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

#542 - Brewing a Matcha Empire with Childhood Bonds and Sharp Strategy

They say the best businesses are built on the foundations of friendship, and that's exactly what Samuel Loo and Singchuen Chiam, childhood pals, prove with their journey from elementary school to dominating the matcha scene on Amazon. Their tale is not just about the green goodness of matcha but a story of two friends who took divergent paths—law and business—only to converge into a powerhouse duo. With Sam's sharp legal acumen and Sing's Alibaba experience finesse, they've brewed up Naoki Matcha, a brand that resonates with quality and customer delight, nurturing it from a side hustle to a multi-million dollar success.

Our conversation steers through the meticulous craft of standing out in a saturated market, with Sam and Sing revealing their three-year grind to perfecting their matcha blend. They share the trials of juggling full-time jobs while planting the seeds for Naoki Matcha, a testament to their enduring patience and entrepreneurial spirit. Their business acumen shines as they discuss the potency of Amazon PPC in propelling their revenue growth, and the strategic decision to maintain a premium on their product—ensuring Naoki Matcha is not just another tea on the shelf, but a premium experience for the discerning consumer.

As we wrap up, the future of Naoki Matcha gleams with potential, from its lean operational approach to its plans for product diversification and international expansion. Their story isn't just an inspiration for Amazon FBA sellers and matcha aficionados but to anyone with entrepreneurial dreams, demonstrating that with the right blend of passion and strategy, even the smallest idea can grow into a thriving E-commerce empire. Join us as we toast to the success of Sam and Sing, and keep an eye on your social media feeds—you might just catch the upcoming viral sensation of Bradley Sutton’s matcha flan!

 

In episode 542 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Samuel, and Singchuen discuss:

• 00:00 - Childhood Friends Start Successful Matcha Business
• 08:35 - Exploring Opportunities With Macha Tea 
• 11:33 - Journey to Success
• 14:50 - Product Growth From Gradual to Significant
• 20:46 - Brand Growth Through Market Analysis
• 21:26 - Strategic Growth of Naoki Matcha Brand
• 24:37 - Matcha Market Segmentation and Competition
• 28:56 - Success in their Amazon Business
• 30:15 - Amazon PPC Advertising Strategy Effectiveness
• 33:37 - Matcha Success Story and Plans For Future Growth

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we've got two childhood best friends from elementary school who linked up as adults and started a matcha Amazon business that now does millions of dollars a year. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

 

Bradley Sutton:

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Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we are going to the opposite side of the world today, to I believe they're in Singapore, and it's funny because the way they were introduced to me by Crystal and somebody else from Amazon she was like oh yeah, I want you to meet the Macha Bros, but I don't think that's their official name, so I'll let you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves to our audience. This is the first time we'll be on the show

 

Sam:

Sure. So my name is Sam and this is my business partner, Singchuen. We're not actually brothers, but we work together quite closely on a business that we started together. Our business is called Naoki matcha and, as the name suggests, we sell matcha green tea powder in the United States, in the United Kingdom and in Singapore.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know what I've known you, of you or about you? I literally thought you guys were blood brothers entire time, not just because of that name, and so I've already learned something new. I literally thought, you guys were.

 

Sam:

No, no. We get that a lot. We get that a lot.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Brothers from other mothers.

 

Sam:

Yes, I think we can go with that, yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right, hold on now. Let's you know like I already learned something new, so let's just take it. Take it way back, both of you born and raised in Singapore.

 

Sam and Singchuen:

Yep.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How did you guys meet? Did you meet like some story, like you met in university, or how did you guys meet each other?

 

Singchuen:

Sam and I met oh, this is Singchuen, by the way, so I'm the business partner. Sam and I met in primary school, so we have known each other for quite a long time.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So that is a good story, all right. And then you just went to that. You went to the same one, or? Or you just met in the neighborhood, or what?

 

Sam:

We went to the same one and we actually were in the same school so like 10 years, and then our paths kind of diverged for a little while. But we reconnected in university because we were both interested in like business and entrepreneurship and I think that's how it kind of like reconnected and we started exploring different things and that's how we started working together again.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What did both of you major in in university?

 

Singchuen:

I studied business and Sam, he was actually a lawyer.

 

Sam:

Yeah, I studied law at university.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Upon graduation, did both of you guys go into that field that you had studied law and business?

 

Singchuen:

I guess in a sense that because we started a business, business would be quite relevant. But in that in another, in another complete sense, it wasn't really that relevant because the things that you studied in school were geared to get you a role in a company, so it wasn't very practical. But the concepts, they were useful.

 

Sam:

Yeah, so after graduation I did practice law for like a couple of years and then, while doing this business, and then at the end of the two years, I realized that, like you know there was I had two opportunities and like this one kind of showed itself to be a bit more, have more potential, so I left the law and I went into e-commerce.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Who discovered e-commerce first? Was it you, Sam?

 

Sam:

Yeah. So I think I really found out about this opportunity on Amazon and FBA the ability to like sell in another country that is not yours. I think back in like 2015-2016 this is like early days, right but at that point in time I was still like a university student at Seoul 6th year, so we really didn't have like the kind of resources that we needed to really tackle this, this, this opportunity, right. So we spent some time like learning about how to approach it and we only really launched it like late 2016 and from then we went on our careers. We kind of like grew it slowly along the way and then after a few years, we realized that okay, the time is right, this is a good time to go all in.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So in 2016 you guys had reconnecting, like, hey, let's do something together while still having day jobs at that time.

 

Singchuen:

Yeah, exactly, Sam was a lawyer. I actually worked in e-commerce as well. I worked in Alibaba for quite a number of years, so it helped that I could bring a certain kind of context to how the Amazon platform worked, and so we decided to start this sort of like to see where this would be going, because it was exciting, it was an opportunity and we always wanted to have our own business. So that was sort of like the paradigm in which we started off on.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And so at the time in 2016, when you first just started dabbling in e-commerce, it sounds like you weren't all in. Was it matcha that you got into? Was that your first thing, or was it other things?

 

Sam:

Yeah, so when we first started, we started, as most people do, with like a search query on Alibaba.com. The first products we actually sold were like these glass teapots, so we realized that they were not too bad to sell. Actually, we reached like five figures in multi-revenue by like within a year, but we met the same problems that I think a lot of people encounter, which is that after a while, people see that you're somewhat successful and then they'll try to launch a complicated product and therefore, when we found that happened to us and we found it very difficult to grow, so we really were like scratching our heads to think about like what other types of products or categories that we could do, and that's why we landed on matcha.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so when you landed on matcha, were you still working your day jobs, or by that time you were all in on Amazon already?

 

Sam:

No, we were still working out day jobs because for matcha category and the grocery category we found that, like you know, it's not so much of like a quick win kind of situation. You need to invest the time and energy and you need to have quite a lot of patience before your results actually bear fruit, and for us that took actually a number of years because you need to kind of like build your credibility and gain experience in what you're selling as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Are we still talking 2016? Are we already now in 2017 in the timeline, or where are we at when you guys decided matcha?

 

Sam:

Right. So in 2016, we dabbled in matcha and then we spent the next two years essentially trying to improve the product and better understand the category and the product market fit as it is in the US, and we took like a couple of years to do that properly, and I think it was only about 2020, you know, right after COVID hit, when we realized that, okay, the product is good, we have a good product that can stand up against the other competitors in the space, and you're going to go all in and grow this thing.

 

Singchuen:

On the side of this, because our matcha green tea is from Japan and there was a requirement I want to say it's a hard requirement, but there is an understanding that in order to get the good product in Japan, especially from suppliers, you kind of need to cultivate the relationship a little bit and take some time for them to trust you. And so it's not as though, as we didn't want the best product right in 2016. Number one it's not. It's a learning process, right, especially when what the market is telling you of a certain kind of taste that they prefer. But it's also bringing back those requirements to the suppliers and the factories to let them know this is the taste that we want and, barring communication barriers, there's still that they need to feel, feel each other out to exactly ascertain what we're looking for. And that took quite a bit more time than what you would be doing on Alibaba.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's what has been curious. This is not something you would just like find on Alibaba. So where did the like, how did you guys land on matcha? Was it something you guys just liked? Was it because you were doing tea cups and you just like it was a side thing? Like how in the world? Or did you find it in Helium 10? Or how in the world did you say you know what? I think there's opportunity in matcha. Let's go ahead and examine this further.

 

Singchuen:

In Singapore, generally we are exposed to Japanese culture quite a little bit already, but more closely, I guess it's also because I liked green tea. So at the point of time I didn't drink a lot of matcha, but I knew about it. So we explored that as a potential item to try to sell and in a sense it checked all the other boxes as well right. Whether it is for the economics, the logistics, the business, fit, branding, pricing. And that's how we started off on like taking the first step.

 

Sam:

I think also at that point in time this is like 2015, 2016, right, I think matcha was just beginning to get popular in the US. So, yeah, that's when I think the craze started, right. So I think we were also at like the right time in the right place and we realized that, you know, we could marry like our interests and the market opportunity in front of us, and that's how we really landed on matcha.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I don't have any matcha shirts or anything, but you mentioned like Japanese culture. So I got my Astro Boy jacket here. I got my old school Japanese Tokyo Giants hat here. You know, I used to live in Japan when I was younger and and that was why you know, like matcha is not exactly a natural thing for an American person to like, but I kind of liked it. Before it was cool and now, now, like you said, it's just like booming. Everybody's like, hey, matcha, you know you can go to Starbucks and get matcha, this and you can get matcha, and you know non Asian markets, which before it was different. So that was, you know, a little bit of foresight. Now, when you first started with the matcha, you know you had said, until then you were doing dabbling in other things, were you profitable on the Amazon side? Or, up to that point, you still hadn't made profit in the first year or so of your Amazon business.

 

Singchuen:

We tended to search for products that were more profitable on the first sale. So in that sense, the first products that we went to more like glass cups, g-ports, things like that they were already profitable. So it's not as though, as we were dabbling in things that were really difficult to do, low priced or otherwise.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Your first matcha product that you launched? Was that the one that was successful, or did it take a couple of tries before things really started taking off?

 

Sam:

Well, I think it is still the first product that we launched, but what we had to do was tweak the formulation over the years several times and each time we're trying to improve it and fine tune it to better suit, like the feedback that we were getting. So it is the same product, it looks the same, but they're always like tweaks over the years and this kind of like helps build that, I guess, average review score. That goes up because, like you know, you're getting closer to what people like with each iteration.

 

Bradley Sutton:

To find that like perfect blend and everything. You kind of mentioned it and I know this about your history. So can you talk a little bit about, like we just said, this wasn't something. Oh, let me find something in Alibaba, let me just put my sticker on it. How did you look for I don't even want to call it factories, but producers of matcha in Japan like we said, it's not on Alibaba and then talk about the long process of? Actually, I believe you would fly to Japan and meet different places and try things. Talk about that long process how long did it take and what were the steps involved in that.

 

Singchuen:

At the start, we asked for samples from willing factories and once we tasted them and we realized that this was something that could be in a ball pack of what's considered as good tasting to the market, we would ask the supplier whether they are willing to sell us a certain volume of matcha. So there are several factories in Japan that do just green tea, and their idea was sort of branch out to selling matcha as well, because there was where the growing market was, and these were the factories that were more suitable for us to go into, and once we spoke to them their experience with matcha may not be the best at the point of time, mind you, but they were willing to work with us and over a period of time, once we let them know exactly what we're looking for and they were willing to tweak to our preferences, that's when we got a good fit and from then, as our volume started going up, more and more, various factories started.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Until that part, though. How long was that? Were we talking a month? Were we talking multiple months?

 

Singchuen:

No, that actually took quite a long time. I think about three years at least so around 2016 to 2019,. On the marketing side, Sam was trying to define a market fit, but on the supply side, we were just trying to make sure that factories produce what we needed and the trust and formulation. That takes a while.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How can somebody have that kind of patience? That's very rare, not just in matcha industry, but just Amazon or business industry to have that kind of patience to you know to like, hey, I'm spending two or three years to get this right. Like, is that just in your nature or what's going on there?

 

Singchuen:

To be fair, I think we were not so much in a hurry, just to share a little bit. Personally, it's a little bit more of we always wanted to get a business eventually, but the timeline wasn't so important. We weren’t in a rush. Sam, as Sam has mentioned just now, both of us had decent careers, so we were optimizing on that front as well and we're happy to wait.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Like you said, you still had your day jobs, you know, for a time. So it wasn't like you know, like you were about to go out of business and I think that's important. You know, like people sometimes just like, all right, I'm going to quit my job before they even have like a viable business and that's what you know. That's not going to allow somebody to have the patience. That's interesting. Now, at what point in this three years did you finally have like a product just start taking off? And was it just random, like it was just one day that it started going viral and never looked back? Or was this something where it was like, all right, you know, over a few months you were selling 10 units a day, then 15 units, then 20, was it a gradual thing? Or when did what? Was that moment where it's like, oh shoot, we got this right and this is going to take off.

 

Sam:

Yeah, I think it was really like a gradual process. But that point for us, I think, when the old shoot moment, I think, was when we realized that, like the monthly sales for this Macha product alone was quite significant and this was enough to basically sustain ourselves, number one and number two provide a good base and recurring cash flow to kind of grow the business from there. Yeah, and this was really about, like you know, as I said, 2020, mid 2020, early to mid 2020, after COVID started, where we realized that, hey, this thing has snowballed into something quite significant. So it was really a gradual process.

 

Bradley Sutton:

If you can recall either of you, what was your sales the year before, in 2019, when you were still just dabbling in Macha and maybe still had some of the other products?

 

Sam:

I would say that it was like maybe like six figures a year, low six figures a year, and then, okay, yeah, we was at that point in time. We were, we were often optimistic about, about close to doubling each year. So that was, that was where we were at.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And then. So at that point, obviously still working full time jobs. And then it was at 2020, when it took off, and then you quit in 2020, your jobs or you still, even though it started taking off, you still were working your full time.

 

Sam:

I wouldn't say it took off right. It was just at that point in time with, like, the good momentum that like we know that there's some something to stand on. So that was when we decided, okay, time to go all in. And then we know that the product was ready. And then we started doubling down on marketing in order to kind of know that, you know, this optimized product is available to everyone. And then that's how we kind of grew from there.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What kind of marketing? I mean, obviously Amazon PPC is part of it. Was that it or other things as well?

 

Sam:

So we did try a bunch of things at first, but by the late by late 2020, we realized that Amazon advertising PPC mainly is that engine that's going to give us the growth for the next few years, because we realized that, like on a cost acquisition basis, like you just can't beat it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You said 2019, low six figures. What about 2020, that your first really good year. What did you end approximately with?

 

Sam:

I think we were just under seven.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And then how about 2021?

 

Sam:

Yes, somewhere, seven.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So now it's like you guys knew you had something. It wasn't just a fluke, you know. You had some consistency. Do you mind if I show your product on screen right now? For those watching this on YouTube?

 

Sam:

Oh yeah, go ahead.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So let me pull it up here. Was this variation family here of the superior ceremonial blend it says here, was this like your first product that you got into?

 

Sam:

Yes, it was.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now I'm looking. Now it's like you know, according to Amazon, according to Helium 10, you are selling throughout this variation family here, thousands of units, multiple six figures per month, just with this, with this fam variation family. So this is the one that is your, your big seller. So I mean, if I'm looking at these numbers correctly, unless this is just a very nice month here, you're like what in the you know mid seven figures now, or higher?

 

Sam:

I think that's fantastic yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay and explain this product. You know there's a lot I like matcha. I understand it, but there's a lot of people who might like think like what? Like? Do you just like dump this in tea or do you actually use it to cook something? Like what? Like? How in the world are you selling almost 10,000 units of this a month? Like, what are the people buying this to use?

 

Sam:

Right, I think the way to look at this product is that it's a form of tea and in Japan it's enjoyed as a form of tea. Now in America it's usually enjoyed in a, in a form of a latte. So imagine you have a tea and then I think in some parts of the US, like milk tea is popular, right. So in the same way you can add milk to matcha and then you get a Matcha Latte. So because people find that coffee is not working for them for various reasons whether like they feel, like you know, nervous or anxiety after that they try to find something else, right. So matcha kind of ticks all the boxes because it's got a little bit of caffeine, so you don't feel that like that anxiety that you get with coffee sometimes, and also there are like amino acids inside that help you stay alert for a longer time. So that was kind of like the health food appeal of matcha. But that's, I think, why it got popular and that's why people drink it. So we also wanted to kind of share a bit of that Japanese heritage of matcha in our product, which is why it looks the way it does, because in Japan actually the traditional way of preparing it is to take like a teaspoon of the powder, add some water and then whisk it up with this bamboo whisk until it becomes like nice and froth.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I see that here in your A plus, your premium A plus content, so I can see a little bit of that here. You're telling that story. Really great branding here, I like that.

 

Sam:

So they whip it up into like this frothy little mixture and I guess if you could kind of relate it back to coffee culture, I would say like it's like a Matcha Americano. That's the way that they would drink it and that's the main way it's consumed in Japan.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now you've got just a beautiful listing here. You know, looks like premium A plus content. You're educating people here. You have a frequently asked questions, and then obviously you've got some great pictures here where you've got infographics. You've got, you know, like kind of like a history lesson of matcha. You have pictures of it. I mean what else? Like you even show the origin. I think I saw somewhere there's like different cities where this comes from. Where is that here, here? It is here Like you're like oh hey, this one is from Kyoto, this one's from Fukuoka. You have the city. So like I'm assuming that I mean, did you start this from like day one such in depth like information here, or is this just gradually how you were able to kind of hone your branding?

 

Sam:

I think we didn't know that it would take this form at the very start. We knew that, like you know, instinctively this is the branding angle that we want to work with. But as we grew with time we know we were reacting to what's happening in the market right and how we need to kind of distinguish our brand and our product from other people and to make sure that, even though, like, they like the product but they need to have like some visual reference to kind of like make that association, to know that like, oh okay, this is now Kimatcha and I like now Kimatcha.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know what I'm going to check something. Hold on, let me see, I'm actually gonna run Cerebro on one of your products. I'm curious, you know you mentioned, hey, people are actually searching for Naoki Matcha. I'm just curious, like, what kind of brand recognition you have. So I'm just running Cerebro on here on our YouTube and podcast version. We'll speed this up. Let's see here, because I have a feeling, you know you've been selling for a while now and you're doing so well that there are literally people who just search for your brand name. So let's take a look at how many people are searching for your brand name here. Hold on, all right, here in Cerebro I'm gonna put phrases containing Naoki and let's apply that filter and wow, there's 45 different keywords that have Naoki in it and with thousands of search volume a month. So people like know your brand. You know just Naoki Matcha by itself has 1200 search volume and there's 45 other versions that people are actually searching for. So I mean that's kind of like what the goal is. When you're selling on Amazon, hey, sure you want people to buy you on the generic searches, like you know, Matcha Tea or Matcha Powder or something. But you know you've kind of made it when there's actually search volume for your brand.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You guys are getting, you know, using expensive you know matcha directly from the source in Japan. You know I'm sure there maybe are some competitors going like a cheaper route. Or maybe you know, like I'm just looking here in the search for Matcha Tea and I even see you know listings that are like $9, you know $9.95. And you guys are at like $40, $39. I see some that are, well, that's a different product, but like $7, you know $15. How can you guys stay at around the top? Like I'm looking at the BSR, you're like one of the top three in the whole Matcha category. Like some people think, oh, I have to. You know, like if cheaper sources come on, I'm just going to have to try and price match and then you know race to the bottom and I like to tell people no, no, no, there's ways to still succeed even at a higher price point. What's your guys secret where you can stay at this $40 price point and still make a lot of sales despite these cheaper alternatives coming into the market?

 

Sam:

Well, I think it's all about getting people to try it once. And once the person tries it once, right, and then they compare it to like the cheaper one that they bought before they realize, like you know, the difference is like night and day, right. So what we want to do is to make sure that they realize that they're getting like a good price for this level of quality, and once that kind of barrier is unlocked and then they realize that, hey, actually, if I pay $25 for one ounce, right, I'm getting a lot more value if I'm paying $40 for like 3.5 ounces, so the $40 one actually becomes like a good idea, even though, like it's like four times whatever is available on. You know the results when you search for matcha.

 

Singchuen:

Just to add on to that, the cheaper matcha products are by nature of how it's grown and how it's produced. It tastes incredibly different from how matcha products of a certain price level are like because of how much more expensive it is to produce. So matcha is actually in quite a bit of a supply crunch and so there is actually not that much matcha supply to go around at the higher quality price range. In that sense, because it's so expensive, it's not possible to match the quality level if you're to go below the price. So the market kind of like segmented itself in a way. So we, as Sam has just mentioned just now, as long as we are sort of value for the price that we are offering, it's good enough for us and that's how we managed to stay above the competition. If you notice that there are other competitors that are also doing well with high BSR and they are similarly high priced. But once you do the math you realize that in addition to our better tasting product our price per gram, if you want to put it that way it's still much better than our competitors.

 

Sam:

It's pretty competitive still.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What's the future hold? Now you actually have Naoki Matcha in the brand name. So if you just stay with this brand, you're kind of I don't want to say limited, but it's not like you can start selling something completely off the wall under this brand, like do you have are there still enough new kinds of variations and blends that you can come up with to keep this brand going? Or have you considered, like maybe we should start something completely different, like I start a new brand? Or what's your goal for growing the business?

 

Sam:

Right. I think for this brand there's still some room for growth, because actually so far we haven't touched the whole products that deal with, like matcha accessories. We're just starting that this year and also there are different grades of matcha right. So honestly, we are really at like that middle to high kind of grade, but we haven't really touched the other grade so far. So those are kind of like the growth opportunities that are available to us, yeah, but of course, once we hit there's a ceiling for category, once we hit that, yeah, I think you do have to choose another brand.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Obviously, Amazon USA is your main market. Are you selling on other Amazon marketplaces? If so, which? And then also other marketplaces at all, like Walmart, Shopify or other websites?

 

Singchuen:

We are in the UK. We're selling the exact same brand in the UK as well. It's sort of like an offshoot. We started it because some fans who have tasted it in America have gone back to the UK and so they are wondering why aren't you in the UK? So we decided to launch it over there as well, and so far the growth is okay, but not as high as in America, obviously, and in Singapore. We are on e-commerce platforms as well, and I'm not too sure we can confidently say this, but we are in the top few brands on those platforms selling decently well too.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know, talk about some specific strategies that you guys think have helped you get to where you are, because it's not just like I mean somebody could spend 10 years and develop like the most perfect, pure form of matcha known to mankind in history and it's meaningless, you know, without the strategy that is going to get it in front of people. So what are some of the things that set you apart from maybe the 10 other matcha people who maybe have started and gone out of business, you know, because they didn't have your strategy? What do you think set you apart from others?

 

Sam:

Well, I think a handful of things. The first one is okay, so I think you can use. You can rely on Amazon PPC. You can look at your search term impression share reports. You can look at your keyword ranking and all that kind of stuff and that will help you in the short run. But honestly, the thing that really helped us the most was patience and making sure that your product is on a sensory level it's actually good and people like it. Once you have those two things covered, then you know you just need to get people to try to get them to tell their friends, and then, like people, their friends who are interested in matcha will buy, and then they are buying again and then this whole thing kind of grows by itself. Your PPC and all of these other tools that you have are really just like fuel that you add to this engine

 

Singchuen:

And on the other side of things is obviously you kind of need to make sure that you treat your supplier well as well. Make sure that they understand what you're going through and make sure that you try to understand what they're going through. If language is a barrier, hire an interpreter, right, it's not too difficult. Decency goes both ways. So you may be pressed, but you got to recognize that the factories themselves, they, are pressed as well. So working together for compromise, understanding each other and not drawing too much, just to be a little bit more understanding towards each other, goes a long way. I think what tends to happen is that if you're not patient, as Sam has mentioned, you may cut off communications with factories that may help you in the future, and you don't want to do that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now I'm looking, speaking of PPC, I'm looking at just what I see on Amazon and I see everything. I see sponsored product ASIN targeting campaigns right here on this one page I see you're targeting your own ASIN and sponsored display ad. I see sponsored brand ads in the search for Matcha tea. I saw sponsored brand video, regular sponsored products. So you guys are just like going all out with all the different kinds of PPC that Amazon provides. Any one of those, like you think, has performed better for you or gives you the best ROI, or is it kind of just kind of even across the board?

 

Sam:

Well, I think at the start sponsored products perform very well, but as you get more and more ad types and different you know SV, SD, SP you mix that in. You have some DSP thrown in. The attribution for which ad actually did the sale for you gets a bit more tricky.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's true. That's true, yeah, because you know. But the good thing about that is you're just your top of mind because you're advertising everywhere you can. You know, like sure, maybe you don't know exactly what got the attribution, but the point is you have such a big share of voice you know, potentially, maybe compared to your competitors, that you're your top of mind for your, for your customers. Okay, so PPC is important for what's on Amazon. I'm sure you use Amazon data points as well. What about Helium 10? What's your favorite tool in Helium 10 and how has it helped you?

 

Sam:

I think, honestly, the keyword coverage and Cerebro is still like my favorite tool. I've been using it since like 2017, when it first launched.

 

Singchuen:

As you use, you search on Amazon and you search on other platforms take a look at how Helium 10’s are like compared to others. You always use that. There's a certain sense that Helium 10’s information is letting you after it. It's more of a sense. I can't really explain it, and then that really goes a long way, I think.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now for either of you. If there was something on your wish list for Helium 10, like, like something, maybe we don't do right now, you're like, wow, it would be so cool if Helium 10 could do this. Here's your chance to tell me what is on the matcha bros top wish list, for what Helium 10 can help now give matcha with?

 

Sam:

Right. So I think my number one wish list would be cohort analytics. So if, for example, I can see in January how many new customers are acquired and how much, and how much of that repeat over the next 12, 24, 36 months, that would be awesome. I don't think there's none of the big analytics platforms do this. There are some specialized ones that do it that we subscribe to, but they're expensive and I'm pretty sure that you guys can do a better job.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. Now my last question is just, you know, you guys have reached this level of success, selling millions of dollars. Obviously you two are working together. How many people total does it take to run the Naoki Matcha machine? You know like, are you guys doing 100% of the work? Do you have virtual assistants? Do you have, you know, in Singapore staff? How many people does it take to run your business?

