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

#457 - The State Of Shipping And Supply Chain In 2023

In this episode, we welcome back Burak Yolga of Forceget to talk about the dynamic realm of shipping and the supply chain. Dive into key topics and latest updates such as Amazon warehouse space bidding, China manufacturing, 3PL service rates, optimizing Amazon fulfillment, shipping methods comparison, international logistics, freight forwarder fraud prevention, leveraging HS codes, global freight prices outside China, and other exclusive insights and strategies from Burak. He also shares his top money-saving strategies that you can utilize on your next international shipments. Tune in now to stay ahead of the game!

In episode 457 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Burak discuss:

• 02:09 – What’s New In The Shipping Industry In 2023?
• 04:00 – Bidding For Extra Space In Amazon Warehouses
• 06:30 – Updates And Issues On China Manufacturing
• 09:40 – Current Rates For 3PL Services
• 11:11 – Sending To Multiple Amazon Fulfillment Centers
• 12:45 – UPS Shipments Or LTL Shipments?
• 15:13 – The International Shipping Process  
• 17:15 – How To Make Sure Your Not Getting Ripped Off By Freight Forwarders
• 23:25 – How To Use HS Codes Properly To Save Money
• 25:30 – Freight Prices From Other Countries
• 28:40 – It’s Time To Visit Your Chinese Supplier
• 30:11 – Burak’s Healthy Habits And Hobbies Outside His Daily Work
• 32:25 – Learn More About Shipping Inside Freedom Ticket 3.0
• 33:00 – Burak’s 60-Second Tip
• 35:00 – How To Reach Out To Burak Yolga And Forceget

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got back on the show. Somebody who knows all there is to know about freight forwarding warehousing and much more, and he’s got some tips that could save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think

Bradley Sutton:

Black Box by Helium 10 House is the largest database of Amazon products and keywords in the world outside of Amazon itself. We have over 2 billion products and many millions more keywords from different Amazon marketplaces, from USA to Australia to Germany and more. Use our powerful filters to search through this database for pockets of opportunity that you might wanna get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me/blackbox. Don’t forget, you can save 10% off for life on Helium 10 by using our special code SSP10. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got for the second time back on the show, Barack from Fork. How’s it going, man?

Burak:

I’m great, man. Thank you for having me again. Now,

Bradley Sutton:

Where are you at right now? Are you in Miami or where are you?

Burak:

Yes, I’m in Miami after so many different Amazon events this year, you know, January, February, March, finally back to Miami. And then a little bit enjoying the time and weather.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, it’s good to have you back. We’re not gonna go too much into your backstory. Let me, let me give everybody the the podcast number that you were in before. So if you guys wanna find out more about Brocks origin story go to episode 324. So h10.me/324. Let’s just hop right into it, you know, now we’re, we’re in the middle almost of 2023, you know, kind of covid is a thing of the past, you know, even China’s opened up now again, but what, what are like the main kind of topics in the shipping industry? Prices been pretty steady? Any predictions you have? What’s going on here in 2023?

Burak:

I think, you know, 20 21, 20 23, we had 2021 and 2022, we had so much conversation about you know, shipping prices, the delay, the congestions, and so many people had really good sales numbers, actually. So they brought lots of inventory in, and as suddenly with inflation, things slowed down. Right. So mainly last two years we talked about, you know, the congestions in Los Angeles part. Some of the containers had to wait maybe two, three months until it was you know, off the dock and then, you know, delivered to the destination. But recently what we were talking about is mainly cash flow inventory management, which is part of the supply chain, which is part of the international logistic, which is part of the successful Amazon sellers because you know, last two years they, we had so much money in the market, so people could go and borrow as much as money they want with a very low interest rate, and they brought loss of inventory.

Burak:

So since the sales is down, a lot of people cannot move the inventory. So they start liquid liquidating, they try to get back some money, and then I think re restructure so many different things. So I think shipping is now also in our company, we’re trying to put everything like, you know, puzzles together, not only the international shipping, but now we have different layers like inventory management, international shipping three pl and the last mile lower to Amazon. So now it seems like getting more complicated because it’s not only about finding the cheap prices or trying to book in advance now, it’s about like how you manage your inventory and how you manage your money.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So now, you know, it’s been a couple months since that new inventory kind of system has gone live in Amazon, the one where you kind of like get a heads up as far as, you know, when you’re gonna be outta space. You know, that was one thing that I think a lot of Amazon seller complained about the last couple of years, is they could go to sleep on Sunday and have maybe, you know, 5,000 units of storage available. So hey, all right, Monday I’m gonna go ahead and make my order your or my inventory transfer order and send in. They wake up Monday morning and it’s like, no, you are a 10,000 units overstocked. You can’t send any units in. So, so Amazon kind of like, we’ll give you more of a heads up, but at the same time, there’s this new whole system where if it does seem like you’re gonna be out, you know, you can do some bidding for, for extra space, maybe you’ll get money back. So it seems like it’s complicated thing, but you know, since you, you store a lot of product for, you know at your three pls for a lot of Amazon sellers, what can you say about how this has been affecting your customers, if at all?

Burak:

Actually you’re right. It seems Amazon also thought maybe this is not very, it’s not really fair to, you know, go to overnight, and then the next day you wake up and then you cannot even send, I mean, you have so much overstock, some items are not selling well, but your best selling items is almost run out of inventory. So they’re not, they don’t used to go like single by like SKU by SKU. They are looking at your overall performance, but you might have some products has been sitting there a long time, and then, you know, you’ll have like a really best one or two SKU running, so you had to query, or you had to take it back that inventory is not selling. So it started, it costs you a lot of money. So that’s why I think last six months to one year, whenever we go to the events, I mean, you also do a lots of you know, in-person events like big events like Prosper.

Burak:

Now we are gonna meet actually next week in Irwin for the LA workshop. So, so many companies, they had confusion, but right now it’s even kind of getting worse because they, they think that they can kind of make a strategy, but they don’t have the right prediction because still the market is not very clear what’s going on, like, you know, the buyer strategy buyer’s expectations. So it is very hard. That’s why so many people are more cautious right now to place the larger orders. And you know, we have so many friends now traveling to China. The main private label production is still, you know, dominated by Chinese manufacturers. And even they complain so much that they don’t have enough orders. And last two trees, we saw so many fan manufacturers, they moved out of China to go to countries, like I’m talking about not the buyers, but actual the factory owners in China, they start opening like another plants like in Vietnam, Thailand say, avoid this, you know, the tariff additional 25% China tariff.

Burak:

But now even those companies regret big time because now they have additional plant that they cannot fulfill the order. So I think this is causing both seller and supplier side, like some problem with the stability. So this is causing brands to make you know, planning issues like inventory management issues. And it’s not anymore like, you know, I think we all talking about this, and it’s not anymore just to put your brand on a product and then ship it to Amazon seller, that is over, right? You have to do so many different. Amazon is also encouraging to become like a brand for the sellers. Like, you know, they encourage outside traffic, they encourage other type of new advertisement changes. They encourage sellers to use the influencers. Basically Amazon, Amazon is also changing. Its its business model. Absolutely. That’s why they started this new product called like a w d, which is Amazon warehouse distribution.

Burak:

So you can store some of your not good selling product instead of like fulfillment centers. You are kind of storing them in a different location and Amazon transfers it. Obviously some people test it, it’s not the best operation rise because, you know, there’s so many legs between the fulfillment centers, AWD or the inventory management systems are not a hundred percent accurate. So a lot of sellers, they have this kind of problems, but Amazon is also trying to change their business model. And, you know, the other big brands, other big marketplaces are also coming into the market like more aggressively. You know, we think we’re talking about like, you know, Walmart they become like very active in the events. They become like really active. But more importantly other e-commerce size, like TikTok, they’re talking about like, you know setting up like a bigger marketplace for third party sellers to be more flexible.

Burak:

So similar to Shopify. So I think they’re giving, there’s gonna be some change in the market. Obviously, like, you know, it’s very hard for the end users to change their habit to buy on Amazon. And now, you know, also, like they change their refund policy. So now not everything is like a hundred percent free to return. So I think this is gonna change some of the different things because the Amazon fees have increased so much for the sellers. So people start looking into the new marketplaces or new solutions, like how they can reduce the cost. Shipping costs went down, absolutely, but then, you know, the, the sourcing prices are higher. Three pls are very expensive, especially in California area. So I think people save in one part, but then their cost still increase. I think eventually.

Bradley Sutton:

What is the current going rate for like three pls? Like as you know, for somebody who’s never used one before out there the basic, the basic fees are probably, you know, per pallet storage per month. And then also like, you know, in and out fees, like, you know, there’s, there’s checking in your shipment and then, and then maybe, you know, the, the fees to actually prepare the shipment and send it to Amazon. What are, what are the main fees now in 2023 that a seller needs to keep in mind if they’re considering using a 3PL?

Burak:

In, in California, you’re looking at PT per month storage fees, something between 30 to 40 US dollars. Oh, wow. Yeah. And you know, one of the, one of the, the things actually increase, like the pallet supply fee, actually the buying the physical pallet, 40×48 40 inch times 48 inch pallet, we used to pay before covid $5, $4, even $6 sometimes for great B and C, like the pallets are also like a different quality, but regular size, like not overweight, we used to pay like five to $6, maximum $7 during the covid. We start seeing the numbers like 20 to $25. So that rate stay there and square feet in California, you know, you know that it’s just really expensive. The labor cost is very expensive. So this, this adds up, you know, not only storing but inbound and outbound and so many times.

Burak:

Amazon is also, if you have even a full container. One of the issues that we see recently, Bradley, is that if you have a full container order to Amazon, Amazon generally don’t allow you to send them to one fulfillment center. So it means that you need to have a prep center to bring the container in, unload it, palletize them ship to three different Amazon fulfillment centers. This cost is really high. So if now you wanna deliver a full container from channel to Amazon, if it is in the west coast, you’re looking at include everything, you know, the custom clearance, the interest, the ocean freight and track is around $4,000. But we had a case that Amazon asked the seller to separate the sh three different location. It cost them at the end like 10 to $12,000. So when the sellers, I think we were gonna do like a one maybe tip, you know, for the sellers how to, how to save money.

Burak:

They, they prefer, they, they should be using a location close to where they wanna ship them. We know when you create like a ship from when you create a shipping plan in your Seller Central Account, they’re asking you ship from address. I recommend sellers not to use their, their supplier location in China. If it is overweight, oversized, it’s definitely giving you the East coast. But if it is a regular product, it might give you more than one place. But people can contact us and get our location information in Los Angeles, and they can use their ship from address our location, Los Angeles and Amazon might give them a location nearby. So this could help them to sell, save some money.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, you know that’s actually caused a lot of issues. I heard lately the, the new send to Amazon flow that even even LTL shipments, you know, not even using the, you know, like UPS partner carrier, but even LTL shipments, you, you used to create it and it would all go to, to one location. Are you seeing that more that since that new send to Amazon went live that Amazon is making sellers send to, to multiple, multiple warehouses more now than, than they have in the past?

Burak:

Yes, absolutely. I think one of the reason is also they, they see that, you know, the running the business in California is really getting expensive. So I think they wanna like move more like a Midwest or like Texas area. However, you know, the 40% of the entire United States import comes through Los Angeles port, so it’ll never change. You know, the shipping to Los Angeles now costs like 16, $700 versus New York is like 3000. So you’re looking at like 40% higher. So Amazon is changing that. Yes. And one of the issues that we see is with the Amazon partner carriers, they’re they have just so much to handle. So they miss so many times the pickup appointment. So if you book like an, I mean, UPS is really expensive if you ship what we realize is in our company, if you are shipping anything within California, 300 kilogram is the optimum kilogram that you should be using ups.

Burak:

So if you have anything up to 300 kilogram, it’s still okay to use the UPS and the check-in process is much faster. If you have anything more than 300, 400 kilograms, if you have anything more than like two tree pallets, yes, LTL shipments, are fast cheaper. However, there are a couple of problems in here. Number one, the, the transit time, the transit time, by the time the carrier comes and picks it up from the, the 3PL on delivers. It’s not a direct truck. So it means that they take from, they collect the pallets from different location, they bring it to distribution center and they ship it into Amazon. So there’s no timeframe that it’s currently. So, you know, we are already middle of the year, so lots of companies are actually planning their fourth quarter orders from China or domestic or from South America, Turkey.

Burak:

They, they already consider what to order from China. But also when the shipment comes in, it’s very important to send products to Amazon in the right way so it can check in very fast. So, you know, so many times when we do even the Freedom Ticket 3.0, when we record that, I explain in one of the episodes the international shipping process. So many people, whenever they request the price from China, they only ask what is the transit time between port to port? But so many people, they forget that there’s a long process from the time we contact the supplier, get the shipping documents until we pick up, until we load container, it takes seven to 10 days. The same store. When the shipment arrives to the destination port, it takes three to four days to clear the custom at the destination waiting.

Burak:

The containers become available in the terminal, and Los Angeles port still has a problem. We sometimes cannot find an appointment to go and arrange the pickup. So a lot of people who are not in the industry, maybe they think that, what do you mean with making the appointment with the terminal? So you cannot just show up to it like a container terminal saying, Hey, where’s my container? It doesn’t work out that way. You need to track every day the status of the container. If it becomes available, then we need to make an appointment. When are we gonna go pick it up? So sometimes it takes seven to 10 days until the container becomes available. By the time the container comes into our warehouse, we, we do the prep center, send it to Amazon, it takes another 15 days. So, so many people, they think that, oh, I have enough time.

Burak:

So one of the questions we always hear, when is the best time to book my shipment? We always talk about like, you know, two weeks prior, one week prior at least. So they can save in that time that we are planning this international shipping better. So as I mentioned, we used to talk only about international shipping time because, you know, the main problem was like, oh, it take three, two to three months to, you know goes from one port the airport, but now they’re like more other elements coming in such as the new way Amazon is shipping services like LTLs used to go one location. Now you need to use the two different, three different locations LTL. So this is like really hurting people’s budgets, honestly.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now speaking of budgets and, and, and shipping costs and things, you know, like I know if somebody books with you got very upfront pricing, very transparent, you know, I’ve used you for multiple, you know, Project X, Project 5K shipments, but, but whether somebody’s going to use Forceget or whether somebody’s using, you know shipping company they find from Alibaba or, or maybe their supplier finding, let’s, let’s talk some strategy here about how a, an Amazon seller can make sure they’re not getting ripped off. You know, so like, what are the questions they need to be asking? What are the red flags? You know, like, like I remember one time I showed you how there’s this one company without even knowing the, the invoice price of, of the shipment was already giving, like, you know, quotes and things like that. Well, that’s a red flag because how in the world could they give you know, a door-to-door price when they don’t even know what the invoice, you know, of the products? What are some red flags? What are some red flags people need to watch out for? What are the questions that sellers need to ask? What are some things that they need to kind of like make sure about, to make sure that they’re getting a, a good deal in shipping?

Burak:

Honestly, we always talk about like, do not use your suppliers freight forwarder in the same way. You will not use your freight forwarder to source product, right? Because it’s not their core business. So they can help you maybe with that one day, but eventually when you face a problem with the quality problem or you know packaging problem, you are not gonna go and complete your freight forwarder. You need to have the direct relation with the supplier. So same thing, whenever you have any issue with your shipping you know, maybe the product is damaged. So you need to like have the direct communication with the freight forwarder. I think one of the things, what we see is right now that is with us custom, what is going on right now. I mean, if you’re selling in US marketplace last two, three years, there was like a huge volume coming from the Asia.

Burak:

And because of the covid, the restrictions, the map, like we didn’t, I mean the US custom didn’t have maybe enough sources to have the regulate all this common shipments because the volume was almost like double, right? So this year in, in like 2022 December, we received a new regulation from c from the custom border protection that every invoice needs to have the product picture and every invoice needs to have product material. This was not a requirement in the past. So this is exactly what you mentioned. Like if you, if the freight forwarder doesn’t know what’s the product, what is the material made of, what is the HS code, how they can actually give you all in DDP price because they don’t even know what’s the tax rate. So the rat flag is one of them is, I think you should be asking the freight forwarder if they’re NVOCC licensed, which is like official international freight forwarder license, that they’re responsible.

Burak:

You know, in USA when you work with the freight forwarder only based in China, if you have any problem in the custom, if you have a problem with like product loss damage, you’ll not have any authority to go and actually looking for your money, right? This is number one. I think number two, so many freight forwarders they’re asking, they’re charging you insurance, but they never share the insurance policy. If you wanna ship something, the insurance is cheap, you should edit like 20, 25, $30. Sometimes it’s only, it’s less than 1% of the cargo value. If they’re asking you the insurance, ask for the insurance, yes, but collect your insurance policy. If there’s something happens, then they’ll be like, oh, you know, we forget to do the insurance because insurance is something they can do backwards up to third days. So if something happens, you have to like deal with that, that’s important.

Burak:

So I think the MUCC license is one of the most important thing, your insurance policy and upfront payments you should deal with negotiation with, negotiate with your freight forwarder that at least ask for the payment when the shipment arrives to the destination port. So many times we saw like cases that people come to us and say, Hey, my freight forwarder wants to charge me the destination port charges cuz they said there’s an extra fees, this and that I paid upfront. So if you pay upfront, you don’t have any power to negotiate because you already paid, let’s say 2000 and I asked like another 300, $400. And also I think like, you know, the social proof and then the, the reviews there’s so many like non-name companies that you should be careful about. There’s one thing that also I always mentioned, like people’s like private label products are like your baby, right?

Burak:

You probably band night, you work on your product with your supplier, you pay the deposit, you take the pictures, and then when it comes to finally after two, three months when it comes to the shipping, you’re like, okay, yeah, you can just ship my product. But I think that you should be like more careful because either you might delay your launch if product get damaged or, you know, get lost or it’s delayed or you have to pay extra fees or you might be running on of inventory in one of your best SKUs. So there are a couple of things that you should be careful about, and I think there are like more information now about training. You know, what is the best way how to ship from Alibaba if you’re a new seller. If you’re a larger seller. Now, I think when it comes to shipping from China, it’s more about like payment terms and, and then the right, right tracking, I think digitalization is getting important in the industry that manages supply chain.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, you know, we’ve been talking some, some strategy and you’ve given some tips about, you know, saving money when you have a shipment to try to try and, you know, set your origin address. What are some other strategies and tips, you know, whether it’s about utilizing 3PLs, whether it’s about shipping, whether it’s about taxes, any, anything at all. What are some strategies some more strategies that you can give sellers that will help them save money or potentially make money even?

Burak:

Right, I mean, in first get we ask, we actually provide free audit free international shipping audits. So if people send us their, like previous shipments, we can give the code, we can match them if it is possible, or we can tell them how the freight forward can offer such price. I think one thing that people should be careful about the HS codes, HS code is one product, HS code is if people don’t know that it is every single product has a special code that is globally registered in the customs. And one, one of our customer, we recently had this issue, they order doormats and the HS code the factory uses in the export documents in China should be different than the one you use it for the import. So one of them has 25% tariff, and that is 7.5% the tariff.

