it was just strictly. We were so Amazon focused. We were just like let's rank for keywords on Amazon, like let's just make sure that we're good here. But now you can't just rely on Amazon anymore. You have to be well-rounded in on different platforms. And we've been doing a lot more social media. It's obviously a lot more work but once you have the systems in play, it kind of makes it easier when you have VAS pumping out that content for you. But yeah, we've been doing a lot more content. Like content is king. You know how they say attention is the new currency, like that rings true and truer than ever. So one thing I am trying to do is become more comfortable in front of the camera and almost like pull things that I'm doing from the retail side of things, like from the, from brick and mortar into our e-commerce.

Melisa:

So like, for example, knowing the life cycle of your product is so important because then you know, okay, especially because we're in consumables we know when someone's going to run out of their product. Usually, it's either like a 30-day or a 60-day supply. So if you can, you know, send out an email to your customer a couple of days, or, if not, like a week, before they're about to run out, or even just like as they're about to run out. You're going to raise, you're going to have that top of mind awareness and you're going to be there at the right time. You're going to be there when you know your customer is going to need you and then it's going to, you know, trigger something in their brain. It's like oh yeah, I'm about to run out, I should probably order more.

Melisa:

So we've been sending out like emails or follow-ups for our customers, even with like review generation. What we do at like the escape room, for example, is we do have like a funnel, almost, where people would like leave us almost like feedback and then we convert it into a review but now we've been doing it as like more personal. I'm trying to find AI tools to help us automate it a little bit more. But basically we have like a selfie of us holding like a whiteboard and then we would just put like the person's name on it and be like thank you so much, like so and so, or whatever, and just thank them for their feedback. And then they're like, oh my God, like this is so personal, like of course, I'll leave you a review, you know. So, trying to do like more personalized things like that, and I think AI is going to make it so much easier. And yeah, that's the other thing, right, AI, implementing so much AI and everything in all aspects of our business has been so different because, like a couple of years ago.

Bradley Sutton:

Obviously you're probably doing 10 different things, but if you were to say the most impactful, what is the most impactful AI thing that you've implemented?

Melisa:

Using Midjourney has been a huge game changer for us as well, because now content creation for us is so much easier and so much cheaper, even product images. So before, if you wanted to get a really high quality product render with crazy you know, like crazy fruit in the background, things like that you'd have to pay someone a lot of money to just get one photo, like from a photographer. But now AI can literally generate it and it costs you pennies on the dollar. And then copywriting oh my gosh, copywriting is so much easier now. So that's why we're doing a lot more email marketing too.

Bradley Sutton:

Last couple of questions here. Favorite Helium 10 tool.

Melisa:

Favorite Helium 10 tool. Well, the one that I use on a daily basis is obviously the Keyword Tracker that helps me keep on top of everything, but also the map that shows you, you know-

Bradley Sutton:

Inventory heat map and sales heat map.

Melisa:

And seeing like the clusters of customers and where most of your inventory is and kind of tailoring to that, because we've been doing a lot more location targeting as well. So kind of what I mentioned earlier was knowing what to show someone at the right time. So taking a page out of like Tim Hortons book, for example, I don't know if you know Tim Hortons, but that's like a coffee company in Canada,

Bradley Sutton:

That's like Canada. Yeah, I know, I know about it, yep.

Melisa:

Yeah. So they have an app where they'll show you different deals based on your location, but also who you are as a person or as an individual shoppers like personalized coupons, things like that. So there's this one platform we were using, called Aviva, for the longest time, where we can on our website. If someone visits our website, we can show them different popups based on their location.

Melisa:

So we can show them like a very personalized experience when they arrive to the website. So knowing where our customers are super helpful, and I think the Helium Heat Map tool is cool for that just seeing where our inventory is as well, because then you're going to have, like that, faster shipping. So you know that. You know it's going to show up as prime or even same day shipping sometimes, so being able to focus on a specific area is also super cool.

Bradley Sutton:

When you look at the sales heat map and see, like, where your sales are concentrated, do you do anything based on that, like, do you actually run Google Ads or something that geolocated you know, to areas that you're not doing well, or you double down on the areas you are selling? What's the action that you take after looking at that?

Melisa:

Yeah, we usually double down on the areas that have high concentration of our customers because that's where they typically are and sometimes it surprises you where some of your customers are. Like, we do get a lot of customers in New York. Obviously, it's a big city, but I think a lot of people during COVID they were lonely in their condos but because it's very constricted you get a lot of small dogs. So we'll start like doing like when we do our targeting for Facebook ads and things like that, we'll actually show a lot more smaller dogs in New York versus, like you know, in Texas maybe they have bigger yards, things like that. We're going to show the bigger breeds so that way we can hit more of our demographic.

Bradley Sutton:

I used to have a great Pyrenees, because I have a big lot here and I would actually have. I had goats and pigs and stuff and that's like a livestock guardian. But yeah, somebody in New York City would not have a great Pyrenees, which is the gigantic dog. Okay, cool If I were to give you the keys to the Helium 10 product team, like, hey, you're our CTO for the day and you're like Helium 10 needs to have this feature in an existing tool or it needs to make this new tool that we don't have now. What would it be?

Melisa:

Yeah, you guys don't do that anymore, but if you can create your own Google redirect URL targeting keywords, that would be cool. Okay, because I use that regularly, especially for launches especially for launches.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, how can people find you on the interwebs out there if they want to follow you or maybe connect?

0:33:34 - Melisa:

You can follow me on Instagram @melisa with one S, my mom's felt my name on a member certificate, so it's very fab of her. Or you can email me. Linkedin is also a good one. I'm starting to be a little bit more active on LinkedIn, but yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, Melisa. Thank you so much for joining us and I'm going to have to go to your escape room. But don't judge me on how slow I am. Sometimes it takes me up until the very last deadline to try and get out and I sometimes have to have help from the guide in those things because I don't think well in those kind of high pressure situations. But I'm going to give it a try. Hope to hang out with you at an upcoming conference soon.

Melisa:

Yeah, absolutely. I can't wait to catch up with you somewhere in the world. We always see each other, you know, in our travels.

Helium 10 Buzz 7/19/24: Amazon Prime Day 2024 Recap | New Helium 10 Keyword Tracker

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 Prime Day drives U.S. online sales to record $14.2 billion
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/18/amazon-prime-day-us-online-sales-climb-to-record-14point2-billion.html

Shoppers spent $14.2 billion during Amazon's Prime Day: Here's what they bought
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/shopping/2024/07/18/amazon-prime-day-sales-record-14-billion/74457292007/

Prime Day 2024 drives record sales for overall US ecommerce
https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/amazon-prime-day-sales/

Here’s some numbers that caught our eye when we looked at Pacvue data from Prime Day so far
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/melissaburdick_amazonprimeday2024-primeday2024-activity-7219460602312708096-Tmdu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Amazon Prime Day 2024 is officially over, and once again, broke records. Adobe Analytics' initial data shows that spending surpassed forecast, totaling $14.2B over two days.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pacvue_primeday-pacvue-commerceacceleration-activity-7219815051182919681-KIZw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Don't miss the introduction of the upcoming live monthly Freedom Ticket webinar on advanced branding techniques with guest expert Emma Schermer Tamir. Plus, get a sneak peek at new Helium 10 features, including the Adtomic Dayparting feature for Walmart advertising and an updated Keyword Tracker tool with enhanced functionalities. Lastly, discover how to effectively utilize the sales and traffic conversion tool to improve your e-commerce performance, and hear personal insights on tracking crucial metrics and making strategic adjustments throughout the year. Tune in next week for more invaluable tips and insights!

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

• 01:01 - Prime Day Stats
• 04:13 - More Prime Day
• 07:09 - Community's Prime Day
• 09:07 - Freedom Ticket Webinar July
• 10:00 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 14:56 - Pro Training Tip: Amazon Business Reports Inside Helium 10

#579 - How to Source Amazon Products in India, Turkey, and Vietnam

Meghla Bhardwaj, the globe's leading expert on sourcing from India, joins us for an illuminating discussion on the current and emerging trends in India's e-commerce landscape. Discover how giants like Amazon and Flipkart are transforming the market and how tier-two cities are becoming key players. Meghla also gives a heartfelt account of her personal journey of moving back to India from Singapore, shedding light on the adjustments and opportunities she encountered along the way.

We take a deep dive into the quick commerce revolution in India, where mobile apps deliver groceries to your door in mere minutes. From specialty e-commerce websites focused on categories like apparel and electronics to the impressive success stories of Indian sellers on Amazon.com, this episode covers it all. Learn how individual entrepreneurs and niche manufacturers in sectors like bedsheets and jewelry are thriving, and how Indian factories are evolving to meet the needs of Amazon sellers with improved packaging and labeling capabilities.

Beyond India, Meghla shares insights on sourcing opportunities in Turkey, emphasizing the high-quality textiles and unique designs that set Turkish products apart. She also discusses the growing electronics manufacturing industry in India and the increasing competitiveness of Indian sectors like organic cotton babywear and wooden toys. With a focus on the booming handmade sector and the importance of India sourcing trips, this episode is packed with valuable tips and personal stories for anyone interested in the dynamic world of e-commerce and global sourcing.

In episode 579 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Meghla discuss:

• 00:00 - State Of E-Commerce in India
• 03:34 - Rising Trends in Indian E-Commerce
• 06:14 - Success in Cross-Border E-Commerce
• 11:51 - Finding Suppliers in India - Tips
• 14:32 - Sourcing and Differentiation in E-Commerce
• 20:38 - Changing Sourcing Trends in India
• 20:48 - Growth of Electronics Manufacturing in China
• 25:04 - Utilizing Meghla's India Sourcing Services
• 31:58 - Exploring Turkey's Unique Products and 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 the world's foremost expert on sourcing products from India, Meghla, back on the show and she's going to talk about a variety of topics, not just sourcing in India, but also e-commerce in India and even sourcing in other countries like Turkey. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Helium 10's got over 40 tools for e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know how overwhelming it might seem to try and figure out how you're going to learn how to use everything, or maybe even to know which ones you want to get started with, so for a completely free course that's going to guide you through learning everything you need in order to become a Helium 10 expert, visit the Helium 10 Academy that is h10.me forward slash academy. 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're going back on the opposite side of the world again. For the fourth time, Meghla 's here on the show. Meghla, welcome, welcome.

 

Meghla:

Thank you so much, Bradley. So excited to be here for the first time, yeah, but it's been quite a while. I think the last time I was on was a couple of years ago, wasn't it?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, yeah, so just you know, if anybody wants to get Meghla’s full backstory, I got a list here of all the episodes she's been on, so you guys can, you know, pause this one and go back if you guys want to, but she's been on the show since 2019. All right, that was her first time on the show, was episode all the way back in episode 84, then two, 10, then three, 31. And now we're in the 500. So, every couple hundred episodes she joins us here like clockwork, and so it's been a couple of years. I guess the last time was right towards the end of COVID there early 2022. First of all, what are you up to these days? Where do you live? Where are you calling in from today?

 

Meghla:

Well, I'm calling in from India. So, as you know, I was previously based in Singapore and two years ago I moved back to India. To, you know, focus a lot more on the India sourcing business, India sourcing trip. So now I'm permanently based in India and it's been

 

Bradley Sutton:

Whereabouts?

 

Meghla:

in Delhi.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How is it being back home?

 

Meghla:

well, it's amazing, I mean, I really like it. My son had a bit of a problem adjusting.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I was about to say like your son, never lived in India before or when he was little. Maybe or no, his whole life was in other countries.

 

Meghla:

Yeah, his whole life was in other countries China and Singapore and so it was a bit of an adjustment for him as well. He couldn't even speak the language very fluently, but now he's like totally Desi. Desi is like a local person, that's the word that we use. So, yeah, he's, he's adjusted. I'm really glad I moved back because there's so much opportunity, you know, so much happening in terms of the economy, manufacturing, exports, so I think I made the right decision to move back.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, nice, nice. Now let's talk a little bit about, you know, the economy over there and I know, like you know, social commerce is big, and but what about just the traditional? You know that's been one of the larger Amazon marketplaces. How is Amazon doing, you know, versus Flipkart, etc. What's the e-commerce situation in a nutshell that's going on in India the last couple of years?

 

Meghla:

Yeah, the e-commerce situation is very rosy. I mean, e-commerce is booming. There's, you know, increasingly the tier two cities are also getting on the e-commerce bandwagon and there are more sales from, you know, the smaller cities as well. It started with mostly the Metropolitans but now it's sort of you know, the tier two cities are also. A lot of people are shopping online over there.

 

What's really moving very fast is quick commerce. So that's something that is, you know, like for your groceries, for example, or daily use products. There are these apps and they're totally mobile based, right, there's no website that they have no browsers are only apps and you can basically order your groceries and they're delivered in minutes, like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, seven minutes. You know there's a race to like how fast the groceries can be delivered, so it's very convenient. Like since the time I've moved here, I've probably gone to the grocery store, maybe like twice or so. So, everything is ordered online by these websites or these apps basically.

 

Meghla:

So, I think that's really booming, that whole quick commerce sector. Apart from that, there are a lot of these specialty e commerce websites that are coming up that. So, for example, you know, for apparel, there are specific websites only for women's apparel, for electronics, for toys, for all of these kinds of things. So that's another trend that's happening. But Amazon is still sort of the everything store, so if you can't find anything anywhere else, you'll definitely find it on Amazon. And then Flipkart as well is sort of number two, you know, to Amazon, but it is. I mean, both Amazon and Flipkart are sort of neck to neck and they're still dominating the domestic e-commerce sector over here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Are there more successful Amazon India sellers? You know, I remember when we first started like or around then, like in 2019, you know I was like, hey, I need some help with finding some, like, really successful sellers. And then you did come up with one, but that was about it. In those days there was, like you know, one main guy who was doing really well but uh, are you seeing more people have a lot of success over there, or is it still pretty kind of like just even like everybody's just doing okay and not many people have really made it big?

 

Meghla:

No, so there are some people that have made it really big and you know, they're doing like seven figures, eight figures in terms of cross border e-commerce, in terms of, you know, like selling on amazon.com mostly amazon.com at Amazon Europe as well. So that is definitely happening. A lot of the larger manufacturers, you know, they have established their own brands and they have, you know, started selling on e-commerce directly. So that's a trend that's happening. But, by and large, most manufacturers prefer not to sell directly on e-commerce platforms, even though Amazon themselves have been encouraging manufacturers to sell directly. But typically, the small, mid-sized manufacturers they want to focus on their core strength, which is manufacturing. They want to do large orders. That's where they really make their money and a lot of manufacturers have tried selling cross water but they have not been successful because, you know, of course shipping rates are high and there are a lot of returns and things like that. So not able to manage it.

 

Meghla:

But the people that are being really successful are entrepreneurs and individual sellers, you know, because they are good at marketing. So, they source products from different manufacturers and they sell those products cross-border. So, there are quite a few niches that are seeing a lot of successful sellers. So, for example, bedsheets. I know one manufacturer that's doing really well in terms of bedsheets being exported. They have their own factory and they're doing that. Then there's also things like marble products and jewelry. So, a lot of sellers, resellers and manufacturers doing jewelry from the city of Jaipur. So, there are niches where people have been successful.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you know, speaking of sourcing in India, you know that was something we've been talking about every time you've been on the show. Now, in the early days, you know, like before 2020, it could have been said that, hey, a lot of the manufacturers I believe we even talked about this a lot of the manufacturers, you know some of them didn't have that much experience, as far as sourcing or supplying. I should say Amazon sellers you know the new ones is that go on with that, like the manufacturing time and the quantities, and interfacing sending stuff directly to Amazon. Like you know, a lot of the Chinese factories are ones who have been doing this for 10, 15 years and they know all the ins and outs and the requirements of Amazon and it's like clockwork. But, you know, in the early days, you know, I remember you had said that, hey, you know, some of the factories might be a little bit green when it comes to that, but now I think you know I hear more and more sellers manufacturing, or even ones who were manufacturing in China, you know, moving their manufacturing to India. You know, due to tariffs or whatever the case is. What's the situation now? Do you find more and more factories are almost like on par with the Chinese ones as far as experience now with dealing directly with Amazon sellers?

 

Meghla:

Yes, definitely. There are increasingly more factories that are familiar with the packaging requirements, the labeling and all of those things. In fact, I was visiting a couple of factories just last week in the city of Moradabad, where there's a lot of metal production that happens there metal and wooden production. So, I was visiting this factory that makes urns and they have a ton of Amazon sellers as their clients, and what they have started doing now like they're adapting to Amazon sellers’ requirements. So, for example

 

Bradley Sutton:

urns would be something good for my spooky coffin shelf friend, perhaps. Maybe you should think about adding that.

 

Meghla:

Absolutely yeah, and they're beautiful, gorgeous urns, right. And so, they cater to Amazon sellers. And what they have started doing is because Amazon sellers require inventory very fast, very quickly. So, they have started keeping stock of just blanks, you know, because the basic shape of the urn is the same, it's just it comes in different sizes and it's basically the patterns, the designs and the finish that differentiates one earn from the other. So, they just keep blanks ready in stock and so whenever you know Amazon sellers have sort of an order, they're like okay, quickly send it into production. So, they save a lot of time. And they specifically told me this is for our Amazon sellers because they require, you know, products to be shipped really fast. So that's happening. A lot of small midsize companies, because more Amazon sellers are sourcing from India now, they are definitely getting more familiar. The one thing that I'm seeing is that there aren't too many still like freight forwarders that are familiar. Not everybody is familiar with how to ship to Amazon. So just a couple of days ago I was talking to a freight forwarder and they were like we have no idea how to ship to FBA, but the one that we work with, for example, they understand how to do it very, very well. So, I think for shipping you just have to be a little careful. But increasingly suppliers sort of understand Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

When sellers who are sourcing from China experience increases in shipping costs, kind of like. Now what's going on? Is it pretty much the same across the board for India, or sometimes they're kind of immune to those, or pretty much just hey, anybody who's going that direction over the Pacific Ocean is going to have the same changes.

 

Meghla:

So, it depends. In some situations, India does face increases, just like China. So, for example, during COVID, both India and China, that was sort of a global phenomenon overall. So, even though, I mean, China’s cost increased significantly they were up to, I think, like $25,000 per container at one point, but India's cost did not increase that much. I think they were maximum $12,000 or so. So currently India's costs are increasing, but for different reasons, because it's mostly because of the whole situation in the Suez Canal and you know, because of which the ships have to sort of take a longer route to the US. So that's what's mostly affecting, you know, the shipping costs from India currently, whereas in China, I think it's a different situation, where, you know, there is sort of increased demand for certain products as such. So, yeah, it's not always the same trend, but it can be.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Obviously, you know, we'll talk a little bit about it later. You know, I think you know, one of the best ways to find factories is getting help from you and also, you know, maybe even visiting the factories on one of your sourcing trips or taking, you know, source. You know, maybe somebody can go on their own to visit certain factories. But what are you know, outside of that, what are some other ways that people can find the factories? Like, obviously, Indian factories have always been on Alibaba. Is that still a good way also, at least just to see what's out there? Or are there other websites that have emerged, maybe I don't know about, in the last few years?

 

Meghla:

yeah, so Alibaba and global sources, those are the two key global marketplaces. There are some suppliers from India and other countries, so you've got to use the supplier location filter to find factories from India. Plus, you can also just do a google search. A lot of the websites are now ranked on Google because Google is not blocked in India as it is in China. So, you'll find, you know, suppliers have websites, but of course, they don't keep their websites up to date. Sometimes they don't reply to emails that are sent to. You know email addresses on the website. So, you know, that's something you just have to keep in mind. Avoid the website India Mart, because that's going to come up very often, but that website is very domestic focused, and so there are a lot of companies that you know might not have export licenses, for example. So, yeah, I mean, there's also export promotion councils that you can go to, so visit their websites. You can download the list of their members, all of whom are exporters, but again, you have to like call them or email them to actually find out what their capabilities are.

 

Meghla:

In terms of other websites, I mean, I don't think there are any other supplier directories that have come up recently. There are some websites that have started, you know, selling products from India. For example, there's this website called expobazaar.com, which is basically they have stock in the US, which is basically they have stock in the US and so if you want to drop ship, for example, or if you want to buy very small quantities, like five, 10, 15 pieces, you can buy it from that website and then they can ship it directly. So, they have a lot of stock in the US and what they don't have in the US they can ship from India. So that concept is sort of picking up. Drop shipping is picking up for certain categories as well. Yeah, concept is sort of picking up Drop shipping is picking up for certain categories as well, and we have started offering sourcing services now like a sourcing agency. Previously we were just sort of connecting suppliers and buyers, but now we are managing the entire process because we found that a lot of people just stumble a lot. India is not easy to navigate, suppliers are not easy to manage sometimes, so we've started offering sort of end-to-end sourcing solutions  as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. Yeah, speaking of that, you know, like a couple of years ago we were working on what was going to be kind of like a version of Project X, and then most of it we kind of just postponed, like we filmed a whole bunch of stuff, but then, you know, with COVID and different things going on, like we kind of paused it. But the one thing that we actually, or the only thing in that project that we saw all the way to the end, was something that we sourced. I remember, you know, I I told you about it. I was like all right, you know, we obviously know in project X how to source products. Uh, you know, from China, let's try to do a product, that would be, that would be good for India, and then it was this macrame, product, and so, um, conversations and stuff. You know, I believe Shivali went directly to you but, walk us through, kind of like what happened? Like she, she maybe, contacted you and told you kind of like the, the, the kind of product it was, and then, first of all, you had to make the decision is this good to source in India or not? And we'll talk a little bit about that. You know what is good and maybe what isn't good to do in India. But then then, how did you go about finding and vetting factories, like, did you have one exactly that went to mind, or did you, maybe you know, shop around a little bit, get some samples? Walk us through the process a little bit.

 

Meghla:

Yeah. So, Shivali basically sent us a link and, I think, a couple of photos, and she had specific requirements. So, then what we did was we looked through our database, because we have a database of vetted suppliers and we do have quite a few suppliers that do macrame, because macrame is one of India's strong points. Like anything that is handmade, handcrafted, you'll find it is you know better in India, because labor is, of course, cheaper over here. So, what we did was we spoke to I don't remember the exact number of suppliers, but maybe like four or five suppliers we sent out the product to, we got quotes from them and then we basically went with the supplier that had the most competitive quote and also that had a good experience in macrame products, because a lot of the macrame products actually are done in homes by women, they're not done in factories and they're outsourced. So, it's very important for the supplier to be able to manage quality for such kind of products.

 

Meghla:

So, you want to make sure that the supplier has control. So, we spoke to quite a few suppliers and with this supplier we've done some other products in the past and we know that he's got good control over the quality of products and he has somebody to go around and check what's happening in each of the households or the communities wherever these products are being manufactured. And I personally have visited his facility over here in Delhi, so I know that he has the you know facilities to process and he has a process of you know like a checking and cleaning and packing and processing the entire product after it comes in as well. So, then we decided to go with this supplier and we got a coat and the coat was very competitive. So, you know, we negotiated a little bit with this supplier and we went to Shivali with the coat and she was pretty happy with it. So, we didn't have to negotiate that further and the only issue that we had was for the hook. So, Shivali, wanted a specific kind of hook,

 

Bradley Sutton:

That was me. I was the one who told her about that.

 

Meghla:

yeah, you're the one causing all the trouble.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yep, yep, I remember that part of it.

Yeah, I'm always thinking about how to differentiate, and the reason why was, you know, like already. But you know, by the time we started working on this, it started getting saturated. I was like, well that's fine, I want to show what happens when you do launch in a saturated niche. But I'm always thinking about how to differentiate. And one thing I learned about, you know, from my experience with the coffin shelves and things and I do a lot of other home decor products and I do a lot of other home decor products was that something that differentiates is how much you know how heavy you can, you know put something that's hanging on a wall and there's two, two factors there it's  not just how heavy, but how easy it is to install.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know, like me personally, I hate something you know that requires like a drill to use or you have that plastic piece and you put a screw through and through and it leaves like a humungous hole you know, I might have to have a drill in my house, which I know a lot of people don't have. So, and then, plus those just screws that go straight in. You know, those always aren't the strongest, you know, unless you're going directly into a stud or something, and then I think they're called, like, monkey hooks, but that was what we started using a while back for coffin shelves, and it just like you can just put it in with your hand and then, because of gravity and physics and everything, the way it works is like the strongest, and so I was like, no, we have to have this special hook because we'd be the only, we'd be the only macrame holder that has that, and so I think, if I'm not mistaken, we ended up actually sending it from China to India right?

 

Meghla:

Yes, exactly. So, we tried sourcing those over here, but we couldn't find them. We could find all of the other types of hooks, but you know there are certain products that are just not made over here. Oh, there we go, that hook right here, yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, yeah, here's one of the listings. Like I'm using this, you know skipping to the end, you know to the end, you know we ended up getting this product from India and then I'm using it for a couple of my launching case studies, where I'm just analyzing the different effects and it'll be it'll be like a permanent product on Amazon too, but already we've been using this whole product, and then there's those, those hooks and nice little bag here that they came up with.

 

Meghla:

so, yeah, this is a real product, guys, that we are talking about here yeah, so the hooks came from China and that was a smooth process as well. We didn't have any issues. I mean our supplier over here. It was sent directly to his factory, so he was the importer. There were no duties or anything. It was very smooth process. So, yeah, that worked really well, and then the bag as well. So, the bag was also sourced from the same supplier, because he also does, cotton bags and things like that. So that was also one reason why we chose him, because he could do the bags too.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, did Shivali organize the shipping, or did, did? did you also find the shipper for it?

 

Meghla:

yeah, so we organized the shipping too and, because we used our shipper that you know, we're we've been using for a long time and they, they know how to ship out of India and also we used our shipper. Yeah, there was no issues with the shipping as far as I.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now that product in particular, you know, like I just happen to know, probably from previous conversations we've had, and then sometimes I'll watch your live streams on LinkedIn and stuff so I knew that you know that was a good one to source in India. But what are some other do's and dont’s Like? In the past I believe you had said, hey, you know electronics, you know like consumer electronics maybe stick to China, you know they're very good at that, but you know textiles and things like that in India. What about nowadays? What would you say are the top three or top five to do in the top three or so that maybe another country is better?

 

Meghla:

So, electronics, I would say, still China is better, especially if you want to do OEM of things like Bluetooth headsets and if you want small quantities. But that's changing. I think maybe when I'm on the podcast, like in episode nine or so, I'll probably have a different story in the next couple of years, but that's changing too. There are a lot of electronics manufacturers that are being set up over here and, in fact, a lot of the bigger brands like Apple, Xiaomi. They have set up their factories and the supply chain is growing. So, there are a lot of like Bluetooth headsets and those kinds of companies that are setting up that are supplying to the domestic market and gradually these companies are going to export as well. So, the situation is definitely changing very fast. For example, there's this brand called Boat. They make a lot of Bluetooth headsets and you know, headphones, a lot of the small accessories, and now they have started exporting under their own brand and, of course, they will start doing OEM as well and they have, like I don't know, like 10 000 or so employees and across you know, various factories. It's a really big setup that they have and the government has been promoting electronics, but anyway. So, unless you are a big large, many you know brand electronics is still in China.

 

Meghla:

And then I would also say in terms of dont's, a lot of the very low value products. You know something like for example, recently somebody came to us with the you know these curtains, polyester curtains that are blackout curtains and they're selling for I don't know like ten dollars or something or $15 online and we were not getting them in India at a good price. So, something like that that is very mass produced and suppliers and manufacturers in China can sort of get you know scale by producing in high volumes. Those sorts of products are still better in China. A lot of the plastic type of products as well, I would say China is still better, although again, there is more manufacturing of plastic items happening here, bigger factories being set up, but still, by and large, China is better for plastic items as well. In terms of the items that are good, of course, textiles, any kind of fabric, especially cotton and organic cotton. So organic cotton is really a really high quality over here. We're seeing a lot of growth in baby wear, very high quality, organic cotton, kids and baby wear. That's a very fast-growing category. Also, toys so there's a lot of focus on the toy industry in India. Because what happened a couple of years ago, Bradley, that there was a bit of a tension between India and China at the border I'm sure you must have heard of it. It was probably around COVID times and so you know. China did a couple of things to you know, sort of in defense, and then India sort of retaliated and one of the things that India did at that time was impose very high import duties on toys being imported from China.

 

Bradley Sutton:

A toy Cold War.