 

Singchuen:

Right now we are actually quite an entity, Sam, as I'm sure you can tell from this conversation. Sam does most of the marketing and I do more of the supply side operations kind of activities. So in total we have about five people running the entire business.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Well, this has been very enlightening. I've you know, despite knowing about you guys, almost 95% of this I think was completely new information to me and obviously new to our audience. It's great to see this success story. I love matcha, so I'm going to have to purchase your, your product, and make some. I'll be your influencer. Make some matcha, some kind of matcha. Let's see I'm going to. I wanted to make a matcha flan flan like a. I don't know if you guys know what that is. That's like a Mexican dish. So that's, I'm going to make something and then it's going to go viral on TikTok and make you guys another few million dollars just for me.

 

Singchuen:

Thank you for your support.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You could take me out to dinner

 

Sam:

Yeah. Thank you and looking forward to that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you so much for coming on, and let's have you guys back on the podcast in 2025 and let's see how you guys have grown at that time.

 

Helium 10 Buzz 3/8/24: Amazon SEO Update | How To Save Money With New FBA Inventory Fees

Get ready to navigate the buzzing twists and turns of e-commerce from some curious buzz around the COSMO document to the significant Amazon FBA fee hikes, we break down what sellers need to know to stay ahead.

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

COSMO: A large-scale e-commerce common sense knowledge generation and serving system at Amazon
https://www.amazon.science/publications/cosmo-a-large-scale-e-commerce-common-sense-knowledge-generation-and-serving-system-at-amazon

Target will launch unlimited rush shipping subscription to rival Amazon Prime
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/6/24092880/target-circle-360-free-delivery-shipping-annual-plan

Walmart and Amazon Race to Provide Best Virtual Try-On Experiences
https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2024/walmart-and-amazon-race-to-provide-best-virtual-try-on-experiences/

We tested Amazon’s new shopping chatbot. It’s not good.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/05/amazon-ai-chatbot-rufus-review/

Exclusive: Walmart opens new front in same-day delivery war
https://www.axios.com/2024/03/07/walmart-hours-delivery-early-morning-online-orders

Use persona builder to create and get insights on your personas
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/use-persona-builder-to-create-and-get-insights-on-personas/

Amazon will no longer underwrite loans for sellers in its $140 billion Marketplace business
https://fortune.com/2024/03/07/amazon-lending-loans-sellers-marketplace-discontinuing/

My name is Alexa and I loved it until Amazon's smart assistant came along and ruined it
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ruined-name-alexa-2024-3

Cap the episode off with an inside look at how Amazon's FBA fee changes are reshaping the game for sellers. Discover how you could turn the tide on FBA fees with savvy shipping strategies. We also dive into Helium 10's latest feature alerts that promise to bestow an edge to Platinum Plan users and European sellers. Join the conversation, test out these new tools, and let's tackle these changes together.

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

• 01:27 - Amazon Cosmo - Sellers Panic?
• 07:39 - Target Prime+
• 08:36 - Amazon / Walmart Augmented Reality
• 09:35 - Amazon AI Chatbot
• 10:44 - Walmart 1 Hour Delivery
• 11:58 - Persona Builder
• 13:05 - No More MYCE
• 14:29 - Voice of Customer
• 15:34 - Amazon Lending
• 16:08 - Coupon Requirements
• 17:42 - Amazon Alexa
• 19:35 - FBA Inventory Fees...SAVE Money?
• 30:20 - New Feature Alerts

 

 

#541 - Amazon Listing Optimization Gets an Upgrade!

Ever feel like you're playing a game of chess with the Amazon algorithm, constantly striving for that checkmate which is a perfectly optimized Amazon listing? We're peeling back the curtain on the new secret weapon that the Listing Builder by Helium 10 has that could give you that winning edge on the Amazon battlefield. Prepare to be armed with knowledge as we take you through a live optimization of the Project X "coffin shelf" listing, dissecting the art of keyword research to uncover those high-traffic phrases that could propel your product to page one of the marketplace.

Marinate your brain in the sauce of Amazon seller strategies as we stir in the nuances of listing optimization and the significance of performance scores to outsmart your competition. The Helium 10 score may not be part of Amazon's official playbook, but it's a valuable benchmark we explain in detail, showing you how to leverage different types of keyword matches to boost that all-important performance score. And it doesn't stop there; we dive deeper, sharing actionable tips on how to strategically position those keywords for maximum impact, ensuring your listing is as tantalizing to Amazon's search algorithm as it is to potential buyers inside the online shopping platform.

 

In episode 541 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 00:00 - Optimizing Amazon Listings With Helium 10
• 07:11 - Keyword Analysis for Listing Optimization 
• 14:17 - Amazon Listing Optimization Ranking Score
• 22:43 - Optimizing Keywords and Phrases on Amazon
• 25:26 - Analyzing Title Density for Ranking

#540 - Keyword Research With Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer & Helium 10

Join us as we explore the intricate art of keyword research with Jason Mclellan, the mastermind behind Vitacup's impressive $20 million e-commerce achievement. This episode is a great resource for anyone looking to enhance their Amazon selling skills, where we unravel sophisticated strategies to optimize your Amazon product’s online presence. With tools like Helium 10, Amazon’s Brand Analytics, and Product Opportunity Explorer at our disposal, we dissect the methodologies that lead to keyword research excellence, pinpoint niche markets, and boost your brand's visibility.

This is not just another chat about keywords—it's an immersive experience of how big sellers operate their Amazon business. We navigate through the ever-changing landscape of consumer trends, driven by the influence of social media platforms like TikTok, to keep your listings fresh and relevant. Together with Jason, we dissect the strategies that make products rank for the keyword "extra shot coffee" stand out in a crowded space. It's about refining, optimizing, and capturing the essence of what your customer is looking for, turning clicks into conversions, and conversions into Subscribe and Save loyal customers.

Wrapping up the conversation, we dive into actionable insights for harnessing the full potential of keyword strategies on Amazon and Walmart. It's about more than just being seen—it’s about resonating with your audience. We share how to weave the benefits of your products into descriptions that speak directly to your niche and discuss the significant impact of organic search success on platforms like Amazon. So pour yourself a cup of Rapid Fire Protein Coffee, pull up a chair, and let's unlock the secrets to catapulting your products to the top of the search results.

 

In episode 540 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jason discuss:

• 00:00 - Deep Dive Into Advanced Keyword Research
• 00:50 - Keyword Research Strategies for E-Commerce Sellers 
• 04:44 - Learning From Successful Amazon Sellers 
• 06:45 - Product Research and Optimization Methodology
• 07:20 - Product Refinement for Increased Sales 
• 14:38 - Identifying Top Search Terms for Niche 
• 20:37 - Understanding Product Placement Strategies
• 22:57 - Amazon Keyword Strategy for Coffee Products
• 24:26 - Amazon Seller Keyword Strategies Training
• 28:56 - Advanced Keyword Research Strategies for Amazon
• 34:52 - Top Keywords for Platinum Account Success
• 40:33 - Keyword Research Strategy Discussion
• 43:02 - Importance of High Search Volume Keywords
• 44:27 - Optimizing Amazon Listing for Spanish Keywords

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

 

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we're going to have an advanced deep dive into some of the top keyword research strategies for 2024, including some strategies from a seller who does over $20 million on e-commerce per year. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10's Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton and this is the show. It’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for Serious Sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We're going to be talking today about Keyword Research. And just like last time, I'm not going to have a bunch of slides that I'm going to be showing. Basically, what we want to do is show you real life examples of how we have done keyword research for some of our products, how we would do keyword research in 2024, and not just in Helium 10, but also we're going to be showing you some things for those who have brand registry and are able to access search query performance. Okay, we're going to be showing you some things that even if you don't have brand registry, a way you can find good keywords for your listing using something called product opportunity explore. Now, a couple of things just really quick. I want you guys to bookmark this one page. I want you guys to go to forum.helium10.com. And that is our new Seller Connect Forum where you're going to be able to interact with different helium 10 members in addition to our Facebook groups that we've already had, we're going to have one where it's right inside of Helium 10. Okay. And so we've got some information already there. I posted some blogs, but make sure to bookmark that guys. And I want you to regularly connect. So before we get started into, I want to go ahead and introduce a special guest that we had teased on today, a real live person who is going to show us his products and his keywords and his keyword research too. You know, how many of you Amazon sellers out there, if I ask you in the chat, what is your product? That's how it is. People usually don't want, the majority don't wanna sell their product. Show their product. Today, we don't have that. So Jason, go ahead and come on and let's introduce Jason. He has been on the podcast before, but for those who haven't met you Jason or haven't seen your podcast episode, go ahead and introduce yourself, please, and brief history on Amazon and what company you work for.

Jason:

Hi, my name is Jason McCallum. I've been with the last five years of the company called VitaCup. We are a vitamin and superfood -infused coffee and tea. We're probably the number one functional coffee on Amazon right now, a wide variety of modalities. So, there's just always keeping us busy between the K -Cup format, instant copy and ground. So I've been in this market space since the early 2000, starting off in eBay. So I've kind of seen the evolution of the place from eBay to Amazon and where we're kind of going in the future with some other things that are developing on other marketplaces. And just... love online marketplaces.

Bradley Sutton:
All right, so I take his products too. Here's his VitaCup Extra Shot. This is very important for the morning. So I am running a little bit on empty. So we are gonna test this now because I've stayed up most of last night and then this morning, like I said, did back to back webinars. So I am actually taking this product and we are going to go ahead and I'm going to be drinking it live right here. First of all, stir it. Hold on. This is one of my tests for if products are good or not, like how easy it is to open this. How am I supposed to open this there? Oh, look at that. Easy, easy, open, easy, open.

 

Jason:

Much better than the other one you try..

 

Bradley Sutton:

Last year, I didn't like how to open it. It was like impossible. And it's sprayed all over my face. We won't mention it.

 

Jason:

And we're changing it just for you. No one asked for. Just for you. Yeah, Just for you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So now I'm making my instant coffee and stirring it up. So again, like I said, the reason why I'm just going overboard here in this product is like I said, hey, Jason is somebody who has opened up his product and listings to us before. And although most Amazon sellers don't want to do that, he is doing that. So we thank him. And now Jason, just as you know, you're kind of a humble guy. So people won't, you know it just by the way you talk. But what kind of gross revenue is your, is VitaCup doing on Amazon and Walmart, if you were to combine both of those marketplaces per year about?

 

Jason:

Around 20 million.

Bradley Sutton:
About 20 million dollars, all right? So, you know, there might be a couple of people here on the call or on this call who do a little bit more, but I would say most of us, including myself, don't, aren't at that level. And that means we can probably learn a thing or two from Jason. Now, Jason does a lot of the same strategies, maybe that are common practice as far as finding new keywords for listings. But he also has got some unique things that he does as well on and off of Helium 10 on and off of Amazon. So I would like to I would like to go ahead and turn the stage a little bit over to you. What is the first keyword research strategy that you are going to help us? Give us the background first. Like, is this something that helps you find a product? Is it something that you already had the product and now you are like, all right, I got to find this, some keywords that are going to convert for me. Set up the stage here for this first one.

Jason:

So great question. The first thing I'm going to start off with is product opportunity, explore something that's been released for around the last four years. It's been evolving. I really call it at this point, the Swiss army knife of Seller Central. There's a wide variety of uses you can use for it. We look at it and research it for when we're developing new functional blends and flavors. I try and keep my process simple. A lot of people you know the more complex you get, the harder it is. Starting with product opportunity explore, we're researching and launching a new product. It's great to see what the market potential is, what customers like, what they don't like, sort of those keywords that are driving sales can start doing some research on what's the average CPC projected for those. Is it going to be something that we think we can do some conquesting on keywords and how much is it going to cost and is it even worth it? We started hitting over X amount of dollars for keywords. It really is not that viable. So, and then we also use for refinement, and the example I'm going to show right now is we start off in product opportunity explore and we're continually doing improvements and testing new things on our products and just how we go through and find those keywords and then the competing products on it we're going to be using. We'll use the extra shot coffee as example and then

Bradley Sutton:
What do you mean by refinement?

Jason:

Because we're continually refining your content and your images and we utilize the data to improve our images, which improves your conversion and increases your sales dramatically at this point, you got to consider 70, 80% of all Amazon shopping today is done via mobile experience. Your hero and your secondary images are actually more important than your product description, your bullet points and your A plus content at this point because of how everything's delivered. I mean, if everyone has their phone there, you can pull it out and at some point you can get ready by the cup, extra shot K Cups and we can take a look at that as we're going through and why. And so we're utilizing the keywords. We're pulling a product opportunity explorer and the keywords we're pulling in refinement. We're pulling out of Cerebro and we're directly addressing the data that we learned from that into our images, not just our bullet points, not just our titles, and because of that we're seeing a great conversion like extra shot. We just ran this through where we've seen it wasn't one of our stronger performing products, but we've seen in the last 30 days we've seen basically doubling the sales on that my lead, my number one product. In my rolling 30 day sales average over the last two weeks I'm up 16% on sales because we applied the same methodology. You continually have to be updating content. New words enter the ecosystem, Amazon new consumer trends are going on. TikTok drives a lot of different trends depending on the categories you're in, and that introduces a lot of search relevancy. People see things on TikTok or other social media forums. and they come to Amazon looking for it and necessarily you're not just trying to compete for your own space, but when these new trends come on board, sometimes that product isn't there and Amazon will see for those terms that your product is really relevant. And if you've been running for a while and you have some relevancy, you'll start getting delivery. And if you have sharp titles, bullet points and images, your conversion will be great and you'll continue to grow and accumulate on these new trends that are just kind of ancillary to what you're doing. So we see a lot of growth in that. So we're always just in a constant rotation of just testing out all content, all aspects, and then kind of refining and judging, through catalog performance, what your different points in the chain through click through to purchase, conversion, our improvements being made.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, a lot of your sales comes from subscribing, save and maybe certain things like sponsor display ads and a lot of other ways. Now, have you ever looked at search career performance for a week and looked at your brand's overall search career performance attributed sales, which is very limited? As far as hey, it has to be from a search, it can't be sponsored brand or sponsor display ad. They have to have clicked it, they have to have purchased it within 24 hours. Have you ever compared the amount of sales for a week that came through search career performance with your overall unit sales to see, like, hey, how much of your keywords or how much of your sales are coming from the normalized searches, which for some people it's 15%, some people it's 50%, some people more.

 

Jason:

You know I haven't broken it down that more when I generally start, because where I generally start to look at what branded searches and everything is what we're running off Amazon. Amazon, there's no like. Amazon actually is great, but if you use it for a while you understand that it's not capturing the full thing. Or if you're just doing, especially doing stuff on TikTok, it's not capturing hardly any of it. So I track by week, by month on branded searches to see if there's any spikes in overall, like wide a cup searched terms, and then we can start to correlate. And if there's a spike in sales we can start correlating. It is what we're running off traffic to educate the consumer about a particular blend or a particular product. Is that having a positive impact in customers coming back and searching for it? Because, as you're saying, like you know, we're running a lot of DSP, we're on search display and so we have all these lovers we're pulling. So we want consumers to touch our page, because we want to get them in the flow, because we want to acquire a new customer and move them to subscribe and save, and that's the way you kind of take the approach on it. So first one is is you're finding the niche in which your product exists, and so mine is looking at extra shot. I know it's already strong coffee. You can search by ASIN and the ASIN will generally allow you to select it. So you pin your product ASIN and sometimes there's enough affiliation. Where it can drive up.

So two niches under strong coffee is for the K-Cups and the high caffeine coffee. I've already been through both these. The keywords are kind of similar. We're selling in a K-Cup format so I wanted to focus on that one Initially. You kind of can see the total search volume over the last three, 60 days, kind of how the product niche has been growing, the estimated unit sales on an annualized basis. What we're starting to see more and more is really kind of interesting.

Is this return rate percentage. So for other, this is a consumable item and you're not technically supposed to be even be able to return it, so it's always going to be pretty low. But if you're looking at researching products that you're going to potentially get into, you can say, hey, does this statistically have a very high return rate, or does it have very low return rate? Because you're going to want to build that into your business model for the product. It gives the price range and then the kind of that sweet spot, the average price. So you know, from a pricing point of view, when you're thinking about pricing it, where do you fall in line? So we're going to select strong coffee K-Cups and then just there's such. They keep adding a wealth of information to this. What you're going to see on the first tab for products is all the ASINs that make up 90% of the volume that are associated with this strong coffee K-Cups. The second portion is the search term. These are going to be your top search terms for the niche. So this is where you can come up with a search term. So you can come up with a search term, your top search terms for the niche. So this is where you can kind of start getting an understanding of 90% of the volume that has been driven by the volume that's being driven by 90% of the search terms. So I tend to look at, what are the search terms that are non branded? so definitely, which I'd kind of ignore. But you know high caffeine, coffee, K-Cups. So everyone remember that term high caffeine, coffee, K-Cups, strong coffee K-Cups, extra caffeine coffee K-Cups, double caffeine coffee K-Cups, and then you start seeing some variations. So we've got strong coffee pods search less than strong coffee K-Cups, but still has relevancy. So you know that when people are coming to search they're not always necessarily searching for K-Cups, but they're also searching for coffee pods in some form or another High caffeine K-Cups, double caffeine K-Cups and etc. Also, it's really interesting as you can use this as a tool to monitor how you're performing within a product niche. So for this instance, if you're interested in going after high caffeine coffee K-Cups, this need. All the niches are updated once a week, so over time you can start seeing am I making headway into being one of the number one top click product on it, which is Deathwish, the number two, which is a variety pack of high caffeine coffee pods, or the number three clicked on is Wake the Hell Up, dark Roast. Keep that in mind. Like these are your top keywords. This is where I start with. I get my top keywords and then I'll eventually be going over Cerebro to find out what are those medium to low end keywords, and you're also gonna see these. The beauty of Cerebro is when we run the top three, our product with the top two products in it, we're gonna see a lot of the same keywords. It's gonna give a lot of validity. This real data that we're getting out of Amazon live, from the source, is being mirrored what's coming out of Cerebro, and so it's giving validity to Helium 10's authenticity, to those lower and mid keywords. You can then trust the data that, hey, for long tail keywords, I'm gonna grab these and build them into the text. For just some organic ranking. I wanna run some long tail keyword strategies on my Amazon PPC. I wanna build some of this content into my images. The next thing I go through and I look for keywords customer sentiment is on Customer Review Insights. This is amazing. So what it does, it takes all these products and starts aggregating that. We're on the product page. It starts aggregating the reviews together and looks for themes and looks for what consumers want. So the first one is aggregated haste. We can start seeing what customers are saying, and I love when I see things like just delicious, or the coffee is delicious. That tells me when we're communicating to the end consumer, we have to be communicating in the text, in the imagery, in the bullet points, in the A plus content that it's gonna be a delicious cup of coffee, so talks about flavor quality and we start smooth, so we start stripping this information out and that's what we're gonna use to help build. So in Cerebro what I do is I take my product extra shot plus two or three of the leading ASINs and I run it in Cerebro to get my top keywords.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And for those who aren't familiar with Cerebro, what this is doing is it's pulling up all the keywords where, in the last 30 days, any of these three products have shown up in the organic search results. They have shown up in sponsored search results or that, according to the Amazon algorithm, it suggests is relevant for the keywords, regardless if it's in organic or ranking. And so you know there's what? Oh my goodness, 24,000. 24,000.

 

Jason:

So we don't want yeah, that's pretty Two of the keywords. So, honestly, one of my favorite like filters is just the quick top keywords filter that's built into Cerebro, this, you know it at down to 83 filtered keywords. I do a little bit more refinement. I wanna exclude phrases like death, death wish, black rifle, pistachio and wake. For what I'm trying to do, regardless. This bumps it down to 59. So, and we'll search by search volume, things that are gonna be important we have a shot of espresso in our, so the espresso K cups, that's a great one. Blackout coffee I'm still trying to figure out how do you work out blackout within the text, cause blackout is a branded term, so utilizing it within blackout coffee Same as danger coffee. You're picking up a lot of these things, but then you start seeing like hey, strong coffee, k cups, high caffeine coffee, dark magic I know dark roast is really important to this, so that dark magic is a blend and so on. So you know, I'll go through and I'll delete out the ones that I don't like from this. I'll pull these out and I'll start using both these sets of data, to start building out what this should look like in as far as new content for both imagery and bullet points, and I-.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now one cool thing. You know you might not have been looking at it, but just in this sense, guys, they're the column on. You guys see on the very right hand side, a match type. This also kind of shows you where if we have seen one of these products doing other placements. You know I said that Cerebro's showing keywords where you have shown up in organic results and sponsor results, but it's not just those two. If they're coming up in one of those widgets that says Amazon recommended, if you see something that says SBV, that means a Sponsored Brand video. So now you can know where your competitors are advertising in the video sections. Maybe the Sponsored Brand ad at the top, maybe if it comes up in highly recommended. So these are other ways where you can kind of look for holes in the market on the keyword side.

So right now Jason just showed us two ways. Hey, look at Product Opportunity Explorer. Look at which products are dominating the niche. Remember, like he said, Product Opportunity Explorer isn't the products that make up 90% of the clicks and also the keywords that make up 90% of the clicks of that market. Here he can round out his strategy, using Cerebro to find other keywords that maybe aren't part of that Product Opportunity Explorer niche, but the competitors are probably getting some sales here or there. Do you have anything else for us today, Jason?

 

Jason:

Yeah, I could run through how we're using manager experiments, where we popped it in that we're running experiment now on this board.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Oh yeah, why don't you show that to close things out, and then I'm gonna show some more strategies and then maybe we'll bring it back here for some Q&A.

 

Jason:

Right now we do take that details and we're running on through manager experiments and anyone who is brand registry has the ability to access and manage experiments and you can run A-B testing on titles, bullet points, A plus content and images. So right now we're running one for title and bullet points. As you can see, I totally just deconstructed my listing for this so you'll notice I've started to put in high caffeine coffee pods. Espresso shot. Through some other research I saw not just espresso but espresso shot was very important. Dark roast, strong coffee, espresso powder once again because powder it's a little bit different. People could have used espresso shot and espresso powder, but I saw, just because we had that included in it, there was actually some relevant high volume search relevancy on it. And then you start lacing some of these key words into your introduction double caffeine, strong, smooth and robust. We picked up on strong, smooth and robust dark roast all in like flavor profiles through product opportunity explorer. Customers were specifically using these keywords, so why not use them? They identify with them. It has meaning for them. Then we always have like a functional benefit to our. So we talk about our vitamin B12, there's a sub niche called healthy coffee that we dominate. So I always like layering in healthy coffee, and then we talk about our pods. All this is going to be baked in. It's going to start as we start driving advertising more and more focused on it, on these keywords. We're doubling down to try and gain organic relevancy. Amazon will pick on it, our AI will pick up on it, and this is kind of the process we use.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Love it. All right, Jason, thank you so much for sharing that. I want it. Instead of just being like, oh, this is going to be a Helium 10 training where just Helium 10 employees are showing stuff, I want to show, hey, Jason is a real live Amazon seller with a real live product, and these are the strategies that he's using to get ahead. You don't just randomly achieve the success of making 20 million a year on Amazon and Walmart without some solid keyword strategies, and those are some of the things that he has. Now I want to show you guys some common and some also maybe off the wall keyword research strategies in the next 10 minutes and then we'll open it up for Q&A. One of the things I want to show you and this I mentioned before some things you have to have a brand registry for the first thing that Jason was talking about Product Opportunity Explore. You don't need brand registry for the thing that he showed about how to use the experiments with his manager experiments and showing the alternate kinds of titles and bullet points that had different keywords in it. You need brand registry for that. This next one I'm going to show you also requires brand registry and it's because it's utilizing brand analytics. Now I could do this inside of Amazon, but it's much easier to do it inside of Helium 10, because I can search multiple weeks a lot faster. So let me go ahead and share my screen and while he was talking I just loaded up that search for one of the keywords yeah, strong coffee K cups. So I'm just going to take and look at VitaCup. Right here at the very top is advertising. Let's say I'm not VitaCup and I'm just going to copy him and copy his ASIN, and I want to go ahead and see where he is, has been ranking or one of the top three clicked. All right, now. What I want everybody to do is, right now, go into Black Box inside of Helium 10. And then, if you have a Diamond account, all right. I don't think it is available for Platinum just yet, hit this new tool called ABA top search terms. ABA stands for Amazon Brand Analytics and I'm going to be pasting in a few ASIN. So let's go ahead and put that ASIN in here. Did I copy it? I must not have copied it. Oh, there, it is. Okay, I pasted it and let's go ahead and take in the red alert coffee. This guy is selling about a thousand units a month and maybe a couple more ASIN’S here. Death wish, he was mentioning death wish, or there we got three ASIN’s from the top ones. All right, so now what I can do is I'm going to look, let's just say, going to February 4 to February 10. I'm going to hit apply filters and now what is going to come up is where any one of these products was one of the top three clicked products for that keyword. Now, not that many keywords came up, only 17, because I only put in three. But imagine I could have put here maybe 20 or 30 products and then for any week or any month I can say hey, show me where these are these products. At least one of them was one of the top three clicked and I could say I want to see the ones where at least maybe one ASIN had more than 1% of the conversions, meaning that there's got to be some conversions on there and theoretically, all keywords said have that, but there might be some like lower level keywords that have no conversion. Sure enough, there was one, because now there's only 16 keywords left here. But look at this I am now looking at any keyword where at least one of these products is one of the top three clicked, and I could start going in deep here and seeing all right, what is the history of how this product, who are the top three clicked? Like, for example, look at this one protein coffee K cups. All right, protein coffee k cups is not a branded term, and so I'm looking at the Search Volume All right, 735. This is not that much search volume. Is this something that's newer or is it trending? I personally have not seen this keyword before and I'm looking at the last year on Amazon and I could see that, hey, it's actually gone up from like in the 200s and 300s and slowly it's on the rise. So, right off the bat, you know this is not some crazy amazing keyword 735 searches but it's on the upper trending. You know I'm probably one of the ones who's trying to search for out because I'm looking for like hey, is it? Is there a chance to get some protein when I'm drinking coffee, you know? So I would keep looking at this keyword. Now I'm like all right, well, who has been some of the ones who are converting for this keyword? So I click the total click share chart in Helium 10 for the keyword. And now, if I'm looking on a month to month basis, I just put my mouse over and I could see who are the top three clicked products and are they similar to my product? Right, like, for example, look at here in the month of December, VitaCup Keto Coffee Pods was the top the sick, the third most clicked product. Now who is dominating, though? The rapid fire protein coffee. Right, they've got protein in their title of their product, so it's no doubt that somebody searching this is actually a great example. I completely just by chance, found this is a perfect example of keyword research and how it's important and how it actually kind of like will give you an idea about who's going to be one of the best products here. Think of somebody who is actually typing in protein coffee, k cups. All right, I look at the search results and I see all three of these products this Corelatte one, the VitaCup Keto one and the Rapid Fire Protein one. But just the fact that in their title and the name it just so happens to be the name of the product is protein coffee, it's going to get them a lot more clicks. And then, look at that. I don't have to guess if it did or not. Look, amazon is telling me this product got 28% of the clicks right and total makes total sense. The VitaCup one is just a keto. One might give some protein but it only got 6% of the click. It's still top three. But you can understand now all of a sudden why this product is dominating. So that means if I really wanted to dominate this product I might have to think I can just make up protein and say, oh yeah, my product is. You know, this extra shot. VitaCup is a protein coffee. If it's not a protein coffee, that's false advertising, right. But if I'm developing a product I really got to take that in consideration. Now this is how Keyword Research ties in even to your product development. Right, I've got to think about putting that keyword in my title if I want a chance at kind of like busting into this rapid fire proteins market share here. I can also see the history here on the right hand side about how organic and sponsored rank ties in to being one of the top three clicked. For example, this protein coffee in December, in January, in November, they, for this keyword, were not running any sponsored ads. Nowadays, you know, somebody might think you know you got to be running, you got to be having a high bid on this, on any keyword that you want to have a big sales, but for whatever reason, this protein coffee comes like nah, I'm good, I don't need to do sponsored after this keyword because I'm dominating without it right Now. What about VitaCup? VitaCup here in December. This is pretty cool, guys. All right, this is exactly why combining Helium 10 data with Amazon data is so cool. VitaCup was one of the top three clicked ASIN’s, right. The number one clicked ASIN was this protein coffee. Rapid Fire All these brands are really great, right,Rapid Fire. And then you're looking oh, no wonder they're the top click ASIN. They were Organic Rank one. Now, if you were just looking on Cerebro, right, and you saw our Keyword Tracker and you saw that VitaCup Genius Coffee was ranked 12th, you might think, oh, there's no way it's one of the top three clicked because it's kind of like towards the middle of page one. But this is one of the top three clicked and you don't have to wonder why or how. Look at the sponsored rank average. So in December of this month, this variation family was showing up on average right there on the top. So you see how, in some situations, organic rank is all is all that's needed, but if VitaCup was relying on their organic rank only to get clicks for this keyword, would they be one of the top three clicked? Absolutely not, because their organic rank is all the way down here, but they were able to be one of the top three clicked because of their high sponsored rank.