Burak:

So imagine the amount of tax you’ll be paying if the, the shipment is worth of $50,000. It’s almost like eight to $9,000 different. So you can always ask your freight forwarder or supplier if there’s an alternative HS code. Most of time suppliers don’t really tell you the difference because they wanna use the high HS code for them to get the tax refund in China. We talked about that in the last time, you know, when we were in Las Vegas, but so whenever the Chinese manufacturer, they have a finished product, they can get the VAT back from the government in China. So they’re using, so Chinese products also has domestic different tax value. So it could be 5%, 10%, 15%, they always use the higher tax to get the money back from government because they do export. But when you import the new country, that HS code can have a very high tech. So that’s why whenever you collect, especially if you’re shipping a full container, ask your freight forwarder, ask your supplier to look for an alternative HS code so you can really save money on the duty and tax and which can create couple of different dollar difference in your lending cost. So I think this is the one thing that you should be focusing on checking your, excuse me, checking your HS codes to see if there’s any alternative.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. You know nowadays people are, are wanting more, I would think to like maybe diversify where they get their products from. So what can you tell me? Let’s say I’m selling in the USA. What, what is the difference of pricing about for if my suppliers from China, or if I’m shipping from India perhaps Vietnam is maybe number three, I think more popular. What I hear about, you know, Pakistan what are the differences in pricing that, that you’re seeing on freight from each of these locations? Is China the cheapest because of the volume that that happens? Are the other places getting cheaper? What’s going on?

Burak:

Actually, that’s a very interesting question. We, I had this conversation one of the members was asking about they wanna ship from India, but then when we calculate the shipping cost, it was not a full container. It was less than full container. And because China has so much bigger volume for the shipping versus India, the shipping cost is much cheaper actually from China. And because in China, like MUCC licensed freight forwarder like us, we can consolidate different cargo into one container so we can read and lower the cost. In India, such service doesn’t really exist. So that’s why we need to ship each seller’s cargo individually. So their extra charges adds up, such as origin fees in the destination, port fees, the, the logistic fees. So when we did the calculation, even if they find the product a little bit cheaper, the freight went up almost 30 to four, 35%.

Burak:

So I’m not saying don’t go, don’t look into India of first just do that, but make the freight calculation before you place the order. So in that case, the person already placed the order from India, alternative Chinese supplier, then at the end they ended up paying actually more for the landing cost. So planning is great, but same thing we see with the Mexico because the truck fees from Mexico to US is not cheap at all. So that’s why so many people, they try to source from Mexico, they go look into the states, yes, it’s great. Maybe they can scalable, you know, the supplier is also the size of the supplier. I think Bradley, like, I mean, you know, sometimes you work with a supplier in China and you wanna expand to Shopify, you wanna expand to Walmart or it’s a great idea.

Burak:

You should be expanding to Amazon, Canada, for example, you’re not selling it yet, or Amazon, eh, has great programs now to do the cross border like globalization. And they want you to go to different marketplaces. They give you, they make your life easy now. And if you wanna expand to these markets, then you will maybe have like more volume. But you need to make sure look, you know, where is your where’s your source? How are you gonna ship it? Do you have enough money? All these things are like really important. So before you go start sourcing, make the calculation of what’s the freight cost, what is the HS code from that? So maybe you buy something from China, it has 25% tariff, like, but you go back to India, it has 0%. So even if you pay 20% more to your product plus the shipping, you still save like 5%.

Burak:

And I think it’s a really good idea. And since China has opened big sellers, Elite sellers, Elite members, they should go back to China, discuss with you know, suppliers, what happened. Cause China, like Chinese suppliers, they had very tough lost three years. They had very strict code restrictions. They couldn’t travel outside of China, they couldn’t go to the trade shows, you know, the people like buyers couldn’t go to China. I think it’s very important to rebuild the relationship. Even if you cannot travel to China, if you buy like 50,000, a hundred thousand dollars, you know, per month, you should invite your supplier to come and visit you. So you can sit down, renegotiate the prices, see what else you can add your, you know, production line. Amazon comes up with lots of different new features like, you know, frequently added, frequently returned so you can actually see what you can create with your supplier and that can help your business and ask for better trade terms.

Burak:

Like better, better pricing. Not anymore, like anyone’s paying 30% down 30%, you can easily get like 10 to 15% down payment and you break down into like another 30% to 40% before shipment and then remaining maybe one month after delivery or upon delivery so you can get better terms. So I highly recommend if you’re selling like above like $57,000 per month or even buying that much, you should go to China and visit your suppliers. Just see what’s going on in the market and then try to add a couple of other suppliers in the market. Everybody is hungry right now for more business actually.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright. Well we’ll get into your last couple of strategies in a little bit. But you know, something, I’m doing this year on the podcast is ask a lot of people their, their health habits. You know, like health is my theme for, for this year. And when I talk about health, it’s not just, you know, physical health, but, but mental health too. So one thing that I always highlight is hobbies. That’s why at the beginning of, of all these podcast videos, I show my main hobby, which is traveling, you know, around the world. So first of all, what are your, your hobbies? You know, the things that you do to, to kind of like take yourself away from you know, your, your day-to-day work and, and relax your mind. And then what are some of your physical health habits that, that you’re also doing to, to keep healthy? You

Burak:

Know, like people like us who live in a very big time zone difference with our main office, China, like 12 hours, it’s very hard to slow down, but that’s something I also start to feel like, you know, with the events, the Amazon events, you go travel a lot, you always stay in the hotels. I think the sleep is something really important, especially for men. Men’s health, men’s mentality. I actually start to listen more TED Talks, you know, like they are short 20 minutes, 25 minutes. You can learn lots of different things. I love CrossFit. I’m very lucky. I live in Miami Beach, so lots of people dating that I could work like 1:00 PM go to the pool, but it’s not really happening. I generally have like 7:00 AM, 7:00 PM thing, but I go workouts, I have a motorcycle, I get some air.

Burak:

I’m actually thinking to get a bicycle. I think I like doing outdoor stuff. It’s very important. And man, we spend so much time with our phones and computers. I try to disconnect from my phone at least 30 minutes before I go to bed. That gives me like, you know, a better, maybe I go for a walk a little bit. I try to read a little bit more. I always had the excuse I travel too much. So, and more importantly I I I start cooking. I like actually disconnect with a glass of wine or a beer after the workout. Do like meal prep? Only the downside is the dishes, but.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes. Little bit less DoorDash, a little bit more home cooking is also I think very healthy there. Okay, interesting. Now, now guys, I if you wanna get more info on, on the A to Z of shipping and all the terms and everything you need to know you know, Burak mentioned it, but, but check out week six in Freedom Tickets. So, so if you’re a Helium 10 member, you guaranteed you have access to Freedom Ticket. Go to week six. There’s multiple modules in there where he goes everything from, you know, international shipping, step-by-step and, and freight quote breakdowns and FBA packing requirements and this and that. Anything you need to know, you know, it’s right there in Freedom Ticket. He did most of the modules there, but maybe something that’s not in freedom ticket or something that’s that’s new in the last, you know, couple months or just something that you think that sellers need to be aware about. What is a strategy or a 60-second strategy or tip that you can give our sellers? You know, you’ve given us a number of them already in this episode. Is there anything else you can, you can do to educate us?

Burak:

The one thing comes to my mind that we don’t really speak in supply chain on Amazon is the digital tracking. I think that’s gonna be the future because if you don’t know when your shipment is gonna check in you cannot really manage your PPC budget. You cannot manage your coupons, deactivate, activate it. I think you should be find a way to see, have better visibility on international shipping. Not because we are the only company doing that in the industry, but I think it’s really important because every time we go to the Amazon events, people talking about, this inventory issues or they place too much order or they’re short running, they have some products on the water, they don’t know when it’s gonna come to Amazon, they stress out. Same thing like, you know, when I wake up my supplier, my office in China, they’re sleeping.

Burak:

And by the time you brush off like, you know, small things from your table when it comes to sit down and work one or 2:00 PM you cannot really do planning. I think planning is like the most important thing right now. The inventory management and managing your money good. I think having a good visibility on your inventory planning and supply chain is the key to success because so many people are working on the team margins right now this year cuz of the all the price increases. I think that’s the most important thing. I think managing your inventory, understanding, checking how much the keyword search volume increase or decrease compared to last year and what should be the, this year’s orders. I think that’s very important to read in the data and connect the puzzles. So it’s not anymore just keyword research. It’s not only checking the keyword performance, it’s not only the cheap shipping, but I think it’s time to like put everything together and could put in the right s sop for your business.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now if somebody wants to get more information from you or possibly reach out, you know, for a quote for shipping or for warehousing or other services you provide, how can they find you on the interwebs out there?

Burak:

It’s forceget.com and sales.forceget.com. I normally used to, you know, wear my Forceget t-shirt, but this time I changed to Sell and Scale. So forceget.com, they can find us and we have free consultancy 15 to 30 minutes for each you know Helium 10 members as well as the podcast listeners. We love them all and we can do free audit, especially the, you can send us the HS code and we can give you alternatives if there’s any in the custom system.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Well look forward to seeing you at our helium 10 social and elite workshop that we have coming up and then of course at future events. It’s been great to have you on here and we’ll be seeing you soon.

Burak:

Thank you so much, Bradley, for having me here.

#456 - Walmart Listing Features, Ad Placements, & Strategies

In today’s Walmart Wednesday episode in SSP, we speak with Mark Jordan of Vendocommerce, an expert in the field of Walmart selling. One of the key topics we discuss is the struggles that Walmart sellers often face. Mark provides insights on how to overcome them and achieve success with your product launches. From pricing changes and suppression issues to understanding Walmart’s 90-day returns policy, Mark sheds light on the intricacies of navigating the Walmart marketplace.
 
Helium 10 tools have been instrumental in optimizing Walmart listings, and Mark shares valuable tips on leveraging these tools effectively. Bradley and Mark break down listings inside Walmart.com and provide guidance on crafting compelling product details that resonate with customers.
 
Mark also provides a quick yet powerful hack for Walmart sellers looking to elevate their game. Tune in to this captivating episode to discover the secrets on how to crush it on Walmart.com!

In episode 456 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Mark discuss: 

• 01:45 – The Helium 10 Project Expansion Series
• 02:41 – Mark Jordan’s Backstory
• 06:11 – Struggles That Walmart Sellers Have
• 08:21 – How To Crush Your Walmart.com Product Launches
• 10:32 – Pricing Changes And Suppression
• 11:40 – Breaking Down Listings Inside Walmart.com
• 13:16 – How To Get The Pro Seller Badge
• 14:50 – Be Aware Of Walmart’s 90-Day Returns Policy
• 18:01 – Using Helium 10 Tools For Walmart Listings
• 22:12 – How To Properly Write Your Walmart Product Details
• 23:19 – Let’s Learn Mark’s Specific Strategies
• 25:09 – Creating A Different Version Of Your Amazon Product On Walmart
• 26:32 – Using 2-Step URLs For Walmart 
• 27:12 – When Rich Media Is Available For Regular Walmart Sellers?  
• 28:23 – Mark’s 60-Second Tip
• 30:52 – How To Reach Out To Mark Jordan And Vendo

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today’s our special Walmart Wednesday episode where we invite an expert on, and he and I are actually gonna break down some live Walmart listings to see what’s working and what’s not working on them. We’re gonna talk about keyword research Walmart advertising, and even some cool hacks on how to see what kind of attributes your competitors are in. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you browsing a Shopify, Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba, or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you wanna get some more data on? Well, while you’re on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what’s happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you wanna then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me/extension. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Walmart Wednesday show of the month where we do an episode live dedicated to Walmart.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s important, you know, here in 2023, we feel that, you know, more Amazon sellers who are selling in the us start considering selling on Walmart as well, because, you know, we’ve talked about it a lot. We have a new series Project Expansion. We’re actually documenting, bringing an Amazon seller who had never sold on Walmart and showing you the step-by-step. Carrie and Shivali are showing you step-by-step how to get them set up on the Walmart platform. So if you guys want to check out that video series, just go to our YouTube channel after this and, and check out type in Helium 10 Project Expansion, and you’ll be able to see, you know, the step-by-step. They’ve got about four episodes up so far, and they’ll have some more up soon, but if you have not taken the leap yet, we highly recommend doing it. And we also, you know, for those of you already selling on Walmart, and we realize that you guys might have some questions on things as well on how to set up. So every month we invite experts like me. I don’t know much about selling on Walmart, so I couldn’t be able to sit here and do ask me anything. So this month we have an expert from Vendo, and that’s Mark Jordan. We’re gonna go ahead and bring him on to the show. Mark. How’s it going?

Mark:

Hey brother, how’s it going? Thanks for having me.

Bradley Sutton:

Thanks for being here. So where are you at, like right now? Where are you located?

Mark:

Yeah, so I am currently in Miami, Florida. Actually, I just moved here in October.

Bradley Sutton:

Where’d you move from?

Mark:

I moved from Hoboken, New Jersey. Okay,

Bradley Sutton:

So you’re East Coast, all about the East Coast, huh?

Mark:

Yeah, from the East Coast, from Pennsylvania, but was in Hoboken because that’s where the old Walmart e-commerce office was.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, okay. All right. And tell me, where did you go to college at? Was it in New Jersey?

Mark:

So I went to a school called Marist. It’s in Poughkeepsie, New York. It’s about, New York City.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ve got a good basketball team, sometimes.

Mark:

Sometimes, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t know the mascot there. I always try and know the mascots, but What’s the Marist mascot?

Mark:

The Red Fox.

Bradley Sutton:

The Red Fox. Ooh, I like that. That’s pretty cool. All right. And then what did you study about e-commerce or entrepreneurship or what, what business, what was your major over there?

Mark:

Yeah, so my major is Information Technology and systems. So it was kind of like a IT, Computer Science business related in that realm. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

And then, so how did you get into e-commerce? Did you ever sell yourself or did you just went directly to, to working for agency or how, how did that happen?

Mark:

Yeah, so during college, my kind of, I started with e-commerce a little bit, playing around in college. I created my own lip balm company. Actually, I was ma hand making it in my dorm room, and I used to sell it through Etsy on that e-commerce platform. That’s where I think my entryway into e-commerce. But with Walmart specifically and other e-commerce platforms I was recruited to go work for Walmart e-commerce during the last semester of my senior year of college. And so that’s really where I began.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Now, how long have you been here at Vendo?

Mark:

So I’ve been with Vendo just almost three years.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. And has it always been for Walmart or did you do Amazon too?

Mark:

Yeah, so I primarily focus all on the Walmart side. We, in the last probably, it’s a year and a half, two years since I’ve been in with Vendo I’ve played a more dedicated role specifically to the Walmart marketplace. So we do also manage, you know, brands and clients. On the one piece side, we’re very connected with the store side, with our sister company team direct as well. But I specifically focus on the Walmart marketplace side.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, just off the bat, you know, like what are some of your most successful clients? Like, how much are they doing on Walmart? Like are these newer sellers or you’ve got some six figure sellers? Are there any seven figure Walmart sellers that you work with?

Mark:

Yeah, great question. Everyone wants to know kind of what the size of the prize on Walmart is, especially coming from Amazon. Most of the clients, so we work with clients on Amazon too. I don’t touch that business, but those clients on Amazon, some of them are doing, you know, multimillion months, right? However, when we come to Walmart and they’re launching from scratch, they don’t have that maybe, you know, brand exposure on Walmart, it’s quite different, right? We’ve seen brands anywhere from probably 1% to maybe 20% of Amazon volume on Walmart. The platform is different. The brand exposure’s different, the customer’s different. So that may give you a little direction there on kind of what we see.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Now what’s one of the struggles that your clients have? You know, is it, is it, you know, how the PPC system, the Walmart advertising is not as advanced yet as, as Amazon, they’re used to a lot more, you know, capabilities. Is it WFS? Are people having problems with WFS? But what’s the biggest pain point you think that, that Walmart sellers are facing these days?

Mark:

Yeah, there’s quite a few. If you’re in any of the Walmart marketplace Facebook groups, people are kind of complaining all day about the different problems with Walmart. Some of the issues, just the portal itself is very clunky. It’s not super user friendly. It has its own issues. Walmart search has a lot of issues. People not being able to find their products and search the Walmart algorithm for selecting items for their product types is really crazy. Actually, just getting onto Walmart being approved can be a whole process in itself. They have a pretty strict approval process, and a lot of times your average seller may not understand how to really go ahead and resolve that. So actually just getting on the platform itself could be, could be an issue.

Bradley Sutton:

I know it was very difficult before for foreign businesses to, to get started on Walmart USA, but I’ve heard that it’s getting a little bit easier. Do you have any foreign clients you know, that, that are based overseas who are having success on a Walmart or is is pretty much everybody? US based

Mark:

I would say everyone that we work with is US based, however, yeah, it has gotten easier to get onto the platform, for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Cool. Now launch these days on Walmart, let’s say you know, I’m not like a Nike or some brand that already has tons of, of branded searches, right? I’m just like in regular Amazon seller, maybe not even a million dollar Amazon seller, you know. But I want to get started on Walmart. You know, on Amazon these days is pretty much all like kind of PPC. PPC only launch, you know, like there’s no more, you know, search, find, buys and things like that. What are you doing for your customers to get on page one for a brand new Walmart listing?

Mark:

Yeah, great question. So, a lot of the brands that we’re working with are typically, you know, disruptive kind of direct to consumer brands who have done well on Amazon and they’re ready to kind of maybe go to Walmart and there could be reasons why they’re going to Walmart. Maybe they’re expanding their, you know, sales channels or maybe it’s kind of something that they need to do to get in store. And so depending on the goal, right, of what we need to do. But the first thing is getting on the platform and optimizing the listings. I know others have talked about this, your constant quality scores and the pieces that break down into that. So super important, especially when you’re transferring over any maybe imagery or copy from Amazon. If you have that already, you wanna make sure that you optimize it for the Walmart style guide.

Mark:

So when you build the items, make sure you go to growth opportunities, you check the dashboard in there and you see kind of what the callouts are. You need to also ensure very, very important when you set up the items that the product type that Walmart selects is actually accurate for that product, right? So if you set up a hairbrush, but the algorithm thinks that it’s dog food, your item is never gonna appear in any of the right searches because the Walmart search algorithm is based on a subset of rules per every keyword that pulls in specific product types. So you have to make sure that you get that updated. That’s also going to affect the type of content that you can actually apply to the listing in that growth opportunity section. So get your product type changed, and then update the content accordingly for the Walmart style guide, super emporium.

Mark:

So things that we do will, we’ll actually vet competitor listings on keywords that are fit for that brand or client will actually look at what the competing product types of already existing page one ranking products are. We’ll go back and make those changes, and then we’ll optimize the listing. Because we work closely as well through our agency partnership with Walmart, we do get a lot of context through the strategic account manager program which are like internal Walmart marketplace kind of merchants on that side, who help us a lot with a lot of our brands and getting, you know, free review syndication applied, getting the brands engaged in some campaigns, earlier flash pick deals or things like that to give the brands a little more exposure from the jump.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now, is it still the case where I cannot make my Walmart listing price even a few cents less than the Amazon, because then it might lose the buy box on Amazon? Or is that not happening as much anymore?

Mark:

Yeah, no, they definitely do read off each other for the buy box. So you do need, you know, if you’re gonna take the, you know, promo promotions on Walmart, you definitely wanna do the same on Amazon and vice versa.

Bradley Sutton:

So vice versa. Can something happen if like I’m doing a prime day deal on Amazon and I lower my price from 19.97 to 14.97, does Walmart get mad if that happens? Like, do they do something too?

