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

#523 - Using Amazon Brand Analytics Data Like You Never Have Before!

Listen in as Bradley Sutton unveils the game-changing Black Box Brand Analytics tool, a groundbreaking resource that blends Amazon’s Brand Analytics with Helium 10's robust capabilities. This episode is a gold mine for Amazon sellers eager to master product research and optimize their keywords to increase Amazon product rankings. Bradley walks you through the ins and outs of using the tool to pinpoint high-traffic keywords, unpack the nuances of search frequency rank, and demonstrate how these insights can drastically improve your click and conversion rates. Using practical examples, such as the comparison between "coffin decor" and "coffin cat tree," he highlights the market saturation and what it means for your marketing strategies and listing optimization.

In the second part of our session, we turn our attention to the strategic application of data filters for laser-focused keyword research. Bradley guides you through advanced techniques to navigate through the data, revealing how to eliminate certain terms and hone in on keywords with substantial search volumes. Moreover, we shed light on how to identify products with low conversion rates and dissect the competition by examining click share and conversion share metrics. We also dive into analyzing Amazon's Best Sellers Rank to identify high-performing products and dissect the success factors driving traffic to top listings. By listening to this episode, you'll gain valuable insights into market gaps and learn how to strategically position your products to stand out in the crowded Amazon marketplace.

 

In episode 523 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 00:00 - Introducing Black Box and Brand Analytics inside Helium 10
• 05:03 - Click Rates and Sales Dominance Analysis 
• 08:44 - Data Filters for Targeted Keyword Research
• 12:34 - Searching for Dominating ASINs and Keywords 
• 21:41 - Analyzing Top Clicked Keywords for Competitors 
• 25:16 - Newer Home and Kitchen Products
• 30:19 - Keyword Analysis for New Product Launch
• 35:08 - Helium 10 Demo

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Transcript

 

Bradley Sutton:

Today I'm introducing a brand new, really cool tool to Helium 10. It's called Blackbox Brand Analytics and it allows you to combine Amazon data from Brand Analytics with Helium 10 data in ways that you have never used before. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. I want to know what keywords are driving the most sales. For a list of keywords. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10's keyword research tool, cerebro. Now, that's just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it's the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. Don't forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast discount coupon SSP10.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our monthly Ask Me Anything and training session. This is actually something that we do every single week for our Serious Sellers Club and Helium 10 Elite members. I got a cool demo I'm going to be doing today a little mini training on a brand new tool that Helium 10 launched a couple of weeks ago that maybe you haven't had a chance to play with yet. So we're going to be demoing that so that you guys can see how you can get benefit from it. So let me show my screen here. This is brand analytics. All right, so this is not Helium 10. Obviously, this is from Seller Central, but this is something that you guys have been using maybe for years, right, it's? Anybody with brand registry can use it. The way you access it is go to your menu in Seller Central, then you go to Brands and then you go to Brand Analytics and then you want to hit, under Search Analytics, the top search terms.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now how I've been using this, how sellers have been using this the one, the version that's on Amazon, is you can go to a date range, like weekly, you can go monthly, you can go quarterly, and then let's say, first of all, that you want to see all of the keywords that start with the word coffin. Right, like hey, what keywords have coffin in it that was searched for the most? So here is one use case. All right, so I'm going to hit Refine Results after I put coffin inside the search term and then now all of the keywords that were searched the most on Amazon show up here for this week. Let's start with the word coffin. So we see, here we've got coffin nails tips, a lot of stuff that has to do with nails. Right, search frequency rank is how often it has been searched compared to other keywords. There we go. There's coffin shelf all right, c coffin shelf has been searched for is the 129,000th most search term on Amazon for the week of 1217 to 1214,. All right, you can see other other keywords here that have come up Now. This is great. Obviously, you know it's been out for a little over three years almost four years I think and it gave unprecedented at the time information you know, like, for example, let's take that word coffin shelf. Or let's go into a different one, let's go to coffin decor all right. So now if I see here under coffin decor, I can see the top three clicked. All right. So again, if you guys know this, you know you might be bored right now, don't worry, we're going to get into the new stuff soon, but I want to make sure everybody understands the value of this data.

 

Bradley Sutton:

First of all, what Amazon is telling you is, for whatever keyword, here are the top three clicked out of the after the search of a certain keyword. So if somebody searched coffin decor, the product that was clicked more than any other product in all of Amazon after the search of that keyword is this Gothic wooden makeup organizer. All right, and it makes up 5% of the clicks. Now, of the conversion share, it was 6%. That means of the actual sales of that product it makes up 6%. So, right off the bat, I know that they have a better conversion rate than just the average because, theoretically speaking, if they were converting at the same rate as everybody else on this page, well, their click share, or their conversion share, should be about the same as their click share should be 5%. Right, but it's 6%, okay.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The other thing I can do when I look at this and how I used to use this is I, right off the bat, can tell this is a wide open keyword. Why the top clicked product is only 5%, meaning that the other top clicked, the top three clicked, are less than 5%. What does that mean? That means that more than 85% of all of the sales from this keyword are from products that weren't even the top three clicked. Does that make sense, guys? That means it's wide open. That means people are probably purchasing like 30 different products on that page, and let me just contrast that with this keyword right here. This is actually the keyword that I found the other day using this tool. Look at this keyword here Coffin Cat Tree. Now, coffin Cat Tree. Take a look at the percentage of clicks that the top clicked product has 33%. You guys remember what the other one was 5%, right. The second top clicked product 27%. So, right off the bat, I know that this keyword, coffin Cat Tree the top two clicked products, already make up more than 50% of the clicks out of all the clicks on this keyword. Look at the conversion rate 33% for this top clicked one and 11%. That means that the other products on the page are only making up about 60%. You guys remember what it was on the other one it was more than 90%, all right, so you see the huge difference. So this is being dominated by a certain number of products.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The other thing that you could use brand analytics for is your historical data. Before Helium 10 had the historical cerebro, this was the only way that you could do historical research Like let's say, all right, hey, valentine's Day is coming up, right. What's interesting is I can actually look at what were the top keywords, and maybe I want to put valentines here. So here in brand analytics, I'm going to. What did I say I was going to look at 12th to February 18th. What were the top keywords? That has to do with valentines, all right. And yeah, I think I picked the right date because, look at these, valentine's Day gifts was the eighth most searched term in all of Amazon for the week of February 12th. So obviously this was a hot keyword. But if I were to try and do this right now, you know, if I was using not historical cerebro, it's not going to give me what are the best selling Valentine's products, because nobody's buying Valentine's Gifts in December, right. So this is was one of the ways that people could do Historical keyword research and see what were the products that were doing well, right, all right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now that brings us to this announcement of this new tool inside of helium 10,. All right, I want everybody to navigate with me there. It's going to be under tools and then go to black box. All right, black box is a tool you guys know and love to find products, and now this tool Is in black box, and there is a new Tool here called a BA top search terms so I call this black box brand analytics. All right, a BA is just a abbreviation, because that's too long. A BA stands for Amazon brand analytics, so just click that and let me explain how this tool works and why this is going to be beneficial for you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

This is going to be pretty awesome, guys, because this is pulling in all of that data from Amazon, and now it's combining it with the helium 10 data points that you already know and love, and it's giving you just a lot more targeted filtering ability and research capabilities. For example, I could just use it the same way that I was using it right now. Right, like again, hey, let me go in to the week of February 12th to the 18th and let me See what keywords that have the word Valentine in it, and then go ahead and apply the filters, and there those same keywords are coming up here right now. All of a sudden, though, I can see that, hey, what does being the eighth most search term mean? Right, it's not just that, which doesn't give me that much information, but now I can see, oh wow, the search volume was 2 million, because that's a Helium 10 Data point.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, I could see the top three ASINs, total conversions, share. I could see pictures of the top products All right, and I could also go to the history of the click share for this product. So I can do already just what current things that you can already do in Brandon Alex. But here's where it starts getting cool. Maybe I I'm like, hey, I want to Not see any keyword that has candy in it. So I'm gonna say exclude phrases containing candy, all right. Now I want to see. Maybe I want to see were there any products or Were there any keywords where the current the click share was wide open, meaning that people were clicking all over page one. There wasn't any dominant products. So I'm gonna say the top three ASIN total click share is a maximum of if I were to add them up together, a maximum of 20%. Let's just say, all right, maybe I want to see I don't want to see this two word Keywords. I want to say, hey, show me any keyword that hits this but that actually had three words. So like Valentine's Day wouldn't come up, but Valentine's Day gifts would come up, all right, what else can I do? Hey, I want to see the keywords that have a search volume of at least 20,000. All right, a search volume of at least 20,000? All right, let's just. Let's just see how that filters it down here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, all of a sudden, those 2,600 keywords Go down to 36. Look at that. I went from 2,600 to 36 and now I can see Instant information, exactly what I was looking for. What are some other things I could search by? Like maybe I want to say, hey, what are all the the keywords where the top three products had bad conversion rate? All right, so let me reset these filters on and I'm gonna go and look at Just this last week. All right, guys, I have not tested any of this, I'm doing this all live right on the fly here. But let's look at December 10th through the 16th. Let's just say, out of any of the top keywords from December 10th to the 16th, if it was a keyword that had, let's just say, at least, let's just, let's just narrow it down. Let's try and find some low-hanging fruit. Let's go 2000 search volume to 6,000 search volume. All right, we're finding, from the week of the 10th through the 16th, a Keyword that had between 2000 and 6000 search volume. It's at least two words long, okay.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And then look at this. I'm gonna go hey, I want a Matt. Let's just say One asin had greater than, hmm, let's just say, 50% of the clicks. So I want to find a keyword where one asin is just dominating. All right, they were just dominate. I'm not sure if, you know, I can actually find something here. I might have to fix this a little bit, but we're one what had more than 50% of the clicks, meaning that you know, maybe they're, they're, they're just completely Dominating the clicks. Everybody's looking for this one product, all right. But if I take, look at this, the top three click asins, the average age is less than, let's just say, 12 months. All right, this is crazy, guys. You can't do this in seller central. Let me see, first of all, if anything comes up. I might have gone too narrow on this. Let's take a look here. And let's go 12 months average age 94 keywords come up. Look at that. All right, let me. Let me make it even more narrow conversion share let's just say we're one asin. Number of asin has greater than 40% of the conversions. That narrows it down to 62 keywords.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now let's just take a look at it now. Obviously, we've got Lego and stuff like that here, but Is there anything One? So a lot of brand names here? Okay, that that that explains it, right? Which would you expect Products to dominate on a certain keyword like this? Well, obviously, it's going to be brand branded keywords. Mostly, if I'm searching for a Lego, I'm not gonna buy something else, right? Or here here. But look at this bubble face wash, right? Maybe I don't know what bubble face wash is. Well, I just put my mouse over here. I can see the top 10 products. So I'm like what? Why in the world is A Product getting dominated? Well, it does look like bubble is a brand name, which I didn't realize, right? But let's say that. What? Let's pretend that bubble wasn't a brand name? This would be something I would want to look into. Like, wow, there's only one product that's really getting a lot of sales here and a lot of conversion rate, and so that means that if I add another product, it's gonna be that much more likely that I can, I can get in on the action.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's take a look at some of the other keywords that come up here to see if we can see any non, any non branded branded ones I might want. I might want to go a little bit. I'm gonna go a little bit wider on this. All right, let's go. One asin had more than 30% and the top three ASIN's total review count is less than 400. All right, again, this is stuff that you cannot do in Seller Essential guys. But what I'm saying is, hey, I wanna see where it has a lot of the clicks. I need to go a little bit wider on this, but if I add up the top three click products, their total review count is less than 400, meaning it's a relatively newer niche. Let's take a look at the keywords that come up here Bassinet, lipliner, and I'm still seeing a lot of branded keywords here. All right, which is what you would expect, but look at these conversion share Top three ASIN's total conversion share 70% for this one Top ASIN click share 73%, 98%, 46%, 30%. So this is just an example of the filters that I'm entering, but you can see the potential here of how you can instantly find keywords that might have opportunity here. I was going and I was looking on the opposite end of the spectrum, where I wanna see where one or two products are dominating. Maybe I wanna see the opposite, where I want to see the top products only have a maximum of 5% click share or conversion share.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The list goes on and on. There's literally a million different combinations of filters that you could enter into here. Let's just go over some of these other filters I could use. I could have an exclude phrases. I can have the top three ASINs have a total click share with a minimum and maximum total conversion share, minimum and maximum search frequency rank. That's from Amazon where it's like which rank of search volume does it have? I could use the helium 10 search volume. I can have the search frequency rank trend. All right, search volume trend. Like, let's say it's, I'm looking at the week list on helium 10. Let's actually do that because I think that's a cool one. Maybe I want to see what are the keywords from week to week from December 10th through December 16th. Are there any keywords with at least 5,000 searches that increased 200% and that had at least three words, meaning that, hey, these keywords had to have like less than 2,000 search volume if it increased? And there's tons of them. Good grief, botox face serum look at that. Botox face serum went up. Let's take a look at the search volume here. Good grief, look at this. Like I'm not saying guys, go and source this product. But would I ever have known that Botox face serum went in one week from 10,000 search volume to 200,000 search volume? That's way more than 200% increase.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Look at this one gag gifts adults, dog beds for large dogs Dog beds for large dogs obviously was a hot Christmas product because it went to 151,000 search volume from 22,000 search volume. All right, let's narrow this down. I don't want to see these humongous ones. Let's go to 5,000 to 15,000 search volume. Anything that increased 200%. Let's take a look. We've got 1,200 keywords. Grippy socks, women all right, grippy socks, women is a keyword that went from and we can take a look here. It went from last month 9,000, now it's up to 14,000 searches. Let's see another one here, mr and Mrs Gifts. All right, 14,000 searches. It is up from 6,000 searches, all right. So, as you can see, guys, here the possibilities are endless as far as what you want to play with. Now, the question is this is just version one of this tool is what do you want to see? How do you want to search brand analytics to find products or to find keywords? Remember, this is not just a product research, but this is also a keyword research. You can enter I didn't show this to you, but you can enter in an ASIN. I probably should show that, because that's an important way of using the tool that we didn't go at all.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's just go to Amazon. I'm gonna go to Amazon and let's just say that I am looking for a bat shelf. All right, or I'm thinking of selling in the bat shelf, or I am selling a bat shelf and so I wanna see, hey, who's one of the top players in this niche and I could see that, hey, this product here is definitely a top one, so I can copy his ASIN, all right. Now I'm gonna go into Black Box brand analytics and I can paste that here. Okay, and I don't wanna just do this top one, maybe, I wanna do a lot of the top products. So let's just take a couple more of these bat shelves here, all right. Here's another bat shelf that sold like 100 units. Maybe let's go ahead and copy that. I can actually put up to 99 different ASINs here, all right, let's do another one. Let's copy this ASIN, all right. So here's three ASINs. So basically, what I'm saying is here for the week of December 10th through the December 16th.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Show me any keyword that has over 500 search volume where one of these three bat shelves was one of the top three clicked. All right, so this isn't just hey, they were ranking high, which is what's the rebro, and you know keyword tracker and tools like that tell you. But they were ranking high, but they were also one of the top three clicked and there's actually only three keywords that these came up that had at least 500 search volume. Bat shelf, goth shelf and bath home decor Tells me right now. Maybe I wanna go ahead and take off this search volume. Let's go ahead and apply the filters, see if any lower search volume ones come up. Six keywords come up. All right, emo home decor, bat shelves. Plural, bat room decor. All right, so this tells me now where any of my competitors were one of the top three clicked products in all of Amazon for that keyword. So if I have 20 competitors, I drop them all in there and I would instantly I would instantly see that to see where they were one of the top. All right, let's go ahead and open it up right now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Do you guys have any questions on how to use this tool and what I can help you with or how to use anything helium-tun related. Guys, this is your time here. David says I would like to see leave out a specific ASIN or choose a competitor. Hmm, the second part, to choose a competitor we have that, so you could put in there your ASIN. I would assume, david, the exclude is because you may. Are you saying that you maybe you want to look specifically at keywords, that you are not one of the top three clicked already? And if that's true, yeah, that would seem like a reasonable, reasonable request right there.

 

Bradley Sutton:

We got another question here from Joanna. Can helium 10 find out what's new sellers who are settling the top 10 and best sellers ranking are doing in order to get their Product the top 10 so fast? Well, yeah, absolutely, you could see on the keyword side, all right, so so I don't, I've never done that, but let's walk through this and let's see if we can do it. All right, let's go ahead, joanna, and let's do this as a nice little case study. So let's, first of all, I'll go to see who is in the top 10 BSR in a certain category and then again that's in black box. So I'm gonna go this time to black box products, all right, and let's go into a, a subcategory All right, let's go in the home and kitchen category and let's go into the Kitchen and dining category and let's go bakeware All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So let's go bakeware and let's just see who has been in the top 100, like in the last month in BSR. And I can do that right here using the filters, where I put a minimum one of BSR and Maximum 100, and I'm in the bakeware category, I go ahead and hit search. Let's go a little bit higher. Instead of looking at that category, let's look at what was I in home and kitchen. We can just look in all of home and kitchen. Let's see. They better not be doing maintenance on this. Let me get mad. Nope, the here we got, we got tons of products in the home and kitchen category, all right. So maybe I want to know are there any products that are newer here? All right, and we do that by age, all right. So let's, let's go and put here under age a maximum Of, let's just say, four months. Are there anybody within one to 100 of BSR that have a product that's only four months or less? And we've got a lot of products here that have variations. So that's why there's tons of products coming up here, let's see, that has a lot less reviews. I actually don't want. I actually don't want the variations to come up. So let's just say max variation one, let's see if anything comes up at all. Nothing comes up in the home and kitchen category. So what you were asking nobody in the home and kitchen is less than four months old. That doesn't have variation.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So let's let's check out another, let's check out another category here. Let's go under. Let's look up baby, let's look up beauty, let's look up the Entity of home and kitchen. Here we go. Is there anybody? That's a new product that's up. So right now, Joanna, there's not many products that are newer, that are really hitting your criteria. But let's just, let's just expand this out and just do a make-believe. Let's go to 1000 BSR or 2000 BSR and let's see if anything comes up. Here we go, sorry. So here is a product. Let's just take a look at one of these products strong ahead Hair kit. The heck is this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's take a look at this product on Amazon Strong ahead hair kit. I have no idea what this product is, but it's fairly new. It's less than four months old and it's already got a strong BSR. So if I wanted to see instantly what was some of the keyword ways that this product is getting up here, I could actually just run Xray keywords on this page itself, all right. So if I'm on an Amazon page, I put my mouse over the Helium-10 chrome extension and Select x-ray keywords and then I could see, without even having to go into Cerebro, what were the top searches, and I can see there's tons of branded searches. So for this product, now I know instantly why is it one of the top BSRs and it's a brand new product, and the reason is they have crazy amounts of brand search. Like, look at this Olaplex brand search 232,000 search volume Right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So this is the process, Joanna. Any product on Amazon that you are seeing is doing really well and it's brand new, maybe doesn't have that many reviews. Just run x-ray keywords on it. If you wanna go a little bit deeper, go into Cerebro and then you'll find out where they are at least getting their organic and sponsored traffic, all right. So this is this doesn't show you the sponsored traffic on x-ray keywords. You'd have to look into Cerebro for that, but that's not going to tell you. Are they running Instagram traffic to it, et cetera, but it'll at least give you a nice overview of where their organic traffic is coming from. That allows them to be one of the top sellers. So thank you for that question. Joanna Danian says how does this match up to competitor software using brand analytics data? Well, there's no competitors to Helium 10 that have this as far as, like all in one suites of tools, we're the only ones to have this in it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Joanna now has a product, so this is the product that Joanna found. It's not selling that great. This is a top BSR, did you say. Let's take a look at their BSR, if it even says anything. So it is the number 33 in the Garment Steamer category right now. Okay, there we go number 33 in Garment Steamer category. Let's take a look here. What are we going? How old is this listing? Let's take a look at the BSR chart history and I could see that it has only been out for three days. All right, it's only been out for three days, so the odds that we could see words ranking for already is probably slim to none, because there's not enough time if this product has only been out for three days. But let's just give it a try. I don't think anything is going to come out here because this is too brand new Like even brand analytics is more than three days old. So brand analytics I'm not even going to look, because brand analytics is usually one week behind a little bit. So when I would check this, joanna is, I would check this next week, once the data comes out. But let's just see if Helium 10 has any data at all for this keyword, even though it was only launched three days ago. Oh, my goodness man, helium 10 is on it We've got.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's take a look at keywords where they're ranking in the top 20 and at least 300 search volume. Might not be too many here because, again, this product was just launched three days ago, but there we go, it's already ranking for 30 keywords in the top half of the page. So right here, look at this Travel steamer for clothes, portable mini. Good grief, that is a long tail keyword if I ever saw one. It already has 10,000 search volume and this product is organic rank 13. And look at their sponsored rank. They were one. So they are going hard and heavy on this brand new keyword and sponsored. So there you go.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I was kind of like selling Helium 10 short, saying that we wouldn't have any data since this product was just launched three days ago. Nope, I'm wrong. Helium 10, one Bradley, zero here. Easy to see where this product is getting sales from, because on a 10,000 search volume they're bidding for top of search and they're already ranking number 13. All right, so there you have it. That's where this product is getting a lot of its sales from that exact keyword, right there. Good question, joanna. I hope that was clear for you guys on how to do that for any product on Amazon. All right, you wanna know where their traffic is coming from, at least their organic search traffic. You just run Cerebra on it or look at it in the brand analytics, if it's been out there for longer than a week, and you're instantly gonna get an idea of the keywords that are driving sales for the product.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Jerov says I'm a new Amazon seller. I look for keywords to rank higher on Amazon, but I am still in 306 rank. So if you're 306, that means that you're not ranking at all, because Amazon only shows 306. I'm assuming that you're looking in Helium 10 keyword tracker and it shows greater than 306. That means that you're not ranked. Actually, how can you help me, because I've yet to make three sales. All right, the first step you need to do, jerov. If you're not ranking for keywords that you know are relevant to you, you need to make sure if you're indexed. Let me show you how you can do that. All right, so let's just take this product right here. This is the steamer that Joanna had found. I need to see if I'm indexed for certain keywords, all right, so let's go here to index checker. All right, what I'm gonna do is you're gonna take your ACI. I'm doing this for this travel steamer. You gotta put your ACI in here and I'm gonna put a keyword I know it's already ranking for, just to show you how this works. And so we already determined that this product is getting sales.

 

Bradley Sutton:

From what was that keyword? Here we go travel steamer for clothes, portable mini All right, so I'm gonna put that here. But what's a keyword that is probably not indexed for? I'm just gonna put a random keyword here sumo wrestling All right, but obviously you're not gonna put these nonsense keywords here. You would put the keywords that you think you should be ranking for, but you're not All right. So this is what you're gonna look for. You're gonna hit check keywords and then you are looking for the right column on index checker if there is a checkmark or not. Forget about all these other columns here. You just wanna see this cumulative and so I can see that travel steamer for clothes, portable mini.

 

Bradley Sutton:

For this product there's a checkmark. That means I am indexed. That means I am even if I'm not ranking. There's a potential for me to rank. But look at this keyword sumo wrestling. Maybe this was a product that I thought was super relevant to me, but you see here how there's a dash instead of a line. That means that I am not indexed. And what does that mean? That means I can't run PPC on this keyword. That means it's literally impossible for me to rank for that keyword. So the first thing you need to do, jerov, is make sure that on your keywords that you're trying to rank for that you even can. And if there's a dash there, the simplest reason could be you don't even have that keyword maybe in your listing. That means you're not indexed for it. If it does have a checkmark but you're not ranked, it's just. You know there's hundreds and hundreds of products that are indexed for certain keywords To be one of the top 306, it takes some doing. You probably gotta start running some sponsored ads to there. So, for any keyword that you are not ranking but that you are indexed for and you wanna get ranked, the path to doing that is running sponsored ads at the top of the search and hopefully people will see your product, click on it, buy it and that's what's going to move up your organic rank.

 

Bradley Sutton:

David says can you show us how Helium 10 works for Walmart sellers Interested in seeing its abilities for keyword ranking and finding arbitrage opportunities? All right. So, david, pretty much almost everything I've shown other than Blackbox. It works the same way for Walmart. So, for example, so let's look at walmartcom, all right, and let's go. I don't know, let's look up this product here Steamer iron for clothes. Let's do a search for that on Walmart. So let's just type in steamer iron for clothes. Okay, so this is not really for arbitrage, but this is more for ranking.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Like, hey, I wanna have, I'm gonna come out with you know some steamer, you know my own travel steamer and I wanna see the products that are selling a lot on Walmart in this niche. Where are they getting their sales from? All right, so let's just take, let's just go to this product right here. This is like the organic rank product. I'm gonna copy the item number, which I believe is this item number here at the very top of Walmart. Let's go into Cerebro and now I change this left hand marketplace chooser to the Walmart marketplace, all right, and let's type in that product ID. I'll know in a couple seconds if this is the right product ID or not.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And you just press get keywords and now this is going to find all of the keywords that this product is ranking for. And there it is. Look at that, let's find. Let's go search under the Walmart search volume anything over 1000 search volume, and now instantly I can see the top keywords where this product is one of the top 10 organic ranked. And now I know where this product is getting sales from. And these are the keywords I'm gonna have to put in my Walmart listing and I would also add this to keyword tracker for Walmart. If I'm already selling this product, I'm not ranking very high. I'm gonna put it in keyword tracker and track my organic and sponsored rank for these keywords Right off the bat too.

 

Bradley Sutton:

For this Hamilton Beach product, I can see that they are not running sponsored ads, so there's an advantage right there where I know, hey, Hamilton Beach is not running Walmart sponsored ads for this product, because Helium 10 doesn't show any sponsored ranks, so there's an instant advantage. I know that I can get as far as arbitrage goes. You just have to kind of like search for the products that have a high amount of sales, and we don't have as many sales estimates for Walmart products as we do for Amazon, because Walmart doesn't have what Amazon does, which is BSR, which allows us to make an algorithm, but we do have some sales estimates for Walmart products, and so that's another way that you could use the tool for Walmart selling. I'm about to actually start doing some arbitrage and some wholesale on Walmart myself. I was just talking to one of my team who I used to use a few years ago. We're gonna relaunch my Walmart business, so I'll have a lot more Walmart information for you guys soon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you guys for joining us. If you're an Elite member or a Serious Sellers Club, we'll be back next not next Monday, but next Tuesday, I believe, because Monday's a holiday. If you are just watching this on YouTube or another platform, make sure to come back. At the end of January. We'll go ahead and have this available as well. But thank you guys for joining us, appreciate it. Make sure to use that tool and we'll see you later. Have a good one, bye, bye now. I'll see you guys next time.

#522 - The Best Amazon and Walmart Seller Strategies Of The Year

Join us for a packed episode where we share the Serious Sellers Podcast’s cream of the crop e-commerce strategies this 2023, specifically curated for Amazon and Walmart sellers aiming to amp up their selling game. We kick things off by covering a slew of actionable tips, from the critical role of eye-catching main images to PPC campaign finesse and leveraging meta descriptions for Google indexing. Each insight is distilled to empower you, the serious seller, with tactics you can apply right away for real impact. 