So this is, guys, this is like not your grandfather's keyword research strategy we're talking about today. This is like next, next, next level, where you're going into seeing who are the top click to try and like, understand, buy your intent, and then now you're reverse engineering the strategy with how these different companies were able to dominate this keyword. For this company, it's a matter of hey, they named this product after this keyword. It's in their title, right there at the beginning. They're able to dominate this. For VitaCup, it's completely opposite. Their path to being one of the top three clicked was through sponsored ads. So for every product there's always going to be different strategies, but this is the once you guys are experienced sellers, this is kind of the level of keyword research you need to do. It's not just hey, let me throw in an ASIN and a group of ASINs in a Cerebro. You obviously have to do that, exactly what Jason showed and find those 24,000 keywords and then whittle that down into what are the most important ones. But you also need to take a step farther and start using Product Opportunity Explorer and the Brand Analytics Data to kind of understand, well, what are companies doing after they find that keyword and how are they getting their sales. So that's Brand Analytics. For anybody that has the Diamond plan, I highly recommend it. Now let's say you're on the newer side and you just have a Platinum account, which is totally fine. What is the easiest way to get the top keywords? Let me just show that. Let's go back to that page that's Coffin shelves. Where are we at More Coffin shelves? Where's my coffee one? Here we go, all right. So I'm going to choose the top products on this page that I just want to go ahead and measure my success and my keywords versus them. Or maybe I'm just I don't have my own coffee product yet and I want to know what are the top products here. And, by the way, you can still see there's VitaCup still right there with their Genius Cup right there as one of the top three sponsored ranks, and this is kind of cool. I bet that Jason is actually spending slightly less than Deathwish Coffee and what is his wake the hell up Dark Roast, but he's probably getting a very similar click-through rate. You don't have to be position one or two on sponsored to be one of the top clicked or sponsored Dial back that spend, be the number three or number four and you'll still get almost the same kind of click-through rate and clicks. Let's go ahead and hit Red Alert. I got the Deathwish and I don't want to do Pete's. Let's do community coffee, right. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit run Cerebro. Now this is going to open up in Cerebro, kind of like just what he showed. Now I wasn't paying attention to. If these products are all pods and if they're definitely competitors I'm assuming they are. But you guys need to really take a closer look at who you are putting into Cerebro and make sure that you're doing very similar competitors or that, like Jason was talking about, you're pulling it from Product Opportunity Explorer and you know by definition they're in the same niche. But I just picked four random ones just from the search results, but within seconds here, or a minute or so, I'm going to be able to get where all of these keywords or all of these products, the keywords that they are ranking for and that they're doing sponsored ads. The very first thing that I'm going to do once this shows up is I'm going to hit the button top keyword right here, top keywords so everybody can do this anytime they run Cerebro, and basically what it's doing is it's like hey, where are most of these keywords are ranking for, or most of these products ranking for on these keywords very highly? And look at that. I came up with 24 keywords and a lot of these are branded. But, just like Jason showed, there's a lot of non-branded keywords here as well, like, for example, high caffeine coffee cake. I'm almost positive. He literally found that in Product Opportunity Explorer and I guess randomly guys, this is the first time I've ever searched these things in my life. It just shows how Helium 10 is validated by the Amazon data. That exact keyword that he found is showing up right here Strong coffee. There's the other keyword that he found that came up right here Protein coffee K cups. That's the keyword that I had found just on my own that I put up here. So these are the top keywords. Another thing, though I like to do, this obviously, is going to just show tons and tons of branded ones. I like hitting this button Opportunity Keywords, because, instead of looking at the products or the keywords that everybody is ranking highly for, this button allows me to see, in seconds, products where only one or two of these competitors are ranking high and, by definition, of course, the majority of those are going to be branded. But every now and then I'm going to be able to see unique keywords that other competitors might not be able to see, they might not be paying attention to. Like here, instead of k cups, here's a keyword that I didn't realize. Some people are typing in kpods. Now why did this kpods keyword come up here? Let's take a look at the Relative Rank here. All right, perfect, look at this. I don't know who is who, but look at this Of these top competitors. Let's say these guys are all kind of equal, competing with each other. Do you see where everybody is ranked here on this page? One of them is 78, one is 107, 241, 245. There is only one of these competitors getting sales from this keyword cake pods with no spaces, and they're ranked on page one, position 12. What does that mean? That means that if I were to kind of like, do a campaign on this keyword. It potentially could be easier for me to rank for this because I'm not having to go up against all of my main competitors. So that's why this button, guys, is a sleeping giant of a button right here.

Opportunity keywords let's see if we can find any of the hidden gems in here that aren't branded keywords. Let's take a look here: Coffee pod, bulk k cups. Maybe some of these products think, well, we're not really bulk so we don't think we should put that in our listing. But there are some people, for one of these products at least, where they are heavily ranked for bulk k cups, even though they're not really a bulk and they're actually getting sales from it. So this is just another way to get some keywords that can help you. I want to give you guys some deep dive strategy sessions on keyword research. To kind of round out your on Amazon and off Amazon, your on Helium 10 and off Helium 10 strategy. So let me go pull up those episodes right now. We did a three-part keyword research series on Helium 10 a few months ago. That really is going to help you, in about three hours of time, get all of the keyword research tips that you need. So you guys got a pen handy, write this down. And the way you can find this is everybody, go ahead and pull out your phone. If you have an iPhone, type in podcast and open up the podcast app. Or Spotify if you have a Spotify and type in Serious Sellers Podcast, all right, type in serious sellers podcast, and then go ahead and hit subscribe. And then the ones I want you guys to look at are these three episodes here keyword research masterclass 100% free, doesn't it? And you don't have to be a Helium 10 member to listen to these. All right. Episode 506, 507, and 508. All right, so again, go to the podcast, Serious Sellers Podcast. Type in episode 506, 507, and 508. If you guys are more visual, it's h10.me/506 , h10.me/507, and h10.me/508 . If you go to those links you'll go to a page where you can actually even see the video too of it. But either way, subscribe to the podcast and go to those episodes and maybe next time you're on your treadmill or you're taking a drive or a run, listen to those and then go back later to the video to kind of like have the overview. But what Jason gave and what I gave are maybe only like six or seven different research strategies. We have over 33 in those videos that will help round out your knowledge, and not everything is Helium 10. Half of them just have to do with Seller Central. Liz says I'm a newbie to Helium 10. I want to know where to start. All right, the podcast is a great way to start. If you don't have your first product yet, product research is what you want to get into. I would go and go into Blackbox and look at hit the Learn button, Liz, and watch all the videos there. And definitely, if you're brand new to Amazon altogether, don't even go there first. Go into the Freedom Ticket, go into the Learning Hub. At the very top of your Helium 10 dashboard you'll see a button called Learning Hub or Freedom Ticket. Hit that and start going through the training there. That'll give you a good way to start. So, Jason, are you looking at what's more important that, a high search volume or not a high search volume, a trending up search volume, kind of like that protein K Cup, or a keyword that already has like 3000 searches? Compared to that one only had 700 and thus has a lot more sales. Which one is more important for you?

 

Jason:

It depends. So let's if we take protein. We actually released a protein coffee slim protein coffee back in December. That's because of the AI and the way Amazon runs broad and other campaigns, it started picking up on that search term. So it started delivering on Genius. Genius gets delivered on every new search term that gets in. It's trying to find relevancy just beyond what other one product you're carrying. So we developed slim protein coffee because we saw a high search increase on protein coffee in general, which was a trend off Amazon as well. So but I also have baked into our slim protein coffee high search terms such as instant coffee and some other ones. So it's kind of a mixture of both. I always like high search term keywords built into titles and bullet points because it's going to bake in some organic relevancy that it's gonna be cheaper for me to try and build long-term. That it is versus advertising on.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent. Does Amazon auto translate keywords from different languages? One of my organic ranked keywords is Spanish, but I never added to my listening Great question, and the answer is yes. So in America and different countries, it's different languages. In America, Spanish is the main second language that Amazon is on, and if you turn your Amazon browser into Spanish, it automatically translate your listening and then those keywords a lot of them you are already indexed for, and so sometimes, if it doesn't, I highly recommend looking for organic keywords that you're ranking for, and then what you might have to do is adjust your listing optimization, because the Amazon auto translator sometimes doesn't use the exact phrases, and so you might not be that relevant to the Amazon algorithm, even though you're indexed for it. So definitely look at what are the top Spanish keywords and then, if your translation is not good, talk to Amazon and see if you can get your translation updated with better keywords. Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the extra shot I had today, and thanks to everybody for joining us today. Hope you guys enjoyed this session. We'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye now. I'll see you guys next time.

 

Helium 10 Buzz 2/29/24: TikTok Shop On Google | Amazon Posts to Sponsored Brand Ads

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

TikTok Shop listings are surfacing on Google Shopping
https://www.modernretail.co/technology/tiktok-shop-listings-are-surfacing-on-google-shopping/

New Feature: Now advertisers can convert high-performing Posts into Sponsored Brand Ads.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7166461642057142272/

Chinese TikTok experts are teaching Americans how to sell
https://restofworld.org/2024/china-livestream-studios-train-tiktok-influencers-in-us/

Top Amazon aggregator Thrasio files for bankruptcy
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/28/top-amazon-aggregator-thrasio-files-for-bankruptcy.html

Monthly Fees May Be Coming to Etsy
https://www.ecommercebytes.com/2024/02/25/monthly-fees-may-be-coming-to-etsy/

The episode continues to buzz with discussions around the benefits of the Helium 10 Elite program, including expert training and exclusive networking events. Plus, don't miss out on the insider scoop about Helium 10's new feature enabling price adjustments directly from the Insights Dashboard. We also encourage our community of Spanish and German speakers to connect through upcoming networking calls, ensuring a global touch to our Amazon selling conversation. Tune in for these fascinating updates and more, as we provide sellers with the tools and knowledge to thrive in the ever-evolving world of online commerce.

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

• 01:10 - TikTok Shop On Google
• 02:47 - Amazon Posts > SB Ads
• 03:50 - TikTok Live Streaming
• 07:46 - Thrasio Bankrupt
• 09:23 - New Etsy Seller Fee?
• 10:10 - Join Helium 10 Elite
• 11:06 - Spanish Networking Calls
• 11:47 - German Networking Calls
• 12:00 - New Feature Alerts
• 15:04 - Pro Training Tip: Reverse-Engineer Your Competitor's PPC Strategy

► 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:

TikTok shop listings showing up in Google results. Amazon posts can be now made into sponsor brand ads. The most famous Amazon aggregator has filed for bankruptcy. These stories and more on this week's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown on all the news stories and goings on in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world and we also let you know what new tools that Helium 10 has released. And we also give you a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing For two weeks in a row now. Not too many articles, couple of big ones out there, a couple of interesting ones for sure. We're gonna hop right into it, but make sure to stay to the end. We got a really cool training tip from Shivali and we also have a pretty cool new feature update from Helium 10.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So let's go ahead and go into the first article here, and this is from Modern Retail and it's entitled TikTok Shop Listings are surfacing on Google Shopping, right? Have you seen that in Google? This article talks about how listings from TikTok Shop have begun to pop up in Google Shopping, especially results for beauty and skincare products. So, through Google searches for trendy beauty products like Nail Art or Dior Lip Oil, dup results now feature links that go directly to smaller sellers on TikTok Shop, and the actual TikTok team did confirm that this is something that TikTok is dabbling in. Now this, to me, was a little bit interesting because you know, like traditional keyword research tools, you know, like Helium 10 for Amazon, don't necessarily like, don't have as much oomph. Right For TikTok Shop because it relies on so much virality, right, TikTok? You know kind of like influencers are the ones who have like these viral posts and that's what sends tons of traffic to videos. You know it's not like oh, let me get to page one for a certain hashtag on TikTok, right For TikTok Shop. But this could be interesting Depending on how Google is indexing some of these products and how TikTok Shop is integrating. Now, all of a sudden, it could open up a new thing for keyword research on TikTok Shop so you can get some maybe outside traffic that don't come from another TikTok videos directly to your TikTok Shop. So pretty interesting stuff. It'll be definitely worth taking a look at in the future.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is actually not an article, but it was a post from our buddy, Jeff Cohen, from Amazon, and this was from his LinkedIn last week. Just in case you guys missed, it was from a few days ago, but I missed it the first couple of days that it came out. But you can now have high-performing Amazon Post which are free, as you guys know. You can now convert them into sponsored brand ads. All right. So right in the ads console in Post Manager, you can just take an Amazon post that's doing really well and make it a sponsored brand ad. Now, this hasn't been rolled out to everybody yet, so go ahead and check. Go into the Post Manager in your Seller Central ad console, click on the boost button if you see it, and then you're gonna be directed to the sponsored brand campaign builder to review the creative setting. So in his LinkedIn post that we'll link to below, you'll be able to see kind of like some graphics of how it might look. But that is gonna be interesting If you can turn your Amazon post into sponsored brand ads.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from restofworld.org I should say. Again about TikTok, and seems like I've been beating a dead horse for almost two years now about how US consumers haven't really adopted live shopping. Well, this article says Chinese TikTok experts are teaching Americans how to sell and it says, convinced, a live stream shopping boom in the West is inevitable. Entrepreneurs are sharing Chinese playbooks with aspiring US influencers. And there is just one kind of like tidbit here, guys, that blew me away. Listen to this quote right here In China, 25% of online sales in 2023 took place through live streams. Let that sink in, guys. 25% I mean, if you think about all of online sales in America, like the minor ones, you know, like Walmart and others is not even 25%, a lot, lot less. But out of every single thing that was sold online in China in 2023, again, let it sink in 25% were from live streams. Now, I don't think America will ever, ever get to that number absolutely not right. But I mean it would be kind of crazy if it even got up to like 5%. 10% might be asking for too much. If it gets up to 5%, that's gonna be, you know something, that's going to be pretty, I think, big, and that's what these people are making on.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So this article talks about how they've got these agencies that are training influencers on how to do like TikTok shop lives, perhaps some Amazon lives, et cetera. Here's one agency that has more than 10 streamers in the US. So these are kind of like streamer factories that they're pumping out and they're giving them the literal Chinese playbook. Like the documents they get is in Chinese and then it has English translation. Now one of these agencies said hey, on a regular day there's about 100 people watching simultaneous sales. This is even the agency. Just shows you how much it hasn't really taken off in America. The professionals can only get like 100 people watching a live stream live, but it says that some days the streams can attract over a thousand viewers at the same time.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, thinking about the cultural differences, of how different things work, you know one influencer said hey, I saw many Chinese live stream sellers screaming at the top of their lungs, counting down until a product is live to encourage rush buying. And this person said I don't think that's gonna work in the US. You know American customers don't like to be told what to do or just because somebody's yelling at them, right, but this influencer who has been doing lives here in America on TikTok shop. She says that she closed over 200 orders on her third day on the job, worth more than a hour with $11,000 worth of products in one afternoon. So again, it's not like completely, completely dead. It's just nothing compared to what's going on in China. But everybody keeps saying, hey, we expect this thing to take off in America sometime. So it's something that I think you know Amazon sellers, e-commerce sellers should be kind of paying attention to what's going on. You know, if we're selling on Amazon, amazon already has Amazon live. Walmart probably will come out with something if it kind of takes off, and then obviously it's a big part of TikTok shop. So do you have a plan ready to go for if live shopping starts taking off? I think it would be great because it's kind of something that's going to be net new. I think it's going to have a lot of impulse buying if it starts taking off and it's not like it's just going to take away from your sales that you already get during search. It's going to be like net new sales for Amazon sellers if this ever takes off.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of Amazon, you know some more sad news Going to. CNBC says top Amazon Aggregator Thrasio files for bankruptcy. Now, there wasn't too much information in this article. I don't understand the whole, you know bankruptcy thing. I know it's not good, but basically what it says here is that the company agreed with lenders to shave off about 495 million off of its debt loan. Doesn't take a bankruptcy specialist to understand. Half a billion dollars is a lot of money, and some creditors committed to provide it with up to 90 million dollars in fresh capital, which it said will go towards ongoing operations and enable to keep running brands as portfolio, so all the brands that it bought. You know it's not like, oh my goodness, they're all going to just run out of stock and go out of business. It still looks like it's going to keep going. But this is, like you know, for those of us who have been in the Amazon game for a few years. You know might be kind of. You know, for some of us maybe not a shock because we could see some things coming. But if somebody were to tell us three years ago or whenever Thrasio was at their peak, you know, hey, they're going to be bankrupt in a couple of years, like we, probably like no way. It seems like they've growing money on trees over there, right, but just the state of the world that we're in ice. There's still a lot of people who are buying and selling Amazon businesses. All right, the that model of buying and selling Amazon business is absolutely not dead. Make sure to check out a recent Kevin King podcast, amp and podcast, which talked about this this model still going strong.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Last article of the day is coming from e-commerce bites and for those of you, if you're like me and sell on Etsy Something real small it says monthly fees may be coming for Etsy sellers. I didn't realize there was no monthly fees, you know like. So I don't really think this is big. I mean, we're all used to it. You know we pay Walmart, right, we pay Amazon a monthly fee. I don't even know how much I pay Amazon right now. It's like what 30 bucks, 40 bucks, 50 bucks don't really care, because it Etsy sellers are kind of like scared that this is a fee might come. But if you're scared about $20 a month fee or $10 a month fee, you know you probably Shouldn't be selling on the platform, but still, hey, money is money. We got to count all our money. So this is something to watch out for. If you are an Etsy seller.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, a couple of things before we get into a really cool feature update I wanted to remind you of is. You know, a couple weeks ago, for the first time in over a year, helium 10 elite is open. So remember, with helium 10 elite, you can have one-on-one calls with me, one-on-one calls with Carrie and Shivali. Hop on private trains with Kevin King twice a month. You know one where he gives you the seven ninja hacks and brings on expert guests, and another would just him where you can literally Face-to-face, ask Kevin King anything. You want. A lot more perks, you know private networking, big events that we we do around the world. We just did one in Germany, we're gonna do one in Madrid, Spain, in a couple of months. So all of this for only $99 extra a month.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So if you're interested in more information about the helium 10 elite program, go to h10.me forward slash elite, h10.me forward slash elite, and Once you sign up for elite, make sure the first thing you do is go ahead and book a one-on-one call with me. I'd love to help you out with what you need. Now, if you speak other languages, we have some other networking calls coming up that are completely free, open to anybody. If you speak Spanish, we have our monthly networking zoom call coming up with Adriana, so make sure to sign up at h10.me/llamadaconadriana, and that's the link to go to that call, which is just gonna be in a couple of days. And if you speak in Deutsch, if you speak German, the one that you want to sign up for our monthly call happening this weekend is h10.me/elite-de.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, next up we have a new feature alert from Helium 10, pretty cool feature that a lot of people have been asking for. So you're in your Helium 10 account. You might see some insights from Insights Dashboard about your competitor has lowered their price, they've raised their price, competitors out of stock, competitors running a coupon. Your sales are going up, your inventory is going up, your inventory is going up. All these different things you can see inside of Helium 10's dashboard right, well, on some of these things, the action that you might want to take is you might wanna raise your price or lower your price that is appearing on Amazon, and sometimes you might want to go ahead and do that to a big group of products, like maybe you're selling leggings, like my buddy Yizhak in Israel. I mean, he's got hundreds and hundreds of SKUs. You know, some product lines have 100 SKUs with all the different colors and all the different sizes. When he wants to go change his price. It's like a very tedious task to do inside of Seller Central. Well, that's why I'm happy to introduce that on your Insights dashboard.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now you can go ahead and change the price directly from your dashboard. So what you do is you go down to your product table, make sure that you're on the SKU view and then you can go to like listing and you will see this column that says price. So first of all, you click this button and you'll be able to see the history of the price. But right directly here in Helium 10, you can go ahead and, one by one, enter a price. So if you watch Carrie's training last week, maybe you saw how to do tags in your dashboard, where maybe you give all of your coffin shelves a tag. That's what I did here. So I can click on coffin shelf. All of my coffin shelves appear automatically here. I can select everything and then I can hit this button edit price and then go ahead and put the price that I want, to put all of them at once and it's going to go ahead and update in Seller Central.

 

Bradley Sutton:

There's a lot of use cases for this. I would think that the bulk one is especially appealing, because that really is not easy to do inside of Seller Central and especially for those of you who've got a lot of variations. You just wanna say, hey, all 60 of these variations. I want the new price to be $12.97 or whatever. Instead of going one by one, do it with just a couple clicks of the button. Let us know what you think of this product. Would you like to see some other feature? Me personally, when I saw it, I was like, hey, I wanna be able to see, or be able to maybe make a sale price. I don't wanna lower my price too much, but I would like to be able to make a sale price with a beginning and end date. Other people have asked for coupons. I'm not sure if that's even available for helium tend to do, but if that's something that you want us to try and investigate, make sure to reach out to customer support and let them know what you think of this new tool, but give it a try.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next time you wanna change your price for one product or multi-products, go ahead and do it directly inside of helium tend without even having to go to Seller Central. So pretty cool update there, all right. Last up, we have got a really quick hitting tip from Shivali. So maybe you're examining some of your competitors and you wanna know what is their PPC strategy. How are they allocating their spend? Now, you might not be able to just hack into their account and see their seller central advertising console, right, but using Helium 10, there's a cool way that within seconds, you can pretty much see all of their strategy. Check it out in this video.

 

Shivali Patel:

Hi there, let's talk about how you can analyze your competitor's PPC strategy so you can figure out which keywords and phrases you want to go after. Theoretically, let's say, you found a good seller in your niche that's generating decent volume. What you could do is run a single search on Cerebro, as we've done here with this product, which is the Goer gift Woodcuff and Tray and then you could slide over to check out the keyword distribution. The keyword distribution tells us we have 646 paid terms for this ascent, of which, by hovering over the eye icon, we can see that 287 are for sponsored product placements, 41 are in highly rated spots and 318 are sponsored brand video. What's cool is we can filter for those match types. Let's say I wanted to check out which keywords or phrases is this ascent running sponsored brand videos on. I could go ahead and select that, tap out, click apply filters and you'll see that we have 318 filtered keywords right here. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Or let's say that instead of sponsored brand video, you are interested in just the regular PPC keywords and phrases. I could change out my match type to sponsored product, click apply and all of a sudden, the 287 placements for sponsored product are now visible. You could always further refine this search by inputting in something like a minimum of 200 for search volume and a sponsored filter of one to five. This is going to show us which keywords they seem to be concentrating their PPC spend on Applying just a couple more filters takes us from 287 filtered keywords down to a more feasible 22.

 

Shivali Patel:

Of course, as sellers, we wouldn't be bidding top of search unless those keywords are actually profitable. So now you can use this information to your own advantage. This contrasts to this other ascent we have here, where you can instantly see they're not running any paid ads. We have zero for all of these placements across the board. Now compare that to this last ascent, where we have 22 for paid search and, guys, anytime you see such few keywords underneath paid, then you're probably looking at an ascent that's not running any auto phrase or broad match campaigns and you can leverage this information. Especially if that ascent is in similar standing to your product, you can figure out whether that's something you want to duplicate or completely stay away from all this to say there is so much you can do with Cerebro. We have so many filters and I just showed you match type. Make sure that you go in and do this for your own products to figure out maybe how you want to change up your strategy or what are some new keywords and phrases you want to add. I'll see you next time.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, Thank you, Shivali, for that. That's actually pretty cool. Did you guys know that you can pretty much reverse engineer some of your Competitors Exact Strategy, especially those who aren't doing broad or phrase or auto campaigns? So make sure you guys are utilizing that. A lot of those features are available to any level of Helium 10. Well, that's it for this week's Weekly Buzz guys. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

#539 - Selling on Amazon Japan - All You Need To Know

As the landscape of Japanese e-commerce undergoes a seismic shift, we're fortunate to have e-commerce experts Nick Katz and Gary Huang join us again to unpack the transformation. It's a world where Amazon goes toe-to-toe over local stalwart Rakuten, a surprising twist given the resilience of Japan's physical storefronts during a pandemic that skipped a full lockdown. Their insights shed light on Rakuten's gamble to step away from their cornerstone points program, a move that has sellers keenly watching the horizon for its ripple effects.