Mark:

So we have seen some forms of suppression on Walmart actually for, on publishing it for pricing. There is actually, you might have noticed this on your items tab, if you go to the error, if you see something unpublished, there is like a reasonable price error that can occasionally happen. Walmart is not as sensitive to it as Amazon, but the other reason why you wanna do that too is we’ve actually seen Walmart get a tremendous lift during prime day as well, right? So you wanna make sure you have the deal running as well in case someone’s going on over to Walmart to check the pricing and capture the sale.

Bradley Sutton:

Hmm, interesting. Okay. All right. Now I just want to go live on Walmart and just, you know, find some random listings here. So why don’t you give me like a keyword to search or something here on here on Walmart. Walmart, like something, you know, is like gonna have some, maybe some mature products.

Mark:

Yeah, sure. Why don’t we look at something maybe like mushroom supplements. I know that’s a popular trend.

Bradley Sutton:

I’ve never even heard of that mushroom supplements. That is kind of crazy, but I’m just looking here and the save with Walmart plus badge. Does that mean that for sure that is a WFS product or potentially a Walmart supplied product? One of the two?

Mark:

Yeah, so that one, that would mean that it’s either in WFS or it’s a 1P item, like a vendor manager relationship, or it’s in store.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And then, so that means that people who have that, that membership, they get the the free shipping and it’s two days basically kind of like, you know, Amazon Prime, in other words, right?

Mark:

Yep, that’s, that’s correct. And it could even be like, depending on your location to like a store, if there’s a ship from store capability for an item that’s in store, you may even get it in like one day. But it’s essentially very similar to Amazon Prime. You can actually filter on the left side you can toggle specifically for like Walmart+ shopping. So it definitely, you know, wanna get in WFS as a marketplace seller for the reasons of getting that because people are shopping for two day delivery or quicker, quicker timing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now I’m looking here, I just clicked on this neutro because they’ve got like over a thousand reviews. And we’ve talked before about review syndication. Maybe they’ve done, maybe they’ve done that a little bit. Who knows, but what, what is this Pro Seller Badge? Like how, how does somebody get this Pro Seller Badge that we’re seeing here?

Mark:

Yeah, so the Pro Seller Badge has four metrics that you have to meet. So you get the badge, it’s cycled out on the fifth and the 20th of each month. So you have two chances per month to get that badge. But it’s based on four metrics. So you have one, which is for overall listing quality scores. So 70% of the trending catalog believe has to have over 60% overall listing quality scores. So things that we were talking about before of checking the product type, updating the content really important that you go deep dive into there cuz that’s a metric that a lot of people will miss. One of the other hardest metrics is you have to have a hundred orders in the past 90 days. So that’s one that, you know, if you’re kind of, if you’re kind of new, right, you’re, you’re gonna have to do some PPC or drive some external traffic to really ramp that up. The other two metrics are related to on-time delivery and cancellation, like and refund defects. So easier to meet with those, but the two others for listing quality scores and then for a hundred orders in the last 90 days are the ones that are gonna require more work.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now another thing I see here is 90 day returns. That, that seems extreme to me. Isn’t Amazon like only 30 days, but Walmart is giving people 90 days to return something?

Mark:

Yeah, 90 days. And you know, I go back to, if you’re in a lot of the Facebook marketplace groups for sellers, it’s been like such a problem. There’s been a lot of fraud with returns and issues with that too, which has been like a real, a real challenge for marketplace sellers. It’s quite frustrating with you know, how hand, how Walmart’s handling a lot of that.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Okay. That’s something to keep aware of. Now, by the way, I was looking just as, as we’re talking here at some of the search volume history of, of like mushroom powder was like peaking a few weeks ago, and then on Amazon it’s like blowing up. Like, and sometimes you see this, sometimes it is like 10X you know, the search volume on Amazon compared to Walmart, but sometimes there might be things that are trending on Walmart. But yeah, I can definitely see why you were talking about this mushroom supplement because yeah, it’s, it’s been, it’s been kind of going bonkers. But anyways, back to this mushroom product here. What about this ad right here? Is this a regular ad that a regular seller can do like, I mean this is kind of like in the space of where on Amazon it would be a sponsored display ad, like under their buy box? What kind of ad is this?

Mark:

Yeah, yeah, you can access, you can access it through the Walmart ad center absolutely. You know, we in-house leverage our partner API for all of our ad management and we’re able to access it as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And then like, on Amazon, I could choose the ASINs I or you know, Amazon ASINs I want to advertise on is this, can I, can I choose, do I use the product ID of other products or is it like auto campaigns where Walmart is kind of like steering where these ads show up?

Mark:

Yeah, I believe that ad is still automatic for now. I’ll have to double check on it, but I believe that one is.

Bradley Sutton:

Now I’m looking here, I don’t know, you know, like if I’m just comparing it to like a Amazon listing this almost, I would think product details is kind of like the, the product description, right? But I’m not seeing like bullet points, like are these bullet points separate or is this part of all the same field down here?

Mark:

Yeah, separate fields. So those bullet points there are what’s Walmart calls, the key features when you’re on when you’re editing the item, that’ll be the key features section for bullet points, everything above that that you see where it’s like very, very long on this, on this product. That’s part of what’s called the site description. So it’s two separate fields. When you’re editing an item typically your site description is your kind of like brief paragraph, and then you have your key features, which is the bullet points. This seller has kind of decided to take the site description and really lengthen it out, which, you know, you can do here. I would assume that if he was to go to the growth opportunities dashboard and look at the listing quality score for that specific site description, it’s probably gonna say that it’s over the maximum requirements for how many characters are supposed to be in there. So that’s something to be mindful of.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m gonna pull him up while we’re talking. I’m gonna pull him up in cerebral because maybe, maybe he’s like trying to get index for a lot of keywords, so I’m gonna run Cerebro on him and see if he was successful or not, but yeah, that it does, it doesn’t seem like a good buyer experience. So, so if this was your listing, you, you would not have made the description like that?

Mark:

Yeah, we, we would prefer to optimize to the callouts that Walmart has in, within the portal.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, wait a minute. Oh, that’s weird. Look at this as I’m scrolling, all of a sudden the ads change right here. So that’s, that’s something different and here’s this sanitary napkin ad is popping up again. Interesting. Now I see tons more like all these different specifications and this why it’s, it takes a lot longer to make a Walmart listing, right? Because like I’m seeing just tons of, of stuff here that you don’t normally, you know, you might not see, and these are stuff that you all have to fill out when you, when you’re creating a Walmart listing, right?

Mark:

Yeah. So when you’re creating the Walmart listing and there are multiple ways that you create a listing now that they’ve added, but there are many, many attribution fields that you can, you know, do when you’re setting up listings or do you know, after the fact? Of course. When you do optimize listings for the content quality scores they’re not gonna show like every single attribute. So you may wanna go back to listings to refill those in. It’s only gonna show the ones that are gonna be scored against, like that specific product type that you absolutely should fill in. But there are many, many attributes that you can go back and always fill in.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, good to know. Let’s see, as I scroll down here, it says similar items you might like based on what customers bought. Now, is this organic or is this kind of like an Amazon product targeting ads where these are all sponsored,

Mark:

That’s all organic right there. If you scroll down a little more in the more items to consider, I think you’ll see sponsored slots in there.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, yes, yes. Oh, you can see one organic, one organic or two organic and two sponsored. Interesting.

Mark:

Yep. So there’s a couple different spots that you can target.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And then the reviews all the way down here at the bottom. Customer. Good grief, they’ve got so many weight, you know, people complain about Amazon widgets. Walmart’s got just as many widgets here. Yeah, this is like the fifth different widget here. More items to explore even. Oh my goodness. Oh, related pages. Oh, I like this. This kind of like, kind of shows what Walmart is thinking is relevant to this listing. So I guess this would be kind of a way to make sure that if you’ve got some random keywords here, that probably means that your listing optimization is not great because Walmart doesn’t even know what kind of product you have. I never noticed this

Mark:

Here. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don’t know if people are even getting to the bottom here. You have to think most people are probably on mobile. I don’t know if people are even getting to this bottom section, but yeah, it’s interesting. There’s a, there’s plenty of stuff going on on the website.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I see about 200 or so keywords here in Cerebro that was pulled up on where this product is indexed for. And there it is right there. Mushroom supplement. That’s how I found it. That’s, that was the page that we, we found it on and then looks like they’re not running sponsored ads on everything here, but that’s, that’s fine. So like, one thing that’s different now is I see organic rank and sponsor ranked, correct me if I’m wrong, but like, it wasn’t it before where you could only show up once on Walmart, like, like either organic or sponsored, but now you can show up twice on the page in each spot. Is that correct?

Mark:

Yeah, yeah. A long time ago. It used to only be like once but now they’ve changed it a few times how those, you know, searching grid placements are, so it went from like three slots to four slots to having other sponsored slots within the searching grid. Now you can also organically rank at the top. So yeah, a couple of those that are like winning kind of the top of page placement for sponsored, they’re all, they’re also organically ranking pretty high as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Okay, cool. Now here’s another listing. It’s not WFS, no reviews, so I’m assuming it’s pretty new, but somehow they already got to the top of page one on this. Oh, okay. So, so I can definitely see the difference that you were talking about as far as the the product details. They have a completely different strategy, like they went a little bit more hardcore into their, into their bullet points here and then have the description. Would this be more along the lines of how you would have set up a product here?

Mark:

Yeah, so this format with the paragraph and then the key features is what the Walmart style guides calls for.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, good to know. Let’s use some quick hitting strategies, you know, like it could be about launch, it could be about PPC, it could be about you know, listing optimization image strategy, how it’s different, but what are, what are some strategies that you’re implementing for your customers that if somebody’s just starting, maybe they’re trying to, you know, manage Walmart on their own that they can learn from some of your tactics.

Mark:

Yeah, absolutely. So Pro Seller Badge is super important. I know we talked about the couple metrics before, but get into Walmart fulfillment services. That’s gonna ramp up your timing to get, actually get the Pro Seller Badge way, way quicker just because you’ll be able to convert quicker for two day shipping that’ll help your a hundred orders in the last 90 days. You’re gonna have the, you know, shipping time metrics that, that Pro Seller Badge is gonna need. So I would say get into WFS when you can start with a conservative amount when you send in, and then kind of like forecast out from there maybe on a basis of what makes sense. I am pushing the product types hard lately because this affects everything with surge as well. So please audit your product types. And there are tools out there that you can find the, your competitors’ product types, you know, you can’t really see that just by looking at the page, but there are different tools and other methods that you can use to pull the computing product types.

Mark:

So absolutely do that. And then you’ll have to submit seller support cases for it. Super important because if you don’t have it again, you’re there literally will not come up in search. We’ve seen it over and over and over again. So those are two things that are very important. The third thing I would say is external traffic. You know, we can talk all day about running ads and PPC on Walmart, but external traffic is really important as well. And we know this from the Amazon side, right? This affects kind of your keyword ranking, and they’ve taken that feedback. We look at it more from can you, can you get sales from external traffic to really ramp up quickly enough to kind of increase organic rank. You’ll see on Walmart there’s like best seller tags, there’s popular pick tags. Those are algorithmically chosen on products based on conversion during a given period, right? So if you can do page one type strategies and things to kind of ramp up the sales volume, you have a really good chance that you can get that tag on a product early.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you recommend to all Amazon sellers that, hey, just take your Amazon product and put it , that same packaging, same everything and put it on Walmart, just, you know, with Walmart listing optimization, or are there cases where it’s like, you know what, you should maybe make a different version like so that you don’t have to worry about that, that price matching thing? Or maybe, maybe you think something in a different format is better on Walmart or is it pretty much like 99% of the time just go ahead and take your Amazon product, that same exact thing, you know, stick the UPC on it and put it on Walmart.

Mark:

Yeah, great question. And this is like what a lot of brands when they get into Walmart stores do a lot of the time is they, they change up the packaging. They have an exclusive size or something like that because it’s a different pricing model, right? And so, but you have to remember that in-store listing does go on the website. And so Amazon could, could crawl that even if it is the identical product that you were selling on Amazon. So it’s like a yes and no. Should you have your assortment on Walmart to capture the sales from like similar Amazon products? Like yes. Would it be good to create something different for Walmart? Yes, if you can, but I know that’s a lot of extra work on brands. We talk a lot with brands about creating maybe exclusive Walmart bundle of a certain product or something, but there’s cost associated with, with that, right? You have to get a new UPC you have to maybe over box package that to ship into WFS. So it’s, it may not be the right move for everyone to do.

Bradley Sutton:

Isaac has a question. I think we kinda answered this earlier, but yeah, as of now, two-step URLs are not against Walmart terms of service. You know, it wasn’t against Amazon terms of service for like 10 years and then all of a sudden it was, was like, you know, a couple years ago. So that’s why helium10.com/gems, we have two forms of Walmart, two step euros that you can use. One is based on the seller, one is based on the brand. And the last time I checked on those they actually worked pretty good in the categories, especially where there’s not much competition. When is Rich Media gonna be available for retailer? This was something that was available back in the day, right? Like, or they could use services that, that offered it and then they took it away. So let’s take that first part of the question first.

Mark:

Yeah, yeah. Great. Great question. So for Rich Media, for video and for 360 spin on a product, you can access that now directly through Seller Center. You could just need to go through a seller support case. There’s a specific pathway for Rich Media if you want video or 360 spin for like below the fold content and all of that, you’d have to access like a third party service provider. You can’t do it through the portal yet. So there are some different providers on the marketplace website that will host that below the full content. As far as the storefronts being available supposed to be rolled out sometime this year, we do work with a couple brands that have been enrolled into the beta program with it. So we have been in contact with Walmart, have actually submitted all of the details for the brand stores. So I do expect it to hopefully come out within the next maybe three to six months.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Last tip of the day, like, like, you know, we have we always on the podcast ask for our 60-second tip. So you’ve been giving us, you know, tips and strategies throughout this whole episode, but what’s something that you can say in like 30 or 60 seconds or less, that highly actionable that you think a seller should be taking action on?

Mark:

Yeah, a hundred percent. I’m gonna go back to the product type piece. So actually what I was talking about earlier, to find a competing product type, go onto your competitor page, go onto a competing product listing, actually click on the listing and right click on the product and inspect the page source code and search for product type. And it’ll actually show you exactly what the computing product type is. Do that, and then make sure you vet the other keywords, see what other product types are showing up, and go back and submit your seller support case to get it changed. Again, if your product type is not right, you’re never gonna show up in search, it’s a huge, huge problem. But that would be definitely my biggest tip right now for actually getting into search. Cuz I see so many people complaining that can never find their item. And that’s usually–

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s see if we can do that live on this one product that we were looking at, this is something that this guy would’ve done. This guy’s a new one. So you should do this on the, on the sellers who are well established, right? Like the ones who are selling more and have more reviews.

Mark:

Yeah. So j I would say anyone who’s organically ranking, I would say away from the paid, but that one was one that was organically ranking. So yeah, right click and then go to the–

Bradley Sutton:

Inspect.

Mark:

Yeah, view the page source. So actually not inspect, but you wanna view the page source code.

Bradley Sutton:

View page source. Sorry, hold on. So right click. Oh, view page source. Okay.

Mark:

Yeah. So you can do this if you do control F and you type in product type as one word, as one word

Bradley Sutton:

Product type one word product type ID and then it’s right here Dietary supplements.

Mark:

Yep. Dietary supplements.

Bradley Sutton:

Only one.

Mark:

There only ever is one product type assigned.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, there only is one. Okay. So it’s not like, you know, on Amazon sometimes they can be in multi.

Mark:

Nope. There only ever is one product type assigned. So yeah, for that, for that search term, which, you know, we just saw before on the helium 10 using magnet rate, the volume, that’s like the, one of the biggest ones for that category. So that would make sense. Then if you lost a similar product, you wanna make sure it gets put in dietary supplements. Versus maybe, versus maybe getting in herbal supplements.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, that’s a cool tip. That sounds like something that Helium 10 make a little bit make a little bit easier. All right. Well Mark, if people want to a, reach out to you to ask more questions on Walmart or perhaps, get your clients become one of your clients to get some help with their own Walmart business, how can they find you guys on the, on the interwebs?

Mark:

Yeah, absolutely. You can shoot me a email. It’s mark@vendorcommerce.com and mark@Vendocommerce.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. You can shoot me a message there, Mark Jordan, if you find me. But yeah, I’m happy to chat Walmart anytime.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Well thank you for coming on the show and maybe we’ll invite you back in a year or so and, and see what’s new. Walmart’s been adding so much stuff lately that, you know, I’m sure there’s gonna be plenty, plenty new strategies that you, you’ll be able to share with us. So thanks a lot for coming on and we’ll see you next time.

Mark:

Great. Yeah. Thank you so much.

#455 -10x Amazon Sales With TikTok Advertising?

In the world of e-commerce, finding effective marketing channels is crucial. Enter TikTok advertising. Tamara Zeravljev, a seasoned expert, is back with a “different vibe” and invaluable insights to help skyrocket your Amazon sales.
 
Discover the power of TikTok advertising to skyrocket your Amazon sales. Learn how to leverage TikTok campaigns to drive conversions and maximize your business potential. In this episode, Tamara shares her client’s experiences and how they were featured as a real case study on TikTok, providing inspiration and practical examples.
 
TikTok advertising has emerged as a powerful tool for amplifying Amazon sales. By listening to Tamara’s actionable tips in this podcast, businesses can tap into the vast potential of TikTok and achieve remarkable results.

In episode 455 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Tamara discuss: 

• 01:30 – Tamara Is Back With A “Different Vibe”
• 02:30 – Getting Her First Client After Appearing On This Podcast
• 06:00 – Helping A Struggling Client Sell On Amazon Through TikTok
• 09:31 – Following The Performance Of TikTok Campaigns To Amazon Sales
• 14:00 – What Is A “Hook” In TikTok?
• 18:30 – Featured As A Success Story Case Study On TikTok
• 20:40 – Strategies That Are Working Inside TikTok Advertising
• 23:00 – How Does TikTok Advertising With Influencers Work?
• 27:20 – How Much Does It Cost To Advertise In TikTok?
• 29:40 – ROI Expectations For TikTok Campaigns
• 31:00 – Campaign Maintenance Strategy
• 33:15 – Tamara’s 60-Second Tip
• 34:30 – How To Reach Out To Tamara Zeravljev

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got somebody back on the show who thanks to her first appearance on this podcast, got a client for TikTok ads. And through TikTok, they were able to 10X their sales, and now they are even featured as a case study on the TikTok website. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Not sure on what main image you should choose from, or maybe you don’t know whether buyers would be interested in your product at a certain price point. Perhaps you want feedback on your new brand or company logo. Get instant and detailed market feedback from actual Amazon Prime members by using Helium 10 audience just entering your poll or questions. And within a short period of time, 50 to a hundred or even more Amazon buyers will give you detailed feedback on what resonates with them the most. For more information, go to h10.me/audience. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got somebody who helps sellers from the other side of the world all the way coming live from Serbia. Tamara welcome back to this show. How’s it going?

Tamara:

Thank you very much. I mean, it’s going great. Such like different wife these days, but love it to be here again.

Bradley Sutton:

What do you mean, different vibe these days?

Tamara:

Yeah. so I have my own agency this time. So it’s, it’s a different vibe. It’s you know, working on my own with a small team, doing something different than the other time. So because of that different vibe.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. But you’re still there in around Belgrade area, right?