This episode doesn't stop there; we continue with the inside scoop on Walmart's Review Accelerator program and how it can significantly lift your Gross Merchandise Value by infusing your product listings with valuable customer feedback. We listen to the secret sauce behind crafting Amazon product titles that resonate with mobile users and discuss the art of bundling, showing you how to identify complementary items that could delight your customers and potentially lead to glowing reviews. The conversation shifts to strategic PPC advertising, underscoring the advantage of long-tail keywords to improve organic rankings without breaking the bank. It's a treasure trove of tips that will sharpen your competitive edge on platforms like Amazon.

As we wrap up, we reflect on the top strategies shared and their potential to redefine your Amazon business in 2024. Your feedback is crucial; we urge you to select and implement your top three tactics and join the conversation by sharing your favorites in the comments. The excitement is palpable as we look forward to featuring some of you in future episodes to celebrate the strides made in your Amazon and Walmart selling journey. Here's to taking the wins from 2023 and charging towards an even more prosperous year ahead!

 

In episode 522 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 01:44 - Top Strategies for Amazon, Walmart, and E-Commerce This Year
• 05:53 - Find Trending Products on Alibaba/Amazon
• 12:00 - Strategies for Obtaining Product Reviews 
• 13:10 - Walmart Review Program and Bundling Tips
• 16:32 - Surprise in Customer Reviews
• 21:54 - Increase Amazon Productivity and Selling Strategies
• 25:32 - Maximizing Product Visibility and Differentiation

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Transcript

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

Today is our yearly episode where we give you my handpicked top 20 Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce strategies of the entire year. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Series Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we've come up at the end of this year and, as we do the last four years now we do a kind of recap episode where I handpicked some of the strategies. There's a bunch of people on my team, you know, from Mhel, Nikko, John, Ralph, Bill, Maia, Klaudine. They all worked like going through all the transcripts and like gave me what they thought were some of the top strategies and then, from those like I don't know, like 90 different ones that they submitted, I like whittled it down to like 20 that would fit into this episode. So we're going to give you some stuff that you might not have heard, you know, if you weren't listening to every single episode or you might have forgotten about good reminders. We got some actionable stuff that have to do with, you know, Shopify and keyword research, product launch, just a whole bunch of different subjects, most of these like 60 seconds to just two minutes long, and so I hope you guys take advantage of this. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

A lot of it was really great when it aired and they're just just right now also as much, if not even more, applicable. So again, whenever we do these strategy episodes, I implore everybody, don't just, you know, listen to these and think, oh, this is so great. Isn't this amazing how smart these people are? No, I want you guys to actually pick two or three of these and put it in practice, and then let me know what you do afterwards. I'm wearing my Dodgers jersey today because, you know, just like we had a great year of strategies. Dodgers had an incredible year at the end of this year, hiring some of my favorite, or getting some of my favorite baseball players in. Shohio, tani and Yamamoto. But anyway, we're not here to talk baseball. I could have a whole episode just about that. We're here to get into the top 20 strategies, so here you go. 

Dr. Travis Zigler

 

Best thing you can do, I’m trying, I was going the brand route, but I’m gonna try to keep it on Amazon route. Main images are key. Your main image has to be different. Go look up silicone coaster on Amazon, just go do that right now and tell me which one’s your brand because every single one looks the same. So it doesn’t matter, like for all those plastic widgets from China, everything looks the same, but what can you do to differentiate it? And the unfortunate thing is if you sell something that everybody else sells with no differentiation, then you can make a change to your photos, that works, then everybody else will repeat it. And so what can you do to make your product better and differentiated? And then how can you show that on the main image? And if you can show that on the main image that’s gonna lead to a higher click-through rate, what can you do with your branding and your copywriting to make it a little different to make it stand out a little bit more?

 

Aaron Biner

 

And another tip is your meta description of your brand store. Like, actually it’s super powerful, but there’s still so many sellers are this opportunity, if you’re gonna, like every page of your brand store has this meta description that is indexable by Google. So it doesn’t have any impact on Amazon, but it has really huge impact how your brand store will show up in the search result with sample who will type your brand name. So just, it’s only 160 characters. Do not keyword stuff make it readable and sometimes it’ll, like your brand store will show up like in top one in a Google search result. So it really works and it also helps you not only for your brand, for your brand name, but also for keywords that you can include in this section. So it’s really powerful. Well,

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

Where do you edit your meta description for your

 

Yana Tatochko:

 

You just have to kind of every it’s you have this meta description for every single page. So if you have five pages, you can fill in five pages of meta description. Okay. You just have to go to the settings of your store and when you will kind of click on the page, like you will see this meta description.

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

So why this is important is sometimes we might get into the rut of like, oh, I can only use like Helium 10 Black Box, or I can only search for product opportunity actually on Amazon. But a lot of times you can find some unique things that are trending on other websites. Like here is one of my strategies, like let’s say I just happened to be searching for a batch shelf and I find it on alibaba.com. What I like to do, if I find a factory guys that has a lot of reviews, I’ll actually click on their factory link in their Alibaba page. And then what I want to do is I just wanna search through some of their other products and see is there anything interesting that maybe I could just do some quick research into maybe something that’s trending in China that’s not here in the States yet.

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

So if I’m looking on this, this particular one who, this guy was selling batch shelves, but I clicked on his other products and I see he’s got something wood wine rack. So if I click into there, I see a whole bunch of interesting products that I didn’t even know existed. And then I see these a few of them here that are pretty interesting. This looks like a wall mounted wine bottle rack. I see a few of these here. Wall mounted wine rack. So what I can do is I can just, on this page, I can actually click the Chrome extension and I’m gonna hit this tool called Analyze Product Demand on Amazon. And then I would type right there, wall mounted wine rack, I haven’t left alibaba.com. And then I hit see analysis.

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

And what shows up is it’s going to show me if that exact keyword has search volume on Amazon and some related keywords to it and some data on it. Now, this right here, as you guys can see, those of you watching this on YouTube, there’s nothing much here. Like this keyword that I entered only has 633 search volume. But take a look at the variations down below of what it says, wine rack wall mounted. So just sh shifting the keywords around that has 9,000 search volume on Amazon. Here’s something that five minutes ago I didn’t even know existed, or at least this exact keyword I didn’t know was a thing, and now I realize it is something that has almost 10,000 searches a month. So guys, this, this is a great technique to use when you’re just like, ah, you just can’t seem to find new product opportunity to expand your brand, especially if you’re on your own suppliers website probably a lot of the products, like if you’re making coffin shelves or a back shelf at a, at a factory there, other wooden products probably could potentially go in line with some of your existing brands.

 

Destaney Wishon:

 

Yeah, so one of the first things I’ve been doing when I’ve been auditing brands is relying on the targeting tab. So if you go into advertising console in the top left-hand corner, you’re gonna see targeting under your campaign manager, something around those and the targeting tab actually allows you to add a column for conversion rate. So if you have been in advertising console for a while, you know we’ve never been given access to conversion rate on the keyword level, well within the targeting tab we now have that. So that’s been super, super helpful for any brand owner. Even if you don’t manage ppc, even if you outsource it, go into add console, open up your targeting tab, filter top down by spend and look at where your spend is going. Your highest spending targets should be your highest converting targets and the most aligned keywords for your products. That is like the number one quickest way to audit your brand performance. If you see that the top of your targeting tab has auto campaigns category targeting or product targeting, you’re probably not optimizing your PPC the best way possible because it’s not actually gonna improve your organic rank that much.

 

Ryan King:

 

So there’s that way of identifying competitors to match against. AB test, what I’ll say here is, is someone might be thinking do, are you switching it like every four or five days? You’re probably not switching that often. This is probably like you’re testing it two or three product types max cuz there’s not that many out there, right? And again, another caveat would be you’re not looking at, okay, I’m in herbal supplements and my product type is an herbal supplement. Am I gonna do well in protein shakes as a product type? Right? And we just one that’s just gonna be manipulation. It’s not, it’s not serving the end shopper. But also you’re not for that purpose. You’re not gonna index for any of the keywords you really want. The example I’ve given before is using herbal supplements was we had a product that was in herbal supplements as a product type and they were in an herbal supplement.

 

Ryan King:

 

But we were banging our heads up against a wall because we were not indexing for what we thought were no-brainer search terms for that product. And the algorithm just wasn’t letting us index for those. So what we simply did is in growth opportunities, I know you’ve shown this before as well. You go into growth opportunities on Seller Center, you go to those details next year, your listing clicks on one of your listings, and there’s a widget right in the middle there. Walmart makes it really easy. There’s a widget in the middle, it says product type. You look at that and you can say report issues. I think it’s a reported issue or something like that right below it. It’ll give you a dropdown of a few suggested product types there. And the herbal supplements case, what we saw was, although herbal supplements seemed to be an exact match, the end result wasn’t what we thought was gonna provide the shoppers with the best experience.

 

Ryan King:

 

And so what we saw was if we went one level up vitamins and supplements, there’s, so it’s, it’s, it makes sense in that vertical broader, and we found that instantly. We were almost instantly within a few hours we were indexing for the keywords we needed. So that’s, that’s what I mean. So you’re probably gonna be able to figure out product type pretty easily of what general ones make sense right now. That’s the best solution I know of. So I think it’s one of those, it’s just a helpful point of data as long as it’s available. And so hopefully that’s a help to you. Hopefully, that answers the question.

 

Lyann Nguyen:

 

First, we talked about keeping track of your three scores. Get cr experian.com or Identity iq. And if you have zero money and you’re broke as no joke, go to Credit Karma, get that account, put it on your phone, monitor that and find out what needs to be done. Number two, fix all your personal information, your name, your address, your employment, your phone number. Clean it up till you have one of each. Don’t have a whole bunch of stuff that would actually help clear a lot of bad data.

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

Wait. Hold on. Yeah, on on number two. Where do I go to do that again? I know you mentioned it earlier, but I forgot to write it down myself.

 

Lyann Nguyen:

 

No problem. You can go to experian.com or Identity IQ and the part where it says personal information, you can dispute a lot of that stuff. Or on Credit Karma, you’ll see all that information and then you’ll see like their name, address. The report doesn’t look right, you can contact the bureaus. You can just Google phone number.

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

So directly from like these experian.com and these.

 

Lyann Nguyen:

 

So you call them and then they’re gonna say, can you can you send me a get, make sure you get your utility bill because or your bank statement that has your name and your address, you would have to send that to them and a driver license to make sure that that’s your one address. You are not living in 10 different places. That’s gonna actually bump your score anywhere from 20 points to 50 points. Just that one move because it’s data.

 

David Milstein:

 

Reviews is a huge strategy. You definitely, it’s gonna help you with your conversion rate. I just do wanna point out, unlike Amazon where sales volume is the number one driver of ranking on Walmart, it’s the conversion rate and there’s two conversion rates that reflects, it’s the impression to click and to click the sale. And aside from price and basic content, the best way to get that conversion is through reviews. Now, how do you get reviews on your product? I’m going to suggest two strategies. You have reviews syndication, which is a free program from Walmart that I don’t know why people are not as into finding it. Maybe they should probably run a promo, Hey, sign up for reviews, indication, maybe send emails. If you have reviews on your website, Walmart allows you to bring them to the program. Two platform for free. This is a free program.

 

David Milstein:

 

Now you have to make sure that it’s legit and you’re not bringing in only some of your five star reviews. You have to bring in all your reviews to the program. Additionally, you cannot have your Amazon reviews on Walmart illegal. Amazon is against terms of service. They technically own their reviews. Technically you shouldn’t even have them on your website in the first place, but that’s none of my business. But Walmart is not gonna let you take those reviews to Walmart. You could try and they’re gonna say, Hey, those are Amazon reviews, you can’t use those. But it’s a great way if you have reviews on your website, sign up for reviews syndication hopefully you’ll get accepted as long as you answer the case correctly. Don’t, don’t try a lie and try to cheat the system. They’re just gonna shut you down and potentially suspend your as a seller.

 

David Milstein:

 

No one wants that. And go ahead and bring in your reviews. Legitimately A second program, I would su strongly recommend, this is a new launch from Walmart, which is the review accelerator program. It allows, it’s similar to I guess the Amazon Vine, but I think it’s actually cheaper. It’s where you enroll certain listings. There is a bit of a restriction on what is allowed and there’s up to, you’re allowed to get up to five reviews per product and it doesn’t recommend, it’s not necessarily gonna get you a five star review. This is important to note, it’s just gonna get you a review. Walmart does claim that five reviews on a product increases the GMV by 75%, which I think is that’s pretty crazy. So there’s just two restrictions. You have to have a sale in the past x amount of time, I think potentially 30 days.

 

David Milstein:

 

And you have to have under five reviews and therefore that will make your item eligible for the program. And it costs you $10 per view that you get regardless of the rating. And the incentive to the seller, or to the customer rather the shopper is that they will get $3 credit towards their next purchase. So Walmart sends out an email to them, Hey ’em, hey some li review and you got $3 credit and you will get up to five reviews per product. It’s a great way, the only thing is it’s kind of a bit of a cash 22 cause you’re like, I need to get sales in order to get into the program, but I can’t get sales cause they don’t have reviews. Advertising is key folks. With advertising you’re guaranteed to get at least one sale as long as you’re not extremely priced. That’s as simple as it is.

 

Jana Krekic:

 

It’s basically bilingual show, so I support that. But when it comes to translations, but we know this is basically maximizing on the keywords in the first 60 characters of your title. A lot of people forget about the mobile version of the website on Amazon which only shows first 60 characters. And a lot of people go crazy and wild with the keywords, like at the end of the title, just don’t put enough of the most important ones in the first part of the title. And I say like, you should definitely do that, if not because of like the mobile version. Cause a lot of people also will purchase products on their phones and people forget about it. They tend to forget a lot. Especially if you have like a really, really long brand name, then you couldn’t really wanna think about if you’re gonna like play with it or not.

 

Jana Krekic:

 

There was the one brand that we did, it was eye patches and then it had like the wordplay eye, like your eyeball, like Eye love it cause it’s an eye patch. And that literally took the whole first 60 characters of their title. And in the mobile version, it didn’t show any of the keywords. So that had to be completely redundant. We completely dropped the, I love it because also like in German and for Germans, it did not sit well, like too much English never work, works amazingly well for the German audience. So that is my tip when it comes to the title. And just like the mobile versions for Amazon. Cause brands really do not think about it a lot.

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

Another thing I wanna talk about is explore bundling options, not just as something to add to your listing or to your product. I mean that, yes, that’s definitely something that you can do. You know, maybe you see that people are buying a coffin shelf and a skull together, right? So maybe you’ll be the first one to have a coffin shelf with skull together. Of course, that’s an option, right? But take it a step even easier. Use Black Box product targeting. Enter in your competitor’s ASINs and then filter for frequently bought together.

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

This is gonna show you what has been frequently bought together over the past, like 30 days or more that Helium 10 has detected. And sometimes you might find a product that’s like seven or $8 or even $6. And basically what this means is this, this could potentially be a product that you could source for like 30, 40 cents. Like one of the ones that was showing up here is, is spooky stickers. You know probably you could source some spooky stickers for like, what, you know, 25 cents or something like that. But if you have a history that your competitors are selling their product, and then the buyer at the same time is buying spooky stickers on their own, because you can see it in frequently bought together. Now what you should do if it’s really cheap, just go ahead and buy that product, maybe even in a smaller quantity if it’s a little bit more expensive, and then stick it into your product costing you 25 cents each.

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

If it’s really small, like stickers. And don’t advertise it. Don’t even advertise in the listing, right? I mean, you could advertise in your listing, but I prefer that for like, you know, more impressive bundling opportunities. But here’s what happens if you don’t advertise, and this is a strategy that, you know, Toma Rabinovich has, has been teaching for, for a while now. It’s part of his like six star method, and I’ve seen this myself out, out in the wild. But what happens is now your customer gets the product, they open it up expecting whatever they bought, say it’s a coffin shelf, but then all of a sudden they have these spooky stickers that customers like them, like, now what does that mean? That means it’s like a pleasant surprise, and it gives, it makes them like double 2x, 3x, maybe even 4x more likely to leave a positive review than if they were just happy with the product by itself.

 

Jocelyn Jeffries:

 

But if you want, if you’re in the natural toothpaste space, you need to be competing on those terms. You know you know, Toms of Maine, 12 pack natural toothpaste, blah, blah, blah, blah, is only gonna get you so far. That’s not really gonna improve your rank. You’re probably already solid there, but if you’re looking to improve your overall rank for a product, you need to be going after the keywords that are gonna keyword lead to that improvement. So it’s very much about understanding where you need to be spending and what terms you need to be spending and what’s actually gonna lead toward you know, improvement and rank. I think that’s the, the first step, and then it’s going and executing on that. So PPC is really the tool that you can use to influence specific pieces of search terms and customer behavior and whatnot. So that’s really how you start going after improving your organic rank. 

 

Jocelyn Jeffries:

 

Yeah, so there’s a couple approaches you can take. I think the long tail keyword is a good way to look at it. You know, if you’re spending money on again, natural toothpaste that’s gonna be probably a waste of money to be honest with you. It’s gonna be so expensive for you to even try and compete in that, that it’s gonna be a waste of dollars. So starting to look at what are some of the longer tail keywords that I can win, you know, if it’s, you know, the most br you know, specific keyword ever, but if it applies to your product, going after that and starting to just chip away at some of that organic rank is gonna be a good way to start. And then, you know, if you have a similar product within your brand or you have competitors, you can start targeting their product detail pages.

 

Jocelyn Jeffries:

 

So if someone’s not specifically searching for you, but they see you on you know, another product detail page, that’s a good way to kind of start again, chipping your way in and kind of moving from the outside in to the, the kind of larger volume because again, it’s gonna be a waste of money if you’re trying to go after those high volumes and you don’t have the foundation of strong rank. So starting to chip away I think is the best method and mantra of having it, and this goes to new products as well of if you’re starting from zero, it’s gonna take some time. So long tail and product detail pages is what I would recommend.

 

Lailama Hasan:

 

Yeah. So a lot of sellers can get nervous about like, main image strategies, and we give a bunch of those strategies out right at the end. You wanna increase, increase your click through rates. So one way, one hack that I have for testing that out if you’re nervous about it, is upload the strategy that, you know, your agency or whoever’s come up with versus like a fully compliant image. And you know, what you wanna do is upload it on, manage your experiments, and if it gets through the Amazon bots, then you’re good to go and you can upload that image, actually, it will verify it for you, so it’ll automatically upload it for you. Because one thing I wanted to point out is a lot of people will be like, oh, this is not compliant, but you theoretically, 80 to 90% of the main images on Amazon are non-compliant with including props, you know, let’s say a fruit and fruit bowls or including a model in there, or, you know, adding an extra sticker onto your label. All of these are non-compliant. So this is just a hack that I have if you’re worried about it, and plus you get extra insights on which version works better.

 

Vincenzo Toscano:

 

Yeah, so when I, when it comes to strategy something that we’ve seen a a lot, I know maybe you have heard this tip before, but it’s focused on the second language of the country you’re selling on. So, for example something we having a lot of success lately with our US brands is using Spanish cures in Canada, we’re using French related cures. For example, in Germany there’s a big population of, of Turkish people Polish and all of that. So there’s a huge potential of using second secondary languages on all these markets. And on top of that, what I would advise as well as an extra plus tip on, on top of this tip in the US for example, you can request your translation to be updated the Spanish one because some of the translation that have been done if the listen is old is it was done with the old translation engine that Amazon had, the backend. So you can actually request Amazon to redo your translation. And this sometimes can help you a lot to reindex for some Spanish queue that you’re not indexing the first time and actually be more relevant for Spanish related keywords. So that would be my tip. Yeah. Cool.

 

Crystal Ren:

 

So one tip I learned to increase your productivity by the way is to color different activities you do. So put everything together on your calendar. Like, if you go take a shower, you put it on your calendar. If you go to do some paperwork, you go put it on your calendar, but you want to categorize them differently. So, for example, I categorize them based on, you know, deep work, shallow work. So deep work could be something like a drafting agreement, right? With a supplier. And that would probably take like two to three hours of uninterrupted time. And shallow work would be something like I don’t know, like you know, putting together expense report, you know, so that’s some kind of administrative work that you need to do. And you know, there’s other things, for example, like personal time you know, a shower.

 

Crystal Ren:

 

So you mark them differently to make sure that you have enough of deep work time a week so that you know how much, how many hours you spend on deep work, how many hours do you spend on shallow work, which is something that you wanna shrink as much as possible and how, how many hours do you spend on personal time, which maybe perhaps that’s something that you wanna protect right? And you also want to make sure that you have a balanced life so you’re not overworking. So by coloring them into different categories, you can see that visually whether you’re being productive and whether you are having like a balanced week. And that’s what I’ve been doing for now, like six, seven months now.

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

Hey, you’re doing great on sales, about to run out of stock. Do you slow sales by raising price and turning off ads and then that hurts your potentially keyword ranks before? Or do you just go hard and heavy, run out of stock and then just get back in and hopefully you still have your keyword ranks when you come back in the stock in a couple of weeks?

 

Liran Hirschkorn:

 

I think, from a ranking perspective, it’s better to run out of stock at a better BSR. I think that’s the better way to go. Sometimes you’re going to make a decision that, hey, I just want the profits Right, because that’s what’s more important to me at this point in my business. I’m going to focus more on the profits now, I’m going to reduce, I’m going to raise the price. Or sometimes you may be able to raise the price and there’s so much demand that you’re still driving pretty good sales and you can still raise the price someone and there’s a happy medium. But I would say, from a ranking perspective and coming back in stock at a better rank, it’s better to go out of stock with great sales than to slow down your sales.

 

Bradley Sutton:

 

And this is why I said that kind of like off the wall thing earlier where I’m now suggesting that you might want to always do a test listing. Now, all right, I didn’t say that before you know. I said do kind of test listing so you can, so that you can know what kind of exposure you’re going to get on PPC to validate some, some theories you have. When there’s not enough information from existing competitors, you know you might want to make sure that you validate your idea with a test listing. But now, guys, I’m saying, if you’re selling in a newer niche, especially and maybe sometimes, even if you’re an established niche, it might be worth it to spend you know 50 bucks and get another UPC code and just do a fulfill by merchant listing, send a couple of or have a couple of units available and have your listing that you want to go with and then see immediately what does Amazon think that you’re relevant for right. And then if you’re completely fine with this listing and you have the right keywords for Amazon recommended rank from day one, all right, well, you’re good to go. That means go ahead and launch your regular product once you’re ready and you can have that exact listing, knowing that from day one you might have that.

 

Mina Elias:

 

So for me, I think what I’ve seen is the sale, the selling points, like the USB, the selling point being visible and you showing that you’re better than everyone else just from the main image. And so when I, when I put a bunch of you know like products next to each other, my competitors versus me, like I know that I’m looking for a product, not a lot of people take advantage of the text on their, on their boxes or on their products. So, for example, let’s say you know you’re selling like flip flops, the cloud flip flops, so you can have the flip flops and, and you know, in an angle whatever. Or you can have the flip flops put on top of a box, a fake box, and on that box, you have two sides where you can write text and it says, like you know, the softest material on the market or whatever a hundred percent recyclable stuff like that, right, because you can have that text on the box that you couldn’t have actually have on your package, and that box probably doesn’t exist. You know you’re probably shipping it in a of the day, they’re going to get your slippers. They’re going to look this, you know they’re going to look like slippers.

 

Mina Elias:

 

So for me, my product, my electrolytes if you go look at it on Amazon, it’s like shinier. There’s text on the cap, there’s like some different logos that show that actually don’t exist on the bottle and when they do get the bottle it looks very, very similar. There’s just a few things, and those few things those are the differences that when someone types in a keyword and they’re looking, you know they’re browsing, I catch their eye because I have, like some elements outside of the product that are eye catching and I have some text on the product that, like they’re looking at all like this is an electrolyte powder, so this is an electrolyte powder with no sugar, with no carbs, and it has this and it’s made in America and it’s all of these things on the label and so they’re like they’re convinced to click on me without having to read like title or anything like that.

 

Ritu Java:

 

For example, just this morning I was preparing for a new product launch for one of our clients and I’d got all my data from Helium 10. I was at the stage where I have to come up with some keywords for broad match campaigns. I wanted to make sure that all the right keywords are in there, not just the long tail ones with high search volume, but I wanted to make sure that I’m capturing all the seed combinations of important words that make sense. So what I did was I exported the Helium 10 cerebral analysis and I fed it to ChatGPT and asked it to come up with two words and three word combinations of seed keywords that would perfectly describe this product. Now what I’m going to do next with that is basically convert that into broad match modifiers, which basically means you add a plus sign in front of all the seeds and then I’m going to create campaigns with it. So that’s something that I do at every launch. I generally don’t skip that step. It’s an important one for me. So, in addition to all the long tail keywords, I will come up with enough seed words that will run at a slightly lower bid but will be like a discovery campaign for me through the broad match modifier channel. So that’s kind of one thing that I do.

 

Ritu Java:

 

Then, like yesterday, I was doing another one for another client, where we have a list of keywords that we discovered from the search query performance report, which is kind of this new, very valuable piece of data that Amazon is giving us these days. So from there I was able to come up with a structure for sponsored brand headline ads and I didn’t have to do the work. I just fed that entire list to ChatGPT and said, hey, organize this into groups of very related words and then give me a headline ad which is less than 50 characters, because that’s the amount Amazon will give us. And then it did that for me. I also gave it one other important instruction, which is to make sure that one of the keywords or a very close variant of that keyword in the group must be included in the title, and that’s basically my way of saying, hey, I want this to be a lower funnel ad, not a generic kind of upper funnel ad, because my sponsored brand ads tend to be more focused on RoAS rather than brand discovery and brand awareness. So those are some of the ways that I’m using it almost on a daily basis. I had switched to ChatGPT plus a long time ago. I’ve been paying for it and it’s totally worth it.

 

Matt Altman:

Yeah, so the great thing about Product Opportunity Explorer is it really shows you what keywords are driving the sales for those. So more than how many products are there we’re looking at, are there branded terms that are in the Product Opportunity Explorer.  So like an example that we were looking at this past week was for a floor cleaning product and we saw that of the 20 top like 50 keywords, bona was one of the main sales driving keywords. Like, even if there weren’t that many products in that category, we aren’t going to be able to overcome that branded search deficit. So it’s just not something that we would go into Um, but we definitely prefer to go into categories where those sales are spread across more Um. The main reason for that is we really like to do kind of um I would call it kind of like tailgating. We like to kind of stay behind everyone and we’ll pull like 10% of the sales from this person, from this person, and you can kind of pick off keywords from certain top products and they may not notice that you’re coming up and then you can really use that to catapult yourself to the top of the category before the rest of the products in the category realized what’s happening.

 

Marcus Mokros:

 

Amazon recently announced that they will look for title images that are not meeting the terms of service and they will use AI to change that. They will download your image, remove everything that doesn’t belong there in their opinion and upload it again, and that is something you don’t want. You don’t want an AI to touch your title image. Yeah, and Michael from AMZ Boost, a product photographer, he told me, just use your picture, space number nine. Nobody looks there. Put a title image there that will meet the terms of service and because what Amazon is doing first, they will scan your product photos and check if there is something that is compliant to the terms of service and they will put it to spot number one as your title image. And if they don’t find something, they will change it in their terms. So that’s an awesome hack.

Helium 10 Buzz 12/28/23: Amazon Prime Video Ads | 2024 Amazon Events | SnS Tracking

Listen in as we explore the latest buzz around Amazon, starting with their new advertising push on Prime Video to their billionth same-day delivery package milestone. Plus, let’s look at the latest features inside Helium 10.