 

Meghla:

Yes, a toy Cold War exactly, and so because there were these cheap toys that were flooding the market over here and of course, that was, you know, affecting the toy industry. But what that has done is that it's given a boost to the toy manufacturing. You know industry in India. So now, for example, a lot of wooden toys are coming up, and not only in, you know, like the traditional mango acacia wood, but like steam beach wood and pine wood, and very high quality and prices are very competitive. In many cases we've actually been able to beat China prices as well for you know wooden toys. Then there are a lot of factories being set up for you know regular like dolls and action figures and you know guns and sort of those types of things. Well, so that's a fast-growing category and a lot of local brands are also coming up and they are in fact exporting. So, there are a couple of local brands that do STEM toys, like India is really good with engineering and mathematics and all of those things. So, STEM toys is another huge category. There are some brands that in fact, we are helping launch them in the US and other markets, so that's another good category. Then I would also say, of course, all the entire handmade sector. So, there's wooden products, metal, ceramic, glass, all of those home decor items. That is still a very big category, especially for Amazon sellers and most sellers we know are finding a lot of success in those categories. Then there's leather, so a lot of beautiful, different types of leather. There are equestrian products, you know garments, shoes, accessories, bags, all of those things. And then I would also say, to add one more, eco-friendly products. So, if you're looking for anything that's made out of maybe cotton or jute or a lot of R&D is being done in alternative materials. So, for example, cactus material or banana fibers. Those are being converted to fabrics and they are used in bags and other kind of accessories, but of course they're not mass materials yet because there are niche and the prices are much higher than a normal material, but still that’s an emerging category.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting. Now, guys if you guys want to you know reach out to Megla to you know, perhaps you know, utilize her sourcing services, just like we did with success, as you saw. You know, one of the easy ways to remember is go to hubhelium10.com and then just type in India and then it'll come up right there, India sourcing network, and you could, you could connect her with her right from this page, right inside of Helium 10. Now I noticed also here on your Helium 10 hub page, it talks about India sourcing trips. So, are you still, have you still been doing, or did you start doing those again after COVID? Like what's the? What's the? You know? Like the cadence, is it once a year, twice a year, once every other year?

 

Meghla:

Yes, we're still doing the trips there twice a year, and we started after restarted the trips after COVID, and the one that we did after COVID we had 70 people on the trip, so that was amazing, and since then we've continued to do. The next trip is coming up in October. So, you know for people who don't know much about the trip, it's basically an eight-day tour to India where we teach you all about sourcing from India. We take you to a trade show that has almost 4,000 export-focused manufacturers, and then we also do some cultural activities and, of course, there's a lot of networking. You get to meet all the different service providers. You can also do factory visits. We can customize the trip so that you are able to find the products that you're specifically looking for, and it's just a very fun experience. And, Bradley, what are you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What are some of the fun things that you that you do, because I still have been saying for a long time I'm going to go. What do I have in store for me the first time I go on one of these? For the fun side. Obviously, I know the work side, what's going to happen, but what about on the fun side and the food side that's very important to me, as you know.

 

Meghla:

Yes, the food side is amazing because we choose the menus and the restaurants very carefully because India has so much variety in terms of you know, the different food, um sort of flavors and items, like each state of India has a different type of cuisine, so we try to mix and make sure that you get a flavor of all different types of Indian cuisines, we do a Bollywood night. I would say that's the most fun night on the trip. You can basically wear an Indian dress. For men it's the Kurta, which is like a long shirt. Women wear Saris. We buy Saris for everybody. We have a live dance troupe. They're singing and dancing on Bhangra tunes. Bhangra is a very fast-paced band.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I love Bhangra. I have some Zumba routines for some Bhangra songs. Yes, indeed.

 

Meghla:

Yes, amazing. So, we have that, and then we're just, yeah, dancing and singing and drinking and eating, so that's a very, very fun night. And then we also go to Taj Mahal. So, I think that's also very special, because that's one of the seven wonders of the world, and especially if you come with your partner, like your better half, or your spouse, then you can get a picture in front of the Taj Mahal, which is basically a monument that's dedicated to love and romance. So that's also very special.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right, interesting So, the next one, is in October, you said.

 

Meghla:

Yes, October 14^th to the 21^st.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent, excellent. I'll see there's a chance you know I might be going, or I am going, to Maldives, as they do every year, you know, to film one of my every 100 episodes of this podcast, and then this year, I'm actually going to be going from Turkey. I'm speaking at Turkey and I think I want to ask you a couple questions about that it's Segue, but I found one flight that potentially has like a like a set, like a seven-hour layover or something, on my way to the Maldives from Turkey, in India, I think, Mumbai, and so I had never even set foot on soil in India. So, I'm like, all right, maybe that'll be my, my first dip and then next step would be going on the India sourcing trip. So, speaking of Turkey, I believe you said you just spoke at an event there and actually you've expanded some of your sourcing to there. And, like I know, you know Carrie, who works with us here at Helium 10, she was telling me you know she went like on a sourcing trip to Turkey on her own, like last year, for her own Amazon and Walmart brands, and she actually moved some of her manufacturing from I'm not sure if it was in China or Korea, but to Turkey, and has had good success. What, what can you? How did you get you know? Linked with sourcing in Turkey?

 

Meghla:

Yeah, so I was invited to this conference. I mean, we have been thinking about sourcing in Turkey. In fact, I got the domain name turkeysourcingtrip.com last year because we were, you know, sort of exploring that and that's the first thing you do, right, when you have an idea. So, you know, because Turkey is definitely coming up as an important production hub and in fact, somebody told me when I was there that Turkey is the China of Europe. So, if you're based in Europe, if you're sourcing in Europe, then Turkey is like the perfect destination for you. So, I was speaking there at the World Deaf Conference and, you know, I thought that, you know, while I'm going there, I would meet manufacturers and we already had had been having discussions with some sourcing agencies and some sourcing partners over there. So, yeah, I mean, in terms of the products, Turkey makes a very wide variety of products.

 

Meghla:

So, first of all, textiles, like any type of towels, bedsheets, like Turkish cotton is very, very famous and I was, you know, some of the towels that I saw over there at the factories. They were so unique. I've never seen any towels like that. They had beautiful embroidery, some of them had like beads, embellishments, like very, very unique designs. Even the bedsheets were like very different from what you'd find in China or India. Then another thing is that they do a lot of cosmetics. So, there's in terms of cosmetics, it's also like skincare, or maybe shampoos, or you know, soaps, for example, things like that. So, there's a lot of R&D happening at that front as well. There are a lot of brands that I met that were doing vegan and organic. You know, like creams and body. You know body products as well. So that was another category.

 

Meghla:

And then, of course, apparel. So, Turkey does a lot of different types of apparel, whether it's women's apparel, kids or even men's apparel. There are men's suits. They do a lot of linen fabric as well. That's very popular linen and cotton. Then they do things like carpets. In fact, Turkish carpets are very popular. Then there's some handicraft items as well metal and ceramic and those types of things. But I mean exports of those are very minimal. There are also some very good packaging companies that we found so like very high-quality boxes. If you are sourcing some kind of product from there, then you can get the packaging and all done in Turkey as well. Also, the domestic market in Turkey for e-commerce is pretty strong. It's growing pretty fast and in fact Amazon is one of the marketplaces there, but it's not very popular. The popular marketplace is called Trendyol. So that's a local domestic marketplace and you know there is an opportunity for you to also sell in the domestic market on Trendyol if you are sourcing in Turkey.

 

Meghla:

I also saw quite a few like wooden products and very unique designs. I mean that's one thing that sort of differentiated you know Turkey from China or India. The designs are very unique. And then some toys, some very basic kind of toys, like puzzles, some, you know, board games and things like that. So, I mean at first, not a huge variety of products like China or maybe Vietnam, but very niche, very unique, very differentiated. And I mean, if you're in Europe you should definitely, definitely explore Turkey, because it's just in your backyard and you can save on logistics costs and of course, the deliveries can be faster and you can order in smaller quantities as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, cool. So, another you know alternative place that not a lot of people yet are sourcing from. That I think sellers should, should look into and I'll be looking forward to when you actually launch that website, because it means you're going to have some events and I love Turkish food too and I so many places I want to visit in in in Turkey, you know Bible history, a lot of Bible history there in a lot of cities and a lot of like Maldives-ish kind of places even that people don't realize on some parts of Turkey. So, I know you'll arrange something good. Just to prove, I wasn't making it up, but I found one of my old videos here of some Bhangra dancing here. Look at the skinny me going and doing some fitness right there. That's me, that's me from like 10 years ago. and even you can see my kids in that in that video leading a fitness class doing some Bhangra dancing there. But, anyways how you know, I already gave you know I told people how they can find you from the Helium 10 hub, but if they want to find you, you elsewhere out there on the interwebs. What are some good ways that they can? They can reach you.

 

Meghla:

Well, I'm on all of the social media platforms, so just search for me on either LinkedIn or Facebook and or Instagram and message me. You can also go to our website, Indiasourcingtrip.com or IndiaSourcing.net, and then Vietnamsourcingtrip.com as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Vietnam sourcing too. Yeah, I know that's another hot place. I see a lot of people moving to. Maybe there was just a couple of kind of products, a specialty, but I know a lot of people who are not only moving sourcing there, but even some of their operations moving to Vietnam. I spent about a week last year there and the last couple of years really nice, really nice place to visit. So maybe next time we can talk a little bit more about that. Do you have like a 30 second tip or 60 second tip you can share with the audience? Could be about sourcing, could be about travel, could be about moving to a country your son has never been to. Whatever kind of tip you want to give, go ahead and hit us with it.

 

Meghla:

Yeah, I would say be adventurous in your business. You have to explore different markets. China is not the only place where you can source products. Sometimes we get too comfortable sourcing in China and like, oh, we're sort of scared to go to these other markets. But there's a whole world out there, like whole different world, and people who are more adventurous and who are willing to take that risk will definitely reap rewards, because there are tons of unique products to be discovered in these alternative production hubs.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. Well, Meghla thank you so much for coming on here for the fourth time, we’ll look forward next year for the fifth time and hopefully maybe by then we can say that I've been on one of your sourcing trips, like I've been planning for years to do So hopefully that happens within the next year or so. But thanks for joining us and we'll see you back here for sure.

 

Meghla:

Thank you so much, Bradley Bye.

#578 - The TikTok Shop Opportunity

Unlock the secrets of skyrocketing your e-commerce sales with TikTok Shop! Join us as we sit down with Michelle Barnum-Smith, a leading expert on TikTok Shop, who will reveal why this platform is revolutionizing e-commerce and how you can tap into its immense potential. From unparalleled user engagement to an all-inclusive buying experience that supports brand building and data transparency, Michelle dissects the unique advantages TikTok Shop offers over traditional platforms like Amazon. Get ready to learn how full visibility of sales data and direct customer interactions can transform your business.

In this episode, we explore the seamless customer journey on TikTok Shop from sparking awareness to completing a purchase all within the app. Discover how the shift from traditional influencer marketing to a collaborative affiliate model is empowering creators to drive sales through direct rewards from TikTok. We also get into TikTok's growing prominence as a search engine for younger generations and the new shopping features that make discoverability effortless. This is a golden opportunity for sellers to leverage TikTok Shop's innovative ecosystem to maximize engagement and boost sales.

Prepare to be inspired by real-life success stories and practical tips for setting up your very own TikTok Shop. We cover everything from business registration and linking social accounts to optimizing your listings and content for viral success. Michelle shares invaluable insights on inventory forecasting and the ripple effect of TikTok Shop's success on other platforms like Amazon. Plus, learn the importance of adhering to community guidelines to avoid account suspensions and ensure your business thrives on TikTok Shop. Don't miss out on this comprehensive guide to navigating and conquering TikTok Shop's dynamic marketplace!

In episode 578 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Michelle discuss:

• 00:00 - Exploring TikTok Shop for Sellers
• 02:56 - TikTok's Influence on Consumer Purchases
• 06:23 - Enhanced Shopping Experience on TikTok
• 09:32 - Maximizing Sales Through TikTok Shop
• 11:04 - Reviving Live Selling With TikTok Shop
• 16:22 - TikTok Shop Viral Success Stories
• 16:40 - Success Tips for TikTok Shop Setup
• 19:55 - Maximizing Marketing Opportunities on TikTok
• 25:11 - TikTok Shop Guidelines and Best Practices
• 26:40 - Navigating TikTok Shop Suspension Guidelines
• 33:48 - Effective Creator Outreach Strategy Guide

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► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

TikTok shop is one of the hottest marketplaces in 2024 to sell on. Today we're going to do a deep dive into everything you need to know to get started selling on that platform. 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 special Freedom Ticket monthly workshop, where we actually film live a training, a deep dive training, into a certain aspect of e-commerce and we put it later into Freedom Ticket so that you guys can benefit from it. But you guys here on the podcast are going to get the benefit of getting this training too. Now today's guest is going to be Michelle Barnum-Smith, who is definitely an expert in the field of TikTok shop and she's going to do a deep dive into like hey, what do you need to do to get started and what are some best practices? You know we've had some people on this podcast who sell on TikTok shop. You guys have heard them doing some crazy, crazy numbers, some of them even doing more than their Amazon business. So if you guys want to know what's involved with getting set up on this platform, this episode is going to be for you.

 

Kevin King:

Now, Michelle I've known for quite some time, and so today she's going to be showing you why you need to be considering TikTok and talking about some of the opportunities that are there and what she's doing to help herself and her clients actually crush it. So please welcome Michelle.

 

Michelle:

Today we've got lots of ground to cover and we're going to be talking about the TikTok shop opportunity. Just like Kevin said and Shivali said, unless you've been living under a rock, it is all the buzz, and rightly so. Some people don't realize this, but TikTok shop was born from a hashtag and the whole idea of TikTok made me buy it. This hashtag has been around for several years and it basically was like hey, I discovered this on TikTok and I went and bought it. And here I'm showing it off again because TikTok made me buy this. And essentially, TikTok shop allows businesses to showcase through engaging short videos, live streams and creator collaborations, and users can discover and purchase products directly within the app, creating a smooth and convenient shopping experience. And we're going to talk about, like, just how powerful this really is for you as brand sellers.

 

Michelle:

So the opportunity of a TikTok shop has never been hotter. I mean, essentially, we're talking about a billion monthly users. They're on the app 17 times a day, with 83% of people saying that TikTok has influenced purchase decisions on what they're doing and what they're buying. So consumers are on TikTok specifically to be entertained. They hang out for hours. One and a half billion monthly user base spending an average of 95 minutes a day on the platform. I want you to think about that. That's like at least three episodes of your favorite show on Netflix. It's, you know, it's like people are just like scrolling, scrolling, scrolling and, um, all, all times of the day, like, like we saw in that previous stat of 17 times. You know, essentially starting the app 17 times a day, kind of crazy. Um, they offer a frictionless buying experience from creator to product page, to checkout to back to scrolling in seconds, which is one of the huge reasons why TikTok and TikTok Shop is such a powerful opportunity for sellers, right this second, so you can literally go from an organic discovery experience to a checkout experience in just seconds, and you can amplify that opportunity with some certain promotional activities that we'll talk about. So, bottom line, TikTok shop really helps build brands, not just sell products, so they have more high quality traffic, more sales and repurchases, have full visibility of data, end to end loop closing data.

 

Michelle:

So one of the things that I love so much about TikTok shop is having previously just used TikTok to drive traffic to Amazon. So I have tried it a whole bunch and it is so frustrating because Amazon's a black hole. They don't share data back with you. So if you've ever tried to run ads, drive influencer content, even do social media like, just focus on the social media side of TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or whatever it might be. There's no data back from Amazon, even with using attribution, because Amazon attribution is 55% inaccurate to actually tell you what converted, what drove sales. It's kind of like a guess most of the time and if sales rise you're kind of like, okay, well, what contributed to that In TikTok shop? You know exactly what contributed to that sale. You know exactly what social posts drove how many sales. Which affiliate is your number one affiliate? If you're running ads, you know exactly how those ads are performing.

 

Michelle:

It allows you to speak directly with your viewers as well, your customers, your prospects, every step along the way. It's you the face of the brand, your brand, interacting directly with customers. So most of the time, most sellers, most consumers, don't realize that there's sellers behind their brands on Amazon. They just think that they're buying a product on Amazon. That's not the case with TikTok. TikTok gives sellers opportunity to interact directly with the customer on every step of the customer journey. So there's no question who is? You know who this relationship is with and there's serious marketing opportunities, and I'm such a marketing geek. I love all of the marketing opportunities that TikTok has. Just this, just today, they released promo codes. Super excited about that. So let's talk about the full shopping journey within TikTok. Essentially, TikTok allows you to discover through shoppable content and through short videos and lives to select, basically go and learn more from about the product on the product detail page and then actually check out and buy, place orders and check out without ever leaving TikTok. So why this is so significant? As a marketer and as a seller myself, if I have, let's say, the counter to that is on Instagram and if you've ever been influenced on Instagram, you know, let me know, raise your hand, you're watching, you're watching that content and then the person is saying, oh, go to the link in my bio and you go to the link in your bio in, and it's some linktree that may or may not have been updated and that link might take them to Amazon. Take you to Amazon, where their Amazon storefront is like laid out, all for you to have to sort through just to find the product that you were interested in that caught your attention for just a second, that interrupted your entertainment experience that you were there on Instagram to experience, and now you can't even find what it was that caught your attention. You just give up in frustration.

 

Michelle:

What I love about TikTok shop is that you can go from being entertained seeing a shoppable video, seeing something that a creator is promoting, to all the way to checkout in just seconds and back into your entertainment. That experience has very little interruption. So TikTok has several ways to checkout. Essentially, you have the opportunity to go from a shoppable video to a TikTok shop where you can see that brand's full lineup of offerings, and go to the product detail page where you can then check out. But this is not typically the shopping experience. Usually, it's you see a video. It takes you directly to the product detail page and then you just check out. These are the things and ways that you can build your brand on TikTok shop directly. So let's talk about the customer journey on TikTok versus Amazon. So previously TikTok, when it was just a social media channel, sat a little bit higher up in the customer journey. So if you guys aren't familiar, the customer journey is this idea of a funnel or this process where somebody goes from awareness to consideration, to purchase, to customer service, to going deeper in their rebuy or loyalty to that specific brand. So previously, TikTok the app, the social media side of TikTok was just in the awareness phase, the awareness and consideration phase. Just like Instagram, it was like a place of discovery, a place of entertainment, a place to maybe get educated, but it wasn't a place to purchase. That was where you would go to Amazon, and Amazon fit squarely in the consideration phase, like I need more information, I'm aware of my need already and then I'm going to purchase. So essentially, Amazon is solution solving. It's a search engine for buying. Customers are already aware of a need. They search, research and buy on Amazon.

 

Michelle:

Buyers don't hang out on Amazon for fun or entertainment, despite Amazon's best efforts with Amazon Lives, Amazon Post, Amazon Inspire, and that's really why TikTok shop has taken over in that regard. Not necessarily like I'm not saying that Amazon's going away anytime soon. Obviously that's a huge opportunity, but TikTok shop now owns the entire customer journey, from awareness through consideration, purchase, the customer service experience, all the way to rebuy opportunities, average order value increases, um rebuy rates, all sorts of things that TikTok shop makes available to sellers to be able to do and accomplish all within the TikTok shop platform. Are you guys seeing the potential and the opportunity here? And, as a marketer, this is why I'm so passionate about it, because if you own the awareness, if you are the one creating the awareness of the need and you immediately go into a checkout scenario, you win. The checkout is not okay we're making you aware and then you're being taken to a page where you and 100 other competitors are then brought up with different options and people are overwhelmed with options. It's not like that. It's literally going from awareness to checkout to back to entertainment in a matter of seconds. So TikTok really comes down to need awareness. Their focus is on entertainment and education and their goal is to keep users on the platform with their addictive algorithms. Users are made aware of products and the purchases is done within TikTok shop with quick checkouts and then buyers are back to scrolling within seconds. So that's really kind of the crux of TikTok shop there and live selling. I don't know if you guys have seen have been on the platform yet, but live selling it really had its heyday. I feel like you know as far as US consumer behavior goes in, like the late eighties, early nineties, Saturday morning infomercials Anybody remember those?

 

Michelle:

I know I was like, always sucked in. I was always sucked into those Um. And then there's QVC and home shopping network where, you know, basically little ladies hang out to buy kitchen kitchenware, but TikTok shop, specifically, is bringing live, selling back, and it's crazy's crazy, the amount of organic viewers you get checking out your products live, seeing what you have to offer live, you know, and it's a form of entertainment, so they're already on there to be entertained and then they get to watch you pitch whatever it is that you have. That's kind of crazy. And also creators we have this. Creators have been kind of like put up on this pedestal as influencers, right, and this kind of title and with that has come a little bit of a combative nature. When it comes to working with brands, right, how many of you have worked with an influencer where you've reached out to them, you've tried to recruit them and they're charging like a couple hundred dollars of post to like two thousand dollars a post, five thousand dollars a post for the honor to get to work with them. Anybody experience that. And then you're like, um, what did I get from that? I got a post. Did it do anything, right? So the awesome, the awesome thing with working with creators now is that they essentially become affiliates because TikTok is rewarding them for sales that they make through the platform. So creators are now motivated to work with brands and to push products and seek out opportunities. It's no longer just like oh well, I'm a creator and so my creative needs are above your needs as a brand. Now they're willing to be more collaborative with brands in and focusing on content that converts and that drives sales, because, at the end of the day, they want to make money right and we all want to make money, and so it makes it more of a win-win relationship. So that's one of my favorite things about this kind of shift is it goes from the honor of working with a creator and an influencer to now like okay, we're affiliates and we're in this together.

 

Michelle:

So there's kind of four native ways to discover and buy on TikTok. There's the browse area, which is shoppable videos. That's what you would generally see if you're just scrolling through TikTok. You're going to have some content that is just entertainment content. You're going to have content that's educational and informative and that sync to and our shoppable videos, basically, and shop pages. That's where you know brands show up with their brand presence, um, live shopping, like we discussed, and the shop tab. So that's the new kind of search functionality within TikTok. That's all about finding and discovery and searching for solutions. It's kind of crazy, but TikTok has now become a search engine for a certain demographic. Anybody who's less than 25 years old, instead of going to Google with their questions first, they're going to TikTok with their questions first, and it used to be that videos were what was served first in the search results and now it's product. Are you picking up? What I'm putting down? Like this is this is a significant opportunity. This is such a crazy shift and I will say that every almost like 80 to 90% of the in TikTok shop contacts that I have were recently recruited from Amazon. Like Amazon employees are moving over to TikTok shop just like clawing their way over here. So it's very soon there's gonna be some aspects that are native to Amazon that we'll start seeing show up in TikTok shop, especially this kind of search portion, the shop tab, and then the buying experience, like we've talked about, is very seamless, from the product page to the checkout page. You literally can like sync your Apple Pay with TikTok shop, click the side of your phone gosh and be back to doom scrolling in seconds, if I haven't, you know, beat that into you enough.

 

Michelle:

But let's talk about this idea and this question is TikTok shop just a distraction for you as sellers? I hear this kind of objection a lot, and from really big sellers, and so I'm a little surprised. I'm always a little surprised because, like Kevin said, I think that if you have an opportunity to make money, are you going to say no to that opportunity, especially when it's relatively zero to low cost to get started? You already have inventory. You just bring it over to TikTok. So let's talk about just some case studies really quick. Every time I talk to an Amazon seller who is looking to expand off Amazon or diversify their revenue off Amazon, they're usually happy with like, hey, if I can get 5% of my Amazon sales off Amazon, like my Shopify site or Walmart or Etsy or something, I would be happy if just 5%. So here we have a few sellers and I'm just going to cruise through here. This brand got serious about TikTok shop beginning of April and year to date, they are 8% of their Amazon sales on TikTok shop. This brand launched in September of 2023 with TikTok shop. They're one of my brands and we immediately went viral. Immediately, like the bestseller that we had became a bestseller on TikTok shop and then, as we got to know our audience a lot better and affiliates a lot better, launching products on TikTok shop with them, we saw halo effect on Amazon. Every single time that we launched a new product on TikTok shop it would go viral. It would go viral on Amazon as well. Rank would skyrocket and along with sales. So their year to date revenue is 11%.

 

Michelle:

Our biggest struggle with this brand is every time we go viral. Like it's really hard to forecast inventory for going viral. So we keep running into like our bestsellers going out of stock because they just take off. They just take off, so that I guess that is like one of the sides of TikTok shop that is a warning is that your shop could go viral and with your inventory. This seller I did a big training in Cancun back in February and in and around TikTok shop this seller was doing two sales a day before my training and after that, um, 180 sales in the week following. So I was a little proud of that. And then subsequently, uh, we've been working together and now their brands, their, uh, they have 15% of their total brand revenue, uh, of their Amazon revenue they're making on TikTok shop. I'm not going to talk a lot about these brands, because these brands are just like killing it. They're 16% of Amazon sales for this brand. This brand, gosh, they're just like. I just met with their category manager last week, their new category manager. They're number one in their category on TikTok shop, all of TikTok shop, and their year to date is 17% of their Amazon sales. So I guess you have to ask yourself, like, is it worth getting started? Like, yes, I think the answer is obvious, right, like I'm not doing a sales pitch here guys. I don't like this is you already have the inventory, right? You're already selling on Amazon. It's not too much more difficult to extend, uh, what you're doing and get started with that same inventory on TikTok shop as well. So, but there's some nuances to it and I want to talk about those nuances. So there are some keys that are necessary to a successful setup on TikTok shop. So this is where we're getting a little bit down into some specifics. On setup, I am not walking you through step-by-step a setup step-by-step at this point. This is not necessarily how to. This is more of kind of like lessons learned from setting up over 30 brands personally on TikTok shop and some of the nuances, some of the troubleshooting, some of the kind of like things to avoid, basically from a high level perspective.

 

Michelle:

So this is kind of my setup checklist to be successful, this is what. These are all the things that you have to do one time during a setup. You need to get through your business registration. You need to complete that. You need to link a TikTok social account that is US based based with your TikTok shop seller account that is US based. You need to create or connect a TikTok ads manager to that account ads manager account to your TikTok shop account. You need to get your shipping set up and your listing set up and your content optimized for TikTok shop. You need to import available reviews, meaning, if you have like and this is all legal TikTok shop owns well, TikTok is owned by a company called ByteDance and ByteDance owns lots of different tech companies. One included is the main tool that's used for importing reviews. So if you have a Shopify site or another website with reviews on it, then you can bring those reviews over. If you don't, you can import reviews from Amazon to your website and then import those reviews from Amazon. It's a little bit of a process. It's a process, but you only have to do that once. To help you build up, to start the process of building your review presence, you need to select and implement promotions for your listings, such as pre-shipping with qualifications, product discounts, flash sales. Now the new promo codes that are released, and for select accounts, if you qualify, there's now a customer marketing whole section where you can go back and offer, you know, present offers in app. So showing up in the customer's TikTok inbox, basically like they already bought from you once, or, if they're a potential client, you can get directly inside of TikTok users' inboxes with your offers. My marketing heart, it just loves this from an opportunity perspective and we can actually measure how many sales converted from those messages. I love email marketing, I love SMS marketing, I love all of that, but sometimes we just can't close all the loops. And when we're talking native platforms and the marketing opportunities that are native to that platform, we're able to see all those loops close. When it's when we're talking native platforms and the marketing opportunities that are native to that platform, we're able to see all those loops closed and the associated data with that. So we know what further to invest in, what's working, what's not working, and then, of course, they're the final step in success. A successful setup is making sure that you have an affiliate plan set up for affiliates creators to find your products and to start promoting them and to make sure free samples are available. We'll show that here in a second.

 

Michelle:

Okay, the second thing that you need to make sure that you do is to review the prohibited products list. So just because you can sell something on Amazon and Shopify doesn't mean you can sell it on TikTok shop. And this is probably like the number one thing that I see sellers screw up on, um, that they just like rush to get all of their products on TikTok shop and all of a sudden uh, they didn't ever check prohibited products and all of a sudden their account gets deactivated. Um, because they're promoting products or promoting it in such a way that's against, that's either prohibited products or against community guidelines in how you talk about it. So the most suspensions and account deactivations could be avoided by checking this first. So essentially, just, I mean you could even just search for it TikTok shop prohibited products policy and go on there or also look at their restricted categories on there as well to see is my product a prohibited product? I've been surprised how many products are not allowed on TikTok shop that are allowed on Amazon and, of course, on Shopify. You can sell whatever the heck you want to. So it's definitely one of those things that just because you can sell it somewhere doesn't mean you can sell it on TikTok shop.