Tamara:

Yes. Still in Belgrade, Serbia, but moving around, let’s say to different let’s say events and such a things through Europe. So, but still based in Belgrade.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Cool. So if everybody if anybody wants to know Tamara’s the more of the backstory w go to episode 3 32, so h10.me/332. That was the first time we we had her on the show. And you can, you know, find out, you know, a little bit more of her origin story, but it’s actually interesting, speaking of that exact podcast episode, you have got an interesting story for us. So somebody heard you on that podcast and then they reached out to you down the road and that’s the thing, guys. You know, you get on this podcast sometimes you know, it doesn’t just, it’s not live and it doesn’t just disappear after, after it’s live. Like it stays out there on the, the interwebs for a long time. And so somebody reached out to you a few months ago and go ahead and start, you know, telling us tell, telling us the story then

Tamara:

Yeah, you said it right? I mean, it doesn’t go away like it stays for years, I’m sure. Like people are still listening to like, episodes from like a year, year and a half and, you know, more so one of my first clients, actually, the first client that I started with was Brand Marbotic that reached out to me, like after listening our previous episode talking about TikTok, of course. So she reached out to me and I was like, oh, Tamara, are you still working with TikTok? Are you freelancer? You know, what’s your story? Because I see that the podcast is like, from the beginning of this year, but she was reaching out in September last year, 2022. So I was like, yeah, still doing it, blah, blah, blah. And we started to work together, you know, and she talked to me about the podcast, about what she was, you know, listening to paying attention to what she liked about it. So she was really keen to try it on for her Amazon brand.

Bradley Sutton:

In what state was her brand, kind of. What kind of of product was it, et cetera. What, when, when you first started researching that

Tamara:

Them, yeah, so it’s brand from France, actually, it was from France. They are how can I say? Like, they have developed app for io. So for iPad, actually, it was for teaching children how to read or how to count on some fun and active way, you know, to be playful for them with some characters and similar and additional to that app, they have developed like little stamps with numbers and letters. So you can take that stamp and like literally stamp it on your iPad and like learn how to read, make some sentences and words and how to count. So they started to sell that on Amazon, if I’m not wrong, on 2016, 2017, something like that. So they had the struggles since day one. I mean, all new sellers will know how it is at the beginning, but they didn’t find, like in a few years, like five, six years, they didn’t find, let’s say like a bright formula, how to increase their, you know reach on Amazon, how to be you know, better seller to get some badges at least or something.

Tamara:

So they tried TikTok, like at the beginning of 2022. They didn’t know how to optimize the campaigns, how to do it. Nothing was working for them. But I have to say, the product is amazing. Like really App Works amazing product is really nice. Children really engaged with it because it’s really funny. Like you really want to stay and learn if you don’t have like a sense you are learning something, it’s like more playing, but still learning. So they had a struggle for some reason they didn’t know how to optimize the campaign on Amazon. And then on TikTok, so when she reached out to me, the very owner the previous owner of Marbotic she said to me like, they never get that much of a brand awareness and couldn’t increase the sales as they would like to at least little bit, just to be profitable. So at that time in September when she reached out to me, she actually applied for insolvency. So she couldn’t, you know, work anymore with it, but she was like, we’re looking to try it one more time. And she heard the episode and, you know,

Bradley Sutton:

So she was going to go out of business in other words, yeah, like trying to like wind down. And so this was almost like her last last to try and make something out of it then, huh?

Tamara:

Yes, yes. Literally the last step, you know, before she goes you know, totally with the brand, but yeah, we started to work together and I had like with the team, we had some good ideas for her videos because like she had some girl for UGC to create the videos on TikTok for her and the video. So she

Bradley Sutton:

Had her own TikTok account. She had somebody even creating UGC, but like what was the problem? It wasn’t getting you know, views or you don’t, the content wasn’t great or what was the issue when you took a look at what her strategy was before she came to you?

Tamara:

Yeah, they didn’t know how to, like, when it comes to organic, they didn’t know how to reach out to the audience to write users, you know, and when it comes to advertising, they didn’t know how to optimize, right? You know, they couldn’t find a good agency or good freelancer or someone in-house. She really tried everything, you know. So taking overall, the videos were actually great. Amazing. They needed just like a few little things to how can I select, add it, you know, add some hooks for, for example, or to show up the product, at least.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s the name of your new company again?

Tamara:

Add2Ads.

Bradley Sutton:

I see you put it, you threw in a little pun there, I see. They needed just a little bit to, to add. Okay. I got, I got you. You’re already good at this marketing thing. I like it. All right, continue, please. It,

Tamara:

It’s already into my head and I do it. I don’t even notice it anymore. But good. So yeah, we needed to add little bit of Sparkle there. So we helped them with the strategy for organic videos. Like we helped the girl that was doing a UGC, like with little bit for hooks, little bit of how to show product in the first two, three seconds. And the rest of it was amazing, you know, anyways, so what they actually needed was optimization of the campaigns and the right team to do it. So let’s say we helped a little bit with an organic part, and then we start with an advertising. I mean, in September, it was like end of September, I think about we started the campaigns and in about like five or seven days, she already noticed, you know, some results she already saw increase in sales.

Tamara:

Like I don’t know, like now exact numbers, but it was like, she usually sold like about 10 products a day. Then it was 13, 15 in like seven days increased, but she never had that number, even if it’s like lower in the seven days, she was like, I think it’s doing something. So comparing September to October, it was like eight times we increased their sales, which was crazy because I never saw something going, you know, crazy up, like with them and October, comparing to November, actually November to October, like in November we had like 12 times increased it, you know? So it was huge.

Bradley Sutton:

So from like, what numbers were they doing before approximately per month on sales? And also, is this all on Amazon or is this also including like their .com sales?

Tamara:

Yeah, so we never did like.com sales and I think they didn’t have nothing on that side. It was just Amazon. Amazon US actually.

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon US. Okay.

Tamara:

Yeah, it’s US Market, and even they’re from France. They were just selling in US. So yeah I don’t remember the exact numbers of the sales, but as I said, it was like, in my mind as I remember, it was below hundred, and then it started to go like to hundreds, you know, sales, like crazy sales, you know? And the funny thing about it’s that I really always like to mention when it comes to Amazon is we were trying to follow the performance, like how that happened to see what’s going on in the campaigns. And the funny thing is, we couldn’t see anything in the campaigns, because when you’re creating on TikTok campaign, you still need to have Amazon attribution link to follow. Why? Because, TikTok will show you only views and clicks, you know, engagement and just the basic things because Amazon doesn’t allow you to.

Tamara:

So you need to create Amazon attribution link to see actually sales of the product. And we were seeing small numbers there. For example, I remember it were just showing around 10% of the sales, nothing else. Then in like, in second month, it was showing like around 30-40%, but still not a hundred percent that we saw, like from TikTok actually, that was coming. And we were trying to figure it out. Like we, as a team, we had all the access to her Amazon account, and of course the TikTok account, she had it also on her website as well. We tried like some different tools to follow what’s going on. And still, we couldn’t find any tool that will help us to follow what is going on on Amazon. And attribution link didn’t allow us to see a hundred percent of what’s going on. So we were trying to actually turn to Search Term Report and to see actual sales and compare it to the month when we didn’t work. And we even had, like in the middle of October.

Bradley Sutton:

Which Search Term Report are you referring to?

Tamara:

Yeah, like on Amazon Search Term Report, Advertising Search Term Report.

Bradley Sutton:

The advertising, not, not Search Query Performance. Okay, cool.

Tamara:

Yeah, so we were just trying to see there what’s going on, like, because also on Amazon advertising on campaigns, we could see increase in sales, better ACoS, and much, much more sales that it was before. So we saw in a Search Term Reports, like some keywords that weren’t there before. And when we, you know, put them in some like Excel sheet, we realized it was the keywords from the hooks, from the videos that were in the campaign on TikTok. So for example, hook was like I don’t know, funny way to play with your children or, or such a things, I forgot. But it was something with the kids playing and we saw like kids playing keywords with letters and numbers mixing. We never had that, like, well, hold,

Bradley Sutton:

Hold on, hold on. Just, so what do you mean by hook?

Tamara:

Like the hook on the beginning of the video on TikTok?

Bradley Sutton:

So like the the caption. Okay. And so then the caption on a TikTok video was something, and then, so what your, your theory was that, hey, maybe people, instead of just clicking the attribution link, they’re just going directly to Amazon and, and kind of typing that in to try and find this product and then use, were you already targeting that in, in Amazon advertising, or was that just com coming from an auto campaign, or how did you even get that in Amazon advertising?

Tamara:

Yeah, so most of them were in auto campaign. Some were in a phrase in broad at groups because like, it’s a longer story. What we realized, because we were launching the campaigns in US, I was in Serbia, Belgrade, and they were in, you know, France. We had some team in US helping us. We at the end, like, I don’t know how, but it happened to show to one of our, you know team members in US, the commercial, when he clicked on it, he said like he needed to log into Amazon account, and he was like, I’m too lazy to do this now. I don’t even remember my password now. So like, I would naturally, if I like the product, I would go and search for it on my Amazon app, actually. So we realized that not all the users can actually click on it and be immediately through their to, I mean they could saw Amazon page, but when they click on buy it, add to card, they need to sign in.

Tamara:

So for some, they needed to sign in because they were even, I don’t know, lazy or forgot the password, password or whatever they needed to go to their app and actually search for it. And the keywords they’re actually searched for are from the video, the text that was, you know, point out on the video, like hook at the beginning, like, did you know this or try this? Or even we realized, because the boxes, you know, huge was huge for the kids. And we have some video where one of the girls were trying to, you know, pick up the box and it was too big and it was a little bit funny, but you could see the name of the product. It was the Lux kit and everybody were trying to actually search for the Looks kit as well. So I remember that keyword was actually huge, you know increase of sales with only that keyword.

Tamara:

And before that, I mean, we tried that keyword on Amazon, like Lux kit, but never converted because no one knew, you know, the name of the product and brand and everything. Yeah. So also brand keywords increased. No one heard before that. I mean, no one, such a small amount of users heard of Mebo, and it was not trending on the account to see Marbotic brand keyword has converted and sold. So we saw also Marbotics Lux kit, you know, Marbotic kids, Marbotic, whatever, you know, stamps. We saw increase of that keywords that never have sold that much, maybe one or two products per month. It was not a big deal. And then we saw it increase like crazy. So those are like key points that we have discovered and was like crucial for us because we didn’t know how to follow if it’s good or not.

Tamara:

I mean, we saw increase in sales, but we wanted to know how to follow it, what happened, and to investigate more. So I would say really, really helped us to see like a search term, Advertising Search Term Report, and the guy who saw the commercial and told us, you know, about the problem, but when we tested, like we could enter to, to to Amazon didn’t need to, to go to app. So it was, you know, strange things happen, but it still was working. So I think it’s a valuable info to know that about TikTok advertising, like how to actually follow the results. And you know thanks to that we knew what was going on and trying to still push the ads until the end of Q4.

Bradley Sutton:

And then, so I guess it was so successful that even TikTok itself, like found out about this they’re like, what’s going on with this company? And then they reached out to you and even used this whole thing as a, as a case study on website, isn’t it?

Tamara:

Yeah, yeah. At that time I was like talking with you know, TikTok team from UK, and they, they looked at the account that I was working on with team, and they were like hey, this is like crazy campaign, because we see crazy increase, like in beginning of September, nothing almost. And then in October and November and December starting to going crazy. So they were like, are you interested to do case study with us? Like a success story to be, pointed out on tiktok.com, like TikTok for business? And I mean, for sure I said yes. And Marie from Marbotic was also like, thrilled to hear the, to hear the news. So it was amazing story actually. Like, I think if I remember it almost brought the tears, like to me and Marie, because I know her story, how it was and how they struggled for years, and now to have crazy increase.

Tamara:

And then TikTok reaching out to us like, Hey guys, do you wanna do like a case study success story? And I think I was talking to you like these days about it, but it wasn’t real for me and for my team until we saw it live, until we had the link, you know, to see and to really screw it because I mean, we just started with an agency. I had it in my mind for goals for years, you know, to come. And I did it in just a few months. So it is still like I’m still happy to talk about it.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool, cool. Now, what else? I mean, you can’t always just get some amazing case study that gets picked up by TikTok, but Yeah, but what else is going on that you, that’s interesting. You can tell us like things that are working or specific strategies that people can use either in just TikTok advertising or Amazon advertising. You’ve been doing this for, for quite a while now, and it’s, it’s been over a year since you’ve been on the podcast. So what else has happened in the last year or so that you can share with the audience that you think can help them?

Tamara:

Yeah, so a lot of actually changed, especially on TikTok. I know more about it because I’m more on that platform. So changed in like how people like to search. They don’t go anymore that much on Google to search for things. I mean, they still do, but not that much as they were. They also go to TikTok app and go to search and search, like, for example, how to fix something, how to do some things, whatever, like to make bad or to dress yourself or wedding or similar. And it helps a lot to users and also to sellers, because when you still go to Google and you search for how to do something, blah, blah, blah, you can see like in one of the first three or four links, you will see a TikTok link. When you click on it, you will go to TikTok video actually how to do something, or trying to find some answer for some topic.

Tamara:

You will see it on Google because TikTok has become now like a search app as well. So yeah, that’s like a major thing that happened since we last talked. So but let’s say also with the influencers, I realized like in the last year changed a lot. We have lot more influencers going now to TikTok rather than to Instagram. And of course along with that, their prices have increased, but we have them more now on TikTok. And that game was changed a lot, like, let’s say fighting between Instagram and TikTok has apps, so a lot more people are there now. A lot more sellers are at a lot more brands. I mean, last year when we talked about it, I think I said I remember like it was still new. Not a lot of sellers are there, especially from Amazon now, we can see the numbers are increasing.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, when you talk about TikTok advertising, can you only advertise your own content, or let’s just say some influencer or user does their UGC, an organic post on their own account, can you send advertising traffic to their video as well? How does that work? I’ve never, obviously never done TikTok advertising.

Tamara:

Yeah, no worries. So there are two ways when advertising the video already posted. So if you have, for example, organic profile on TikTok, you can just link in your like, business account for advertising with your organic profile, and then take the videos from your profile to advertise it to increase, for example, also likes, shares, comments, you know, and everything, followers as well. But you can also have like hire some influencer to post the video about your brand, and then when they post it, they need to send you like some kind of a code so you can implement it to your business account and use their video to advertise your product. So with that being said, you don’t necessarily need to be like present on TikTok to have the videos. You can just like hire the influencers and then advertise their videos to send traffic to your Amazon page.

Tamara:

So like that’s how it goes. But I would always recommend to have both sides, because it’s always good to have to see like what work maybe better for your brand. It can maybe go, you know, similar like a 50-50, but it’s always good to have it from influencers, you know, eyes like someone that is closer maybe to users and from brand side, and you can increase followers, engagement on the profile. A lot more people can see you than recommend and such a thing. So I think it’s always better to use, you know, maximum of it, but if you’re not able to, as you said, like you can use some other’s video to actually advertise your brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now I’m looking at their Marbotic TikTok page, and so, you know, I see just tons and tons of yeah, of videos here and, you know, without clicking on it, it seems like mainly like UGCs. So does this mean that like somebody records this, like with the TikTok app or in this format and then they send it to you guys and then you just post it, or they send just a bunch of raw video and then you guys format it to put these like captions and things onto TikTok or what, what’s the process here? Because thi this is, you know, obviously not just, you know, Marbotic company you know, using every employee’s different kids in their <laugh> company and putting these videos up, I’m assuming.

Tamara:

Yeah. So as I said, they had like a girl that was their, you know, UGC like creator for them. They together came up with the strategy. As I said, we helped them at some point, like how to little bit improve it, so the girl was actually filming her kids, some friends kids, you know, like she, she was trying to find out like different kinds of kids. And she was a teacher, actually, she is teacher. So she was filming it like from her perspective as a user. And it is more natural way to show off your product, as I said, like how actually kids are using it, not like fully screened. She were just filming them, playing with it, talking about it like, oh, mom, I really like this one. Can I play with the Marbotic? Or some kind of a things like pulling it out from some drawers, like to play with it. And then she was editing the videos, adding the text on it, like some hooks and post it on their, you know, profile. And we actually used those posted videos on their profile to advertise the product. So it was everything filmed with the UGC, like from their user perspective. And we used that to, you know, increase sales.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now let’s just say you know, I’m one of the listeners, Amazon company out there. I’m doing, I don’t know let’s just say, you know, $500,000 a year on Amazon currently. So I’m about that level of seller. Now, I’ve never done TikTok advertising. I don’t even have my TikTok account, so I would assume, all right, first step is make your, your, your TikTok account and then now what kind of budget, you know, should I be looking at to, to even get started? Because this is not something where it’s like with Amazon PPC, I mean, if I wanted to, I could just do a $5 a day auto campaign and just have that and who knows, what’s gonna come from it. But I know on TikTok it’s different, like there’s kind of a minimum where it’s like, hey, if you really want to, to have a better chance of success, you can’t just have some $5 campaign. So what, what would it what would it, what would be your advice there

Tamara:

When it comes to budget? Like TikTok platform actually has set minimum that is pair ad group in the campaign 20 US dollars. And with that, actually, I have to be honest, you can run follower campaigns and get, like, if I’m not wrong, like in a month, about 10K, 8K followers but when it comes to traffic campaigns, the budget is a little bit, you know, going up. So something that will bring you some sales, you know, some results, it’s about 70 US dollars per day. Why? Because with the less amount of budget, the advertising, actually the videos that are advertised will stop at some point of the day and you will not use the whole day. So because the US, you know, market is big marketplace, so we need like around 70 to start with. I mean, if the brand has the budget, it will be nice if they can start with the hundred that is like, you know, our always go-to option. But if they don’t, I will say a minimum is a 70. So when it comes to budget, of course.

Bradley Sutton:

And then so, you know, like day one, I’m not gonna get my money back from that 100, you know, unless something crazy happens. How long does it usually take? You know, like, you know, 10 days I’ve already spent a thousand dollars, like by that time, how much should I expect to have a return on investment there?

Tamara:

Yeah, so when it comes to like bras and everything, like, not the same for each brand of course, but in around seven to take 10 days, you should be able to sue at least, you know, little bit going up at least for like you know, one 2% to see something is happening not that much because in the first seven or 10 days, like top in the 10 days, for sure we can collect the audience, we can see how they behaved with the videos, what they liked, what they did, and what they shared, how many seconds they viewed, which video, and then how to turn over the campaigns in which sites to actually optimize, you know, the campaigns. So in seven days, for sure, you can see where it will can go, so you can optimize in that direction, and then from seven day actually to start growing your business on TikTok.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Interesting. Now what’s, what’s the maintenance look like? You know, so, so obviously every month you weren’t 10Xing Marbotics, you know, sales, it gets to a point where it’s like, all right, now it’s like, you know, we’re out there, we’ve got the followers and we just want to, you know, keep bringing some new traffic. So how does your strategy change after the initial, you know, traffic building, I guess you can call it?

Tamara:

Yeah, amazing, amazing question because that’s like a, you know, usual question after some time we got it there. Like you know what? Now actually TikTok is always, always having like some new option. Like for example, what we did with probiotic at some time, we had like some interactive add-on, on the video. It was a display card, we sell like NCE Vita, we have the access for it, let’s try it on because it can, you know, change the game a little bit to see how the people will react. For example, we tried with that. Of course, every new month we have some new bids going on, some user behaviors change. We have some new idea for the video, how to change, you know, approach on the beginning or in the middle of the video.