Steering through the complexities of international logistics, this episode covers the strategic use of freight forwarding when entering the Japanese market, a journey our expert guests navigated firsthand. We dive into the benefits of Japan's proximity to China, the advantages of trade agreements with other Asian nations, and reminisce about the global hiccup caused by the Suez Canal crisis. These discussions are not just theoretical musings; they're actionable insights for bolstering your bottom line and carving out a niche in one of the world's most dynamic Amazon marketplaces.

Finally, we celebrate the cultural tapestry that is Japanese business ethos, examining the surprising competitive edge that international sellers can unleash with astute analytics and Amazon product reviews. These narratives of success and support—from local sellers to global players—culminate in an invitation to an upcoming event in Okinawa, promising to be an epicenter for networking amongst the entrepreneurial elite. It's here where the theoretical becomes tangible, and where the future of selling in Amazon Japan takes shape before our very eyes.

In episode 539 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Gary, and Nick discuss:

• 00:00 - Sell on Amazon Japan Expert Tips
• 07:47 - E-Commerce Changes in Amazon Japan
• 12:04 - Import Taxes and Duties Abroad 
• 14:25 - Freight Forwarding and Japan Business Opportunities
• 22:16 - Success Stories of Selling in Japan
• 29:37 - Selling in Niche Markets - Japan
• 33:49 - Leveraging Global Reviews for Success

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:
Today we've got two of the world's foremost experts on selling on the one Amazon marketplace that you probably aren't selling in, but you need to be Amazon Japan, where sellers are making more profit than all their other Amazon marketplaces. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. We know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/keywordtracker. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And it's the middle of the night almost middle of the night here, so I'm in my normal attire of what I wear every night here in my house, but the only people that I can go ahead and keep this on and not have to change back to work clothes when I do something at this hour of the day is the two guests here because they are actually in Japan right now. So we are, makes me feel right at home here with what I'm wearing. We have a back on the show, Nick and Gary. Welcome back, guys.

Nick:
Thank you.

Gary:
It's great to be back and for those of you guys that are listening, I can see Bradley. He has like a black and white sumo themed what they call you could tell or like a robe, but he wears it very well. I love the Japanese motif you got going on. It's great to see you.

Bradley Sutton:
Yes, thank you for that. Likewise I haven't seen Nick in a year. But, Gary, you know we saw each other. We had some nice Tonkatsu right there in Ginza a while back a few months ago with my favorite place to eat over there. So it was nice to see you there. But you know, for those who want to get the full backstory, go back guys to episode 426 was the first time Gary was on. Nick's been on before then as well. But 426 was from last year and we had a lot of updates on what's going on in Amazon Japan and since then there's been new things. So I wanted to, you know, invite you guys back. But I'm not saying this is the reason. But we were talking earlier about how my LA Dodgers was able to sign Ohtani and Yamamoto, my two favorite baseball players, both Japanese, but I'm looking on the 7 Figure Seller Japan Mastermind website at last year's event. Let me just show everybody this. All right, I'm not saying that the Dodgers have me to thank, but last year at this event I wore my Helium 10 Dodgers themed jersey and you can see me here in this picture. I'm explaining something. I'm like think about it, man Ohtani is going to come to the Dodgers. He's like oh, I'm not exactly sure, but I was telling him that the Dodgers are coming. Well, we're going to talk about your new event this year for sure. I just wanted to call that out, though. You know, dodgers, you know. Let me give you my address. My check should be in the mail. You have me to think I set the ground, I set the standard there last year early. Anyways, let's start with Nick. How many years, now total, have you been Japan? I know Gary's newer, but how many years do you have under your belt?

Nick:
I can't even count how many years now, but I came in 1995. So whatever it is from then?

Bradley Sutton:
1995. Yes, that's quite a while. Right after a few years, just after I moved out. Now You've been there so long. Just like you just said, the years kind of just bleed together. But if we were just to start off with one of the biggest changes in the e-commerce landscape in Japan in the last year, what would it be? This is maybe like the first kind of full year after COVID and dust is kind of settled. In America at least, there's a lot of the boom that was happening in e-commerce, I wouldn't say one crashing down. It's a steep decline to pre-COVID time. Something similar in Japan, or how do you view the landscape over there?

Nick:
Yeah, well, I mean, e-commerce is very, very strong here. It still is very, very strong. Japan, unlike a lot of other countries, has always traditionally had very strong brick and mortar retail. People do like going to stores, but I mean, Japan never had a full-on lockdown, so most of the stores were open for most of the time. There were small periods where they weren't open, but because we also do retail, we actually do distribution to stores. We've seen that they are really starting to cut back. So there has been a real shift to online and I've noticed, certainly in the last year. I hope no one from Rakuten is hearing this, but I think they're starting to feel a little bit of pain. They've made a few adjustments and I think there is definitely more of a swing towards Amazon over Rakuten. They are pretty much half and half for the section of the market, no, of the section of the market, so they've both got about 20%.

Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, no, I mean, I thought Rakuten was still way ahead.

Nick:
No, I think Amazon has now overtaken Rakuten. It's kind of hard to compare apples to apples, but it does look like Amazon has overtaken Rakuten and Rakuten have started to do some strange things cut back on their points program, which has always been their main strategy. That it was their strongest point the fact that you can collect points. Japanese people get Rakuten points in their lives, doing everything, and even my company has a Rakuten bank account. People have Rakuten. They have Rakuten for everything for travel, for insurance, for everything and it's to get points. But Rakuten started to cut back on those points. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think that is going to encourage more people to move over. So that's kind of something that I'm seeing personally, all the Rakuten is still a very, very good marketplace here.

Bradley Sutton:
All right, interesting. Now, going back to Gary, let's take a step back from e-commerce. This is only what is it? Second, third year in Japan for you?

Gary:
Third year in Japan, one year in Tokyo.

Bradley Sutton:
Third year in Japan.

Gary:
Yeah, two and a half or two years in Okinawa.

Bradley Sutton:
How has your family settled in now? Japanese speaking, culture, food. Is it home now or still feels a little bit foreign?

Gary:
Well, I wish my Japanese was better. I mean, my son is 5, he's in pre-kindergarten. I'm pretty sure his Japanese is going to surpass mine very soon. But yeah, we're acclimating very well and we actually just got back from a trip from Hokkaido, which is in the north, really nice skiing. My wife had, they have this drift ice area in the northern part of Hokkaido like literally the ocean is like frozen, and my wife had that on her bucket list for many years and we were able to do that. So, yeah, very fortunate to be here and, yeah, very happy.

Bradley Sutton:
That's awesome. Yeah, I used to live right south of there, in Aomori, for about a year and a half. Not quite as cold as Hokkaido, the oceans didn't get frozen over there but it was cold, I didn't mind that. I went back last year. Yeah, I went back to Aomori for the first time in like 20 years no, 25 years and so it was nice to go out there. My son actually went to Hokkaido. My son took his very first trip without his parents. He was friends and he actually went to Hokkaido before me. Now, what about e-commerce for you? Like, what have you noticed on your side that has changed? Maybe specifically more to Amazon Japan for your network of sellers there in the community?

Gary:
Selling on Amazon. Amazon is still very strong. We can get deliveries very quickly. But, for example, when we went up to Hokkaido, rather than buying like a sled and like lugging it from Tokyo to Hokkaido, we just ordered off Amazon and shipped it to the hotel and you know my son was thrilled. He was ready to go, and so Amazon has that coverage. But one of the biggest changes for e-commerce sellers foreign sellers especially importing into Japan is there was a new import law change October of 2023. So previously you could use what they call a importer of record or IOR. I mean, you're not in Japan. If, let's say, you're a US seller with the LLC, previously you could use an IOR, a company that's importer of record to represent you to import the products. But now they changed the law because it seems the government is getting smarter when it comes to all of these e-commerce sellers. So now you have to go through ACP. I think that stands for Attorney of Customs Process. I might be getting the verbiage mixed up, but basically it's a different scheme and you may have to pay more in the taxes because you will be billed on the total selling cost. So that's the Amazon cost. So that's one of the big changes that we're seeing so far.

Bradley Sutton:
So if somebody was already selling Japan, they don't need to convert to that. They can keep going with their importer of record. Or do they need now? They needed, you know, even if they already have tenure there, they got to switch to this new thing.

Nick:
Yeah, so it's actually import base, so it's the time that you import. So if you're importing after October 1st, in theory you can't use IOR. I should probably stress the fact that this is all in theory. I can tell you that there are sellers who are still importing using Chinese freight forwarders, who are getting the goods into totally fine, but in theory there is no more IOR and so you have to use this. As Gary was mentioning ACP, which, although it's not so, the tax and duty is based on the selling price, which doesn't mean it's not exactly on the selling price. You're allowed to remove the cost, like Amazon fees and certain things, but the whole concept is that who is the purchaser of the goods. So if you're, if you're not a domestic company, if you're an international seller that don't have a registered business in Japan, then the goods being sent to Japan, going to Amazon, going to the customer the customer is the person purchasing the goods, so for tax and duty should be based on what they're paying, as opposed to, for example, for my company. We're based in Japan, so we actually do purchase the goods. We can show a paper trail back to the supplier. We are the purchaser, so we only pay tax and duty and what we buy it for and then we set it on Amazon. So it's just the way that the import office is just customs office is kind of interpreting. It's all a bit gray, to be honest, but that's kind of how they're interpreting it. The actual final buyer online is the kind of original purchaser of the goods. Therefore, tax and duty should be based off whatever they are paying.

Bradley Sutton:
And then what? So is the customer paying for that then?

Nick:
No, so the customer isn't paying it. So, but that is what they are using. So it's actually the ACP, or so you have to pay. So your company pays, so the customer isn't paying that, but that's what they're basing off and that's their reasoning for it. They are essentially, they're being almost regarded as the importer, which is obviously just ridiculous.

Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, but it's not something like in Europe, where VAT is applied to what the customer's paying at the time of purchase and then the. I believe that I don't even sell in Europe, so I believe the seller has to remit that or Amazon keeps it, but it's like that price has to include that and so it's kind of like a surcharge. But how much are we talking about, like for somebody like me? I'm selling, let's say I sell in Japan and I'm importing. Like are my duties and all these taxes? Is it comparable to you know what I'm doing by importing from China to US and what I have to pay for customs? Or is it more? Is it less?

Nick:
Well, it kind of depends on a few different things. Obviously depends on the categories and exactly what the products are, you have to remember. So in Japan the consumption tax is a lot lower than, for example, Europe. You mentioned Europe. So the tax is 10% in Japan, or it's 8% if it's, for example, food or drink. So, but because they base it on the price that you're selling as opposed to the price that you are actually purchasing the goods, for at that point it will be a bit higher. But there are. I say there are lots of ways actually around this and I don't know if Gary is going to mention it. There are a lot of countries that have agreements where you don't actually have to pay duty at all, for example. But it does kind of make things smoother and easier if it's a Japanese business doing the import as opposed to an international business. And one of the main ways around it is that you get a company in Japan to do the import for you and that kind of covers all of the problems. So all the large kind of import companies. That's what they're doing now. They're essentially importing themselves, paying the supplier, and then you only pay the tax and duty on basically the cost of goods, so it will become a lot cheaper. So you kind of have like a bit of a middleman in there.

Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, makes sense. Now this question is for either of you. So at what point am I having to have my ducks in a row for this like am I? Do I need that already when I apply to sell in Japan? You know, I just go into my US, or if I'm a European seller, I go into my European seller central and apply to sell in Japan. Are they already asking me for this? You know ACP preview, the artist formerly known as IOR, or is that just something I need to take care of by the time?

Nick:
It's something you need to take care of yourself. Amazon is not involved in this whatsoever. This is completely

Bradley Sutton:
No. But are they asking me? for it, for like proof that I have that. Just to apply the account?

Nick:
No. So basically, when you want to send goods to Japan, you just speak to your freight forwarder, whoever you use, and the freight forwarder will give you all the information and sort it out for you. It's not something that you really need to do yourself. The freight forwarder will do that. So the freight forwarder is traditionally done IOR. A lot of the Chinese freight forwarders, as I said, are still doing it and they seem to be getting the goods in quite fine. But there's something that you will do through your freight forwarder so whoever you use and to ship the goods, that. So it's not something you specifically need to kind of go out and do yourself in most circumstances.

Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, all right, makes sense. That's good, like I thought it was something I had to, like, you know, find and or maybe you know, hire a company to handle it. But that's good to know that. You're like me. For example, when I import from from China to US, I actually don't worry about anything. Yes, there are obviously customs, yes, there's some kind of certification, but actually my sourcing agent, who's also my freight forwarder, she handles all that for me. I'm like, all right, you know apply, you know tell me what you need from me, but you take care of everything. That's nice to know that there's something like that, where you know I don't have to go searching in the Japanese yellow pages for people on my own, so that's good to know.

Nick:
Yeah, I mean, if it's all set up, you don't? There isn't any extra work that needs to be done by you.

Bradley Sutton:
Now, Gary, you know like speaking, you know we're talking about freight forwarding. You had mentioned something interesting. You know, in recent months, obviously many Sellers in Europe were affected and actually worldwide about. You know what was going on with the pirates of the Caribbean, there in the Suez Canal, like you know, the Red Sea, you know like that, that affected shipping prices worldwide because you know like ships couldn't go there. You know they didn't want to get shot down and things, and then obviously you know there are shipping delays and that increases prices. You know people felt it here in the States, people felt it in Europe, but you were saying kind of in Japan it was whatever, right, because it's so, so close.

Gary:
Yeah, I mean the Suez Canal Crisis. It's really impacting ocean freight all over the world, like going from like 2000 something dollars or containers, who you know, over 5,000 and even more right, even if you're not, by passing through Suez canal, because it has a ripple effect, because it's taking longer for the ships to go around, like South of Africa, so it adds like two additional weeks and most people don't realize. You have to factor in for the containers as well, because the containers are used, so you have to have more empty containers to accommodate that. But if you look at the map, you know Japan is China's neighbor, right? So I mean a container from China to Japan can arrive in, you know, like a week, so it's really fast, I mean compared to China, USA, you know 30 to 45 days or even more right, so you can definitely save a lot of time shipping if you're selling in Amazon, Japan shipping from China. And also you can save a lot of money as well because distance wise is very close, I mean literally, I mean their neighbors, right, so you will save a lot of money as well. And then in terms of sellers, you know we were talking to with, you know, Brandon Young Last year and that was kind of like a light bulb moment for him, because if you can reduce the lead time you know from when the factory ships out the good until you land it, you know from you don't have to keep so much inventory, right? So rather than buying up like three, four months of the inventory just staying stock, you could cut that to, let's say, a month or two months inventory so that for the seller, that frees up your cash flow as well. If you were to sell in Japan, from China, Japan, given the shorter lead times. That's why we feel like there's, at least you know, this one big X factor for sellers. You know it would be an advantage to sell into Japan. If you're sourcing from China and actually not only China, because you know, as they could quickly touch upon just a few minutes ago. If you're sourcing from other countries in Asia, there's actually three trade agreements between India and Japan, Vietnam in Japan and Thailand in Japan. So it depends on your exact product, but your product could come in if it's made in India. If you're exporting Japan, if you land duty free right, I mean, it could be zero. So there's and obviously there's no trade war going on between you know, China, Japan. So there's no Trump tariffs and you could significantly reduce your landing cost and obviously that would help every seller, you know profit margins right if you're able to do that. So you know there's a lot of these type of logistical advantages that Japan has. Then not a lot of sellers are aware of, and you know that would it could. I mean you could land your product a lot cheaper, a lot faster. You know if your cash flow selling in Japan compared to other countries. So we feel like that's one big advantage.

Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, I really need to get off my butt and do it. You know, like I've been saying I would, but I just been so busy at Helium 10 that I haven't been able to expand any of my Amazon business almost like this week. I'm finally launching like three products for the first time in probably a year and a half. But um, but yeah, I need to get.

Gary:
Can we do a Project X Japan?

Bradley Sutton:
We should do that, yeah

Gary:
We should do a project here first.

Bradley Sutton:
Yeah, Project X will be doing. All right, I like it, we'll do it. Anime with Japanese animation. We'll get Wit studios to do it for us yeah. Speaking of Japan and Japan. So we'll get back to the Amazon strategy. But let's talk a little bit about the 7 Figure Seller Japan Mastermind. I attended last year. I'm probably going to attend this year. I'm not going like it in the official capacity. I think I like it so much I think I'm going to pay my own way, you know, because we have a certain budget for events at Helium 10 and then, you know, usually they rotate things, or one year we'll do, you know, like last year we did Prague European one, this year we're not doing that one, in the next year we might do it again or something, but this one wasn't on the list for our travel budget. But you know I'm a points hacker, so, like I'm sure I could, you know, probably pay for a flight myself or make it not so much. And it's going to be in a place that I have been in Japan 40 times, lived in Japan, have never, ever been, and that's Okinawa. So, Gary, was it your decision to do it in Okinawa, since you had lived there before, or how did you decide that you're going to do this event in Okinawa?

Gary:
Yeah, well, Okinawa I mean, for those that don't know, it's known as the Hawaii of Japan. So there's beautiful beaches, it's, you know, subtropical climate, and we were able to secure a fantastic resort hotel, that Hilton in Okinawa. So literally it's on the beach. I wanted to do it in Okinawa, and I was talking with Nick as well, because it's Japan, but it's a nice change of pace as well. So it's kind of like the Hawaii of Japan and then logistically, there's, you know, the airport. You can arrive there pretty conveniently at Naha Airport and basically everyone's going to be there at the same place. You know we have 8 figure sellers, 7 figure Japan sellers. We have, like, all these different experts. You know, every step of the way, right from compliance to shipping, localization etc. But yeah, and I kind of wanted to to give back to Okinawa as well, because during COVID I mean, some of you guys know my family story. We weren't able to because we were living in Shanghai before. You know, I'm American and I couldn't go back to Shanghai, even though my wife is Chinese. I lived there 11 years, I paid all my taxes. I couldn't go back because they closed the border and my visa had expired. But Okinawa, you know they allowed us to stay on a temporary tourist visa for two and a half years. So Okinawa also is like the poorest prefecture in Japan and they really suffered a lot during COVID. So I'm just happy that you know people can come visit and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do in Okinawa, to kind of get back as well.

Bradley Sutton:
Alright, yeah, I'm a history buff, I'm a travel buff, so, alright, guys, you heard it here first. Like I'm committing that I'm going to go, you know so, April 8th to 10th. If you guys want to join, like, I have a forwarding website here that make it easier. Remember, just go to h10.me/japan and that'll bring you to sign up and there will be, you know, a lot of great speakers talking about local. You know selling in Japan, strategies and, while I was there last year, you know there was a couple interesting success stories. I saw one I forgot his name, but one influencer who was doing 7 figures in Japan. I forgot his name, but, Nick, maybe you can give us some other success stories, maybe of either local Japanese sellers or maybe somebody from a foreign marketplace foreign to Japan. You know Europe or USA getting started in Japan and being successful? Any stories you can relate.

Nick:
So one of our clients is an international brand, they're an American registered company and last year they cleared 7 figures and we're definitely looking to do a lot more this year and that's in two years. The sales currently are, so they're actually doing very, very well.

Bradley Sutton:
Seven figures in US dollars, we're talking. Seven figures in Japanese Yen is not too much, but you're saying, you're saying US dollars, right.

Nick:
No, we're doing 7 figures in Yen a month now. So, no, yeah, they're doing very, very well in America. They sell in Europe and they sell in Canada, but the Japanese sales are now almost comparable to the US sales, but the profit margins are a lot higher.

Bradley Sutton:
That was about to be my second question.

Nick:
Yeah, because you know things like the PPC is a hell of a lot cheaper. The ACoS for the account is about, I think it's about 8, 9 percent now. The TACoS is about 3 or 4 percent and it's the kind of figures you can't really get in the US. So, actually in theory you could sell a lot less in Japan and still end up with the same kind of profit as you could in the US. But obviously, if you, if you're getting sales close to the US, you're probably going to have much, much higher margins. Japan really is cheaper. It's a cheaper tax as well. If you are off the threshold to pay tax. But if you're under 10 million Yen, which is probably about 60-70,000 US, if you're under that in sales, you don't have to pay consumption tax. There is no tax. So anybody like me selling in Europe who gets absolutely lost by the tax authorities there you know paying 19, 20, 21, 23 percent in some of the some of the regions in Europe, you could be selling, you know, 50-60,000 US in Japan and not have to pay any consumption tax whatsoever. So there are definite advantages to selling in Japan.

Bradley Sutton:
Another advantage that I've seen is the kind of Amazon seller culture is a little bit different. So, for example, the Chinese sellers and the foreign sellers there they're used to. You know they're using a lot of Chinese tools. They're using Helium 10, you know to be able to do their keyword research. But one thing I noticed, you know at least last year or the year before, was a lot of the Japanese-based sellers, even some of the bigger ones, it's like not in their business culture to really use like tools, like they're not using Helium 10. They're not using the Chinese tools and so sometimes you can go in there and like you might have these insights about keywords. You know running Cerebro, you know they wouldn't have any idea what reverse ASIN means and you've got keywords that you can put in your listing that they might not even know because they're just maybe relying on PPC to find their keywords. Is that still kind of like the case where you know tool usage is not widespread amongst the local Japanese selling community?

Nick:
Yeah, definitely. I think it comes from the fact that most of the sellers, most of the largest sellers, were originally on Rakuten and Rakuten there aren't really as many kind of tools available, so they just haven't really kind of built up the systems and kind of the processes to handle that kind of data. So no, I don't think they are using it. Obviously the Chinese sellers are, but the local sellers don't think are anywhere near as much.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, that's definitely what I've noticed. Now, Gary, back to you. You know you've probably heard a lot of excuses. You know I just gave you an excuse of I don't have any time, you know, to do it, but what are some of the myths or excuses that you hear about what people think? Maybe it's just a conception of how selling in Japan is, or obstacles that really aren't there. What are some things that maybe you can debunk for those who might be timid to dip their feet into the Japanese waters over there?

Gary:
Yeah, I think one of the biggest ones is language, because obviously Japanese language is very different and you know I don't really speak Japanese and you know I figured out how to sell in Japan because you really you don't need to actually know Japanese to sell in Japan. I mean, obviously it helps, but the fact that the number 1 Amazon Seller Central Japan is all in English, so literally, if you know how to sell in the US or Europe, you instantly can sell in Japan. And number 2, in terms of the keyword research obviously we have tools like Helium 10 so sellers can get smart. They're already familiar with how to do reverse ASIN searches and you know all that good stuff. You can do the same thing in Japan. And number three now we have tools like AI, ChatGPT and the translation feature. I mean, it's like miles ahead of Google translate, like you know what we're using just two years ago. So I'm able to use ChatGPT to really get smart and even dissect some of the Japanese competitors listings to extract keywords to better understand that. So I feel like you know that's one big myth about Japan and I feel at the same time, you know like all of these obstacles. You know, talking about culture, talking about language. You know, I kind of. You know I like that book, The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Like I don't know if you guys read that book, it's kind of like a stoicism book. But like these obstacles actually, if you look at it from the flip side, right, a lot of people are intimidated by Japan. But if the fact that you learn how to do this I mean, if you want to come to our conference, we'll literally guide you through it. You can leave no stone unturned; these obstacles actually become your moat, right, they're like a barrier against your competition, that they're intimidated by it. So I feel you know, for the certain seller that is motivated to do this especially, I mean this selling in Japan is really good, for sellers who are already selling in the US or already selling in EU. They have skews, let's say, with like 700 reviews, 1000 reviews. Why? Because you can actually carry over those reviews from Amazon US to Amazon Japan. So that way when you launch on day one, you don't launch with zero reviews, you launch with 700 reviews and like the review moat, I mean the review, like the average review is a lot lower, like review score is a lot lower in Japan as well. So I mean,Japan is the fourth biggest market, but it still seems like a lot of people are either too intimidated or, you know, they don't know about it. So I'm really trying to help sellers, and you know, Nick as well, right, we're trying to help sellers better, you know, take advantage of this opportunity, even though it's 2024, you know, like, what Nick said before, you know Japan is the niche, right? I mean, we're all talking about the riches are in the niches, I mean in Japan, like the best selling thick yoga mats, like I actually did. Like a comparison, in the US, the best selling thick yoga mat has 4.6 stars and has 75,000 reviews, so it's way too saturated, right? But in Japan, the best selling thick yoga mat only had 3.9 stars and only 370 reviews, right? So you think about it. I mean, which one would you rather compete against, right? The yoga mat with 4.6 stars, 75,000 reviews, or Japan, right? And if you're already selling the US, if you have a thousand reviews, you can actually carry them over to Japan and then you can be like, you know, the king right from day one. So there's all of these advantages that sellers can have if they know how to do this. Just sounds in Japan.

Bradley Sutton:
What else that we haven't talked about yet are people going to be able to learn about at the conference in April?

Gary:
I think something that's new that we talked about is Rakuten, because everyone knows Amazon, right, but Rakuten, like what Nick said, they're literally neck and neck with Amazon. So we're going to bring in a speaker to talk about how to sell on Rakuten and this way we can give the sellers, you know, a balanced perspective, right, Amazon and Rakuten. We didn't have this last year, so this way we want to give sellers more information, because certain products may sell better on Amazon or on Rakuten, so this way you can have more perspective there. And then we're also talking about how to get into offline retail in Japan as well, so we're going to have some content there as well. So I mean, if you're a seller, if you're going to make the investment to import your products into Japan, it kind of makes sense to maximize the different options that you have, right? So, beyond Amazon, Rakuten, getting into physical retail stores, and then we're also going to talk about external marketing strategies. There's social media, and you know Nick is really good at this, like using Japan social media platforms. eI think this is information You're not going to get anywhere else and you know we share, like real examples from real sellers. You know what they're doing, that you can take away, you can imitate. So, yeah, I think these are all great opportunities, and also AI as well. I mean AI is like super prevalent now you know Japan is trying to like push AI a lot as well because you know, with like the labor costs and you know Japan has kind of like fallen behind compared to the rest of the world. Right, but they're looking to amplify AI. So we're trying to help sellers use AI to scale your business in Japan, even if you don't speak the language.

Bradley Sutton:
All right. So again, guys, if you didn't write down that address, how can you get more information on this conference, h10.me/japan. Nick, maybe any last words about selling Japan that you think foreign sellers need to know about the market, good or bad?