 

Michelle:

And this is just from a having been through it so many times. Business registration is not what it used to be. In September, I was able to get just like a ton of brands on TikTok shop with very little effort. Now there's a few more steps. Now there's a few things that kind of slow people down. It's amazing to me how many sellers just like give up. They just roll over and they're just like oh no, I can't get it to work. And I'm like guys, you are Amazon sellers, it is selling on Amazon is not an easy thing. Why are we giving up so easily? Have some like, have some resilience here. Also, TikTok shop like says oh, your account setup failed. I wish they would use different language, because sometimes it's not true failure and sometimes it's like they're just um, you get to a certain place in the process and then the system is moving you forward, but it needs more information, like you need to submit additional documents or you need to submit them in a certain way, and so it says failure, but really it just means like you need to go add more, add more documentation or whatever it is that they're actually asking for. So my advice to you is just keep pushing forward, keep pushing through that. It is worth it in the end. And just as a little like hack is any requested documentation, even if it says that they accept PDFs and PNGs, only submit them as JPEGs. Like their system, their bots read JPEGs and more often than not they don't read PDFs. So just, even if it says it'll accept a PDF, just submit it as a JPEG. Okay, cause it will help you. And especially if you're talking to support, support. It's so crazy because support can't see submitted PDFs or PNGs, but it can see submitted JPEGs. Does that make sense? So that's a little, a little note for you to take and make sure that you're doing Okay.

 

Michelle:

This is relatively new and this has to be. This is around community guidelines. Community guidelines were updated mid last month and essentially it's just saying hey, this is the way that we behave on our platform. So there's, they become a lot more strict about what creators as well as sellers can and can't say on their product. You know, on the platform and that includes your listings and what you say about your products, especially, um, you know if something has an effect on weight or weight loss, physical performance or physiological effects or changes. So in this example, I had a seller reach out to me and they're like I don't know what I did wrong, I don't know why this account is frozen, or this product is frozen, I don't know what's wrong with it. And all I had to do was read through the title to see what the issue was. They're essentially saying this eliminates snoring and enhances facial structure and post-workout recovery claim, claim, claim, claim, claim, like you're physiological effects, physical performance, eliminate snoring. You can't say that on Amazon had. Like how can you say that? Like you can't say that on TikTok shop either? Um, and if you have any product in and around weight loss, I'm not saying it's not possible to sell on TikTok shop, it absolutely is. But how you talk about it is really critical. You cannot say weight loss, you cannot say metabolism, fat burning oh my gosh. I had another brand that was just like beside themselves. They were so like offended that TikTok shop suspended their product, their you know key seller, and I was looking through their account. It was like weight loss, metabolism, dah, dah, dah. And I'm like you can't say those things. You. You failed TikTok, you know like. You showed up like, oh well, we can sell it on Shopify. Yes, you can sell it on Shopify, because on Shopify you can say whatever the heck you want about your product. There's nobody policing what you can and can't say on your Shopify site. But this is their market and so they get to say what you can and can't say. And it's not just what you say in the text, in your title, in your bullet points, it's also what you say in the images, on the products themselves as well. So if you have packaging that you're showing and it's making claims. You got to scrub that. You got to like, get rid of it if you have infographics. So that's why I say you're not just pulling over everything that you've created for your Amazon listing or your Shopify listing. You got to be really careful in what you're bringing over and being aware of these community guidelines and what you can and can't say. These are the main ones. It's worth looking at, it's worth reading through and I do talk about that extensively in my course where I detail and outline it, but these are the top ones.

 

Michelle:

Okay, focus on your bestsellers. I often see that the second somebody gets started on TikTok shop, they bring their whole category, their whole catalog of offerings over at once and I really advise you to just test the opportunity and to learn the platform and which of your products is the best opportunity first. So too many products are a distraction to affiliates and your ops team. So, like in this example, this brand brought over gosh all of their products and anytime that they were doing creator outreach they basically all of their creator and targeted plans was just like hey, here's everything that we sell and that's a lot, that's too much. So instead we shifted their focus to okay, what's your best seller on Amazon, what's the one with the best reviews, the strongest call to action, the most obvious for how it helps a consumer? And they're like, okay, this one, their free sample request took off, the affiliate performance took off, their sales took off. So just don't flood. It's a distraction for your team. It's a distraction when you start to reach out to affiliates, so just focus on your best sellers first. Now hear me out. This is probably the biggest warning that I have for you. Second to prohibited products okay, so this is probably the biggest area that I want you to be really careful with. And don't use the shortcuts, okay. So oftentimes I see that sellers are you're on Amazon, you're on Shopify and there are apps available within TikTok shop where you can just sync your Shopify account or sync your Amazon account and sync over your listings. So all of your listing content immediately gets imported into TikTok shop, and I have seen so many issues with this. Like I've said so many times, there's things that you're saying on your listings that you can't say in a TikTok shop, and what happens, guys, is that your listings are not reviewed by human beings, right, they're reviewed by bots, and what I have seen happen so many times is that people have seen those listings and they bring over their entire catalog, like we just talked about, and they're making claims or bringing over prohibited products or something like that that they didn't know.

 

Michelle:

I didn't know and immediately they get account violations and account violations and they get a million account violations and then their account gets suspended because there's a limit to your account violations that you can receive, and then you lose your account, your account gets deactivated and it's over before you begin. So that's an extreme example, but I have seen that too many times to count what also happens, especially in the case of Shopify. For example, if you're syncing your listings, let's say you want to make a change to your TikTok shop listing, like your price or your title or something like that, because your listings are synced with these apps. You can't do that because Shopify and the Shopify listing owns the TikTok listing, so you have to go and make the change on Shopify If you want to make that change, show up on TikTok. You see how that's a problem, right? So and it's not an easy fix, it's not, it's not just like a quick separation, um, because I have a seller, like I've talked about. He's number one in his category and he set this up, his like. When he first got set up, an account manager told him to do this and they didn't know. These account managers have no clue, they really don't, um, and so he is dealing with this issue. If he were to try to separate at this point, he would have to create a new ASIN, for lack of a better term. A new listing for one of his best sellers and one of the big areas of social proof on TikTok shop is to see how many people have purchased the product. He would lose all of that history on that listing that now has like a hundred thousand purchases. So, yeah, it's, it's like a serious deal. So please don't do that. If you're wanting any kind of true shortcut, use the bulk uploading options. This is new the import product upload accelerator. Go this route if you're looking for shortcuts. But, like I said, I really do want you to like set up your listings manually first, at least the first couple, so you understand what TikTok is really looking for, so you can then go and add more products in the future.

 

Michelle:

Offer free shipping. Oh, my goodness, we're running out of time, guys, we'll send you these slides. Basically, bottom line, you set up the free shipping opportunities within the promotions tab and not when you're setting up your shipping templates and your shipping solutions. So it's a promotion and you can apply all sorts of qualifications to qualify for free shipping and fulfilled by TikTok is now a thing, and they're gonna start pushing this really, really hard. So start with your Amazon inventory, start selling via Amazon MCF syncing with TikTok shop. Once you've proven the opportunity for your brand, immediately apply for FBT as soon as you set up your TikTok shop account so that when you prove like, hey, is this an opportunity for me, cause MCF is expensive, you want to get that inventory into FBT and start taking advantage of the opportunities and like super cheap pricing that they have for fulfillment over there. Okay, I'm going to cruise through this, but, just like I showed you, there's kind of like the setup checklist and then there's the ongoing success checklist. This is what you need to do ongoing, daily, weekly, monthly to be able to make sales on TikTok shop. Really, what it comes down to is working with creators, making sure you have your free samples turned on. I have my three S's to targeted outreach, which is search, sort and then save. And just a warning if you are using bots or planning to use bots, that gosh. They've now put regulations in place where new sellers are limited and restricted on how many people they can reach out to because of these messaging bots that are out there. So I really recommend focusing on target collaborations versus and reaching out to creators that way, versus messaging and spamming methods. So this is my search and sort and save method. Essentially, you're under the find creator tab and you're searching via relevant search terms for your brand or your category. You're sorting I like to sort by GMB, and if they're fast growing that's even better, because then they're hungry, they're starting to see success, but they're not so successful yet that they you can't get the time of day with them. And then you hit the little save button over here and then when you go to target collaboration up here, you can import your saved folks I recommend at least 50 per day that you're reaching out to via this message.

 

Kevin King:

Thanks everybody for showing up today. We'll be back again next month to do this again on a whole new topic. Remember there's a replay of this, if you missed part of it, in Freedom Ticket inside the Helium 10. So if you're a member of Helium 10 at any level, there's a little button somewhere up around the top in the education section or resources section that says Freedom Ticket. You'll be able to find this recording in a few weeks in there, added as a permanent addition to the Freedom Ticket. So thanks everybody for coming today and thanks again, Michelle.

 

Michelle:

Thank you, bye, guys.

Helium 10 Buzz 7/12/24: TikTok Shop Special Program | Temu Becoming Amazon-ish? | Etsy Shift

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.

TikTok Launches New Program To Attract More UK Merchants
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/tiktok-launches-program-attract-more-uk-merchants/720798/

Temu Breaks With Direct-From-China Strategy In Threat to Amazon
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/temu-breaks-with-direct-from-china-strategy-in-threat-to-amazon

Amazon Price Matching Update: As we all know Amazon has been price-matching Target and Walmart for a few years now causing many issues for brands.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brandonfishman_amazon-target-activity-7215821589546721280-2Rv_/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Flip, The TikTok Shop Competitor, Expands Social Commerce By Acquiring Curated
https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/07/09/flip-the-tiktok-shop-competitor-expands-social-commerce-by-acquiring-curated/

Amazon defeats US consumer lawsuit over ‘buy box’ product listings
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/amazon-defeats-us-consumer-lawsuit-over-buy-box-product-listings-2024-07-08/

Etsy loses its ‘handmade’ and ‘vintage’ labels as it takes on Temu and Amazon
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/9/24190843/etsy-handmade-vintage-policy-change

Don't miss an exciting preview of the Amazon Accelerate event and how you can win free tickets from Helium 10. Lastly, Bradley talks about the latest update on Helium 10's Chrome extension, designed to give you the competitive edge you need in title optimization.

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

• 00:47 - $1M TikTok Shop Program
• 01:43 - Temu Becoming Amazon-ish?
• 03:27 - Target / Amazon Buy Box Blunder
• 05:12 - New TikTok Shop Clone
• 07:12 - Amazon Wins Lawsuit
• 08:24 - Big Etsy Change
• 10:38 - Walmart Connect Updates
• 11:15 - Amazon Accelerate Updates
• 12:00 - Follow Helium 10 On TikTok
• 12:54 - New Feature Alerts & Training

► 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:

Temu's going after Amazon now. Big buy box issues. If you sell on Target and Amazon, is change coming to Etsy? These stories and more on today's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the new stories that are going on the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We give you training tips of the week and we let you know what new features from Helium 10 can give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. All right, we got a lot of articles, so let's go ahead and hop right into it Now. The first article that we're going to be talking about today is actually from social media today, and it's entitled TikTok launches new program to attract more UK merchants. All right, so this is basically called the 1 Million Pound Club Initiative and it says it aims to help UK retailers reach 1 million pounds, or about 1.28 million in US dollars, in revenue via the app. Now what is involved in this program? Well, it says they're going to offer special incentives, support offerings, 0% commission, free sales, free storage, free fulfillment by TikTok seller support priority service. Some of you all might be saying, hey, sign me up. So it's kind of crazy these benefits that they're going to do Now. If you're interested in getting more information on this program, if you're in the UK, there is actually a link in this article that you should be able to get to down below.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go talk about another platform and it's funny. A couple of weeks ago, when Carrie was doing the weekly buzz, there was a news article she had where it was entitled Is Amazon Becoming Temu-ish? You guys remember that story. It talked about how Amazon's opening up a kind of channel where it's kind of like Temu, where they have Chinese sellers, sell directly to US buyers and then they ship directly low-priced items and it gets to customers in like 10 days. This is funny. Now this is entitled Is Teemu Becoming Amazon-ish? So there's this article from theinformation.com and it's entitled Teemu Breaks with Direct from China Strategy in a Threat to Amazon. And basically what this article is talking about is how Timo is trying to kind of go away from just the direct from China to US model and they are actively trying to recruit US sellers, or at least sellers who have warehouses in the US, to ship and then potentially, you know, who knows, maybe Temu would have some um fulfillment now for the very first time ever. I started like downloading the Temu app and looking at it and I'm like, oh, my goodness, uh, they've got coffin shelves and other stuff on there for super, super cheap prices. I'm not sure how it would work in the U? S. Now I I'm going to be actually trying to reach out to Temu and maybe do like a little mini case study to see how in the world they expect to have US sellers selling on the platform. But who knows, maybe it's an opportunity, like if they have a whole bunch of incentives where you can make a profit, you know, due to maybe no selling fees and very, you know, no advertising, et cetera. So let's see, come back in maybe three or four weeks I'll let you know how my project X team is going.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is not really an article but just a LinkedIn post. In case you missed it, Jason, who comes here on the podcast sometimes, and he along with the CEO of VitaCup, Brandon, were reporting on something that's going on where you know how Amazon price matches, you know, with Walmart, Target and other websites. And now target had this circle, target circle prices like target, that target circles, kind of like their club where they get special discounts. But then what's happening is, on this target circle Now they're showing the target circle price over here with the regular price, with a line crossed out of it. Now you know you might be wondering, well, how is that an issue? You know that's pretty cool. But no, it's not cool because what's happening is Google, I guess, picked up on that new Target Circle price which only a few people have. It's not like, oh, everybody's a Target Circle member, like everybody's an Amazon Prime member, almost right. So what's happening now is that's a special price, a special discount that I believe Target even gives. It's not really the buyer or the seller who's giving all of that discount. Target, I think, is subsidizing it a little bit. And now what's going on is that Amazon's price matching that and so of course, your Amazon listings are priced higher than that Target circle price. And so what happens when Amazon detects that? No, buy box. So a lot of sellers out there it's not just VitaCup, I've heard this across the board that a lot of people are being affected by this where Amazon is removing the buy box because it thinks that they're price gouging, right. So if you're selling on Target and your Amazon sales have gone down, take a look at your Amazon listings. That could be the reason. I don't know offhand of a solution, but I'm sure Amazon will come up with something before Prime Day.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Forbes.com and it's entitled Flip, the TikTok shop competitor, expands social commerce by acquiring curated. Now, I have never heard of Flip. I have never heard of curated, but it's interesting. First of all, why should we care about this? This is like you know. We're talking about social commerce where there's social media blended with buying right in one. That's, that's the whole kind of like premise. You know, there was TikTok and then now there's TikTok shop. Now this is big overseas. You think it's already getting big in the US. Well, the social commerce market in China is going to grow from 350 billion back in 2021 to 900 billion next year. Now US social commerce was 37 billion in one and it's projected to get to 80 billion. But that's like China's like 10x the ceiling. If it really starts to take off in the US, you know, who knows how big it can actually get. So it's interesting to follow, hey, who are the new players in the game? We saw what happened with TikTok shop in the US and now it says hey, it has over 500,000 merchants in the affiliate program selling products via influencer produced shoppable videos, as we know, right, bloomberg reported that TikTok shop expects to reach 17.5 billion in sales by the end of this year.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now there's another social commerce player. It's called Flip and they're similar to TikTok shop, but it's significant differences, it says, could make it more appealing to customers. In the US it only has 5 million users, so this is not something that TikTok Shop is. Shaking their boots, oh, my goodness, this Flip company is coming after us, but they curate every brand. It features On TikTok Shop not anybody, but it's a little bit loose. But on TikTok or on Flip, it said pretty, a little bit loose, uh, but on Tik TOK or on flip it said 70% of the sellers that apply uh are actually rejected. Uh, giving customers more confidence. So, anyways, um, just another, maybe marketplace that you can maybe get in a little bit early on. Um, if you think it's going to get bigger, uh, take a look at flip.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Reuters and it's entitled Amazon defeats US Consumer Lawsuit Over Buy Box Product Listings. Now, at first when I saw this I was like, oh, did that crazy FTC lawsuit finally get thrown out? No, this was just like something that a couple of random Amazon customers wanted to do some class action lawsuit, saying that, oh, amazon is not rotating the buy box in a fair way. You know, it's actually showing some prices that were a few cents more expensive than other ones and we're all affected by it. So obviously the judge kind of like threw this one out because they're like all right, well, show us the receipts. Like literally like where's the receipts? And they're like well, we don't have any receipts. I guess is how it worked out. But you know, remember that other FTC lawsuit I haven't heard about that in a few months. You know, what I've said always from the beginning is like I don't understand why the FTC is going after certain things that Amazon is doing when there's so many other things that Amazon sellers are concerned about, like you know, the new fees and buy box matching and things like that. But here I guess anybody can file a lawsuit against Amazon. But hey, just because you do it, that doesn't mean you're going to win. Amazon won and these Amazon Prime customers zero on this one.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is kind of near and dear to my heart because a couple of weeks ago, literally two weeks ago, I got a whole bunch of my Etsy listings suspended. And I don't know about you guys who sell on Etsy, but when you sell on Etsy or you get suspended, like on a listing, there's like no way to contact customer support, no way to argue. It. It's like final, it's like this and that and my products, you know, like coffin shelf products on one account and on another account some other similar, uh, not mass produced products that I sell on Etsy. It absolutely falls within what Etsy is says. It's like the handmade policy. It's got to be handmade or made by a member of your shop, uh, or designed by you, like. I qualify for all three of those. You know pretty much. So it's ridiculous that Etsy was removing my listings but now this week the verge is reporting it. Etsy loses its handmade and vintage labels as it takes on Temu and Amazon. So what does that mean? Well, it says hey.

 

Bradley Sutton:

A policy update announced today creates four new classifications for items for sale on Etsy Made by, designed by handpicked by and sourced by. All right, all products need to fall into just one of those four to be eligible. Vintage items will fall under handpicked by. But again, this is kind of crazy. I had to redo a whole bunch of my listings just because Etsy erroneously removed it. Couldn't they have waited two weeks? Their policy was about to change anyways. There's no way that. I mean, who knows, I was already not breaking the policy. So who knows? I mean Etsy probably still could remove my listings. But anyways, this is kind of big news, I think. You know Etsy wants to kind of like, you know, make sure they're competing a little bit more with Amazon, and you know websites like Teemu, I guess, and so this move you know, let's see might help them. You know, let's see might help them. Does this open up the possibility for you to sell on Etsy? Maybe before you didn't think you qualified. But do you qualify under one of those four things? I, technically, if you design your product, even if you're not the one making it, you absolutely should qualify if you take that at face value. So a little bit interesting for those of you. Maybe you can start considering Etsy as a marketplace.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of different marketplaces, Walmart had a Walmart Connect few announcements that they sent out in email. They said they launched a couple of new things a video module, item and module reordering for brand shop. So brand shop is kind of like I guess you know the your brand store on Amazon, but now you can add a video module to that. You can also rearrange your modules on your brand narrative or brand shop page and do a couple other things. So I don't even have my brand store set up on Walmart. I better get on that and then I can go ahead and take advantage of some of these other features going to Amazon seller central they have.

 

Bradley Sutton:

This is the last story of the day Amazon accelerate We've been talking about for a few weeks. They announced a couple of the special speakers Amazon Store CEO, Doug Harrington, and also Martha Stewart is going to be joining Amazon Accelerate 2024. So there's your chance to meet a couple of celebrities of the Amazon and pop culture world. I guess there that you can do if you go to Amazon Accelerate. Now Amazon Accelerate, if you go to h10.me forward slash accelerate, you'll be able to get a hundred dollars off your um tickets, which I believe is only four 99 right now. But do you guys want to go to Amazon accelerate for free?

 

Bradley Sutton:

We have a contest going on right now. If you go to our Tik TOK channel right, helium 10 software. Right, helium 10 software follow us and then like one of our posts. All right, don't just software. Follow us and then like one of our posts. All right, don't just always just pick the first one I don't know why my face is all over this TikTok channel right now but pick one of the recent ones and like it and then comment something with the word accelerate. Don't say, hey, I'm entering the contest for Amazon Accelerate. Say something like Bradley, looks like your hair growth has been accelerated lately with your haircut, I don't know. Just trying to come up with a unique way of using the word accelerate. And then our social media person, Lailama, she's going to pick one of you to win a completely free ticket to go to Amazon Accelerate worth $600. So make sure to do that when you see this sometime this weekend, if you can. All right, that's it for the news this week.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now let's get into a couple new cool Helium 10 feature alerts. All right, we've got some new things that are coming to our Chrome extension. Actually, they have come to our Chrome extension and here's the background of it. As you know, when you take some of my listing optimization classes, or if you've learned from other people out there, like Tomer Rabinovich, he's always said, hey, try and find out what is the niche theme? Right, like what kind of images the competitors are using and like what kind of style they have. But one part of a niche theme is the length of title. All right, it's not like hey, every single category, every single product, you should have 200 characters in your title. Every single product, you should have 50 characters. No, some could be 50. Some could be 200. Different things work in different niches, and so now what sellers were looking for is hey, how can I just really quick, at a glance, get an idea of what the top 10, 20 products on a keyword page? What is the length of their titles? Well, watch this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

If you go into the Chrome extension now, you are going to be able to hit Xray, for example, right here. This is a search that I have here for collagen peptides. And if I hit the search button now, as you can see, there is this new widget at the very top. It says average title character count 169. And then, if I put my mouse over the eye here and it says here at the bottom there's actually six that have 180 to 189 and there's seven, seven listings, 35%. So 65% of the listings on page one of collagen peptides have between 180 and 200 in the top 20. All right. So now compare that to another one. We go and search accordion on Amazon, all right. And then we run a Xray on this page remember the collagen peptides was 169. What's the average on accordion? It is only 116. All right, and if we put our mouse over right here we can see that, hey, 25% of the listings on page one actually have less than 100 characters, all right. And another maybe 50 percent or 40 percent have between 110 and 139. So completely different than what you were seeing for collagen peptides, right. So again, just because a list you know, even helium 10 has listing scores. It's just based on like kind of best practices overall. But this is something that is interesting, where now you can see what's going on at the individual product level. You can see the title character count of every single product on page one and on average. So pretty cool update for the Helium 10 Chrome extension.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now one more update here in the Chrome extension. Hopefully you guys have had a chance to maybe use the new tool that we launched a couple of months ago that uses AI to kind of aggregate and analyze and organize your product research maybe projects, right. Well now, let's say you're researching accordions and you ran Xray here and you want to add a few products, like, oh, I want to add this to my product research project right in product launchpad. Well, now what you can do in Xray is go ahead and select any of the ASINs you want and then you are going to hit the button right here save product idea. And once you hit the save product idea, it's going to open up a widget and now, if you actually have some projects open in product launchpad, you're going to be able to choose it from here and then just add it right there. Or if you're just like oh, wow, I'm just browsing Amazon, this is like actually a really interesting idea. These mini accordions for kids never thought of that. I want to start researching that, uh, without having to go and do all this research right now. Let me save this for later. So then you would hit new product idea and now it's going to go ahead and save in your new project. So super cool updates this week from the Chrome extension and hats off to Simon at Helium 10 for helping push those through.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now it's time for the Helium 10 training tip of the week, and this also has to do with the Chrome extension. Maybe a new way that you can see who is targeting your ASIN and start tracking it. All right, it's not available like in black box or in the Helium 10 tool. It's available right here in the Chrome extension. Just go to your product pages or go to your competitors product pages If you want to track. Hey, who is showing up on my competitors product page? Where am I showing up on my competitors product page? Or vice versa, who is showing up and who is bidding for the most on the Product Targeting Ads on my page? Who's putting sponsored brand ads on my page? Who is putting a Sponsor Display Ads on my page? Let me show you how you can do that. You go into Amazon and like, let's say, this is my product. Actually, this is one of the products I work on in motion hemp cream. You can see that there's plenty of ads all over the page. Here's products related to this item. There was a couple of sponsor display or some sponsored brand ads down here towards the bottom. There's even more products down here that are showing up.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So what you can do, all you have to do now is hit Xray and then instantly all of the products on this page are going to show up. All right, so you can see here that there's actually um, let's see, it looks like 25 products are all appearing on the front of this page, from sponsor brand to sponsor products. Uh, maybe some sponsor display here, and I could just go ahead and just save this as an excel file and just start storing it to see. All right, hey, maybe you can have one of your VA’s do it. You know throughout the day, like, uh, or every once a day, it's like, all right, let. Hey, maybe you can have one of your VA’s do it. You know throughout the day, like, or every once a day, it's like, all right, let me just track who is showing up the most on my page. So again, that's just two clicks it takes to do that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Make sure to start looking at your competitors pages. Look at your pages. I like looking at competitors pages too, because it might give me ideas on different products that I can target in my Sponsored Product ASIN Targeting Campaign. So, uh, pretty cool feature. I think you guys maybe are sleeping on. You might not have known that it existed. Make sure to go to hop on any product page, run Xray and tell me who is advertising on your page. All right, guys. Thank you so much for joining us this week. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

#577 - Walmart Seller Success Strategies with SellCord

Join us for an insightful episode where we chat with David Milstein, co-founder of SellCord, about the strategies that drive success on Walmart. David shares an inspiring success story of a client who saw their sales surge from $2,000 to $200,000 per month within just two months by leveraging strategic account managers and Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS). We also discuss realistic expectations for Walmart sales growth, suggesting sellers aim for 10% to 20% of their Amazon sales, emphasizing the importance of focusing on Walmart to unlock its full potential.

Explore the benefits and intricacies of using virtual multi-packs with Walmart Fulfillment Services in this episode. We discuss how virtual GTINs can create multiple listings for a single unit, like multi-packs of shampoo, without additional physical inventory, reducing storage fees and return orders while lowering WFS fees. David also sheds light on pricing strategies, highlighting the significance of the $10 price point, and the current beta status of virtual packs and their anticipated wider rollout, along with the role of promotions in driving sales on Walmart.

Listen in as we navigate the intricacies of Walmart's promotional campaigns and recent updates to their item specifications. We cover different types of promotional campaigns such as category-specific events and flash deals, and the strategic advantages they offer. Learn about accessing these campaigns through the growth opportunities section and the newly introduced Item Spec 5.0, which shifts from category-based to product-type-based listings. David also shares essential tips for managing Walmart accounts, including consolidating multiple accounts, transferring reviews from Shopify, and utilizing Walmart's Review Accelerator Program.

In episode 577 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and David discuss:

• 00:00 - Walmart Success Stories and Strategies
• 07:23 - Walmart Virtual Pack and Promotion Strategy
• 11:08 - New Walmart Promotional and Listing Strategies
• 11:38 - Accessing Growth Opportunities and New Promo Campaigns
• 15:55 - Optimizing Attributes for Walmart Ranking
• 20:36 - Walmart Account Management Strategies
• 21:01 - Bringing Reviews to Walmart Restrictions
• 23:58 - Flash Deals for All Sellers
• 29:05 - PPC and Listing Optimization Strategies

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► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Today we're talking with David Milstein from SellCord and he's going to be talking about some Walmart success stories and some strategies to help you to become successful on Walmart. He'll also be talking about the new item, spec 5.0, and Walmart promotions that can help boost sales.

 

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 am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and this episode is our monthly live Walmart Wednesday show where we talk about anything and everything Walmart related with different guests, and today's host is going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away.

 

Carrie Miller:

Welcome to another Walmart Wednesday. I'm so excited to have a very special guest today. We have David Milstein here, and so we're going to ask him a lot of questions. He is definitely one of the top experts in Walmart. He definitely has taught me a lot of what I know about Walmart, so definitely a privilege to have him here today. I'm going to go ahead and bring on David. Hi David.

 

David:

Hey, Carrie, it's great to be on. Thank you for having me.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. So I told them a little bit about you. I mean, you are the co-founder of SellCord and you've been doing Walmart or in the Walmart game for like maybe three or four years now. Definitely an expert in Walmart and very, very knowledgeable about anything. Okay, so let's go ahead. And, David, I don't know if I've done enough justice for you about your background, but can you just tell a little bit about what you do at SellCord and just a little bit about you and your background and anything you want to let us know.