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

Amazon Prime Video viewers will have to pay an extra $2.99 monthly in January to avoid ads
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/amazon-prime-video-ads-commercials-when-does-it-start-how-to-avoid-rcna131369

Amazon customers have scored 1 billion packages from U.S. Same-Day sites
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazon-same-day-delivery-milestone

Amazon.se: Three years in Sweden
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/job-creation-and-investment/amazon-se-three-years-in-sweden

Bringing electric cargo bike deliveries to Croydon, England
https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/sustainability/bringing-electric-cargo-bike-deliveries-to-croydon-england

Meanwhile, Bradley is buzzing with excitement as he gears up to jet-set across Pakistan, Germany, and back to the US next year for multiple Amazon events. He’s excited to meet you in person! But before you think this episode is all about the hustle, he introduces you to slick additions and features to Helium 10: the product tag group, Chrome extension updates, and the new subscribe and save feature. It's all about giving you that competitive edge.

And for a final flourish of wisdom, Shivali steps in with her training tip on using Inventory Heat Maps, ensuring you're never caught off guard by shipping delays again. This year might be winding down, but we're just getting started on setting you up for success!

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

• 01:17 - Amazon Prime Video Ads
• 03:19 - Billion Same-Day Orders
• 05:04 - Amazon Sweden
• 06:07 - Vacation Settings
• 08:00 - Amazon Delivery Bikes
• 09:19 - Catch Bradley On The Following Events
• 14:52 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 21:18 - ProTraining Tip: Inventory Heat Maps

 

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon sponsored TV ads are about to go into effect. Even more, amazon just delivered its billionth same-day delivery product the Amazon conferences you need to attend in Q1 of 2024. How to check which warehouse is your inventory is at in FBA All of these and more on today's weekly buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That is our Helium 10 weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that affect Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce sellers. We let you know what new tools and features Helium 10 has, and we also give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. We've got a few articles that we're going to talk about some various topics that are actually not that much going on in the e-commerce world. For a change, it's the holiday week and not a lot of news reporters out there or Amazon press releases going on, so a little bit light, but make sure to stay to the end, because we have some cool training tips. I think that will help you. Let's go ahead and hop into the first article

Bradley Sutton:

Now. The first article is actually from Amazon, and this article I actually pulled from CNBC. But Amazon announced that Prime Video viewers are now going to have to pay an extra 299 monthly fee in January to avoid ads. So ads are now going to go ahead and start coming in. This was announced a while back. We talked about sponsored TV. That was announced at Amazon Accelerate or Amazon Unboxed. It was talked about, and so how people are going to consume these ads is basically everybody who's been watching Prime TV shows or Prime movies. They're going to start seeing these ads more unless they pay this $2.99 fee starting in late January. That's going to be in addition to the $139 cost of Amazon Prime I didn't remember that Amazon Prime cost that much or the $8.99 a month Amazon Prime subscription. Now this should come as no kind of surprise as far as Amazon always trying to find new advertising lanes. This article talks about how Amazon's advertising is now 8% of the company's total net sales and advertising incomes surpass income from subscription services last year. All right, so are you going to be trying these sponsored TV? It's different than pay per click where it's like, hey, somebody sees an ad of your product and they could purchase it right away. Now there are some versions of this where that can happen. We saw that in was it the Black Friday football game a few weeks ago but this is more of a brand play, like an awareness. I think that's going to be the benefit of this, and that's a little bit harder to measure if you're a smaller brand. This totally makes sense for a huge nine figure and above brands. What about you? How many of you are interested in trying out sponsored TV ads? Has it? Have any of you tried so far? Let me know in the comments below.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article is also having to do with Amazon, and it was entitled that Amazon customers have scored 1 billion packages from US same day sites. Now, they had this quarterback from some college I think he's from Washington or something, Michael Penix and he actually physically himself delivered the 1 billionth package. This article brought out that there's actually 90 different metro areas where same day delivery is possible and 55 different locations that's delivering, and this is all just big cities like the ones mentioned here, which are San Francisco, LA, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Orlando, Detroit and Miami. There's a lot of other places like I live in like a suburb of San Diego and you know this is a tiny, not tiny town, it's like 50. 50, 80, 90,000 people, but a lot of the stuff I get is same day delivery. So this is, you know, something that just I think, makes Amazon Prime more sticky for customers. And so the more inventory you put into Amazon, the likely, the more likely, that a portion of the population are going to have it available for same day delivery. Now, where you're, you know if you actually get a list of warehouses where Amazon does offer same day delivery service. Now, that would be something interesting for you guys to check and cross reference with where Amazon is storing your products to see if you know how big, how much of the country or how many of these 90 locations are getting same day delivery. And actually, the training tip of the week this week, you know, Shivali is going to talk about how you can actually see where in Amazon your inventory is stored.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article, also from Amazon, it was entitled Amazonse three years in Sweden. Believe it or not, guys, I mean it just seems like yesterday this was one of the new kids on the block in Amazon. Europe was Sweden, but, believe it or not, it began in late 2020. So now it's three years and there's 550 million products available on Amazon Sweden in 30 categories. I'll tell you right now I have not heard of one amazing success story from Amazon Sweden. Obviously, you know you can look at this article that's linked in the comments. But you know there's Amazon Sweden is moving some numbers, but I want to hear from those who are crushing on Amazon Sweden, because I haven't yet. You know, like, like, we always talk about the big five in Europe, you know being UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany, but I don't hear too much about Amazon Netherlands and Sweden and Poland, about you know, some people crushing it. So if you are selling in that marketplace, let me know in the comments and let me know how it's going for you Speaking of Amazon there in your seller central dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

There's just a reminder for those of you Maybe this is your first holiday season. Maybe you're going to go on vacation and you've got fulfilled by merchant listings. That would be me. I'm not going on vacation, but I have tons of everything I sell in Project X and in my own accounts is fulfilled by merchant and I also have another skew for FBA. Now what you need to do if you're not going to be able to fulfill. You know you have to be able to add tracking numbers right To orders. It's better to not close the listing one by one, especially if you have a lot, but set up vacation settings is what Amazon is reminding you to do. So you can actually do this by setting up vacation mode on the account. There's a link right on your dashboard to do that, and so just with a couple of clicks Now all of your fulfilled by merchant listings are going to be paused, so you're not going to be responsible for shipping anything.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one of the things that this doesn't do is affect the time that you have to reply to customer service emails. Remember, you have 24 hours a day. Due to that, 365 days a year, seven days a week, you have to reply within 24 hours to customer service email. So I didn't know about this and I wouldn't pay for this. I'm just gonna always, you know, reply. But they say in this article hey, you should consider setting up customer service by Amazon. It's a paid program that's why I wouldn't do it but where Amazon will take care of customer service on, even on your self-fulfilled Orders, and they'll they'll take care of that by a phone, a chat and email. So, again, if you're going on vacation at any time of the year not not just here in the holidays and you've got fulfilled by merchant listings, amazon doesn't care that you're on vacation. You still have to deliver it within a certain time, so it's best to turn it off. Or if you've got a lot, go ahead and put that vacation settings on a last article of the day. It's just kind of like a funny article, you know, if you think of, you know FedEx trucks. You think of the white with the blue and red letters, right, if you think of, ups trucks is brown. You know those brown trucks. They all look the same and even now Amazon has mostly those like gray, amazon Prime kind of like electric looking trucks and other vans.

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon put out an article from Amazon Europe. They have got the coolest delivery out of everybody. I think, right, like I would rock this, like I would deliver pizza in this. But, guys, if you guys are watching this on YouTube or if you're watching this on the podcast, go watch us on YouTube. Take a look at this article. They've got these cool electric Cargo bikes, they call it. They're kind of like four wheelers, almost With no doors. It's kind of hard to describe if you're not, if you're not looking at this, but I would totally have rocked this when I was like in high school to go to school or something or you know, deliver pizzas on the side, but is this like what you guys in Europe, is this how you guys are getting your Amazon deliveries on these cool, these cool electric bikes? They even have like a windshield and a windshield wiper and it's just. It's kind of hard to describe here, but definitely take a look at it. If you're just listening to this on the podcast, I'm just curious is that what you guys are used to? As far as what's delivering your products? Let me know, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, I want to talk about the different Events I'm going to be at and all over the world. You know, you guys know I like to travel, but I like meeting helium to members in different parts of the world. Now, the very first event of the year that I'll be at will actually be back in for my third time in Lahore, Pakistan. All right, so that it's the reality check growth conference. Saddam from AMZ One Step is one of the ones who is putting it on. I'll be one of this speakers there, there'll be other speakers, you know, people I've met before and a lot of service providers and agencies Coming out. So if you are in the Lahore area or anywhere in Pakistan you're able to go. Go to h10.me/reality. It's January 14th in Lahore, Pakistan, you know, one of my favorite countries to visit because of the food, the hospitality. There goes my diet for my news years. If I had New Year's resolution in January, it's gone, because I cannot be on a diet in Pakistan with the Chicken Biryani and everything else I want. I want to eat. But anyways, January 14th, if you guys are in that area, make sure to come by.

Bradley Sutton:

The next event is going to be January 25th, all right, and I don't have a, a website for this yet. We'll announce it next week. It'll be in Frankfurt, Hermany, right in the airport. Like literally, you walk off the airplane and there's the airport and then it's a building that's attached to the airport. It's gonna be a co-hosted event with Avosk and this is gonna be the first half is gonna be an Elite workshop. So if you're a helium-10 elite member or serious sellers club member, go to the Facebook group and I'll give you guys a link to sign up for that. It'll be free for you and you can stay the whole day. For the afternoon it's gonna be open to the public. I believe it's gonna be 75 euros and there'll be tons of different speakers at the event, including myself. I'll be speaking at the event and there'll be other speakers from different countries around, including potentially speakers from who have worked at Companies like Lego, etc. So We'll be confirming the speakers and confirming the the how to sign up shortly.

Bradley Sutton:

But mark your calendars Frankfurt, germany, on January, the 25th, speaking of Germany, also going to be at AMZ Hacking live. That's gonna be in Berlin, germany, and that's gonna be on the 27th of January. So make sure to go to AMZ hacking line. You can go to the website by going to h10.me/germany to get tickets. I'm just one of many, many speakers who are gonna be at at this event. It's gonna be great. There's gonna be like VIP dinner the night before and then a social afterwards. So that's definitely one of the top events in for the entire year in Germany is the AMZ Hacking live, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Another event this is actually a virtual one in February, all right. So after the Germany ones, the next one that I'll be doing is online wins the billion dollar seller summit. All right, this is gonna be an online event. You can go to h10.me/bdss, BDSS it's there's and then look for the online event, or it's called the virtual event, and that'll be February 21st and 22nd, put on by Kevin King. Tons of speakers there. I'm gonna be doing a presentation unlike anything I've ever done before, completely different than what you're used to when you're, when you're seeing my, my presentation, and we talk about stuff I've never talked about before. So make sure to go to that one, too.

Bradley Sutton:

Next up, there's going to be back here in the United States a Want pretty much usually the biggest conference In the United States outside of the ones that Amazon does every year, and that's the prosper show, and it's going to be in Vegas at Mandalay Bay, all right, from March 4th to March 6th, all right. So you know, I've been to probably every prosper Since like 2018, so I don't know how many. That is 6, 7 or something like that. Always a great show. I'll be speaking at that event too. If you guys want to get tickets, go to h10.me/prosper. And I'm not sure where this coupon code comes from, but there is a coupon code for this event that you can use to get a hundred dollars off, alright, and it is SANAR1100OFFSPEAK. So again, if you're, you know, just listening to this and you don't see the little ticker right here, write this down SANAR1100OFFSPEAK. And that should save you $100 off of the ticket. That again, that's in, that's in Las Vegas, and we'll probably do, like you know, maybe some, some mini socials or something that we can, you know, get together at that event. Now, shortly thereafter it hasn't been confirmed yet I might be going to do an Amazon event, like an event that's actually put on by Amazon in the Philippines, their first time Going to the Philippines. That'll probably be announced in the next couple weeks. All right, so that's it for all of the events in Q1 of 2024. A lot going on. I know there's other events too, but those are the ones that I'll be personally at, and others from my team might Be there as well, so you can meet us and hang out. We always love to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, next up, let us go into the new feature alerts from Helium 10. This is something that we do every week, because literally every week, Helium 10 is launching either a new tool, a new feature, a new function, some kind of you know request that the customers have been asking for. The team is working year round. Here we are right after Christmas and there's stuff to announce, all right. So the first one I want to talk about is this again comes from the customers, because a lot of you guys were asking like, hey, yes, that's cool that in Helium 10, you know, in the profits and the insights dashboard, I can see products group by parent and things like that, and I could, you know, maybe even buy brand. But I want to have like full flexibility about Grouping products together so I can maybe see all of the sales of a certain you know like niche of products, or maybe it's not everything in a certain brand. Whatever the case is, you can now make custom groups and we call this tags. All right, so in your dashboard, your insights dashboard, I should say there will be a button that says tag, with a plus sign. So what you can do is hit that button and then you are going to go to this create tag. Like, let's say, I want to make a group of my products or a tag for all of my coffin shelves, all right, so I type in the name and then I add all the products that are coffin shelves, all right, and so I can just go ahead and do a search for coffin shelf. So what I can do is I can just go ahead and select, one by one, all of my coffin shelf products and then now I have this tag of coffin shelf and so I can just go ahead and hit this button uh, coffin shelves and then now in my insights dashboard, where it shows all of my product performance, I can just instantly see, like, all right, how's my keywords doing on on this? Um, how is my inventory doing? How many units have I sold in this timeframe? So a kind of cool feature there that you guys have been asking for is the ability to make groups of your products.

Bradley Sutton:

Next thing I want to talk about a couple uh updates to the Helium 10 Chrome Extension the most used Chrome Extension in the world for Amazon sellers, over one million active users and a couple of things you're going to uh, notice. First of all, this is just the beginning. You're going to start seeing widgets that are in other sponsored ad placement. So you guys know that in the uh, you know search results of Amazon when you run the chrome I mean, actually you don't even have to run the Chrome Extension It'll start showing up these little widgets that say where the seller is coming from, what the BSR is, how many sellers there are, et cetera, et cetera. But now, like, for example, in the sponsored brand headline ad you know that that you guys, hopefully, are running sponsored brand ads you're going to be able to go ahead and grab that ascent information right there, cause you know you can't really see what ascent it is unless you go ahead and click on the ad. So that's one update that has happened. Uh, another update is in this niche or keyword summary section that's at the top of any search result page, once you hit show full summary. Uh, something that a lot of customers were asking for was the ability to sort within the charts that come up here. So now, uh, if you hit the show full summary at this top little widget, any of these charts, you can go ahead and sort by organic rank, by the revenue by the market share, uh, things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

The last thing I want to talk about in the Chrome Extension is an Xray. All right, so when you run x-ray, first of all it's like loads, a lot faster than it did before and you can see tons and tons of rows. A lot of you guys were saying, hey, we want to see a design where there's a lot of rows showing up here. Now, something you're going to see at the very top right is this little section. Now you know there's no uh, more multi-factor success score. This is called the two-factor score that you can customize so it says top 10 products with revenue over $8,000 in mind and under 125 reviews. So what it's doing is instantly we just a click of the button on x-ray. You can take a look at the search results pages and now know from the top 10 organic positions how many have revenue over x and how many have reviews under y. Now everybody has different thresholds. Like, I put here $8,000 of revenue and so I can see six out of the 10. Top 10 organic ones have $8,000 revenue, but three out of the top 10 have under 125 reviews. Now if you want to customize, like, what thresholds you want to see with that quick access. Just hit your Chrome Extension button and go to the settings gear button and from there now you can go ahead and specify how you want your two-factor success score to work. So again you can. I put $8,000 revenue and 125 reviews because that's what I'm looking for in my top 10 products Last up.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you somebody who uses subscribe and save? Hopefully you are, if you have some kind of replenishable product, like in grocery or another category. One of the accounts I work on, as you guys know, is a hemp cream, and so this account definitely uses subscribe and save. So now you've got a way to quickly track, get some you know cool information on your subscribe and save in your dashboard. All right, so you're going to want to go to the very bottom of the page and then you're going to hit add chart. There's an add chart button and the chart that you're going to want to add is the subscribe and save chart. Once you go ahead and add that, it's now going to come up a new widget that will tell you exactly, in the timeframe that you have selected, what's going on with your subscribe and save. You'll be able to see your rate, the number of units that you've sold in, subscribe and save your sales, what kind of discount the customer got, and then your day by day chart. So this is just the beginning of this tool, but it's something that's going to allow you to just get a quick snapshot at how your subscribe and save is hopefully growing over time and then, if there's like any issues, watching this chart frequently is something that's going to help you out. All right, guys, that's it for the new feature alerts.

Bradley Sutton:

Last up, we've got Shivali with our training tip of the week. I talked earlier about you know understanding where your inventory is at in the United States, especially when you're launching that's important or when you're relaunching, coming back into stock, or you want to know how many people have access to you know same day service. So you have a list of those locations. Here is how you can see where your inventory is at in the United States. Shivali, take it away.

Shivali Patel:

Knowing where your inventory is located in warehouses across the country can really come in handy. After all, in the case that you were just launching, opening up your listing before your stock is nicely spread out means running the risk of having potential customers ditch your product for a competitors, all because your delivery time was two to three weeks compared to that gold standard two day shipping. Or perhaps you just want to see where the heck all of your inventory is because you're already selling, but waiting for a shipment to be checked in and save you from low stock or those incoming low inventory level fees that we discussed last week can be really beneficial. A great way to stay on top of both of those concerns is our inventory heat maps located inside of Profits. Think of it as the big brother of all of your Amazon FBA inventory, or a visual map that can help you see where everything is stored. For instance, I am looking at a product I recently launched this past month I actually had the shipment sent to a single Amazon facility a while ago and check out how you can see the inventory spread day by day across the whole country all the way going into December. The bigger the circle you have, the more product you've got there and it's updated every day, giving you the low down on sellable items, on damaged goods, defective items and the total count for each city.

Shivali Patel:

God forbid but say that there was a tornado that hit an Amazon warehouse or a worker strike, causing chaos. You need to be able to see if your product is affected. At the bottom, you can see how many units are available at every single facility that your shipment has been sent out to, and with heat maps. That is something within reach, because you always have a bird's eye view of your inventory. So go ahead and give it a try. Maybe you'll even get to make some correlations between where your inventory is situated and where it's being sold with the tab over, to help you make smarter decisions and ultimately keep your business on track. Cheers.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, thank you very much, Shivali, for that. So that's something you guys all have access to. Make sure to check that out in your Profits dashboard. All right, guys. That's it for the news and training of the week. Hope you enjoyed this episode. This is our last one of the year. I'll see you guys next year, next week, to see what's buzzing.

 

#521 - How to Sell on Amazon UAE & Saudi Arabia Marketplaces

Unlock the secrets to conquering the Middle Eastern e-commerce landscape as we team up with Krystel, our Dubai-based expert, to navigate the dynamic marketplaces of Amazon UAE, Amazon KSA, and Amazon Egypt. Our discussion peels back the layers of these culturally rich and diverse regions, showcasing strategic entry points for foreign sellers and the innovative AE2SA program that's revolutionizing logistics and cross-border commerce. Embrace the tales of triumph as we reveal how a local Prada sunglasses distributor and a savvy Polish pet treat enterprise struck gold in the desert by leveraging Amazon's robust platform.

Crack the code on advertising strategies and product hijacking within Amazon's ecosystem, where we dissect the intricate dance between cost-effective marketing and the darker shades of competitive tactics. Our conversation extends beyond mere product listings, as we arm you with the know-how to refine your sales acumen and construct a resilient product framework. Plus, get an exclusive scoop on the upcoming seller meet-up in Dubai, a hotbed for networking and exchanging insights with fellow entrepreneurs.

As the sun sets on our enlightening session, Krystel and I invite you to explore the vast opportunities ripening in the Middle Eastern sun. Whether you're a seasoned seller or just planting your flag, the region's e-commerce growth is a fertile ground, ready for you to sow your business dreams. So, tune in and prepare to be whisked away on a magic carpet ride of invaluable strategies and heartwarming success stories that await in the Middle East's online bazaar.

 

In episode 521 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Krystel discuss:

• 00:00 - Fastest Growing Marketplaces on Amazon 
• 04:34 - Amazon Marketplaces In THe Middle East 
• 12:09 - Amazon's Middle East Market Expansion 
• 19:05 - Increase Sales With Prada Sunglasses
• 22:47 - The Viability of Reselling Products
• 28:19 - Comparing PPC Costs in Different Marketplaces 
• 29:02 - Advertising and Hijacking on Amazon
• 34:17 - Building a Customer-Friendly Product Framework
• 35:30 - How To Contact Krystel Abi Assi

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got somebody back on the show who is going to talk about some of the fastest growing marketplaces in the world for Amazon, amazon UAE and Amazon KSA. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Helium 10's got over 40 tools for e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know how overwhelming it might seem to try and figure out how you're going to learn how to use everything, or maybe even to know which ones you want to get started with, so for a completely free course that's going to guide you through learning everything you need in order to become a Helium 10 expert, visit the Helium 10 Academy. That is h10.me/academy. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we are going on the opposite side of the world today, coming to us live from, I believe, Dubai. We've got Krystel back on the show. How's it going?

Krystel:

Hey, Bradley, very good. Thank you so much for having me back. Very excited to talk Amazonian with you.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, let's do it. Let's do it. You know I'm here in feeling the nostalgic vibes. I'm here in my I'm not going to call this the original serious sellers podcast studio because we, when we first started, we were in another. During the podcast we were in another small we work office way, way back in the day, but this was our second ever podcast studio. I'm here in Irvine, California, at our original Helium 10 office doing some meetings this week, so not in my regular studio, but you, you are. You've been in Dubai. How long now.

Krystel:

Since, well, I officially moved to Dubai in 2019 myself and the company we moved to Dubai in 2019. So not a very long time.

Bradley Sutton:

All right About the same time, since I've been in this, this office here. So if you're looking for a Krystel's backstory, we're not going to go too much into it today. You can go to episodes 304 and 376. She was on, so just h10.me/304 or 376. And you can, you know, see, you know a lot more of her backstory there. But today I wanted to, you know, catch up, because now it's it's, you know, pretty much, it's 2024. And we are, you know, in a new world where Amazon is opening up again to other market places. You know, there was a time where, where it seemed like it, wasn't really opening up to to new marketplaces and there was a time where there was just booming, you know, opening up in UAE and Saudi Arabia and other places. So I wanted to kind of like see what's going on in that region. So, first of all, in that area it's not just Amazon UAE, but what are the other main marketplaces in your region over there?

Krystel:

If you are a seller that's based or you know, you launch on Amazon in the UAE, you're not just serving the UAE customers, but you're serving UAE customers, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and, most notably and recently, Qatar, which became quite a popular country because, you know, if you're, if you're soccer fans, or yeah, or World Cup fans, then that's a really cool country. So, yes, as a seller, now you could just send your products over to Amazon in the UAE and you'll be able to access all of those countries as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting, interesting. Now, which token is that connected to? Because I like, for example, if I'm selling in Amazon USA, that's like the North American token, but it actually also includes, you know, Mexico, Canada and Actually Brazil. You know, if I'm selling in in in Singapore, that's part of like the Asian token includes like Japan. And then there's Europe, which, just with the, you know, once I'm in one marketplace, I'm in all of the others. Now, is that, is that region connected to Europe? Is it connected to the Asian Marketplace where, as long as you're selling there, it's, it's pretty much just a few clicks? And then, of course, your business information, where I don't have to apply like from scratch, or is it its own separate entity?

Krystel:

It's really cool that you brought this up. So let me just clarify again Amazon doesn't have an Amazon like, unlike in Europe, where you have, for example, amazon Germany, amazon Spain, amazon France. Amazon still only has Operations in these three countries that I mentioned. However, they do. You as a seller, it'll be much easier for you because you can simply have your products warehouse in the UAE and sell them all across the rest of these countries that I just mentioned as well. Amazon has its own entity for the region, dubbed as Amazon Middle East, so it is part of your global marketplaces. For anyone that is currently an Amazon seller, you could just log in, add a new marketplace and you'll find the Middle East, and you'll find three countries under the Middle East KSA UAE and Egypt. You will not, unlike North America. You'll not be automatically, automatically. You know not. All three markets are gonna be automatically. You're not gonna be enrolled in them. You're gonna have to enroll in them separately.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting interest. All right now. I think as far as helium 10 is concerned, it's it's tied to one of them, if it's its own region or tied to another place.

Krystel:

I'm not a hundred percent sure you guys are tight counts, like when you're.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, oh tight to Europe. Okay that's important for some customers like, or anybody who uses software like helium 10, everybody does it the same way. Like they count, like how many Marketplaces you're in, not necessarily by each marketplace, but by the token. So so like, for example, a certain level of helium 10, if it says you're allowed to connect to Tokens, it doesn't mean just like two marketplaces like US and Canada, that actually still counts for one, even Mexico and Brazil, and then if you're in Europe, that actually counts for two. So I think what you're saying is like, hey, if you, if you are selling in Europe, or whether you're not selling in Europe, it counts as all, as just one token. So you don't have to like, get another helium 10 account, guys you know, to be able to to access our tools for the UAE marketplace. Now, what, how's it been? You know UAE is now, you know, been there for a few years Amazon UAE. Is that the number one grossing marketplace from the ones that that you mentioned? Or Saudi Arabia, come up, or what would you say?

Krystel:

So let me give you some numbers which are quite interesting. I'm looking at my phone cuz I have, like these slide See, these pictures of us in the actual event, so that I just mentioned. So If you forget all of the stats coming out of the region, you'll find that you know the numbers are really promising. Just to just as a backstory as well, the region isn't that big. Population wise, like the whole of the Middle East, is probably the same population of just the US alone, so this is not a very big market. So these numbers, which you might not consider very big if you guys sell in the US, but based on the population, it's quite.

Krystel:

It's quite interesting seeing that Two of the strongest countries when it comes to e-commerce are really just the UAE and Saudi, because they have also the biggest population. But what's estimated to Sales and e-commerce are estimated to reach about 56 billion US dollars in 2025, which is a really good growth and a really big spike. Very interesting, but that's e-commerce sales in general. Now, amazon in the recent year. What they shared during the event was what they saw in 2023 was a 69% sales growth on Amazon UAE and a 65% sales growth on Amazon KSA, which is quite interesting the reason why I think KSA is Picking up.

Bradley Sutton:

I know what it means, but just let everybody know what you're referring to with KSA.

Krystel:

Oh, kingdom of Saudi Arabia, sorry. Yes, so it's Saudi Arabia. So the official, the official or the shorter version of saying Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or Saudi Arabia.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I knew that, but, like you know, I think there's a popular youtuber with that name, so, like some, some people might have got a little bit confused, but yeah just make sure, we're all on the same page, but that's.

Krystel:

KSA. But yeah, you're right, You're right.

Bradley Sutton:

There you go, okay.

Krystel:

You're right. You're right, so it, so the sales growth, is quite significant. It's simply because Saudi Arabia started a little bit later than UAE Amazon wise, that's what I mean started. So Amazon launched in 2019 In the UAE and then at the end of 2020, early 2021, which is obviously not wasn't an easy time they launched in Saudi. So that's why, plus Saudi, Saudi Arabia, or KSA, is Bigger, like it has three times the population of UAE. So I think it's natural to see those growth. Another number that I think would be interesting to share is something that they call the new to brand, which is very much a Salesy type of platform type of metric that they follow. Will would would life to dissect it with you a little bit further, Bradley, but what they said was the UAE is experiencing about 38% increase in new to brand customer growth and Saudi Arabia is experiencing 67% in new to brand customer growth.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting, interesting. So that's you know some promising, promising numbers. Yeah, um, there now, uh, there's every. You know, for somebody who's not familiar with the region, uh, and the operations there, is it very similar with how amazon operates everywhere else? You know like most customers will be able to get, you know, same day or one or two day delivery, and, and you know there's different. There's FBA warehouses all over the place and, and just like the, the, the system is exactly the same. Um, or are there some intricacies due to local laws or or the region?