Nick:
So I think one of the main things that people should really understand is that about half of the market in Amazon, Amazon Japan is made up of Chinese sellers. So, although you know we have these kind of podcasts and Gary is explaining to people about the fact that Amazon Japan is a very good marketplace, a lot of people who sell in Europe or the US, they might think about it, they might consider it. The Chinese they know. They know just how good it is because they know there is very little competition, there's very little branding, so they can ship products out to Japan and sell. They don't need to have very many reviews. If you are a brand that already has. Sorry. If you are a seller who already has a brand and you've already got reviews on your products, all you need to do is list them in Japan. Global review thinking has been a thing for probably about three years now. You can start in Japan with more reviews than all the other sellers combined. You don't even need to have very many, even if you've got 500, that might be more than all the people in the top 50. And so it's so much easier to launch in a marketplace where your main competition are Chinese, non-face brands. They aren't even brands, they aren't even brand registered, whereas you are a brand, you look good, you've got the assets, you've got the images, you've got the videos are more importantly, the most important thing you have the reviews. You are starting with more reviews than anybody else. I mean there isn't any other way, any other better way to sell. You'll have cheaper conversions, you'll have cheaper PPC than everybody else and I think that's probably the main thing.

Bradley Sutton:
Awesome, all right guys. Well, if you're convinced already, well, hurry up and sign up for selling in Japan, and you could reach out to Nick and Gary for help from their network or attend in person the event and meet a lot of these people who can help you in person while enjoying the Hawaii of Japan. So I look forward to seeing you guys in Okinawa and month or so now, and it'll be great to see you there and hope to see some listeners there as well, so look forward to it.

#538 - The Path To Half A Billion Dollars Annually - Solo Stove

Listen in as Alvaro Lopez from Solo Stove shares this brand’s incredible entrepreneurial journey that began with two brothers with a vision and has since flourished into a significant role in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce landscape. Our conversation paints a picture of how his academic pursuits in international studies set the stage for a career that expertly intersects with the Amazon-selling industry. We also unravel the story behind Solo Stove's creation by two brothers who dared to dream beyond the confines of their day jobs, skillfully navigating the supply chain from China to North America to deliver a product beloved by outdoor enthusiasts.

Join us as we dissect the intricate details of brand strategy and e-commerce optimization for Amazon and Walmart. From the leap of establishing a direct-to-consumer channel to strategic maneuvers post-IPO, our discussion with a global director of marketplaces offers many insights. We dive into the crucial role of consumer obsession and mastery over logistics, and we share invaluable tactics for brand defense on platforms like Amazon. The importance of rich content and keyword optimization to cut through the noise of a saturated marketplace is laid bare, providing a roadmap for e-commerce success.

Wrapping up, our chat transitions from the tantalizing secrets of Peruvian chicken to strategic e-commerce maneuvers. We highlight the essential role of high-quality ingredients and cultural heritage in culinary success before shifting to the nuances of effective copywriting and the power of tools like Helium 10's Cerebro tool. Alvaro emphasizes the significance of localization in global branding and imparts wisdom on the 'action over perfection' philosophy that has fueled the growth of many successful brands. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to navigate the complex yet rewarding waters of e-commerce with agility and foresight.

In episode 538 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Franco discuss:

• 00:00 - Strategies for Solo Stove's E-commerce Success 
• 07:58 - Solo Stove's Brand Defense Strategy In Amazon
• 09:50 - E-Commerce Brand Strategy and Optimization
• 12:05 - Strategies for Brand Protection
• 15:01 - Emotional Branding in Marketplace Selling
• 18:56 - Marketplace Performance Analysis and Expansion
• 20:21 - Expanding Sales Channels and Branding Strategies
• 25:57 - Peruvian Chicken's Secret & Other E-Commerce Strategies

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Transcript

 

Bradley Sutton:

You've probably heard of Solo Stove, a company that does almost half a billion dollars annually and does ads with people like Snoop Dogg and more. Now, today we're going to talk to one of the heads of their Amazon business to see what strategies that any Helium 10 user has access to that help them increase to this level. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

 

Kevin King:

Hey, what's up everybody? Kevin King here. You know, one of the number one questions I get is how can you connect to me? How can I, Kevin, get some advice or speak with you or learn more from you? The best way is with Helium 10 Elite. If you go to h10.me/elite, you can get all the information and sign up for Helium 10 Elite. Every month, I lead advanced training where I do Seven Ninja Hacks. We also have live masterminds and every single week, one of those weeks I jump on for a couple hours and we talk shop, we talk business, do in-person events. Helium 10 Elite is where you want to be. It's only $99 extra on your Helium 10 membership. It's h10.me/elite. Go check it out and I hope to see you there.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And again I am here on the other side of the world, here in Frankfurt, Germany, and got to link up with somebody I've known virtually for a while but now got to meet in person Alvaro: from Solo Stove. Alvaro, how's it going?

 

Alvaro:

Good, Brad, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, your accent is not a typical Swiss accent. I know you live in Switzerland. Where, so where were you born and raised? Let's talk about you, the person first of all.

 

Alvaro:

So I'm originally from Lima, Peru, my parents, but I grew up in Washington DC, which is why you hear the accent. So just outside of DC, you know, finished secondary school, started my undergrad in Utah and took a two-year break. During that undergrad, moved around Mexico, different parts of the states for an LDS mission at the time, and then, right after I got back and got into my undergrad, moved to Spain. That's where I met my wife, who's Swiss, German, and that's what really brought us to Southern Germany. This is why you're hearing American accent.

 

Bradley Sutton:

There you go. So how long have you been in Europe then?

 

 Alvaro:

That was in 2014. So it's been. It's crazy to think it's been a decade. Yeah, but it's been a decade, a decade exactly this month.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, where did you go to University?

 

Alvaro:

Utah State.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Utah State. Yeah, aggies, oh, I got it. Oh, yes, man I always try to like test myself.

 

Alvaro:

Right, it's like randomly in a very cold part of Utah the coldest part of Utah right on the border with Idaho but it's a pretty big undergrad campus, about 25,000 students, so don't keep me honest, but the international programs are amazing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What do you study when you're there?

 

Alvaro:

I study International Studies. I'm really an honor trajectory to work for the State Department at the time, and I had already met my wife prior to finishing my undergrad, and so when I finished a foreign service exam right after my undergrad, she had got a gig in Basel. She works in the biotech pharmacy industry and Basel is mostly known for the pharma industry, and I took a job at the time in e-com through some friends in my network, and the rest is history, dude.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, what was? So when did you get into e-com?

 

Alvaro:

2016.

 

Bradley Sutton:

2016? So what? What part of e-com was that? Was that Amazon, or was that?

 

Alvaro:

Specifically, I was working through an agency at the time that was helping North American brands expand on Amazon generally, and I was a first European hire at the time to bring brands into Europe, and that's really we were able to successfully scale certain clients and from there moved around through other European companies, brought me into Luxembourg. I've worked back in between Germany and Switzerland for a few years and it's so now for almost four years. Great as a thing, yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so that's Alvaro's background. Let's talk about Solo stuff. A lot of this is that household name. I've had all kinds of cool companies like. I just interviewed somebody from Lego here now. We got Solo, so yeah for those who don't know about Solo. So what's the background of Solo? So the company?

 

Alvaro:

Yeah, so you know, Solo stuff is a business. Of course we're in the consumer product goods industry but, like our whole goal as a brand and as a business is to help our customers connect with their loved ones and connect with the outdoors. So I'll kind of get back to that later if we go in detail. But the organization itself, two brothers founded the brand in 2010, as you see my t-shirt here I'm like repping well the company and really what they were looking. They were both entrepreneurs. They're both Chinese, Canadian origin, so both very familiar with the supply chain aspects in China, but, of course, going up in Canada, so many opportunities in terms of producing things in China and bringing it over with healthy profits in the Western market. So these two brothers were just looking for ways to find freedom from their day-to-day jobs. We're both were working at the time some pretty strenuous jobs. So they found a space and so I'm giving a lot of context. I think it's important to understand.

 

Alvaro:

As they were iterating different product lines, they created this ingenious. What was this mini, now known as the light? But it was the original, just only Solo Stove and it was really a camp stove designed to be able to light a little camp stove within 90 seconds from twigs to a burning fire that you could cook with, with just the stainless steel concept, and so that same design and engineering is ultimately what ended up being optimized into grow I almost spoke German there close into bigger camp stoves from the light. And then, back in 2018, we ran a kick starter that introduced the bonfire range, and that's really what helped accelerate our growth and our momentum as a brand. But originally started from two brothers wanting to just have freedom in their lives, to create products that create good moments that leads to lasting memories. And now here we are as a publicly traded business.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Public company having Snoop Dogg. Maybe some of you guys saw the ad campaign like I'm going smokeless.

 

Alvaro:

You did go smokeless. Yes.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So that's, that's pretty cool. Now, you're a publicly traded company. I know like I think you guys had published like in 2022. You've done over like 400 million across all platforms. Were you up last year, down last year, 2023?

 

Alvaro:

Yeah, so from a marketplace perspective, we were up, which you felt really grateful. Obviously, last year, 2023 was really interesting year. We’re kind of pretty much all brands in our sector are reconciling like post pandemic trends. So as a business, overall we were pretty flat, healthy, cash wise and profit wise, very strong marketplace and international saw tremendous growth, which we can talk about this in detail. But I view our partnership with Helium 10 as a core variable to that consistent performance. I'm really helping us understand where the market at scale really is and how we can continue to take part of that market share that we have and grow it. So, from a marketplace perspective, amazon specifically USA was up in Amazon global was up significantly year-over-year.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What percentage? You know what once you get to a certain level. This is similar to what I talked about, Silas, who formerly from Lego is, is like what percentage is from brand search? And then what percentage would you say is just coming from people typing in you know, smokeless Barbecue pit or something? Random keywords.

 

Alvaro:

It's a great question and actually you know it ties directly into what we can do within Helium 10 and tech stack. You guys simplify, but from what we've seen, both within the search query performance on brand analytics and seller central, and from the believe it's Frank and center said, able to remind me where we can find a search volume that I don't yep, yep, we see that the Solo Stove branded searches is almost three times bigger than smokeless fire pit. Wow, which is wow, which is unique, because there's not a lot of brands that can pretty much be synonymous to an entire market. I mean, yeah, of course. Yeah, Lego is.

 

Bradley Sutton:

One of the only examples where it's like I don't know what you would skate toy bricks right.

 

Alvaro:

Kleenex, I guess. So we've been really grateful that we can drive that. Obviously, in the US, Germany, Canada, UK, Amazon is definitely if not the biggest, one of the biggest search engine platforms for consumers looking for a product or looking into a product. So, naturally, the way we have our omni channel sales channels, I should say set up, we leverage Amazon as both, of course, a place where we can drive tremendous growth and profit, but also a place where we need to defend the brand. So I think from a percentage perspective, all over half of our sales come from branded search, which is really a strong attribution to our entire brand and marketing team and, of course, product development team. We can go into detail in this podcast, however you wish, but for us, a marketplace that's really critical is how are we defending the brand, how are we displaying the brand, how's our content, what's that consumer experience like and how are we defending the traffic that's looking for us so we're not losing them in the funnel? It's a critical component of our strategy.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. I definitely want to get into some specific strategies, but one just general question I'm curious about is from what I understand, Solo Stove in the States has been kind of like a household name for a while. You're a little bit newer here in Europe. What was your expansion strategy? Like, did Amazon play a big role in trying to get your brand out here, or was it a lot of just traditional marketing?

 

Alvaro:

Yes, so we officially. So. I was actually the first European hire fun fact for Solo Stove back in very end of 2020, going into 2021. Originally brought on as a director of marketplaces globally. First for Solo, this was pre acquisition of other brands, pre IPO, so then took that role as we acquire new brands right shout out to Oro, Kayak, Iel, Chubby Shorts. So it was really really interesting experience. And then that fall 2021 is when we launched direct to consumer.

 

Alvaro:

Now, we had a little bit of a head start. We had some great distribution partners, some that we still work with very closely with today, that we had some organic search and so really, from the circumstance in the car that we were playing, that really helped us define, specifically in Europe, the way we're going to market is like where to put our focus in terms of marketing spend and our focus in terms of channels, like where we're actually going to sell. So we immediately noticed that in Europe specifically Northern Europe to be most specific, right between the UK, Nordics, Benelux, the Dach region, right Germany, Austria, Switzerland we knew that would be our focus. So that definitely helped us define where our headquarter would be, which is today in Rotterdam. That was extremely critical. Make sure we staff that effectively.

 

Alvaro:

For us, consumer obsession is our fundamental. We want to make sure customers have a great experience and that logistically which we own our distribution out of Rotterdam we own all of our logistics. That's an extremely critical component. So, in terms of, like, the actual launch right, the setup is critical. Understanding which market we're going to play in.

 

Alvaro:

I mean, these were things that were important to set up, but once actually going live to market, we're a digitally native brand. So when we went live to market, it was an omnichannel mix digitally, meaning that we focused, hyper focused on our website and across Amazon Pan Europe, and we did more our first full year being live direct to consumer than it took solo, so 10 years to do it domestically. So it was, I would say, obviously and this is with the same profit constraints that we have in the US obviously, as public and traded business, we have a responsibility to shareholders, not only to drive top line but also to drive bottom line. So we're really, really proud of that story and we've just seen year over year growth, sustaining those same top and bottom line figures that I'm alluding to.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome. All right, let's get back into some specific strategies. You alluded to like kind of like brand defense and putting a moat around your brand. And yes, of course, when you're that size of a company, like you guys are, it's important. But even smaller sellers, once they're building up their brand, there's going to be brand search and it might not be at the scale of a Solo Stove or Lego, but they would have to follow the same principles as kind of like you have. So what has been your strategy? I know, like Helium 10, maybe Adtomic and some others tools talk about that a little bit, but what's your strategy at protecting your brand?

 

Alvaro:

One of the most profound conversations I remember the last three years working with Solo Stove and solo brands is a conversation I had with our Chief Digital Officer at the time, who's also one of the founders of Chubbies, Tom Montgomery, who, like what an incredible experience working under his wing for over a year. We were talking one day about like specific tactics for operating on Amazon, and one of those things actually was brand registry, and I was going into detail and he, for lack of better terms or articulating this, he just kind of stopped me and said hey, Alvaro, this is a fundamental, we don't need to go into detail here. So, when it comes to like your defense on Amazon, like make sure that the resources Amazon provides you to defend your brand, be it like the most fundamental basics being like hey, get brand registered. Make sure it's basically like an Amazon trademark right. Or maybe it's a transparency program right If you're dealing with counterfeits or unauthorized resellers.

 

Alvaro:

Maybe it's project zero, which is a more robust element of transparency I'd say, make those fundamentals in your business. I would say that's an extremely critical component. Like, make the resources that Amazon has to give to you now, what Walmart's providing right through their seller platform, make those brand resources to defend your brand of fundamental and exhaust them right. If you're a bigger business and you need to make that cross I'd say cross department focus initiative, like with your legal team or your finance team or your CTO, do so, but just make it a fundamental like don't postpone any resource you have through brand registry. Okay, hope that kind of answers your question.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, absolutely, so definitely important. And again, you don't need to be a humongous seller. I would say brand new seller. Why not start with brand registry? You know, if you're just an arbitrage seller or something, of course, yeah, you don't even have to worry about that, but everybody should be protecting their brand. What about on the kind of like listing optimization, keyword strategy, advertising strategy? As far as protecting your brand in that sense, though.

 

Alvaro:

Yeah, I mean indexing is critical. You know, as I alluded to earlier, we have a lot more search for Solo Stove than someone who's probably looking for a product that we sell right, similar to our core product, I'd say. But as far as like what we do to defend a brand through the listing, going again back to the principle, fundamentals, we have hundreds and thousands of assets. So this to any brand that's serious about selling on marketplace, where I mean, look, cost of acquisition is more expensive, there's more sellers, there's more listings, you need to make sure that your content is rich, right? So for us, where you know anyone can buy like a random fire pit from Walmart or from Target for 50 bucks, 100 bucks, you know why are you gonna spend three, four, five times more on a solo, so fire pit? And it's because we want to evoke that emotion of creating good moments. And so, for us, part of the defense strategy is hey, is the content, the copy, your A plus for Amazon specifically, is it evoking that emotion that you want to be associated to your brand? Right for us, it's, of course we're selling fire pits, but the end to all these means is can we evoke the emotion on that session that a customer or potential customers having with our Brand, showing that they can create good moments with the brand. I think it's a really critical component of our brand and that defense strategy from a listing perspective.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Yeah, I think that is something that smaller sellers sometimes think they don't have to worry about. But you know, people look at that stuff, you know, and in a cookie cutter world where maybe there's 15 people doing the same thing, similar prices, that's the kind of stuff that sets you apart and makes you memorable. What kind of advertising do you guys, you know, focus on? Do you just do pretty much everything that Amazon provides, whether it's sponsored, band, display, DSP, etc?

 

Alvaro:

It's a great question. You know, we actually just had some pretty high-level folks at Amazon in our offices last week in Great Vine. It's really grateful for that experience because we actually had some key members from the Amazon ads team coming to the office and really give us insights into some of the new products that Amazon ads is developing. And so for us, definitely it's part of a strategy broadly is to maximize the way we utilize resources that Amazon has to offer. But as far as like the going back to like the ad console and what we're executing highly and yeah, it's across the board right we obviously see best efficiency across sponsored product, right. And then the way we define that strategy top to bottom, the funnel is critical right, defensive to offensive, and we carry similar strategies across sponsored brand, sponsored display.

 

Alvaro:

And now we're getting to a point as a business where I mean you'll hear high-level team members from Solo, so speak about this over this coming year. But we're really trying to blur our performance digitally, right. Amazon is developing some products that is going to affect more positively performance outside of Amazon and we want to take part of that right through AMC or DSP. So that's gonna be a really critical component is leveraging the experience we have from the ad console right through the three core campaign types that we could have run into new products that they're developing and really blur both performance and our operations behind it with Amazing talent that we have in-house that historically been focused on, like paid social and Google, and trying to blur that operation, if that kind of makes sense.

 

Bradley Sutton:

On Amazon Advertising, how does your team leverage a Helium 10 Adtomic?

 

Alvaro:

You know the biggest, biggest benefit that we've seen with that Adtomic specifically is helping streamline extremely time-consuming things. I mean we're highly tactical, highly experienced and very, very detailed in terms of the, the campaigns and the way we're optimizing. I mean, you're probably looking at our account we have thousands of campaigns just in the US alone and then you can do the multiples of that because we put similar efforts across all of our channels on Amazon and we're in 15 Amazon stores a little bit under once you start to consider international. So what Adtomic has done really I can speak transparently with you here in person is helping a streamline, extremely time-consuming task like bulk changes, bulk edits, in a way that's not just to get it done to save time, but in a way that's it's insightful and data-driven. Yeah, to keep it simple.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Taking a step back, you just mentioned all the different marketplaces you sell in. If you were to say, you know, just gross revenue, top five, you know, I'm safe to say US number one, what would be? Germany, number two, UK.

 

Alvaro:

It's really interesting on Amazon. It's similar performance that we see between UK and Germany. It's funny because off Amazon our British business is more material. So it speaks a little bit to the power of, I think, of Amazon Germany, or maybe even the preference of consumer behavior. Maybe German is just again, we need to take a deeper dive in this but maybe our German customers just prefer to shop on Amazon Germany, for whatever their reason is I'll come back to your answer but an important fundamental as a brand is we want to meet our customer where they want to be met.

 

Alvaro:

That’s why omnichannel is so critical. But as far as Amazon, definitely the top four is Germany, UK after the US. Canada is up there and then in the rest of Europe between France, Italy, Spain and Holland. I think you have a pretty much flat performance competing for that fifth spot. We most definitely can scale our performance in Japan and Australia just from the data we can see in terms of search volume for our brand. But obviously Japan and Australia aren't necessarily right next to Europe, so it requires a bit more effort logistically. Yeah, that runs up the top five. I hope that helps.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, what about any non-Amazon marketplaces that you guys are doing well in, like you know, be it Walmart or TikTok shop?

 

Alvaro:

It’s a great question. You know, domestically, 100%, Walmart's been a really great partner of ours. Obviously, they as a business have been hyper focused on developing this marketplace that can, over time, become a pure competitor to Amazon. At the moment, from my understanding, at a macro level, it's still, you know, years away from really competing with Amazon, but they've been great partners in terms of giving us the human element and time and attention and placements that I think a brand like ours deserves, considering how much branded search goes into their marketplace. So that partnership with Walmart has been really important for us. Again, going back to the notion of meeting customers where they want to be met, we've found that there's a lot of customers that want to be met there, and so we're excited and eager to double down on the performance on Walmart marketplace.

 

Alvaro:

And yeah, man, look, I'm based in Basel, one of my favorite things about living in Basel is it's on the border with Germany, France and Switzerland, and so I have firsthand, daily I can see how fragmented consumer behavior is across those three countries and so in Europe, way more nuanced in terms of our marketplace approach. It's obviously Amazon Paniu is critical, but I mean we've got other really important sales channels to us, such as Bowl, right out of Netherlands and Belgium, Allegro, which we've heard a little bit about today in Poland, Manor in Switzerland, Galaxies something in our radar, so a few other marketplaces just because it's so much, so much more fragmented that are critical for us.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Do anything in Korea?

 

Alvaro:

At the moment? No, but we do have a great partner in Korea and we do have some pretty strong performance, not necessarily through marketplace.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It's got to be some Korean barbecue, a product you have. I mean, Korean barbecue is so popular worldwide. Yeah, you know, there's got to be something you can do there.

 

Alvaro:

Yeah, I know that for sure there. I mean, if you guys ever want to see like amazing engineering around a Solo, so I mean I hope I don't know of some of your audience if they're looking at Solo stuff. The aesthetics of the product is so simple. It's a beautiful product, but some of the things we see engineered around the Solo sale out of Japan and Korea and China not by our team is incredible. So owe them a lot of props in terms of like giving us definitely some inspiration.

 

Bradley Sutton:

If you make an in-house Korean barbecue table or device, I would be your first customer. You know, because, like you know, like what I do in my house, you know, none of us are Korean but like I've been eating Korean food my whole life and I just only watch Korean TV and everything. But you know, I just got like this burner with a little tank of whatever it is and it's not efficient. Smoke, like you know, everywhere. I got to open up all the windows and I got to, you know, replay. It's like there's got to be a better way and I think you guys would be the ones to do it. So let me, let me beta test.

 

Alvaro:

Don't challenge us. We're one of the key polar of ours is getting indoors, you know, with some of our core lines.

 

Bradley Sutton:

We mentioned earlier how you, you know, did something with Snoop Dogg. You know that now that's something that, no, not you know brand new sellers or even million dollar sellers, you know should be considering somebody of that stature. But at what point should an Amazon seller start reaching out to maybe micro influencers or just you know people, people to promote their product?

 

Alvaro:

Yeah, look, it's a much different answer today than it was even two years ago. Like, if you're coming on Amazon or you're like a newer brand on Amazon and you don't have a strategy to develop your brand off Amazon, you're going to lose. You're going to lose and it's going to make me. Maybe right now you're on a wave and trying to feel as good, but I promise you, the more you can flatten your reach as a brand holistically, the better you're going to be. In this case, like, the best example is we've been able to grow successfully on Amazon with further investments off Amazon by driving more organic search, because Amazon is a beast right, it's a massive search platform. So the more you can drive awareness off Amazon, you're still going to be technically driving awareness into Amazon. So I would say today, when you consider the basics of you, know, increased competition, increased cost, you know.

 

Alvaro:

Then you have some macroeconomic factors to implement in terms of how consumers feel about spending, you know, their own hard earned funds into brands that maybe they've never heard of. It's a lot more nuanced today and a lot more difficult, so you want to make sure you're definitely focused on developing a brand where consumers can not only connect but have awareness about what your brand is, so they can make a more. You know, feed the funnel earlier and get to that bottom much earlier than anticipated, because Amazon, of course, is the bottom of the funnel when it comes to sales channel. Like, people are ready to shop if they're on Amazon. So, yeah, I would just strongly recommend, like, make sure you invest as much time when it comes to branding off Amazon as you do on Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, before we get into your final strategy of the day, just a couple somewhat off related topics. But first of all, if you guys want to find out more or find you know about their products, you know, just type in Solo Stove literally to any search engine or on Amazon or Walmart or anywhere. If people just want to find you on the interwebs out there is LinkedIn a good place to follow what you do.

 

Alvaro:

Yeah, LinkedIn is great. I'm pretty private on social media unless your part of our online community. My German wife has taught me well in terms of privacy, but LinkedIn is a great platform. If you just look up, there's only one Alvaro. Alvaro, it’s a very Spanish name, very difficult to Germanize or Anglicize. So if you just look up, Alvaro Lopez. All opus, you'll find me for Solo stuff. I think it's the best way.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay cool. Random question why in Peruvian restaurants is the chicken so good?

 

Alvaro:

Man, it's a great question. It's definitely a combination of the..

 

Bradley Sutton:

You got some secret spice that you all are using or what's going on?

 

Alvaro:

Well, actually it's funny because I was like in Utah recently and I know the owner of one of the biggest Peruvian chicken chain in Utah called a Red Fuego. If anyone's ever in Salt Lake City, I've got a couple of chains around Provo, Salt Lake City and he invested like his core investment was the kitchen and he imported it from Lima. So I think that's a core component. And then, of course, you get into the quality of the chicken.

 

Alvaro:

I'm pretty pro animal rights here, so make sure that chicken's well taken care of. It's gotta be a healthy chicken that you're going to be putting into your diet. And then just the seasoning. I mean Peru is like I'm very biased here, but it's definitely top five culinary countries, I think, in the planet because of our mix man. It's a great balance between the indigenous ingredients and culture from the yin and beyond that the Spanish, Italian immigrants, Japanese, Chinese immigrants that came through the 19th century and just made a perfect blend of spices and herbs and that's what goes into the marinade of the chicken man. So those three things man.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It's such good stuff, man. When I was living in LA I would always go. I forgot it was something, Inka was the name of the restaurant. Oh my goodness, so good. Yeah, um, favorite Helium 10 tool?

 

Alvaro:

That's very difficult. Yeah, I mean to be transparent, it's a very difficult answer. I want to say the one I'm just going to complete a correlate a tool to success, and I think the way we write our copy has been critical, right cause we do index very specific things that we know have high search volume on Amazon that don't necessarily appear on our website. I say Frankenstein has been very critical in terms of, not only providing a good copy for a customer, but also getting keywords that have attacked. You know, I've added new, uh, new customers that would have never found us anyway.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. And then if you were to have a wish list, like maybe something that Helium 10 doesn't do, or a feature or a filter or anything, what would you tell me? Because that's my goal this year is trying to get all the features we don't have yet.