 

David:

Of course. Of course, sure, thank you for the opportunity. So, yeah, so I'm one of the co-founders of SellCord. Uh, we are a Walmart focused agency, so we only work on brands, on their Walmart growth, and we've positioned ourselves to just be exclusively focused in this, in this space, as we understand the future and opportunity that Walmart does have to offer. It's always great to be alongside Carrie, a fellow like-minded individual, who is with us on this Walmart train, so we're excited to chat, as always.

 

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. Okay. So let's go ahead and we're going to just get into the questions, and I think one of my first questions that I wanted to ask you about is because and I'll kind of give you a little bit of background a lot of people say you know, what kind of sales can I do on Walmart? You know if I'm doing, you know millions on Amazon, what can I do on Walmart? But I just wanted to see if you could give us some stories about, like a client who maybe got on Walmart. Maybe they were struggling with Walmart before they came to you and then you helped them to do certain things and they became successful. So, like you know what was the scenario, how did you help them? Any kind of thoughts you can give us about like client success stories would be kind of cool way to start this out.

 

David:

For sure, for sure. Actually, Walmart just did a case study with us on one of our clients. So you go on LinkedIn, you guys could check out like a post on this brand, Simply Magic. Uh, this was a brand you know they have a lot of success just historically, both on Amazon. Actually, they were at Walmart before and they were working with us. They were just trying it out. They were doing about like two thousand dollars a month like really really low business, not really giving it the attention it deserved. They came to us, we met with them and just due to their you know experience, we're able to link them with some really insider people at Walmart to be able to work with like a good Sam, the strategic account manager, and working with like the WFS team, and within two months we're actually able to get their sales to 200k, which is like that's, I don't think that's a normal scenario, like we really did. It went above and beyond with them, but that's just because of the opportunity that they had to offer. Now this is a major, major player the Amazon space. However, we do work with brands of all sizes and we have just general expectations of what you can get from Walmart. We typically like to say you should aim for about 10% to 20% of your Amazon sales. So if you're doing like $2 million, $3 million on Amazon, you should be able to expect $200,000 to $300,000 a year, which is again a very solid opportunity.

 

David:

It's obviously all about the long run, but so many accounts are coming to us. We meet these guys at shows all the time. Hey, I'm not even doing 1%, I'm doing 2% and just talking to them. It'll come down to some of the things we'll speak about in this call like different strategies, but it just often comes down to just focus and really giving Walmart the opportunity it deserves, but getting them up within just a few months the 5%, 10% and then it's about can we grow up more from there? And that's really where the opportunities lie, you know, if there's some more strategies to grow further than 10%, how you can do that and we'll speak, I think, a little bit about that more in this talk, in this podcast.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, Well, what do you think the top things are that they're not doing beforehand? Because I've definitely experienced this where people aren't necessarily doing. You know all the things they could do possibly, but what are some of the top things? People like they're just totally ignoring that they would never ignore any Amazon that you see with clients.

 

David:

So so the same way that you would give the opportunity to, let's see your copy on Walmart compared to, let's say, you know, Amazon, Amazon, you're in there like which keywords do I need where in my title and my description? Specifics, like you're very detailed with it, and then you'll just kind of use the same copy on Walmart. Walmart has a completely different guide. You know like they want to have a very different set of copy. They want to have a shorter title descriptions should be more keyword rich and we've done actually a lot of research also on like the keyword tracking and indexing and we found that if you're lacking your main keywords within your copy, those are the highest scenarios of just not indexing for those keywords. It's so related I could show proof. Like not being not having your keywords in your copy, you're just not gonna index. And indexing is even worse than ranking. That means you just don't show up at all for that keyword. And these are basics. That's just one great example.

 

David:

I think another very common one is being in the correct category or product type. We'll speak more about product types a little bit later. Just with Item Spec 5.0. Just being correctly categorized is so important because that determines which keywords you're able to rank for. Just don't make the mistake that Walmart is just some other random marketplace. It's going to be the next big marketplace. You can even see the trajectory of where things have come up thus far and how it compares to Amazon and just the growth it's seeing. And if you're missing that, you're just missing out on the opportunity. Treat it as if it's Amazon right now, you know. Think of it that this is an opportunity that Amazon was seven years ago, five years ago, whatever, whatever specific timeline. But understand that it is an opportunity. And if you had, the chance to do Amazon again now just think of it. What would you just do on Walmart?

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, that's all good information. The next thing I wanted to talk about was the virtual packs, because I know I saw you post on LinkedIn about virtual packs that they had just come out. So what, you know what are they? You know how have they been doing? Have you seen a lot of success with them so far?

 

David:

Yeah, for sure I really love the direction Walmart's going with all their beta programs and the new things that they're rolling out. You know I love that they kind of have like Amazon to kind of like go after. You know they don't have to be the pioneer, they can be like hey, this is something that we like about Amazon and they're going all out. You know there's so many new programs coming out and virtual packs is like the latest and greatest. I just want to make a distinction. It's not a virtual bundle, it's specifically a multi-pack on a single unit, and this really what it allows you to do is to create multiple listings for a single unit. So let's say, you're selling a bottle of shampoo. Instead of having to create a second GTIN to list a second bottle of shampoo with it, you can now create a virtual GTIN and you can do up to as many as you want. And where the real benefits come in is actually through using WFS for the fulfillment. So oftentimes you know you might want to list a three-pack or a four-pack or a five-pack and then when you send it to WFS it doesn't actually sell, and then you have to deal with storage fees, you have to do a return order. It's just such a pain.

 

David:

So what this allows you to do is just to have one unit. You just send that into WFS and WFS will just create the virtual packs for you. And what's even nicer is that they will have actually consolidated and lowered WFS fee. Depending on how many units, for two units they reduce it by like a dollar for each one. You can look at the like. There's a great guide about this from Walmart where they give you the specific breakdown of the fees. But it's just a really good opportunity to expand your assortment and offer multi-packs where you might not necessarily have that opportunity. It also works really well when it comes to, let's say, you're in a category where, let's say, if you're under $10, there's an 8% commission break. So you think if you go two pack, if you had a separate two pack listing, you'd be paying that 15% fee because it's above $10. But with with virtual packs, you actually still locked into that eight percent fee as long as, like, the average price is lower. So that's really nice, you know, it's just like an opportunity that people aren't necessarily factoring in I just want to make a really cool point, though, about that is there's also in WFS if your products are under ten dollars. This is something actually people don't really know much about. I'm not sure why if your products are on WFS and your retail is under $10, there's a dollar fee that gets attributed to your product. So if you're selling it under $10, even if it's a multi pack of two and it's selling for $19, you still have to pay that dollar fee twice. So it's very important to factor in your pricing and how that impacts both your WFS and your fee.

 

Carrie Miller:

That might actually be a reason to kind of lower your price if you're just at like the 12 or 13 dollar mark, maybe I don't know. I guess you'd have to do the numbers but.

 

David:

It's kind of. It's kind of a hack. I like, like, I call, I call like the 10 perfect price.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah.

 

David:

It's exactly 10, because at 10 you don't have the WFS fee for a dollar, but if you're in certain categories you're still in the eight percent. So it's kind of like if you're at ten dollars on one cent, you're at 15% commission, and if you're $9.99, there's that extra dollar WFS fee.

 

Carrie Miller:

Wow. So interesting.

 

David:

So it's actually if you're around that price. Yeah.

 

Carrie Miller:

Very, very good to know. And those virtual packs are in beta, right? So when do you think they're going to roll out to everybody?

 

David:

Yeah. So from our information, they have like a virtual pack, a virtual bundle, virtual pack beta that we did months ago that only a limited amount of sellers got in, and other rolling it out across the board. The initial release was two weeks ago, I think on the June 13th, and then they're also going to be doing early sometime in July, I believe that should be the rest of the sellers that should be live for everyone and I'm pretty sure that's what. It's not confirmed, but we'll find out next month. You know, if you don't, you don't have it. It's a great opportunity. You know, open a case, reach out to your strategic account manager if you have one. Ask for these programs. You know they're here to help you and they'll try and get you in wherever you can.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let's move on to another topic, and I want to talk about promotions. So let's go ahead and just talk about, like, what types of promotions does Walmart offer for sellers to participate in?

 

David:

Totally. So, I mean promotions is such a great topic on Walmart. I think, after advertising or even combined with advertising, promotions is going to be the best way to grow your listings. Kind of referencing that previous case study we spoke about, the way we were able to see such insane results so quickly is because we enabled these items to go into promotion, that to really grow. And so just to speak about, like, the different types of promotions on Walmart, there's two main categories that exist. There's promo campaigns, which are like category specific and they happen during a specific set amount of time. For example, there's a July event happening throughout the entirety of the month of July and then you have different events here and there. You have some highlighted special events. You know that we just had like Walmart Plus week this past week and you have like Black Friday like, but there's generally more like you know this is allergy season or like some like some random home and cleaning week, like something that they come up with. You know just where they're trying to get some products in and you could automatically enroll in that. If you go to growth opportunities, you'll see promo campaigns.

 

David:

If you don't have access to that just open a case and you'll be able to get access to that. You have to be an admin on the Solid Center account, which is pretty obvious, and you'll be able to roll your products in there and just be able to participate in that. And then another type of campaign which is called Flash Deals which is kind of similar to Flash Picks on Amazon, the difference being lightning deals on Amazon are Lightning deals are a single day, versus Flash Deals on Walmart run for a whole week and it's every week, I believe Sunday through Saturday, that it runs through a promo for your product and you can get in there with a basic 10% off and you can really roll through your catalog. You have to get approved for it, but you can't do back-to-back for the same product in two weeks, but you can do it every four weeks per product and it's actually a really, really great way to be able to quickly move your products because you get put into a special flash deal page and if you go to Walmart's home page, there's always a little icon for a lightning symbol. You can click it and, depending on how well your product does, it will fluctuate in its rank amongst the deal. So if you push a lot of ads, you'll actually quickly be able to move up the list just because you have a high conversion rate. Even if they're not clicking on the flash deals page, your listing just moves better. So you'll move up on the ranks and actually able to fly through units. Like that it's interesting. We've seen higher conversion rate. I mean it makes sense at a cheaper rate but very like a 30, 40% increase in sales, dollar wise, not even units specifically dollars. So even at the 10% discount, which is not a lot, you're still able to really kill it over there.

 

Carrie Miller:

So do you have to have a strategic account manager for that? I've noticed a lot of accounts don't have access to those Flash Deals or Flash Picks.

 

David:

I would say just open up a case. Yeah, I think with Flash Deals, Flash Picks it used to be called Flash Picks. They changed it to Flash Deals. No, that's Walmart, though wuickly changed things on the fly just to sound better, but open up a case. If you don't have a strategic account manager, just that case should be able to get it for you.

 

Carrie Miller:

Cool, yeah, let's go ahead and talk about something that I just saw roll out recently, and it's the Item Spec 5.0. Can you just tell everyone what, what the Item Spec 5.0 is and how it can help with the visibility of products, or just any information you have on the Item Spec?

 

David:

Yeah. So this is. This is one of the bigger buzzwords you know happening right now in the Walmart space and it's just because of how impactful this is for your listings and really planned forward with Walmart. Uh, Item Spec 4 came out quite a while ago and what they did was they changed the number of categories you were able to list under to like from like 20 something to like 77, and now, with Item Spec 5.0, they're doing it in a different, a different style. It's based on product type. That's how you set up your product, your items, rather than doing it in a general category, you now have to actually select the product type. This is similar to like my experience with Amazon. The minimal experience that I've had in the past with their flat files is you have to select, like, a product type prior to uploading it, so it's not a similar idea on Walmart. So I understand if you have a big assortment and you're trying to come up with how you could quickly list it. It could be a little bit harder now because you can't just generalize it into Home and Kitchen. You have to find your product types. But previously Walmart would automatically select the correct product type for your item and you can change it. But now that it's forced into the product type, as like the initial start, you do have to do a little bit more research on listing. But what's the point, aside from just the change in how you list your product and how you do edits to your product, what's the goal of what they're doing here.

 

David:

So this is actually, I expect, 5.0 was previously first released on actually the 1p side. So if you're doing edits through item 360 or supplier one, you should already have familiarity with this and all that was already done by product type for a while. And what it does is it enables a whole bunch of more attributes by product type. So each category has, like its list of predetermined attributes, but it didn't tell you which ones you should fill out for this. Like it could be in sports and like you're selling, you know weights and it's like what sports team is this? It's not applicable to your weights, you know. But then if you have let's say you're selling now with the new product type if you're selling something related to like a sports, like an actual sports team, it'll ask you for the sports team, but if you're selling something that's not relevant, it won't make it a required category for you. So it's basically they make attributes that are dependent on your product type, which is really cool in the flat files they'll gray out certain areas and it'll actually have like recommended attributes that you should be filling out based on your product type.

 

David:

So it's a lot more dependent. It's a lot more granular, which helps you fill in the correct detail with mine. This is like the number one thing that people are just what attributes do I fill out? There's just so many and some of them are useless, but like what's important. So now that with 5.0, I think it's only going to get better and better, Walmart's going to keep showing even more information on how to utilize it, but with this it enables you to actually see more attributes that were previously only restricted to one fee, which is interesting, as well as which attributes they recommend that you do fill out in order to rank better. So how does it impact your rank? I think this is like leaning into that Walmart's actually trying to not necessarily focus so much on the. You know, obviously, conversion rate is the number one driver of rank right now, but they want to have attributes actually have a bigger impact on your rank, because discoverability to them is something that's so important. So if you have like a very specified search, they want to be able to show your product, not just because of your relevancy from keywords, but also your relevancy due to attributes. So that's why it's so important to fill them out.

 

David:

I want to sort of tip about Amazon Fill out every attribute you can, even if it's just as N/A as long as that's an option, obviously or just type in something basic, even though it's not applicable to your product, just so that you have everything filled out. If anyone ever comes searching for you, you have literally all the information you need there. It might take you some extra time, but it's totally worth it because you're then setting yourself up for future success. It also limits the ability for someone to hijack your listing with content rights issues. Someone could just put your listing in and they could fill out one attribute and now all of a sudden, your listing's content rights restricted for that one thing which could be some miscellaneous attribute. So there is the opportunities for you as a seller and also opportunity for people that might want to try to harm you. Not recommended. But there is so much happening with Item Spec 5.0 and I'm excited to see the great impact because it is it is slowly rolling out for a lot of sellers. It's not fully live for everyone. We're able to see from the UI if there's like an add items or update items feature. You can see from your items page. You'll know if you're like in 4.0 or if you're still in a Harfian 5.0. So a lot of cool stuff there and excited to see what comes.

 

Carrie Miller:

So if you download it and still in the 4.0, do you just write a case to ask to get the Item Spec 5.0? Is that?

 

David:

I don't think they're going to help you with that. I don't think so. I think it's just going to like they'll just tell you like they might not even know what they're talking about, honestly, in that case, but they'll also just say it’s rolling out. You’ll get it when you get it.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay.

 

David:

Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't push for you to ask your Sam If you have a Sam, maybe it's worth off to pick it up to them but oftentimes they'll also just say, you know, you're you'll get it in in September, you know. Hopefully everyone gets this sooner than later.

 

Carrie Miller:

Definitely. Um, somebody in the comments said that the drop downs in spec 5.0 are not working. I don't know if you have any. Have you had any any experience with that, with the drop downs not working or kind of some glitches with this, with the spec sheets?

 

David:

Interesting. So the drop downs are possibly for if it's great, look, if it's grayed out, is that what it is? It's something that's grayed out. But if it's grayed out it's not relevant to that product type. And is this specifically in a flat file? Because you'll notice when you go to edit an item and through, like the item page, it will. It will be a whole new layout. It's going to look a lot cleaner, a lot newer and instead of having three different tabs, it's all going to be on one page going down. Are you experiencing the same issues there? There are definitely issues and actually as of today, if you log into SolidSign, you'll see a line on top that says there's issues with files right now. So they are having some issues right now as a whole Walmart, so don't go crazy on them If it's still not working in a couple of days and once that banner goes away, that's something to definitely want to take a look at. See if it's something with the flat file, see if you're able to manually edit it. In that case, I definitely suggest opening a case. But I was just working on a file earlier this week and it seemed to be working just fine.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so I'm going gonna go in straight to the questions. We've got a lot of questions up here, so I'm excited about this, a lot of good interaction here. So the first one is we have brands A and B already on Walmart but would like to test B without setting up another account. Can we test list these, these products, on existing account that belongs to A? So I guess like testing products on different.

 

David:

Yeah, yeah, I mean there's, there's absolutely no issue with that, the only thing that you might consider is that it's going to say sold on ship by the store name. So if it's brand A, as long as you're okay with saying like brand B product is being sold on the ship by brand A, like that might be something to consider but there's no issue. But another thing you might want to consider is that if you eventually want to have an account added for brand B, it's a bit of a pain to have to transfer the content rights from account one to account B, but it is possible. If you set up brand portal for brand B on account A, I don't recommend that. You're kind of setting yourself up for future failure. But unless you plan to run everything through one account. We've actually worked with a lot of aggregators unless you plan to run everything through one account, we've actually worked with a lot of aggregators and at first a lot of them had one brand, like one account per brand, and they realized it was just such a disaster. Also think of it from like Walmart's perspective like they don't track accounts together, they don't really group them together, so they treat them as like 10 different accounts and it was just too hard for them to deal with Walmart. Too hard for them, like they would have access to beta programs in some accounts but not others, so it actually consolidated all to one account. It can become a little bit of like a billing issue if you have, like, different legal entities, but I would recommend sticking to one account unless you have a fear of really like getting suspended. But I would just recommend staying clear of doing anything that would get you in that in the first place.

 

Carrie Miller:

The next question is about the best way to bring reviews from Shopify or Amazon, if that's allowed.

 

David:

This is a good question. So there's a few options here. So, firstly, you're not allowed to bring in reviews from Amazon. Amazon officially, according to the terms of service, they own their reviews. You're not allowed to bring them to Walmart. Walmart actually won't even allow you to upload them. Back in the day, you'd be able to get away with it even though it wasn't recommended, but these days you cannot do that. You can, however, bring in organic reviews from Shopify and as well as from other sites as well, just not Amazon specifically. So there is a free version through Walmart. You just go to reviewsindicationwalmart.com. You'll be able to sign up for it. You can work with your Sam to get access to. It is through a company called Aspective. I believe Walmart purchase them. There are other tools as well, like there's the Yotpo, which officially does it. There's also Bizarre Voice, which, if you're like a bigger brand, I want to go that route because it's in the case to many, many platforms. But for most of like Amazon sellers, I find this just very expensive for what you're looking for. So I would just check out again that reviews indication the online economy. You can also message them if you have any questions. Just reviewsindication at Walmart.com, we'll go to them.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right. So the next one kind of goes with it, and it's about you know, is there a fine program on Walmart. So what is the similar program on Walmart?

 

David:

Right. So, Walmart does have what they call the review accelerator program. There is a requirement in order to get into it, which is you do have to have a sale. Recently they did change some things up. It used to be limited to five reviews, now it's up to 10 reviews, and if you work with a service provider. I believe it's up to 20. It's available through growth opportunities. They charge $10 per review. They recently changed the specifics of the program so I don't want to misspeak over here, but if you look in you can see the exact details of like. Walmart is great with their guides, like their guides are amazing and they're typically up to date. Just click on the guides you can read through, like the whole program. But growth opportunities reviews indication, I'm sorry review accelerator program that will give you what you're looking for and you can enroll products. There's even something cool which they say is there, but I've never actually seen it’s something called a pre-purchase. So post-purchase is very common, where someone purchases your product. Walmart will accept the buy and then give them a $3 credit to leave a review, you're not guaranteed to get a five-star review. Just keep that in mind. You could get a one-star review through the review accelerator program, but there's something called a pre-purchase, which I'm not sure when it's going to be enabled, but this actually will allow you to discount an item on Walmart in order to get a review up to 100% off. I've never seen it, but it's something that does exist in.

 

Carrie Miller:

Wow.

 

David:

You can see an option for this. You can enroll your items.

 

Carrie Miller:

The next question is is SellCord able to get my Walmart account access to a Sam? Strategic account manager is a Sam. For anyone who doesn't know.

 

David:

Right. For sure, we can definitely help with that. We work directly with Walmart. We have our own like agency level Sam and we work with them to in order to get a Sam through Walmart. Also, depending on what category and we work with a lot of categories we can even just reach out directly to other Sam's to try and get someone approved. They typically expect you to have good sales somewhere. We've seen randomly accounts get assigned to Sam. Walmart's trying to do like as much as they can, even for the lower end accounts, but for like. If you're like a smaller account, Walmart might not necessarily go for it, but if you could prove like sales to them, either from Amazon or from like another website, that's kind of the best way to get it. But we've had a lot of success with that. If you guys, if you want to reach out, we could definitely give that a shot.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, here's kind of a follow-up with. The other question Is Flash Deals, are Flash Deals offered to brand owners only?

 

David:

No, you know, it's not restricted. Actually, here's a little fun, little fun fact there's sponsored brand ads, which is actually exclusive to brand owners right through advertising. You're not allowed to do if you sell, if you resell. But there's actually something called sponsored product, sponsored brand, like Flash Deals, which you can use, instead of having like the brand logo, to say flash deals and you can list your items that you're reselling. It's exclusively managed through Walmart you have to work with, like your product manager, but you can definitely run Flash Deals on items that you do not own the brand for.

 

Carrie Miller:

Someone asked where do I download or where do you download spec 5.0 from?

 

David:

It will either be on your account or not when you go to your items page to go ahead and make updates so you have like you have like on the top right Like add items or manage items. You'll just see from there it'll be a little bit of a different UI. Things will look a little bit different than they were before. Previous, it was like it would give you by template. You could update it by category or by g10 match now, just as like by g10 match or like by product or product, something like that. And if you click on like, do by g10 match that's my favorite to do it g10 match, just throwing all your g10s in there and just export the file and you'll see the name of the file will say 5.0, or we'll say something like 4.5.

 

Carrie Miller:

Here's another question, should our brand prioritize matching Amazon's prices on Walmart or focus on offering flash deals?

 

David:

Wow, this is, that's a great question. So, uh, I want to touch on this earlier with. I just want to talk about couponing, which I think would be something that also a long conversation, generally speaking, for most of you. Amazon is your main business and you shouldn't jeopardize your main business because of Amazon. If you're listing on Amazon is bringing in so much more than Walmart you don't want to risk losing your business there. We have found that Amazon is a little slow sometimes to catch price differences. We've been able to run a 10% flash deals for a week and actually be cheaper than Amazon, and the price on Amazon will. We won't lose the buy box and Amazon won't catch up. What I would just recommend is if you could get away with it for as long as you could and let's say Amazon does give you problems. Just quickly change your price on Amazon, just you got a monitor you gotta be on top of your game. What's cool is that coupons, which is also a beta program, is the only way, as of today, they able to actually offer a cheaper price on Walmart than on Amazon without having to lower your Amazon price at all. So there's a lot of strategy around that you could. Also, if you have a Sam, you can work with your Sam to be like, let's say, you want to get into a bigger program where they request like a 30% discount. You could do like 10% strike through and then a 20% coupon. They'll work with you and because they understand the Walmart damage on Walmart issue, I think that's the biggest issue Walmart's trying to deal with is how do you get a promo on Walmart without impacting Amazon? That's why Walmart loves Walmart-only sellers. They love these guys. They don't care about their Amazon, they're all invested in Walmart and there is maybe a strategy to having a Walmart-specific catalog. If you have a lot of different products develop bundles or even go back to virtual packs. Play around with things and see what you can do to differentiate your Walmart from your Amazon listings. There's also you could have a different UPC that you use on Walmart versus Amazon. I'm not sure that's going to last forever, but it does. It is a good way to keep Amazon from price matching your items.

 

Carrie Miller:

Let's see the next question here. Once copy is set up, products are properly categories and PPC is running, other than those two and those three tasks, what? What are other daily, weekly, monthly tasks that SellCord would do to make my Walmart business successful? What could a new customer expect to see SellCord to be working on every month in their account?

 

David:

So it's not just the copy on the categorization, there's also attributes. You know it's played a very big role, kind of spoke about, especially with items spec 5.0. And then PPC is really it's not a set end and forget. It's set up with Walmart. You know you want to make sure that you're constantly, you know, revisiting PPC, checking in daily, seeing how things are going, what's doing better, what's doing worse, especially at launch. It's so important to be tweaking things, you know. You see, we didn't really talk PPC strategy much, but learning what's happening, especially if you're new to Walmart, you can't just expect things to be a certain way. Every account, every listing has its own history, which is just so complex. It makes things so much fun just to be able to learn within each account. There's also constant work that you can do just to see like copy as well. It's not a set and I forget it situation. You want to test something out. You want to learn more keywords and implement them into your copy. You want to try out different categories, different product types, to see if you can succeed in different areas as well. There's also just working with brands to discuss promotion strategies, to just continuously work and figure things out. There's also constant audits you have to do on your listings.

 

David:

Walmart is like I'm not going to say notorious. It doesn't sound nice, but your images could just revert back. Your variation could split up your copy. If you have multiple paragraphs, it's squished into one paragraph. These things happen all the time. There's constant audits that you have to do just to make sure your things are, your content is good, and then it's just about primarily utilizing PPC as well as just promotional strategies to grow and grow, and there's also a lot of tracking information you know you have many items you want to be able to see. Let's say, keyword tracking. You know how. Am I ranking for my main keywords? Am I doing well overall? Is there more opportunity? Do I need to go more aggressively? Because even in ads like, are you ROAS focused or are you trying to just grow general sales? There's so much to go, depending on your strategy, Just like we deal with many, many different size accounts. We deal with accounts that are doing literally $5,000,10,000 a month. And then there's also nine figure Walmart sellers. You know that are PPC isn't necessarily their larger thing. It's about like having a strong pricing strategy because they have to win by $1. And then, not even having big margins, they just have to just make units sell. So so many different strategies depending on the count types.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right. Last question what program is best for keywords on Walmart and for optimizing your listing in general?

 

David:

Okay, so I'm a little biased over here, folks. So obviously Helium 10 is a fantastic tool for any keyword research. I live in Cerebro and Magnet. The fact that they're available for Walmart, I love it. It shows you. I mean, the amount of data that's in there is just fascinating. You can learn immediately what your top keywords are for your product. They have a search volume which is so impactful. It shows you historical so you can see, since it's seasonality, you can see one was this product doing well. It gives you the past, like two years or something like that's great. It'll really show you like where and when you can expect to do well. You also have to do the work you can't just like go here's everything. Do the work, make sure you're not hitting branded keywords, make sure they're relevant to your product, obviously. But it is really solid in terms of just keyword research, very, very highly recommended. In terms of optimization auger listings program-wise. I am also biased here, but that's just because this is what we do. We do listing optimization as a company, so obviously I'm going to plug SellCord, Carrie does Helium 10 have some sort of like AI tool to optimize listings for Walmart.

 

Carrie Miller:

So we do. We have a Listing Builder and as you, basically, you put the keywords in a keyword bank and then, as you write them into your listing, they get crossed off, so you make sure that they're fully optimized. So yeah, we have a Listing Builder that will help you to optimize using the keywords you find with Cerebro for Walmart.

 

David:

I'm sure it's fantastic. I mean, obviously we have a self core strategy, but I mean you guys make amazing tools. Definitely give it a shot.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, that's all we have. Thank you so much, David, for answering all those questions. We had a lot of great questions, and definitely David's the you know the best to ask all these amazing questions too. So thank you so much, David, for being on. And again, if you are interested in SellCord, David, can you say your email address and how they can get in contact with you again?

 

David:

For sure. You can send us an email to david@sellcord.com S-E-L-L-C-O-R-D.com. You can do info@sellcord.com. If you want just more general, hit us up. Visit our website. Sign up over there. There's a lot to talk about.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, sounds good. Thank you everyone for joining and we hope you have a great rest of the day. Bye, everyone.

 

#576 - Amazon PPC Masterclass for Prime Day

Do you want to outperform your competition on Amazon Prime Day 2024? Join us as we explore cutting-edge Amazon PPC strategies with the esteemed Destaney Wishon of BTR Media, who shares her expert predictions and actionable insights to help you skyrocket your Amazon advertising game. With Prime Day 2023 setting a new benchmark at $12.7 billion in sales, we decode consumer behavior shifts and the unique opportunities presented by this mid-year retail extravaganza, differentiating it from Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Our discussion dives deep into the art of managing Amazon ads around Prime Day, emphasizing the importance of defining your primary goal—be it maximizing profit or driving sales. We also unpack the extended attribution window's impact on ad spend, conversion rates, and ACoS. From the advantages of increased pre-event ad spend to capture window-shopping customers to the phenomenal conversion rates during Prime Day itself, we provide a holistic view of how to capitalize on this massive sales event. Destaney’s insights reveal the significance of targeted ad strategies in enhancing your organic rank and BSR, alongside the long-term benefits of acquiring new customers.