Krystel:

That's a really good question. Actually, they are exactly the same and I have another number to share with you, if I can find it. Um, it's based on what amazon is trying, how amazon is trying to expand in the region, what they're trying to do and this is according to amazon's metrics, not to mine, okay, not my metrics uh, what they're what they've done is when it comes to storage. So let's, let's dissect the storage part of of your question. Yes, all fba, everything's there. Same day delivery, um, next day delivery, probably not two day delivery, even Quite quite good fulfillment centers and quite good uh logistic support. Uh, when asked, uh, a lot of customers say the reason why they like buying from amazon is primarily because of convenience and not because of price. So that's something to to be aware of. It's not a very price sensitive market, but obviously everybody likes to get a bargain. You know, um, amazon currently is it's increasing its capacity in the UAE by about 70%. So they do have about five fulfillment centers and they're opening up mega fulfillment centers in the UAE. I think they're positioning the UAE in particular to be the hub for the rest of the Middle East. Um, they obviously also do have uh lots of storage warehouses in Saudi Arabia. I don't have numbers for that. And what they're looking is they're looking to showcase and to, but they call it showcase, but obviously they want to onboard new sellers. They want to reach a hundred thousand sellers by 2026, all focused on SMEs and not necessarily large brands and retailers. So that's cool, okay.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now, you know, like, when you look on the amazon website and look up like, or Google like, amazon middle east, it mentions the two marketplaces we've been, we've been talking about um, which is, uh, you know, UAE and and KSA. Now what I don't see you know, their advertise at least is is amazon Egypt. But it but it mentions they like amazon Egypt was also something taken over from a Sukh website, like, like, is it fulfilled from amazon UAE? Is it completely separate or what's going on in Egypt?

Krystel:

You know, Egypt is one of the most interesting markets for me uh population wise. It has a hundred million people, so it is technically one of the biggest countries uh in the Middle East Um and it's a very promising market Uh. However, based on the logistics and how difficult it is for uh foreigners and foreign sellers to be able to import export products into uh Egypt, what amazon have done is they've just open, operating it as a local amazon market, meaning they're really focused on supporting uh manufacturers and sellers in the region sell on amazon as an additional sales channel and it's not really opened up to um to foreign sellers or to international sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting Okay.

Krystel:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So then, if I am a foreigner international seller, would you suggest, uh, I go at the same time in UAE and KSA, or is one a better starting point uh than the other?

Krystel:

That's a really good question. We get a lot of people reaching out to us for support, especially brands that want to, you know, really come into the market. Um, they're potentially already have feelers in the market. They know their product might work well. So we always tend to suggest that you get started in one market, which is probably the UAE. It is the most easiest market for you as an international seller to get into, launch your products in the UAE and then sell on amazon and KSA. What do I mean by that? So amazon did recently release a program which we are a part of and we support all sellers with that program called AE2SA, which basically means they want to support sellers.

Krystel:

Uh, try to expand from the UAE to KSA with support with things like logistics, shipment, product registration and also being able to immediately open your global account from UAE to Saudi. The reason for this is because the laws and regulations in Saudi are quite difficult when it comes to importing products, in particular, as opposed to the UAE. Um, I think the country is definitely making a lot of changes. I'm sure you guys have heard a lot of things that are happening nowadays in Saudi, so it's a really, really interesting country. But still, when it comes to business, there's still this problem. Amazon really recognized this and they saw that um SMEs, which are the majority of amazon sellers, aren't able to easily logistically get into Saudi, and that's why they thought the easiest way would be to just help and support them get from UAE over to Saudi with the help and support of Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now, uh, I know UAE is in mainly English marketplace as far as the language that you make your listings in. What about, uh, KSA? Is it also English?

Krystel:

Um, honestly. Honestly speaking, let's talk about the actual consumer first. Yes, amazon in the UAE is like you said, Bradley, because you have a lot of insights here. Uh, yes, primarily English. You do all of your cataloging in English. However, in UAE they did actually have to change the backend, the Amazon seller central, to be also in Arabic, because primarily, the main language spoken in well, the language in the region is Arabic, of course, but the UAE has about 80, or maybe a little bit more than 80% expats all English speaking, so the market itself is very heavy in English, whereas in Saudi Arabia it's it's the national, the actual language of the country, which is primarily Arabic.

Bradley Sutton:

So you can list your, so then you need to create your listings in Arabic for for KSA, as opposed to English.

Krystel:

You can. You have the option of creating it in both English and Arabic. You have the option of creating it in Arabic and getting Amazon to translate it to you in English Sorry, yeah, and getting Amazon to translate it in Arabic if you want to or you can log in and tweak the Arabic content as well. In the UAE we don't have that option, so we catalog all of our listings in English and the website automatically just translates the language into Arabic. We can't, we don't have any input as to if there's anything wrong with the, with the wording.

Bradley Sutton:

Got it, got it Okay, so not a lot of work for translation companies here in the region.

Krystel:

So it's going to be quite easy for you guys to be able to list your products for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

How about one success story each? You don't have to, you don't have to mention names or exact numbers, but one success story each from somebody that you know having success in UAE from outside of the country. You know could be somebody from Europe, somebody from North America who you know, maybe one of your clients, or just somebody in your network who said, hey, let's try UAE, and then they were here and now they're here, and then also somebody living in in UAE. Like I know, we had a one of somebody from your network last year on the podcast. I think he was originally from Serbia, if I'm not mistaken, but another kind of like success, or just to give people like an idea of like what the potential is of, you know, showing examples of real people.

Krystel:

Of course, I'm going to give you two examples of actual clients that we've worked with. Being an Amazon service provider, we work with a lot of key accounts from Amazon, so they send us a lot of great accounts that we can help, especially when it comes to strategies, which is what we love to do. What we see in the region here is that especially you know the numbers that I told you about earlier new to brand numbers. Those are primarily because larger brands in the Middle East, such as the recognized brands that you guys know and love, that we all buy, like Apple, samsung those types of brands don't really take Amazon seriously in the region. It's just just another sales channel for them. So that's why I think really savvy entrepreneurs are able to just come in soup in, and if you know how to sell to the Amazon customer these days because you know, you really know how to sell, you really need to know how to sell in this market then you'll you're able to pick up where these brands have left off.

Krystel:

We recently actually started working with Prada Prada sunglasses. We don't work directly with the Prada company, we work with the distributor of Prada right here in the UAE and they are a prime example of a retailer that was just. You know, they just have their products on Amazon because they need to. They don't have their team is amazing, but their team has no knowledge of Amazon. They're just an e-commerce like a couple of e-commerce people. They know a little bit about websites, they know a little bit about that, but they don't know a lot about the interest cases on Amazon. And because we made a lot of the changes to their listings, we were able to understand who their key client was. And, mind you, prada sunglasses are not cheap, of course. You know that. So we were able to actually increase their sales during definitely during Black Friday, without doing like a crazy discount, but we focused a lot on some of the viral Prada sunglasses that were, you know, viral now on TikTok. We were able to increase their sales by about 500%, and that's just during Black Friday. So the key takeaway of this story is to understand that sales are there, customers are there, but it's also very important to understand how the customer operates on Amazon, how they like to purchase products, what are their buyer personas and how to talk to those buyers. And still large brands like Prada still need to do the same thing.

Krystel:

Another story would be one of our brands that we recently well as of three or four months ago we started working with. They are a dog treat company. They sell natural dog treats. Based out of Poland, they are one of the largest they're really really popular brand on Amazon in Europe. We help them from start to finish, enter into Amazon in the UAE. It was quite difficult because they sell natural, raw dog treats for them to enter into KSA, so what we did was support them. You know, to get these products into the UAE is not really that complicated If I were to compare it to any other country. They do require registration. Things like makeup, things like supplements. Of course, these products do require registration, but the registration is quite simple. It takes about 15 days. It's very inexpensive to do, very easy to get done. So we did that. We launched the products. The pet industry here in the region is booming since 2020. Everybody now has pets. You see pets everywhere, but obviously pet stores sell the same exact products because it's the same distributors. So customers who are looking for things that are different, looking for things that are unique whether that be pet accessories or food or anything like that opt to search for them on marketplaces like Amazon, and that's where this company was able to, you know, really come into the region and be able to take a huge market share on Amazon, and now, from Amazon UAE, they've also launched NKSA through the program that we just discussed.

Bradley Sutton:

Are there other kinds of of selling that are having success in KSA and UAE, for example? Obviously we mainly talk about private label here, but there's people who do wholesale arbitrage. I'm not even sure if KDP is a thing over there, but our other forms of selling like maybe entry points for people or pretty much the way to go is private label in those marketplaces.

Krystel:

That's a great question. Thank you so much for bringing that up. I mainly work with private label. That's why I always have the private label lens on. I love private label as well, but, yes, for sure, other selling models, and obviously you don't need to pigeonhole yourself. If you are doing private label, you could also do reselling as well. Kdp doesn't exist in the region. I would say retail arbitrage is quite impossible. Amazon is making it very, very difficult for sellers to just sell just products that they buy from stores. But reselling is available and, yes, we don't deal with I don't have direct relations with anyone that does reselling, but I do. Obviously, in our community meetups I do meet a lot of people that are doing reselling and they're doing quite well.

Krystel:

The only thing that you would need to think about is you would just need a larger catalog. Because of the size of the market. You're not gonna have products that are selling thousands of units per day, so you would just need to think about expanding your catalog, and that's what you need to do also for private label. You just need to think about the strategy. You need to expand your catalog so that you can generate the revenue that you're used to generating in markets like the US as an example. But yeah, reselling very popular as well. A lot of people actually go to the local markets here in because we have a lot of wholesale Chinese local markets. They pick up just generic products and they resell them and a lot of people sell branded products. They go directly to the distributors, buy products or they even buy them from. Recently I met a great young lady. She started selling on Amazon. She buys all of her beauty products, everything from a distributor based in France and she sells them. She sells like very recognized brands on Amazon in the UAE and she's killing it and she just started. She's in university and she's doing really well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, excellent, excellent. Now something that's I think a lot of sellers might wonder is all right, this all sounds well and good. How do I get started? Well, a lot of your clients using Helium 10 to do product research and keyword research. And then what are they for KSA? Are they kind of just using like brand analytics and things, since Helium 10 is not, doesn't have the research tools yet over there.

Krystel:

You guys have left us hanging in KSA. But you are promising me, Bradley, that soon nobody knows when we're gonna have Helium 10. Not, promising. Not promising.

Bradley Sutton:

But hey, what I can promise is that if the demand is there, we'll make it. So, like if somebody's listening on the show or some of your network want to make sure that Helium 10 opens up for KSA, you guys need to, like, make your voices heard and send customer service messages to say, hey, please, we need these tools for KSA.

Krystel:

I think that's what everyone did for UAE. I think your customer service team was like help. So, yeah, happy to do it in KSA as well. Let's go. The population is bigger, so I'm sure you're gonna get three times the amount of requests. So, yeah, exactly, we, almost everyone because Helium 10 is a really popular tool. You guys are doing great and we love it as well. Helium 10 is primarily the tool that people use in UAE. Unfortunately, there are no tools currently for KSA. For us, yes, we use brand analytics and such, but unfortunately for new sellers, they try to piece together any type of information that they can find. They maybe use Helium 10 for UAE and try to. They're very similar markets, very, very similar type of customers. So, yeah, they just try to make do with what they have.

Bradley Sutton:

What for a foreign entity? What are the requirements? What is Amazon asking to set up the account? Like, if I'm a UK business, can I just use my UK corporation? If I have a USA LLC or I'm a private individual, do I just register that? Do I have to have like importer of record, like Japan has? What are the obstacles that I need to think of before going ahead and getting started over there?

Krystel:

Really cool. Obviously, like any region, I know I'm painting it as very positive, but I look at it as a great region. Of course, but of course, just like any endeavor you guys want to do, you need to research it. Expansion is great, growth is great, but growth comes with risk and being uncomfortable. So if you're happy with that, go ahead and do it. I think and I did say that with you on the earlier, maybe the first ever podcast, I think Amazon UAE is one of, or the Middle Eastern general is probably one of the easiest markets that Amazon have for you to set up as a seller. Absolutely yes. You can get started with your LTD if you're a UK based seller. You can get started with your LLC if you are a US based seller. Absolutely no problem at all, and you can also register a company here in the UAE, avoid paying taxes if you like, and set up on Amazon in the UAE as well. But it is very, very simple. You just need a business license. You can even open a professional account without a business license. You can just use your ID. You just either need your business license and a copy of your ID or you need your ID and a bank statement Very simple and you'll get it done. It's a very simple process to open an account, for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

PPC costs usually in, I mean, I think in America now people are like, oh my goodness, ppc is so expensive. But in my experience I've seen some of the other newer marketplaces it's usually lower. So is that your experience, comparing it to like US and Europe, where the per click fees in UAE and KSA are a lot less than what somebody might be used to paying in other marketplaces?

Krystel:

I wish you didn't ask me this question. That's the only negative thing. No, ppc is actually quite expensive here, which is very, very odd. Yes, it's very interesting, very odd. However, this is where it becomes really interesting. Sponsored, brand sponsored display ads are quite expensive. However, everything that you get as a trademark or a brand registered seller on Amazon, such as video ads, banner ads, are quite inexpensive. The reason is the majority of sellers on Amazon, especially the new sellers, are not brand registered here in the market, however, so that's why that part of ads is quite Cheap, dare I say. However, standard ads are somewhat expensive per click Mixture of things. Obviously, everybody wants to advertise these days you know how Amazon is but also potentially because there are a lot of new sellers in the region. So when a new seller launches, they just want to get started, they really want to test out the product. They are willing to sacrifice that product. So they start bidding more than they need to. Guys come on. So they start bidding a little bit higher than they should, which basically gets the PPC ads to be quite expensive. Well, based on how I think they should be, but yeah, it is somewhat high. It's not a cheap place to advertise, for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, all right, sticking on the potentially negative kind of things. What are the like? Is the same kind of maybe black hat things happening over there, or is it maybe less? You know, like in American marketplaces, there's a lot of maybe listing getting hijacked or a lot of fake reviews that maybe don't get policed, or people trying to do shady things, like again, since that's a smaller marketplace, is that not happening as much, you think, like some of these shady practices, or is it just as prevalent over there as it is in other marketplaces?

Krystel:

That's an interesting question, I think. When it comes to reviews, no, not that much. When it comes to hijacking, yes. But listen, I get a lot of messages on Instagram. I got a lot of like. We get a lot of calls to the office, people just asking us for help and they say, oh, my listing got hijacked. And then I discover they're not brand registered, they're just selling a standard product. And I say, well, that's not hijacking, that's just another resender. So, yes, if I were to say are there hijackers? Yes, there are, but mostly it's not actually hijackers, it's just the standard business format of Amazon.

Krystel:

But some sellers don't actually know that that's the case. When they launch on Amazon, they think they own the product. They created the listing and nobody else is allowed to set it. And some hijackers that we have discovered don't do it because of black hat tactics or anything like that. They actually resell a product because they think they're allowed to. They think that's how it works. So we normally actually just communicate directly with the seller and we say, look, you're selling this product. We haven't permitted you to sell it. We don't even have to go through Amazon brand support, like. We could just talk directly to the seller and they're willing to just remove themselves. So it's not as prevalent and it's not as tough. It's quite easy to handle, for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, cool. Before we get into your strategy of the day, a couple of things. So I'll be in Dubai on January night of January 11th, 12th. So we're going to be planning Krystel something. I maybe, either. I'll probably come in too late on the 11th, so it'll probably be like a seller breakfast or something like that the morning of the 12th. So if people want to first of all, just if they want to reach out to you at all to ask follow up questions or get help with UAE, or they want to reach out to you to find out details about whatever we're going to do on the January 12th, how can they find you out there?

Krystel:

First of all, I'm really happy. You've got really great loyal listeners, me being one of them, of course, but whenever we did our very first podcast, I got so many follow up questions and it's really, really exciting to see people excited about the potential of coming into the region. Please feel free to reach out to us. You know we're happy to help you in any question that you have, even if it's just a small question. The easiest way to reach out to us is through our official website, which is wwwasasamazonsellerssocietymiddleeastorg, or you could just simply find us on Instagram, amazon Sellers Society. Dm us and we'll be able to help you with anything that you need.

Krystel:

We will be, obviously, once we decide, bradley, what we're going to have for breakfast and where we're going to have it, we will be announcing it as well. So very excited to see a lot of people come to the breakfast. A lot of Helium 10, you know, a lot of Helium 10. People from the network also now live in Dubai, especially that, as you know, in January the weather is absolutely wonderful. So I hope maybe even people will fly in, who knows? Because the region is really quite close. So if you live anywhere close, you could just hop one hour and come to the breakfast.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, Awesome, awesome, all right now, what is your, you know closest, with a 30 or 60 second strategy of the episode. Go ahead and hit us with one.

Krystel:

So thank you First and foremost. I always hear from new sellers, especially in the region here, that Amazon is such a saturated market. I think we've been hearing about Amazon being a saturated market probably since the beginning of Amazon. Tools like Helium 10 can definitely help you find really cool products to sell, but nowadays the Amazon customer, the e-commerce customer, is no longer just build it and they will come type of customer.

Krystel:

You really need to hone in on your sales skills. You really need to know how to build a framework for a product that customers can buy. We see it all the time. Customers come to us and they say sellers come to us and they say I'm spending so much money on ads and I'm not generating any sales. Is it a platform problem? What is it? Is it a product problem? And 99% of the time, it's because they don't know who their buyer is. They don't know how to talk to their ideal customer, so they're just listing the product and hoping for the best. Nowadays, that's not something that you can do. Make sure that you work on your strategy and you'll be super successful on platforms like Amazon or anywhere you decide to sell. And good luck.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right, Krystel. Thank you for coming back on the show and it'll be great to see you in person again. So my first event I did an event with you a couple years ago in Dubai. That was great and I look forward to seeing you in person again and wish everybody the best of success if they're expanding to Amazon Middle East. See you guys later.

#520 - Amazon Launches, SEO strategy & UGC Tips

Ever wonder how an Amazon ranking maestro maneuvers the complex chessboard of e-commerce strategy? Alina Vlaic, the founder of AZRank and our go-to guru, returns to the show with a fresh cache of tactics for conquering Amazon's ever-changing TOS and algorithm. With a pivot towards market research and feedback-driven methods, she reveals how her business remains a tour de force in enhancing keyword relevance. Our conversation is a riveting game plan for sellers eager to sink their teeth into compliant and effective ranking strategies, tailored for those who play to win.

Navigating the e-commerce seas requires a versatile captain, and in this episode, we chart the course through the distinct waters of Amazon, Walmart, and Etsy. Discover how social proof anchors Etsy's success, why Walmart's ecosystem is the new frontier to watch, and what Amazon's virtual bundles mean for your bulk sales strategy. I even share a personal tale of triumph with these virtual bundles that's revolutionized how my industrial scientific brand approaches the bulk market. This is your masterclass in adapting to the unique currents of each platform, a conversation not to be missed by merchants sailing towards profitable shores.

When it comes to marketing artillery, press coverage and user-generated content (UGC) are the cannons of the day. We dissect when press really packs a punch for brand awareness and the shift towards a cost-per-click payment model. Then, we turn the spotlight on UGC, contrasting its current clout with the fading glitz of external traffic channels. To cap off, I let you in on a strategic secret using Amazon's Opportunity Explorer to sharpen your PPC and ranking initiatives. For visionaries ready to unleash the power of authenticity and innovation in their online presence, this episode is your treasure map to success.

 

In episode 520 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Alina discuss:

• 03:13 - Dynamic Year in Amazon and E-Commerce
• 05:34 - New Strategies on Amazon, Walmart, Etsy
• 15:05 - Ranking and Variations in Virtual Bundles
• 18:50 - Press X and UGC in Marketing
• 22:07 - Discussion on UGC and Expanding Opportunities
• 23:03 - UGC and AI in Amazon Selling
• 31:03 - Expanding Brand With Miraclecom Dashboard

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

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

 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we got Alina back on the show, and she’s gonna talk about what is working with Amazon and Walmart ranking strategies, as well as some cool Amazon virtual bundle that I didn’t even know about. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10's Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we're going to the other part of the world. I believe she's in Romania right now. We've got Alina back on the show here, and what city I'm trying to remember? What city in Romania are you at?

Alina:

Sibiu

Bradley Sutton:

How far away is that from the Dracula castle that I've always wanted to visit?

Alina:

Very close, like 100 kilometers.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. So, yeah, all right if we visit your family over there. I know we've hung out in Turkey, another place in around the world, but not in your home country, so I definitely want to visit over there. Now, guys, if you want to get her full backstory we're not going to go too much into it today because she's been on the podcast before, make sure to go to episodes. 122 was one of them, and also 267, and then most recently she was on in 406. All right, so this is now her fourth time on the podcast. Each time she's expanded what she's done, and you might know her from AZRank, which I've talked about a plethora of times. I've always joked with her that I wish I had some kind of contract where I get $10 every time I mention it. I might not be working at Helium 10 anymore. I'd be so rich. But hey, I mentioned things that I organically use, and no, you know, Alina doesn't pay me to, I'm not an affiliate, but I naturally will recommend services and things that I use and that I trust, and that's definitely AZRank.

Bradley Sutton:

Throughout the years has changed because of Amazon differences, and then last year we talked a little bit about one of our newer companies called Press X, and so let's just first talk about what people know you for what's going on in the AZRank world these days. Like somebody might think that, oh, AZRank must be completely out of business because now there's no search, find, buy and stuff. But you know, you guys are obviously still doing things that are above board. It's not, it's not, it's kind of on purpose. I'm wearing a gray hat, I'm not wearing a black hat, not a white hat, but it might be some gray here, but no, but anyways, update us on what's been going on the last year on the AZRanks.

Alina:

Yes, First of all, hello everybody and thank you so much for having me again. It's a pleasure, always a pleasure. It's been a very interesting year, a very dynamic year all around, I feel. I mean, from all the five and a half years I've been in the industry, it's been the most dynamic year from all points of view in the Amazon and e-commerce world. Yes, we're still alive and breathing in our ranking business. Things are working still very well In terms of TOS compliance, because I know everybody has this question on their lips. I feel like and I know we've talked a lot before about this everybody has its own, their own, risk tolerance about how the Amazon TOS is interpreted. You've known me for a bunch of years now and we've always tried to be TOS compliant or as much as TOS compliant as possible, because even back in the days, people have always been debating about even the search find buys were they compliant or not. So it's pretty much the same thing right now. We have pivoted and we have changed our way of doing things. We're mostly focused on market research and we have combined that with some surveys and with some feedback that people give you back while you're still ranking for keywords. And from my point of view. Now it's been like two years since Amazon has changed completely the TOS and I strongly can admit that the way we're doing things right now it's working much better because you're going on a broader experience with everything that means ranking and that helps you basically be more relevant in the algorithm point of view.

Alina:

So, yes, working, still doing it. We have a lot of, you know, tweaks and tricks and different strategies depending on. Depending first of all on the product, second of all on the marketplace, because Amazon is one thing, Walmart is another thing, Esty is another thing, and so on and so forth.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now what about on? You know you're talking mainly about Amazon, but did refer a little bit to, like Walmart and Etsy. Still the same old school stuff. Working on platforms like that, as far as you know, like, like you know, potentially search, find, buy, which is not against Walmart's service, and then on Etsy is something similar, is what's working for ranking.

Alina:

These days, etsy is pretty much in the same place you need to. On Etsy, we don't have too many tools yet. It's still the E rank that we're mainly getting the info from and the organic search that you're doing and finding your ranking. But at the same time, what we've seen lately I mean not lately, like lately in the past year or so, a year and a half on Etsy is that you need to have some social proof, like you said, you need to have some reviews, you need to have some, some people talking about you posting some real, real life photos of your product, because you know, etsy is all about visual. So Etsy, that's pretty much it. And on Walmart is very dynamic, it's extremely dynamic lately. They're changing so much and, yes, search, find, buy is not against terms of service you can do those. Add to cart are not against thermal service you can do those. And there are a bunch of strategies that we were working on right now and we're doing a bunch of tests to see which way to better go on specific situations. But it's going really well and I feel like Walmart is going in the right direction.

Bradley Sutton:

Finally, Now, going back to the Amazon, you know, like you know you're kind of like me in the sense that you like, you like experimenting and different things and you've had different theories. You've tested. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But you know, I know you've talked about experimenting with the questions and answers and potentially finding the scene you can find the secret sauce of if Amazon posts. You know influence, you know algorithms and stuff. But what can you tell me like in the last year or so, like even ones that failed, because you know if you tried it, I'm sure somebody else probably had the idea that maybe it would work. So what are some experiments that worked out well? Some things that are like Nope, can't really influence, you know, can't really help this ranking at all. What are some stuff you've been doing?

Alina:

So a lot of stuff, but what? I can tell you something? That it didn't work and it's related to my latest episode of the last year, one in December, when I was very sure that I am very close to discovering the secret for Amazon posts. Unfortunately, something happened and I think in the algorithm at one point it just didn't work anymore. If you're already doing the Amazon post, go on and do them. If you don't do them at all, maybe it would be a good idea to have that content out there and more visibility for your brand, but not in the terms of doing them just for ranking. I couldn't find the secret sauce yet. Hopefully it's still going to be out there. What I found to be working, and working real well, is something about virtual bundles. I know we've talked about that a lot lately in the past. So virtual bundles before pretty recently I couldn't say exactly when, but before recently you couldn't shuffle the quantity of the same product within a virtual bundle.

Bradley Sutton:

So then yeah, because I know, let's say, I've got a coffin shelf and a coffin bath rug I could make a virtual bundle, and it's one each. But now you are ready. Now are you saying that I could do a virtual bundle with 10 each, or I can do a virtual bundle with 10 of one and one of another.

Alina:

Both. Now you could also make a virtual bundle out of two coffin shelves only.

Bradley Sutton:

Of the same ASIN. I really Well, since when I haven't even been. You see, that's what happens. That sometimes boggles my mind. You know, like Amazon, obviously we were just talking about how I had to delay you because I was on the, I was doing the weekly buzz and you know I Amazon announces so many things and a lot of it is just like little tiny things, but that seems like it would be a pretty significant announcement or a change, and I never saw that announced. Anyway, were you just like playing around with it? And that's how you?

Alina:

discovered it. Here's the story. Uh, I think I told this like back two years ago in one of your podcast. So I'm selling uh, one of my brands is an industrial scientific and I'm selling some lab supplies, which usually are a pack of 10, pack of 20, pack of 100, because there's small stuff, you know. So I I saw at one point that people were buying more of the same product, right, like two units, three units five units. But since the virtual bundles were there, I couldn't do a virtual bundle with shop with the same quantity, I mean more of the same um quantity of the same product. So then I I created some FBM listings with pack of 500, you know, and combined and basically I was it's it was the same product but I was selling. I was sending the buyer five packs instead of a pack of 500. I was sending five packs of 100 because my pack of 100 was the product I was selling on Amazon. Make sense. So.