 

Alvaro:

Yeah, that's a great question. I knew you were talking earlier. You're going to spend more time in Europe, I think I think for serious brands that have I mean, you've seen now like the proliferation of great brands that are focused on Amazon. Well, a lot of these brands are going to have global reach. So I think the more resources you can offer to better localize and translate within Helium 10, I think, there's a massive market for that the more you can automate maybe it's something with ChatGPT, but something to translate and effectively localized would be critical.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Got it, got it. All right. Something I asked the guest is like give a 30 or 60 second tip, strategy could be about anything in e-commerce or non e-commerce. Could be about anything.

 

Alvaro:

Go ahead, yeah, I mean let me put my consulting hat on, which have been a brand operator for the last few years. So just focus on action and I think one of the most again going back to lessons I've had from the executive leads at, one of the most important things I took away from, our former CEO, John Maris. He said he'd rather have me focus on doing twice the amount of things half as good than half the amount of things really good and that, really, to be transparent, that philosophy of just iterating different initiatives, obviously targeted initiatives that can drive business, drive top and bottom line, has been really critical. In terms of finding out what sticks, doubling down on those and then the ones that don't work, quickly offloading them, have been really good. So I think just purposefully actioning items that's going to grow your business is extremely critical. You need to be. If you're not waking up every Monday, if your business is good and you're not waking up the beginning of the week, if you're not obsessed about how to double down on that growth, you're on a track to lose. And if you're losing and you're not obsessed about how to offset those losses, then you're going to lose even more.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, well, Alvaro, thank you so much for coming on here. It's been great to meet you in person and thank you for taking the time out and wish you and the solo so best of success. Maybe we'll have you back on the show next year and see what you guys are doing.

 

Alvaro:

Yeah. Thanks Brad!

Helium 10 Buzz 2/23/24: Big Amazon Virtual Bundles Update | Walmart Sales Increase

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from and provide a training tip for the week.

Walmart grows online sales in Q4, agrees to acquire Vizio
https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/walmart-online-sales/

Advertise Audible titles with Sponsored Brands
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/advertise-audible-titles-with-sponsored-brands/

Rev up your digital sales engine with the latest tools and techniques featured in this episode. We're talking about Helium 10's releasing a lot of new features in one week! Get the lowdown on enhancing your product visibility with Keyword Tracker's new packs, and learn how to optimize your listings with the newly improved Listing Builder. And for those with an eye for analytics, we'll guide you on customizing your product insights dashboard using tags for a laser-focused approach to product performance. Lastly, our training tip of the week features Carrie as she shows us how you can use groups inside the Helium 10 Insights Dashboard. It's a powerhouse episode packed with insider tips and actionable strategies, so tune in and transform the way you navigate selling on Amazon and Walmart!

► 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

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

• 01:02 - Amazon Virtual Bundle Update
• 04:34 - Walmart Sales Up
• 06:22 - Audible Sponsored Brand
• 07:23 - Follow Helium 10 On TikTok
• 08:24 - New Feature Alerts
• 08:44 - Keyword Tracker
• 10:35 - Listing Builder
• 12:03 - Custom Dashboard
• 12:57 - All Marketplaces Button
• 14:00 - Black Box for Amazon Brazil
• 15:37 - Pro Training Tip: Insights Dashboard Groups Feature

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon makes virtual bundles extremely more valuable. Walmart releases latest sales report, the most released features from Helium 10 in a week for the whole year. This and more on today's Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. We give you a rundown on all the goings on in the Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce world. We let you know what new features Helium 10 has released and we give you a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing.

Bradley Sutton:

We actually have a pretty light week as far as news Like this is one of the lightest weeks I've seen in a long time. Like crazy, crazy. I'm not complaining, though. Hey, sometimes no news is good news, right, and actually let's start off with some good news. There's no like doom and gloom reports this week, but the first article I wanna talk about is actually not an article at all and what it is kind of a beta test that one of our Helium 10 elite members noticed is running, so you guys know about virtual bundles, right? You know historically this is how virtual bundles look Like. Here's an algae cow product and then I'm just scrolling down a little bit and then right under the image you know, above where the sponsored ads go and even above where frequently brought together is, you'll see this virtual bundle section where it shows other products on this brand. You know I've been saying for, oh my goodness, almost two years now about how I think anybody that has two products or more in a brand should be using Virtual Bundles. It's completely free to use as far as there's no pay per click and it takes up, as you can see here, historically, pretty big real estate but, however, it's not something that a lot of people actually use to buy, like, you know, those who do virtual bundles. It's not like, oh my goodness, it's gonna increase your sales by 30% or anything like that, but it's great to push your sponsored ads down and also, you know, take up some nice real estate and cross promote your products now in our Helium 10 Elite and Serious Sellers Facebook group.

Bradley Sutton:

One of our users, Elizabeth, who has been on this podcast before she noted how hey woke up this morning and Amazon has an update for the Virtual Bundles widget, right above the bullet points, showing it as a variation even of the main product. All right, so this is interesting. Take a look at how it looks on her screen the same exact product that I just showed you. You can see right here that it kind of shows as a bundle right here, right under where the variations are, right to the left of the buy box, and then if you mouse over it it actually shows what products this bundle has. Now that image I was just showing you guys a minute ago on my screen for the first one for the product that's live on my computer. So obviously it's not across the board yet, like where it's universal, where Amazon is showing us, but I really hope that this is going to be something that's permanent. All right, you know, sometimes Amazon does tests and we're like yo, what in the world are you doing? You know I'll go back to how it was, but this is one of those ones I'm hoping they push through On my cell phone, my mobile app of Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Take a look at how it looks. It's actually kind of cool here. Let me go ahead and play this. I did a video here of how it looks on my cell phone, but you can see, here's the image and there's the variations, and then again, right under the variations and right before the Buy Box, you can totally see that there is the virtual bundles that are advertised right there Now on mobile, which is how most people buy these days. Right, this is even going to be more valuable. I mean, I don't know if you guys saw on that screenshot there though, the very top of the listing, it had one of her Sponsored Brand Ads for one of her other products and it showed the main image of her product. It showed the variations and then the virtual bundles and then the Buy Box, like there was not a competitor listing anywhere in sight. So, man, again, here is to hoping that this is going to be something that happens across the board with virtual bundles. I think that will be very that'll be pretty cool for sellers and, again, all the more reason that you guys need to be creating your Virtual Bundles.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Digital Commerce 360. It's entitled Walmart Grows Online Sales in Q4 Agrees to Acquire Visio. Walmart put out their report. They talk a lot about their regular sales, which only increased just a very slight bit, but Walmart US online sales grew 17% in Q4. And said global e-commerce sales actually grew 23%. Now another interesting part of this article they said, hey, e-commerce sales were led by continued strong growth and store fulfilled pickup and delivery. Over the last two years, store fulfilled delivery sales have nearly tripled and now we're doing over $1 billion a month. All right, so again, that's one of the kind of ways that Walmart is catching up with Amazon without having an extensive warehouse network like Amazon has and delivery drivers and things like that. They've got over 4,000 stores and a lot of these stores are the ones that are doing that final delivery. Now the article goes on to say that Walmart didn't share specific information about the Walmart+ program as far as how many members it has, but it says it finished Q4 with a record Walmart+ membership penetration. The article also talks about how there's over 400 million SKUs on Walmart's marketplace now and a significant portion of sellers are using WFS Walmart fulfillment services. So again, we've been talking about this for years. Now, guys, if you're not selling on Walmart yet, probably something to think about. It keeps increasing the marketplace there and as Walmart expands it's Walmart+ offerings I think you're gonna see more customers shopping on that platform.

Bradley Sutton:

Last article today is just something from Amazon and it's about something we've never talked about in the show, probably doesn't affect a lot of you, but just goes to show that you can pretty much advertise anything these days. So we've talked about having your own Kindle, direct, publishing books on Amazon, maybe merch by Amazon, things like that. Well, how many of you have Audible books? All right, so books that are for the Audible app that Amazon has, where you can listen to books, right? Well, guess what? If you make Amazon Audible books, you can now run sponsored brand ads to there in North America, Europe and Asia. So maybe it might be something I have to do and episode on in the future, or some training about how can you get on the Amazon Audible platform with a book, because now you can go ahead and advertise to it as well, whereas in the past only KDP and traditional books could have sponsored brand advertising. All right, that's it for the news this week.

Bradley Sutton:

So one quick thing I want. I'm gonna do a little quick contest here. All right, guys? All right. As you guys know, we've talked about on this show, Helium 10 has a new TikTok channel. I wanna give you guys an opportunity to win a one-on-one call with me. Here's your homework if you wanna qualify to at least be eligible to do it. All right, so go to our TikTok New page, right. It's called helium10_software. There's some fake accounts out there. Don't click on helium underscore or helium10_software, all right. And then scroll down all the way towards the bottom of our feed. Once you get there and find my video when it says best Amazon ranking hack. I talk about something inside of helium 10. I want you to go ahead and watch that video and comment on it and say you've heard about this from the Weekly Buzz and Make sure to follow helium 10 as well and those who follow the helium 10 channel on there and who go ahead and comment on that video, or we're gonna pick a random person to have a one-on-one call with me, all right, let's hop into our new feature alerts of the week.

Bradley Sutton:

And there was not that much news on the Amazon side this week, but oh my goodness, we have released tons of things this week. A lot of them you guys ask for the first thing want to talk about real simple. A lot of you Definitely use Keyword Tracker, but then those of you who have tons and tons of of skews, you always ask a hey, I don't have enough keywords to track. Well, if you don't have enough keywords to track, don't worry, you can now go ahead and go into your Keyword Tracker. At the very top of the page there's this button that says need more keywords and you can now buy like packs of keywords that so that you can have more than whatever your plan has for Keyword Tracker. So that's the first tool that we have. The next announcement that we have is actually I'm gonna go ahead and let Kevin King Do it himself. Kevin, take it away.

Kevin King:

Hey, what's up everybody? Kevin King here, you know one of the number one questions I get is how can you connect to me? How can I, Kevin, get some advice or speak with you or learn more from you? The best way is with Helium 10 Elite. If you go to h10.me/elite, you can get all the information. Sign up for Helium 10 Elite. Every month I lead train advanced training where I do 7 Ninja Hacks. We also have live masterminds and Every single week, one of those weeks, I jump on for a couple hours and we talk shop, we talk business, do in-person events. Helium 10 elite is where you want to be. It's only $99 extra on your helium 10 membership. It's h10.me/elite. Go check it out and I hope to see you there.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys. So don't forget, Helium 10 Elite has tons of perks, you know. Kevin just mentioned some of them, so I highly recommend checking out the program h10.me/elite as soon as you get into Elite, book a one-on-one call with me. If you don't win that TikTok contest, you can book a one-on-one call with me or with Carrie or Shivali If you're a Helium 10 Elite member. And that's just one of the many, many different Perks there are of being a Helium 10 Elite member. Last week, we announced a new tool and Listing Builder for being able to see the score of how your listing kind of like stacks up compared to your competitors, to the Amazon algorithm for SEO, right? Um, a quick update to the tool once you get into Listing Builder. This is something that people Requested right away once we launched. This is we. We brought back the root keywords when it was, like in the old scribbles, we would tell you what individual keywords were in the phrases that you put in. Well, now we have the One word roots. So you click on one word roots. It'll say what are all the individual keywords that make up the phrases down below and, in addition, how many times you have in your listing. But now for the first time, we also have two words or three plus phrases, like, for example, if I hit two word roots on this page, coffin shelf comes up, coffin makeup, gothic wall, and that's because those are all in multiple phrases below. So maybe there was coffin Shelf for men, coffin shelf for women. Well, that means coffin shelf is in those phrases twice, and so I can see how many times I've used that root for two or three word phrases. And then down here at the bottom We've got the competitor performance score right here on the right hand side and the search volume that's listed and which keywords I have used and not used. So a pretty cool update there for our Listing Builder. Next week there's even gonna be more updates to that tool that we'll be Announcing shortly now.

Bradley Sutton:

If you guys are on the Supercharge plan right, not Diamond, not Platinum, not Elite, but Supercharge there's one update I want to let you guys know about. You guys have the ability to now make custom dashboards. So you would go into your just regular dashboard here and hit new dashboard and Now you can create just tons of different things, like whether it's a chart or a graph about anything in your Amazon, in your account in Helium 10. For example, I can select your graph and then now I can graph, maybe, hey, what's my PPC click-through rate and graph that compared to my unit sold. Let me graph my RoAS and my ACoS. Let me check my ad spend, compare it to my refunds over time. I mean, you can pretty much chart anything here in your dashboard. So those of you who are supercharged members, make sure to go ahead and check that out and play around with your first graphs that you can now make.

Bradley Sutton:

One quick update in our Chrome extension and this is what I suggest doing any of you guys doing if you're selling in one marketplace is you might not know that there's potentially people in other marketplaces that are hijacking your listings, like maybe they're selling on it. So what you should do is go to your listing page any of your listing pages and the Helium 10 Chrome extension that comes up at the top. What you do that you're gonna see this All Marketplaces button. Hit that, see more data there. And now, instantly, I can see all of the different marketplaces that my product is being sold in. So, like, maybe I'm selling this garlic press only in the US and I'm like, wait a minute, I don't sell in Germany? How is somebody selling it for 35 bucks in Germany? How is somebody selling it in Great Britain? Right here, that's not me. So now you can go and click this and go check. All right, who's the seller that is selling my product in these other marketplaces? Sometimes you'll be shocked to know that other sellers are selling your products and you might wanna take action on that.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, the last update of the day comes from Black Box. I told you guys there was a lot of updates today and all of the black box tools now are available for Amazon Brazil. All right, so you would just select it right here in the drop down menu of all of the different marketplaces that we service and and just enter in a search, just like you would in your marketplace. So right here I'm in Black Box Keywords and I said hey, here in Brazil, show me a keyword with a search volume of a thousand. So, for example, right here I see hardy met BC, that category, I think that's garden and pool category. Right, I'm saying, hey, show me this keyword with a thousand search volume and it has at least three words and a title density of less than five and I have a whole bunch of Portuguese keywords from Brazil. Here's a Basel de planta, a racket electric, a mosquito electric mosquito racket. I guess a lot of interesting products here. I don't speak Portuguese so I don't even know what these mean. Here's one I think that means a garden hose 20 meter garden hose. But here's some just keywords that came up in the Amazon Brazil marketplace.

Bradley Sutton:

That's our latest marketplace, that we have tons of tools. Already Amazon Brazil was working for profits and Keyword Tracker, Magnets, or Cerebro, or more, and we're adding more tools as the time goes by. Don't forget that soon everybody who sells in Amazon United States is going to be able to sell an Amazon Brazil with this a click of a button. Some of you already are able to do that, but by March everybody's going to be able to do that. We'll have a podcast all about that program coming up soon. All right, next up we have our training tip of the week and it's actually a newish filter that a lot not a lot of people are doing, where you can group some of your products together on your Helium 10 Dashboard. Carrie, take it away.

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone, today I'm going to show you a new feature that is available in Insights Dashboard. Now, if you're not using insights dashboard, you are missing out. It helps you to see so much that's going on with your products. Like you know, it'll basically it's a dashboard where it's kind of like a hub, where everything that's going on with your products is very visible. So, if you need to add keywords, if you need you know, if, if your listing got suppressed or if there's an alert, you know, maybe your dimensions changed, there's something that's going on with your products. It's all shown in the dashboard. And you can also monitor your competitors to see, you know, have they added a coupon, have they changed their price? They changed their listing? There's so much more than that, but it really saves you tons and tons of time monitoring your own products as well as your competitors products, and now we have the ability to tag an insights dashboard, so I'm going to go ahead and show you what that looks like. So this is insights dashboard. You're going to want to go over to where it says my products. Okay, so click on my products and this is going to be a list of all of your products here, and so, basically the way that this populates is if you connect your Helium 10 account to Seller Central so that it automatically pulls this information in.

Carrie Miller:

But sometimes you have tons and tons of products and a lot of different types of products, so maybe you're wanting to look at a specific type of product. You can actually group these with these different tags. So, for example, we have a bunch of different coffin shelves. We also have egg trays, so I made two different tags. One is coffin shelf, and so if I click on coffin shelf, I'm going to be able to see all of the coffin shelves that we sell that I tagged, and then, if you want to untag it, you want to see everything. You just click back on the tag. So to create your tag, it's super easy. All you have to do is, you know, go in here and click on the settings wheel that I just clicked on, and you're going to click on add tag.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so on this, you can actually tag your competitors and your own products, okay, so, um, that is one really great thing about this is that you can. You can, you know, find and group them all together if you want to, so you can do competitors or you can do your own products. In this instance I, you know I actually just tagged my own products, so all of these are my own products but say I wanted to go in and I wanted to kind of edit this tag and I wanted to add some competitors. And take a look at the competitors, I can click on the competitors tab and I can search those competitors and add them on there to have them grouped kind of in a similar way. So there's a lot of different ways you can do this. You can also even go over to the competitors tab. So I'll close out of this and I'll go over to the competitors tab. And in the competitors tab you can also just create you know the same place here.

Carrie Miller:

So you can just add a tag here and you can say you know you can name it like increasing revenue or something like that, maybe you want to track those people, that you can do whatever you want in these tags and you can group your competitors in your own products in any way that you want to. Um, or maybe there's groups of products of your own that maybe you, you know, have started to see fall. You want to keep an eye on them. There's a lot of different ways you can do this, um. So all you have to do is unclick the tags so you can see all of your products. And one cool thing is you can actually even go through and say, oh, I want to add a tag here or here. Oh, I didn't add this one to my egg tray one, so I'm going to click and add it to my egg tray tabs tags so that I can see it there. So you can do this. You know in so many different ways.

Carrie Miller:

Um, you can you know, maybe also tag something that's on promotion, or if you're launching different products, you can say you know in launch phase. Or you know ranking. If you're working on ranking, you can tag those and say you know ranking. Um, because you're doing a lot of outside traffic, maybe an influencers, and you want to keep an eye on those and you want to sort them out. You can do literally anything with these tags. It's the sky is the limit. So what's great about this tool is that you can customize it to whatever you want to do and it helps you to just sort through the products very quickly based on what you're looking at or what you want to look at. So go ahead and check it out. If you haven't checked it out, I think this is a really great um feature to be able to categorize your own products and your competitors products and to be able to find them and sort through them very quickly and easy. So check it out and we'll see you later.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, thank you very much, Carrie, for that. So you know you might be wondering how do I use that. You know, like, for example, me, I've got four products right now that I'm launching all at the same time, and so maybe I just want a quick way to see those four products, about what's going on with my keywords, my sales and everything, instead of having to like filter through them. Well, now I can just give those products a launch tag and this with a click of a button. Now I can see everything that's going on for those four products on my Helium 10 Dashboard. So play around with that guys. Make your own custom tags. Let me know which ones you put in the comments below. That's it for the news and features and training of the week. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

#537 - Walmart Sales Growth Strategies From The World's #1 Walmart Expert!

Have you heard the latest buzz about Walmart's marketplace? It's time to tune in as we chat with Michael Lebhar of SellCord, the brain behind the surge in sales for countless Walmart sellers. Our discussion is packed with strategies and insights, from exploring the alluring incentives for new sellers to the secrets of wielding the latest metrics to skyrocket your sales.

Imagine mastering the art of ad automation or creating a brand shop that takes your visibility to new heights; that's exactly what we're unpacking in this episode. Michael and Carrie dissect Helium 10's Adtomic and its advanced features, designed to empower Walmart sellers with precision ad management. We're also sizing up the impact of Walmart Brand Shops on your sales figures. The conversation then shifts gears to the nitty-gritty of search engine marketing (SEM) and how Walmart's beta coupon program is shaking up the game – a potential goldmine for engaging customers.

But wait, there's more! Are your listings primed to pull in buyers, or could they use a tactical tweak? We're laying out a blueprint to boost your presence and sales on Walmart's marketplace, emphasizing the vital role of high-converting keywords and how Walmart's Fulfillment Services (WFS) and flash deals can be your ace in the hole. We wrap up by dishing out pro tips on navigating Walmart's evolving landscape, from optimizing product categories for approval to the influence of title density on your Walmart listing’s performance. Walmart sellers, buckle up – this episode is your roadmap to conquering Walmart's bustling bazaar.

 

In episode 537 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Michael discuss:

• 00:00 - Selling on Walmart With Helium 10
• 00:56 - Winning with Walmart Wednesday: Incentives for New Sellers
• 03:15 - New Features for Walmart Sellers
• 04:47 - Walmart Seller Center Updates and Strategies
• 07:05 - Walmart Brand Shops and Marketing Strategies
• 08:17 - Success of Search Engine Marketing Strategy
• 11:28 - Strategies for Boosting Walmart Sales 
• 13:35 - Boosting Sales Strategies on Walmart
• 14:49 - Optimizing Walmart Marketplace Sales Strategies 
• 19:30 - Effective Keyword Campaign Strategies
• 21:43 - Walmart Strategies and Tips for Sellers
• 23:48 - Amazon Seller Approval Guidelines Update
• 28:53 - Optimizing Walmart Listings for Success

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

In today's episode, we are going to be talking with Michael Lebhar about strategies that sellers can utilize to help grow their sales on Walmart, and we're also going to be talking about some new metrics that Walmart has made available to sellers and how you can use them to your advantage. This and so much more on today's episode.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure to join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook or you can actually go to h10.me/walmartgroup and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join. You can tag me and Carrie with questions and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group.

 

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the serious sellers podcast brought to you by Helium 10. My name is Carrie and I'm going to be your host today, and this is our Walmart Wednesday, where we go over all of the things Walmart and we answer your questions live and we give you any updates that have to do with Walmart. So we'll go ahead and get into it. So today I do have a special guest that I'll announce in just a minute and he is going to be great for answering questions and I will answer some as well. But before I get into that, I wanted to talk about some incentives that Walmart is having for new sellers. So if you have been considering selling on the Walmart platform and you haven't pulled the trigger yet and you want to get into selling on Walmart, there is a really cool incentive right now. I'm going to put the link to this special deal because it's not for everyone. You have to apply through our Helium 10 link. Basically, what it is is, if you apply through this Helium 10 special link, then you can get up to 100% of the referral fees taken off, basically for 90 days. So you won't have to pay referral fees for literally up to 90 days, so actually up to 100% for 90 days. So the way that it works is basically everything that you do kind of unlocks something. So the first 50% off that you get off is you get 50% of the referral fees for just signing up and getting your products up and running, and then the 90 days start. Once you're up and running, then you get another 20% off your referral fees if you start utilizing Walmart Fulfillment Services. So that's WFS and you can enroll in that pretty easily. The next thing is you'll get another 20% off for using Walmart Connect, which is the ads platform, so you can start advertising on Walmart. And then, finally, if you want to start automating with the repricer, you can. You get another 10% if you start using the repress repricer. So that adds up to 100% off of your referral fees. Now, not everybody's going to use the repricer, so at least up to 90% off referral fees, which is absolutely incredible, such a good deal. So I will add that link in. So if you haven't started selling on Walmart and you really want to get started selling on Walmart, definitely click that link and take advantage of that. And this goes for US sellers and international sellers. So they're they're allowing anyone who clicks that link, that is a seller on, or wants to sell on Walmart and gets accepted, you can have that great deal. So that's great.

 

Carrie Miller:

And then the next thing helium 10. As you all know, we have Adtomic for Walmart, which is our ads program where we help you to manage your ads. It makes it a lot easier to manage your ads, and so we've added some rules and automations. You can now do day partying so you can advertise at certain parts of the day that are more profitable for you. You can add in bid rules. You can add a target, a cost max, impressions max, or you can create custom bid rules. So the new Add Tomic is absolutely incredible. If you want to book a demo, we'll also put that link below as well, because you can book a demo with one of our Helium 10 Adtomic experts that can help you. Not only you know, show you how it works, but then get you up and running on that. With ads. It's super easy. There's so many automations that will help you to manage your Walmart ads. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and get into our special guest, because I think a lot of you are very excited to have him on and his name is Michael Lebhar, so I'm going to go ahead and bring him on. Hello, Michael. Hey, so Michael Lebhar is from SellCord and many of you have seen him on Walmart Wednesday and a lot of other podcasts. He's been speaking, I pretty much all over the world, haven't you? He's been talking about selling on Walmart. He owns an agency called SellCord and he is doing really, really well on Walmart, has some products in stores, so we have a wealth of information available to us by just chatting with Michael. So thanks so much for joining us. What’s up Michael?

 

Michael:

Thanks for having me here. It's fun to be back.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, yeah, you were on here last. It's been, I think, a year since you've been on, so I'm very excited to have you back so I wanted to talk to you about a few things like new updates, and so we'll talk about some updates with Walmart, and then I'm gonna also ask you about some strategies that you can give to sellers. So the first thing I want to talk about, though, is sales rank, because this is something that's new. In the back of Walmart seller center, under search insights, you can actually see your sales rank for your product, and so I was wondering if you had any insights on how any Walmart sellers could utilize this information, or what you know, what you can do with that, or what you've been using it for for sure.

 

Michael:

Yeah, that's a pretty new data that Walmart started adding in and basically, if you go to your growth opportunities and you go into search insights, there's actually a lot of helpful data there conversion rates, click rates, and they rank it kind of high, medium and low select you could have a good idea of how you compare against competitors in your category. But what you're specific specifically regarding is Sales rank, and sales rank is a number that they basically rank how well you're doing Compared to the other. You know your competitors in the space, so it's pretty helpful number. I like seeing when we have also multiple items within certain categories, seeing how they rank against each other, how the search links against each other, and then you could see the difference in sales rank and obviously the difference in sales between those items. You could kind of gauge a little bit more on like the type of sales you should be expecting from other items. So I would definitely make sure to take a look at that. Look, go, look at the data and start getting more comfortable with it. As you know, time goes on, it'll start becoming, you know they'll start there again. It's gonna start being more and more data there. So I would definitely take a look at that data and try to utilize it another thing.

 

Carrie Miller:

I mentioned this on our last Walmart Wednesday and that is that brand stores are now available. So I was wondering if you have started utilizing those, because I know you manage a lot of brands. Have you started creating brand stores and how are you utilizing them? What kind of success have you been seeing so far?