Get ready to maximize your Prime Day advertising efforts with practical advice on Adtomic Day Parting Schedules. Learn how to control CPCs and optimize conversion rates during peak traffic times, identify high-performing search terms, and strategically adjust bids. We also tackle the challenges of regaining momentum post-stockout, realistic budgeting, and leveraging coupons to boost conversion rates. As we navigate the new pricing rules and the competitive landscape with events like Walmart Plus Week, we arm you with strategies to ensure your brand is well-prepared. Whether you're a seasoned Amazon seller or a new brand, this episode is packed with invaluable tips to help you make the most of Prime Day 2024.

In episode 576 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Destaney discuss:

• 01:22 - Amazon PPC Readiness for Prime Day
• 04:20 - Prime Day Impact on Shopping Habits
• 08:56 - Amazon Prime Day Advertising Strategies
• 13:23 - Maximizing Sales Opportunities Beyond Prime Day
• 19:29 - Prime Day PPC Optimization Strategies
• 21:00 - Optimizing PPC Strategy for Prime Day
• 27:18 - Maximizing Creative Impact in Ads
• 32:06 - Prime Day PPC Strategy and Sales
• 35:48 - Maximizing Sales Strategy for Prime Day
• 36:42 - Price Matching and Marketplace Strategies
• 39:15 - PPC Spend Strategy for Prime Day

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► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)

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► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

We continue in our series and helping you guys get ready for Amazon Prime Day 2024 with a special Tacos Tuesday episode with best practices for advertising, not just on Prime Day, but before it and after it. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you're like me, maybe you were intimidated about learning how to do Amazon PPC, or maybe you think you just don't have the hours and hours that it takes to download and sort through all of those sponsored ads reports that Amazon produces for you. Adtomic for me allowed me to learn PPC for the first time, and now I'm managing over 150 PPC campaigns across all of my accounts in only two hours a week.Find out how Adtomic can help you level up your PPC game. Visit h10.me/adtomic for more information. That's h10.me/adtomic any level in the e-commerce world.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is completely bs free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in e-commerce world. Welcome to a very special edition of Tacos Tuesday. If you guys have noticed, for the last few weeks on, like the podcast and other live streams, we have been focusing on Prime Day readiness. We wanted to make sure that 2024 is your best Prime Day and today we wanted to go deep in specifically talking about Prime Day readiness for PPC. All right, because that’s one of the things that you can still kind of like control up until the day of Prime Day. So that's why we've invited the number one expert in the entire world on Amazon PPC Destaney Wishon here. Destiny, how's it going? Welcome back.

 

Destaney:

Hello, hello. Thank you so much for having me very excited to be here, as always.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Before we get into your training here, do you have any predictions for Prime Day. Like, are you expecting things to be just kind of like normal, business as usual? Are you expecting anything new and unusual this year?

 

Destaney:

I am going to predict that this year is going to be even bigger than last year, which is saying something, because I distinctly remember being up at like 4 am having to adjust budgets last year because everyone was expecting it to be a little bit lower, just due to the state of economy and kind of where we were at with inflation. And it was 9 am and we're like out of budget across the board and conversion rates were double what they were the two weeks prior. So, I was like you know, we're driving a ton of sales, our ROAS looks fantastic, let's maximize this. So, I'm expecting it to kind of see a similar trend and be pretty big this year.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. I hope that that prediction comes true. Share it. All right, I'm going to go off screen and let you go ahead and take it away. Destaney, that prediction comes true, share it. All right, I'm going to go off screen and let you go ahead and take it away, Destaney.

 

Destaney:

I think when it comes to inventory and deals and content, it's a little bit more of a one size fits all solution. But when it comes to Amazon advertising and Prime Day, there are hundreds of different strategies that you can run depending on where your brand's at from a profitability perspective, from a cash flow and a lifestyle perspective when it comes to repurchasing, inventory and things like that. That's going to influence your Amazon advertising strategy. So, I've always been a big fan of not giving one size fits all solutions. I think everyone who follows me is very familiar with that, and this is no different. Some people are going to go online and say do not increase your budgets, do not change your bids. And some people are going to say, to maximize that opportunity, but it's going to be really dependent on where your brands at. So, kicking things off, let's talk about Prime Day 2023 and why these matters.

 

Destaney:

$12.7 billion in sales. It was an absolute record for their largest annual event 375 million items sold. 37% of US households took part in Prime Day. That is really important. And also consider how many people share accounts you know grandparents, cousins, things like that so it's probably even higher. For being honest, the reason this matter is last year was the largest single sales day in all of Amazon history, and the reason I'm calling this out is because, as customers become more and more familiar with Prime Day, it's changing their shopping habits. For one, everyone knows that the first two to three weeks leading up to Prime Day you log into your app, it's the first thing you see. Right, they do a homepage takeover, letting you know it's Prime Day. They're also starting to drip out Prime Day deals. Now what this means is customers are going to stop their normal purchase habits. If I buy Tide Pods once a month on a Thursday, I'm probably going to hold off on buying my Tide Pods until Prime Day. If I have back to school items that I want to purchase, I'm going to hold off on buying those until Prime Day. Now the problem is customers are still shopping, they're still opening the app and they're clicking around, but they're not always purchasing. This is important to call out because the two weeks leading up to Prime Day and really the week before leading up to Prime Day, you're almost always going to see a drop-in conversion rate. Customers are still shopping, they're on the platform, they are clicking, they're adding to cart and they're building their list, but they're not checking out until Prime Day. So that's really important to consider.

 

Destaney:

The second part to consider is think about Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Everybody knows what time of year Black Friday, Cyber Monday, is and everyone builds their baskets beforehand. You know they get the magazines for Walmart and for Target. They circle all of the items they want to buy. The difference is those items are holiday specific. The consumer habits are still similar, but the items are different.

Prime day is smack dab in the middle of summer. People aren't necessarily buying their Christmas gifts yet. They're buying all kinds of gifts and they don't necessarily have specific items going into it. I, for example, will hop onto the Lightning Dill app and get caught up in all the excitement and the craze and just scroll until I find products that I want. So naturally, due to the flooding of customers on the platform, everyone is getting increased visibility. I think that's the biggest thing to consider. So, whether you have deals or whether you don't have deals, you're probably still going to see an increased visibility, but Prime Day is synonymous with savings. So, if you don't have a deal and you don't have a badge, you may not get that visibility.

 

Destaney:

Now another small screenshot I added here is from one of our accounts. Last year we had 101 campaigns almost out of budget. This is not due to Amazon trying to spend more money on Prime Day. This is just due to the nature of how the auction works. When you have five times, 10 times as many customers on the platform clicking around, your ads are going to get clicked more, and the more clicks you get, the more you spend. So, the more your budget's going to be spent. This is why the first level of optimization is almost to increase your budgets, because we know there's going to be so many more customers on the platform. They're going to be clicking so much more because they're shopping around. So, increase your budgets and we're going to dive into that optimization later.

 

Destaney:

But I thought it was really important to set that context and understanding just how many customers are on the platform during Prime Day and how that trickles down to your brand, whether or not you participate. Now there's kind of three important things to consider. You have lead-in Prime Day, lead-out, Prime Day either or. And why this matters is because the week before Prime Day is historically some of the worst performance you will ever see when it comes to Amazon advertising on the platform. Why? Well, as we mentioned, customers are still shopping. They may not be purchasing, but they are window shopping. Lead in period is really important because, again, people are logging onto a platform and they're starting to add to cart. They're starting to build their list for the products that they may want to purchase. This is important to understand because you can make your optimizations as early as 10 days prior or 14 days prior, and you need to optimize towards what you're wanting your outcome to be. So, if your only goal is profitability, then you should probably lower your budgets the week before. On the flip side, if your goal is maximizing sales and understanding consumer habits, you'll start to realize that those customers are adding to cart and clicking, so you probably still want to continue to run ads there, even though they're not purchasing.

 

Destaney:

Yet we all know that attribution is extended on Amazon. The majority of the time, it's a 14-day attribution, sometimes longer. What's happening here is the customers are going to add to cart and click on your ads, but they may not purchase until later. So, your clicks and your spend are going to be much higher and your sales are going to be much lower. At its simplest, conversion rate is going to be down because people are clicking and not buying, and a cost is going to be up. People are clicking and not buying, so some people will just say you know, it's fine, let's continue running my ads full speed ahead, knowing it's going to pay off later. That's typically what we recommend our brands do, but some people who are only focused on profitability that is it. They don't necessarily care about the Prime Day customer because they know they're too price conscious. They're going to lower their bids and budgets the seven to 10 days before Prime Day because they don't want to attract the customer who's not going to convert until later on. So, keep that in mind. The second thing to keep in mind is that there is a lead out period, which pretty much means that a lot of shoppers are going to continue to stay on the platform after Prime Day. As we know, Prime Day has now been extended to almost Prime Week and when you have Walmart and Target and every other major retailer running these discounted days and deals, you're going to see a much longer timeframe. So, we've actually seen the week after Prime Day have some of the highest conversion rates because shoppers are still ready to buy, but some of the lower CPCs because most advertisers actually pull back on their budgets after Prime Day. So, lead-out's another really big opportunity for brands. So, keep these things in mind as you're building out your strategy.

 

Destaney:

Here's just some kind of quick insights that I pulled from our personal accounts. As you can see the timeframe here impressions are definitely relatively high before Prime Day. Prime Day one last year was insane. It was one of the craziest days I've ever managed. Truly Before 9am we had blown through most of our budgets because there were that many people on the platform, I honestly kind of put the brakes on quite a few of our brands because I was worried that it was an attribution issue. But at the end of the day our conversion rate was about 2x 3x what it was on normal days during the beginning of Prime Day morning. You can also see the day after Prime Day there's definitely a drop off. This is influenced by the majority of our brands run deals, but impressions still stayed relatively high or back to average kind of a week afterwards, spend is the same thing.

 

Destaney:

So again, our brands we recommend continuing to spend at a higher-than-average pace leading up to prime day, because we understand customers are window shopping, so we want to go ahead and catch their eyeballs before the day even hits. We want to stand out, so we personally increase our spend for the majority of our brands. Now, again, if a brand comes to us and says, hey, my only goal is a cost, my only goal is profit, then we're going to pull back on spend the week prior. But that is a decision that needs to be made at the brand level, not the agency or software level. So, knowing all of this, I think, before we dive into some really specific strategies around how you manage your ads, from an ad type, from a bid, from a budget perspective, you really need to decide is your goal on Prime Day to maximize profit? Is that your only focus, yes or no? The second thing is do you want to maximize sales? Now, a lot of people argue of you know a Prime Day audience isn't the best, it's, you know cheaper, it's discounted audience. They're not actually looking for your product, they just want a discount and save money. But at the end of the day.

 

Destaney:

We've seen some two really strong effects from Prime Day. One, when ran appropriately, in an incredibly targeted way, you can take advantage of the heightened conversion rate on Prime Day and 100% improve your BSR and your organic rank on the page. We have run multiple tests with that. The second question I always get well, does your organic rank stick? Yes, if it's ran strategically in a very precise way. So, for us, we do like to maximize our presence on Prime Day because we know it's an opportunity to improve our presence on page one and improve our organic rank because our conversion rate is higher than our competitors. That's something really important to remember.

 

Destaney:

The second part to remember is, as we saw earlier, around 40% of households are participating, so think of all of the new eyeballs you can get in front of. So, anyone who has a product that's purchased more than once whether it's a supplement that's repeat purchased, or whether it's a brand that has multiple products, like fitness gear Prime Day is a huge opportunity to get in front of a very warm audience that's ready to buy. So sometimes you can bring them into your brand and then they'll come back post Prime Day to purchase your other products. So those are things to consider when you're deciding. You know, is your goal to maximize product profit and just take advantage of the wave of traffic and do nothing, or do you want to maximize sales and build on all these other opportunities and make sure that you're investing in a much longer-term strategy than just Prime Day? Once you know those two, you can start optimizing beyond that. So, for all of those here that their main goal is maximizing profit, there's kind of a few things that we want to look at here.

 

Destaney:

One bid management. We don't recommend making aggressive changes to your bids. In general, we see that brands who do not run any deals and are only focused on profitability will maintain around the same ACOS or ROAS. Sometimes it improves if they're in a category that does well during Prime Day. Sometimes it's worse because they didn't run any discounts and all their competitors did so. Now their conversion rates decreased. The traffic's going to your competitors and not you. If you're not running any deals, we do typically see a lower conversion rate. So, we sometimes recommend going ahead and lowering your bids a little bit, maybe 5% to 10% across the board, because customers are going to continue to click but not purchase, and again, this is because maybe your competitors are running heavy discounts and deals. If your competitors are running heavy discounts and deals and someone types in toothpaste and you're the only one not running a deal, you're not going to drive sales and you're going to have a lower conversion rate than everyone else. So, keep these things in mind. Lead-in is another strategy where maybe you need to lower your bids and budgets because your ads are not going to perform well leading up. Right, you can't sacrifice the increase in ACOS leading up because you're not going to drive sales on Prime Day without deals or discounts.

 

Destaney:

Budget management's another really big one. At the end of the day, if you don't run deals or discounts and your category is known for deals and discounts, you're going to perform worse. So maybe it's worth decreasing your budget on everything that is not in line with your performance expectations. So the two easiest ways to do this are just go into Ad Console or Campaign Manager or, if you're using Adtomic, you can easily make adjustments throughout there and look at your targeting tab in Ad Console or the search term tab in Adtomic, which is the better tab to look at, and you can filter by everything that has an ACOS that is not in line with your expectations the last 30 days and go ahead and decrease that bid, knowing it's probably going to perform even worse on Prime Day, right, and it's not always a drastic difference, but it's usually enough to make a difference. Same thing with your budgets. Maybe you leave your budgets or you decrease your budget slightly on everything that has over 100% ACOS, right, Everything that's just out of line.

 

Destaney:

Go ahead and decrease, and what's going to happen is you're going to optimize towards a little bit more profitability. You're going to get a lot more customers viewing your listing. Naturally, usually you know anywhere from 10% to 20% if you don't run deals or discounts. So, you're still going to drive more sales, but you're going to do it without advertising a ton. So, you're going to usually have a much higher profit on these days if you run this style of strategy. Again, the downside to this is, if all of your competitors are running deals and discounts, their conversion rate is going to be higher. They're going to drive three to four times the amount of sales as you and, as we know, the digital shelf is not unlimited. So, if they're doing much, much better and their organic ranks pushing up, yours is going to be pushing down on the page and that can be hard to make up for unless you're doing a ton externally or have other plans right outside of Prime Day. So, keep those things in mind.

 

Destaney:

Now the second half of the strategy maximizing sales is where we're going to have a lot more very specific strategic recommendation. If you're not running deals, you can still expect a lower conversion rate, but across the board, what you really want to look at is increasing budget. That's the first and foremost way to maximize sales. Everything, all of your campaigns that have a ROAS or ACOS within your target, go ahead and increase your budget 20 to 30% and what's going to happen is, again, your organic sales are going to increase. So, if you're also increasing your ad sales and your ad spend with an increased budget, your tacos is typically going to stay close to the same, but you're seeing an overall sales increase. So, your overall profit's going to increase just due to economies of scale. So that's kind of the first thing that we look at is making sure everything converting really well, everything within a cost of a row, as we're increasing our budget on. The next thing we do is increase bids that are in a similar situation, but we're a little bit more strategic on this. Again, I'll open up my search term tab and I'll say, hey, my average conversion rate for my account is 12%, but these five keywords that are my most important keywords they're converting at a 20%. Let's go ahead and increase my bids on those, because I want to drive as much traffic as possible to those precise keywords that are going to improve my organic rank as well as improve my overall performance if my conversion rates higher. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to be very strategic with our campaign creation, and that's what we're going to get into in our next few slides. We're going to create campaigns that are specifically focused on maximizing visibility.

 

Destaney:

A really quick pro tip and I'm only calling this out is because Prime Day traffic comes in waves. We typically see the morning of the first day of Prime Day as one of the highest. You can use Atomic Day Parting Schedules. So, if you're nervous to go in and just increase bids and budgets 24 hours because you don't know what performance is going to look like, you can use Adtomic Day Parting Schedules to choose those certain time frames where you can actually see your conversion rates higher and your CPCs are lower. So, we all know that your conversion rate does fluctuate throughout the day. You can use something like the day parting schedules to build out rules throughout the day if you want to balance that line of profitability and sales. So, keep that in mind, All right.

 

Destaney:

So, leveraging the search term tab this is a really quick screenshot pulled directly from Atomic that I wanted to shout out because it's one of the best ways to have a lot of control. So, a lot of people will go to every single campaign and add a crazy placement modifier, increase sales or top of search by 100%, increase budgets. But that's not very strategic because you're going to have some search terms that don't do well, some that do well. So, if you pull Adtomic, you can leverage the search term tab. If you're an ad console, it's the targeting tab and you can filter top down by spend. I'm a really big believer of operational efficiency and 80-20. So, I almost always go top down by spend efficiency and 80-20. So, I almost always go top down by spend.

 

Destaney:

What I am personally looking for are the terms where my conversion rate and click-through rate that's another good metric to look at is higher than average. So, as you know, we can pull our category average from insights and planning tab. More on that probably later when we hop into Q&A. But you can also pull it from your account average. So maybe your account average again is 8%. So, what I'm really looking for here are there any terms that have insane conversion rate that I know is better than the category? If so, you can assume that during Prime Day it's going to perform even better. So, I'm going to go control my bid and increase my bid on all of those terms, especially if my ACOS is lower than what my target is. This specific account does have a 30% average ACOS, as you can see here. That is our target. So, I'm probably going to increase performance on these terms. But if I see a term that's performing less than our average maybe it this 3% and 8% and it's not a strategy that the brand wants to run, I'm going to pull back my bids, right, Unless I'm running a dealer discount. This is a way that really helps improve your total sales and your organic rank while still maintaining some of that level of profitability. What you don't want to do is spend a ton of money on a term that has a terrible conversion rate. All that's going to do is hurt your organic rank because Amazon wants the products that are converting the best at the top of the page. So, keep that in mind when you're running your bid magic and be a little bit more strategic around these increases and decreases during Prime Day.

 

Destaney:

The second thing we want to do is if we're running deals or discounts, this is even more so. We want to create a couple of campaigns focused on winning top of search. Now, Bradley and I have talked quite a bit about this area and whether or not to use high bids or whether or not to use placement modifiers, but for Prime Day specifically, especially if we have a deal badge on our ad, we create campaigns for the top of the page. The reason being is, as we know, customers are looking for deal badging and the best place to see that deal badging is the number one slot on the page. Now, most people can't afford to win this 100% of the time. It's just incredibly expensive. In the supplement space it would cost you around $90,000 in spend to win one keyword over 80% impression share $90,000. And this was last year. So, this is why we create separate campaigns is because we don't want to compete with all of our other campaigns that are focused on profitability.

 

Destaney:

We create one to two campaigns for one to two top keywords that convert better than anything. Profitability we create one to two campaigns for one to two top keywords that convert better than anything else and our one to two keywords that we want to improve our organic rank on and we're going to set insanely high bids and probably put also a top of search modifier on it. And when I say insanely high bids, people always think it's three to four dollars. No, that is not going to compete during Prime Day, especially not in a competitive market. For some of our campaigns where we only want to win top of search, we don't care what the return on ad spend is during that timeframe, because people repeat purchase or because we have a good deal. I'm talking $10 to $15 bids or in the supplement space it's $40 to $50 bids. That is the kind of bid that is often needed in competitive categories on Amazon. And again, why we do this is because our conversion rate is so much higher with our deal. We drive so much traffic because of our deal badging that our organic performance will improve and stick for the next four to six to eight weeks. And if we continue to maintain that high and heightened level of traffic, organic rank will stick the whole time.

 

Destaney:

So, we don't do this with all of our campaigns. We don't do this with every keyword. We cannot afford it, we would hemorrhage money. But we create one to two campaigns with one to two keywords and we set a budget that we can control in order to piggyback off of that conversion rate and those sales. So, think very strategically around this what keywords in your account are you converting better than everyone else? What keywords can you afford to win top of search on and create some of these campaigns so that way you can start improving your organic positioning on the page through PPC during Prime Day. Another quick thing to note is when you create your campaign, put top of search, put Prime Day in the campaign name or whatever you need to see, so that way when you see a poor ACOS or poor ROAS you don't pause it, because that's not the objective of the campaign. The campaign is to improve your BSR and to improve your organic positioning, not to drive profitability. So that's kind of a really quick tip and we'll probably talk more on that in the Q&A section.

 

Destaney:

The next thing that's incredibly important is to consider how many people window shop on Prime Day. So more frequently than probably any other time of the year, customers are clicking around sponsored display almost always does really well during prime day because this positioning on the page is really valuable. So, what we do is we create really specific sponsored display product targeting ads where we only target all of our own products and we run these with the increased budget on prime day. And we run these with an increased budget on Prime Day because we know that customers are less loyal. Now it can be argued how much brand defense campaigns you should run throughout the year and I have some good data to kind of back into those areas but during Prime Day I'm of the opinion that customers are less brand loyal. They're looking for deals, they're looking for discounts. So, make sure to protect your listing, especially if you have a deal. If you have a deal, the last thing you want them to do is land on your page, see a better competitor ad and click out. So, we increase and run specific prime day targeting strategies for sponsored display. Don't throw in hundreds of products to target. Don't put expanded product targeting. Only target your own brand name to make sure you are defending your listing. Other sponsored display strategies we can talk about later whether or not it's audience targeting, category targeting or retargeting, but this is something that needs to be ran in almost every single account.

 

Destaney:

Profitability or scalability focused. Maximizing your creatives is another big one. So almost all headline search ads are being forced to move to a custom image regardless, but even more so on Prime Day. It's needed to maximize your creatives because you need to stand out on the page, and when there are hundreds of deals, hundreds of discounts, you need to stand out on the page, and when there are hundreds of deals, hundreds of discounts, you have to stand out by how you've built your brand. So, look at the differences in these two ads. They're both selling the same product, but one of them is way more eye-catching. The bottom one also will typically drive a 200% increase in click-through rate, which is incredibly, incredibly important, because as you're running these ads, everyone's running deals right. Almost everyone in your category is gonna run some level of dealer discount, so if you're not, you have to stand out.

 

Destaney:

Adding a lifestyle image is one of the number one way to improve the performance of your sponsor brand ad and your sponsor display ads. So go in there and get that done If you don't have the creative to make this happen, use Sponsored Brands AI Builder. Is it fantastic? No, not always. I said no really aggressively, but we actually have used it for a lot of brands. It's not always as fantastic as a professional shoot, but is it better than nothing? Yes, because even if it's a poor AI creative, you're not getting charged. A list of customer clicks. Sponsored brands ads are pay per click most of the time, right. So, get it up and running to bring eyeballs to your listing and then, if the customer is still interested, they will click on. So that is kind of the biggest thing that we recommend from a sponsored brand sponsored display ad perspective. Immediately get your lifestyle images uploaded.

 

Destaney:

The other thing we're going to discuss is creating remarketing campaigns. So, one thing that you have to consider is, again, 40% of households are on the platform. This is your opportunity to get your brand in front of hundreds of hundreds of thousands of customers. Now, some of them may not purchase. Some of them may look but not buy, as we know. So how do you take advantage of that traffic? The 30, 45, 60, 90 days after prime day, you create remarketing campaigns. You can create remarketing campaigns directly with an ad console with sponsored display. As you can see, there's a target added section here. Remove all of those targets. Amazon auto-populates some of them. Remove them. All you want to do is create a remarketing campaign within the look back window that you would prefer. Why this is so important is because if a customer was looking at your product during Prime Day, they are interested in it probably throughout the year, right? So, you're able to capture that customer ID and then serve them an ad 45 days later when maybe they're ready to repeat, purchase or buy a new one, right? This is a really valuable way to take advantage of all the traffic you're getting on Prime Day and monetize it later on throughout the year. If you run this same campaign within DSP, you can also get even more targeted. Within DSP, you can say hey, I want to go ahead and serve everyone an ad. Who viewed my page on Prime Day but did not purchase. Or who viewed my competitors but did not purchase, right? If I'm selling TVs, you don't want to continue serving someone an ad. If they already bought a TV, they probably don't need another one, maybe.

 

Destaney:

So, within DSP, you can set up and create that audience where you own that customer ID that viewed within your category and you can get really targeted of negating and or highlighting certain audiences. So, this is incredibly, incredibly important. If you're not a fan of DSP or if you have any concerns red flags you think it's terrible drop those concerns in the chat because I can answer them. Around. 90% of the time, DSP does not work because it's not ran appropriately or expectations weren't set or it was spent too much money without highlighting how granular you can get and, if that's the case, run sponsored display ads to dip your toes in and play around with getting really granular with your remarketing audience to take advantage of Prime Day traffic. Those are all the biggest things that we had here, so I wanted to leave it at that and then hopefully answer some of the follow-ups we had.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That was good. The main takeaway guys. I mean, there's tons of takeaways you guys should have, but I hope one of the main takeaways that maybe opened some of your eyes is that when we're talking Prime Day, PPC readiness, it's not just July 16 and 17 that you have to keep in mind. There's stuff you have to do before Prime Day PPC readiness. It's not just July 16 and 17 that you have to keep in mind. There's stuff you have to do before Prime Day. There are things that you have to keep in mind, like this last slide about after Prime Day. Prime Day has a big impact and it's outside of just two days, so just keep that in mind. If there's one takeaway, make sure you remember them. One question of somebody made about 10 minutes or so ago not necessarily about prime day, but it's especially important because of prime day coming up is she's been sold out a month and I've actually talked to some sellers like this. They're worried. Like prime day is coming back. Um, how do I regain my momentum? As far as you with PPC to make sure I'm okay for Prime Day, so what would you say to Paula?

 

Destaney:

Well, I think Prime Day is actually a fantastic time to launch if you can find out or carried away to stand out on the page. The biggest thing I would say is you almost need to restart your honeymoon period. I know this is more Bradley's area of expertise, but a lot of people will go out of stock and then come back into stock and expect to have the same BSR, same positioning on the page, same traffic as they did prior. That's almost never the case. From what we've seen, we see a huge drop in just organic positioning. So, the biggest thing is like setting expectations and making sure you're preparing your budget. When you come back into stocks, you're probably going to have to spend more money up front to make up for the sales volume that you did receive organically. Now, with it being Prime Day, I almost recommend at least having a coupon or something on your page to improve your conversion rate relative to your competitors and then just spending maybe a little bit heavier up front, knowing you're going to make up for that once your organic position goes back to normal.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, what else we have here? We've got, Gianna from. She says if I've paused keywords in the past, I've not performed well. Is it worth reactivating them with low bids during prime to generate visibility and perhaps sales, or is it better to leave them paused? Oh, that's a nice and juicy one right there.

 

Destaney:

I wouldn't say that they're gonna perform that much better on prime day, unless maybe you're a lot cheaper and you have a good you know deal badge or something along those lines. I would say why did you pause them instead of lowering your bids? Right, if they're absolutely converting terribly and you've got 50 clicks and no orders like, okay, that makes sense, pause it. But if they've driven any sales in the past, maybe you do start them with a really low bid just to see what can happen. But this is again drawing. If you're only focused on profitability, probably not. It's probably not conformed that much better out of the blue. But if you are focused on maximizing sales, maybe it is worth looking at. You know, last 90 days what keywords have driven an order, even if not profitably, and what should my bid be, knowing my conversion rate may be higher.

 

Bradley Sutton:

One quick question I have for you before I go back is I think one of the things differently this year is Amazon's new rules on like sale prices and coupons and things like that, where, hey, you've got to be lower, you can't just artificially raise your price and then. And then you know, like some people do, and then people see, oh my goodness, it's 60% off, but it's just because they raised the price by 60%. Now, that being said, obviously there's going to be some people who still game the system, maybe from variation, abuse or some black hat stuff. But one thing that I've found now is, you know, like me personally, what I would do in the past is I would still have some kind of sales discount before prime day a little bit, just to get some momentum going and maybe increase on my organic. But now I'm all of a sudden, I’m trigger shy because I'm like, oh shoot, whatever discount I do now, that's setting my, my baseline price for this month, which means I'm going to have to do it even bigger. Uh, you know discounts, even getting a coupon approved. So, has that new rule changed any of your strategy at all? Or? Um, are you doing less pre? Uh, prime day discounts um, or what's your strategy there?