Tamara:

So we try to change it, you know, in a different ways when it comes to video, when it comes to optimization, when it comes to some new, you know, additions to the campaign. So that’s how we increase it and still going on with it. But I have to say their course as on Amazon as on every other platform like a month where you will see lower sales, that’s normal. Like, for example, January for most of the product. So in January we would usually decrease little bit the budget because the sales will normally go a little bit low, but not that much as it was in the beginning. So still we have those, qoutations with the sales, but how to keep it, you know, and trying to increase each month more and more is changing the game in the videos of course, because that’s like, at least 60% of the successful campaign is successful video and interesting. And then of course, with optimization and new things.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so just like last time you’re on the podcast, you know, it’s time for our 60-second strategy. So what haven’t you said today that you think something that’s actionable that you can say in 60 seconds or less for our community?

Tamara:

Yeah, I would say if you’re not running TikTok ads, try it out. And when trying out, be aware to follow, as I said, with an attributional link at advertising Search Term Report, follow the performances, like dig deep into it to know if it works for you or not. If not, try out like some kind of different videos, different hooks, try to be more interactive, you know, in the first three seconds and interesting to your audience, show off your product. And I think that that will work.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I think my biggest takeaway is, is what you were talking about earlier about, you know, when, when you weren’t seeing everything in the attribution from, from Amazon, from Marbotic, you, you thankfully had some broad and phrase campaigns and auto campaigns. And then, so taking what that hook is, see, I’m learning all kinds of TikTok language here taking that hook and then making sure there’s a campaign on it, and then sometimes you’ll be able to see the effects just from your Advertising Search Term Report. So I think that’s really interesting as well. So if people want to reach out to you and get more information and, and who knows, maybe be one of the next TikTok case studies that’s picked up by TikTok. But where how can they find you on the intro webs?

Tamara:

Yeah, they can find us on www.add2ads.com or reach out to us on office@add2ads.com. And actually for today, I prepared like a 300 US dollars coupon for all the listeners that will reach out to us. Hopefully just put on the subject Helium 10, and that’s how you’ll get, you know, little discount from us.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on here. I’ll be seeing you hopefully in a few weeks when I go to Serbia and in your languages, I guess I’ll say (Speaks Serbian) thank you for coming on here and let’s see where you you and your agency are at next year when you come back on the show.

Tamara:

Yeah, thank you very much for calling me again, and thank you very much for the kind words and I can say also (Speaks Serbian) and can’t wait to see you here soon. Thank you very much.

#454 - Exiting a Brand Featured on TV & Living as an Amazon Seller Digital Nomad

Episode 454 of the SSP features Kunal Dattani and Reggie Young, members of the Serious Sellers Club, sharing their incredible stories. Reggie started his e-commerce business while in active military duty, turning a $3,000 investment into almost a $1 million exit. Kunal began by selling diet plans on eBay, eventually establishing a successful men’s cosmetic brand in the UK and making $2 million annually on eBay. They discuss living as a digital nomad, sourcing strategies, launching in the UK and other EU markets, and off-Amazon marketing tactics.
 
Tune in to this inspiring episode for invaluable insights into the world of selling in Amazon and E-commerce!
 
If you’re eager to connect with Kunal and Reggie, we encourage listeners to join the Serious Sellers Club Group, where 6/7/8-figure Amazon sellers and like-minded individuals gather to share knowledge and insights.

In episode 454 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Kunal and Reggie discuss: 

• 02:00 – Meet Our Guests, Members Of The Serious Sellers Club
• 02:30 – Reggie’s Backstory
• 03:50 – Starting An E-commerce Business While In Active Military Duty
• 04:50 – From $3K Capital To An $830K Exit
• 08:30 – Kunal’s Backstory
• 10:30 – Started In Ecomm Selling Diet Plans On eBay
• 12:00 – Starting A Men’s Cosmetic Brand In UK And Was Featured In Dragon’s Den
• 13:00 – Making A $2 Million A Year On eBay
• 13:30 – Why Did Reggie Decide To Be A Digital Nomad?
• 15:30 – The Cost Of Living For A Digital Nomad
• 16:45 – Talking About Kunal’s Deals Inside The Dragon’s Den
• 18:40 – “I Realized That Amazon Is The Best Platform”
• 19:15 – Strategy Session From Kunal And Reggie
• 22:18 – Sourcing Things Under $2 Per Unit Landed Into Amazon
• 27:50 – Launching In The UK Market And Into Other EU Countries
• 29:30 – Off-Amazon Marketing Tactics
• 31:25 – Kunal And Reggie’s Hobbies And Healthy Habits Outside The Amazon Grind
• 33:22 – How To Reach Kunal And Reggie Online
• 33:50 – Join The Serious Sellers Club Facebook Group

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a couple serious sellers in the show with really cool backstories. One seller started with a $3,000 investment, and he turned that into a nearly $1 million exit and now lives as a digital nomad. The other seller was a seven figure seller on eBay and even got into Britain’s version of the show Shark Tank. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Want to enter in an Amazon keyword and then within seconds get up to thousands of potentially related keywords that you could research. Then you need Magnet by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/magnet. Magnet works in most Amazon marketplaces, including USA, Mexico, Australia, Germany, UK, India, and much more. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a couple sellers from different parts of the world, actually, today, for the first time on the show Reggie and Kunal, am I pronouncing your name right? Reggie, where are you at right now?

Reggie:

I’m currently traveling through the States. Just got done with Seattle and then heading to Lisbon soon.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Do you have a home base or are you full digital nomad life? Just on the road? Yeah. Yeah.

Reggie:

Digital nomad professional, homeless person. I call myself.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it. And Kunal, where are you at in the world?

Kunal:

I’m in the United Kingdom in a place called Leicester near Birmingham. Not too far.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So what’s the local football team there then?

Kunal:

Leicester City.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, I was like, wait a minute. That sounds that sounds familiar. Weren’t they the ones who had like Cinderella season? A little while back.

Kunal:

2016 it was.

Bradley Sutton:

I remember that. Yeah. Remember exactly. Okay, cool, cool. Excellent. Now I got turned onto the part of our new Serious Sellers Club. We have this club private community within Helium 10, where it’s sellers who are doing 6, 7, 8 figures. And so I had just thrown something out there. I’m like, Hey, I’m looking for new people to come on the podcast, and these gentlemen volunteered themselves. And so like, it’s, it’s great to have you guys on here. And I know literally nothing about either of you. So what I want to start off with is just getting your superhero origin backstories here. Let’s start with Reggie. Where were you born and raised?

Reggie:

Oh, sure. Yeah. hello everyone. Reggie Young, born and raised in Hawaii. Joined the military when I was 18. My commanders sent me to the Air Force Academy to become an officer, but I wasn’t smart enough, so I had to go to a prep school for like a year. Kept having to start over and over. Really, really was passionate about business after our graduation. I wanted to do like the most business related job in the military. Wasn’t able to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

So you went to the Air Force Academy?

Reggie:

Yeah, yeah. Went to the Air Force academy for five years.

Bradley Sutton:

Is that like Colorado or something?

Reggie:

Yeah, it’s in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Nice place there. I was basically, I never really left campus much. I was always head in the books type of thing. But yeah, I did five years there, became an officer, was a nuclear missiles officer. Was spent like half the time underground, a day and a half above ground, a day and a half below ground. And at that point I was like, Hey, this is not really giving me much fulfillment, so really just eat, sleepp, breathe, e-commerce, drop shipped high ticket, then eventually moved to private label, and then sold my first business about a year and a half ago, and then just scaling sense.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So you exited the military and then immediately went into like being in like online entrepreneur or, or was there, you know, different jobs you held in the meantime, or?

Reggie:

I thankfully had replaced my income about six months before my military contract ended, but I knew–

Bradley Sutton:

So while you were still in the military, you had started selling online, doing different things. Oh, okay, cool.

Reggie:

Yeah, totally. It was like years of just burning all the ships, you know, some success, some failure, the entrepreneurship journey. And then I was consulting for some other brands that ended up exiting. So I had some experience consulting, had some online consulting income options.

Bradley Sutton:

What year about are we we talking about here in the timeline?

Reggie:

So I started Amazon 2015, 2016. I left the military 2020 and exited my business 2021.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. So the business you exited, was it an Amazon business or was it just online?

Reggie:

Yeah, it was an Amazon business. It was a $3,000 investment.

Bradley Sutton:

So you started an Amazon business with $3,000 and then built it up to exit?

Reggie:

Yes. Yeah, it was like, I think my fifth or sixth launch product launch. And then that, that specific product launch was $3,000 invested. And then with the cash flow and the exit, I netted a little over $830,000, which was I believe, a 27,500% ROI. It was like the, the craziest investment return I’ve ever done in my life. And since then I’ve kind of just tried to scale out and

Bradley Sutton:

Are you able to say what kind of product it was or category at all? I mean, if not, it’s fine.

Reggie:

I can say it was like a kitchen appliance accessory okay. Less than, yeah, less than $10.

Bradley Sutton:

So $3,000 for like, what was that, 500 units, a thousand units or what?

Reggie:

Yeah, my landed cost was 45 cents into Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Landed cost was 45 cents a unit. What were you selling air? What was this?

Reggie:

Yeah. It was a really, really small kitchen appliance. But I ended up selling the product. We had over 16,000 reviews when I sold it.

Bradley Sutton:

So what was the retail price for the product?

Reggie:

The retail price, I started at $9. So I had crazy high margins. And then of course, like competition came in, product costs got higher, I increased my product quality costs, my landed costs jumped to like a, like a dollar 50 landed eventually. But yeah, it was just an amazing ride and it made up for all the losses, obviously. It was great.

Bradley Sutton:

Did FBA small and light was that a thing back then?

Reggie:

No, it wasn’t. It was not a thing.

Bradley Sutton:

You were paying just regular regular FBA fees.

Reggie:

Yeah, yeah, it was, and I think, right before I sold it, small and light came out and then gave that opportunity to the buyer as, Hey, this is a way for you to increase margin.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting, interesting. That’s like living the dream right there. So when you sold the brand, was it your whole seller central account that you sold and all the products in it? Was it just that product or, or how did that work?

Reggie:

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. When you exit, most people want to acquire the entire account instead of doing like, you know, yeah. A listing transfer. So they say, so I actually sold the entire account including my KDP account with it, which I had made a book during covid that was doing, doing okay. But yeah, you end up selling the entire account which is fine cuz you net a good amount of money and it’s okay to start up another account just under a brand new LLC, new account.

Bradley Sutton:

They took over all the products you had in under the account? But that was kinda like the hero product that, that was doing most of that. What did your annual revenue get up to before you exited?

Reggie:

Yeah, so my, my pricing period was I was averaging about $16,000 a month in profit after everything. And then with that I was able to exit, I think it was like great timing, you know, it was post covid this aggregators were starting to come into this space and it just made sense to take chips

Bradley Sutton:

Off. Was it an aggregate or just a private party that you sold to?

Reggie:

This was a a private party. I had the, thankfully been educating myself for years on how to sell my business. So when the time came I knew exactly like what avenues would make sense versus not. And I was able to exit all cash no earn out. So super, super blessed and thankful.

Bradley Sutton:

Is that when you became a digital nomad or were you, had you already started doing that before? Yeah,

Reggie:

I’d already started. I knew like I knew in 2015 when I was underground that this life wasn’t for me at the time, so I was like, let me burn all the ships when 2020 comes, no matter what, I will be a digital nomad traveling. So it just ended up working out really, really well. And then since then, I’ve consulted for some of the top aggregators continue to do so in helping other people sell their online business.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, let, let’s switch over to Kunal now. Where were you born and raised?

Kunal:

Born in Leicester in the uk.

Bradley Sutton:

So stayed local your whole life, huh?

Kunal:

Yeah, I actually moved to Spain a few years ago. But yeah, ba back here for now, and the plan is to get a Dubai hopefully next year,

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And then, and then what about you? What was your educational journey like upon graduating? I dunno know what you guys call over there? High school, I would say.

Kunal:

Yeah. Yeah. So we, I graduated in accounting. But yeah, there’s a funny story because after graduation I applied for about 20, I think it was 22 or 23 jobs, and got rejected from all of them. And the recruitment consultant said to me you’re too entrepreneurial. Because I was actually challenging the people that are interviewing me couldn’t get work. And it was, it was absolutely nuts because I was trying my best to get work. But yeah, then kind of fell into E-com and never looked back ever since.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So you never did end up working in the accounting?

Kunal:

Never, never. I’ve never been employed.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. I love it. What was all this happening where you were getting rejected at these jobs?

Kunal:

That was 2011. Okay. Yeah. So I went nearly 12 months without anyone.

Bradley Sutton:

Still living with your, like, family at home, like parents or how were you supporting yourself? That’s the way to do it.

Kunal:

Come from Indian family, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, yeah, like, well, you know, the, the stereotype is, you know, for, you know, I’m half Filipino myself, you know, like Asian families are like, Hey, you need to become a doctor or lawyer or something like that, or Filipinos, like nurses or something. But what, what, what was their mindset when you would get rejected job after job? They weren’t giving you a hard time

Kunal:

To be found third in line in the family? So they weren’t really by the time they got one.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, okay. There you go. If you were the first ward, it would’ve been a different story. Yeah. Yeah. And then, so what was your first entrepreneurial endeavor then when you finally settled into that?

Kunal:

So I actually started playing around with E-com at age 16. So I was selling diet plans on eBay.

Bradley Sutton:

Selling diet plans on eBay? IHow do you sell a diet plan on eBay?

Kunal:

I was the fat kid selling diet plans on eBay because there was an opportunity there, right? Yeah. And yeah, and I was making money. Wel I funded my whole college and university through.

Bradley Sutton:

Selling diet plans?

Kunal:

Yeah. It’s ebook and it was automatically sent to the customer. And yet it is funny, in hindsight, when I look back, you know, these women that were buying this diet plan, they were actually starving because they’re only on like 600 calories.

Bradley Sutton:

So there’s a whole bunch of women in the UK buying a diet plan from a 16 year old guy/kid.

Kunal:

But you have to remember, this was like, you know, 25, 20 years ago, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, 20 years. What are you talking about? Oh, when you were 16. Okay. I was about to say. That’s interesting. All right. Like, you know I, I’m not sure we we’re gonna suggest everybody to start when you’re 16 and selling diet plants where you should only eat 600 calories. I’m not sure if that’s the most healthy thing. At least here in the States, you can get in trouble for doing doing that, perhaps. So then you’re making money throughout, you know, high school, throughout university, and then now come, you know, 2012, 2013, you’re, you’re a full-time entrepreneur. What kind of, I’m assuming you weren’t continuing to sell diet plans at that time? Yeah,

Kunal:

We actually with my brothers, we set up one of the biggest UK cosmetic brands for men. So in beard care which became fairly big. So we did like the Shark Tank equivalent in the UK called Dragons Den.

Bradley Sutton:

Is that like a TV show over there as well? Yeah. And then so you were on the show, like with your brothers?

Kunal:

Yeah, so we did the show in 2018 and then I sold the company in 2020, literally like a week before the pandemic.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. So, yeah, so, like beard oils and things like that.

Kunal:

Yeah, that’s like, there was Beard brand in the US you know, dollar Beard Club. We were, we were kind of the number one in the UK and Europe. Were

Bradley Sutton:

You selling on Amazon as well? Or or was this all just like on a .com website or,

Kunal:

Ebay was actually at one point, like a hundred percent of our business. Then we kind of went on.

Bradley Sutton:

What kind of revenue were you doing on this brand on eBay per year?

Kunal:

Couple of million.

Bradley Sutton:

Couple of million on eBay. That’s crazy. Let’s switch back to Reggie. I picked two good guy. Like, I, I had, I had no idea about anybody’s backstory here. I just knew that they were serious sellers club members, so I knew they were doing, you know substantial revenue. And I was like, say no more. Just bring it on and I’m gonna find out about you guys. On here. So, so let’s go back to Reggie. I’m just curious, what was the inspiration behind deciding to, to be homeless? In other words, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, I couldn’t do it cuz you know, I’ve got family and things like that, or, you know, I, I suppose I still could, but they hate traveling and stuff. But was this something that you’ve always wanted to do? You like traveling or you just don’t like staying in one place, you get restless? Or what was the thought process there?

Reggie:

Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it was, I remember when I got to the point where I had product launch failure after product launch failure, and I was like, considering giving up. I was, you know, I was asking like, what’s my why? And once I internalized my why, I had like, like complete mind shift change, and it was to do what I love wherever I want, whenever I want, surrounded by the people I love. And in 2015, 2016, 2017, around that time, I looked around and like nobody was working remotely. There weren’t that many, like, opportunities to make significant amounts of money online that were like, just “easy to do”. So once I internalize I guess that, that that thought process, that, that became my strong why to, to move forward and become a nomad. And, and I just really, really love it now, being able to pick up and go wherever, whenever I absolutely love it. Work on my own time.

Bradley Sutton:

So how does it work? Do you like set up Airbnbs for like, months at a time? Or do you have a trailer or what do you do?

Reggie:

Yeah, so I’ve done e everything from traveling with two checked luggage all the way from like a small carry on bag and a small roll on. I never really do the whole, like, backpacking. Nobody really does that. I feel like it’s like, where are you going, where you’re not gonna be able to roll a luggage? Like, there’s always gonna be someone that you can either fire, you know, someone to take your luggage for you. So I normally just pack everything up and I’m pretty, pretty passionate about different types of travel gear, so I’m always like looking at what works. But yeah, absolutely love it.

Bradley Sutton:

And how long do you stay in like one place?

Reggie:

One place? I try and stay at least three months. Anything less than that is way too much turnover. So I’m like very big on systems, I feel.

Bradley Sutton:

What is your average per month then? Does it end up like with not counting food, but, but you know, like I mean, I guess, you know, utilities, so all your pain is far as the Airbnb. So like, you’re lodging. What does it come out to a month?

Reggie:

Yeah. I think really it’s just choose your own adventure. I’ve done like the super cheap studio, like kind of rinky-dink all the way to like, Hey, I wanna like, live really nice with the view. So I travel right now with my partner. And I think I would say for most people, unfortunately right now with like the state of the economy, you really can’t find anything for anything that isn’t like, really, really low quality for under like $1,200 a month. I would say it’s like the standard in most, most places for like a one bedroom. So I would say all in, you’re probably at like three grand at least a month to live, like, okay, really, really comfortably. I haven’t cooked in like two years. I literally order everything on, on like Uber and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

DoorDash and stuff like that.

Reggie:

Yeah, Doordash. So you get, you really get to like Uber everywhere. Uber Eats everything travel, and it makes it really, really nice.

Bradley Sutton:

I just Googled it right now, I’m like, Hey, wait this is a show that’s that’s like pretty legit here. So what were you trying to get on that show, and then what happened when you were on there?

Kunal:

Yeah, so we went in for 150 grand, which is in, in hindsight, again, doesn’t seem like a lot of money now that everything I know now, it doesn’t seem like a lot. But yeah, we got four offers and we took two. So two people call Peter Jones and Te Lavanne. So yeah, big players, they’re worth like half a billion each.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. All right. And then, so this was before the exit, I mean, that wasn’t the exit, like you weren’t exiting and they were buying your brand, like you got the investment and then, and then built it up even more, the brand and then, and then you exited later.