 

Michael:

great question. Yeah, so brand stores been. You know We've been waiting for them for a while because there's been brand store functionality for years. But you used to have to pay seventy, five thousand dollars, if I'm not mistaken, to get a brand store. Now it's actually free. You just have to apply mom, not all brands get accepted to the most brands kind of that we've been applying. I've been getting accepted to the brand store. It's through Walmart connect. So it's through your Walmart connect account, you apply and you get access to there. There's a few great reasons. Number one like on Walmart, the brand shows pretty prominently on top of the title. A lot of people click on there. They look at your expanded assortment. So you're able to actually you know, you know, utilize it to bring all your items into that one link. A lot of times when you're it's just done by shelf and it's not by your brand store, like you'll see, random items that are you're not your brand show up when you click on your brand. So it's important to. That's one great way. Number two is for advertising. You're able to start sent. You're able to send ads to certain shelves. Now, sending it to a shelf that just has items on it because of a filter and doesn't. It's not like a. A set shelf Through brand shops is way less effective. Also, you can't have any banners and things like that, so we've been using a lot for advertising and that proves to be pretty effective. So, yeah, definitely exciting and there's definitely a lot of Opportunity there. A tap into creating ban shops We've been creating a lot of them for brands over the past. What would say mainly like month and a half, two months.

 

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. Yeah, I think a lot of people have started to work on those, so I think that's definitely a huge opportunity as well to not only get your sales for the one item but, you know, showcase all of your items and increase the court order court cart order value. The next thing I wanted to ask you about is the search engine marketing. It's called SEM on the growth opportunities tab. How has that been working for you? What? What kinds of things have you been seeing with with SEM, or I guess they might call it Sem on the back end there. And, yeah, just go ahead and get some insights on that this was an interesting one because you know it's.

 

Michael:

If you know in the Amazon space like people use different providers to help send Google traffic to their Amazon listing To build rank, that's essentially what this product is. It's you could run Google ads from within though your Walmart account. So number one, your attribution is gonna be, you know, much more legitimate, obviously because it's first-party data, so they know what converts. So like that's really helpful. You know, I'm trying. I was trying to kind of see if there's a difference in cost running gets through Walmart versus. So I'm trying to see a little bit about that. But yeah, so we long story short. In a lot of cases we haven't seen success that. There's been some cases where we've seen some good success with it. I wouldn't say like any crazy results, but if we're helping boost items that also have like lower ad relevancies and are having a little bit of hard time getting traction, like we've seen some decent success there. I would say, just because they're giving away a lot of promos with that, like check your email, you probably got either like spend a thousand, get a thousand, spend 500, get 500, or even now yesterday I think I saw some clients got like spend 500, get 250 or something along those lines. So there's a lot of you know I'm opportunities, or even you could see from there, like how you know how effective it is and then from there you could decide if you want further in it. I think it's definitely worth what. It depends on the category. So, like I would say, you know, search on Google for, let's say, you sell bikes, or turn Google for bikes and see, like what Google Shopping ads are coming up and if you feel like you're right, fit well there and convert well there, based on your pricing and Based on your product type, like then there's definitely opportunity there.

 

Carrie Miller:

What's kind of interesting is. I remember you pointed out to me like two years ago that Walmart was actually doing this for us for free, and so we actually got a lot of traffic to our listings through those kind of Google ads and I noticed my sales picked up with the Google ads that they were doing for me for free. So I do think it's definitely something that's worthwhile to do, because it says Walmart comm under the Google shopping little ad and so people trust Walmart comm and it's just a, I think, a higher conversion rate. For that reason I'm. Coupons can you tell me a little bit about coupons? I know they're in beta and I know you have had access to coupons. What kind of success have you seen with those? And can you tell us just a little bit about the coupons that Walmart is testing out right now?

 

Michael:

Yeah, so traditionally there's really been no coupons on Walmart.com. Besides, for some in-store items was through a third-party provider. There was a couponing program that was very expensive for in-store brands and you should spend tens and tens of thousands of dollars to be part of it. That was the only couponing available on Walmart. Walmart recently rolled out couponing through Marketplace beta and it's been in beta I think it's already been a couple months and we've been having a lot of testing with it. I've started to become a really big fan of it. We've started seeing some really strong success there. Now, in some ways, obviously when you have a price cross-off it works better, but obviously with coupons, not everybody redeems, so you save a little bit there. But more importantly, the reason why we've been leveraging coupons is Walmart has these deal shelves that do a lot of volume, and very significant volume, In order to be able to be eligible for those deal shops deal pages that a lot of times want really good pricing, sometimes even better than Amazon. So if you're going to provide pricing that's better than Amazon, or even if it's going to be good pricing but you just don't want to bring down your Amazon, you're okay, get bringing down your Walmart. You just don't want to bring down your Amazon because your Amazon is doing a lot of volume. Whatever the case might be, you don't want to lose your buy box on Amazon. One of the good ways to do that is through couponing, because it depends on who your account manager is and how well your relationship is with Walmart, but they do sometimes accept your items for that. So that's been a one really cool way to leverage coupons and we've been seeing some success there.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, another one that's in beta is subscribe, not subscribe and save. You said subscribe. So have you had some clients utilizing subscribe on Walmart? Has it been getting good traction? What do you think about subscribe?

 

Michael:

I think it's got ways to go. I think it's really cool that there's that functionality there now. I think in the beginning that we're testing out subscribe and save and now it's just unsubscribe. But there's really, if you're selling obviously consumables, anything consumables, but anything people repurchase often, it definitely makes a lot of sense. I think just the Walmart, it's pretty prominent now and a lot of times it's auto selected, so it's like pretty prominent and I'll talk to buy a lot of items. So we have been seeing some traction there. The issue is, I think the Walmart customer isn't used to subscribing yet. So on Amazon they're very used to subscribing. So I think it's going to take some time till the Walmart customer really picks up on that. It doesn't hurt to have it on there, obviously, but I think it's going to take some time till the Walmart customer really picks up on the habit of subscribing and the convenience of it. So I think we got a little bit of time to go there, but it's cool that it's already built out.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, sounds like coupons is giving better traction. Okay, so I have had a lot of questions from people recently about, you know, they're starting up on Walmart and they're kind of, you know, getting everything set up but they want to really, you know, be successful on the Walmart marketplace and they want to get sales going. So what are some strategies and what are some things that you would give advice to somebody who's you know maybe just starting out on Walmart, or maybe they're on Walmart and they haven't had enough traction yet? Like, what are some sales strategies that you would recommend to them to boost their visibility and sales on Walmart?

 

Michael:

Yeah, so I think there's a few things and obviously it depends a lot on the type of items you sell and a whole bunch of other things, but some things that generally keep in mind is Walmart recently started releasing some data, which is extremely helpful. If you have Pacvue, you could actually see it on search insights on Pacvue. But there's basically Walmart started releasing data through API on the Kinect side where it basically shows you every keyword on Walmart, from 1,000 to 300,000, what the keyword is, how high it ranks, right. So they're not giving you search volume data, they're giving you, if it's one, it's the most searched keyword, right, for example. And then what are the three top items converting getting the click share and the conversion share for those keywords and the way we you know, I think, when you're coming to the platform and you're in a new or seller coming to the platform, I think it's really important to understand the shelves that have volume and the key word is the shelf. But like the shelves that have volume, and then what's converting for those shelves and make sure like your product fits the characteristics of what's currently converting there, because if not, like you're right, you might be successful, but it's hard to know. But if your product has the right features, as at the similar price points and maybe even more competitive, then you know there's good opportunities there and I think you really have to tailor your approach a lot more to understand the shelves and their standards going on. That's number one. Number two is, like, lean into the Walmart programs as fast, as quickly as possible, whether it's WFS, whether it's Walmart Connect, whether it's work incentives working with Walmart, whether it's, you know, flash deals, promotions. Like, really lean into those programs. They drive so much significant volume and it's something that you know is. It's one of the advantages of being a marketplace seller versus selling DSV on you know one P to Walmart. So, like you have a lot of those advantages, you might as well use them to your leverage.

 

Michael:

And people always complain about and I hear this all the time the one P seller is in the store items. They're on the top, ranked on the top and they get preference. The reality is that marketplace sellers have a lot of advantages that the one P sellers don't. So if the marketplace sellers really tap into the advantages and I've seen the ones that do it but if they tap into Flash Deals, promotions, a lot more of those placements are marketplace right now. They're not. Flash Deals is basically all marketplace, I think if not I'm not mistaken, it's all marketplace. Mosaic's are, especially during key times and events. It's very heavily marketplace driven. A lot of the data and things you get is a lot more on the marketplace side than on the one-piece side. So there's really a lot of programs that you could really lean into, especially with WFS. There's so many things that if you do them, you put yourself at a better advantage. So yeah, I would just kind of strongly emphasize that.

 

Carrie Miller:

So you're saying Walmart Connect is advertising and the Flash Deals not everybody has access to those. Can you maybe give some strategies to get those or what is needed in order to get access to Flash Deals?

 

Michael:

So if you're doing volume any decent significant volume it's usually going to be added to your account. If it's not and you're doing a lot of volume, you can reach out to me and I can get it added to your account. But yeah, most cases if your account's doing volume it'll get added to your account. If not, you can open up a case and request that. I'm not sure if that works, but you can email me and I can try to get it added to your account.

 

Carrie Miller:

Is there a number of certain amount of volume, a year or a month, or what are they looking for?

 

Michael:

So I'm not sure they don't say it. I know there's a number for that specific item to be eligible for Flash Picks. To actually do that it's in the thousands. It's not that much that it has to be doing in sales. It's in the low thousands for it to be eligible for Flash Deals. But for the account itself, I'm not sure Because I have very small accounts that have it and I have sometimes bigger ones that don't have it, that just have to request it. So yeah, I'm not sure exactly what the criteria is.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, yeah, those are some good suggestions. Anything maybe on the optimization side, or like do you think? That the pro seller badge is really needed, like what are some other things people can do and focus on that they can control to get more sales.

 

Michael:

Yeah. So I think items if you're already an existing seller or if you're coming on, like I think it's important to pay attention to item spec 5.0. There's been new updates in the Walmart guidelines for how items are listed. I was actually in the Walmart offices in Hoboken a few weeks ago and we were actually looking through listings that we managed and seeing how, like, once item spec 5.0 got implemented for listings that didn't implement the changes, how, like slow performance kind of dropped off in some areas. So definitely learn those, pay attention to some of those, adjust your listings. You know, in Venezuela there's no reason to wait until, like, you're not just starting to not rank to make those changes. So I would definitely suggest that is one thing that you could control. I really pay attention to.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right. So what about keywords? So you said you know they're basically ranked on there, but I know you know with Helium 10, we have kind of a search volume. You know, what kind of keywords do you recommend going after, like if something has you know 30,000 search volume or it's like a high ranked volume, do you think people should go after those? Or should they go over after low hanging fruit keywords in their advertising, in their listing? Like, what's your keyword strategy for marketplace sellers?

 

Michael:

It's a great question. So start off with getting as really figuring out your really high converting keywords and building campaigns around those. Because even though the volumes of those are so low, you really need to build ad relevancy on Walmart and you could try bidding on the main keywords. But it's just so. Even if your item in a situation where your item would convert really well for a high volume keyword, you eventually want to target those because that's where you'll make sales. It's too hard to make sales by the smaller keywords. If it's a situation where the really large keyword, your item, doesn't fit in well there, like then you know that shouldn't be an item you're focusing on. But in order to be able to bid effectively on those keywords, you need to start building some ad relevancy. So what you'd seen work best is like building some campaigns around a lot more targeted keywords and build some relevancy there and then from there, like when you start bidding on the main keywords, you'll start being able to win them much easier and much better.

 

Carrie Miller:

Do you mean like long tail keywords, like, for example, like bookshelf, like you would say large green bookshelf and you would target that instead of just bookshelf?

 

Michael:

Exactly, yeah, and with Walmart, like you don't have to go even that long tail, like sometimes it's even two words, right. So like a white bookshelf, a bookcase, a green bookcase, but things like that, and you'll already have, you know, some volume there. That already allowed you to start converting.

 

Carrie Miller:

Another question for you about ads. Then I noticed whenever I'm shopping on Walmart I haven't seen many people utilizing video ads. Do you know why that would be? You know? Do you think they're really good converting tool for you know? Because I think they're only a dollar and I think that's pretty cheap for a lot of people who are moving over from Amazon, or like just a dollar or something. They're not that expensive comparatively to Amazon. So I'm just curious why you think maybe there's not as many video ads and what you think? You know how well you think they're doing?

 

Michael:

Yeah, so we've been having good success with video ads. It's really great if you have good content about your product and there is good video, so to say, do about your product. You're getting so much brand visibility and just for low costs. Like you said, the reason why it's not in a lot of categories is, for the most part, it's usually people not bidding on it. Like you have to accept the video ads and most people are just not doing it. So a lot of times, like we'll see really good success there, then some competitors start the video ads because we're doing it and then it starts becoming not as economical. But in the beginning you could get some good boost out of it.

 

Carrie Miller:

Any other strategies or anything that maybe I haven't covered, that you wanted to talk about in this?

 

Michael:

I think that's good. I think just pay really close attention to the updates and things that are coming out from Walmart, like if you're pretty quick to jump on those, you know some of those programs could help move the needle. So and just plan a lot around promotions. Like there's a lot of leverage with promotions. Like try to plan properly around how to position your promotions. It's a longer conversation but there's a lot to unpack there. So definitely try to have a better eye for the promotional angle.

 

Carrie Miller:

I did see like Black Friday it came up pretty quickly. Is that kind of how Walmart works? Is like the deals come out pretty quickly, you have to move fast and say you want to do them, or is there a planning process for them?

 

Michael:

There's a planning process. If you have an account manager, like holiday deals get planned way in advance, but there's also like the prime equivalent event that they do around prime things. So like definitely want to plan ahead with your account manager and ask them if there's any opportunities for your items to fit into any of their promotions and see if there's any opportunities there.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, all right. So we've got a question from Lady and the Storm. How long is the process to get approved?

 

Michael:

To sell on Walmart. It could either happen right away, it could either take a few days, it could either be a denial. So you know it really depends on. But if you really, if you fill out your information properly and you double check it all and you fill out your information properly and all the paperwork and everything matches up and you're, you know it looks like you have a decent Amazon store, like you know, you shouldn't have a problem getting accepted unless you have, like another application before. And most people, by the way, that come to us with like a non accept, like denied accounts, it's usually like they have another, they have another, they have another account they tried opening. It's linked on the email, there's that to like all these bunch of things. But just, I think it's very important to make sure you really think through your application, make sure that you know you have everything filled out and if you already tried applying in the past, like reach out about it rather than opening up another application, it'll just get both your applications, yeah you can reach out to sell cord.

 

Carrie Miller:

Michael does has helped some people that have gotten rejected. That I've sent over to him. So reach out to them if you do have some issues with that. And also have they kind of loosened the guidelines on? You know, do you have to be an established seller still? Or I've seen some people who, like maybe started a new brand and then they applied and they got accepted. Is that the kind of the norm or is that just kind of like? They got kind of passed through and they got lucky.

 

Michael:

No, so they're starting to accept like newer, smaller sellers. It depends a lot on the products you sell and you know it goes there. It goes under different teams based on the main category that you're under. So you know there's definitely there is there. There changes a little bit but for the most part we started seeing new small applications get approved.

 

Carrie Miller:

So it is dependent on the category. So that's a good thing to note. Okay, next one from Lynn how to manage Amazon PPC. Okay, so we're not doing Amazon. See, for example, how to add negative keywords in Walmart. So okay, so I'm going to try to sit rephrase this, maybe in Walmart terms, because this we're not talking about Amazon in this one, but how to manage Amazon or Walmart PPC. The platform is different from Amazon. For example, how to add negative keyword in Walmart Seller Center.

 

Michael:

Yeah, so Walmart Seller Center doesn't have negative targeting yet they're adding it so that they're adding that there's new things that came like conquesting ads and stuff like that, so there is newer things for targeting. But, yeah, negative is gonna come soon.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah they said it was on the road map. So yeah. Alright. Next lady in a storm asks how long do you have to ship your items?

 

Michael:

So it depends on how you fill out your shipping template. So you just have to whatever you fill out in your shipping templates, like that's what you have to when you have to meet. So if you fill out two days, you're gonna have to make sure it's two days. It's a fill out one day. So it depends how you manage your shipping templates. I think there's a minimum. There's like a maximum, though I'm not exactly sure what that is.

 

Carrie Miller:

But I think it's seven days. This is the max. Can you analyze wholesale for sales data in competition with helium 10? You can with x-ray. So you can, you know, find the products that you want to sell and you can actually Utilize x-ray to look at sales. So that's a great way to do it, mostly. And then also, you know, you can also look at the sales rank as well in the back end of seller center. You can utilize that information and then any information that you get, like if you have Pacvue or using kind of a software To help you to run your ads. You can see some more data in there that way, but I would say mostly x-ray for helium 10, go ahead and go to the, the main page for the price that you're selling, and then pull, pull our Chrome extension and it'll show you the sales data there. Um, okay, is tied? Janak Ranchod said is title density as relevant to Walmart listings compared to Amazon listings?

 

Michael:

Yeah, so I'm not sure exactly what it's meant by that, but Title Density on Helium 10 is basically Keyword phrases on Amazon.

 

Carrie Miller:

So if you, for example, green bookshelf and you wanted to target green bookshelf but if, like 50 competitors on page one have green bookshelf in their title, it's gonna be really competitive. However, if that phrase you see that maybe only one or two have just that same exact phrase, then you can actually rank for it a lot easier on Amazon. So it's basically like the exact phrase form and how many competitors have that exact phrase in their title.

 

Michael:

Yeah. So I have a different approach when it comes to ranking on Walmart and you know everybody's got their own opinions. But my approach for ranking on Walmart is more about you have to find the keywords that have the most volume and then, based on the most volume, you have to then analyze who's taking the conversion share of those keywords and then understand their product, their price points and, if you're on the features around their product, if your product Matches up well enough to their product, meaning you're just as you have just as much features, your item is just as good, if not better, and your price points competitive enough. That's what you want to target because you know if you get there you'll convert and you're gonna have to check their PDP and make sure like your PDP is better and all that kind of stuff. But the problem is, if you're focusing on, if you do all that research, but you're focusing on key on items, on keywords, that the items that converting in the shelf, you're not gonna, you're not gonna match on, you're not gonna match one next to it, doesn't matter if you rank, you're just gonna start de-ranking because Walmart's so heavily based on conversion rates. So I that's kind of our approach to it, and also because the Significant keywords are the only ones that drive legitimate volume, like there is some volume done from other keywords but it's usually not significant enough loose is asking Do you recommend to start Walmart even when just started on Amazon? I would say it depends on their products, your storemen and a little bit of more about your company. But as a whole, usually not usually, I would say like build your brand, build a little bit of your capabilities off of Amazon. It's gonna be hard to tackle both at the same time and then start with that.

 

Carrie Miller:

So you think starting on Amazon first is a good idea, and then yeah. Okay, the next one. Jenak asked. I hope I'm saying your name right, Jenak. Jenak, can you simply copy your Amazon listings to create your Walmart listings?

 

Michael:

You shouldn't. That's a big no-no. You should Rewrite your listings like you can use the same core of information. You should rewrite your titles, descriptions, key features, to be optimized based on Walmart style guide. So number one, the keywords that you care about, are going to be different. Walmart wants shorter titles, they want different style, descriptions, key features. So for the most part, all that's different. So you really that's kind of the biggest Task is to just make sure you're optimized specifically for Walmart.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, I think it actually kind of hinders you on your listing quality score when you do that. So yeah, Lynn asks are you going to host a Walmart PPC management session? We really need it. I think we can arrange that in the in the near future. So we'll definitely work on that and if you haven't joined our one winning with Walmart group, that's probably where we'll do it. So make sure you're in our helium 10 winning with Walmart group if you want to do that. Alright, it looks like we've come to an end of the questions. I think that we had a lot of great information. Oh, we got another question. I will put this one up here. Let's see here. Mr. Kamal says how much revenue Should you have on Amazon to consider yourself to move to Walmart?

 

Michael:

So I mean, the revenue number is a hard thing because it depends on your Category and the type of items you sell and how competitive is on Walmart versus how well you're doing on Amazon. A lot of times, if you really started tapping on your Amazon and then definitely make sense to spend one by once, you already have some traction and you have a good hold. You have good products, like you know, I would I mean, we're a big fan of Walmart's a lot of times will tell people to start pretty early on. So it's just, I think, less about revenue numbers because it's so dependable based on different brands. I think what what's important to understand is like do you have good enough products that are? You know? You feel like you know you could move properly on Walmart. Is enough volume for them on Walmart? And what is that? What is what type of a volume are you looking for it to be worthwhile for you to kind of take on the endeavor? And then you know, yeah, and, and based on that you could really analyze, okay, are you ready to move, and what that would look like and just expand not move, but expand.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, it looks like we've come to an end of the questions. Thank you everyone for joining and for just, you know, interacting and asking all these great questions throughout. And thanks again, Michael, for joining us. I know it's been a while since you've been on and I'm really happy that you were able to answer a lot of these questions for us. So thanks again and we will see you all again next month. We'll have another guest for Winning with Walmart Wednesday, and we'll see you then. Bye, everyone.

#536 - From Sinking Ship To A Thriving Amazon FBA Business

Cara Sayer's entrepreneurial spirit shines brighter than ever as she recounts her nail-biting journey from the brink of closure to soaring profits. Her candid discussion with us offers a lot of wisdom on the critical importance of keeping a keen eye on business metrics. As an e-commerce maven, she underpins the conversation with her own blunders and breakthroughs, ensuring that our listeners can sidestep the pitfalls and replicate her success. And for those with a penchant for cultural quirks, our banter in British slang adds a hearty dash of charm to the mix.

Our talk takes an exciting turn when we unlock the secrets to mastering keyword research and making data-led decisions that skyrocket sales. Cara and Bradley dissect how tools like Helium 10 can revolutionize product listings and why a stale strategy could be your downfall. We also unravel the complex web of inventory management and the savvy approach to just-in-time shipping, a must-know for Amazon sellers looking to conquer international markets. Plus, don't miss our exploration of the monumental impact that solid branding has on weathering the competitive storm and securing consumer trust.

Wrapping things up, we navigate the art of standing out in Amazon's vast marketplace. Cara shares her playbook on crafting a unique narrative and engaging brand backstory that can mean the difference between blending in and breaking through. We spotlight the strategic edge of maintaining your website for direct consumer rapport and a sneak peek at new products. With a nod to the upcoming changes in EU regulations and the significance of a diversified sales approach, this episode is jam-packed with actionable insights. And as we close, Cara and Bradley reflected on the delicate dance of work-life balance, ensuring our listeners remember the heartbeat behind the hustle.

In episode 536 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Cara discuss:

• 00:00 - Reviving and Growing a Struggling Amazon Business
• 02:53 - Origins of Common UK English Phrases
• 07:59 - Amazon SKU Economics and Tracking Sales
• 11:05 - Keyword Optimization for Sales Growth 
• 14:45 - The Importance of Branding in Business
• 16:29 - Brand Marketing on Amazon
• 20:17 - The Benefit of Having a Website
• 28:29 - Favorite Helium 10 Tool
• 28:43 - Selling Tips for Amazon
• 30:42 - Importance of Websites Beyond Amazon

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got listener favorite guest car back to tell us how she came close to having to shut down her business since she wasn't looking at the right metrics, but she's going to show us how she was not only able to save her company but grow it. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you a 6, 7, or 8 figure seller and want to network in a private mastermind group with other experienced sellers? Or maybe you want to take advantage of monthly advanced training sessions with Kevin King, an expert guest? Do you want to come to our quarterly in-person, all-day trainings at Helium 10 headquarters? Or do you want the widest access to the Helium 10 set of tools? For all of these things, the Elite program might be for you. For more information on Helium 10 Elite, go to h10.me/elite.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And to continue in my series of me being on the other side of the world here in Germany, the next guest that we recorded here in Frankfurt is none other than the amazing Cara. Welcome back to the show.

 

Cara:

Thank you, gorgeous one, thank you for having me.

 

Bradley Sutton:

This is actually the fourth time, believe it or not on the podcast.

 

Cara:

Am I approaching a world record for the most interviewed person?

 

Bradley Sutton:

You're in the select top 5% of people who have made it to four episodes.

 

Cara:

There you go I love it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So we're not going to go too much into her backstory. Mhel here prepared some of the numbers where she's on, so if you want to find out her origin story, that's episode 117. She came back on episode 246 and we were talking pandemic stuff and then most recently back in 2022, she was on episode 378. And that was interesting, talking about some of her struggles that she started seeing with her business, and we're going to talk a little bit about that today. Hey, we keep it real on the podcast, but before we get into the stuff we. Every time Cara is on the episode, she teaches me a little bit more of British English, all right, and I'm sure it's going to come out like, like she, the way she talks. She always says stuff that I'm like what, what did you say? So we're all going to learn some more British slang here? My first question is wait, what is this one phrase? That was something.

 

Cara:

Yeah, so we were talking about something. I said oh, that's just piffling, and piffling is when something's really inconsequential, so it's just like so little, it's like a piffling thing, okay. And then the other one was put some Wellie into it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Put some Wellie into it.

 

Cara:

So, which is, I suppose, a translation, would be put some oomph into it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, put some oomph in it. All right, so I'm wearing my office the office t-shirt Dunder Mifflin here, because you know that's one of our exports that we got from, from Britain, is the office. You know, one of our most popular shows. I know how it's used, but when people say Bob's your uncle, like, like, where does that come from? Though that's the most ridiculous phrase I've ever heard Bob's your uncle, how does that?

 

Cara:

I actually have no clue. This is half the problem. So when I talk, a lot of the time I'll use these phrases and I have no clue. I haven't got a Scoobies where it came from. That was one, and I thought maybe that had something to do with Scooby-Doo, but apparently it doesn't, because I Googled it last night and it's got something to do with the Scottish word that's got to do with Scooby or something. So that's the thing is a lot of these things I have, and in fact, what's the other one? There's one oh, I'll have it, it'll come back to me. But there's one that I use quite a lot and I actually had to Google it because and it turned out was something to do an Australian runner or something. Oh, Gordon Bennett, that's right, Gordon Bennett, have you ever heard of that one?

 

Bradley Sutton:

I have not.