 

Destaney:

Yeah, I would say, less pre-prime day discounts and or just being a lot more thoughtful around our overall pricing strategy. Because I think, like that's always, like the biggest complaint I see with Prime Day is some brands like, no, don't do anything, don't make any changes, it's not valuable. Everyone's looking for discounts and it's like, yeah, that is true, but also, as we discussed, you're getting in front of 40% of households in America. So, I think, just being a lot more strategic around the timing, also realizing that if you overlap high spend and PPC and steep discounts, you're not going to be making any money, so you better hope you make up for it with inflated conversion rate and improved organic rank. Another big factor I think is, as we're starting to see more with Walmart and other retailers and external influencers, is just price matching as well. It's making sure that you have price parity across all of your platforms and your discounts are lining up in a similar fashion.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's actually important, because last year Walmart Plus Week was the same week as Prime Day, but then this year Walmart has two of them and they're both not on Prime Day. One was already last month and one, I think, is this week or next week or something. So, yeah, definitely what Destaney just said Keep in mind, guys, because if you could lose the buy box on one or other marketplace, if you're running discounts on one but not the other, Sydney says, alright, during Prime Day she's going to have a deal badge. But she's asking would you run an ad on a keyword that you already have your product organically ranked on the first page, or would you target keywords based on the conversion rate, regardless of organic ranking?

 

Destaney:

Great question. So, the line that I usually draw on my sand is if I'm ranked in the top four, then I'll pull back on PPC. That's kind of the line. Page one does not matter. In my opinion. 80% of click share goes to the number one carousel on the page, the top four, that's 80% of clicks go there. So even if you're ranked on page one but you're at the bottom of the page, you're not getting near as much visibility and you can be booted really quick. So, we typically say, hey, if we're in the top four, that's a great place to be. If I'm five through eight, sometimes that's okay as well. It really depends on the category. But you got to think as a customer. If you're shopping on mobile, you see a headline search ad, you see three sponsored product ads and then you see your four organically ranked, and then you have another sponsored ad carousel. So, a customer has to scroll quite a bit just to get to 10 to 50. So that's kind of the area that we see. Cannibalization starts happening when you're ranked in the top four and you're advertising in the top four. Other than that, you really don't need to worry about it too much. Maybe you lower your bids a little bit and you focus on that mid-point in the page. But yeah, good question.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Johnny says sponsor display as CPC or VCPM for protecting your own listings.

 

Destaney:

For protecting my own listings, I do recommend a CPC model. VCPM gets a little murky when it comes to attribution because it's quite a bit different, so I like just controlling my CPCs and only targeting the specific ASINs I want to target.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Danica says in order to maximize the sales, what percentage uplift or down of the PPC spend will you do in two weeks ahead of Prime Day, a week ahead on Prime Day, after the Prime Day?

 

Destaney:

Good question Really depends on ROAS and overall budget. If we're being honest, we have some brands that will do a 15% increase in spend for lead-in. So, we'll segment our campaigns that we want to increase. We know that performance is going to be terrible. We'll invest in DSP. We'll do a lot on the awareness side 15% to 20% heavy. Some brands that have a specific marketing budget will go even higher. But if it's like a traditional brand that's focused on tacos, ACOS, then we'll only increase 5% to 10% for lead-in. And then on Prime Day, again it really depends on budget because you can maximize your spend if you want to, but you got to make sure you're hitting sales targets. You spend if you want to, but you got to make sure you're hitting sales targets. Lead out, as mentioned, was stronger last year than we've ever seen it before. So, I believe our lift for lead out was around 12% the two weeks after.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another good one here from Dion. He's, or she, is still in launch phase, so it's only been a little over a month since they created their listing, so he's not profitable. He's still trying to get that traction. Should he or she stay away from doing you know, prime Day activities and just keep going with his launch, or what is your suggestion there?

 

Destaney:

Honestly, as mentioned, I've seen multiple brands launch products on Prime Day and have an amazing head start because their traffic is so much better, even from a review positioning standpoint. If you can get 50 people to buy your product on Prime Day and 5% of them leave reviews, that's a really, really good start. If you don't have the money for it, then, yeah, probably stay away. But if you have enough reviews even in your launch phase to have a decent conversion rate, then it's a really big opportunity to get in front of a lot of customers. That's going to drive sales volume and increase your review count.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Last question of the day is any specific strategies for advertising listings with lightning deals.

 

Destaney:

Nothing too specific. You can create specific sponsor brand ads and shout out the deals in your headline. You can also. Usually what we've seen historically they change this frequently is if you run additional auto campaigns not necessarily additional, but if you have auto campaigns on the ASINs with lightning deals, they typically do win unique inventory on the page, whether it's frequently bought together, the lightning deals page on Amazon or other segments of like sponsored deals. So just make sure you have the maximum exposure we discussed

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so now, what homework do you have for everybody from now until next week? Again, like I said, guys, this is like the third, fourth, fifth thing in a row that we've been doing about prime days. We want to make sure you guys have the best prime day. What do you want people to do from now until next week? Uh, and then report back to you on when you come on.

 

Destaney:

I would say the biggest things are we released a prime day checklist which covers things outside of amazon advertising as well, so I would 100% check that out. The second thing I would do is really define is it that profitability or that scalability strategy? What are you trying to accomplish? And then go through the deck that I shared today I'm sure we'll send it out and just look for any of those low hanging fruit opportunities. Do you have your brand defense campaigns covered? Do you have your bids and budgets ready for lead-in, which starts really soon? Do you have the appropriate creative assets, custom imagery, video, lifestyle images, all of that? Do you have it ready to go? And then I think the reason we actually wanted to do a follow-up campaign is because a lot of the items that I mentioned are hands-on keyboard. You need to log in and make these adjustments. You need to look at your search terms tab in Atomic. So, we wanted to put a follow-up of like hey, here's everything we think you should do. Once you've identified what you want to accomplish, let's actually hop on and do a Q&A for everyone who maybe tries to launch a sponsored display ad and gets confused. You know, sponsored display is now overly complex. You have reach and sales and audiences, so we really wanted to give everyone the opportunity to then come in hot and ask questions. For hey, I tried to do this. It doesn't work, or this is what I'm seeing, this is what I'm not.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. So, guys, I don't have the signup sheet yet for next week's live, but just if you're watching this on YouTube, make sure to hit the notification for when we go live and look out in your email, we'll send you a message to register for that uh workshop. You guys have got your homework uh cut out for you. I've got. I put the link that she referred to right there. There are some tips from Carrie, some tips from Destaney and others there. h10.me/primelist. h10.me/primelist. Destaney, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your knowledge. I got to kick back for half the workshop here and chill. I just listen and learn like everybody else. So, thanks for that and we will see you back here next week. You, Destaney, and also everybody else out there as well. Thanks a lot, everybody.

 

Helium 10 Buzz 7/4/24: Temu / Shein Crackdown? | TikTok Shop Prime Day | Amazon Brand Tailored Promotion Update

Will Shein and Temu lose the tariff loophole they take advantage of? TikTok Shop has its own version of Prime Day. Amazon Brand Tailor Promotions has an important update. These buzzing news stories and more in this episode!

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.

EU plan to impose import duty on cheap goods could dent Shein and Temu
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jul/03/eu-plan-to-impose-import-duty-on-cheap-goods-could-dent-shein-and-temu

TikTok Shop to discount ‘thousands’ of items during sales event
https://www.retaildive.com/news/tiktok-shop-july-sales-event/720155/

Walmart+ Subscribers Break the 30% Mark
https://www.pymnts.com/subscription-commerce/2024/walmart-subscribers-break-the-30-mark/

Amazon Discontinues Security Robot for Small Businesses After 8 Months
https://www.pymnts.com/amazon/2024/amazon-discontinues-security-robot-for-small-businesses-after-8-months/

Virtual Stores are now showing up on some Amazon Storefronts. LinkedIn post by Liran Hirschkorn

Save 25% on Amazon Warehousing and Distribution storage costs
https://sell.amazon.com/blog/amazon-warehousing-and-distribution-promotion

But that's not all! Take advantage of our tips on maximizing Prime Day sales using Helium 10's Insights Dashboard. Many sellers are sleeping on these features. This episode is packed with essential updates and strategies to keep you competitive in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.

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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

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► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft

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

• 01:03 - Temu & Shein Crackdown?
• 04:23 - FBA Shipment Feature
• 06:05 - TikTok Shop Prime Day?
• 07:58 - Walmart+ Milestone
• 08:42 - Brand Tailored Promotion Update
• 09:49 - Amazon South Africa PPC
• 10:24 - Amazon Robots
• 11:38 - Amazon VR Stores
• 13:06 - AWS Discounts
• 14:03 - Pro Training Tip: Helium 10 Features You Should Use This Prime Day

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Will low-cost marketplaces like Sheen and Temu lose their tariff loophole they take advantage of? TikTok Shop has its own version of Prime Day. Amazon Brand Tailor Promotions has an important update. These news 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 news stories that are going on the Amazon, Walmart, TikTok shop and e-commerce world. We also give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing, all right, well, today is July 4th of July, national holiday in America, but you guys know me, I work 365 days a year, so I know no holidays. You guys need the news and I'm going to bring it to whether it is a holiday or not, so let's go ahead and hop right into it.

Bradley Sutton:

To start off, we actually have a news article that's not based on USA but actually based in Europe, and it's entitled. It was actually from the Guardian and it's entitled EU plans to impose import duty on cheap goods could dent Sheen and Temu All right, so they're making this move. Now, as you guys know, the reason why you know Temu and Sheen can offer such low prices, regardless of what country they're shipping to, is they take advantage of this kind of like loophole, as it were, like, for example, an EU. The threshold for this tariff is like 150 euros. In UK it's 135. And then there's also some other like threshold at 39 pounds or less. It doesn't involve VAT. So basically, what this means is that you know you can ship from China to the country uh, you know in EU or even America, uh, and the sender nor the recipient are charged like import duties and taxes, as opposed to if you're getting like a you know $200 item or something where you got to, you know fork over 20% or whatever it is, and in addition to that, you know to send from China that they take advantage of like these subsidies where they can get, they can ship things really, really cheap. But the one of the biggest advantages that the Chinese sellers have over European sellers or American sellers is that advantage of shipping things one at a time directly to customers so they can get around that import tax.

Bradley Sutton:

So what an EU Commission's spokesperson said is hey, what we have proposed is that there's now no exemption anymore for packages valued at below 150 euros. So this is not, like you know for sure, going to happen, but this impacts a lot in Europe, you know. It says imports from online retail retailers have more than doubled year on year to more than 350,000 items in April. Now this is like I said this is still in the preliminary stages. We don't know if this is going to pass or go through or not. But if you're in the US, you know this is impactful, I think, because you know Temo and Sheen are really attacking those low price kind of market there. Mainly it's been in the clothing like for Sheen and stuff like that. But I was just looking the other day on Temo there's coffin shelves all over the place and like a lot of the same products that amazon has and it's like super, super cheap. Now, thank goodness, not as many not nearly as many people shop on that platform as opposed to like TikTok shop or amazon and things. But you know this is something that maybe us sellers might want legislation on. I'm not sure you know like. Would you like the United States to crack down on these no-fee imports, because, remember, it's not just Temu and Shin anymore. What did Kerry talk about in the Weekly Buzz last week? Now Amazon has entered this game where they're going to offer these kind of direct shipments that'll get to buyers in like 11 days at a very low price. That's kind of like exclusively for those shipping from China. So this this will help, you know, maybe alleviate some of those imports if this loophole is kind of closed. So it'll be interesting to watch in the coming months what happens with this legislation.

Bradley Sutton:

Now the next news article is actually directly from Amazon Seller Central, a cool feature, something that you never see on Amazon. You guys know those announcements that we sometimes get news from, or you see it on your dashboard and you see how there's like a thumbs up or thumbs down. Have you guys ever seen one that had 66 thumbs up and only one thumbs down, like usually? It's like mostly thumbs down not usually, but a lot of times. A lot of sellers are not very happy with the updates that Amazon is giving, but this one is like 99% positive.

Bradley Sutton:

Now what is it? It's very simple, but it's. It's beneficial for sellers like myself who do similar shipments all the time. So if you've got your own 3PL and you're sending shipments in or you're sending shipments directly from out of the country, this feature is called a send it again feature, replicating previous FBA shipments with one click, all right. So basically, let's say you have this shipment you're selling, you're sending in 10 boxes of five coffin shelves each. Well, if that's usually what you do, like you just do that every two weeks or you do that every four weeks or whatever Now, instead of having to build that whole shipment over and over again from scratch, you can just hit this button and now it's going to duplicate that shipment. Now that doesn't mean you're locked into that SKU. It says you can still manually add or remove SKUs or modify the number of units, but at least you're not having to start from scratch again. So if you want to play around with this and see how it works, hit inventory in Seller Central, then hit FBA inventory, go to the shipments dropdown menu and then select manage shipments under the next steps column select send it again. If you want to see how it is to repeat a certain shipment, all right. The next article is repeat a certain shipment, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article is from a retail dive. I'm not sure if I've ever quoted them before, but this is a article entitled TikTok shop to discount thousands of items during a sales event. So you know, we know, amazon has Prime Day, Walmart has Walmart plus day or deal or week, I think it's called, and then they actually have another one going on right now on Walmart before Prime Day. But now TikTok shop has its deals for you days that's coming this July it's actually going to be coming on July 9th and there's going to be exclusive discounts that I'll have with some major brands. Doesn't really say that everybody is has access to offer this. But what about you guys who are selling on TikTok shop? Did any of you guys get access to this deal for you days? Let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

Regardless, it could be a way to boost traffic on Amazon. The deal for you days is a week before Amazon Prime, so there's a couple ways you can do it. If you're selling on TikTok shop, maybe you don't even have access to a deal for you days, but maybe you just go ahead and discount your products or do a big push on TikTok shop to influencers around that time. Well, that might boost some of your Amazon rankings before prime day, because you know, if you, the more outside traffic you get, you can get your ranks increase. Another strategy could be, during Amazon prime day, to run certain deals or run influencers on TikTok shop. And, you know, maybe your TikTok shop sales will have a boost, which you probably like, because there's a lot less fees on TikTok shop. But your Amazon sales might get a boost too, because people there's still people who might see something from an influencer on TikTok shop, but then they'll they prefer to go buy it from Amazon, right? So then again, during prime Day, you might be able to have some benefits there by getting that outside traffic from TikTok. So just something to keep in mind with Prime Day coming up.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from payments.com and it's entitled Walmart Plus Subscribers Break the 30% Mark. So they did a survey of about 8,000 different respondents and it said 30% of consumers had a subscription to Walmart Plus account. All right, Walmart+ is getting more market penetration, guys. And then, interestingly though this is the one I found fascinating is that among those subscribers, 87% also had an Amazon Prime account. So it's not just a matter of oh, they have to pick Walmart+ or they're going to pick Amazon Prime. A lot of people, myself included, have both Amazon Prime and Walmart+ accounts. Next article is back to Seller Central Dashboard, something that was announced this week Brand tailor promotions kind of a pretty good update, especially with prime day coming up.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now there is an ASIN exclusion feature, all right. So before brand Taylor promotions, you can go to custom audiences. We announced this months ago when it first came out, and you know you can. You can like target all of your cart abandoners, but it's at the brand level. So maybe you have like 30 products in your brand but you don't want to everybody to get this discount that you're trying to do. You just want a few products or you don't want a few products in there. Well, now you know. Before you had no choice. You had to allow everybody who goes to any of your brands page to get access to this discount, but now you can exclude certain ASIN, so that it's almost as if you can just specify this promotion for a single ASIN. If you want to, so go into brand tailored promotions, check that out. Might be something to run during prime day If you have a lot of people who have abandoned the cart or you've got some repeat purchasers. You want to maybe drive some more conversion to keep brand tailored promotions in mind.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is going to Amazon advertising and it's as you guys know. A few couple months ago we announced that Amazon is launched Amazon South Africa All right, but now Amazon ads is launched All right. So, believe it or not, there is a marketplace where there is no PVC until now. So now sponsored ads and brand stores have launched in South Africa. So if you're one of the very few I don't know anybody yet selling on the Amazon South Africa marketplace, go ahead and get your PPC up and running.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to payments.com, this is kind of an off-topic thing, but I thought it was kind of interesting because I bet you a lot of you don't realize that Amazon made its own robot a few years ago. All right, now one of them they relaunched last year we talked about this in the Weekly Buzz, I think how it was for businesses, where it was kind of like a security guard of sorts, you know, for 24 hours, a 24 hour, uh, you know, like vigilance, like kind of like a ring camera if you were. But Amazon discontinued the robot for small businesses. This is kind of crazy. I'm showing a picture of this robot here for those who are watching on YouTube, but they're going to concentrate their efforts on the household robots. I mean, it's hard to believe there's robots in houses. Now it's called the Amazon Astro, all right. Now the reason I'm bringing this up is there is one person in the whole world who I know has one of this. Who do you guys think it is? Who's on cutting edge of different things? It's Kevin King. So I saw this in Kevin King's house when I went to his house there in Texas and I was like what in the world is this? So he didn't have it set up at the time. I wonder, Kevin, if you're watching out there, let me know how is your Amazon Astro? It's now maybe a collector's item, since Amazon is discontinuing it for the businesses.

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways, next up, not really an article, but something from LinkedIn. If you look at Liran Hirschkorn, last week he posted about how he saw that Lego had this virtual reality storefront in their Amazon store, where it's like a virtual store, where you can just go in there and walk around the. You can see shelves and you see the different Lego sets and you and it's. It's fake because it's like 3d, but it looks like you were in the Lego aisle in target or something like that, and then you can click on the actual products. It's actually quite wild. I tested it on my phone Um, my Amazon app. I have access to it too. So go to the Lego store. Just go to any Lego product on your phone in the Amazon app and then there'll be a button on there on the storefront that says Lego virtual store or something like that. Click that. It's kind of wild, and we've talked about here on the Weekly Buzz in the past that there's different companies that are moving towards this. Walmart is doing something in the meta, that there's different, you know companies that are moving towards this. Walmart is doing something in the metaverse, right? Who knows, maybe there'll be a day where you can go into the Manny's Mysterious Oddities you know our Helium 10 account, you know store it and then see all of our spooky stuff coffin shelves and bat-shaped bath mats and coffin bookshelves and things. I'm not sure if I would shop doing this Like I have virtual reality devices, but that just seems too weird to shop in that kind of environment. But who knows, maybe five, 10 years from now we'll be talking about this. It'll be like commonplace.

Bradley Sutton:

Last article of the day is again from Amazon, and they've got a special they announced just this week where you can save 25% on Amazon warehousing and distribution storage costs. On Amazon warehousing and distribution storage costs. That's AWD, all right. So from July 1st all the way to September 30th, anybody using AWD you get 25% off the base rate for storage costs and 15% off the base rate for processing and transportation costs. So this applies for people who are new to AWD or if you're already using it. You are going to get this discount. How many of you out there are using AWD? You know a lot of people well, not a lot, but I do know some people who switched to that, you know, a few months ago, you know to try and avoid some of those Amazon new fees that are coming for, like inventory placement and low inventory fee and things like that. For those of you who have done that, how is it working for you? Let me know in the comments below if you're watching this on YouTube. All right, that's it for the news this week.

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go ahead now and move into our training tip of the week. As you guys have been seeing the last couple of weeks we've been doing a long series on Prime Day. We've been trying to get everybody ready for Prime Day. We wanna make series on Prime Day. We've been trying to get everybody ready for Prime Day. We want to make sure you guys have the best Prime Day. I've got some strategies here that I have not talked about anywhere else, and none of our live broadcasts for Prime Day have we talked about.

Bradley Sutton:

It's a couple simple things that I think some Helium 10 members are sleeping on. So those of you who have the Insights dashboard in Helium 10, this is what I want you guys to do. All right, so go to your dashboard and then, on the left-hand side, I want you to hit insights. Okay, now, when you hit insights, there's a lot of insights that you know maybe have come up here. I want you to go to the settings and preferences for all the insights and then what I want you to do is look for the keyword based insights. All right, now there's a few that I think can help you this prime day.

Bradley Sutton:

It's kind of like for post prime day, but, as you know, you know you might start losing your keyword rank, your sponsored rank or your organic rank. You know, if everybody starts converting way way better than you, or if they're doing a higher bid, you want to get notified. Now, I'm sure what you guys are probably doing is, you know, maybe refreshing your search results or checking keyword track or something. But instead of that, add insight for that where it says hey, my, our increased sponsored keyword rank or increased organic keyword rank, all right. So then what you can set is like hey, you can say, Helium 10, if my keyword rank goes up or down by this much, please let me know. If my sponsor rank goes up or down by this much, please let me know.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing that could happen in Prime Day, especially if you're going pretty heavy on some of your auto and broad campaigns, you might start getting sales on keywords that you didn't even know you were relevant for, and then what's going to happen if you're getting some organic sales on these keywords? Well, after Prime Day, your organic rank might go up, right. So another one that you can do is you know those other keywords. By the way, what I was mentioning, if organic rank is going up or down, sponsored keyword rank going up or down, those are keywords already on your radar, like the ones that you're tracking in Keyword Tracker right, but remember I said there could be new keywords. So what I want you to do is I want you to go to the my Product Keyword, suggested Insight or Alert, and then you hit Edit.

Bradley Sutton:

Right Now, what you're going to be able to do is like say, hey, if there's a keyword out there that has minimum whatever search volume and all of a sudden my organic rank gets to X or Y or Z right, and it has two words you know you can add a whole bunch of filters here Then give me an insight, in other words, give me alert. So a lot of people after prime day are like, looking at their PPC reports, are like, oh shoot, I didn't know I was getting a sales from this keyword and they weren't even tracking it. But this way, instead of having to look at all your search reports, just look, maybe all of a sudden you're going to get ranked for keywords that you didn't have on your radar. This is going to give you an alert. There's nothing like this out there in the industry. We're unique in offering this function. Another thing that we are unique in and it's important for Prime Day is we allow you to add competitors that you can track for Alerts.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so this was about your own products, right, but maybe you want to know, leading up to Prime Day, which one of your competitors is lowering their price. Is any of the competitors raising their price? Are any of your competitors adding coupons? What about after Prime Day? At what point do they take their coupon off? These are things that you might be tracking. Guess what? You don't have to track it. Helium 10 can do it for you instead of you going and refreshing pages and this and that. How can you do that? What I want you to do is again go to your Insights Dashboard. If you've got the Diamond plan, hit this like two swords crossing button. That's the icon that we have for competitors. All right, hit competitors and this is going to open up If you've got any competitors. If you don't have any competitors, guys, you need to add it. The way that you can add the competitors is by hitting the add competitors button, and then you have an option of hey, do you want to add just competitors individually? You can just track whatever products on Amazon Maybe it's not even something related to your product or you can link your competitors.

Bradley Sutton:

I highly recommend doing that, like if I have coffin shelves, I want to go ahead and add, like the other coffin shelf, so I can compare it directly to my coffin shelf. Like, for example, you can see here I'm tracking five different coffin shelf competitors. Now what do I mean when I say I'm tracking? I'm tracking? Hey, are their sales increasing or decreasing? Is their listing quality score changing? Like, maybe they updated their listing? Is their BSR changing? So what you guys can do for the competitor insights there's a lot of them. You can see when they added a coupon, when they removed a coupon, when their price has changed, when their price has gone down, if they changed their title or their main image or their category, if their BSR changes.

Bradley Sutton:

Basically, guys go into each and every one of these, hit the gear button and then set the alert. That what you want to be notified by. All right, I mean, I think that no brainer is like is my competitor running a coupon? Let me know if they start running a coupon. Maybe I'm going to start my coupon, but then you don't want to keep running your own coupon and they stop running their coupon. So set an alert to tell you when they stop running their coupon. They turn it off so you can turn off yours.

Bradley Sutton:

This is again something that nobody in the industry has. Guys, helium 10 has had this for over a year. I think a lot of you have been sleeping on this, but a lot of the work that you're doing or maybe you're not doing because you don't have time can be automated by this dashboard and setting these insights. All right, guys, so please go into your insights dashboard. Those of you with a diamond plan, I mean this is almost worth it just to have the diamond plan to be able to have this. But go in there If you've got the diamond plan set. Your competitors, set your alerts for your products or your insights. Set your alerts or insights for your competitors products, and then now going into prime day during prime day, going out of prime day, you are going to get the best data possible without having to go search 17,000 different places on Amazon every single day to try and track these things. All right, guys, that's it for this week's Weekly Buzz. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

 

#575 - Amazon Prime Day Seller Roundtable

Get ready for an insightful episode as we gear up for Amazon Prime Day with strategies from some of the most experienced sellers in the business. We kick things off with Abdul, a seasoned seller who shares his journey of nearly a decade on Amazon. Listen in as Abdul recounts his best and worst Prime Day moments, including how he achieved a 2-3X sales increase last year without relying on costly promotions. Instead, Abdul utilized coupon codes, price adjustments, and leveraged off-Amazon traffic through social media and email campaigns. He also shares his game plan for this year, including starting targeted broadcasts a week before Prime Day to maximize engagement and sales.

Next, we shift gears to hear from Abe Chomali who has worked with multiple sellers, including a remarkable success story of a national electronics brand. This brand skyrocketed from $15,000 to $1 million in sales in a single day thanks to a premium deal position and massive advertising push. We also explore common pitfalls, such as internal miscommunications that can sabotage deals, and discuss the latest tactics for Prime Day 2024. Key strategies include leveraging new promotion types and recapturing potential sales from ad spend leading up to and during Prime Day.

Finally, we share diverse seller experiences and strategies for Prime Day from Rolando Rosas, Gonzalo Zamora, Carrie Miller, and Huy Nguyen, highlighting both successes and challenges. From managing PPC budgets effectively to the potential pitfalls of overspending on ads, we cover it all. Sellers like Rolando found that turning off PPC on Prime Day didn’t negatively impact sales, saving significant costs. We also explore the use of Amazon Live for increased exposure without extra expenditure and the crucial role of Helium 10 tools in managing campaigns and tracking performance. By leveraging tools like Helium 10’s Cerebro and Market Tracker, sellers can optimize for Prime Day-specific keywords and ensure continued sales momentum.

In episode 575 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Abdul, Abe, Gonzalo, Rolando, Carrie, and Huy discuss:

• 00:00 - Amazon Sellers Prime Day Strategy From Experienced Sellers
• 01:09 - Prime Day Strategy for New Sellers
• 02:54 - Improving Amazon Sales Strategies Over Time
• 08:15 - Maximizing Strategies for Prime Day
• 12:34 - New Strategies for Promotions and Sales
• 16:55 - Prime Day Sales Strategy Success
• 18:14 - Prime Day Strategies & Tools
• 27:19 - Successful Strategies for Prime Day Sales
• 35:20 - Optimizing Prime Day Sales Strategy

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► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension

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► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Prime Day is coming up, so to continue in our series of Prime Day readiness episodes, we've invited seasoned Amazon sellers who've sold millions of dollars on the platform to give some of their best and worst stories from previous Prime Days along with what they're planning to do this Prime Day. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked, perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image, or Amazon changed their shipping dimensions so they had to pay extra money every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash alerts.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Prime day was just announced, although, of course, helium 10 serious sellers podcast listeners have been knowing when prime day was going to be since April, since we predicted it but we weren't sure. But now everybody's sure July 16 and 17 is the day, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

So, if you're a brand-new seller, by definition, this is going to be your first prime day, and so what I wanted to do is not just have me here give you guys a step-by-step tutorial. I wanted to bring different sellers on to ask them what their experience is, whether it's their own accounts or maybe, uh, they have a lot of clients who they've helped with their prime days, and it's funny, because the answer is not always oh, you've got to go all in the answer from some of these sellers. I'm not sure what they're going to say. Some of the sellers might say you know what I don't do extensive discounts on Prime Day, and that's fine too. We want to make sure that we give you guys a complete view of what people are doing and not doing on Prime Day, but just know that, hey, there's not just one size fits all, where there's one strategy and everybody's got to do it or else you're a failure on Prime Day. I think that's going to be, hopefully, the theme that you learn today that there's different strokes for different folks, and it's okay. So, the first seller I'm going to bring on the show with us today he's been on the podcast before is Abdul.