Alina:

But I did them at the end because I couldn't do them inside Amazon and I couldn't and I didn't want to do it FBA back then, because the FBA fees and all the stuff wasn't worth it. The, the package would would be too big and everything. So the, the profitability wasn't that great on the, it wasn't worth it to keep it into FBA. Let's say so. Then I did this. And then one point recently, very recently it's a matter of 10 days, two weeks maybe I discovered that that it was allowed to. I mean, amazon allows you to create virtual bundles, two of each, two of this, with one of these, three of this was one of this five of the same thing, you know, and at that point I well hold on.

Bradley Sutton:

I'm trying to, I'm trying to do it here and I can't figure out. Let me share my screen here. Let's see. All right, so well. First of all, I was able to add more products. I never did that before, like right then how, where you can only add two, before I was able to have like three here.

Alina:

You have the couple there to add more products, if you see, like on the left.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So I'm looking here and at first I didn't see it. But right here under quantity I can now individually change this.

Alina:

That's crazy To as many as you want.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, like, and then now it's gonna reflect in the ASIN. That is super cool. I never. Why in the world would Amazon not make this an announcement is kind of crazy. And did you just randomly discover it? Like you were creating a virtual bundle and you're like, hey, what's this button do? And that's how you figured it out.

Alina:

It's not entirely my personal discovery. Like me, Alina, I was working with somebody from my team and all of a sudden was like he said I need to try this, I need to try this. I think I saw a plus button somewhere and then that's how it worked. But I have more on that, and this is something even more crazy. That was absolutely not possible at all until now. You can run PPC on the virtual bundles.

Bradley Sutton:

You couldn't run PPC on the virtual bundles, yeah, before I think you could only do sponsored brand ads back in the old days, right.

Alina:

Now you can do anything. He discovered this Really. Yes, my team made discover this first by mistake because he was doing some bulk uploads in the campaigns and he forgot some bundle ASINs out there and all of a sudden we had like some huge conversion on one ASIN and he said this is a virtual bundle. How on earth this one got here? But then we started looking into that and apparently it works Mostly. What I can guarantee for is it's working through bulk upload. I don't know if you can add them manually in your campaigns or with some tools that you're using for the PPC, but with the bulk upload 100% working.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I don't think you can do it in the campaign manager. I'll just double check or add products to advertise.

Alina:

I would check this. If anybody has some bundles that really work, I would definitely check this because, since these changes are happening, they might allow this as well.

Bradley Sutton:

And then you've actually seen it then in the wild where you see a sponsored ad and it's showing the virtual bundle as opposed to so you like confer, wow, okay, that's pretty cool. But bulk upload, then very interesting, okay, so that's like super cool. Now what about ranking? In the old days it was mainly if you're ranking for one of the component units, like the coffin shelf. Let's say, I had a double coffin shelf bundle I could only rank. It's almost like a variation listing where you can only rank for one and you can't rank for the virtual bundle. But I swear I've seen recently where I had a placement for the virtual bundle and the individual. Are you seeing that too?

Alina:

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now I've seen it and I've seen it a lot. I haven't run any tests for clients, but on my product, since we have a lot of this type of bundles I mean in the hundreds probably I see it a lot. So it's 100% valid for my category at least. Again, I'm not sure for all categories, but I think it's out there for everybody. If you're ranking on a keyword with your main product, you can rank on the same keyword with your virtual bundles.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool, so really cool virtual bundle stuff going on. Any other hacks that you can share with us that's been working for you. These are not hacks, but another strategy or anything else.

Alina:

Relevance is still the main thing that helps you with your product launch or relaunch or ranking campaign or PPC or whatever. If you're not relevant, you cannot do anything. Basically and I know you were saying a couple of months ago about the Amazon recommended thing. Amazon recommended rank. I tested that myself and it works like a charm and it's very much valid in terms of ranking campaigns. I mean, yes, if you're having problems ranking, I double you and I say you need to check that Amazon recommended rank. Because there you have your answer and something related to keywords. I would say make sure you stay focused. I mean, of course, all of us want to rank on hundreds of keywords, on thousands of keywords, on as many keywords as possible, but for Amazon, especially when you're launching a new product, you need to be very focused on a particular set of keywords so that you can find your relevance and your ranking juice and then Amazon will start showing you on its own on some related keywords. If you have some root keywords, some good root keywords, in your title, in your bullet points, then you will have ranking on a lot of additional keywords. As I said before, try to have a logic for everything. If the common sense and if everything makes sense to you, then it will eventually make sense for the other people and for the algorithm itself.

Bradley Sutton:

What's been going on the Press X side? Last year you were doing a lot of cool work with getting a lot of traction on the Press side. Is that still a valid tactic, using Press during launch or to promote products at all?

Alina:

After one and a half years now, I can say that you should look at press and especially press acts. I mean, since we're talking about press acts, but press in general, not necessarily as a conversion tactic or a launching tactic or a ranking tactic, but it's a brand awareness, it's an appearance, it's something that people want to talk about, it's traffic. If you're looking at sales, conversions, this type of numbers, and you're planning on making a press article or getting your product featured in a magazine just for sales, then I would say, think again. And especially if we're talking about a new launch Press from what I've seen over a year, it's not necessarily for new brands. You can look at it if you're a very established brand launching new products. That's a different thing. You can very much look at it. If you have a strong Shopify website or outside Amazon and you have I mean, people know your brand and it's not just on Amazon only then, yes, you could look at that. You could also look at that, for example, if you have an extraordinary product, something that is unique, innovative, something that is very special, you can look at press too. And also an idea maybe you can look at press if you're looking at Kickstarter. I know it's very popular right now, but if you're planning a Kickstarter campaign, you can maybe consider also press to driving traffic to that Kickstarter campaign to make more money.

Alina:

So that's how press works. It's working better for some products, not that great for some other products in terms of again, in terms of ranking, in terms of sales, in terms of traffic. It's there. So it depends a lot of what your expectations are. Our model is a CPC cost base, so you only pay for the clicks you get. It's not like a retainer fee, it's not a fixed amount. If your article drives only 10 clicks, that means, for example, $20, that's all the amount you're going to pay and you're still going to get the article. And you need to consider that as the more articles you get, the more love you're going to get from Google and for all the external or outside Amazon platforms that are out there, because once the article is there, it's just there. It's there for everybody to see and click on it.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, all right. Any quick experiences of somebody it's worked out for in the last year like hey, they were doing this and then they ran a series of articles and this is what happened from it.

Alina:

We had a brand which is into the dental hygiene niche and we've had a few campaigns very successful. I mean, I remember the ROAS was six, so for $1 spent they made six, which was good. I mean, on top of the traffic and everything else, this one also made money, you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. All right, now switching gears. You seem you're kind of like me. You can't stay doing one thing. You have to have your hand in like 75 different things. So you and I are liking that. So the latest thing I heard you talking about which I purposely didn't ask you about because I wanted to kind of like find out about here I know nothing about what you're doing there is you've mentioned you're doing some things on the UGC side. So first of all, what prompted that? You know like you don't just dream. One time I actually did have a dream about a tool and it eventually became something in Cerebro, the advanced rank filter. It literally came from a dream ahead. Most people, I think, don't dream up things. There's a reason why you thought of doing UGC. So what started that? And then, what exactly are you doing in that field now?

Alina:

OK. So UGC I think it's the. You know how external traffic was two or three years ago, when everybody was talking about external traffic. That's how I feel UGC is right now. So I started this because, from the community of people that we have and that we use for our ranking campaigns which is huge at one point I thought these people can do more than that. So what do we need as Amazon sellers? What does the market need that we can help with? And so this came First. We only started with UGC because it's more than that. I have something else that even you don't know about.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh my goodness OK.

Alina:

So, ugc, I don't know what's your take on the AI. I love it. I'm a little bit afraid of it as well, but what I can say is that, as much as people love it, eventually everything is a cycle and they will turn back to real life photos, real life commercials, real life billboards. I've seen this happen in Europe, at least Romania, and also other places in Europe. There are billboards with burger photos or commercials saying this photo was taken using a phone and they're showing real people. Those brands could afford an AI and they probably are using AI in different other type of places. I've done some research lately and I found some really interesting data.

Alina:

For example, brands huge brands that are running Google ads, and they compared not necessarily on AI, let's say a professional studio photo which is a wide background, blah, blah, blah, everything with a photo taken with a phone, a little bit of editing, but nothing serious, and they ran Google ads on it. Guess what? The CPC was 60% lower on the UGC one. The user generated a photo and the conversion was 38% higher on the same photo. So that's how we started. I think that's where we're going to go.

Alina:

It's a lot of stuff that you can do with your UGC. We do photos and videos, especially videos that we recommend people using, filling Amazon with content on their listings. In places where it's still free, For example Q&A, you can answer every question with a video and every event I go to and I speak when I ask this question, I get a maximum of five people in the room raising their hands. Who uses this? Almost nobody's still nobody's using this, and it's a free place on Amazon where you can post content. And then there's videos about your product line, right, or it used to be called related videos, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

I have brand.

Alina:

I have eight and nine figure brands I work with. They do not launch a product without at least three to five videos filled in that section, because if you don't put them yourself, then your competitors will come and they will tag your ASIN into one of their listings and then their video is going to show on yours. So when I want to buy your product and I scroll down your listing, I'm going to find theirs and maybe, I don't know, maybe it has a thumbnail that attracts me, and then I'm going to click on that and I'm going to go buy that instead of yours and then all that content, for example, all the UGC we do. If you want to, we can post on TikTok Just like that. Not on influencer accounts we don't work with yet we don't have those type, but we're working on creating a few influencer accounts from our people, but we're posting it there. As I said, you never know what happens on TikTok. We use hashtags. Everything can be there, and this is something that you don't necessarily have to come to us to do it.

Alina:

You can do it yourself in the beginning. You can do your own Q&A videos. You can do your own unboxing or whatever More explanations you want to do about your product and post in your Amazon listing, and then you just go post it on TikTok. It just has to be there. And then, of course, as I said, you can use it on Google Ads. You can do a bunch of things with it. One of the things I do believe it's very important nowadays is that we have so many tools, including AI, because sometimes you can combine these two. You can combine UGC and AI and have something amazing without going to a professional photo studio. I'm not saying that they are bad. They have their own thing. Which they do is great and necessary, but for some things you don't need to go to a professional studio to do it and pay an arm and a leg. Most of the time you can just do this. I hope I didn't ramble too much about this.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Now, before we get into your tip of the week, which you even prepared, so that means it must be a good one here is can you just let us know how people can contact you for any of these 75 different things that we've been talking about today? How can they find you on the interwebs?

Alina:

So if they search for my name, which is Alina, like vlaic on pretty much everywhere, they can find me and message me in person. Or I'm going to just say one website which is azrank.com Contact form, or my email is alina@azrank.com. Feel free to contact me with every I don't know, critique, feedback, idea. I'm always trying to reply to everybody as fast as possible.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right, what's your strategy of the week?

Alina:

A lot of people ignore opportunity explorer section in the seller central. I know all of us love the search query reports and everything that's. It's out there, right. But when you're launching a new product, you don't have that data, unless you use one of my older strategies that you can have. You can have the data, but I'm not going to go into that. When you launch a new product, you don't have that data right. So you should go into opportunity explorer, because Amazon gives you a list of keywords, right. First of all, you need to identify your niche and your perfect list of keywords, because maybe your product will be in several niches, so you need to go there and find all the keywords that are relevant to your product and those should be your focus keywords for your listing and for your PPC and for your ranking campaign. Because if that data comes from Amazon and it's basically given to you for free, if you use it, I'm pretty sure you have much better chances of success to become relevant in Amazon's eyes, rather than I don't know doing your own keyword research and focusing on 3,000 keywords at the same time and spending a lot of money.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah.

Alina:

And again, that's valid. That starts with your listing and then your PPC and whatever other ranking strategies you may use. So something else that is maybe a little bit for advanced sellers, but I found it very interesting. I spoke about this at the last Billion Dollar Seller Summit. If you've mentioned Kevin King, it's something called mirakl.com. It's Mirakl, but mirakl.com. It's a dashboard that helps you expand your brand on thousands not thousands, hundreds of marketplaces all over the world with a click of a button. What does that mean is, basically, they create you an account, you have a dashboard, you list your catalog there and they will take care of everything else. You just need to fulfill. You can connect it with your Shopify for now, but they can get you into I don't know, into Best Buy, into Target, into marketplaces that are very difficult to get in otherwise. Just give it a try and I know a lot of people will find it interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, all right, well, Alina, thank you so much for joining us today. Very few people make it to four episodes on the podcast that means that you're a popular guest. So you've made it, and I'm sure you'll be one of the ones to make it to five. So we'll reach out to you at the end of next year perhaps, and see what's going on with you In the meantime. I look forward to seeing you, hopefully at one of these upcoming conferences. And yeah, thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you soon.

Alina:

Thank you. Thank you, see you soon. Bye.

Helium 10 Buzz 12/21/23: Amazon Minimum Inventory Level | Shoppable A+ Content | New Brand Analytics Tool

Curious about how the latest Amazon innovations could reshape your selling experience? Let’s see what’s buzzing in the tech giant and Helium 10’s newest features that are stirring the E-commerce pot!

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

We're dishing out the details on Amazon's revolutionary Fit Insights tool and the game-changing low inventory level fee, set to shake up the way apparel and shoe vendors approach their trade. Experience firsthand how Amazon's shoppable A+ content module is making waves with its compelling conversion rates, and join us in tipping our hats to TikTok's staggering $10 billion consumer spending landmark, a true testament to the app's growing prowess in the digital realm.

As we navigate the ebb and flow of online retail, we're also spotlighting Amazon's translation feature for sponsored ads, now making waves across North America and Europe. And for a quirky twist, don't miss our take on California's recent ban on donkey skin gelatin sales.

TikTok becomes first non-game app to reach $10B in consumer spending
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/11/tiktok-becomes-first-non-game-app-to-reach-10b-in-consumer-spending/

Language translations are now available for Sponsored Display custom creatives
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/language-translations-available-for-sponsored-display-custom-creatives/

Amazon will stop selling donkey skin gelatin, but only in California
https://www.engadget.com/amazon-will-stop-selling-donkey-skin-gelatin-but-only-in-california-212555337.html

We're thrilled to have Bradley with us, sharing his expert insights into the new Black Box Brand Analytics tool, a powerhouse for sellers seeking to maximize product research efficacy. This episode is brimming with strategic insights, so plug in and prepare to power up your Amazon and Walmart selling game!

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

• 00:44 - Minimum Inventory Tool
• 02:00 - Fit Insights Tool
• 03:35 - Shoppable A+ Content
• 04:45 - Tiktok Hits 10B?
• 05:43 - Language Translations for SD
• 06:33 - Partnered Carrier
• 07:32 - Your Donkey Meat
• 08:05 - Subscribe to Helium 10's YouTube Channel
• 08:17 - Pro Training Tip: Helium 10 BlackBox x Amazon Brand Analytics
  

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#519 - Product Ranking On Walmart, Shopping Experience Survey, and Q&A

Join us as we navigate the intricacies of ranking on Walmart and gauging customer sentiment on this platform with our special guest, Costin Vlaic, from AZRank. Listen in as Costin shares his unique e-commerce experience, shedding light on the importance of product ranking at Walmart.com and how it directly impacts sales. He also shares valuable tips on ranking, from using microworker platforms to leveraging your social circle to place orders.

Further, we explore the value of Walmart Plus and Amazon Prime as essential additions to households. We discuss an interesting survey that reveals a trend of consumers comparing prices and offers on both platforms, with groceries emerging as a hot favorite on Walmart. Get the inside scoop on the potential growth of the Walmart platform and strategies sellers can use to optimize their product range and pricing. Our chat with a successful Walmart seller is sure to provide you with unique insights, from testing and patience to avoiding common mistakes. Listen in as they share their future strategies for selling on Walmart. Tune in for a comprehensive discussion on all things Walmart!

In episode 519 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Costin discuss:

• 00:00 - Ranking on Walmart and Customer Sentiment
• 04:57 - Developing and Ranking Products on Walmart
• 09:01 - Insights From Walmart Shopping Experience Survey 
• 10:08 - Walmart Plus and Amazon Prime Insights
• 13:52 - Online Shopping Platforms 
• 17:19 - Initiating Google Exposure Through Walmart 
• 21:54 - Starting to Sell on Walmart Advice

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

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Transcript

Carrie Miller:

On today's episode we have Costin Blake from AZ Rank and he's going to be talking with us about how to rank on Walmart and customer sentiment about shopping on Walmart, as well as some of the most popular categories to sell on Walmart. So this and so much more.

 

Bradley Sutton:

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

 

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Carrie Miller and I'm going to be your host, and this is our Walmart Wednesday, where we answer all of your questions about Walmart and we bring in guests that are experts in the Walmart field. So today I'm very, very excited to bring on Costin Vlaic, and he is from AZ Rank and so I've actually worked with him and, if many of you probably know his wife, Alina, I've worked with both of them for a lot of different projects, and so I'm very excited. They've been selling on Walmart for a while, and so I'm going to go ahead and bring Costin on Welcome.

 

Costin:

Oh hi Carrie.

 

Carrie Miller:

Thank you for coming on and talking with us about Walmart.

 

Costin:

It's nice for me to be to be here. I'm pretty nervous about but I hope we can bring back. We can bring some very useful information for your audience.

 

Carrie Miller:

I think you're going to do great. All right, so let's go ahead and get into the question. So the first one I want to ask you is can you tell us a little bit about you know, your background and experience in the e-commerce space, just particularly with selling on Walmart?

 

Costin:

So my background I'm based in Romania, so that this is the reason why it's 10 pm I'm speaking at. I'm trying to speak at 10 pm. I guess I was an early adopter of e-commerce in Romania and also an early adopter of Walmart marketplace. I liked the challenges. So this is why when they open, the marketplace is the marketplace. I applied immediately. Luckily for me, I didn't have any issues to be approved, because right now there are still people that have issues with getting approved by Walmart. I don't find any logic from Walmart to not approve big sellers on Amazon. But that's, that's life. So I like to play with the Walmart platform and I discovered things. I'm discovering things, new things every day.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, very cool, thank you, and so so I guess that kind of answers. My next question is like what would inspire you to sell products on Walmart? So I think it's you had already answered that, but do you have any kind of insights? A lot of people are asking you know, should I sell on Walmart? They're not really sure if it's a good opportunity. So Do you have any insights or like success stories from your experience in selling on Walmart?

 

Costin:

So, first of all, because all the people are talking about brands and branding and building a brand, in my opinion, if you want to become a real brand, you need to be on more platforms or more sales channels, not just rely on Amazon, because I think most of the people that are trying to apply to Walmart are coming from Amazon. So my insight is I mean all the time. I advise especially my European friends that are selling on Amazon in Europe and they want to expand in US, because most of them have a big range of products. I encourage them to try Walmart first, not Amazon. Amazon in US it's pretty difficult than Amazon Europe Just to get their feet wet with American customers. I always said that maybe they should think to start with Walmart in US.

 

Carrie Miller:

And so have you seen some success for many of those people selling. Do they get more familiar?

 

Costin:

Most of the people I refer to are people that are afraid, but I know some people that they've been to our company and they are successfully on Walmart. I really think that at some point this is actually one of my personal projects for next year is just to develop a range of products just for Walmart.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, that's actually an interesting thought, because I have talked to Walmart and they said that the products that do the best are complimentary products to what's already on the Walmart marketplace. So kind of creating products that are just for Walmart, for products that are just not even on there, I think is a really good idea. So I think that's a great plan. The next question is, since you all have a company called AZ Rank and I've used you all for ranking on Amazon and Walmart and so you basically help people to rank in these different platforms, so how important is product ranking on Walmart and how does it impact the sales for sellers?

 

Costin:

We can talk about ranking in every platform. So in every platform you are, you just need to think about the ranking. So, particularly for Walmart, I just show you that just before today I did some tests and lately I mean especially for the niches that are not so big add to cards and even some clicks. Sometimes they are working and they are working fine. So you don't just need to place orders, but at some point if you want to be on top of the page, you need also to place some orders. But just to start some add to cards and some clicks, even from your friends and family, because the TOS it's not like in Amazon. You can do.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, that's a really good tidbit there, so can you maybe give a little bit more insight about what you all do, what your strategy is for ranking products on Walmart? You don't have to go into details, but how do you usually go about helping people ranking on Walmart?

 

Costin:

It's depending on the niche. So basically we tried for some customers also the add to cards, which are pretty difficult to be made. But you can always use a micro workers platforms Even you can use even a mechanical Turk or I don't know. I think there are also other platforms for micro tasks and with a few cents you might get some clicks or some add to cards and just to see evolution. And from time to time just ask your friends just to place from in the first week one order. And it always depends on the niche. But if the niche is not very crowded you can try that and you might be successful.

 

Carrie Miller:

What kind of keywords do you recommend focusing on when you're trying to rank? Do you think that Long tail keywords are good, or what do you think about the types of keywords you focus on for Walmart?

 

Costin:

Well for Walmart. I don't believe in long tails, I just believe in pretty broad keywords. I mean, of course they need to be specific to your products but not to be long tail keywords. You should try always the search bar recommended what Walmart is recommending in the search bar. I found them very useful and not focusing, like in Amazon, on a bunch of keywords. Just take two or three in the beginning, the most important ones, and focus on them in the beginning and if you are ranked well, you can develop this strategy with other keywords.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, and just for anyone who doesn't know, that we actually do have two keyword research tools for Walmart. We have Magnet and Cerebro. So you can do a lot of really great keyword research for Walmart on those tools through Helium 10. Okay, so we talked a bit earlier and you mentioned that you conducted a survey with over 300 people about their shopping experiences on Walmart. So what were the main objectives of the survey and what kinds of things did you discover?

 

Costin:

First of all, I'd be very curious to apply the same survey next year and see the changes. Maybe we can share these results of the survey on the chat. So we always share our opinions about Walmart, but I think it's better all the time to return to the people, the people in our community, and ask them what they think about Walmart. So I found it very nice that I mean very encouraging for the ones that are starting a business on Walmart Just to see that, for example, 50% of them have Walmart plus, even if they have Amazon Prime. So they consider a very good add-on to their household to have Walmart plus and Amazon Prime. So that's a very interesting information. Also, I found out that a lot of people are checking both Amazon and Walmart for the prices and a lot of people are following the offers and the prices.

 

Costin:

We found out also that the main categories they are buying in Walmart are groceries. Most of the people said that groceries in Walmart it's much better than Amazon Fresh Groceries. It's a category that's much better than Amazon Fresh. Other categories where people are shopping in Walmart are toys, electronics, things like that, but all those categories are in that survey. I wanted to make the people to write with their own words instead of just checking some boxes. And also I think the results are very interesting. So, for example, around 30% of the people said that they have some products that are buying only one Walmart, not in Amazon, things like that. I guess these are useful information for the ones that are trying to build a range of products in Walmart, because they have also a direction with some categories. And also, in my opinion, after seeing the results of this survey, I believe that this is a platform that will grow in the next future.

 

Carrie Miller:

I think that there's a lot more exposure to Walmartcom, especially because they also have this advertising where you can basically do Google ads through the Walmart platform and your stuff will show up in Google shopping, so you can see a lot more exposure of your products there. When you're searching for anything on Google, you'll see Walmart pop up pretty quickly, so there's a lot more exposure there. Also, I noticed for Walmart Plus, a lot of credit cards are giving free Walmart Plus access. So if you use the credit card to pay for Walmart Plus, then the credit card company reimburses you. Like American Express Platinum is one of them. There's a few other cards that I've seen where they literally give you a free Walmart Plus membership. So Walmart's doing a really good job of kind of giving people incentive to start shopping on Walmart too. So I think that's very interesting that people are intending on getting Walmart Plus or they already have it. So very, very good insights.

 

Costin:

Yes, I'm not living in US, so I don't know all those information, so I was just preparing to say that I mean, I don't know if Walmart has a one year subscription like Amazon has. I think it would be a good way to attract people to their platform and also it's very good for Walmart. I mean this is a plus Walmart has, that they can pick some goods in stores.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, definitely. Was there anything on that survey that you found that you weren't expecting? That you thought was not something you thought people would say on the survey, or was everything kind of what you were thinking?

 

Costin:

I was very surprised that a lot of people that are buying usually on Amazon, are checking also the Walmart platform. So I mean I was really surprised.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, I think that's pretty surprising too. I think it's definitely growing, because I think probably a year or two ago it wasn't the same. So that is very, very interesting.

 

Costin:

This is why I'm very curious what it will happen with this survey next year to see the trend.

 

Carrie Miller:

Is there any kind of strategy that you think, based on what the survey revealed, like, what kinds of things do you think sellers should focus on, based on what you found in that survey?

 

Costin:

We all knew that Amazon, that Walmart, likes pretty cheap products. So if they want to move their brand from Amazon to expand to Walmart, I think they should create a few products that are cheaper than in Amazon and just to sell on Walmart and also on the other platforms, but just not to have them in Amazon. I think this is number one. If they are starting right now an e-commerce business and the brand, they should focus on the category, the order, on specific categories. First of all, of course, they can see in the survey what people answered and also they can check where Walmart is not selling many products, because if they are selling products, it's pretty difficult to rank there.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, I know there's a lot of brands that do a different brand. That's a cheaper brand, and I've noticed big brands in Walmart when I've actually gone into the store. I see Ralph Lauren, like Ralph Polo Lauren. I saw BCBG and a few other really bigger brands that I would have never thought would have been there and they're basically the cheaper version of what they already sell. So it's kind of I think that's a really good strategy and I do know some other sellers who have maybe some products on Amazon, but they do the little cheaper version. They kind of rebranded a little bit for Walmart and they've done well that way. So that's really good on that.

 

Costin:

Exactly. I mean, in this moment we have three or four products we are selling on only one, walmart. Two of them we used to sell on Amazon but the cost of advertising was very high, so we moved them to Walmart. We sell pretty decent quantities but actually we get some profit in Amazon. We just selling but no profit.

 

Carrie Miller:

That's a challenge one. I did see a question in here that somebody asked. Jeremy asked how do you initiate the Google exposure through Walmart? So the way to do this is what you're going to do is you're going to go to your growth opportunities tab once you log into Walmart's seller center and then it's a tab that's called SEM. So SEM is where you can create these Google campaigns. So it's not through Connect, it's actually on the Walmart seller center part. So growth opportunities and then SEM, so that's where you find those. That's a really good question, because it's kind of some of these things are hidden and you kind of some days, oh, you go in there and you see some new things that pop up. So it's kind of interesting that way.

 

Costin:

By the way, also in growth opportunity. You can see the performance of your products. Of course it's not like very detailed like in Amazon, but, like I said before, just to follow a strategy for ranking, you can see if you really have exposure. You know clicks on your products. First of all, I think you need to start with some clicks for your product. You can do it with friends and family Doesn't matter if they are doing that, if you have five friends that can do that every day for one week and see what it's happening. So it's not, I mean Walmart, it's not. I find Walmart it's not a data-driven platform like Amazon. So for the ones that are very data-driven, I think it's pretty difficult to work on Walmart. But Walmart it's more of a, let me say, instinct platform or you need to feel a little bit. You need to try.

 

Carrie Miller:

You got to kind of play around with things a little bit more, since it's so new, you got to figure it out a little bit. Yeah, exactly, okay. Let's move on to a different topic and I'm curious to know what you think the most common challenges that you faced as a Walmart seller or that you've seen other sellers have. So what are some of the challenges you think that are on Walmart?