 

0:03:49 - Cara:

Okay. So you know, instead of being really rude and throwing out an F word, you go oh, Gordon Bennett. And I was like who is Gordon Bennett? Why do we say him? And I'm quite interested in these things and I think he's. Either he was either an Australian pilot or an Australian runner or something like that. I have no clue why we use it, but we do and I say it quite a lot.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now the first. You know like you know how I roll here. I usually don't like trying to get our topics before I don't really think about it. But you know, we went out to dinner last night and you were talking a little bit about some of your struggles and how you were taking one aspect of your total business and we're kind of like not giving it the attention it needed. And then when you actually did, you were just like, wow, this is I'm in such bad shape, why have to close? You know, shut the business. So talk about what you were neglecting, how you put a stop to that neglect and then the steps that you took to rectify this situation.

 

Cara:

So I think a lot of it comes from the fact that when I started my business I had no clue what I was doing, and I suppose a lot of Amazon sellers are like that, in that you just sort of go yeah, this sounds like a good idea. So I'm going to start running a business and I used to work in a corporate environment and had budgets and all various other things, but in my own business I didn't. I just kind of ran a lot like the seat of my pants and I think maybe that's just because, also, my I'm more of an intuitive person versus a data driven person, because I know a lot of Amazon sellers are very data driven and maybe less, you know, intuitive. You know, as in like everyone has different skill sets. And I think what happened was the business grew and grew and grew and I basically broke my own golden rule, which is that at the end of the day, the whole thing about turnover is vanity and profit is sanity. So what I was doing is I was just looking at the big numbers and not really focusing on small numbers, and I sort of came to a point in July where I realized that basically what happened was I used to use the software Sage for my accounts and I knew Sage inside and out. And then I changed accountants and they started to use zero and I didn't know it as well. So, if I'm honest, I should have been more involved, but I just kind of let them like run it. And so when I went to look at my accounts I was like, oh God, I don't seem to have made very much money. I've got really quite a good turnover, but I haven't actually made much profit. I'm thinking like, what am I gonna do? So I started looking into it in much more depth.

 

Cara:

So, first of all, what I did and I would suggest every Amazon seller does this. But, to be honest, as you know, I don't really talk about Amazon sellers, I talk about businesses and brands. But every company that is selling products, you 100% need to really make sure that your profit and loss, your PnL, reflects what you're doing. So mine was literally sales, pretty much as a big picture. Well, I sell in four countries. I've got four websites, four marketplaces. I've also got retailers and distributors and various other things. So to have all of my sales information in one place was a bit stupid, frankly, because how am I gonna get any clarity on what's doing well, what's not doing so well, and pretty much all my costs, like all my Amazon costs, were all bunched in one place. And yes, I could have separated them out if I'd done it by area. But actually I then had an issue with my bookkeeping and so actually it turned out that hadn't been done properly, so I wouldn't have been able to do that, so I then separated my costs out. So again I had like eight different cost centers for well, not eight different cost centers, sorry, I did four different cost centers, but by country, so I could at least see what I was making in terms of turnover and then see what the costs were for those countries, looking at a lot of detail. And then I started looking like then I went into and this is a really really super useful and I don't think I certainly haven't used it before the SKU economics level of reporting, where I mean, obviously it's easy for me because I've got only 13 SKUs and I know I've spone people today and they'd like two and a half thousand. But you can actually see although it would be really good if Amazon could do or actually I don't think Helium 10 does it do they Like, an ability to export SKU economics reports?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, I don't know what SKU economics means. I mean, we have-.

 

Cara:

Oh my God, right. Well, in which case, I'm giving you a whole new thing that Helium 10, a thousand-.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, I probably do it but I just don't call it that. You know like it's called.

 

Cara:

SKU economics.

 

0:07:58 - Bradley Sutton:

There's no other right.

 

Cara:

So basically I saw it for the first time on the app because I'm quite a regular app checker. So I go in and I have a look and it's in the manage inventory. You go to the SKU and then on the top it's got like pricing and this and that and then it says SKU economics and you can actually You're talking about seller central.

 

Bradley Sutton:

This is Seller Central

 

Cara:

Yes, sorry, do translate. So I go to SKU economics and basically you can do it like the last seven days, last 30 days, last six months, last 12 months, and it's the only place I've ever seen where you can literally see what your total sales are, what your net sales are, what your Amazon costs are, and they break it down to a level of detail where it's literally like you spent this amount on a deal coupon code, this amount on a sponsored profit by SKU.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, yes, helium 10 has that. We don't call it SKU economics, but it's just in profits. You go to your product performance and then you could look at it at the ASIN level or you could look at the SKU level. Okay, well, you need to show me how to do that then, okay, we'll do-.

 

Cara:

But I did this myself, just went in Sure, and then I started transporting all the information over and then I broke it down by country and I started looking and I realized that actually, like in Canada, when you actually put in the cost of my product, excluding shipping in or any other costs, I had running a business in Canada I was pretty much not even breaking even. And then I started looking at the US and I was like, oh same thing, not good UK, really healthy Australia, healthy so. But at the time I was before I did all the analysis and there was a lot of work to do on it I was literally like, oh my God, I think I'm gonna just have to shut up shop because I've got an issue with the Chinese sellers who I think were impacting before, but they're really kicking off now because obviously my product was launched over 10 years ago, so they know there's no patent on that product. Therefore, they can go for it. So at the moment they're selling the product that looks like mine it is not the same but it looks as similar enough to the consumer for $5. Well, it cost me $25 to manufacture the thing. They're selling them for $25 on Amazon and I can't compete. Now I don't want to compete, but the issue is what it's done.

 

Cara:

And again, this is where I wasn't paying attention and should have, like, pulled myself up sooner. I didn't see the huge drop in the sales and therefore my storage costs at 3PL level have gone up hugely and therefore I've got huge, big overheads on the fact that I've got all this stock and it's not selling. And if I sell it at too low a price then I'm almost not even, I'm not gonna break even at all. So anyway, I started doing a whole lot of analysis and I literally I've probably had my head in spreadsheets for close to four months, something like that. But I tell you what, once you've done that sort of work, the clarity you have and the decisions you can make. So, for example, I actually decided, normally I'm all about trying to give my customers the most range possible, the widest, and I'm like excuse, my French, fuck that.

 

Cara:

Literally I'm just gonna give them this product, this product, this product, this product. You don't need the variations, because the variations are costumey, extra. They often get returned because they may be by the wrong one thinking they didn't realize it at a pink trim and they bought that one. So I'm like actually that one I know they'll like they either have that one or nothing, and so that's now my more my approach. And then the other thing I was doing as well is looking more into the keywords and looking more into making sure that the listing was actually really reflecting the keywords that are out there. So I was doing a lot of helium 10 research into that and actually updating the listings. So they'd probably been around like one of them particularly had been around for about two or three years and I probably hadn't really ever done that much work on it and already I only updated it like middle of December. It's not my peak season and I can see the sales coming up. And that's from literally looking at what are the terms that we should be using. Because, it changes over time.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It can change the same product, but the how people find it are searching for it to change over time.

 

Cara:

Exactly, and also, I mean, I do have a tendency to kind of invent keywords as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So words, that I use in my speech and also in my listings.

 

Cara:

So I find that things like there are certain keywords that I use in my listings, that because people are copying my listings, they're copying my wording and therefore then that wording is then getting picked up in like brand analytics, et cetera. So it's quite fascinating, but the thing is is at the end of the day, I think it does. You know, I'm all about the marketing, I'm all about the intuition, but also you have to be about the data as well and the numbers, and you know there's a difference between taking some risk and investing in something that your business needs in order to grow, versus just sort of sitting there and maybe not paying attention to what you shouldn't really be spending, and that's what I was doing. So bad me, bad me.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, you know, instead of having to shut down the whole business, you were able to, you know, maybe shut down some unprofitable skews. Well, I shut down Canada, shut down, you know, marketplaces, and that might be a scary thing. You know, some people, they go to extremes. They're like I got to, just I'm just going to quit everything, and that's not good. Or they're like no, like I have to succeed in Canada, like I know it can work despite all the numbers. Screw the numbers. You know I'm going to make this work. You know you got to be able to not easily give up by the same time, understand that you'd have battles, or if you want to win the war, you might need to like. So it doesn't always have to be permanent. That's the other thing, right?

 

Cara:

So just because I've shut Canada down for now doesn't mean I can't come back to Canada. But right now the numbers don't work in terms of getting the product over there, the various other things that are there, the pricing structures, etc. The percentage of the particular products that will sell and the ones that won't it. I literally just was like no, okay, that doesn't make sense. And, like you say, there is a bit of ego in there in terms of like oh well, I sell on, you know, for marketplaces. Well, who cares? If you're not making money, don't sell on any, you know. So I did. And then I actually had a chat, the reason I was gonna shut the US down. So I had another a chat with another friend of mine who she'd exited a business, an eight-figure business, and she was saying the US is really tough and particularly because, like Amazon, are doing all this now Penalizing you for not having enough in as well as penalizing you for having too much, and it's like God, Gordon Bennett, like give us a break, right, seriously, give us a break.

 

Cara:

And I was like you know what the thing is that in my home country it's a lot easier to manage that sort of thing, which obviously, you know it, the US is not my home country, so I'm gonna have to pay more for storage and 3PLs and all the rest of it, managing that constant fluctuation. So I did the numbers and it is actually cheaper for me to fly it in on a sort of just in time basis, at least for the short term, because that's the other thing. Sometimes it's not about always doing things, for I'm never gonna. I'm gonna do that forever. It's more, let's just have a breather and Monitor the costs and then see whether you've got something going on that works.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, now, I didn't get to see your presentation right now because I was recording some podcast in here, but I know like one of the things you talk about a lot is is branding, and I imagine Actually that's one of the reasons why you don't have to shut your business down and why, you know, some people might have been listening right now and thoughts themselves wait a minute, if she has very close knockoffs who are selling for $25 and her price is $90, you know it's not a matter of oh, maybe us is just a little bit more profitable in Canada. You know, like that that's a huge gap, you know right there. But you're obviously not fighting on price and I would imagine one of the main reasons why you're able to Succeed is because of your strong brand 100% because we grew in the UK.

 

Cara:

30% Grew, even at that price..

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know it's not like the Chinese sellers are not selling in the UK.

 

Cara:

I've got loads of Chinese sellers chasing me in the UK, but the difference is that the brand is better known and is better trusted and therefore you know they, they and also I think there is an element, you know, there is an element of the fact that you know whichever country you're based in, you know People like to support a more local business, so there is an element of that. So, if you're a US seller in the US, I do think sometimes you know you need to make more of that because actually you know US citizens are gonna want to support a US business.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so talk, talk a little bit more about that. It's about you know the all of this can be considered part of your branding. You know where's it manufactured. You know, like, are you really targeting your, your target avatar? You know, what did you talk about in your presentation today that you can maybe share with the audience About some things that will help them to one of the one of the one of the biggest things was the fact that I do think a lot Of Amazon sellers don't really have a brand.

 

Cara:

They just have a name for a business or a name for something that they use and they don't really have a what I'd call a true brand, and they don't always. I think sometimes also, existing only on Amazon makes you lose perspective on you know how normal businesses work, like businesses that aren't based on Amazon, and so you know a lot of businesses. I mean, I think throughout life, people buy from people and I think that's so important to remember that, even on Amazon, one of the reasons why Amazon focus is so heavily on a plus listings and now they're bringing in the premium, a plus and all the rest of it, because Amazon knows right. I, you know, you've known me quite a few years now and I've always banged on about brand. I've always banged on about having a story.

 

Cara:

Tell your story. It doesn't have to be your story necessarily. It could be the product story, but you need to have something that differentiates you and and even then I was chatting to someone the conference earlier on and I was saying the thing is that sometimes it's not even the fact that you're you're selling different products. It's the way that you curate them, right. So it's the collection of products that you've chosen to sell it under your brand name Says something because, like, if you check, if I said right, bradley, like we're both gonna do kitchenware, I guarantee you that both of us would choose different products. If you said right, you've got to choose 10 products and you know, off you go, I would choose 10 different or we might have some crossover, but you know, we might both have a garlic crusher, for example. I used a garlic crusher as an example in my talk about how even a garlic crusher can have a story.

 

Bradley Sutton:

We call that garlic press.

 

Cara:

Thank you for enlightening, but you know. But the whole point is that you know, even the fact that individual people are actually running these businesses means that there will be something individual about that business. So it's finding that story effectively and finding the why. I'm always really quite fascinated by the whys of business. So, for example, you look at things like Airbnb and Uber and things like that, and the why was because people didn't want to pay the stupidly high taxi rates. The why was the two guys who did Airbnb was because, of fact, they didn't want to. They didn't have enough money to rent a hotel room and they needed somewhere to stay and they couldn't afford all the other options. So they came up with a concept of Airbnb.

 

Cara:

Even things like Ring, you know, like the doorbell company, you know that originally came that that wasn't the story there is. It's a reinvention of something traditional, but they've used technology that's available to revolutionize an existing product. It could also just be the way in which something is communicated with or handled like with the customers, so making the customers more engaged with the product. So, for example, one of the things I'm doing this year is I'm going to be doing an app which helps baby sleep through the provision of white noise, and you know that's an add-on product, but I won't be selling on Amazon, obviously. But the thing is, is it's kind of something where, again, it can become a marketing tool. It can become like something that you can, you know, give to people. You know there's other. I'm all about added value, like where can you give added value? And hopefully try and give added value where it doesn't cost you very much.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. One thing I think that helps you expand also to different market places. Be it, you know, like when you, you know you started in UK, then went to US I know we were talking about the potential of UAE and you were saying, oh yeah, I've got. You know, I've got some customers down there and stuff, so talk to you about that. Like how can you say something like that Is that because you know people from social media who have bought your product? Or you look at the addresses of where people buy your products. But how can you say, oh yeah, I've got customers there. When I'm ready to launch there, I can hit them up and they'll promote it. Like how can you do that?

 

Cara:

Okay, so yes, yes and almost yes. So, fundamentally, one of the other things I always bang on about and I banged on about it in my presentation is I do believe that any real brand or product business should have a website. There's two reasons for that, so I'm going to just go off on one tangent slightly, but the main reason for it is that, for example, I've been out of stock for two of my best selling products for the last couple of months because we've had issues getting stuff in from China, blah, blah, blah, and we had delays on the line, etc. Etc. So what I'm able to do with my websites, take pre-orders. You can't do that on Amazon, because if you don't have the stock, you can't sell. Literally, that's it, you're done. So I've generated, I've lost. My sales are down for the month in comparison to last year on Amazon and they're up not as much as they would be, but they're still significant enough money coming in on people who are prepared to hand over their money on the basis that the product will come. We tell them the dates and then we ship it.

 

Cara:

And so, therefore, the benefit of having a website, for example, is I know exactly how much traffic my website gets from the UAE. I can literally see it down to the almost like city level because, like the analytics now on things like Shopify is absolutely fascinating. So I did a breakdown of breakdown of, like, all the visitors that come from outside of the UK and you know there's some significant numbers Also. Yes, the other thing with the UAE is that you have a lot of expats. Now, the one thing that expats lack is family, because they're living outside of their home country. So when they have a baby, they're much more reliant on external sources. So they're much more reliant on things like baby sleep experts. They're much more reliant on gadgets and things that can help the baby sleep. And, yeah, we've got influencers. There's actually a few baby sleep experts starting up in the UAE and at the moment I can't, I can't. It's really frustrating.

 

Cara:

The most frustrating thing for me is when someone says they can't buy my product at a reasonable price, because I don't want to be like charging 25, 30 quid for a courier, which I do, and people will pay it, but I don't really want to be. I want them to get it at a price that works for them and in a time span that works for them. So the reason the UAE I've been sort of thinking about it for many, many, many years and in fact, I had way back in the day like 2010. I had a distributor in the UAE and I've had retailers in the UAE before, and I think the main issue is that they don't do any marketing, whereas I'm happy to do the marketing. So we're happy to make contact with the influencers, we're happy to, you know, and the good thing is we get people contacting us because it works both ways, and then we can say, oh, actually, yes, and we're selling on Amazon, so it gives us the opportunity to say, yeah, we can help you, sure.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Really interesting. And another thing that I found or I probably knew this, but you know my memory is so bad but that you are an unexpected expert in things that have to do with, like trademarks and stuff like that. So what is something that you think the average listener might not know or might wow them like well, I didn't know that.

 

Cara:

Well, one of the issues I think that people in fact I was chatting to someone at dinner last night about it is that quite often people worry about the fact that a particular brand name may have been registered already. Now, that's not necessarily a problem because, for example, McDonald’s farms now this is a slightly like random, not realistic example, but the principles are the same. So you've got McDonald's restaurants and then you've got McDonald's farm. Now we know, obviously McDonald's restaurants probably have got their own farm. But if they didn't, then there's absolutely no reason why you can't trademark McDonald's as a farm, because it's a different category and those categories are actually quite important. So, for example, if you've got a rubber duck company and you wanted to call it, you can't call it rubber ducks, it's too generic. But say, you wanted to call it sort of yellow ducky or something like that, right, and then somebody else was doing you know you're making toys and they're called yellow ducky, and then someone wanted to do a swimwear brand called yellow ducky. Well, actually you could have the two existing, like you wouldn't necessarily want to. This is the other thing. Sometimes it's not advantageous to actually have a similar brand name to somebody who's already established. But if they're in a completely different like industry. So if you had a yellow ducky, that was a truck company, right, and you're doing yellow ducky toys, no one's going to confuse the two, like you know. It's really not going to be like a case of someone's going to go to the yellow ducky truck company and think, oh, my goodness, where are my ducks, you know, or toys, or whatever. So there is that and there's also.

 

Cara:

The other thing is, I think, is that you know, people don't really know how to search for that sort of thing and it's not that hard. The USPTO, the US Patent Trademark Office, has actually got some really good search functionality. There's also the WEPO, which is World Internet, because I'm always suggesting the other thing you need to do is you need to make sure that your trademark isn't taken in another country. So we have it quite a lot. I tend to talk about it in reverse, which is you might have a brand in the UK and then actually someone may have already filed for that trademark in the US. So there's no point really building up a brand in the US, in the UK sorry if you're then hoping to go to the US, because it's going to be too difficult, especially if they're in a similar sort of environment.

 

Cara:

So it is really, and that works both ways. So I would say, even in the US, if you're thinking of expanding to Europe or to the UK or Australia or whatever, do a bit of due diligence, search online, because you will be able to find it, and make sure you use a VPN to go looking through on Google in local countries, because the other thing also you don't necessarily know is there was one brand that I know of in the baby industry and if you Google it, it actually means it's in Dutch, it actually means the bits of that hang off the back of a sheep's bottom.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

 

Cara:

Okay, so I'm not being funny, but I don't want that as a brand name they have and I don't seem to impact on them at all. But the thing is, you do want to see whether there's any weird colloquialisms or weird slang and things like that. Plus, the other thing is people get very like oh my goodness, what am I going to do? What am I going to do about like, trademarking internationally? And there is something called the Madrid Protocol and the Madrid Protocol. Once you've actually trademarked in a country that follows the Madrid Protocol which, by the way, includes America and China, EU, Australia, all the big players, all the most of the places you would want to trademark and once your trademark has been accepted and obviously this is why the due diligence is really important, to make sure that you haven't got like McDonald's restaurants anywhere else is you can use the Madrid Protocol to register in those other countries within a six month period of your trademark being approved in your home country. And it's a lot less and you don't need to use lawyers because otherwise you'd have to literally go out to each country and then trademark it. So I always say to people sort of think big in terms of and think safe. So, for example, it's super important to have a trademark in China, because trade in China. It is a first. I think it's a first to file. It is it's first to file, whereas in other countries it's first to use. I think the US is first to use.

 

Cara:

So the problem is that you could have been using a trademark in, for example, I think in the UK we're first to file, I think in the US it's first to use. So somebody would not be able to probably register my trademark unless you know, because I would probably know about it and therefore it would come up and I'd say well, hang on a minute, I've been trading in the US for this amount of time and I also think I had to also do the same in Canada. I had to actually show how long I've been trading for. But in the UK you don't have to have been trading at all. So if I wanted to, I could literally take Helium 10, and I could trademark that in the UK. If you haven't done, you know, because no one else is using it. There's no reason why it wouldn't be, and you know so by thinking with using the Madrid protocol, especially in the early days of like, when you're just doing your trademark. It's expensive, but the thing is, if you think you're going to go. Well, if you're producing in China, you should definitely do it, and if you think you're going to go into the US or into the UK or EU, it's actually quite a cost effective way of getting a trademark.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So Edumacated me about a lot of stuff there. Now, before we get into your last strategy, a couple of questions. I've been asking guests, so you've obviously been using Helium 10 for a while and I remember from the very first time I met you. There's just a lot of stuff that you don't know how to do. But about from the stuff that you do know how to do and that you do use, what is your favorite tool in Helium 10 that you feel gives you the most value, and why does it give you value?

 

Cara:

It's the one. It's a Cerebro where you go in and look at the keywords put the ace in it and get the keywords yes, yes. So I love that one.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Do you know what language Cerebro is?

 

Cara:

Oh, is it Greek.

 

Bradley Sutton:

No, it might be, I have some Greek in it, but it's. Oh, that's so the literal translation or the literal spelling is brain yeah, for Spanish yeah okay, cool, so yeah, so that's definitely one of my favorites.

 

Cara:

and then I also use I get the marketplace alerts and things like that, and I particularly like every time I

change my own or if a price changes. I love that coming in, because Amazon quite often starts selling my products in other places and it's useful to know what they're charging when they're doing it. And also it's a sanity check for me, like when I, for example, I messed up the other day big time. I'm launching a new product and I'm making a variation of another product and I accidentally put on the old product the new title. So I was accidentally selling the new product before it had launched because the old product was still live. So it was only when I got an email from Helium 10 saying my title had changed and I was like. So I ran into the back of, like Seller Central oh my god, I think it was only about 20 orders and then I'm like, trying to change the title, trying to change the title, trying to change the title, got it changed finally and that was yeah, that was a bit of a lifesaver as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So alerts is and Cerebro Wishlist for something that maybe we do it and you just don't realize it, or something that you think that we don't have. That would really make your life easier.

 

Cara:

Well, the SKU economics. I'm gonna be looking for that, okay, so I don't know. We have to have a chat afterwards and we'll have a look, because the problem is with the Amazon seller central version is that it's not exportable. So I literally had to sit there and I was doing screenshots and then moving and copying, like a picture, into an Excel spreadsheet.

 

Bradley Sutton:

For you with 13 SKUs. Maybe not so bad, but imagine somebody else.

 

Cara:

I'm thinking, feeling the pain, but also if I wanted to do regular updates like where am I now? I don't want to have to go through that every single time. So I will be very interested to see. Because SKU economics honestly, I'm a bit obsessed with it at the moment because it's so useful in being really granular, Like literally, like that SKU has spent X amount of money on sponsored ads, that bit has generated that amount of profit and it tells you all the returns, like everything, and so it really gave me some, like I was saying, some really good knowledge into what the business was actually doing versus what I thought it was doing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, your last 30, 60, I know for you might be hard. So maybe 90 second tip of the day. It could be about trademarks, it could be about branding, it could be about the best pubs to go to in Britain. I mean any possible subject that you are an expert on.

 

Cara:

Okay, I'm not going to go down the pubs route.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, okay.

 

Cara:

But no, I think my top tip is have a website outside of Amazon. Have some way where you can sell, because we are all at the mercy of Amazon and all that needs to happen is we've got some new regulations going into the EU that's going to impact on all the US sellers, which is new labeling laws, and if your product is not compliant, amazon will shut your listing down on December the 13th 2024. Literally, so it's absolutely vital that you have another way to sell. That's obviously in the EU, but like this, that could happen in any market. We just don't know what's going to happen. And the thing is, you know, if you have all your eggs in Amazon's basket, then you're not really giving yourself an opportunity to do anything other than be at the mercy of Amazon. And you know, whilst I do love Amazon, obviously, at the same time I don't think it's healthy to be that involved with any one person at all. So it is really good to be able to sort of spread the risk a little bit and, as I say, then that gives you the opportunity to do more things off Amazon, which then actually tend to drive more traffic. So my website increased by 30% last year. Amazon increased by 30% because I do encourage my customers to go to Amazon if that's what they want to do.

 

Cara:

But and then there's also a customer who doesn't want to buy on Amazon because they don't like the concept, they don't believe in it. And there is, there is a there's a definite movement. A lot of people. Unfortunately, they don't understand how Amazon works and they think everything that's being sold on Amazon is being sold by Amazon. And I often have to explain to them like hang on a minute, I'm selling on Amazon. So by you not shopping on Amazon, you're actually not helping me.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah.

 

Cara:

You know, and they don't get it. So, anyway, have a website and make sure you've got a really good, strong, like about us like page which sort of tells people why you're doing this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, Well, Cara, thank you so much. I have no doubt that you're gonna be make it to five episodes next year. You'll have some good stories and teach us some new vocabulary words as well. You know, one of the things I like about you is that you're not here to sell something and then not the people who Nothing bad about it, yeah nothing bad. You know, I have influencers and people who have service providers and they push their website Great. You know, that's why part of the reason why we're all here, but you know, you're just like helping people.

 

Cara:

I love it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You speak and you have no agenda, so we're not gonna say, hey, go to carasayer.com but I have nothing on there. But I'm sure people like to hear from you. So like do you know where the next speaking? Are you speaking at a Billion Dollar Seller? Somebody are going there or anything.

 

Cara:

No, I'm not allowed to, because my daughter's doing her big exams this year.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So I've had it. This is the one year so no international travel until after July.

 

Cara:

But I'm going to the European Seller Conference in Prague Because I'm allowed to stay with it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's in March, I believe.

 

Cara:

Yeah, march 13th to the 16th, I think it is, and I'm not speaking, but I'm just gonna go along as a participant and I'm really looking forward to it, actually, because I've never been before.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So I love that conference. I spoke at it last year. Shivali is going this year. I won't be going this year, but make sure to go there If you guys want to go to Prague.

 

Cara:

It's in March, it's a beautiful city as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, oh, and there's really great, amazing pizza place called Johnny's Pizza. I'll let you know where it works at.

 

Cara:

I'll make sure I go out and make sure you're Really great, me and Shivali can go out and eat some pizza.

 

0:33:57 - Bradley Sutton:

All right. Well, Cara. Thank you so much for joining us and coming out here from across the pond.

 

Cara:

Indeed, a bit of a bumpy landing. It was yesterday, but yes.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That was a little rough here in Frankfurt. I kept me a little awake there, but anyways, thank you so much for coming and I can't wait next year to see what you've been up to All right, take care.

 

Cara:

All right, take care. I'll see you next time. Bye, bye, bye.