Abdul, How's it going?

Abdul:

Hey, Bradley, good, good and yourself.

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty good, pretty good Now. You and I have hung out all over the world. You used to come to our Elite workshops and we had it in California. I know at that time you were living in New Jersey. We've also hung out in Lahore, Pakistan. Is that where you're at right now? Are you in Pakistan?

Abdul:

Yes, I am, and indeed.

Bradley Sutton:

So, what time is it over there?

Abdul:

So, we're like 12 hours ahead of you. It's like 11PM.

Bradley Sutton:

11PM. Thank you for coming on so late. Now for people who maybe haven't heard your Serious Sellers podcast episodes. How long have you been selling on Amazon?

Abdul:

So, we're going up to eight, nine years, but the first few years were not so good. I did everything wrong, and just after that it's just been fixing things and it's been a roller coaster.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now, eight, nine years you've been there for the prime days and so tell us let me just start off, this is going to be a similar question as what I'm going to ask others what was the best thing you've ever done on a prime day? Like, maybe it could have even been an accident, but what's the best Prime Day result you had where maybe sales were up 50%, sales were up 4X? Whatever the case, what can you remember was your best Prime Day?

Abdul:

I think 2X, 3X last year was good.

Bradley Sutton:

Was that coming from a certain strategy, like, did you run Prime exclusive discounts, a lightning deal, or was it just 100% organic extra traffic?

Abdul:

So, that's something we did not do last year. Last year we did not do exclusive discounts, flash sales, because I think correct me if I'm wrong those are usually 200, 300 per ASIN. They can get very pricey quickly, right, sure? So, we did not do that. Last year we did a lot of. We signed up for whatever free we could find and we ran coupon codes, discounts. We fixed our pricing beforehand to make sure that our prices were just right, leading a month, two months before the Prime Days.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so what was your strategy right before Prime Day? Did you have anything different that you did leading up to Prime Day?

Abdul:

No PPC ran as usual. We just kept an eye. If anything was running out of budget, we would put more juice into those PPC campaigns. Otherwise, we were just concentrating on coupon codes off Amazon advertisements. We have a large following now, so we send out messages on our social media, on our email distributions, so bringing a lot of off Amazon traffic to our store.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, yeah, that's definitely good. And so, what are you doing in that regards for this year? Like, what's your plans leading up to this year's Prime Day? What kind of promotions are you doing for your off Amazon this year? Like, what's your plans leading up to this year's Prime Day? Are you what kind of promotions are you doing for your off-Amazon traffic? Are you like telling them, hey, we're going to have a Prime Day discount, or something like that?

Abdul:

So yeah, leading now that it's announced because people my customers don't like vague, it's going to happen in June, July. So as soon as it's announced, you start preparing for your broadcast. So roughly a week before anything you do a week before the dates, it's just prepping. You can't. People don't take that seriously. So, say, about seven to 10 days, you start, you hit them with the first message and you have a series of follow-ups A lot of many chats, if you have subscribers in many chats. A lot of emails. My social media if I have Facebook following or Instagram following you just start hitting them with what your deal is, what your products are, where to find them and to remind them. Don't go to my website, have the Amazon logo prominent. So usually, I don't like to drive people to Amazon store my Amazon products. I like them to go from social media to my own website. But this will be an exception.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, what are you telling them, like, what are you doing? Are you doing prime exclusive discount? Are you just going to have a clippable coupon? Are you just running a discount as a regular discount price offer? What are, what is your plans for this July 16, 17?

Abdul:

I think it's going to be a visible coupon code this year, clippable discounts or typical clippable coupons. People tend to forget, so if something is right in front of them for everyone to see, as soon as someone lands on my page on my product, I want them to see the discount and I want them to be able to just apply the coupon and you don't want to put any hurdles in front of them.

Bradley Sutton:

What's your projected sales this year? Just so people have an idea about your level. What do you think you're going to hit for overall Not for Prime Day, but for your year. We're about halfway through the year. What do you think you're going to end up at?

Abdul:

This year has been a challenge. I have a lot of hijackers Just before Prime Day. I would touch that. We do see a lot of activity where they're using that infamous. There's a new badge, often return badge I'm being hit with that with my best sellers, and there's every year we see that. So that's been a struggle. We have to keep an eye on that and honestly, I struggle with that every year, yeah, so it's hard to say. It's always a surprise. It's hard to put a number on what this year is going to be like.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, but what was your best year? Was it during COVID?

Abdul:

During COVID, yeah, we were hitting 60,000 sales, 60k a month, so that was our best time. But after that I had some family issues still dealing with sick parents, so I haven't been able to give it much time and attention like I used to.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, that's the beauty about Amazon. You can be at home in New Jersey pushing it. You can go home to Pakistan to take care of family and still be running your business. That's the beauty about our industry. Well, Abdul, I wish you the best of success for this year's Prime Day. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us and yeah, we'll definitely connect after to see how it was all right.

Abdul:

You're welcome. Thank you, take care.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, we've got Abe coming on. Your kind of a contrast with Abdul's just working with his own account, but you see many people's accounts because you work with a lot of sellers and so you've got some unique, unique viewpoints as far as selling on Prime Day and what you should do and what you shouldn't do. So, a similar question like amongst you know different accounts you've worked on previous Prime Day, is there something that was sticks out as like the best Prime Day for somebody? Like what's a cool anecdote you could provide us?

Abe:

Yeah. So, this anecdote is one which really stuck out by itself. It's one which is going to apply to very few sellers, but it was an eye popper. So, I work with a brand that has national distribution, so it's a recognized brand, and I work with them to sell a line of electronics like in the $200 plus price range. Now we were having trouble getting traction because in the electronics category there are lots of foreign competitors that sell the same thing for 40% less. So, the brand said we really want to make a push, we really want to see if it's possible to make Amazon pop. They were able to get a SAS core rep. They were able to work with the SAS core rep and say we want a premium deal position on prime day, something that's not in the dashboard, because there are spots that you can get that are not in the dashboard. When you have a SAS core rep, they vet you and they have to make sure that they think you can sell that amount. And that's part of the key, because they say this spot can sell $4 million for us. If you can't sell and you can't fulfill $4 million, we don't even want to talk to you. That's worth what the spot is.

Abe:

So, they were vetted, they were checked. They actually they couldn't even send enough inventory because Amazon could not process it. They had to share the information from their warehouses with Amazon and they accepted the information. Well, that day, prime Day, every single thing was turned all the way on. We launched 30 campaigns of every ad type, you know four different autos at different price points, high-priced ranking campaigns like every single type you've ever heard an experiment about. All launched on the same day and in 24 hours, they went from selling $15,000 a day on one on the hero skew. They sold a million dollars in one day of that skew, which is something like.

Bradley Sutton:

$15,000 to 1 million on that. So that means that there had to be a good number that was fulfilled by merchant too, because no way they had all that inventory in Amazon.

Abe:

Right yeah. three quarters of it was filled by merchant. yeah, so it can't be reproduced. A lot of people suggest very impressive things like it could be done if you flip the right switch. No, this is not. I would be surprised if I ever am part of a thing like this again. But I had the front row seat for it.

Bradley Sutton:

I love that. I love that. Now let's talk about the complete opposite. What was a disaster for somebody? Like somebody just did nothing, or maybe somebody screwed up on their discounts or they didn't realize it could stack, or have you ever what's the worst prime day you've ever heard of that happened to somebody?

Abe:

The worst prime day. It's a thing that keeps happening, but it's just as bad. Every single time it happens you have somebody who is not working with somebody else within the same company. They launch a coupon a week before. The new low price of 30 days is below the price of the submitted deal. Boom, your deal does not run. And every time it happens there's a meltdown because people count on prime day and all of a sudden it didn't work. They can't understand why. They tell me, Hey, why aren't we selling? Where's the volume? Why aren't we even showing for the deal? I said did anybody in your place run any kind of discount or coupon in the last couple of weeks? Cause we don't get a notification about everything they do in their account? And all of a sudden, you'll hear the yelling that Bob ran a coupon two weeks ago. What are we doing, Bob? He ruined everything!

Bradley Sutton:

Wow! Okay, so now what you know, things have changed in the last, in the last Prime Day. You know there's new rules as far as like discounts and coupons and plus there's new ways to. You know there's. I don't I don't know if brand Taylor promotions has been around for a full year yet, but I don't I'm not sure if that was around last year.

Abe:

They keep changing it, so yeah, and.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, and yeah, even the one. Even in itself, it's not what it was two months ago, you know. So, right. So, with that, all that in mind, we're now talking about 2024 Prime Day. What are some general things that that trying this year with some of these new changes in mind.

Abe:

So, the number one thing we're going to be trying is, like you mentioned, the brand tailor promotions. There's something like 10 different types of promotions in there and what we're doing with every brand we work with, we're actually setting aside an hour for time to work with them instead of our usual, you know, shorter amount of time. We say listen, we need to spend an hour to look at each one, read the terms of what each one applies to and think about if this applies to our brand and if it does, let's lean into it. And with Prime Day, a number of those discounts are for people who looked at your product but didn't buy, for people who put it in your cart but didn't buy. And we want to know. What we want to do is all of the ad spend that we spent leading up to Prime Day, all of the money that we spent on Prime Day that didn't turn into sales. We want to do anything we can to capture it in the days and 10 days or two weeks afterwards.

Bradley Sutton:

Prime Day already has a lot of, you know, better conversion rate than normal days because people are coming on Amazon with more intent to buy. But if you are targeting people who already had even intent to buy before, because they added to the cart but they abandoned it you know that's one of the brand cart or cart abandoners is one of the brand tailor promotions that's like should do even better for you if, like, they're already coming on Amazon and they're already somebody who almost pulled the trigger on buying your product before. So that's, I think that's a great strategy to target, to target them.

Abe:

Yeah, I mean these brand tailor promotions have. In some cases, they've been fantastic. They do what DSP promised to do, which is to chase people around after they originally looked at you. These promotions are doing it more effectively than DSP in a lot of cases, because it's really direct and a big thing which is key is that they gave us the ability to run these promos at an ASIN level, which was originally it was just for the brand overall and at that point it was really clumsy in terms of running deals plus stacking something that goes across your whole brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you doing anything differently in Helium 10 as far as for Prime Day, like doing some historical research or looking at search volumes, or is just kind of like saying you know keyword tracker, paying special attention, or it's kind of like business as usual for you?

Abe:

So, I'll tell you one of the features we love best and I'm not sure which level of Helium 10 you need for it is the historical rank tracker for keywords. In Cerebro we love to compare time periods and with the accounts that are connected long enough, we can see how Prime Day did last year and we can compare Prime Day to different peak periods and we use those to set budgets. The number one thing we do when managing Prime Day, we don't do much with bids. We don't have a special bidding program for Prime Day the number one thing is being visible to shoppers as long as possible during the day, which is budget management. And the budget management goes also along with inventory management. You have to have enough product to sell and then you have to show enough to sell all the product you have. That's where all the planning comes in and that's where all the holes fall apart. Usually, either people didn't plan enough inventory, either people didn't assess the impact of their discounts against their regular margins, and then nothing is left over to spend on an actual ad. There's all the different parts that work together. But going back to Helium 10, it gives us an idea of how much of a boost we need in order to get full coverage those days.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you so much for joining us and giving us your insights and definitely want to keep us updated in the Elite Facebook group to let us know how some of these things worked out for you.

Abe:

Be happy too.

Bradley Sutton:

I'm going to invite three people on at the same time. We're just going to have kind of like a mini round table for the next few minutes and let's go ahead and invite the next group. We've got Gonzalo, we’ve got Rolando and we've got Carrie. So, we've got three experienced Amazon sellers of different of different levels, but experienced Amazon sellers of different levels, but all have multiple prime days under their belt. So, we're going to start with our two guests. Gonzalo, you've been on the Spanish podcast. I've never had you on the English podcast before, though right.

Gonzalo:

Right.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so give us some of your background. Where are you based and tell us how long you've been selling on Amazon.

Gonzalo:

I'm based in Chile in South America, in Santiago, and I have been a seller from 2019 before COVID.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so you've got about like you know, depending on if you're counting the prime deal days or the other one that comes up, you know you got at least three, four prime days under your belt. Now let's just stick with you for a second here. What was your best prime day results. Like where it was really a big increase over sales, and then if you can remember what contributed to that.

Gonzalo:

I have one that I X by three in one year. That was pretty amazing.

Bradley Sutton:

Was it by accident, or did you do something different that year that really worked?

Gonzalo:

Actually, it was the one that I set as basis for the next year and I replied the same strategy from them. And what I make is, on my top seller product, I actually decrease the bids and increase the budget, so I'm just waiting for the sales, basically, but just on the top seller. On the rest of the product, especially on the ones that I need to move, I do the opposite thing. I create one week before I create a retargeting campaign because it's shown that you need to be seen seven times before someone bought your product. You need to be seen seven times before someone bought your product. So, I tried to show to the same person seven times before Prime to push them to buy the product on Prime.

Bradley Sutton:

You got some buyer psychology going there. I like it. I like it, yeah, excellent.

Gonzalo:

So, for me Prime started one week before.

Bradley Sutton:

What was your most unsuccessful Prime Day? Where sales just stayed the same or even went down, or you made a mistake and something didn't happen. Do you remember? I remember any. Do you have any bad stories for us from Prime Day?

Gonzalo:

The only one is I think it was the first one that I didn't realize that I got out of budget on my campaigns. I was selling great. I get out of target. Obviously, my sales drops and I didn't realize until the next day.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, we'll call back to you, so stay here Next up, Rolando. Rolando was just on the podcast a few weeks ago and same question for you. We've been asking your best Prime Day and, if you can remember, what was the reason for that success?

Rolando:

We're one of those birds where Prime Day doesn't mean anything for us. Really, it hasn't moved the needle. Last year I would say it was probably our best, and that's because we turned off the PPC. And what we found the year before that so that'd be two years ago was, we were like, oh, let's do something for Prime Day and we'll crank up the juice with ads. We saw a lot of clicks, but we didn't move the needle any further than the previous year. It didn't move the needle further than our average daily sales. So last year we said no PPC and we didn't even see a huge drop in terms of our regular run rates or anything like that. It was right around the same, like in just another day. So, for us that's a victory in that we didn't waste thousands of dollars for people that are browsing and we just kept selling. So that was, I would say, a win for us to really see the difference one year go cranking out on PPC, one year not cranking out on PPC, and so we learned a lot by doing that.

Bradley Sutton:

And that's important for everybody here. Don't think that, hey, I have to do something bold and outrageous on prime day or else I'm a failure. You know like Rolando’s company has sold tens of millions of dollars on Amazon and you just heard from him. You know they've tried both and that when you're selling on Amazon for a while, you can try something one year and try something else. I myself haven't done. I don't I don't do too much on Prime Day outside of just managing my budgets and trying to, leading up to Prime Day, making sure I'm ranked organically where I want to. But that's super important to know that if you don't do anything special, that doesn't mean you're a complete failure.

Rolando:

You know what you could do. That doesn't cost any money and something that we are going to be doing this year. We did this three years ago and also for is that around Prime Day, we start going live. It's great because Amazon does have a lot of stuff going on their social media accounts saying come to our website. You know, check out the live. So being live. Are you talking about Amazon Live. Amazon Live. So, we'll go live those days. It'll run on our Amazon store. It'll actually replay later on the Amazon store. So, we have content. We have our faces on there. We show the product how to use it. We talk about different things. So, exposure wise, it gets people to see oh, these are the people behind the curtain that are part of this company. So, from that standpoint, we look at live as a great day to get new eyeballs without having to spend a ton of money.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to Gonzalo, how does Helium 10 play a role in what your strategies are Like? What aspects are you using? You know, helium 10, obviously you're not using Helium 10 to create coupons and things like that or register for deals, because we don't have that. But on the research side, what are you doing? Or on the um or on the advertising side?

Gonzalo:

First of all, Helium 10 is crucial because I control my all my pay-per-click on Adtomic yeah, it's crucial for me healing time. And then I have two tools that I love. The first one is market tracker that I regularly is going to take how the sale is going and who are my competitors, and the second one is keyword tracking. Obviously, I'm watching always what is my ranking and what is, how do I doing and how it is impact the pay per click that I'm doing.

Bradley Sutton:

On keyword tracker, are you like putting boost on and then really checking, like your sponsored and organic, like on prime day, making sure you're not losing your sponsored rank and then, if you do, you  increase your bid? Or is that how you're using keyword tracker?

Gonzalo:

Yeah, that way, and I also, when I start, when I open a new campaign on a new keyword, I'm start tracking with that, with the rocket, to see if I'm doing some impact or not on that keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, good. Rolando, what are you do?

I mean prime day or Prime Day. What are your go-to Helium 10 tools?

Rolando:

I love, love the dashboard. I love the below the insights, where it tells you all you know, your competitor and all that Below. That is a row that's super customizable, where you can look at things with your by-product performance or by advertising. And it is for me the thing because we're really big in the last 18 months is focusing on profitability and we can go line by line, item by item. It's got everything in so you know your net profit per product and you can pick out the losers, cut them or be like we got to liquidate them or hey, we've got more margin on these, these group here. Let's add some more PPC and see what happens. And now you can work more intelligently than in the past, where maybe the PPC data was over there and the sales data was over here. This combines both of that, so you know immediately these are the losers. They got to do something on them right now.

Bradley Sutton:

Love it. Speaking of the dashboard, something I think a lot of people sleep on at least those with a diamond plan is add competitors to that dashboard, because it's not just about your product and then set up what we call them insights, that you can consider them alerts. But then it's especially good, like for Prime Day or around Prime Day, somebody goes out of stock, somebody’s changed their title one of the competitors. Somebody adds a coupon, starts a coupon. Somebody stops a coupon. There's little things that you can set alerts, that if you don't have Helium 10, fine, you still got to be looking for these things, but you just got to manually go to all these pages, start, you know, have somebody refresh a screen. But if you've got the diamond plan and you guys are using that dashboard that Rolando was talking about, add your competitors and look at, monitor their listings, you can't see their exact sales. Obviously, Helium 10 is not hacking people's accounts. But you'll see estimated sales and things, but you'll know when they change their image or when they change a coupon or have a sale price. So that's something important to look at. Last question we'll, we'll just stick with Rolando. Then we'll go back to Gonzalo. This year, prime day, same thing as last year. You're not going to do, anything special or are you going to do the lives or are you going to do any discounting or any off-amazon promotion? What's your strategy this year?

Rolando:

So, this year we're definitely going to do live. Then we're going to add something we've never done before. We've never done prime exclusive deals never. I hate giving money away if I have to, but in the, in the spirit of experimentation to see if prime exclusives work for us, we've got probably a dozen products that we will be doing some form. One of the things that we literally this morning was one of our meetings. We've found an opportunity where a multi-pack unit where we could sell 50 as well as a hundred. Nobody in our category has had anything like that and we know from what our amazon folks are telling us when we talk to them. They're telling us don't sleep on multi-packs. They keep telling us that they said that the man for multi packs is going up and up and up and up and up. So, a while back ago we tried just that not on a Prime Day. We added some more multi packs. Guess what? I'm kicking myself because we weren't doing it five years ago. So, we're gonna try some exclusives tied with some additional multi packs to see how that works with buyers that are looking for things in volume.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, same question for you, Gonzalo. What's the plan? What is the plan of attack this year?

Gonzalo:

It's the same one that I just mentioned. I just started for my main product I'm going to love it and stay calm on it and the one that I need to push a little bit. Actually, today I set the campaign with retargeting and increased bidding one week previous.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, all right, well, guys, thank you so much. Appreciate sharing your knowledge with us today. All right, Carrie, how many Prime days under your belt?

Carrie:

I've been selling since 2016. So, I guess eight.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you have? I know you've got a lot of horror stories, just in general crazy things, and I'm going to save some of those for future podcasts with you. Yeah, but do you have? Let's start on the opposite side. Do you have any horror stories that specifically are related to Prime Day? or at least just maybe a prime day that just didn't work out for you.

Carrie:

No, what's really cool about our sales is, over the years, they've just incrementally increased, and so every prime day has been better than the last, and so it's not been like, oh, one day we did like 200,000 in sales or something, but it's like we definitely did a substantial amount more than the year before and the year before. And so, year over year, we're increasing.

Bradley Sutton:

That's good. So, you never had one where you accidentally did too big of a discount or you thought you were qualified for a deal and you ended up not doing it. It's been pretty much as planned.

Carrie:

Yeah, for Prime Day. I mean, I have accidentally done a really big discount on a coupon where it was like something that was supposed to be $15 was like $1.99. And I was like, wow, it's selling really well. So off of prime day I've done that, you know.

Bradley Sutton:

But not for prime day. And then do you remember what year was your best prime day Last year? Have one that sticks out.

Carrie:

Last year was the biggest yeah cause every year it's gotten bigger. It was about 16,000. I remember our first one. It was like we were selling about $400 a day and I remember it went up to like a thousand dollars that day and we were like, oh my gosh, and so now we've gone quite a bit more for that day.

Bradley Sutton:

So, you did $16,000 on one day. Yeah, on Prime Day last year. And what would you attribute that to? Did you do something different or a special campaign just really worked out, or what happened?

Carrie:

We do coupons and so not only in the days leading up to Prime Day but also after, we still get a good amount of sales well over our normal average, and so I think that's a big part of it. But, yeah, we offer coupons and like the discounts, not Prime Day exclusive discounts or anything like that, we just do our normal discounts and that's how we do it and it works out really well. And you always have to make sure your listing is optimized and that you've got good product reviews, and so you know if you're, if your listing isn't optimized, you're going to want to turn off the ads on those particular products or if you have kind of bad reviews. But you're, you're heroes. You know if you do some, some discounts on there and you have it fully optimized, it's, it's definitely worth it.

Bradley Sutton:

Now speaking of Helium 10, we're going share her screen now and I want you to actually show, step-by-step, a couple strategies that you think are important for a seller to do leading up to Prime Days.

Carrie:

So, this is one of my favorite tools. I think Abe was mentioning this because I know he really likes this tool too. You can use this in a lot of different ways, but basically, you're going to do what I do is I just do a single ASIN search on a main competitor. In this situation, because I'm looking at Prime Day and I wanted to give you an example of you know some, a way to find some good Prime Day keywords. There's this, this vacuum mop that I have actually purchased and I know a lot of people have purchased this particular mop for Prime Day because it's usually a pretty good deal and so I wanted to just show you how you can find kind of Prime Day specific keywords. So, I took this ASIN and did a reverse ASIN search here, and what I love about this Cerebro tool is the show historical trend tool. Now, when you go to show historical trend, it's going to give you 24 months of data, so you can go all the way back 24 months and you can see where an ASIN was ranked organically and for their sponsored. You can also see the search volume history, and so it's really, really helpful so you can go back to the last prime day and the prime day before. It's just kind of just right there. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this July 2023, because that was when our prime day was last year, and then I'm going to go down and click apply filters, because I want to just look at this month specifically, because I'm looking for prime day specific keywords. Okay, so, um, when, when I'm in this historical trend, if I go down here, you're going to see basically all of the keywords that this particular product was ranking for organically and sponsored. You can see their actual rank here. But I want to look for you can filter this down and I usually like to look at phrases containing. So, one of the phrases I like to look at is prime and if I hit apply filters, then if I go down here, I can see all of the kind of Prime Day keywords.

Carrie:

Now, this particular product they're ranking. They're one of the top sellers, I know, on Prime Day, but their organic rank on these major keywords is, you know, 230. They're in the 200s. They're way behind. So, they're not even really, they hadn't even advertised on these keywords, probably because they didn't really know they existed. So now, if you can go back, you can find the historical keywords. You can create campaigns with these specific keywords in them and you can start targeting those. I mean they've only they only look targeted this one. It was a Prime Day vacuums 1100 search volume, totally missing out on 8500 in search volume. You can also see here this is actually our up-to-date information. It's showing the trending of these keywords going up, up, up. Now a lot of times you'll see these keywords and it's like you know a month before it's going to be like oh there's, you know, 200 searches or whatever. So, this gives you the information of how much they're increasing and so you can even start these campaigns, you know, a month early, two months early, to just start getting yourself, you know, ranked on those keywords. And you can also leave these campaigns going all year round, kind of as an evergreen campaign, to just make sure that you're at the top of those searches and so that they have all their Christmas gifts you know a bunch of Christmas gifts for their family in December. You can you know search phrases containing gifts or anything that really pertains to your particular product. During Prime Day you can start searching for those terms you can look at. You know some of your biggest competitors, like the biggest competitor, and you can see what kind of keywords they're. You know they're ranking for but maybe not really capitalizing on, and so this is just a really, I think, amazing tool to get historical data and utilize it for this particular Prime Day.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Thank you for sharing that with us. I mean, you can use this what she was talking about for almost any period of the year, but obviously we're talking about Prime Day now, so that's why it's especially beneficial for you guys to use that leading up into prime days.

Carrie:

We have a prime day checklist that we put together that has amazing information from. We have Destiny Wishon from Better Media. She gave some PPC tips. We have Emma from Marketing by Emma, and she gave a lot of really incredible tips for optimizing your listing. These things are it's not too late to do them. So, there's a lot of stuff on this list that you could really implement. Implement now, even if you feel like you're kind of like behind in the game. These are tips also you can use year-round, because it's really good optimization. So, make sure you download that, check it out, do as much as you can before Prime Day, and it's going to help your conversion, even if you're just doing a small discount it will help your conversion.

Bradley Sutton:

So h10.me/primelist, h10.me/primelist. And then we will go ahead and invite we up, Huy, how's it going?

Huy:

Hey, how's it going, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty good, pretty good. Now what about you, we? How many prime days do you think you've experienced in your lifetime, your amazon lifetime?

Huy:

Since the beginning, so kind of lost count, I don't know, probably plus five years. What year did it actually start, Bradley?

Bradley Sutton:

I don't even remember. It was before.

And then, plus, there's two prime days a year. But let's just say you have a lot of prime days under your belt. Now, something I've been asking the different guests is what was the best prime day you had where, just like, sales were way more than normal and way more than other primaries? Do you remember what year that was or what the numbers were kind of?

Huy:

I don't remember the year, but it was definitely before COVID One of the things that it might've been the second year that prime day had been announced, right, and this was prior to them doing it only kind of like once a year, right, cause then they switched off to doing it twice a year, probably the biggest opportunity, the biggest win that we had. It wasn't intentional, it was actually when we got mentioned on. They used to do a live stream during Prime Day, right, Amazon did a live stream. They actually mentioned one of our products and we've never sold more products in one day than on that day. So, our product got mentioned in the live stream. We started seeing sales climb up. All the units we had allocated to that promotion were sold out pretty quick, but fortunately we were watching it and we were able to go in and adjust the quantities that we wanted to put in that promotion. So that's probably one of the things is like you definitely want to be making sure that you're looking at how many units you have available in that promotion and if you have the opportunity to adjust it just based on the demand. You know that was a huge win for us, I think. On the other end, though, Bradley

Bradley Sutton:

Disaster, any disasters or crazy things that happen.

Huy:

Not necessarily the disasters, but just to kind of put a point to that other one where it's like, if you put too many quantity in there, it's kind of like a psychological game as well, right? So, when there's a lot of deals that are going on, customers are looking and then they've got that progress bar where it says, hey, how many people have claimed this deal. So, if you put in too many units up in the beginning and then you're stuck between that below 10% claim number, people are not as excited to go out and claim those deals. So, I think that finding that balance of having it over 50% claimed people looking at it and then having that FOMO where they're going to go out and jump on it. So, I think, in terms of disasters, I'm going to be a hundred percent honest, we haven't been doing a lot of prime, uh, prime day, actual deals, lightning deals, and the reason why is the past couple of yeah, past couple of times it has not been effective. You know like, yeah, it's uh cost. What does it cost? $1,000 to run a deal, even if you have it on the day. What we used to do is we used to put all of our items available and put it into the promotion and then we, when they tell us the schedule, then we cancel the ones out that weren't actually on Prime Day or kind of you know, within that range, because they were putting some of us, like you know, the week before Prime Day or just a couple days after that was already not effective.