 

Costin:

First of all, it's opening the account. I mean, I guess you discussed that a lot of times here, so I don't want to go into very big details. Maybe at some point you will have someone from Walmart to explain as the strategy, if there's the approval strategy of the accounts, because it is really annoying. There are people that are selling millions of dollars in Amazon and on Shopify or on the other platforms they can open an account with Walmart. So I don't understand why. So this is the first one. Second of all, I think the common mistake is copy-paste listing from Amazon. I think this is the biggest mistake everybody does Until now. I was about to say that the listing score is very important. I guess it still is because Walmart tries to take care of the catalog. But I did a test if I can rank a product just by optimizing the score in a very, very small niche. It happened.

 

Costin:

So right now I'm tempted to say that the listing score is not so important. So maybe you can sacrifice a little bit the score just to have a listing that it's rolled for your customers and not for Walmart. The same is that in Amazon you should write listing for your customers, not for indexing. I guess this is the common mistake. The common mistake, and also the other mistake, is that sometimes people are panicking. In Walmart things are not happening very fast Like in Amazon, so you need to test a lot of things, you need to have patience. And also for the keywords if you really want to be index and rank for a keyword, you need to have it in the title.

 

Carrie Miller:

A lot of people. When I ask them why they think they're not doing well, I ask them have they optimized their listing or have they focused on some keywords? They run ads and a lot of times people haven't they just copy pasted. So I think that that's probably a big challenge for people is they have to kind of focus on Walmart, like you said, and kind of test things out, because each category is different too. So when I have two different categories of one things that work in one category or not working as well for me in the other category, so it's kind of an interesting thing.

 

Costin:

Yes, things are happening, happening differently in the different categories in in in Walmart.

 

Carrie Miller:

Another question is for any anybody starting to sell on Walmart or that wants to start on Walmart. What advice do you have to give them to start selling on Walmart?

 

Costin:

You can make really good money in Walmart by starting with a big assortment. You I mean you, you really don't need for testing out some products, you just need to buy them from a wholesaler in US. Just put it on your list, it with your own brand, different, different UPC, and just you can just test it. With 20 pieces, I mean, you can start this kind of business in one week.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, you can start. A lot of people do actually also wholesale that I've talked to you where they actually use the brand but they bundle it so like they'll bundle a bunch of different things together that they see people already buying together on Amazon and other places, so they'll just bundle those and they create their own UPC for that bundle and then there's no competition for it because other people have that bundle.

 

Costin:

Right now Walmart, it's really allowing you to play with different brands. It's not like the same policy with Amazon, so you can play with those those brands. Yeah, if you want, or even if you are thinking to to have a private label brand, you just buy from a liquidator or from an out-sailor, just to bundling, just buy some product from anywhere else and just test it. Even if you are losing a few dollars, it's very important to test.

 

Carrie Miller:

You can also test, you know, with AliExpress too, because you can, you know, get things in shipped and do smaller quantities. So AliExpress is a good place too. What do you, what do you think is the future of selling on Walmart, and how are you kind of planning on changing your strategies for what? What do you see as the future like? What does 2024 look like, you think, for Walmart?

 

Costin:

Well, I think Walmart is is still flexible and you can test a lot of things, but unfortunately I see a trend that they will become like Amazon, I guess because they have a lot of employees that leave, leave, left Amazon and went to Walmart and actually I thinking they are doing the same mistakes like Amazon. I was expecting for them to listen a little bit more. The sellers, of course, every company is focused on their customers, but guess what? Also, the sellers are focused on the customers, so they at some point I think I think this will make a big difference, just to to to listen some sellers and some some needs. So the strategy for 2024, it's also from my side and from my point of view it's just testing a lot of things. A lot of things will change. Maybe the rules will be different in two months in Walmart platform, then they are. Now it is possible Because you you can see also a trend that they are changing a lot of things, but I guess, for next year at least, it's still a platform where you can test a lot. All right.

 

Carrie Miller:

Well, I think that's pretty much. We're coming to an end here. So thank you to everyone who joined live and thank you so much, Costin, for sharing all this information with us. You you have a lot of really good, valuable tidbits on ranking for Walmart and just strategies for Walmart. So thank you so much for for joining and and answering those questions and and talking with us about those strategies. So thanks again and we'll see everyone again, I guess in the new year in 2024, for Walmart Wednesday in January. Bye, everyone, thank you very much.

 

Costin:

Thank you very much for having me. Bye.

#518 - From $300k a Month on Amazon to Owning a Fitness Studio

Are you looking to lead a healthy entrepreneurial lifestyle and diversify your business? Our special guest, a fitness celebrity, shares her journey from being a successful Amazon seller to becoming a wellness influencer after a tough E-commerce business setback. Her story is not just about overcoming trademark issues but also navigating a major shift in her personal brand and adapting to a new market niche. 

This episode indeed offers a goldmine of insights. From harnessing the power of Helium 10 Chrome extension for Amazon keyword data to branching out into drop shipping, wholesaling, and even selling audiobooks, our guest offers a wealth of knowledge. We also revisit her previous episode about her brand, Dollface, exploring the trademark drama that ensued and the valuable lessons learned. 

Finally, we delve into the realm of fitness, discussing the transformation of our guest's YouTube content and the decision to open her own gym. Packed with her wisdom on personal branding, niche-finding, and maintaining a balanced lifestyle, this episode is a must for both health-conscious Amazon entrepreneurs and those seeking to diversify their businesses. Tune in to learn, get inspired, and glean wisdom from our guest's entrepreneurial journey and her commitment to fitness.

 

In episode 518 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Carabella discuss:

• 03:38 - Beauty Products to Fitness Celebrity Transition
• 10:02 - Personal Branding and Followers
• 17:46 - Unwanted Attention in the Gym
• 20:53 - Entrepreneurship and Healthy Habits
• 23:09 - Non E-Commerce Questions for Guests
• 28:42 - The Importance of Health and Discipline
• 33:05 - Tips, Tricks, and Transformations for Success
• 34:34 - Diet Plan for 30-Pound Weight Loss
• 36:38 - Introduction to Bella Tech Studio

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton.

Today we've got a guest back who at one point was doing over a quarter of a million dollars per month on Amazon. That had it all taken away and now she's reinvented herself as a fitness celebrity. Out there, she has her own gym and everything and she's going to talk about her Amazon journey and she's going to give us tips and tricks on how to stay healthy as entrepreneurs. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Esty, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on? Well, while you're on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension demand analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we've got a serious seller. Probably this might be the record of the most time between coming on the podcast. I think the first time you came on the podcast is probably like three, maybe four years ago.

 

Carabella:

Yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

We've got Carabella here. The last time you were on the podcast, did you film it here too?

 

Carabella:

We didn't film it here.

 

Bradley Sutton.

But you came here for something else.

 

Carabella:

Then I came here, for there was a conference or some sort. We were teaching something. It was an Amazon event.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yes, Okay, I was about to say, like you might be one of the only people have recorded in this old this is the original Helium 10 pPodcast or the second Helium 10 Podcast Studio, but we don't even, I don't even record here anymore. But okay, so this is your first podcast here, first time in a few years. All right, so if you guys want to get her like full, full backstory, her original episode was actually episode 64. Now we're like at 500 something. But anyways, let's kind of like catch up, because at that time you had your brand Dollface and then you were going through some drama back in those days because then somebody was trying to come and say, hey, this is no, this is our trademark. And I believe how we left it off was you basically had to like sell them your inventory or sell out of your product or what happened.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, exactly. So the company was named Dollface but they were selling cosmetics. I was so new to business and online business I was very naive. My thing was I'm just going to reach out to them see if they can approve me getting my trademark, cause the USPTO, I think, who does trademarks. They were saying there's somebody else that has something similar, you can't do it. So I said I'll just reach out to them. We're not really competition. I'm doing, you know, skincare tools. They're doing skincare creams. They said no way. So then I said okay, I have all this inventory. You're already selling skincare. Why don't you just take it? They said, okay, sold it at cost. And then we went from there and then I went out of business, out of Dollface, out of Amazon completely at that time.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, completely at that time.

 

Carabella:

And then I started doing drop shipping, wholesaling. I started doing audio books. I still have my audio books on there. I made the uh all of these on Amazon all of these on Amazon. So I did a fitness tracker book, things like that, and I was selling those, yeah, so completely different business.

 

Bradley Sutton.

And then that was around the time, like at that time you were kind of like a micro influencer in the beauty uh, you know, seen, because that was what your product was Right. But then you kind of like I remember that was when you first started doing like fitness videos on YouTube. Yeah, did you like make a new YouTube? Channel or you just switch your existing YouTube channel to the fitness stuff. Yeah, I switched my existing.

 

Carabella:

YouTube channel. I completely pivoted. I just started posting workout content and all my subscribers were like what is going on? And I just took down all my skincare stuff and a lot of people unsubscribed. They were like we're here for the skincare? And I said, okay, see, you later, but I just started posting workout videos. I had a tiny little apartment and I started doing these little workout videos in the dark. Basically it looked so bad, and then, little by little, I started my community there. What, uh, what prompted that?

 

Bradley Sutton.

Like, were you just so like, so fed up with what happened with the beauty, so like I don't want to do this, or the skincare stuff, that I don't want to do this anymore. Or you're like you know what. I think there's a need, I see a, you know, like an opportunity for me in the, in the fitness world, or how did that happen? It was kind of like a passion thing.

 

Carabella:

I took Tai Lopez's course 67 steps and he was saying what could you do all day long and love it and talk about it? And I was getting burnt out. On the skincare thing, I was making too many videos. My skin was breaking out. I didn't even wear makeup in reality. It was just like not aligned with me. I was just selling it to sell it and it was selling. So I was focused more on money there when I said what could I really do and just do it endlessly? It was fitness. I worked out every day I ate healthy. I was just in that lifestyle and it didn't feel like work. Okay, so I just jumped in.

 

Bradley Sutton.

All right now how you know the other Amazon stuff. You know audiobooks, drop shipping, like how did those work out for you? In the meantime was like was that the income that was sustaining you?

 

Carabella:

in those days. So I did drop shipping and I did wholesaling and I didn't do anything for fitness. I just kind of learned how to do all this drop shipping.

 

Bradley Sutton.

What kind of drop shipping?

 

Carabella:

I was pulling products from Walmart and I was selling them on Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton.

I used to do that too Until.

 

Carabella:

I was on sorry tracking down and it was money making baby.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Like I think in one like November, December, I probably did like maybe $200,000 in just like one or two months. It was insane in those days.

 

Carabella:

Yes, literally million dollars in like a few months, just in. You know that selling and it was crazy. And then slowly and I started opening more Amazon accounts. This was before they got so strict. So I had multiple selling accounts, I had multiple LLCs and I was doing all this stuff with Walmart and then I was also using Home Depot, I was using a Costco, I was using all these other places to fulfill from because Alibaba and AliExpress. It just took way too long and people on Amazon they want their orders but people started telling on me taking pictures of their Walmart bags why is this that was so ghetto.

 

- Bradley Sutton.

Walmart was ghetto in those days. They would straight take DoorDash I think they still do it a little bit like DoorDash drivers and they would like literally leave a plastic bag of Walmart.

 

Carabella:

And this is supposed to be an Amazon order, it's all yeah, I got busted, but I made a lot of money very quickly and it was pretty successful for a while.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, and then how about the books? Did that do anything for you?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, so I wrote a few. I wrote a planner, a fitness planner. It was like scan the QR code and work out for 60 days with me in a planner. So you scan the work out, you scan the QR code, you get a workout and then you do. You know, I ate this today and it's a weight loss book basically A little bit digital because the QR code. And then from there I said, okay, what about Kindle books? I took a course called publishing.com or something like this, where they teach you how to build out Kindle books and eBooks, and so I started doing that. I made a couple of those and those are still on Amazon, just listed there. I don't even look at them.

 

Bradley Sutton.

So around what year? From when to when I'm assuming it was after we had the podcast, obviously so like 2019, you started doing the drop shipping. How long were you doing the drop shipping?

 

Carabella:

I did the drop shipping for, I think, two years, so okay. So it was a decent amount of time. Decent amount of time, Made a lot of money, built a little team. I had a bunch of VAs, you know it was pretty successful. And then from there I was already doing the fitness recording.

 

Bradley Sutton.

I had my YouTube channel. Yeah, I had my.

 

Carabella:

YouTube channel and I had the drop shipping thing going on simultaneously.

 

Bradley Sutton.

And then you said you were doing a little bit of wholesaling, like what kind of was that?

 

Carabella:

That was like Amazon business, where I found pretty big suppliers that were selling in bulk and I would list on Amazon and then same thing like using Costco, using Sam's Club, these type of places, and I would just fulfill bulk orders at a discount.

 

Bradley Sutton.

What do you mean by bulk? Fulfilling bulk orders?

 

Carabella:

Like wholesale. So somebody orders like 200 units instead of one or two On Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, so also you made like a, like a very, was it like a variation where it was like 200 or they literally had to order 200 items.

 

Carabella:

They literally have to order like 200 items of something Interesting. There was a there was an Amazon business section sector and I got in there and I was able to sell bulk orders, yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, interesting, and then all right. So now, what year are we about? Like when we were talking about the second year of this 2019.

 

Carabella:

2021. 2020, 2021. 2021, end of 2021, 2022. And then I completely stopped all of that. No more drop shipping. Amazon got crazy. They closed all out of my accounts. I had like one account open. I think I have one account open which is where my books live.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, and then on the YouTube side was there a time you know where it just started taking off, or has it just always been gradual, Because I don't really start really small, but that was really big.

 

Carabella:

Actually it's not crazy big. It's like 6,000 subscribers still kind of small, but I feel like I have a very loyal following. And then I started doing selling from there, so selling inside of there. So I created a Shopify store with, like some workout things from Walmart. People can come by from my Shopify store, things like that. And then obviously YouTube pays you for ad revenue and super chats and all these things that you can do when you're going live and stuff like that. Okay, yeah. So that was always just gradual, steady, steady, steady.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, I think that's important, you know, cause it's not always about the number. Sure, yeah, if you're like MrBeast, you know like having he's a beast. Yeah, having that number of followers obviously is good for you, but other you know, you could have like a hundred thousand followers and then if you're not doing branding or you're not really personal, like it doesn't really do you any good because people only they're not following you, they're just like all right, I'm subscribed to this. Oh, there's another video. That was like when I started on YouTube, like a long time ago for the Zumba stuff, I was following a lot of people. Then I thought about it was like, if I saw these people like in an Amazon or Amazon see, I always think about Amazon nowadays If I saw these people like in a Zoom book conference, I literally wouldn't even know who they are, right, I don't know their names and stuff. So I'm like, if I'm gonna do YouTube, it's like how do I make myself memorable? And that's why I created that character. I wear the crazy socks and different things like that. But you kind of have to have a thing that makes it personal. Then you can have like six or 7,000 followers, yeah, and then it still works out for you.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, and you can monetize it and it's still good. And then, from there, I started doing fitness for brides and teaching online. Ah yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

I was doing that, I would do Zumba classes. For you know, guys, don't get twisted for bachelorette parties. It wasn't, the clothes stay on, all right, but you know, like, like, weddings are very stressful, oh yeah. And they're like for weeks, they're just like going crazy and they're like, hey, right, a couple of days before the wedding we just want to kind of like get our indoor friends out and just like work it out. You know, we're kind of and so like I would make a lot of money doing bachelorette and there'd be good dudes there too, you know that'd be kind of strange, you know, but you know so. So that's a, that's a interesting thing. So you would, you would like, was it mainly like, hey, get the bride in shape over?

 

Carabella:

a certain amount of time, or something like that. Exactly From there, I started doing my YouTube. Amazon was like way gone, didn't even focus on it. I started doing more personal training, one-on-one stuff, and then I said I can't do one-on-ones, this is going to be crazy. Like I have no time, yeah. So then, from there, I took a course and look at me taking all these fricking courses. I learned Amazon from a course, though, too.

 

Bradley Sutton.

But hey, see, see, hey guys, real quick takeaway here. Everybody takes courses. Very few people actually act or actually do what they learn. You know, I take a course, oh great, I learned so much, it was great. Or are you doing it? No, like maybe they haven't all worked out, but literally she, you know, she took a course on Amazon. She started Amazon. She took a course on wholesale and then drop shipping. She started doing that and now she took, she took a Tylopus course. She started. You know, she did something off that. I like that. I wish more people were like you. But go ahead anyways.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, it's a finisher, mindset, right.

 

Bradley Sutton.

There you go.

 

Carabella:

I did the publishing course I made books on Amazon. They're still there selling like you get royalties from them. So I took this course. Ruben Brooks he's a coach and he teaches coaches how to build their online presence for fitness. So I took his course. It was expensive like $6,000, $10,000 course and I was like I'm going all in. So I built out my online program. He said you need to niche down. I said okay, who can I teach? I had experience in the bridal industry from way before I started selling on Amazon. I worked with weddings and events. So I said brides, they got the money, they want to look good in their dress, feel sexy, they're honeymoon after, they want to be like ready. So boom, that became my niche and I started building out my course for brides and then from there it just was kind of easy, because there's a lot of brides in LA, especially Beverly Hills, that have the money to take training.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, so all this time, like you were saving money too from Amazon, because I'm assuming you weren't like living it's not called paycheck, they paycheck, but disbursement to disbursement from Amazon. You started saving up money and then. So that means when, that you know, when Amazon cut you off on some, it's not like you were on the streets or anything.

 

Carabella:

No, no, yeah, Always definitely have savings, have backup plans, keep your and I did one-on-ones between. So after that I did my one-on-ones, I made clients. I mean, I made money doing, you know, one-on-one training in the gym and things like that. So from there I said, okay, online is the way to go about the course. I went to conferences in Arizona to learn about the industry and then I started making money online again, but in fitness this time.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, all right, cool. So at what point were you like, did you just kind of like, shut down almost all of your Amazon? Like, today you have no physical products, it's a hundred percent, just like your digital product, digital books.

 

Carabella:

yeah, Two digital books. They just are on Amazon. I don't even look at them.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Was it? Did you have like tons saved up or was it a little bit? Was there a time where you're kind of scared Like, okay, amazon's not going to work out, like I better get something else pretty fast. Or was that other income from the training and stuff already going by that time?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, it was already going by that time. I was also. I'm also very much a worker person. I look ahead a lot. So I'm seeing like, okay, I'm stopping Amazon, they're closing my channels, I'm gonna get my personal trainer certification so I can start teaching people what I love already. And this was already in my mind, because I was teaching people how to do it on YouTube without a certification. So then I thought why not be more legit and then offer these things in person? And trainers can make a lot of money. Especially where I live, you can make a lot of money per hour. So I had already kind of foreshadowed what I wanted to do before Amazon cut me off completely. So I had savings and I didn't live beyond my means, which a lot of people I feel like do, which is bad running up their credit cards, especially in California, not paying the thing, I had a Mazda. I think you knew me then. I had a Mazda. I lived very humbly, so I didn't have all of this debt on my head and I didn't have too much to play catch up with.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, cool. Was there a point where just the trainer on their own like completely replaced what you were doing on Amazon, or was it still a little bit less?

 

Carabella:

Still a little bit less. It was less in person for sure. And then when I started to build scale with the online program and I could have way more clients than just like six a day, because six a day is like six hours of your life.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Hold on, like I'm kind of like spazzy anyways, are you saying you were doing like online, like Zoom? Like oh okay, For some reason I missed that.

 

Carabella:

Okay.

 

Bradley Sutton.

So that just widens your bait. Instead of trying to have to find some, all right, let's find a gym that we can both go to or come to my house or something you were, somebody could be anywhere.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, exactly. And then I was doing training for brides and things like that. And then I built out courses. I already had libraries of videos on YouTube. I just put them in trainer eyes, which is where all the videos live like a course, and then all you have to do is reach out to people who are getting married. And I did the hashtag thing, the cold DM thing. Hey, I see you're gonna get married. I see you just got proposed to. Hey, da, da, da, I'm a trainer, this is what I do. I'll give you a couple, you know, seven days free, 14 days free. Check out my course. Boom, get a sale. This type of thing.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, Okay, yeah, Interesting. Now at what point did it get in your head where it's like I want to have my own like brick-and-mortar location, like a physical studio or Always. Always, so that was always a dream.

 

Carabella:

I love equinox, I love working out and I always wanted my own place and literally I put it on my vision board. It's on my vision board, this little studio with perfect yoga mats, laid out with little yoga blocks. And then, when I got my studio, I did the same photo shoot in there and I matched it to my vision board. It was one year later. Wow, I put it on my vision board and then, one year later, I got the opportunity.

 

Bradley Sutton.

That's awesome. So what was your thought process? Cause I believe it's a little bit unique where you're only catering to female clients, right Like was that always the plan, or were you just like kind of like thinking like an Amazon seller, how can I niche down? Or what was going on there? A?

 

Carabella:

little bit like the Amazon seller. How can I niche down? How can I make it special? Also, being in the gym as a woman. Sometimes you get unwanted attention. A lot of women feel the same way. It was a consistent thing I heard from my brides about being in a physical gym. It's uncomfortable. I have a husband, I have my man, this and that I don't want to get gawked at all this stuff.

 

Bradley Sutton.

So I have to deal with that. I don't know. I'm just like.

 

Carabella:

So I just thought what a concept. And I know the majority of gyms are full of men, so I cut my audience in like half, maybe even 60, 40. Cause men just are in the gym. But we're doing something very different. It's only group classes and it's only for women, and if you go to gyms and you look at their group classes, it's all women.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, when I was teaching Zumba it was like 45 women and like two dudes only. Yeah.

 

Carabella:

And it's all feminine. You know style of movements, classes, so I feel like we're on the right path, Okay.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, all right. So yeah, basically this episode is about guys. Hey, you guys are Amazon sellers out there and if you want to do this for the rest of your life, do it. I think I might do Amazon for the almost rest of my life. You know, like I have no plans to do anything, but it's important to have you know kind of backup plans too, and if something goes wrong with your Amazon business, it's not over. You know, like, like she, she's had a couple of two kind of major bad events happen on Amazon. One because of her trademark. She didn't, you know, do enough research and she got shut down and then she started it again. And then again because Amazon kind of changed her policies with drop shipping and things, and again she didn't, she didn't let it knock her down. So do you have, like you know like financial advisors, or you know planning and stuff, or have you just done everything on your own?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, no financial advisors, no planning. I mean I had a financial advisor when I got life insurance, but that's as far as I've gone, you know, so far. Yeah, hopefully I get huge and I'll need all of those. But yeah, from where I'm at now and where I was, no financial advisors, I did QuickBooks, I had an accountant, but that's the extent of it.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, yeah. So what's in the like on the horizon for you? What's your plan? I mean, obviously the studio just started like a few months ago, right? We?

 

Carabella:

just opened about a month and a half ago. On the horizon, I want the studio to flourish. I'm only focusing on this one location first, but my big dream is to have a clothing line with this company, more locations with this company, and I want to go worldwide. Oh my goodness.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, I want to have.

 

Carabella:

Bellatec clothing line yoga mats. You know huge events. You know how Aloe Yoga teaches yoga too, so we're actually going to do our first event with Fabletics and USC. Wow.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, that's exciting. And the Clippers came into our studio looking for a place to train their girls.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yes.

 

Carabella:

So we're right in the middle of downtown it's my team right there. There you go.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yes.

 

Carabella:

So, yeah, wow, I really want to expand and make this a huge, huge company. I'm looking at it right now Like realistically. I just want to make this baby grow up.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, so then you're almost guaranteed going to find your way back into physical products and online and e-commerce.

 

Carabella:

Yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Because you know, if you start doing merch or something for your brand and start to, you know making your own, I mean you're going to. If you get popular here, you know like right now you're probably just buying all your own like yoga blocks and mats and stuff.

 

Carabella:

Exactly, we actually bought everything from Alibaba.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, but then you see, you could still do that. But then now you put your logo on it and then you know, sell it for people, especially since you're, because you're still doing the online courses and stuff like that. So then in that case, you know, like it's not just, oh, only the people who go to your physical location would be buying your stuff. You know, if you have customers all over the world, they could buy yourself online.

 

Carabella:

Exactly, and Bellatec is going to have an online portal as well, where people can work out with us from all over the world, even from this first location. I've already started building out with our web developer an online portal for girls to work out from New York, and they can join our Bellatec community from anywhere.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Awesome, awesome, alright. What's your advice for somebody else out there, like, maybe people nowadays obviously can't make money that quick the way you did, because it literally doesn't exist anymore where you can just do drop shipping and stuff like that Bye. But is it a matter of like, hey, if you're selling on Amazon or Shopify or TikTok shop or whatever, like Start putting some money to the side. Or what's your advice? Like, how were you able to succeed with life after Amazon?

 

Carabella:

I feel like you just have to play it smart. Be careful, but also take risks. And finally, don't be scared to like Burn it and keep moving, but also just be careful. Like I'm not a financial advisor, and so I can't really say much, but definitely focus on having a cushion, a fallback cushion, save money, plan things for longer term. You know, think smart, think about your future, because Amazon changes every single day and, like you said, you literally can't do that to type of drop shipping anymore, those type of selling anymore, and that was insane. But yeah, I would say just you know, focus on being a little bit careful but also still taking risks, because you can't be too careful or else you won't grow.

 

Bradley Sutton.

We're going to talk you know the rest of this episode is actually something I've been doing. The last year for guests on the episode is I've been asking them a lot of like non e-commerce questions like, hey, what do you do when you need to step away from your business? Because I think all of us you know, you remember how it was like you can get so engrossed because it's fun, you know sometimes, but you know like what's that mean? There's like a meme like hey, amazon sellers are the ones who want to quit their nine to five just so they can work 16 hours a day. You know, like because we just get engrossed and especially when you're work from home, you know you could just like kind of let yourself go and not have great eating habits. So let's talk about healthy habits. But first of all, what's yours? Like you, it's kind of like fitness is almost like your job. That was like for me and like people ask me back in the day what did I do to stay in shape? When I was in shape, like doing zoom, but like I didn't have to. That was my job. Like like I was doing 10 classes, 12 classes a week. I could almost eat whatever I wanted to, even though it's not good, but I would never gain weight because I'm just working out. But like, what about you? What about mentally? Maybe I need to take away from or take a step back from the studio, take a step back from my training. I just need to have some me time. What's your go to? Hobbies or things?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, this is the most important thing for all of us entrepreneurs, because we get obsessed and there's no work life balance and at the moment, I have a brand new baby. I have no balance, but I force myself.

 

Bradley Sutton.

You have a brand new baby?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, at Bellatec.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Oh, okay, I'll say wait a minute. Okay, I was like, did I miss something?

 

Carabella:

No, my business is like a month old. I'm looking at it like a child.

 

Bradley Sutton.

It's how born, yeah, newborn.

 

Carabella:

So things that I do to step away. It's very hard to get away from my phone, just I don't know, it's an addiction thing, obsessive controller thing, but I just go get massages, turn my, turn my phone off, get a massage, put it on, do not disturb. I ride horses, I get in nature. I love to run on the beach, I love to meditate. Journal I'm a big journal. If anyone read the book, the artists way Okay, this book is amazing, it'll change your life. And so she talks about in that book that to sit down and do morning pages where you brain dump three pages a day and you give yourself time and then you can, you know, understand yourself better. But healthy habits for me is giving yourself time alone, alone, alone not with friends, you know. I like to take a bath, I like to spend time in nature, go see my family. Sometimes I mean they're not very far, but I don't make enough time.