Kunal:

Exactly. Yeah, that’s it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And then, so after that, what do, what did you do? You know, you didn’t become a digital nomad, like, like, like Reggie here. So what did you do upon exit any, any lifestyle changes, buy a house or anything like that?

Kunal:

Yeah, no, I mean, we had, we had a stability already, but for me it was just moving away from the UK where it’s like raining half the year. So we went to moved to Spain for a bit. So love the lifestyle there, but then it was a pandemic, so we couldn’t really do much. So the plan is to still so I came back to the UK for family. The plan is to get out of the UK again next year at some point.

Bradley Sutton:

After that, the entrepreneurial wise, you started another brand or what happened after?

Kunal:

Yes, within, so after I sold the the Beard Care brand, yeah, within a few days, I started.

Bradley Sutton:

Within a few days. You didn’t even take any time off.

Kunal:

I enjoy what I do, so it doesn’t feel like work. So, and then the first challenge was how do I get to a 110K in, you know, in a month or, and it took me three months, and then it was like, how do I get to seven figures? And I did that within just over a year.

Bradley Sutton:

Now this was mainly on Amazon, or were you still doing the eBay things?

Kunal:

Purely Amazon. Like I realized that Amazon is the best platform. If you wanna do it fast, do it on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, interesting. Interesting. What was the biggest differences for you learning Amazon? Coming from 10 years, on eBay?

Kunal:

Am Amazon is the, the algorithm? You know, I think if you follow Amazon’s advice and the main thing probably really that’s is Helium 10. It’s the tools. Like without the tools, I won’t be in the position I’m in right now. But yeah, Amazon it is got more competitive over the years. So I think definitely understanding how the algorithm works using the right tools, having the right communities around you as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Now what are some strategies, let’s talk strategies for the rest of this episode here. What’s some strategies that you feel are a little bit unique that, that help you scale to 1 million so fast and help you build up these other brands? You know, like, I’m not talking about stuff like, oh, I tried to e keep my PPC a cost low, you know, like, everybody knows that. But like, are you doing anything unique? Whe whether it’s inventory, whether it’s PPC, whether it’s your listing optimization off Amazon traffic, what are some of the things that you’re doing that have given you the success that you’ve had?

Kunal:

For me it’s finding markets where, or areas where there’s regulation where a lot, basically you have to jump through more barriers because if you look at how many people are you know, selling on Amazon now it’s really difficult for new brands to come along, but if you jump more hoops, you know, then you can get to market that you can really scale up.

Bradley Sutton:

So like looking for where there’s like a lot of like government regulation or Amazon regulation where not just anybody can just launch a product, but they have to go through a process of like certificates and things like that.

Kunal:

Exactly, yeah, a combination. Because obviously Amazon have become a lot more strict, so go Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you find something, or like what’s your process of finding something like that? Like how do you know if, if it’s something that’s regulated or not?

Kunal:

It’s just time on Helium 10 is just, you know, research and then clicking stuff and then yeah, studying really. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

And then, so that’s how you get into a niche, like I guess the pet brand. And then are try and focus on like a really big hero product? Or are you trying to build, build these brands and have multiple products that are accessory of each accessories of each other, or that one person would buy multiple of?

Kunal:

The, the key at the start was trying to find a couple of hero products to just smash it. But now it’s all about adding accessories other products, you know, that people will buy in the, in the niche and expanding it that way. Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

We’ll get, get back to you with some more strategies soon, but Reggie, what about you after your exit? You start going digital nomad and started consulting for different brands. I’m assuming you didn’t start back something within three days, like Canal here, but did you end up starting your own brand again, or is everything you do now for other people?

Reggie:

Yeah, I think it’s important to always have at least one hand as an operator. So I, I have been selling since. Scaling on and off Amazon. And it’s definitely, the marketplace has definitely changed a lot over the, just over the last few years. But the principles are always the same. So I think as long as you’re kind of always learning the principles, learning those fundamentals and applying them, you know, the principles over tactics type of thing end up working out really, really well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And so what are some strategies that you’re utilizing either for, for stuff that you’ve done in your own brand or, or that you’ve seen work for companies that you’ve been working with? What are some unique strategies you can, you can share with the audience? Yeah,

Reggie:

I would say like and they sound very basic, but I’ve helped a lot of sellers at different levels from some of the biggest aggregators to, you know, some of the smallest people just getting started. And I would say at the smallest level, for people who aren’t profitable yet, I love right now the strategy of still sourcing things under their $2 per unit landed into Amazon. And there’s a lot of products you can find like that. It allows you to always be launching. It allows you to limit your downside risk. So I generally look for products that, that’s like my primary requirement. Can I get it landed into Amazon for less than $2? And then I’m hyper-focused on differentiation. So I have a course that’s literally like four and a half hours long, and all I do is talk product research, and half of it is differentiation.

Reggie:

And without having to take the course, one of the easiest ways to become a differentiation like master in my opinion, is suspend the weekend, going to Walmart, Target all your big box stores with like a notepad or your, your phone, look at every single product and ask yourself, what is this product doing better than the product next to it, above it from packaging, from whatever. And you’ll end up with a list, a really exhaustive list. So I generally look at a list like that. When I enter a niche, I really try to understand the niche. And it’s those, again, those principles, if you get into a niche like pet and you don’t, and you realize like, Hey, the pet category right now likes you know, more natural, organic, more single ingredient human grade you know, they, they refer to their dogs as fur babies.

Reggie:

You know, they, they generally like glucosamine, salmon, you know, these different types of things. If you really, really understand and know that, you know the buyer profile, you can create that differentiation that’s needed. You can pull that all the way through from your listing, your photos, your video, and have one cohesive, strong, differentiated product that really stands out. So on the lower end, it’s that low price point. And I’m always watching out for regardless of size variations. So if I’m looking at a, to get into a new category, I don’t want to go and be like, oh, I found the best differentiation, but the top seller can within a month launch that variation and, and, and kind of close me out. So I, I would make sure that it’s not a variation heavy niche or I’m one of the first ones to be able to kind of rank in that area and then defend myself by launching variations.

Reggie:

And then really quickly on the larger scale, very, very basic as well. But on the larger scale, some of the biggest brands their knowledge of Amazon is not that in depth as a seller that’s launched six or seven brands by himself and had to make, make, you know, make the rent work type of thing. So they’re not as in depth on the keywords. One of the things I love doing, and I use Helium 10 as well, is I reverse ASIN of course, easy when I reverse ASIN my competitors. But what I do differently than I fail most people do is I sync, I only reverse a in the top competitors one by one, so I don’t dump ’em in and get a quote unquote skewed average. I dump them in individually, and then I sort by organic position 1 through 30.

Reggie:

And what that does is for some of the top competitors, if I feel like I find, let’s say somebody not even the top competitor, let’s say page two, right? They’re, they’re not ranking they’re not taking up the majority of the sales, but they’re on page two and they’re getting sales, so they’re doing something right. But they probably aren’t, they probably weren’t first to market. Well, if I reverse ace in them and I see that they’re ranked position five for a keyword that all of their people aren’t, I actually can find these keywords early. And what ends up happening for big brands is they’re ranked for these unique keywords like skincare products for women that they didn’t even know about, but they actually can compete on because they have the reviews or or it’s a decor type of keyword, right? There’s all these different things. So finding those keywords on an individual reverse a basis has been extremely powerful, and it keeps me very focused when I’m providing consultations.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So now going back to this strategy about, you know, like looking at Walmart aisles and stuff now, do you pick up product first and then trying and find it in the stores to see what, what they’re doing to set themselves apart? Or are you just like, is that the origin of it? You just start walking down aisles and look for unique things? Chicken and egg here, which comes first? Yeah,

Reggie:

A little bit of both. Like when you’re, when you’re learning high ticket drop shipping, you’re doing the opposite end, which is normally like just seeing what, you know, like what’s your touch list type of thing. I think on Amazon it’s better, generally speaking, to go off of keywords, cuz it, you know, Amazon’s a search platform. So I go off of keyword keyword research and I let my keyword research identify like, okay, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a pet supplement for small dogs with hip problems. Well then maybe that’s, I’m gonna let that secret opportunity there. I’m gonna let that drive my product selection, my product sourcing my differentiation. And then from there I’ll let my differentiation map to the market. Like, I’m not gonna go and make a collapsible supplement bottle that makes no sense. I’m gonna go and source higher quality ingredients or, you know, look at that list that makes sense and apply that to that market.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Going back to Kunal, what are some other strategies you think that has helped you and also that other sellers you think should be utilizing perhaps more?

Kunal:

Yeah. A key, a key thing I do is actually, because I know the USA market is much bigger than the UK I’ll actually look at reviews and products that are doing really well there and bring them into the British market because nobody else is doing this. I found that, you know so you can look at alternative markets and bring in products. Cause one you already know if they’ve got good reviews. Cause we only launched products that are four star and above. We can already, without even launching the product in the market, we can see somebody else has done it, another international market and bring that in. So we eliminating all the risk.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Excellent. What else? What was the thought process behind only launching in the beginning in the UK as opposed to, like, from day one, going ahead and doing Germany and Italy and Spain and things like that?

Kunal:

I think the key is, is the language barrier. Now Germany’s a huge market, probably bigger than the uk but again, it’s language doing all your packaging in German, but it’s probably just a bit of an excuse. But now that I’ve dominated in the uk, it’s, it feels more comfortable to do the UK first. But yeah. But now it’s, it’s so easy to launch in Germany because use platforms like Fiverr people per hour at work and get German translators in.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I mean, what’s involved in it now that you’re getting into Germany and stuff? Like, what’s, are you having to open up a, from day one, like a VAT specifically for Germany, are you going to have to send all of your inventory over or will Amazon, you know, transfers your UK inventory? How does it work in 2023? Because I know, you know, Brexit, you know, years ago had an effect on things and, and I’ve never sold an either marketplace, so I’m just curious what the process is like.

Kunal:

Yeah, so it took Amazon years to catch up. So only about six months ago, they introduced a program where you could ship your stock back into Germany. But Amazon invited us guys to send the stock to the UK and they all do all the transfers for us. But yeah, we needed VAT registration. So we’ve, we’ve got that now. But yeah, we, all we need to do is send the stock to Amazon in the UK in London, and they all trans do all the transfers for us. Okay. But again, it took them two years, right? Two and a half years.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Reggie, going back to any other strategies you’d like to share with the audience?

Reggie:

Yeah actually, I think the state of e-commerce and online now I actually, one of the things I do is I have been doing a lot of off Amazon marketing. So when I, when I start up a brand, one of the things that I’ll immediately do is type my main keyword into Google with the word best. So best, you know, chef knife. And you literally just start going down Google, contacting those people, doing whatever you can to get either a back link you know, or traffic, an affiliate referral. And there’s different ways you can offer offer them to put that in there. It’s like, Hey, you know, are you a part of the affiliate program? If so, I’ll double, triple any commission you have. I will send all post-purchase traffic back to you, and if you make a video, all different things you can do to start building an offline presence which can only help your Amazon, especially now with PPC, it’s just pretty expensive.

Reggie:

So it’s a lot, it’s much more expensive to kind of like mess around and find out the hard way. Learning PPC in in a very, like PPC is just really hard to master. I feel like the way I’d like to explain it is like PPC is, you’re playing chess, like a hundred different chess board games all at once. That’s always changing all the time. So if it’s just your first product and you’re coming in and you only have $5,000, $3,000 or $10,000 and you need to do a $2,000 PPC launch and you don’t understand what’s going on, it becomes very expensive. I’m finding now taking a portion of that budget and allocating that early on to things that directly transfer to an Amazon listing, whether it’s a direct URL with existing foothold traffic. Very, very powerful. And I know Pinterest is something that is definitely on. More people’s minds now have a lot of traffic from Pinterest in the past pinning boards and repinning them. I have a website that does 30,000 page visits a month, and I get a lot of that from Pinterest repinning over and over again.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now something I asked guests, you know, around this year is like, Hey, what are you doing to stay mentally, physically healthy? You know, I say that, and these guys saw me eating a piece of pizza right before I started recording. I’ll call myself out. It wasn’t my choice, but that was what the lunch I was handed. But like, you know, hobbies and, and just physical, physical you know, fitness routine and adult mental health routine. You do anything that you can share? Reggie

Reggie:

I feel like I’ve been through a little bit of the gamut. For me, I realized like after like the third or fourth product failure and like I really hit a really low point, and I realized it’s actually not my Amazon knowledge that’s getting in the way. It’s myself. It’s how I structure my routines, everything. So I started with just like motivational playlists. So I have some motivational playlists that I started with all the way to like, meditation. And then I actually created a journal. It’s just a KDP journal. And journaling, finding some, some kind of iterative process where you’re reflecting some kind of gratitude process. Some kind of like, Hey, let me prioritize my actions for the day. And then let me reflect on those actions, whether it’s people I’ve came across emotions I’ve felt. So journaling’s really, really helped me. What

Bradley Sutton:

What about you Kunal? Hobbies or fitness fitness routines? I think,

Kunal:

Yeah, one, one of the fundamental shifts I’ve had is changing my training in the morning to now afternoon, because I spend all my days just launching products, and it’s quite intense, right? So now, now what I do at one o’clock, I switch off and I go to the gym for a couple of hours and then I get back to work again. But it’s just changing from the morning to the afternoon. And like Reggie said, it’s just the reflection piece for me. It’s like every time I, I always get caught up in the chase of wanting more and more and more and then I have to take a step back and say, actually, what am I doing this for? And it’s for freedom for my family, for me. So it’s always, it is just taking 10-15 minutes a day just sitting down and reflecting on life.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. All right, Reggie, if people wanna find you on the interwebs how can they find you out there?

Reggie:

Sure, yeah. Just type in my name, reggieyoung.com. You can find everything there. Course material and exit advice if you’re looking for it.

Bradley Sutton:

And Kunal like, you don’t have to give information if you don’t want to, but like, if people wanted to reach out to you, LinkedIn?

Kunal:

Linkedin’s best one Kunal Dattani also known as the Lifestyle Entrepreneur.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, Reggie and and Canal thank you for being part of the Sirius Sellers Club. If there’s any Helium 10 members out there who have not even have no idea what I’m talking about, like if you’ve been selling for a year or more and are doing $500,000 of revenue per year, that means you’re eligible to join this exclusive club. So make sure to reach out to customer support to get the link to join. And, you know, it’s completely free to be part of there, but we have a community. We have weekly trainings that we do and sometimes networking. And it’s a cool small group to be in where, you know, you don’t have to worry about there being a bunch of service providers trying to sell you things. It’s just other sellers just like you. So if you’re a Helium 10 member, make sure to join our Serious Sellers Club Facebook group. Reggie, Kunal, thank you so much for joining, and I’d love to reach out to you guys sometime next year and, and see see where you guys are at.

Reggie:

Thank you for having us. Appreciate it.

Kunal:

Thanks for having us.

Helium 10 Buzz 5/17/23: Amazon Account Re-Verification | Shein Marketplace | Amazon Using A.I.

In this episode, we cover the latest news in the Amazon industry, Shein’s impact on retail platforms, and diving into a most requested Insights Dashboard feature that’s now available.

#453 – Amazon Brand Story, A+ Content & Photography Strategies

In episode 453 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley invites a dynamic duo married couple from AMZ One Step, Saddam and Tayyaba. They run an A-Z Amazon agency that has almost 200 employees, with specialties in Amazon Photography and Listing Optimization.

In the episode they discuss best practices for A+ Content, how to utilize the Amazon Brand Story, how using a photography studio in China can be beneficial, how to use different Artificial Intelligence tools, and more!

In episode 453 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley Saddam, and Tayyaba discuss:

• 02:25 – Tayyaba’s Backstory
• 06:20 – Saddam’s Opinions On The Biggest Amazon Changes.
• 08:13 – What is the Amazon Brand Story?
• 08:40 – The Importance of Adds-To-Cart and Off-Amazon Traffic
• 11:58 – Should Every Listing Have Brand Story?
• 12:40 – Tayyaba’s A+ Content Project for Project 5K
• 17:13 – Chinese Photo Studio With All Nationalities’ Models
• 18:35 – How Do You Plan An A+ Content Refresh?
• 20:45 – Does Brand Story Always Need Something About the Owners?
• 23:00 – Using AI and ChatGPT To Help Amazon Sellers
• 25:30 – Image AI App Limitations
• 28:00 – What Should Sellers Be Doing in 2023 For Branding
• 31:25 – Thirty Second Tip on ChatGPT and A+ Content
• 33:15 – How to Contact Saddam and Tayyaba

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a couple back on the show who run an agency with over 150 employees, and they’re gonna be talking about a lot of topics, including brand story, A+ Content, ChatGPT and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you wanna see how your listing or maybe competitor’s listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you wanna compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other. Maybe you wanna see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings. You can do that and more with the Helium 10 Tool Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And back for the third time with somebody different. This time we’ve got Saddam here from AMZ One Step on the show. Now this is, like I said, his third time. Now, the very first time he was on the episode he came along with his sister, Lailama, and then the second time he came on with his business partner, Kamal. And now I was like, you know what? Let’s try something different. Let’s go ahead and bring you on with your wife/employee Tayyaba here. So welcome Saddam and Tayyaba.

Tayyaba:

Hi.

Saddam:

Thank you for being here. Thanks again for having me for the third time. I keep switching partners. So this one–

Bradley Sutton:

He’s talking about partner, Tayyaba’s, like look at like what I keep switching partner.

Saddam:

Partner from a different aspect. Yes, my partner, my family, of course, with my business partner.

Bradley Sutton:

Podcast partner, yes.

Saddam:

Yeah. Thank the company partner. Yep. Partner for life.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, he saved himself on that one. Look at that romantic gesture right there. All right. Now Saddam, you know, we’ve been through your backstory, you know, before, but maybe just a little bit. Since Tayyaba, this is your first time on the show. Were you born and raised in Canada or Pakistan?

Tayyaba:

I would say so I was born in Pakistan. And I came to Canada when I was about eight. I’d say I was raised in Canada, in Toronto.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, did you go to university there in Toronto?

Tayyaba:

I did. I went to University of Guelph. I got a degree that had nothing to do with engineering.

Bradley Sutton:

Did you say Guelph?

Tayyaba:

Guelph.

Bradley Sutton:

Guelph. Okay. I was about to say like, wow, that’s an amazing university name that I went to the University of Wealth, because that’s just what, okay. Guelph. Okay. And what were you studying there? Yeah,

Tayyaba:

I was studying biomedical engineering is what I did. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Good grief. Okay. Crazy.

Tayyaba:

And then it sounds so far off, right? Yeah. Like how did you go from biomedical engineering to marketing and creative leading? But I think anybody who knows me as a person would understand. I’ve always been a very creative person. So that transition just made sense.

Bradley Sutton:

Outta curiosity, like after you got married, like, or even before you got married, was it like determine, hey, maybe you should, you know, come help with the family business? I guess you can almost call it, or cuz you’re there. Now, obviously, I know you’re, you’re playing a role and we’re, we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about that today. But, but wh where did that come up in the discussions? Because I think, I think that’s always a thing when, when I invite married couples on the show is like, who are in business together, it’s always a thing like, oh, is this gonna work out? Or, so when did you g how did you guys come to the conclusion, Hey why don’t you help out with the business?