But I think that because Amazon switched to allowing everybody to provide that Prime exclusive discount you know, like not having an actual deal but just kind of marking it off and then getting that Prime Day exclusive badge that has actually probably changed the most for us. We found that to be most effective. There's no cost to do it and I think that everybody's got that strategy where there's just too much inventory of Prime Day deals out there that when Amazon expanded it out beyond just those lightning deals, everybody just started looking outside as well.

Bradley Sutton:

I'm happy you mentioned that because I think that people need to understand that. Once I've said it five times today is that prime day success is not contingent on, he who does the most deals or he who spends the most money in in PPC, or you have to do prime exclusive discounts or you have to do lightning deals. No, you can have success on prime day in a lot of different ways. For some people, that is what’s needed, or for some people, other people, it's doing everything like. Like Abe mentioned that crazy experience of somebody who went from $15,000 to $1 million on one product on Prime Day because they went all in on something that probably is not duplicatable. But again, there's different ways to have success on Prime Day. Again, Gonzalo, Rolando, Huy, and then Abe and Abdul, thank you, and Carrie, of course. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you guys’ next week. Bye-bye now.

#574 - K-Beauty, K-Food, and Korean E-Commerce

Join us as we bring together a group of innovative Amazon sellers from South Korea who share their unique insights and strategies in e-commerce. We introduce James Park, making his debut on an English podcast, who takes us through his fascinating journey from studying food science engineering in Korea and biology in Germany to working in the cosmetics industry. His story unfolds with a transition from traditional employment to launching his own e-commerce business, inspired by watching our other guest, Bopyo Park, on YouTube.

Our conversation continues with an exploration of the Seller Kingdom community, a dedicated space for Korean Amazon sellers. We dive into current trends among Korean sellers, such as the increasing preference for sourcing K-beauty and K-food products from Korea. Additionally, we highlight the Korean e-commerce landscape, mentioning platforms like Coupang and Naver Smart Store, which offer promising opportunities for third-party sellers. We also consider the potential and challenges for foreign sellers looking to enter the Korean market, emphasizing cultural differences and pricing strategies.

Finally, we explore advanced marketing strategies for Amazon sellers, focusing on optimizing PPC campaigns and enhancing product listings. We discuss the importance of auditing accounts, understanding market trends, and leveraging tools like Helium 10 for deeper insights. Unique approaches such as using search term reports and Google trends to inform listing updates are highlighted. We also introduce the Seller Kingdom Seoul Conference, an event aimed at connecting Amazon service providers with Korean sellers. The episode wraps up with a casual conversation about favorite Korean dramas and recommendations, providing a light-hearted end to a content-rich discussion.

 

In episode 574 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Bopyo, and James discuss:

• 00:00 - Amazon Sellers From South Korea
• 00:12 - Helium 10 Chrome Extension Demand Analyzer
• 04:41 - Career Aspirations and Education Paths
• 07:44 - Korean Amazon Sellers and E-Commerce Growth
• 13:41 - Finding Korean Amazon Seller Partners
• 16:54 - Innovative Marketing Strategies for Amazon Sellers
• 19:11 - Utilizing Trends for Business Growth
• 24:39 - Amazon PPC and AI Strategies for Amazon Sellers 
• 30:13 - Korean Ramen and Silicone Manufacturing
• 35:54 - K-Drama Discussion with Bradley and Guests

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got a couple sellers from Korea who are going to talk about a wide range of topics, including what you can look at manufacturing in Korea, Korean marketplaces that you can sell on, and some general PPC and AI strategies for Amazon sellers. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, ETSY, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on. Well, while you're on those pages. You can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension demand analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host Bradley Sutton and this is the show that's completely BS free unscripted and unrehearsed. Organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e -commerce world. And we are going to a couple parts of the world. I believe one of our guests is in New York and then we've got another guest in six o'clock in the morning on the other side of the world in Korea, Bopyo James. It's been a while.

Bopyo:

What’s up Bradley?

Bradley Sutton:

Hello, welcome, welcome. Now, this is James'. First ever English podcast and he's a little bit nervous, so I like to pick on our guests who are nervous, but there's no reason to be nervous, James. Your English is great and I know you have a lot of knowledge to share with us as well, so it's good to have you both on. Now Bopyo has been on our podcast before. If anybody wants to get a little bit more of his background, go back to episode 429 and you can learn a little bit about Bopyo's background, and he talked a lot about ChatGPT and it's actually funny in that episode some of the things that he mentioned. He would like Helium 10 to have for leveraging AI we actually already have now. So that was kind of a cool episode, so make sure to check that out now. Let's keep with James first, since this is James first time we need to get your background, James, so what city were you born and raised in Korea?

James:

My city is located in the Uiwang city. And then my town is two hours far from Seoul.

Bradley Sutton:

Where did you go to university?

James:

University is Kyunggi University. It's located in Suwon. And then I had experience in living in Germany, had to exchange student and then came back to South Korea and then got a job.

Bradley Sutton:

What were you studying, both in Korea in Suwon there and also Germany? What was your main focus of study?

James:

My focus. In South Korea I focused on this. My major was food science engineering, and in Germany I took a lecture regarding biology.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting and now you're in the e-commerce world, so almost completely different than what you studied. Now, as Bopyo knows, and you know too about me, I watch just tons of Korean drama. You know, I'm even wearing my reply 1988 shirt right here, I'm wearing my kimchi hat here. But anyways, in Korean drama something that I learn a lot about Korean culture, in Korean drama, sometimes I'm not sure how much is fake and how much is real, but one thing I've learned is it seems like for high school or whatever you call your secondary school parents really like there's a lot of pressure to try and go to like really prestigious universities, and then the parents make you go to like the after-school studies and just like everything is about making a high score so you can qualify. Is that what happened to you, James? Or do you just do whatever you wanted?

James:

Actually, I did whatever I want. However, in high school. So, I studied like other high school students. I woke up like at six in the morning, I went to high school like half past seven and then did a self-study until like half past eight, and then did self-study until like half past eight, and then from half past eight to 6 pm we got a lecture and then we had a dinner and then come back to the class and then self-study until 11 pm or 12 pm.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh my goodness gracious.

James:

Yeah, that was my life.

Bradley Sutton:

That's exactly what I see in Korean drama. Was that the same for you Bopyo? Did you have to do something like that too?

Bopyo:

Yes, my parents, they always push to me you have to go good college, you have to get a good job, blah, blah, blah. A lot of things, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So, what is it called the Sky University, where it's the Seoul.

Bopyo:

Sky University. Yeah right, James.

James:

Everyone's goals is that in high school well.

Bradley Sutton:

That's why you know there's a lot of very great Amazon sellers there because they have such amazing education. I guess so, but I want to find the gap. So, James, when you graduated, did you work in biology or in food or anything, or what did you do after graduating university?

James:

Just after graduated my university. I got it and I got a job regard in the cosmetic field and that I work in a cosmetic manufacturer, so in the global business department.

Bradley Sutton:

So, you were working in manufacturing and then how in the world do you go from there to the e-commerce world?

James:

At the time I wanted to do my own business, however. So, you know, I wanted to have a my own brand and then my own product things, and then somehow, I watched the YouTube and the time and then, okay, this Amazon business I could do somehow. So, okay, I let's search my own product and then I use a Helium 10 actually at the time, and then I found something, and then at the time, I create a new design about sculpture and then that sculpture has a function of the photo frame, so this kind of a new thing in the world. However, the problem was the product doesn't have a name, and then my customer couldn't find my product, my own product, in Amazon. So, I had to spend a lot of, a lot of Amazon advertisement fee at the time. So I studied by myself like a one or two years and I spent a lot of money at the time. So I got a lot of know-how. I built up my knowledge at the time by myself, and then many CEOs in company asked me to deliver a PPC lecture in Seoul. So I did it actually for two years and then there were a lot of companies which wanted to give me an offer and I took an offer, so I became somehow PPC agency as well.

Bradley Sutton:

All because you first learned about the opportunity from Bopyo, and so was it called Seller Kingdom in those days when you found it. Or you just found him just from his YouTube.

James:

YouTube.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So then, Bopyo, at what point did you start the Seller Kingdom kind of community?

Bopyo:

Okay, I want to introduce myself a little bit about just a little bit.  You know, maybe some people just know me.

Bradley Sutton:

For those who didn't hear your first episode. Please, please.

Bopyo:

Yeah, yeah. Hello, my name is Bopyo Park. Yeah, nice to see you guys. Yeah, I started selling on Amazon in 2019 and have been doing so ever since. I've achieved seven figures since and I'm currently preparing for launching a new product. Throughout this journey, I've been sharing my Amazon selling experience on my YouTube channel, so reading to the creation of the Seller Kingdom community, dedicated to helping Korean Amazon sellers. Yeah, that's why Seller Kingdom are today. Yeah, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so you started selling on Amazon first, and then you're like, hey, let me make some videos about it. And then like, hey, this community is growing bigger. And then that's how Seller Kingdom started. It's kind of similar to how Helium 10 started. You know the founder of Helium 10, Manny Coats. He started selling on Amazon. He started a podcast so not YouTube, but podcast first and then he's like, hey, let's go ahead and start Helium 10 after that. How many people are in your community?

Bopyo:

I think I just count before I enter this podcast, right? So over 5,000 members in Seller Kingdom right now, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

And how much? How many are based in Korea compared to maybe just you know Korean Americans or based in outside of Korea?

Bopyo:

Maybe 70% people. They are living in South Korea and maybe 30% people, maybe 25% people living in United States and 5% people living in maybe Europe and Japan and different all over the world.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now you know, as many people know and you guys know, you know I've worked with Korean companies for over 20 years and even in the Amazon world, even be way before I was in Helium 10, you know I was working with. You know Korean beauty companies like Innisfree, and skin food and things like that. You know, helping them get their Amazon started. But my partners, who have always been Korean, you know their specialty was not necessarily private label but helping like Korean brands get started in USA. Now for your community. Are most people just doing the traditional method of, hey, let me manufacture a product, maybe China or India, and just private label product? Or are there a lot of also people bringing existing Korean brands to the US and European markets?

Bopyo:

I think maybe three years ago maybe many people want to sourcing from China to selling United States. But right now the Korean people, they now know Korean K-beauty product is a really good product and that also K-food, a lot of K-food product. I mean grocery product like a Tteokbokki and Kimchi. A lot of things right. 

Bradley Sutton:

You know what, I started wholesaling before Kopiko. Those little coffee candies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, it was even wholesale. It's so popular in America now.

Bopyo:

Yes, so I think that's why a lot of Korean people Korean Amazon sellers right now are trying to sourcing from Korea and to sell United States. So maybe they want to create a new brand, or they just sourcing from some brand to introduce to United Market. 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, okay cool. Now, one time I actually last year went out to dinner with you. Guys weren't there, I don't think, but I went with some other people out to some Samgyeopsal restaurant and some of the sellers were there. They sell in US, but then some of them they were also talking about selling in Korean marketplaces, because you know there is no Amazon in Korea as far as Amazon marketplace. So, James, What are some of the top nowadays in 2024? What are some of the top Korean marketplaces that are maybe similar to like Amazon style that are that are in Korea right now? 

James:

That would be definitely Coupang.

Bradley Sutton:

And can just any buddy sell. Is it like a third-party marketplace where they know or maybe coupon has their own products but then other people can ever can sell on that platform, kind of like third-party sellers, or how does it work?

James:

The system is really, really similar to Amazon Marketplace. So Coupang has their own product, private brand. However, their Coupang sellers can sell their own brand product as well, and then some of them they buy this cosmetic from, for example, like a Skinfood Innisfree. They bought this kind of product and then they sell like wholesale.

Bradley Sutton:

Now me as an American citizen, can I sell on Coupang or some of these other marketplaces in Korea?

James:

As far as I remember. Yeah. I heard that there are many Chinese sellers in Coupang as well. 

Bradley Sutton:

Bopyo, what do a lot of your community, do they sell both on Amazon and in Korean marketplaces like Coupang, or are they mainly just Amazon?

Bopyo:

I think a lot of people now trying to sell Amazon and then Coupang and then they have a different marketplace also I think they call Naver Smart Store. I think Smart Store is more focused on private label product, for example, like their own brand right, and then Coupang is a more open market. So, if I'm Korean Amazon seller, if I'm making you know good product, maybe they want to trying to sell three different way, like Smart Store and then Coupang. Trying to sell three different ways like Smart Store and then Coupang and then Amazon United States market or Japan, Amazon Japan, because Japan and Korea is so close right now.

Bradley Sutton:

Is it something that you would suggest that foreign sellers, be it American sellers, European sellers, look into more to be selling in Korean marketplaces, or do you think it's not much of an opportunity due to exchange rate, or what's your thoughts on that?

Bopyo:

I think the Korean market, e-commerce market, is a really big market. So, if they want to sell some kind of product on the Korean market, I think it's going to be a good idea, but also a little bit difficult to enter the Korean market. Because they think it's going to be a good idea, but also a little bit difficult to into Korean market because they have their own culture and Korean market price is so different than United States or Europe, different world. So if you are not living in South Korea, this is a little bit harder but market price is really good. So, looking for some partner, maybe Korean partner? We have so many Korean sellers. So if you guys want to sell something in Korea, maybe looking for some kind of a Korean Amazon seller partner I can introduce to, if anybody looking for it.

Bradley Sutton:

That might be something interesting. But just you know, obviously you know maybe my coffin shelf is not very good market or a very good product for Korea, but it's the same like selling in Amazon Japan. Not every product in Amazon USA or Europe works in Japan, usually the products that are good for that market, or maybe some popular American brands, because sometimes Japanese people like some American brands. Maybe some Korean people might like some European or American brands. But definitely something I think that people should look into. Now we have a lot of Korean Amazon sellers who listen to this podcast, yeah, and maybe some just Korean people who aren't selling on Amazon. So what would you say to them? As like, what kind of advantages does somebody in Korea have to start selling on Amazon? Why do you think so many Korean sellers are successful on the platform?

Bopyo:

Yeah, in Korea there are many beauty brands and health focus on Korean food. I think this product is highly competitive in the global market. So, as you know, Korean country is globally very popular. Korean content and K-pop is a big hit in the world, right? So if you're a Korean Amazon seller looking for, you know, big opportunity, of course, North America is a big opportunity market. So, find some kind of product, maybe from Korea and then trying to niche market and then selling to United States.

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go to some general questions for James. So like, how many brands are you managing for PPC now, other than your own? Are you still managing other companies' brands and other sellers' brands?

James:

Yes, Actually there are a lot of small sellers who want to have a conversation with me and then sometimes I had a conversation with them. However, I don't take like a small brand seller because if they hire higher PPC agency, they should expend a lot of money. And then I advise them to spend this money on their PPC instead of hiring me. And then there are a lot of PPC lectures and then advice and then books on Seller Kingdom and then I told them to learn by themselves and then if they make their brand bigger and they could think about hiring PPC agency. And currently, since years, I handle more than five brands. However, I'm cutting down the number of the brand because I'm working for the Seller Kingdom Conference and I'm traveling around the world. So yeah, maybe I was one more company would be enough for me.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, what's some you know, like, when you take on a new brand, you can you know, I'm sure you like audit their account and see what they've been doing in PPC and that's how you know how you can help them. But what's some unique strategies that you have as far as advertising goes that that, like most of the people when they come to you, like they're impressed or like, wow, I didn't think about that or maybe they were doing it wrong Like what's something you see that people are doing wrong that you think that you have a unique strategy on Maybe it's a certain kind of video advertising or maybe it's something that people are not doing with optimizing their listing. But what's some nice strategies you can give for PPC that you know? You know, don't give me a super simple one like, hey, try to lower your ACoS. You know, give me something good, what you can help with this day.

James:

I'm focusing on actually said TACoS, and then the market trend. And then I told them to learn competitor's product more and deeply. And then I told my customer to learn their customer's idea thoughts, what kind of keyword they were searching and what kind of relevant phrase they are typing when they buy their product. Many customers don't care about search term and, as I always tell them to check their search term, like every weekend or every listed twice a month, because the search term is the exact keyword customer type in that can't Google it. Google with the keyword and then they can see some of the image or the trend, something like that. And then I also told them to check Helium 10. Several and then especially MarkNet.

Bradley Sutton:

So let me go back to that Google one that's kind of interesting. So, let's say somebody sees a keyword that they're converting for, you know, from their search term report or if they're using Helium 10 Adtomic, they can see, oh, I got some sales or um on this. And then they look on Google what are they looking for? And then, based on what they see, what is the action you're suggesting for them to do? After what they see on google?

James:

There are many news or so trend on the recently, and then there are some events about events and news or some kind of a blog, something like that recently released. And then I tell them so why don't you check this kind of opinion, things from US or, for example, like from LA, from New York or from Texas? They have their own idea and then their own trend. So maybe, for example, so Father's Day is just on right corner, so people type in or people type some keywords regarding Father's Day, and then there are a lot of opinion and the news regarding Father's Day, and then there are a lot of opinion and the news regarding Father's Day, and then this kind of new trend this day.

Bradley Sutton:

So is that for like having new product idea? Or now you tell them, hey, maybe change something in their listing or something based on what or how are they using that information? Then, after they find those trends.

James:

After they find a trend. I recommend them to take a new video or new photos, yeah, and then uh with the trend, and they can make a new photo for example, for a product collection or as a video sponsored brand, like that, and then they can renovate their stores. So, like, my main computer company is also the big company, but the big company all the time unloads new photos, new videos, and then they decorate their store with the new photos. And then I think this is a really good idea, because whenever I visit the competitor's company store and they are doing something new and new, and then they I can see they are really care about their customer and then they want to give them more value to their customer. So even I'm not their customer, I can see how hardly they work.

Bradley Sutton:

All right Now before we get into some of Bopyo strategies. You know James referenced that. You know one of the reasons he's having to do less on the PPC side he's going to be working on organizing the second annual Sellers Kingdom event, the first one I went to. I had some good Korean drama moments there. I reenacted some scenes and I'm going to be going there again this year and maybe trying to pick some new dramas like Queen of Tears or something that I'm going to reenact with your staff dramas like Queen of Tears or something that I'm going to reenact with your staff. But, Bopyo, talk about this conference. Why did you start it and what are the plans for this year? How big do you think it is and give us the details when, where, et cetera.

Bopyo:

Okay, I want to explain a little bit about our conference. The Seller Kingdom Seoul Conference was the first internationally hosted Amazon seller event in Korea. This is maybe the first one. I wanted to connect Amazon service providers from North America or Europe service provider to connect Korean Amazon seller because I believe that understanding and utilizing this company effectively can significantly enhance seller competitiveness. So that's why I made this conference, and so last year we did one time and this year, James, when is it going to be this year? I just want to make it clear.

James:

28th and 29th September 2024.

Bopyo:

So, two days event. So, if anybody, if there are service provider listening to this podcast who are interested in expanding into Korea market, if you guys are looking for Korean Amazon seller customer, please feel free to contact me. Yeah, and then we can discuss. You know conference, yeah, and one good thing is you know conferences.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, and one good thing is you know even sellers, if you're in Korea, whether you speak Korean or not. If you speak English, you speak Chinese. Like you have the simultaneous translation. So some presentations, like you know, when I gave a presentation, it was in English but everybody could understand because they had the you know simultaneous Korean translation. But then you had some Korean speakers, but I could a presentation. It was in English but everybody could understand because they had the you know simultaneous Korean translation. But then you had some Korean speakers but I could understand everything. Not because I speak Korean unfortunately, I need to learn more but I had the translations. So if anybody out there wants to get more information on this conference or to maybe even purchase tickets, go to h10.me/sellerkingdom, h10.me/sellerkingdom, and you're going to see some you know pictures of the event and you could see some of the what I was talking about before, where we were reenacting scenes over here. There's some great pictures. There's Savannah right there and so we had some great speakers last year, like from Gatita and Avask. I'm sure there'll be some great speakers last year, like from Gatita and Avast. I'm sure there'll be some great speakers this year, but I highly recommend. I'm flying there just for this event and plus, I need to do some Korean beauty procedures from Gangnam on my face, but I'm definitely going for this event, so I hope to see as many people as possible there. So now you know, like the last time or the only time you were on the podcast before, you talked a lot about AI and how Amazon sellers could use it. Now we're over a year later. Beyond that, obviously, AI has come along. What are some new things that you are doing for you and your Amazon business and your community as far as leveraging AI in it?

Bopyo:

Yeah, thank you for asking. I think that's going to be very good question in this day. Right now, I think in my opinion not officially, but in my opinion I think FAQ is more important than before. Such result if you put a lot of FAQ maybe ChatGPT or cloud AI, but different AI they catch FAQ because usually in the chat they asking something, they came out the result right. So I think FAQ is more important than before. So how do we put in good FAQ? How do we create good FAQ? If you guys have a Helium 10 Chrome extension, you can go your listing or your competitive listing, go to the listing and then, using Helium 10 Chrome extension, leave it inside and then you can download it like a ton of review, like 1,000, 2,000 review you can download easily. And then you can download the CSV file or Excel file, right, and then you can download all review and then copy all review and then put it in ChatGPT or Cloud AI and then put in the prompt oh hey, I'm selling this product. This is a custom review. You know, try review all you all. I passed the review right. Try review all review. And then give me a good FAQ customer, always curious things. Give me a top 10 FAQ things, top 20 FAQ thing. In my opinion, I think more than 10 is good, maybe 20. If you have like a after that, you got like a good FAQ Sometime. Result is very surprising. You never know, right, so, and then put it in you know, premium, a plus content, you can make your own FAQ. And also, if you have a brand owner, you have on your website, right, I think this is going to be very important things too. So put it in FAQ your own website page Shopify or WooCommerce, whatever your page put it in your FAQ session. I think this is a more important thing. So I think that's my first thing in this day using FAQ.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, James mentioned. You know some of the products he's made pretty unique, you know, based on sculptures and things like that. What about you Bopyo, what kind of products have you sold or are you selling on Amazon that you've had good success with?

Bopyo:

Yeah, I was lucky when I was selling the 2019, my product, actually home decor product is kind of, you know, like a small sign or like a tray home and kitchen product. And then 2020, the pandemic situation is coming right and then, you know, home decor cat always boom, so my selling is very well and then I expanding my SKU. After that, you know, pandemic is going back to just right now. It's just normal situation and selling is a little bit down. So I'm trying to find out right now new product, also selling, you know, home decor product, but in this year I'm going to launch a new product sourcing from Korea.

Bradley Sutton:

 It's kind of like everything has not been Korea so far. This is your first Korean made product. 

Bopyo:

Yeah, this is actually first from Korea. This is a private label product. Before I'm sourcing from. Maybe they already have a brand name, but this is my first time private label in Korea, so it's kind of, you know, hangover relief. Jelly stick mango flavor I'm trying to launch, you know, mango flavor. Jelly stick mango flavor I'm trying to launch, you know mango flavor jelly stick.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, that that's something I noticed too, like again from Korean dramas. There's always product placements and in Korea, like supplements and things. It's usually not like capsules, but it's like these jellies, yeah, like either a, like a small bag or like the stick and then that's probably. I mean, it's way more convenient and a lot of people don't like to swallow the, the, the capsules or pills, and so I think that's that might be good. Now me, I try not to drink too much alcohol anymore because of my foot, so maybe I don't need that product, but otherwise I would have tried out. I heard James needs that a lot, but we won't talk about it. Back to you James, obviously, what Bopyo just mentioned, that that's a good product to make in in Korea, because you know, Korea specializes in jelly products and things, and different countries have different specialties. You know, like some textiles, maybe it's good to make in Pakistan and maybe some wood products is good for certain parts of China. But if I'm a foreign seller, is there any products other than like jelly products or Korean beauty products? Is there anything that maybe I should consider manufacturing in Korea, where it's like hey, you know, the quality and price is very competitive compared to China or others. Anything other than that, James, would you say, other than beauty products?

James:

So I would say it's a K food because Korean manufacturers are specialized in using a very good ingredient in the food and cosmetics. And then if I were a foreign seller, I would think about like a food, about food in Korea. And then Korea has a big specialized in the rice, and then Kim many foreigners call it black paper. There's a really boom in the US right now and then Kimbap things and ramen. It's a fried noodle and the ramen is one of the common food in South Korea and the Koreans really love that and the manufacturers keep developing their ramen quality. And if you want to develop your own ramen brand, you can make just simply contact a small company and then you can create your just simply contact to a small company and then you can create your own ramen with a low MOQ. 

Bopyo:

And then silicon manufacturer. I know so many American seller. They sourcing from china and silicon product. But in Korea they have a good silicon manufacturer. This quality is much higher than you know different. You know manufacturer. But only problem is a little bit you know price. You know little bit price than other manufacturers. So if you are looking for good silicone product, I think Korea they have a good manufacturer. Only one issue thing is price. So you can maybe making you know high quality product you know selling to a little bit you know expensive than regular price.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, James talked about ramen, I think you know, or ramyeon, I guess you say in Korean, but just you know. Another note I learned from Korean drama out there be careful about asking a woman, you know, like you know ramyeon mogwale, like that actually means something else. So don't ask if you want to eat ramen to somebody at the Korean conference because they might slap you in the face. I'm not sure, but anyways, it's just another. You see, you can learn a lot from Korean dramas, but basically that's like their version of Netflix. And anyways, what? Some more amazon strategy? Maybe not ai related, but yeah, you know, not everybody can reach seven figures while still juggling. You know managing a full community. So obviously you've got some, some good strategies that you're incorporating that that allow you to have this kind of success. So what other strategies can you share with the audience out there?

Bopyo:

Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, I don't know of any quick way to get rich with an Amazon business. A lot of people are looking for, you know, quick way to get rich, right, but in my opinion, amazon business is not like that. So the truth is there's nothing particularly special about Amazon in this regard. It's an open market place, so we're selling product in just part of e-commerce. So therefore, we all need to approach the Amazon business with a mindset of brand owners and entrepreneur thinking, long-term mindset. I think we need long-term mindset. If you're sourcing from China or other place, you can selling, maybe you can make a little bit money, maybe $10,000, $20,000 per month. But if you constantly making that money, it's different story. Long-term strategy long-term is very different story. So I think if you're looking for a quick way to get rich, Amazon can be a harsh market, I think, for you. On the other hand, if you focus on building successful brand with a long-term perspective, then Amazon can offer great opportunities for you. So, since brands are being sold on Amazon, you know can be quite encouraging for individual sellers. So yeah in my opinion, looking for long-term, yeah, my understanding, yeah, long-term yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, instead of trying to make the quick buck there, yeah, yeah.  So again, everybody, I hope to see you at the Seller Kingdom event in September. H10.me/Seller Kingdom. But first, Bopyo, like, if people want to reach out to you directly or find your YouTube channel or things like that, how can they find you out there?

Bopyo:

Okay, just Google it Seller Kingdom and you can find our website. Our website is contact section. If you go to the contact section, you can email it to me or just email it to me, bopyo@amgbreakers.com. Email it to me. Discuss anything like you know conference or Korean Amazon, stellar things, any Amazon you know launch strategy I always offer. 

Bradley Sutton:

And James, how can people find you out there?

James:

There is also my email address in Seller Kingdom website and then my email address james@amgbreakerscom. .

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent, excellent. All right. Last, most important question 2024, you and your wife Bopio, favorite Korean drama of 2024 so far. Do you even have time to watch drama anymore?

Bopyo:

Wow, I think this question is very difficult to answer, actually, honestly, I cannot lie. Honestly, I don't watch Korean drama but my wife watches Korean drama.

Bradley Sutton:

Which one does she like? I trust her taste.

Bopyo:

Oh, okay. I don't remember the exact name, but one guy and I think he's living in some kind of nearby sea, okay, some kind of love story, but I don't even remember the exact name, but I think that drama on Netflix, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, I think, I know, I think maybe that is Welcome to Samdal-ri.

Bopyo:

Oh yeah, welcome to Samdalri.

Bradley Sutton:

There we go. Just from that description I knew what he was talking about how about you, James? Do you have time to watch Korean drama, or you're also too busy, like both of you, no.

James:

I'm not that busy as both of you, so I have some time to watch Netflix or Disney, and I can recommend you one K-drama, 2024 release name is A Killer Paradox.

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, I haven't watched that one yet, so I know which one that is, but I'll try and watch. My favorite this year so far is called it's also on Netflix Atypical Family. Atypical Family like kind of like superhero kind of show but yeah, anyways, all right. So I have to start planning my presentation for Seller Kingdom to be doing some reenactments of some Korean drama. Bopyo and James, thank you so much for coming on appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you in Korea in a couple of months.