 

Bradley Sutton.

They're my neighbors. I know they are your neighbors.

 

Carabella:

My sister just had her sixth baby. Can you believe your sister has six? Wow, that's crazy, yeah. And then I'm in the gym every day, were they were.

 

Bradley Sutton.

they when we're not tri-city, hmm, tri-city hospital right there, I don't know. That's where my kids were born.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, I don't know, but I saw the new baby on Thanksgiving and she's so cute, oh yeah, but yet I I work out every single day 5am. Make sure that you're choosing healthy foods. You know your food is your fuel. Yeah, so if you don't choose good fuel, you're not going to have, you know, a good day. You're going to feel slow.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Let's talk about that, for a little Cause entrepreneurs out there, I think 15 years ago was different, but nowadays, thanks to the apps from the devil AKA door dash, uber eats and everything else, like it's just so easy to you know, at least back in the day maybe you were lazy you actually ate better because, all right, I'll just make myself a ham sandwich or something you know which is probably more healthy than all right, let me order McDonald's to be delivered to my doorstep.

 

Carabella:

Exactly.

 

Bradley Sutton.

What are some eating habits for the stay at home entrepreneur? Simple things that they can keep in mind to stay healthy.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, no breakfast. Do intermittent fasting, I would say.

 

Bradley Sutton.

How many hours on, and I would say 16, eight 16, eight 16, eight.

 

Carabella:

So 16 hours fast eight hours. Eat no breakfast. I don't eat until 11 o'clock. My biggest meal is lunchtime and then I take breaks. Make sure you take breaks, guys. Get off your butt, walk around, get your steps in 10,000 steps, minimum 10,000 steps a day.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Minimum. We just did the okay hold on Minimum Hold on hold on. We did this thing at work where it was like a challenge and they were like all right, we need to do 7,500. And I was struggling, like I was walking, like I would go an hour on the. I have like a standing desk so I have the treadmill on the bottom and then I would do like an hour on that. And then there was some time where I was traveling. So I would like walk like two miles and I'm like I'm still not at 10,000. I'm like what is it? Or not even at 7,500. So like to get to 10,000, what does that mean? Does that mean I need to walk like three miles? Does that mean I need to spend an hour and a half on a treadmill? It's about six miles?

 

Carabella:

Oh, my goodness, it's about six miles If you walk. So I wear an aura ring. Usually it's dead right now and I see my step counts are insane. I mean, I walk 25,000 steps a day. But if you want to be, if you want to be like the hunter and gatherer people that we used to be walking everywhere, they did minimum 10,000 steps for women.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Wow.

 

Carabella:

Men's steps should be way more, cause you have higher testosterone, you have different bodies. So I would say 10,000 steps a day minimum. Get up and walk around and then your smallest meal should be dinner. So you go to bed light but you're not hungry. You know, and then I don't eat after 7pm. Okay, so 11 to 7 is my window, and that's all I get to Just water. Yeah, water, I like green juice, celery juice, ginger tea, things that'll flush you out also. Yeah, that would be my way to how to eat if I'm going to stay at home and even if I don't stay at home. This is how I eat. Yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

So maybe like, hey, you know, maybe that seems unattainable, I mean, it seems unattainable to me almost 10,000 steps, but you can get a treadmill, that's on. You know, you can still be on your computer, but on your treadmill, like while you're doing it, but then I, the thing that I don't do enough of is, you know, like, take walks outside. Hey, do you have a zoom call or a call that doesn't require to be in front of your computer? Take that zoom call on your phone, maybe and just take a walk. Wow, okay, yeah, I need to step on my. I need to step on my game here.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, but don't forget, health is wealth and you don't want to get to your wealth and be sick because you're not in good shape. Like, don't forget that your body is should be your number one and the sharper you are physically, the better your wealth is going to be. You know and I saw something somewhere, I think it was the guy who does the 75 hard, andy Fersilla. He told me he said when people see a person in shape, they want to do more business with them, they want to work with them more because they see the discipline. So that discipline from your health transfers into other places of your life, like your business, getting things done on time, planning things out, showing up to meetings on time early. Da, da, da da. Cause you build that habit.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, what about I mean, apart from just steps? You know, like, like, if that's all we're doing, that's great, but it's still not enough. Like, what are some easy maybe exercises? The desk jockey, you know, can do just like break. You know, like you said, take breaks and stuff, so like, what should? We? What kind of little mini exercises can we be doing during our breaks?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, jumping jacks, pushups, sit ups I would say planking for sure. Keep that back strong. Anything that's in the area that you're, anything you can do in a very small area. So think about it. If I were to stand up here, I could probably do some jumping jacks. I can get on the floor and do some pushups, simple things like that For guys. If you have a pull up bar at home, hang it on your door, do some pull ups. You don't need a full gym to get in shape or to stay in shape, and then you burn calories a lot. Jump rope get a jump rope, stand outside. That's the best one.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, yeah, All right. What about as far as counting calories portions? You know you talking about having dinner as your smallest, but, like you know, how much vegetables, fruit should we be having? Like? What do you think about these different trends, Like you know, like carnivore diets and all this crazy stuff?

 

Carabella:

I feel like it depends on the person. Not one diet fits all, but I would say depending on. For calorie counting, if you want to lose weight, you got to eat less than your, your basal metabolic rate, which is like the minimum calories that your body burns at rest.

 

Bradley Sutton.

How do you, how do you find that out? Calculate that?

 

Carabella:

There's a, there's a or a ring will track it. Your Apple watch will track it.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Oh, I have an Apple. I didn't know I had that Okay.

 

Carabella:

Your Renfno scale will track it. These scales that scan through your feet they'll track it. So they do this scan and they'll you'll be able to see, you know your weight, your body fat, your muscle mass, your water, your you know metabolic age, which is the age that your body is at in the state that you are in now, and then how many calories you burn at rest. So if you burn 1500 calories at rest and you want to lose weight, you better eat a thousand calories a day and you will naturally lose weight. If you want to gain weight, you eat 2000 calories a day. It's very simple math.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, and I mean that is definitely going to help you lose weight. But then you want to have you know if you go to a physical checkup and have your good cholesterol high, your bad cholesterol low. So what are some foods to stay away from? What are some foods that you think are must haves in your, in your diet?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, Whole foods diet is the best diet, which means not whole foods. See instantly, See, instantly See what I thought about. No whole foods like anything that comes from the earth chicken, eggs, spinach, greens, fruits, anything that comes from the earth. Anything that comes from a bag and you don't know what's in it when you read the ingredients, that's automatically not good for you. I don't drink sugary juices. I would stay away from sugar completely. I would do just foods that come from the earth must haves in your diet eggs, chicken, steak unless you're vegetarian, which I did, vegan, and it was a shit show for me. I'm sorry, Can I say that? It was it was not for me. You know, I did some blood work when I was vegan. Going through that, my protein tanked, my hair was falling out, I had low iron, low vitamins not for me. Some people are thriving on vegan, so I feel like it depends on the person's body. But Whole Foods diet is the best way.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, yeah, cool. What are the tips, and tricks or anything can you give to our community out there?

 

Carabella:

Try to de-stress. Get an animal. I don't have an animal, but a lot of my friends have dogs and I ride horses, so getting around animals makes you feel happy, release dopamine, release stress. Also, you have a companion and then just spending more time outside, fresh air, grounding, just staying. Staying a human in a digital world is so important and that we get lost in that. Yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Yeah, any inspiring stories of people like transformations that you've had, you know, like maybe it's a bride or maybe it's just one of your you know clients, your one-on-one clients, um, where they actually like, all right, we're just going to go ahead and do whatever you tell me. And then they saw some like incredible results.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, actually I have a lot, but I'll tell you this one which I absolutely love. This guy I was training. He's a pharmacist, very successful pharmacist, very busy guy. We started training and he was basically lying to me. He's like I'm not losing any weight, I'm not losing any weight and we're working out three times a week. This isn't, this is not working and not everybody can eat healthy and lose weight. And I said what are you eating? And he was like I'm eating healthy. What are you talking about? And we sat down one time and I was so ruthless I'm like you're a liar. You're not following the diet I'm giving you. Show me a picture of your food every day, every meal. So then we I we had this really tough conversation. Two months later he lost 30 pounds. He was eating clean, he was training consistently and 30 pounds he looked like a different person.

 

Bradley Sutton.

He went what did he take out of his diet? Mcdonald's Also. He was eating McDonald's and complaining that he wasn't losing weight.

 

Carabella:

He was eating out every single day, drinking alcohol, and he took all of that out of his diet. He started work. I had him on something very strict like tuna, salad water and just almost like a keto, and he lost weight so quickly. He went from 193 to 163 and literally like two months.

 

Bradley Sutton.

How tall was he?

 

Carabella:

He's 5’10.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Okay, Well, I mean 193 is not, that, you know, like for for a guy, unless you're like five, six or something that's all right. Can you give me his his diet plan, or the one that you gave him?

 

Carabella:

I could give you a diet plan. I want to lose 30 pounds. It is strict.

 

Bradley Sutton.

It's strict, but I'll give it to you All right.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, I have it on my phone right here.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Awesome.

 

Carabella:

Yeah, I'll give it that to you.

 

Bradley Sutton.

Cool, all right. So this has been a great episode because it's like, you know, we don't have, you know, like we have tons, of course, amazon success stories on here. But success doesn't mean just success on Amazon, just success in life is like, hey, are you happy, are you, you know, supporting for you and your family and stuff like that, and you've achieved that and it's, you know, sure, amazon, you know paved the way, but then you completely transition and it's nothing wrong with that. So, guys, don't be thinking that Amazon is the only way to success. It's a. You know, it could arguably be said that you wouldn't, you might not have been able to have enough to start this, you know, uh, business and stuff If you hadn't done the Amazon, absolutely use Amazon. And then if Amazon keeps working, great, keep it rolling. I'm sure you would have loved to have kept doing like six figures a month.

 

Carabella:

I'm coming back when I get my, when my clothing comes out and I know how to work it and I'm going to come back to it. I love it All right.

 

Bradley Sutton.

But then, most importantly again this you know, you guys know I've had some lot of health issues in the past, and so that's why this year I made sure to always ask the guests about their health regime. And this is, you know, one of the experts in the game as far as that goes, so I hope you put her advice to use now. If somebody is in, you know, if there's any of our female listeners out there who are in the like LA area, how can they find out about your, your studio?

 

Carabella:

Yeah, check out bellatec.com and you can come in for your first class free, and all you have to do is register on the website. It's very easy. The steps are there. You can find me @carabellariazzo and DM me on Instagram. I'm very personable. I talk to everyone. I'm not the type of person who's going to ignore people, except Bradley, except me when I'm trying to get her on the podcast for like a year. Just kidding, but yeah, so check us out there. We're at Bellatec studio on Instagram and everywhere else. Yeah, come say hi.

 

0:37:15 - Bradley Sutton.

It's great to see you again, and I hope the next time you see me, you don't recognize me because I'll be like the more fit version.

 

0:37:22 - Carabella:

Let's go. I believe in you, I love it.

 

Helium 10 Buzz 12/14/23: Amazon Seller Chat | TikTok Shop News | Multilingual Videos

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

TikTok Shop Wants to Beat Amazon at Its Own Game
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-13/tiktok-looks-to-challenge-amazon-amzn-with-tiktok-shop

Let shoppers engage with your brand across multiple products using Amazon Video Builder
https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/resources/whats-new/amazon-video-builder-powers-use-of-multiple-product-asins/

Walmart pushes ahead with e-commerce platform
https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/29475-walmart-pushes-ahead-with-e-commerce-platform

Etsy lays off 225 workers after ‘essentially flat’ sales, says CEO
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/13/etsy-layoffs-online-business-retail-industry

But wait, there's more to this episode. We'll guide you through the process of automating Amazon keyword research using Helium 10. We'll help you streamline your efforts, saving time by setting up keyword insight settings to alert you when a competitor ranks for a new keyword. Plus, we're handing you a roadmap for business growth in 2024. We're talking about a free downloadable checklist that will help you develop essential daily habits, and keep you focused on your goals. Go to: https://h10.me/habittracker for more information! So, whether you're a newbie seller or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with strategies that will give you an edge. Grab your headphones, and let's get started!

 

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

• 00:42 - TikTok Shop Vs. Amazon
• 03:19 - Seller Support Chat
• 04:36 - Video In Multiple Languages
• 05:41 - More Products in Video Ads
• 06:51 - Walmart Investing in Marketplace
• 07:33 - Etsy Sales Flat
• 08:21 - New Apparel Tool
• 09:35 - Helium 10 New Feature Alerts
• 13:36 - Pro Training Tip
• 17:26 - 2024 Daily Habits Seller Checklist

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

TikTok is giving Amazon a run for its money. Chat is now available in Amazon seller support, and now you can upload videos in multiple languages on your Amazon listings. This and so much more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

 

Carrie Miller:

Welcome back to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast. My name is Kari and I will be your host, and this is our weekly buzz, which is our weekly episode, where we give you all of the latest news and updates for Amazon, Walmart and the e-commerce world. We also give you updates on Helium 10, new alerts and features, and we also will give you a serious strategy for serious sellers of any level. So let's go ahead and see what's buzzing. Okay, so let's go ahead and get into this first article, which is how TikTok shop is giving Amazon a run for their money, and I do know that they are doing a lot of amazing incentives for sellers. First of all, there's no fees. They're also covering shipping costs for you and if you give discounts with some of their promotions, they often will actually cover those discounts. So, for example, if you give a 30% off discount through one of their promotions, they'll cover the 30% discount cost so that you don't have to pay for it. And I've actually talked to sellers who have made more money than their usual listing price for products. In addition to that, they're giving customers coupons to purchase and really helping to incentivize them to start purchasing on TikTok, so they'll give them a $20 off coupon. I know I bought something that was $21.95 and I got $20 off, so I only paid a doll her 95 for it.

 

Carrie Miller:

Let's go ahead and get into the article that talks about this. This article is titled TikTok shop wants to beat Amazon at its own game. It's from Bloomberg and they talk about a seller who had started getting all these incentives to sell on TikTok shop and they were really surprised at how they even did $10,000 in sales the day after Cyber Monday, even after all this was done. Really really cool stuff that they started selling and learning how to use TikTok shop and because of all the incentives they're more profitable, which I know. A lot of people on Amazon are kind of wondering what's going on with profitability because it keeps shrinking. So this could be a potentially good opportunity, especially while they're giving these no fee incentives to get in there.

 

Carrie Miller:

But something that's really interesting is that they're saying that Amazon shouldn't be too worried yet because basically people are seeing things on TikTok. They don't necessarily yet trust the platforms that are purchasing elsewhere, so they might go to Amazon. In addition to that, the shipping isn't as fast on TikTok, so you can see that people are going to go and want that two day shipping, which is why you'll see a lot of people buying something on Amazon. Maybe it's the same brand, so a lot of times people will look for the same thing that they found on TikTok to see if they can actually find it on Amazon to buy that. Something else that I found very interesting in this article is that they were talking about how people are saying it's kind of like a farmer's market or a digital craft fair, because you can do live selling on TikTok shop and people can ask questions and you can interact with the product live and show people how to use it. So it's a really good opportunity to kind of have a different experience for people and really incentivize them to purchase. I'm really curious to know if any of you have started selling on TikTok shop and how you've done so far. Put your comments below and just let us know how you're doing. Have you had a hard time starting? Have you gotten some success on TikTok shop? We would really like to know.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let's go ahead and get into the second article, which is something I think a lot of people are going to really like, and hopefully this is something that is really beneficial for a lot of sellers and that is that now that you can actually get chat instead of just email and phone call on seller support. So this is a little press release document that was released by Amazon so you can now chat with an actual person. So, instead of having to call, you can actually chat. So there's an FAQ. So one big question that's what I had. I thought is it going to be a chat bot, because I can't stand dealing with those. So they said will I be communicating with an actual human? And yes, all live chats will be handled by a seller support associate. Will I see if this receive the same level of service that I do with email? And it says many cases you will, and then you don't have to go back and forth with email. And in what cases is it not available? It says they can currently help you with the majority of support issues with chat. So that is a really good thing that they'll be able to kind of help with a bunch of different things with chat, and basically you have to go and find it in the same way that you would any other support and there will be an option for chat. So my question is what do you think about this and are you going to start utilizing the chat feature instead of email or the phone call, or what do you think? Let us know in the comments below.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, this next article is really exciting, especially for the US, because there are so many people with different languages in this country and you want to really market to as many people as possible, and I know I've been noticing a lot of Spanish keywords when I'm doing keyword research in our helium 10 tools, and this is a great opportunity to be able to reach Spanish speakers and all speakers of a lot of different languages. So this article talks or this is actually an announcement from seller central that now you can actually upload your videos in other languages. So now you can upload Spanish videos, you can upload Chinese videos or other languages that you think that your customers might be looking at your listings and maybe they might need it in their native language. So this will help you to be able to sell to those people and really showcase your product to a wider variety of people, and I'm really excited about this. I think this is really a great thing to be able to kind of further expand the languages on your listings that you already have. Now Let us know in the comments below if you think this is a great thing and if you're going to get started doing it right away, or what you think about, you know, being able to upload these videos in different languages.

 

Carrie Miller:

This next article is about being able to upload more than one product to your videos for your ads. I think this is a great opportunity to showcase more than one product. I noticed that when I was able to show more than one product on my brand story and my A+ Content that people were buying in bulk or bundles, basically, of things that they weren't buying in bundles before. So this is a great opportunity to showcase all of your products in one video and catch the eye of a lot of different customers. So this is actually an announcement from you know advertising on Amazon and the way that it works is you're going to be able to upload those three different products, and why it's important is you know you're going to be able to get more brand exposure and just a lot more reach. Maybe one person might not be looking for one thing that you sell, but maybe one of the other items they're going to be interested in, so it's a really good opportunity there. Also, this is where the feature is available. It is. It is available in the US, Canada, Mexico and then all these other countries across South America, Europe, middle East and in the Asia Pacific. So check out to see if your country is allowing this and start getting some of these video ads up, and so I think this is going to be a really good thing for showcasing even more of your products and incentivizing people to buy more of your products all at the same time.

 

Carrie Miller:

So the next article here is in the Walmart realm, and that is basically that Walmart is going to continue to invest in their e-commerce platform in 2024. And this is according to an article on meatpuletry.com. They have they did see quite a bit of growth on their digital market, so they want to keep growing it. They actually talk about how it was even more. They had more growth in China. However, they are still just overall, growing this marketplace so that, you know, more customers can buy their products online, since more people are switching to online shopping. So it's a really you know good time to get into Walmart as well. If you really want to grow your, your brand and your products. You know, maybe consider selling on Walmart as well.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, this next article is a bit of sad news and that is that, um, basically, Esty had to lay off a bunch of workers because their sales were flat, so they laid up 225 workers. I'm not sure what this means for the future of Etsy or what they're thinking about sales trajectories, but it is really a curious thing. I know there are a lot of Etsy sellers who watch our content. So if you're an Etsy seller, have you seen sales kind of stay the same? Have you seen growth? I know it really is dependent on the individual seller, so, um, you know this really could be dependent, um, you know, seller to seller, but also Amazon does have Amazon hand made and you can get these products pretty quickly. So that might be something that's been causing some competition for Etsy. But hopefully this doesn't mean that it's doomsday for Etsy and that we'll see them revive again.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, this is the last but not least, but this is a really good thing for apparel brands and I think that because of Sheen and Temu, those are really big platforms that are really competing with Amazon right now and they sell mostly apparel and basic. We saw last week with the fees, they're reducing fees for apparel, which I think maybe has something to do with the fact that they want to compete with those, those platforms. But now they have a new fit insights tool that's going to help give you know apparel and shoe brands access to fit specific insights about their products to help you know the customers you know get the right sizing so they can help reduce returns. I think this is a really good thing to help offering you know sellers the opportunity to you know, improve upon their actual sizing measurements to make sure they're the most accurate for customers to prevent the most amount of returns. I do sell in this category and I think this is a really good thing. Um, you know, for all of us, I do sell in this category and I think this is a really good thing to add and really help us to be more specific with our sizing so that all of our customers can get the exact product that they want with the exact right fit. All right. So that is all of our news. So let's go ahead and check out with Shivali what our Helium 10 feature updates. So, Shivali, go ahead and take it away.

 

Shivali Patel:

Hi guys let's get into this week's helium 10 new feature alerts. We have some ground to cover today, the first feature being located inside of Cerebro, our reverse ASIN keyword research tool. Let's talk about the Amazon total search volume and Amazon average search volume metrics Diving into Cerebro. Essentially, when you're performing a keyword search and say you end up filtering down any group of keywords or phrases, then the tool will actually tell you what the total search volume is for that given pool of phrases, as well as what the average search volume is per phrase. The first number is especially helpful if you want to understand the combined impact or reach of all the keywords that your products are ranking for on page one, while the latter is great for understanding individual averages of your pulled key phrases, since the multi ASIN search that I have pulled up here is quite broad and it includes indexed keywords and phrases. We have a Amazon total search volume that is upwards of 3.5 million, but let's refine the search to have an organic ranking somewhere between positions 1 and 50. In applying these filters, what you're going to see now is the combined value of your page one reach, and that for us in this cuff and shelf market is 22,000 roughly. Alternatively, in the case that you want to see the search volume of all the keywords that your competitors are beating you on, you could use a different filter. Instead of the position rank filter, you could use the relative rank filter and then proceed to take a look at those metrics. How cool is that? Right, all right.

 

Shivali Patel:

And the second thing that I want to talk about now is filter presets available inside of Atomic. So what do I mean by that? Well, if you navigate over to Atomic, you can actually access this inside of the, the analytics or the add manager tabs. I'm already inside of analytics and I'm in the search terms tab, so I'm just gonna stay here, but you guys are more than welcome to do this inside of the add manager tab as well. You probably are gonna see this inside of Cerebro, too, and going down say that instead of going through all of these 1450 search terms, I want to take a look at the last 60 days. I know that I want to see those different search terms that have 20 clicks but no orders, no PPC orders, and I'm spending at least three dollars on that search term. Well, now I can actually go in and click save the filter preset, and when I click save filter preset, you're gonna be able to name it and then click apply, and every time you go back into Atomic, you're actually going to be able to access it quickly with just one click, by clicking filter library, and then select whatever you'd like to see and it's automatically going to take those search terms and narrow them down based off those filters that you selected.

 

Shivali Patel:

So be sure to take advantage of this. If you are really interested in minimizing your actions maybe you have a lot going on and you really want to get straight into the actionable data and insights that will move your business forward then this is a really quick way to do that, to optimize those PPC campaigns you have. Or even if you're doing this inside of Cerebro, you're using the filter presets to quickly get in and take a look at any new keywords or phrases that might be relevant to your niche. So be sure to take advantage of this if you really want to minimize the actions that are needed to get to actionable data and insights, and I wish you much success.

 

Carrie Miller:

Alright. Thank you so much for those updates. Helium 10 is always doing a great job of just updating products that we offer and then coming out with great new tools that can help you to further your business. So we are so excited about all the things that are going to be coming in 2024. So keep staying tuned to the weekly buzz so you can be the first to know about all these new updates. And, last but not least, we have our training of the week, so we will go ahead and send it on over to Bradley for the training video of the week.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How to automate your Amazon keyword research. Alright, we've been talking about a lot of strategies as far as how to find top keywords from your competitors. You know from your own listings, etc. Now I the way I showed it to you guys. It doesn't take too much time. But you know, maybe you've got 10-20 products and you want to be checking your competitors keywords once a week. Well, it can start getting pretty tedious and time-consuming and a lot of data that you're gonna have to process to every single week or every other week, go through all of your products and all of your competitor products and no, alright, is my competitor ranking for any new keywords that I didn't know? So I can put it in my listing. So how would you like a way to just put time back in your hands? I mean, time is money, right, so that you know this could take hours and hours a month, but instead of that, let Helium 10 do the work for you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How can you automate keyword harvesting from your competitor's keywords? Well, it actually goes back to your dashboard, all right. So what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to go back to just your regular dashboard, okay, and you're going to hit insight settings on the very bottom left of the screen insight settings all right. Once you do that, you are going to find the keyword insight settings and then you are going to hit four insight types and you are going to select customize under keyword suggestions based on my competitors, all right. So hopefully you've set your competitors, and if you haven't set your competitors on your Insights Dashboard, you know there's videos that we have on our dashboard on how to do that but you want to put your top five competitors for all of your products and these are the ones that you probably are running Cerebra off of. Once you've got that done, like I said, go to your insights types, hit under customize under keyword suggestions based on my competitors, and what you're going to do here is you're going to enter exactly whatever you like to do inside of Cerebro. You're basically automating your Cerebro process.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So maybe you said, hey, I want to know any keyword where the search volume is at least 400 and my rank is like maybe I'm not ranking at all, so I'm going to put zero and zero, but at least one of my competitors is ranking in the top 20 positions. All right, that's it. You just fill it out just like you would on Cerebro. So now, any time that one of my competitors for any one of my products right, is getting sales from a new keyword that I'm not ranked for now, I'm going to get actually an insight on it or a notification right here and it'll tell me hey, your competitors rank for these new keywords. Would you like to start tracking it? Would you like to start putting it in your listing?

 

Bradley Sutton:

This is like super, super cool guys, next level. If you don't have access to it, you're going to need the diamond plan in order to access this. But I mean talk about putting money and time back in your hands. I mean this saves hours and hours of work. You now don't have to even run Cerebro almost ever again on your products, unless you want to do some advanced filtering, but you can now get those keywords delivered to you in a message saying hey, your competitor is getting sales from these keywords. Do you want to put it into your listing? So, guys, if you want to start automating it, make sure to set that up on your Insights Dashboard.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, everyone, thank you so much for staying at this point. I do want to leave you with something that I think will be really helpful going into this next year, and that is our 2024 daily habits seller checklist. Now, I actually helped to put this together, and it's daily habits that are going to help you to stay on track, to monitor things that are really important for your business, things like your sessions and your page views and all the kind of metrics that you need to make sure that you're staying on top of your account. There's a ton of different things in this checklist that are going to help give you really good habits to help you to continue to grow in 2024. So I hope that you all check it out.

 

Carrie Miller:

It's really just an easy, free, clickable download. You can actually check these things off digitally, so you don't even have to download and print this thing out. You can do it all on your computer, so we will have the link ready for you in down below in the description so that you can check out this Daily Habits checklist, and I think you all are going to love it. So go ahead and check it out and we will see you all again next week and we'll see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.

#517- Amazon Seller Success Stories from Germany & Latin America

What happens when you blend the minds of Adriana Rangel and Marcus Mokros, hosts of the popular Serious Sellers Podcast Spanish and German shows, with the world of Amazon and its ever-evolving marketplace? As it turns out, a captivating concoction of strategies, trends, and real-life success stories. From the transition from UPC codes to QR codes to new monthly networking calls for Spanish and German-speaking audiences to an imminent event in Germany - we dissect it all with our esteemed guests. We talk about special highlights featuring their recent guests.

Buckle up as we take a ride through the ups and downs of outdoor sports sales on Amazon with two seasoned sellers. One recounts their thrilling journey from a booming 2020 to a challenging 2021, all leading to a triumphant comeback in 2023. Hear their plans for product expansion and driving website traffic, and learn from their experiences. From across the pond, our European seller shares his wisdom on improving product images, revealing two crucial photography tips. We also touch on the advent of a novel 3D rendering service, eliminating the need for physical product delivery to a photography studio. All this while emphasizing the critical role technology plays in growing an Amazon business.