Tayyaba:

I think some recruiting attempts were made before. Could you admit to that a little bit? Before we got married, it’s a creative agency, right? So I think maybe he saw something at that point I wasn’t really considering switching fields entirely and committing to it. After we got married though there was this convenient position open for a creative lead. It wasn’t even called that at the time. They just basically were really, I think busy and backlogged and at the time it seemed like a perfect fit. So it basically, the job description was product research and analysis of, you know, like the market and coming up with a visual plan of what those seven images would look like for a client. So they needed somebody to basically create like that creative foundation for the photographer, videographer and the designers.

Tayyaba:

And that was something, product research is something that I had experience in. Just any time really that I think I got through my engineering degree was we had semester long design work projects. And so that required a lot of research in the initial phases, iterations. You obviously had to market the product to a certain degree. So I enjoyed all of those aspects and it made sense to me. But really I was drawn to, I had knew nothing about the Amazon space and really I was just drawn to this idea of creative direction and selling a product in seven images. What’s the best way to do that? How is everybody doing that? And how can we do it better and differently?

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Cool. And everything been cool so far? Having your husband has also your boss too?

Tayyaba:

A little bit. We work I think if somebody asks how it works, we work pretty. Like you’re not really involved in my team I would say.

Saddam:

Yeah. Now she manages that team. Yeah. And yeah, there’s layers. So we have the head of ops who’s kind of like her manager, so I tend to take the step back and

Tayyaba:

Yeah. But it was amazing cuz I had an Amazon expert basically at my fingertips. I could get into the Amazon space, so it was a huge benefit to have.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Now Saddam, you know, speaking of the company you guys acquired another agency last year, like how many, you know, worldwide, how many employees are, are you up to now?

Saddam:

So I’ve been saying one 50 and then my HR person reached out to me saying correct yourself. It’s 175 ish. So that’s where we are. I think we are like, there’s still so much growth happening since Q4, like we’ve just been playing catch up with, with the new acquisition and just the uptick from Q4. So I believe by end of the summer we should be around 200.

Bradley Sutton:

The last time you’re on the podcast, I would say is probably early 2022 or something. But in the last year, like what are some big changes that you’ve seen? They don’t have to be negative, you know, like maybe it’s positive, like maybe it’s the addition of, for example, Search Query Performance, you know, wasn’t even a thing, you know, the last time you’re on the, the podcast and, and there’s a lot of things in Amazon advertising that has been added. On the flip side, there’s been some inventory issues, you know, like, like bidding for inventory placement and, and trying to maximize your space that, that Amazon made a a, a big change on. But like, what are some of these changes that, that you’ve seen that you know are affecting a lot of your customers in a positive or or negative way?

Saddam:

Yeah, so what we’ve been noticing is Amazon I think has finally realized that their interaction with the customers on the platform was very transactional. You know, customers would come on the platform, search for the product check out, and that’s it. Right now what they’re trying to do is give a voice a platform to the brand so that they can speak about some of their uniqueness, some of their values and really harness a community. And what I mean by that is you look at brand registry, you know, you talked about brand analytics just a few features added to that brand story was a really good one that got added. A+ Premium Content. Amazon Post is now slowly getting that momentum, sustainability badges, you know, there’s small business badges. So all these things, what they speak about is the landscape now is promoting a lot more diversity in terms of brands. So now you don’t just have those high reputation brands. And then the other brands are pretty much like products. Now they’re giving them a place to voice what they represent. And I think it’s heading in a really good direction where there’s gonna be a lot more engagement within the platform with customers engaging with the brands.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Let’s talk about one of those things. You know, that you mentioned brand story cuz that’s the one that I’m probably least experienced with. I’m not sure, but I think I’m, I don’t even know if I have brand story set up, but what’s the difference between brand story and A+ Content? Cuz you mentioned both of those things. So e either of you can, can answer that.

Saddam:

Yeah. Okay. I can take that one. So brand story is, it comes under the, from the brand section. So you do need to be brand registered for it. And think of it like a mini storefront within your product page. So there’s two purposes it has. First one is people now know that factory in China, that it’s a cookie cutter method, right? People are just sourcing from China and putting it on Amazon. They want to hear more from who the founders are, what the company represents. So within the brand story when you see the start, you see a carousel display and people usually talk about either the brand itself, the mission or core values, or they have like a face to the brand. So who’s behind that? Who’s the founder, what do they represent, who do they speak to, who’s their community? So that way there’s a lot more engagement from customers and then just educating them about some of the other products within that category. So as I mentioned, it’s like a mini storefront where you have, you know, carousel display with hyperlinks and people can click on different products and they can shop around from your brand. They’re not just restricted to just the product listing. So if you can get traffic to your listing, there’s a really good opportunity there to do some cross setting upsetting.

Bradley Sutton:

So then the brand story, isn’t there a part of the listing itself that has a brand story? Like isn’t it above the A+ Content? Or I’m thinking of something different, maybe

Saddam:

It is, yeah. Yeah. So from the brand would typically appear above the product description. And I mentioned on desktop, it’s more, I guess for mobile it’s optimized more for mobile, where you have the carousel display, and we know carousels work really well just by looking at Instagram and LinkedIn, right? So basically it would appear from the brand, it’s like a, a sideway display, it’s like a slider. And from the examples that we’ve seen and that we’ve done with the clients, we mostly either focus on the face behind the, the organization or the company values, and then it goes straight into a few products, like the top products within each category.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now I’m just like at a loss here of where to find this. You said it’s under brand like hold on, let me share my screen here. But like, where do I go even to find this? I’m under the brand page here.

Saddam:

Oh, right, okay. So and you don’t have that on your listing yet, right? Sorry.

Bradley Sutton:

I don’t think so. Like, like, unless, you know, a lot of people are in these accounts. But it could be that I’m not, so like, is it like I know where the A+ Plus content manager is? Yeah, you can, and then here’s brands.

Saddam:

Okay. So go to A+ Content manager.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I was probably in the wrong place then. All right.

Saddam:

Okay. And so if you do,

Bradley Sutton:

Is it here? Start creating. Okay, so I hit start creating a plus. Oh, there it is right there. Okay,

Saddam:

So you see brand story now there it is, there’s gonna be an additional option that would show up for some people that have access to Premium A+ Content. We can talk about the eligibility in in a second, but this is where you start creating that brand story.

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, okay. All right. Cool. All right, good. Well, you see, like I, there’s so much stuff I should be doing on my own accounts, but you know, since I only have like an hour to spend a week, I haven’t done it as much now. Yeah. I’m definitely going to look into that more So is that kind of like, do you o when you guys offer that service, do you offer it separate or it’s always like part of the package of creating your A+ Content and this, like, do you suggest always doing both? Or is there a case where you would just say, Hey, you know, somebody should just go with the brand story or somebody should just go with the a plus content?

Saddam:

Yeah, really good question. Usually we do it separate because you just need one brand story, either per the, the entire storefront or per category, you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, so it populates to your other products in that brand then.

Saddam:

Exactly. And that one brand story can just go on all your listings, essentially.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. Good to know. All right. Now Tayyaba, but before you fall asleep over there let, let’s switch to you. You know, speaking of a plus content, you know, we actually gave AMZ One Step a project, and we’re gonna make a blog on it later on. But you, we had a product under Project 5K that people know about on the podcast. It was like a, kind of like a Charcuterie Board, I don’t even know how to pronounce it, Charcuterie Board. And, and we wanted to kind of like highlight how we would use your studio in China, because that’s, that’s a lot of thing that peoples, I can’t even see, I can’t even speak English. These things that people out there, you know, have always worried about, like, oh, okay, hey, I’m making my product in China, but you know, I live in Canada, I live in the United States, and then man, you know, to have to produce one right away and then like air ship it all the way to AMZ One Step in Canada or my X, Y, Z you know photo studio in the us and then, you know, pay somebody $50 an hour to, you know, to do it.

Bradley Sutton:

Like, it’s gonna be expensive and, you know, too expensive and things like that. And then it’s gonna take forever. Might get lost in customs, but it’s like, hey, if you’re producing your, your product in China, you want to, you know, get some fast turnarounds so you can work in your listing. Why not use a photo studio word that they just send it in one day, probably costs like $10 to, to send. And so we’re like, Hey, let’s try the AMZ one step studio, and then let’s use this opportunity since this was already a product we didn’t need necessarily new images, but you know what, let’s refresh the images and let’s make some A+ Content. So what was I, I believe that was given to your, your team to do so, like how do you, what was your mindset like in tackling it when you looked at the listing and then you’re like, all right, this is the kind of direction we should go, because whether somebody uses you guys or not, I think whatever your mindset was is probably, you know, best practice. So, go ahead.

Tayyaba:

It initially starts with just project research. So we wanted to basically look at what features are being highlighted. There was about a few images, there wasn’t seven, from what I remember, this was quite a while ago. But one of the biggest things was this was not just a regular Charcuterie Board. This was an extra large something like 30 inches across. So already that’s niche, right? Warns people use in a social setting. And if something was extra large it would be used to let’s say in birthday parties or any hosting event where you’re serving more than a few people. So the biggest thing was for lifestyle, we already knew that we wanted to showcase that somehow a hosting social setting. And when we looked at the competitors and did the competitor analysis what we found was there was so many complaints about sizing, whether it basically, it seemed to me that there was miscommunication.

Tayyaba:

They either were expecting it to be one size and it just wasn’t. So we knew that we had to communicate the size of this effectively which immediately meant you guys had a model in the project. And so what we did was we got pictures of the model to hold up the board, and you had a visual reference of how tall an average woman would be versus the dimensions listed, because that alone just let’s say a white background shoot that you would’ve done wouldn’t have been enough because people can’t visualize 30 inches across, right? So that was one approach that we had. Another complaint that we found when we did the competitor analysis was quality was something that was a huge complaint. People were complaining about warping as well as it just not being up to par. And so, because this was something that was a hundred percent natural bamboo, we really wanted to emphasize that. And so we dedicated an entire slide just showcasing the quality, where it was made from, and emphasizing that this really was a high quality product.

Saddam:

I think for the most part what I looked at in the project was the focus was more so the way we approach these projects now Bradley, is we centered around less text and more visual you know, aspect of it. So whether it was calling out sustainability or the dimensions or any of the other ones, I know it was a while back we. Just focus it more on how to communicate that message visually as opposed to just putting so much text. And you mentioned a plus content, the previous A+ Content, not the premium one was so bad because when you’re going on mobile, there’s so much text just cluttered and it just creates a really bad shopping experience for people.

Bradley Sutton:

Lemme show some pictures. I can actually show some that you guys did. You just to give people an idea of the A+ Content. And now the first thing that people notice is like, wait a minute, I thought you just said this was in your Chinese photo studio. This person does not look Chinese. So like, you have like western looking models, I guess if people require that.

Saddam:

We do. And we always make a mention of that whenever we jump on calls, I know people get uneasy asking me that question because I’m not Western, or I’m not Caucasian, but by the way, before you have any doubts, I know this is a question elephant in the room. The models that we have in China or Bali, they’re all Caucasian, or at least we can get models from different demographics depending on your product.

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe I want an African American looking individual, maybe I want, you know, somebody that looks European or, you know, you might not have every single nationality represented, but enough that usually somebody people would get what the vibe that they’re looking for, right?

Saddam:

Yeah. And like beauty and skincare category, sometimes we get multiple models. I know we often get like, weird requests, you know, we want a model without teeth cuz it’s a dental product. So then we have to like, reach out to agencies, but we can always find a model that’s never been an issue.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Cool. Cool. Oh, well what else about you just in general let’s say somebody is already has a plus content and they just wanna update it or, or refresh it. Like are you looking at their, the reviews? Are you looking at their conversion rate or, or how do you decide how to tackle? Because it’s kind of a big project, you know, like to do a full photo shoot, like just looking at these images, I was like, this is not something that, oh, let’s just, you know, snap some pictures here in an hour. I mean, it takes planning, it takes, you know, renting of a space, you know, potentially, so you gotta kind of get it right. So like how do you optimize or what kind of things are you, are you thinking of that you haven’t mentioned already?

Saddam:

So, whenever we look at A+ Content that are already existing, everything has to be purpose driven. We don’t just do it because the listing, it doesn’t look pretty and we want to give it like a revamp. So we look at starting with the images and then if there’s a video there are all the features covered. Have we done a good job with covering everything that needs to be communicated to the buyer? If not, what are some of those components? Maybe it’s like extra details. Usually we find this with tech products, they’re so much information that sometimes it’s preferred not to put them in images and then use a plus content for that matter. Second thing is we look at the q and a section and that’s where the burning questions come up.

Saddam:

And we’re again, with a plus premium content, which maybe we’ll discuss in a bit. There’s now an FAQ model or Q and A module that we can leverage. But those burning questions also need to be answered. And then it all comes down to, do we have more products? Are there more in our product line that we need to talk about? If yes, this is an excellent cross setting opportunity, we can create like a comparison chart where people get educated. Maybe this is not the right headphone for you, but we have something else that has a better noise cancellation function. So it’s stuff like these, and as I mentioned, you know, the whole platform is evolving to create brand communities. So any opportunity we get to talk about the brand and if, you know, the brand itself wants to talk about it and it’s not highlighted in the A+ Content section, we’ll make a mention of that.

Bradley Sutton:

Back to the brand story, now that we kind of got the A+ Content, what if there’s a case where there’s not really some cool story about the founders of the company, or maybe I just wanna stay incognito, you know, like I don’t wanna put that front and center. Like how would you only use brand story to, to, to highlight, you know, some, some cool thing about the owners or about their brand purpose or something? Or is there something else that would go in that section so as not to waste it?

Saddam:

Okay, I’ll tell you a really good story. Okay. So last year I was looking for a supplement company cuz I didn’t want to go out and shop for it. And I came across my protein. I love the brand. I order all my supplements from there. And as I was shopping from there, their prices was were really good. Their product mix was re really good. But then I landed on their sustainability page where they talked about reducing their carbon footprint in the world. And even though I’m not crazy about sustainability, what that showed me is they care and they listen to their customers and they made an effort to solve that issue for them. Right. So if you don’t have a face, if you don’t have anything extraordinary in your story, what do you represent? What are some of the core values that are important to you? Because only then can you connect with your customers. Yeah. Are you a Gen Z that wants to have like a sustainable product line? If yes, talk about that in your brand story. So whatever’s important to you ultimately becomes important to your customers. And you just wanna speak about that. And this is the perfect placement to talk about some of those things.

Bradley Sutton:

As far as in the work sense, how are you using either ChatGPT, Midjourney, or anything like that?

Tayyaba:

Sure. I can start with Midjourney. So that is because it’s probably the least hopeful looking right now. We’ve tried a few AI image generation websites and none of them have really proved to be kind of effective in getting that workout. It’s actually just easier to do the image plan and get the photographer to shoot it. You’ll get an accurate image that you want. But when it comes to ChatGPT, it’s a very powerful tool. So we use it to do a lot of our automation is what we’re finding that it helps with. Will it do the product research for you? Absolutely not. You’re still going to need those Helium 10 tools. You’re still gonna need Xray. You’re still going to be using Cerebroo to find those keywords. And you’re still gonna be, it’s very powerful to use the image analyzer, right?

Tayyaba:

The Listing Analyzer. And so what you can do is you can use those tools to feed it information and the output that it will give you will be entirely based on the information that you feed it. And so when it conducts product research, the product research that it can conduct is those review insights that you’re giving it. And it can very quickly analyze 1000 reviews, something that would take a human being so much time to do, to look through all of those reviews, figure out the patterns, what are the pain points, what are the benefits, how are customers using this instead, you can just use a Helium 10 tool, upload that listing, ask it a bunch of questions that would be relevant to your product research and it can do that for you within a matter of seconds.

Bradley Sutton:

Saddam, how about you? You have any other use cases for AI in the company you can talk about?

Saddam:

Yeah, I think we used Stockimg, we used Pebblely or something. We used Midjourney. They was right for the most part. You know, we tried giving it prompts, but the text to visual prompts, they’re still trying to figure it out. So if you say that I want like an image of maybe an office product with office supplies, it’s gonna create some random weird looking pens and pencils. So it’s getting there, it’s really exciting to see that the, all the stuff that you can do with it, but it’s not there yet. And right now we’re just kind of leading a department so that we’re ahead of the curve and we know what’s going on in that world with the content. Yes, we’ve seen that where we’ve done a lot of automation. So where previously a lot of the time it would take maybe four or five hours of just research. Now it’s shortened that to half an hour, one hour just because we can just feed it that. And I’m still, I haven’t tried out the new tool from Helium 10. I think you guys just came out with one, so maybe that’s like connected somehow with all the backend stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

Are there any image AI’s out there where you can take like, like a picture of an actual product and then do what people, you know, do now is like Photoshop it into lifestyle images or even create lifestyle images from scratch? Or it’s still too like random, like it has to be completely generic. Can you like say, Hey, here’s a picture of this water bottle, you know show it of a woman age 35 inside of a kitchen preparing their kids’ meal, or just some random thing, like is there anything that will then put it in her hands or anything like that? Or you don’t know of anything like that?

Tayyaba:

So of the ones that we’ve tried, there’s stock stock stock img, and that one, basically the premise of it is that you can give it an AI prompt and it will generate a stock image for you. Now, it’s really not the best when it comes to lifestyle, including models, models and hands. I think AI is notorious for being awful at generating accurate hands. And God forbid you ask it to hold something, it would be 12 fingers. But even the simpler ones, right? Like, let’s say infographics is what we started off with. What if we do an amazing sh shot of this water bottle in a mountain ocean scene? Right? Even that with with a website like Pebblely it’s, it’s still a bit struggle of a struggle to get that done effectively and get it done to the level and the extent that our graphic designers would be able to do it.

Saddam:

And we’ll, we’ll send you that name cuz we’re struggling with it, but it’s a good one to start with. Yeah. So if your product comes under the beauty category, skincare supplements, hey, you can bust out like five, six good images with that. Yeah. Yeah. Because what it’ll, it’ll do is take a picture of the product, it will cut it out, put it on like a, remove the background, and then you can give it prompts like let’s say you know, place it on a kitchen counter with flat laid with, let’s say if it’s a supplement for, turmeric, you can put, you know, ar around turmeric or ginger and it will create something really nice for you. But again, with models, it kind of struggles. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Okay. Well, who knows maybe the technology will go there in one day, but maybe just in general, we, we talked about some specific strategies, which I think is important, but, you know, we’re in 2023 as we mentioned, things change every year. Your guys, while you are A to Z your specialty is definitely talking about creatives. And, you know, be it images, be it videos et cetera. What should you know, top two or top three things that, that sellers should be looking at when they’re thinking about, all right, this is gonna be my strategy for my creatives for the next year or so.

Saddam:

If it’s the top two approaches, right? So first of all, we talked about it harnessing a community. Think of your brand as a person, what kind of voice does it need to have? And then your whole creatives approach should be around that in order to speak to your desired customer. Okay? So take advantage of showcasing yourself as a brand as opposed to a product that that’s an outdated strategy. You’re not gonna have much chance of success. And then the other thing is don’t treat your creatives as just a one-time task. Once you create it, once you have images ready, once you have title ready, that’s half the job split testing and optimize, you gotta keep going back to the drawing board. Use helium ten’s audience split test your main image split test your title do it on Amazon as well with manage my experiments because you need to understand your opinion and my opinion can vary drastically, right? Because creatives is very subjective, but that does not mean that the market has to agree with either of our opinions. It has to come from data. So everything that you need to do has to be consciously driven by data.