Did you ever wonder how selling on Amazon varies across different European countries? We've got you covered as we compare and contrast Amazon sales in the top five European countries: the UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain. We navigate through the VAT-related intricacies in these nations and how Amazon aids in VAT declarations. Find inspiration in the story of a successful Spanish seller who has grown her Amazon business with a unique approach - collaborating with artisans in Spain and Mexico through Amazon Handmade. We also chat about avoiding burnout while scaling up your Amazon business, ensuring a healthy work-life balance. Wrapping up the episode, we shine the spotlight on two entrepreneurs who’ve built flourishing podcast communities and Amazon businesses. This journey is filled with challenges, triumphs, plans for the future, and valuable advice for budding entrepreneurs. So tune in for an episode filled with information, inspiration, and innovation.

 

In episode 517 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Adriana, and Marcus discuss:

• 00:00 - Tips and Strategies From SSP Spanish and German Hosts
• 01:19 - Celebrating Podcast Milestones and New Networking Calls
• 06:33 - Insights From Amazon 
• 08:28 - Trends in Outdoor Sports Sales
• 14:42 - Using AI Tools for Content Creation
• 18:19 - Build Brand With Technology and VA's 
• 20:50 - VAT and Selling Strategies on Amazon
• 24:11 - Artisan Networks in Spain and Mexico 
• 29:19 - Uniqueness and Innovation in Saturated Niches
• 31:50 - Tips for Balancing Work and Relaxation
• 36:06 - Amazon's AI Strategy for Product Listings
• 37:55 - Celebrating Podcast and Amazon Success

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

 

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got the host of our Spanish and German podcast back and they've got lots of tips and strategies from themselves and their guests on a wide variety of topics, such as Amazon, image creation, KDP, amazon handmade European marketplaces and much more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hey guys. Heads up, Kevin King is the new host of the AM/PM Podcast, so if you love Amazon strategy, make sure to subscribe to it. Whatever you're listening to this podcast on, take a listen to AM slash PM podcast just by searching for it on that platform. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and we've got a couple of our host from different parts of the world here today. We've got Adriana from Mexico and Marcus, who is in Europe right now. Welcome back to the show, guys.

 

Adriana:

Hi Bradley, thank you for having us.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It’s really great to have you both here. This is now. We just celebrated two full years of Serious Sellers Podcast and Espanol Serious Sellers Podcast of Deutsch, and the numbers have been going up, you know, record months this year. It's really great to see what you guys have created just from zero, like literally zero, and now you've got podcasts that are listened to by thousands of people out there. We have YouTube now, you know, for the podcast. So, guys, make sure, if you speak German or Spanish, you need to be listening to Serious Sellers Podcast and Espanol or Alph Deutsch. You can search for either of that on whatever you're listening to this on, even on YouTube now. Now we're doing full videos so you can get kind of like a better vibe of it as well. So guys, this is this is really cool. And just one more thing that's new We'll go ahead and promote it right now is that you guys are now hosting in Spanish and German like monthly networking calls, zoom calls, for Spanish and German speaking community. So, Adriana, tell us about yours like, like when we just had the first one on December 6, but is it always like on the 6th, or is it going to be like the second Tuesday of each month, or how is yours going to work and how can people sign up for it?

 

Adriana:

Yes, of course we're meeting the first Wednesday of every month, so I'm not sure what that is for January, but of course that's going to change for February as well. So basically, the first Wednesday of every month at 6pm, Mexico City time and people can sign up. They just need to visit our link, h10.me/llamadaconadriana and that's it. You can, and that way you will get the reminders and the link to join us in a live call networking call every Wednesday.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right Now, Marcus, you too are just had your first ever German call in December, but starting in January. When is it going to be? And also, what is the link for it?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, we want to keep it simple. It's the first Monday of the month, 12 o'clock, and the link is h10.me/elite-de.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, h10.me/elite-de for German speakers. And when you say 12pm, that's 12pm Germany time, 12pm German time. Correct, speaking of Germany. Guys, I'm going to be in Germany. I'm not sure if anybody out there is going to be in in town, but I'm going to be out there on January 27th in Berlin. I'm going to be speaking at an event and also I will be hosting an elite workshop. So if you guys are interested in going for the event I'm speaking at h10.me/germany. So h10. h10.me/germany. All right, enough of the kind of like logistics here. I think, hopefully, if you're a Spanish or German speaking person, you got enough information there to take advantage of these. Everything we just mentioned is free resources for the community. But you know, you guys, let's start off with. What I like to do is because I don't. You know, I obviously can't speak German, so I can't listen to the episodes and understand what's going on. So I'm going to first start with you, marcus. What are some notable guests you've had in the year that really had like some really cool strategies or really cool story that you can relate to us?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, really some really awesome guests and it's hard to make any kind of selection. But one recent one was from GS1, the company who is doing the UPC codes, and the employee. He told me that they are preparing a big change. They want to go in the next couple of next years from barcodes to QR codes and they call it as a 3D code, and that will be more than just a number to identify your product. That will have like access for you to, for marketing, for example, the customer. Obviously, obviously the shop can scan the QR code, see the price, but the customer can scan it as well and you can put your promotions in it or, for example, like giveaways, anything, and he says it will even support promotions day by day. You can have one promotion set on a Monday, something different on a weekend, or like if there's like a bad batch should produced, you can add it into that QR code and the cashier will know I shouldn't sell that. So there will be a lot of functions and features coming and I mean that's where that will be a big task. They will have to change all systems in all shops worldwide. That will be something very interesting for marketing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Huh, interesting, yeah, I mean because you know the traditional barcodes is kind of like what the world's been used to for so long, but the move to QR and having extra information, that'll definitely be interesting. Alright, going to Adriana now, the first kind of story that comes from your mind, or Stragia, or something that's one of your guests in the last year talked about.

 

Adriana:

Yeah, well, one of the highlights is that we had Amazon join us on a call or on an episode for the podcast, maybe a couple of weeks ago, maybe two or three weeks ago and that was great because we had the opportunity to ask them stuff such as you know, what's up with seller support, how can we best go about getting an issue fixed and, let's say, something happens to your listing, your listing is down, or an FBA shipment, or you know, these things we deal with as a sellers on a weekly basis, right, and so that was a big one. I was very excited to have them on a call because, you know, it's our opportunity to get answers right, instead of, you know, searching in forums or asking other people. It came directly from them and they gave us really interesting tips for how to go about certain issues and also they shared with us really interesting well insights, of course, but also resources on how we can learn more about the platform, etc. Right, and I think that this is very valuable because it comes directly from the how do you say, the horse's mouth? Or, yeah, I guess, directly from Amazon. So that was a lot of fun. That was two weeks ago and, as I said, for me, the main takeaway that I got from them was basically how to work the seller support system to get them to answer and fix our issue, as opposed to getting you know, like the template response that we sometimes get when they don't understand. What is it that we need help with?

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm curious how are your own Amazon businesses going? Like, are you, do you think you're going to be up this year than before, or how things been going for you?

 

Adriana:

So for me, 2023 has been a good year, actually compared to 2022. 2022 was weird. I sell in the outdoors sports category, so 2020 was amazing because, of course, at least the second half of 2020, because, of course, everyone wants to be out of the house and in some place. You know that was outdoors, not indoors at a restaurant or at a mall. So it was. It was a great year sales wise, 2021 as well. 2022. It had, yeah, I experienced a deep, I would say, because everyone was, you know, out and back in the clubs and the restaurants and the concerts and all of that. So people just forgot about outdoor sports. And then 2023 came back strong. Of course, I did focus a lot on my ranking and, yeah, basically, like optimizing my listing and all of that, my images especially. I was like you know what, like if I up my conversion rate, then everything else will fall into place in a way, you know, like my ads and all of that. I do my own PPC, but I'm like you know what, as long as the conversion goes up, then I can send as much traffic as I want via ads and it should convert right, Like it should turn into sales. So 2023 was great and I'm hoping for a good 2024. I want to expand my product line and I also want to work on getting more traffic to my website and, yeah, basically growing that channel too.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now going back to Marcus, what about for your Amazon businesses, your communities? What's some trends that you've seen this year like, especially since your community and you are mainly selling in Europe? Like are things in? Is there inflation in Europe? Is things getting harder? Is competition getting more? What's going on in the European Amazon market?

 

Marcus:

It's an interesting question because, like over the years, I always got that kind of question is it still worth it? Should you still start Amazon? But that somehow that dried out. Everybody knows that Amazon is big and I mean like yeah, like the whole world is in a tough time, I guess, right now. But as I see it, like Amazon sellers, they are doing good, they're doing well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

On the strategy side. You know like one of your specialties and you have people in your community who are specialists about this is like photography and things like that what do you see as kind of like working? Now, what's some tips you can give the audience about, like how they can really make sure their image deck and or videos are really better than the competition?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, actually I have two photography related tips and first one is from JP. He was a guest in the podcast. He's quite young guy but like living the dream, traveling to through Bali, Thailand and doing Amazon FBA. He's like selling a lot and he also started a photography business. But he has a totally different approach. He doesn't need your product. You're providing photos from your smartphone. You get a tutorial. You have to send him six photos from every site and here's a team who does a 3D rendering of that product and, um, that way he's at a price point that's just a fraction that you expect for a product photography. And, yeah, his team will do a 3D model of your product that looks like totally photo realistic and they will put it into a lifestyle photos, put it into Infographics and send you the whole products as a product shots that you expect, but without touching your products. And I mean one.

 

Marcus:

One thing is interest. It's interesting for people who sell, who just start out, or sell products that have like two thousand five thousand dollars of revenue, but also people who don't have time, because imagine your product is being produced in China right now and you don't have a master sample right now and as soon as the first product is finished in China, you can ask your manufacturer Do these photos for me with your smartphone, send it over. He does your product shots and the moment your delivery arrives in your local warehouse, you already have your listing completed. By the way, that website is JPD Dash advertising dot com.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And yeah, that's what I think I remember. You know, I again I remember. I don't, you know, I don't speak German, but I remember that episode because I look at the videos just just like see how they look. And he looked like a, like, a Like, almost like a, like a tick tock celebrity or something like crazy, crazy hair right, yeah, okay there. There we go cool. So that, yeah, that's interesting because Just recently, amazon announced that there's no longer going to be the three hundred and sixty degree Images that have been for a while. Like, if you look at the project X coffin shelf, it has it like we didn't we didn't put it there, amazon just did it themselves. It's being replaced with a 3D image that I think you can you can still like, turn around and then they were saying that all they need they're making some kind of app where you can actually take the images with your phone, and then the Amazon app, I'm assuming, or something, yeah, and then submit it. So that's interesting. You know Concept, because you know, like, I'm still using, like, traditional photography studios and that's. You know, logistically, you know you have to send the product there and then they you know they have to shoot it. So have you seen images that? Or have you seen listings that actually came from this model where they just take the pictures and they do it 3D and it looks realistic, or what's your experience with looking at?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, I mean, I saw it on his listings he sells thirty thousand units a month, and he's just using his service, of course. How many units thirty thousand a month is selling? Europe, US, Japan?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, it's quite, quite busy cool all right, so that's a good one. Let's go back to a either a strategy or some kind of cool story from your experience.

 

Adriana:

Yes, going back to technology, per per Marcus comments I feel like many people, many sellers, that want to Be able to grow without having to invest all of their money into, you know, launching a ton of SK use or Paying people to to write blog posts for them or kindle books for them, etc. I am seeing how many people that come on the podcast. They say how they Work with either either they do and themselves, basically they they use to create content. They are using this To, such as me, journey, etc. Ai tools basically to help them create content, to help them generate user generating content, etc. Right, and so I chatted with Casspin. She was episode 90, actually episode 100 a couple weeks ago and she was telling me how she will.

 

Adriana:

First of all, the way she Gets ideas on how to expand her product line. She goes to her competitors stores and she's like, okay, let me see what else they're selling, right, and they some. And she sometimes finds ideas that way for complimentary or supplementary products to grow her product line and she says that it's actually very easy to launch this new SK use because, of course, you already has the Relationship with the manufacturer and it's a matter of basically just sending other products that can be, that can actually, you know, sell on their own or become kids, right, or become a brand new SK you and she was telling me how she even launches act With every SK you that she, or with every main product that she launches on their her brand. And so, of course, she, she can do this very easily because she can either get a BA to write it for her that that content for the Kindle book, or she can do it be a chat GPT, which I think it's like you know, this is something we couldn't do maybe a year ago, right, and that way, she, of course, she adds a thank you card inside of the store and then you know, for them to get the free Kindle book, because it's, I feel like people see a Kindle book Like a more valuable, I would say, gift as opposed, as you know, like just like a regular, regular PDF. And so you know she tells them that they will, that she will give them that Kindle book, access to the Kindle book, for free.

 

Adriana:

And then she gets that email and then, of course, through email marketing, basically she sends a coupon For, you know, 10% off, 20% off, so they shop the product via her Shopify page, basically right, and that's how she starts creating her email list. And then, of course, she has when, when people visit her site, her Shopify site, they see that she has, you know, six or eight SK use, right, and so people, I feel like six or eight SK use, it's a good enough quantity to you know, for people to see like, oh, you know, this is a legit brand, right, like this is not a brand that you know, only has one product and that's it. And she says that it's like a fairly easy and it doesn't exhaust her, basically her resources to launch up, you know, like a complete brand off of one product. Really, you know she finds the main product and then she gets ideas on what else to add, what other SK use to add and, of course, grow her Shopify brand.

 

Adriana:

Get that images from either me, journey or, you know, get different variations of the content, charge EPT for the, for the text, for the Kindle, or, if you want to, I mean you can create the first draft with charge EPT and then have a VA. Basically, look, you know, do some editing on on on her part, and that's about it, and I was like, okay, I mean that sounds like like something we can all do. Even I feel like when I have some guests in the podcast, I tried to find Useful information for sellers that are starting out and that maybe they have a full time job right and they don't have, you know, eight or 10 hours a day to put into this business. Or, and maybe they don't have a ton of you know money to put into the business. So, finding ways to basically leverage technology and leverage you know help from VA's etc. To to build a brand and, you know, have a brand in a matter of maybe six months.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, she doing this in English or Spanish English, in the US market English, okay, all right, cool, marcus in. Let me give you a couple scenarios here. Talking about Amazon Europe, under what scenario would you suggest somebody in or outside of Europe to, or would you suggest that they only launch in one marketplace to start like, hey, you know, go ahead and start in UK, or go ahead and start in Germany? Or would you always recommend you know, you should go ahead and take advantage of the Amazon Europe network and at least start in a few marketplaces? Is there a scenario where you would suggest one or the other, or it's all one or all the other?

 

Marcus:

I mean, like it's up to you If you're from the US, you could start in UK and you already can reuse your listing, your PPC campaigns, because it's the same language. Germany is the biggest market. That would be also a great test if your product works in Europe and if it works in Germany, you could go to the smaller markets. I mean, france is still a quite big, italy and Spain as well, and then it gets a lot smaller. But yeah, that could be a good strategy to start in one of the bigger countries to test your product and then go all Europe.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay Now, as far as those smaller ones go, like are there any that you think is going to one day become, you know, better than the others? Because I think the core five is the UK, germany, Italy, france and Spain, and then like there's a big gap, you know, between all of the new ones Like I forgot, like Netherlands and Poland and a bunch of others. Like are there any of those lower ones that you think are better than the other? Or they're all kind of just like equally low?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, I mean, it's a question of the population and I guess, like the Scandinavian countries are also very interesting. But yeah, you already named the top countries for the moment.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So now I'm just curious about like VAT and things like that. So let you know, there's obviously not an Amazon in every country, so I'm assuming that, or you correct me if I'm wrong, but if I'm living in Austria, am I ordering from Amazon Germany? Or what website am I using if I'm just living in that country trying to buy something?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, actually, austria shares the website with Germany. You order from the German website.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And then. So in that case, like I know, like with for VAT, do I have to have VAT in every country? I'm selling things in from day one, or it's only until I hit, like a certain kind or amount of revenue in that country. Is it by country or by marketplace? But and what I mean by that is all right, well, there is no marketplace in Austria, so does that mean I never have to have a VAT for Austria? Or or how even does this work, because I've never sold it?

 

Marcus:

over. That's a good question, and that's where it gets a bit complicated. So Austria shares the website with Germany, but there are warehouses in Austria and as soon as you got your products in the warehouse in that country, then you have to register for a VAT number in every single country that you have your products in and regardless how much you sell. Yes, and Amazon has has has a program for that, where they help you with that VAT declarations.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Back to Adriana another story or strategy that you can share with us.

 

Adriana:

I interviewed Noemi from Spain I know there's a big, big community in in Spain that basically they, they do Amazon full time and she was telling me how actually she works with another two partners I have one of her partners here at the podcast too and she was telling me how she is growing her Amazon business through Amazon handmade. And I was like, oh interesting, because I mean, yeah, I mean I guess we usually we focus on, you know the regular Amazon program to launch you know products. And she was telling me how she works with people, people that artisans I wait, yeah, that's the correct term, right, artisans, is that a term in English?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I mean, that's English, but it's too fancy for my language. But I know what that means.

 

Adriana:

Yes, she basically so. She likes doing, you know, handmade stuff for herself too. But she started basically connecting with artisans in Spain, apparently and I didn't know this I mean, I've traveled to Spain for, for vacations, but I haven't, you know, spent much time there. But she was telling me that there's a big, big network of artisans in Spain and of course, as she was saying this, I was like, oh my God, I mean I'm from Mexico and of course, there are a ton of artisans here in Mexico, like a ton, ton, ton, especially cities such as, like, of course, Mexico City, Guadalajara, etc. And she was telling me how she has scaled this, because that thing I guess the first thing that comes to mind to us Amazon sellers were like, yeah, but how are we going to scale this, this business? And she's managing I mean she's, she's managing to scale her business because she, of course she doesn't do or like work on this product herself, of course, right, Like she has a network of artisans.

 

Adriana:

And I was, I was thinking, as she was telling this to me, I was like yeah, that's true. I mean I see, when I travel to the US, how much more expensive, or like highly priced, these products that we manufacture in Mexico are selling in the US, right? Only because they're like unique and they are and they are just like more attractive than you know like the regular products. And I was like, oh, wow, this is interesting. Like I guess I always knew that there was that option over there, but I just didn't see how we could scale that. But it makes sense. I mean, if you just work with artisans and you already know, you know like you start and of course one artisan connects you with another artisan and that's the way it goes and she's I mean, she sells a lot of, you know, at the end of the day, a lot of units of different SKUs and you know the price point.

 

Adriana:

That's at least where my mind went right. I was like you have no competition really, because if it's something very unique, then of course you can play with your pricing strategies, but usually you won't be concerned with you know someone else, that competitor, lowering their prices or you know going 30% off. You know of the sales price, etc. So I was like that's interesting. I mean, even you don't have to be selling a ton of units a day to be making good money, because if you have 40% margins or 50% margins or even more, because I've seen in, you know in the US at the retail shops how they sell Mexican or yeah, artisan you know this type of products and they sell and I'm like what the hell like, do people buy these products at this price? And I know how much they go for in Mexico. So I was like, oh, this is very interesting. And so I thought that was a very interesting. I think that was episode 98 with Noemi. She's based in Spain and yeah, I mean, Spain has a big next to us.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Is she doing all of this in Spain, or is she doing this in Amazon USA?

 

Adriana:

No, amazon. No, she's doing it in Spain and I think she expanded already to Europe. Basically, you know how they have that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I didn't even know there was Amazon, handmade in Europe, in Spain and other. Okay, interesting yeah. It's like oh interesting because definitely a way to make it the key, that of that you mentioned, there is the no competition. You know, like, like. This is a very unique product. It's not a cookie cutter, you know, by definition. So I like that Back to Marcus. One last story or strategy from you.

 

Marcus:

Yeah. One last story that's from Michael. He doesn't sell on Amazon. He runs an Amazon agency called me to you, but he's like the Amazon detective. He's every day on the website looking what is Amazon testing right now? What, what did they change right now? What do other sellers miss? And he's like he comes with the craziest things. And one thing he told me, like would you start to sell a drinking bottle on Amazon? I mean that's like super competitive, me probably not, yeah, and I mean everything is the same. You just fill water in it and that's it. So it's difficult to stand out and there's a company they found a way to differentiate themselves. It's called Arup and they have a small cartridge on top and you can get it in all kinds of flavor, like sherry, melon, whatever. And when you drink your water you still drink 100% water, but you breathe the sherry flavor. So your mind is drinking like sherry juice, but you're still drinking 100% water. But the thing is he pointed out that they just sell the bottle and the cartridges. But if you have, like, all your different flavors and you want to change them during the week, what do you do with your cartridges? So you need like airtight, sealed box for it and people are searching for that. You can see it in Cerebro but they don't sell it. They just concentrate on their bottle. So every Amazon seller should find like an imagine like Apple are selling just their iPhone and you can sell chargers and cases, like I bet there's like in every niche there's something, yeah, and it's a big innovation and the company is just focusing on the product. So, yeah, that was a really awesome takeaway to look for.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Two things there. Number one is never think that a niche is 100% saturated, because there's always, like, a fresh idea you could bring. And then number two you don't always have to be the one that has that idea, you know, let somebody else come up with the idea. But then how can you take advantage of that? Like, is there a unique storage or a unique accessory that's needed?

 

Marcus:

Maybe even a coffin shelf to store your cartridges.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Hey, there you go. Hey, coffin shelf to store your water bottle cartridges. I'll get on that Okay An episode. I'll give you guys, or everybody here, a preview of a coming episode. I'm launching some new project X products and one of them is a bat shaped bathroom mat or rug and that potentially might make a coffin one as well. But you know, the possibilities are endless and that's one of the ways that you could also get into saturated niche is take a saturated niche like bath mats you know like they're going for like $10, you know who knows how they're even making margin on it. But then do you bring in a unique material like make a bamboo one, or make a coffin shaped one, or a bat shaped one for like spooky. So you can almost take any niche on Amazon that's saturated and just come in with a unique idea or unique design or unique material and now all of a sudden it's not saturated because you're the only one who has that. All right. So I'm going to ask for your final strategies, your 30 second or 60 second tips. How can they find you guys on the interwebs? They know how to find your, your, your Helium 10 podcast, but both of you have, you know, audiences and communities out there. Marcus, how can they find your communities on the internet?

 

Marcus:

You can look on YouTube for Amazon FBA by Marcos and everything else is linked inside the videos.

 

Adriana:

For me, my YouTube channel is Adriana Rangel Vende. Just like that, adriana Rangel Vende, and yeah, in there, there you can find everything else that I have going on, and I have a free like 90 minute like masterclass. I would call it because I go from product research to like keyword research, to what kind of keywords you need to put in your listing, et cetera. So, yeah, I would. For people that maybe need some free resources to kind of like figure out how this works, I would advise you check out that video. Adriana Rangel Vende in YouTube.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, adriana. Like, do you have any last, maybe 30 second tip or parting words of wisdom for the audience out there?

 

Adriana:

Yes, well, you know, one topic that I've seen guests come with and share with us in the podcast has been basically focusing, you know, at the first. You know, when we start our business in Amazon, we usually focus on launching products right, and launching new variations, and doing your PPC and ranking and all of all of these activities that we have to, of course, take care of. But one topic that has been coming up very often in the in our episodes here at the podcast is that we at some point, especially maybe like two years into the business, we need to focus on growing our team, right, because if not, we'll get burnt out at some point, right, like I know that happened to me and now I'm working, I already have a VA and, of course, I already have a designer that helps me, of course, with my you know, my products, my listings and also for my thumbnails for my YouTube channel. Like, he helps me for a ton of things, and I feel like that is the way. You know, that marks a big difference between someone that is making, of course, a few thousand dollars a month in Amazon and, you know, the seller that is doing several dozen thousand dollars in Amazon a month.

 

Adriana:

Right, because you cannot do it all by yourself, and also so you keep your motivation right, because at some point, whatever it is that you are doing repeatedly and that you're doing for 10 hours a day or 12 hours a day, after 18 months or 24 months you're burnt out. As much as I mean you can love it, but still you know your body gives out. So that is something that I would like people to start thinking about. Maybe this is your first year in Amazon and that's fine, but maybe start listening to you know these episodes where people such as Rolando and I know you had Rolando Rosas in the podcast because he speaks English too you know Juan David as well talked about this, rod as well talked about this, and I think it's just like very important to start planning this before it's like, before we're like burnt out and it's too late, right, and that way we get we can scale faster and just like with less effort.

 

Bradley Sutton:

What's your Adriana, what's your hobby or what you do to take your mind off of work? You take off your mind off your Amazon business, to you know. Relax like what do you do for fun.

 

Adriana:

Yeah, well, before I got into this whole Amazon business world, I was in the art business. So I of course like to, you know, business museums and you know, if I can business museums with friends and all that that you know, the better, of course. But I try to yes, to, even if it's like at nighttime, right, like I try to consume content that it's not, or like even listen to podcasts that are not like business related. I basically try to put you know if it's after 8pm, even though, even if there's like this really good podcast episode, I'll watch it tomorrow at 6pm or whatever when I take a break from work. But I try to put like hard limits because I just do it. I mean, I just do it for the business, right, like I remember I saw this at the other day that says that says something about your performance of tomorrow basically depends on your recovery tonight. Right, you know something in that frame of words and so I think it's just very important because we talk about, we go on YouTube and we saw, we see everything about. Yeah, you know you can scale to blah, blah, blah and you can be making all this money, but you have to be feeling okay, right, you know, your body has to be healthy and your mind has to be healthy as well. So that is something to we cannot ignore, that, even if that doesn't sound like you know, like the sexy tip, I feel like that's as important, or even more. To grow a business, scale it to as big as as you want, really.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, I like killing two birds with one stone. So my advice to you if you wanted to do that, go to the museum while listening to the podcast in your headphones, and then now you can kill two birds with one stone, all right. So, marcus, what about you? One last 30 or 60 seconds strategy or tip for our audience.

 

Marcus:

Yeah, one tip I learned that will make a lot of changes. Amazon recently announced that they will look for title images that are not meeting the terms of service and they will use AI to change that. They will download your image, remove everything that doesn't belong there in their opinion and upload it again, and that is something you don't want. You don't want an AI to touch your title image. Yeah, and Michael from AMZboost, a product photographer, he told me, just use your picture, space number nine. Nobody looks there. Put a title image there that will meet the terms of service and because what Amazon is doing first, they will scan your product photos and check if there is something that is compliant to the terms of service and they will put it to spot number one as your title image. And if they don't find something, they will change it in their terms. So that's an awesome hack.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, I never heard of that one. That's a really good one, All right, cool. And then same question to you also is you know, like me, that sometimes we can get and Adriana, we can get burnt out and if we put too much emphasis on work. So what are your hobbies, what are you doing to take yourself out of work when you need to relax?

 

Marcus:

Yeah, my hobbies are working out. I've got my home gym in the basement and that's also a good place to listen to something. Or I go for a walk at the beach with my yeah EarPods in and listen to a podcast. That's where I get new content.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, all right, well, guys, thank you so much for joining us. Wish you the most of success. You guys have had already a lot of great success. It's going to be really cool to see the next milestone for you guys, I would say is like hitting that 10,000 downloads per month. I never thought that would ever happen, but the numbers that you guys are doing are getting close to that, so it's probably within the realm of possibility. But I wish you the most of success with your podcast communities and also your Amazon businesses, and we'll see you next year.