Tayyaba:

So one approach that we have when we are deciding about how to showcase a feature in an image is, like you said, like you mentioned before, nobody is reading text anymore. And so the more that you can reduce text, the better and how you want to convey the feature has to be seen immediately when you look at the image. If I were to cover all of the text, am I being sold on that feature? Does it make, still make sense to me? Is am I still getting that message? And if those answers are yes, then you’re on the right track for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. This has been great information. You know, it’s been fun hanging out with you guys at, you know, all the way from your wedding. Now at the Sell and Scale, Prosper Shows there’s a video that came out, all of us dance, dancing on the dance floor a little bit in the Helium 10 Instagram story yesterday. I don’t know if you I don’t know if you saw that but maybe there’s a chance for us to hang out again in the future. Hopefully. I’ve been trying to convince Saddam and Tayyaba to go to the Bali Mastermind. So I’m going to this Mastermind, it’s not by Helium 10, but I’m, I’m attending there and I’m speaking there. It’s in June. I think it’s June 18th to 22nd. So there’s a chance that you can meet this dynamic duo in person as well. But if you guys want more information a link to go to that event is at h10.me/bali. So Saddam, and I’m putting you on the spot in there. Can we party again and can you show me those dance moves from your wedding that we were looking at in person? Again,

Saddam:

We would love to, you know, any chance we fell in love with Bali last year. Yeah. And because with Kenji’s team, I think we’ll be going there this year for sure. Right. We just haven’t nailed down the dates, but that’s in the plans. I know you mentioned it once and I’m, I’m really interested. We just have like a new villa there too now, so I’d love to kind of visit that. But yeah, for sure if we’re going, we’ll hang out at our villa. We’ll party there. I’ll show you some dance moves. How about that?

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s do it. Let’s do it. We’ll bring the whole crew back. I think your sisters might be upset if you, if you don’t take them to to Bali again, Lailama’s definitely interested in going to, so I’ll put in a good word for them. All right now, now it’s the time of the show where we always ask our guests for like a our 30-second tip or 60-second tip, something that’s actionable for our user’s table. We’ll start with you.

Tayyaba:

Sure. so if anybody and everybody who is not using ChatGPT should definitely be using ChatGPT. But the thing about ChatGPT is you have to treat it like it is the smartest child in the world. And so anytime you are asking a question, you need to understand what you’re not asking yet. And a great follow up prompt that you can give ChatGPT is what assumptions were made here and, and, or you can ask it what questions am I not asking that I should be asking? And you will get a plethora of information that might have completely gone over your head.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Saddam.

Saddam:

Yeah, if you’re like Bradley because we saw his screen share and you don’t have access to A+ Premium Content, the eligibility criteria we know brand registry, you have to have brand story on all ASINs and then 15 brand A+ Content applications approved. The trick is you don’t need 15 a plus contents on different 15 different listings. You can just create iterations of the same A+ Content and do it for just that one listing if you have just one product and you’ll be eligible for A+ Premium Content.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Excellent tips. Thank you so much. Now how can people reach out to you guys, whether, you know, it’s for to help with photo studio stuff or listing optimization? Remember guys, you know, like I, I don’t recommend people I don’t use myself and, and for multiple accounts I’ve used AMZ One Step over the last couple of years. So I highly recommend them. How can they find you guys on the interwebs? Or by the way, they might ask you for wedding planning and dance choreography a advice as well. So what’s the contact information.

Saddam:

Sounds good. No, and thanks for all the referrals and stuff. So our website, amzonestep.com or you can just send us an email at info@amzonestep.com or you can find us on any of the social media platforms, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, just AMZ One Step and you’ll be able to see that.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Happy belated one year anniversary and hope to see you guys sometime this year. Thank you.

Saddam:

Thank you.

Tayyaba:

Thank you, Bradley.

Saddam:

Hope I see you in that same outfit. So I’m looking forward to that.

#452 – The Ups & Downs of Million Dollar Amazon Sellers

In episode #452 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Andrew Engle and Huy Nguyen are back. They are 7 figure sellers, but had very different 2022’s. One was up about a million while the other was down a million. We discuss in this episode how they dealt with their wins and losses, as well as a wide range of their strategies including PPC, Insert cards, credit card hacks, ChatGPT, and more.

In episode 452 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Huy, and Andrew discuss:

• 01:34 – Links to Andrew’s and Huy’s Backstory Episodes
• 02:20 – How was Andrew’s 2022 in Sales? 
• 03:50 – Andrew’s one Order of 250 Units!
• 04:46 – Huy’s Sales Have Gone Down
• 08:41 – How Do You Deal With a $1 Million Decrease In Sales?
• 11:58 – Andrew Increased from 16 to 60 SKUs in a Year.
• 15:50 – Huy is Consolidating Marketplaces.
• 19:12 – Insert Card ard QR Code Strategy.
• 24:02 – Andrew’s PPC Strategies.
• 28:45 – Success with Google and Bing Ads.
• 30:57 – Huy’s Suggestions for Using ChatGPT
• 33:08 – Credit Card Hacks
• 36:11 – Helium 10 Party at Dave & Busters

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a couple Elite Amazon sellers who do millions a year on Amazon, and they’re gonna talk about not just their wins, but also they’re gonna get honest about their losses over the last year and give us some of their top strategies. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got two serious sellers here, two elite sellers who are no stranger to the podcast. We’ve had them on here before, Andrew, and Huy, how’s it going?

Huy:

Going good.

Andrew:

Going good.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Now, let me give you guys we’re not gonna go too much into their backstory because they’ve been on the podcast before. So if you wanna get Andrew’s backstory, guys, go to episode 319. I believe you can do that at h10.me/319. But it was an episode where we had Andrew and his brother on talking about their, their journey as brothers starting Amazon Business. And Huy has been on a couple times. The last time we was on was episode 305. He did an episode with Ankit. They talked about, you know, to together achieving over 20 million in sales between the the two of them. And his original backstory episode was, I believe, let’s see, 190. So if you wanna find out Huy’s superhero origin story, make, make sure to check out episode one 90.

Bradley Sutton:

But we’re not gonna go, like I said, too much into the backstory today because we just wanna see what these guys have been up to. So, first of all Andrew you know, this is the first time I’m talking to you in depth in 2023. How did your 2022 end, what was your wins and losses and, and what, like, how, how do your sales do? So in 2021, I’m looking at your original episode, I believe either you or you and your brother did about 1.6 million total. Was that just you or was that you and your brother together?

Andrew:

So that was just me. I can’t remember what my brother did that year, but yeah, that was just me that year for 2022. Yeah, for all through 2022 I did really good. I think I was, I think my goal was to get 3 million. I thought I was gonna get 3 million in 2022, but I only ended up at 2.4 still.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, yeah, you suck. That’s terrible. It’s like 2.4 million. What the heck?

Andrew:

I’ve still gotta have goals. But yeah, some of that was, I think coming off of Covid when everything started to open back up again, a lot of my stuff is industrial supplies, so things you could get at Home Depot or Lowe’s. So I feel like more people went to, you know, get that online there. And then I also got some more competitors that took a little bit of market share. So I think a little bit of combination of those two things. But for 2023 everything looks good. I’m, I’m 40% year over year, according to Helium 10. So that’s, that’s good. So kinda starting off 2023 pretty good.

Bradley Sutton:

And, and what were you telling me? Like when, when we were we were just chatting here before, before we got started, you just saw an order go through your FBA for 250 units of one, one product.

Andrew:

Yes. 250 units of, I like pulled up Helium 10. I saw a huge, like, spike. I’m like, oh, what was that? And just going through and 250 units of one product is,

Bradley Sutton:

Is that normal? Like, do you have a product that, that people buy in bulk a lot, or this is just like, has never, ever happened before?

Andrew:

Sometimes I get bulk orders, so I have, I’ll sell like, individual units and then I’ll sell like case packs of like, you know, 150 of those units, or like a hundred pack of of those units On this one, I, I don’t have a case pack like that. But yeah, sometimes I do get bigger orders but not, I, I would say not very often, maybe like once a month or something.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Huy, I forgot what you were at in 2021. I think you were around like four or 5 million or, or so or what was your 2021, 2 years ago?

Huy:

Yeah, we were around that mark.

Bradley Sutton:

And how was last year up or down?

Huy:

I can say last year was down, so, you know, I’ll be one of those guests on your, on your your podcast that we’ll share it kind of like the downs. You know, I, I

Bradley Sutton:

Like that we always keep it real here, you know, not every,

Huy:

Everything

Bradley Sutton:

I tell Amazon’s not rainbows and unicorns every 365 days a year. So, so was it down just, you know, due to market, did you, did you like, you know, maybe lose a little focus and, and, and concentrate on some other things? Or just the natural cycle of your products? What do you think happened?

Huy:

Yeah, so we saw in the supplements category, and one of the big things that happened for us is during Covid, right? A lot of things you know, weren’t available supply chain issues as well. So we did overorder significantly just because I think that everybody was just, we had problems you know, with supply chain, we had our manufacturers put out really long lead times. And on top of that, I think that the biggest thing was, you know, like if people weren’t used to ordering online, then now everybody was ordering online, right? So you saw a lot of national brands, a lot of big big brands that are out there. They shifted a lot of their revenue dollars from retail directly into online. And then, you know, you started to see as well, Amazon make a significant push into advertising as well into search advertising.

Huy:

And you can see, you know, like if you look at their financials it became a massive part of their business. So a few years back, people didn’t really look at Amazon as being you know, a leader in the online advertising space, but you saw a lot of brands that were, you know, that had just added Amazon as a channel or weren’t necessarily concentrating on Amazon as a channel start to focus more on Amazon and start to push more of their marketing dollars towards that. And so, you know, like small businesses such as ourselves you know, we’ve been on Amazon for 10, 11 plus years and we’ve had the luxury of not having a tremendous amount of competition come in from, you know, some of the more traditional brands. People were focusing on it. They knew that they had some you know, they knew they had customers there.

Huy:

But then that, I think that a lot of people started to push much heavy, much more heavily into Amazon because they knew that’s where their customers were buying. And and so, yeah, like a lot of people, a lot of the brands that we were competing against drop prices you know, the cost of advertising became significantly higher and there was just much more competition. We’re already in a competitive space to begin with. So I think that, you know, we’ve been playing catch up. We’re not a lowcost leader and we generally don’t wanna play in that game. We’re on the higher end. And so I think that it’s difficult sometimes when we look at our, you know, our cost per click and just our you know, cost to acquire a customer. It’s difficult to play that game in large run.

Huy:

It’s just lose continuous amounts of money in the advertising space competing with larger brands that just push more sales volume and have outside advertising. And, you know, for them it, you know, it’s, it might be more cost effective to acquire that first sale and just push for a higher, you know, just to maintain, maintain brand relevance within Amazon. So I think that a combination of that, and then we’ve also had a few logistical issues that have kind of taken us on a downward path, but we’re on our way to turning that around now.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now 2022 versus 2021. Hey, if you were to put a dollar amount on how much you were down, like, were you down a million, were you down less than a million, more than a million year over year?

Huy:

Yeah, I would say we were down over a million. It’s tough to admit that.

Bradley Sutton:

This is why I wanna dive into that now. As a business owner, cuz that happens probably more times than people are up a million you know, are people down a million, you just don’t hear about it that much because people are too shy to come on podcasts and I’m like, Huy is like, Hey, he’s putting it all out there. But how do you deal with that? Do you have to cut back on other costs? Like, like do you have to lay off staff at all? Or how does a how does a business keep going after, you know, losing that kind of gross revenue?

Huy:

Yeah, I think I’m used to, I’ve, I’ve worked with a lot of startups in the past. You know, it’s been great for us for 10 plus years on Amazon. We’ve been on an upward trajectory. But this is the longest I’ve ever done something. I’ve heard it that way. So I’m used to you know, doing other businesses. I have an entrepreneurial mindset, jumping around doing a lot of different things. So I’m used to the ups and the downs, but it’s one of those things as an operator you just have to be calm, have to take a look at, sure. You know, the things that you can control and things that you can’t control and focus on what you can control. I know it’s very cliche to say that, but a lot of it came down to looking at operating costs, operating efficiency and trying to figure out, you know, what changes can you make in the business in order to operate at a more comfortable margin.

Huy:

We didn’t do any fundraising, so we’re completely, you know, bootstrapped I would say from, from the beginning. But we didn’t lay off any staff necessarily. I think the biggest thing was just looking at all the different platforms that we pay for, all the different apps that we pay for. We used to use a couple of the different, different three pls and we didn’t really, we always wanted to get away from using three pls just because we didn’t have full control. And a lot of times the 3PLs didn’t work out. They made a lot of mistakes and errors. So we took that opportunity to move a lot of our fulfillment in-house. And now that would seem like the opposite, where it might be more cost effective to use a 3PL. But in our case we just crunched some of the numbers and found it more effective to control more of our operating processes. So really a lot of it was like trimming the fat, cost cutting, cutting out a lot of apps that we weren’t using. And yeah, I mean, we were using everything and not that we were using it efficiently. We had just been operating like that for such a long time.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. So that’s, that’s good. That’s important for everybody to hear. That’s why I was especially excited to have you back on the podcast is, it’s important to understand that hey, you know, in a perfect world, sure, everybody just keeps going up and up and just, you know, have all the subscriptions and all the overhead that, that you want and you’ll still stay profitable. But there’s ups and downs on Amazon. You gotta be able to pivot, you know it’s not like you just set up, we’re just gonna go ahead and pack up shop. We lost money, or we didn’t make as much money as the previous year. Let’s shut down our business. No, you look at where you can, you know, save some money and make adjustments. So that’s really good that you guys did that. Now, back to you, Andrew, I remember in the, or I don’t remember. That’s a lie. I’m looking at my notes from the last episode. My memory’s bad. But you had said that you found your very first product that you sold on Amazon, like using Black Box, and then at two years ago you had, you know, from that very first product you had expanded to about 16 different SKUs. What are you at now? About,

Andrew:

So I’m at about, I think like 53 now. It is really just four main product types, and then there’s different like color and size variations

Bradley Sutton:

And all in the same, all in the same brand and, niche.

Andrew:

Yeah. Yeah. All in the same brand, not the same category, but, you know, you would use, these products are all like industrial products that you’d use.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So now what’s been your strategy, you know, to increase? You know I would say, like I said, more people are probably down that I talked to, were down last year compared to the previous year. But, but you were up, so is it just because you kept launching new products or you had some of your legacy products also still have been increasing?

Andrew:

Yeah, I would say a lot of the growth for me is just launching new products. If I looked at my existing product line from 2021 to now, it’s probably per unit, it’s probably gone down a little bit. Just cuz of, yeah, COVID was over more competitors in space now. So a lot of that was from coming out with new product lines.

Bradley Sutton:

So now one thing that I think a lot of Amazon sellers have a question of is, you know, sometimes you become top in your space or you’re the, the first person your space to really provides something. But then how do you protect yourself from just a lot of competitors, you know, be it from China, be it from other countries where there’s a lot of manufacturing, you know, going in and undercutting you and trying to steal your market. But like, how do you stay relevant? Like how do you stay at the top where you’re not losing your market share to up and comers who just look at what you’re doing and then just try and duplicate it and, and make it cheaper or, or do so, so how, how have you battled against that? Like is it differentiation? Is it unique marketing you think you’re doing? Or what’s going on?

Andrew:

That is, that is the battle, especially in the stuff that I offer because it’s not, you know, IP protected or anything like that. It’s havin, I try to have the best creative, I try to have, you know, I love PPC and online Ads stuff, so I’m always in there trying to maximize the potential for PPC you know, try to just have the best listing. That’s all I can kind of do. And then lately I’ve been, just in this year, I’ve started to talk to, I have some other friends that are in different businesses and stuff, and I have a local like distributor that might be interested in either some of my products or having me source products for them. So now I’m kind of looking into, you know, possibly doing that, which would be, you know, it wouldn’t be on Amazon, but it would be another kind of side source of income that would help.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now that 2.6 million you mentioned, is that all on Amazon USA or is there a Walmart in there or Amazon Canada or anything else?

Andrew:

There’s Walmart. I think Walmart was like, I sold like 20,000 on Walmart last year, so it’s kind of like whatever. But hopefully, I think that’s doing better this year, but I haven’t checked the numbers on that

Bradley Sutton:

Now. Now we, I remember before you have ridiculous experience as far as marketplaces from Japan to all over the world. So are you still expanding or have you consolidated, like to try and you know, just focus on certain marketplaces or what’s your strategy been the last couple of years?

Huy:

Yeah, I mean, we were selling in UK and all around Europe. We were selling in China and, Japan as well. And I’ll be honest we’re consolidating back down to the US and part part of that is that our product is not universal. Meaning that I can’t just take a US product and put it into the UK or Germany or Japan. And in the heavily regulated space, we need different labels. There’s a lot of compliance regulations that we need to go through. So logistically, we just made the decision that we needed to slim down on some of the things that we were doing, even though that we were making some revenue you know, in those other countries. But I think that just, you know, with the cost of compliance and you know, producing unique products for those markets, it was, you know, an easier decision for us to focus on the US market. You know, we expanded, yeah, outside of Amazon, we’re selling on Walmart and we’re selling a lot more direct as well. And that’s kind of been our focus is really, you know, going back to grassroots as a DTC company you know, focusing on how we can actually drive and build customer loyalty through our own website.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now you know, we talked a little bit about the L’S you took last year. What’s some W’s, what’s something unexpected that happened or something that you actually did expect and it actually worked out exactly as you, you had planned? Like a product launch or some marketing campaign or, or something?

Huy:

Yeah, I think a big W for us was that we increased our subscription revenue and you know, we’ve always been pretty focused on retaining customers and customer retention. So on average our subscription revenue has gone up on Amazon, our subscription percentage and just you know, LTV in terms of Amazon subscribe and Save has gone up. And then also looking at our own website, you know, a lot more of that has you know, improved as well. And I think that, you know, most of that is kind of focused on us not being like the loss leader in our product category, us focusing on providing a more premium product, also working with a lot of affiliates. And our affiliates are not just like internet marketers and you know, your typical influencers, but we have a lot of affiliate partners that are actually doctors and healthcare professionals.

Huy:

So when they find a product that works well for them you know, they continue to order from us or recommend our products. And that’s reflected a lot in our reviews online. So we know that a lot of, like providers that are out there you know, they don’t wanna stock a lot of product, they’ll just tell people which products to go buy. And they know that, you know, a lot of people right now are just going out and looking on Amazon, looking online to buy those products. So we’ll offer them a discount code or affiliate commission for them to give to their customers to just go out and order. And we do see that reflected in our reviews where a lot of our products are like, my doctor recommended this to me, or you know, my healthcare provider recommended this, this to me, and it’s worked great. So I think that’s a big w for us is that, you know, just increasing our subscription revenue. But we do suffer on net new because you know, with PPC and just trying to get people for the first time, sometimes they’ll go and look at other products that are much cheaper than ours. So we do require a lot of education upfront and you know, we’ve been doing a lot more of that externally.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you have like inserts or QR codes where you can capture some of that Amazon what’s your strategy there, the, the Amazon customers where, you know, you might not be able to market directly to them?

Huy:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, we’ve used insert cards for, you know, I can’t remember when we first started it, but it’s been many years since we use insert cards. And we’ve tried a variety of different things from free product offers you know, to eBooks and a lot of different things. But now we’re switch, we’ve switched over in the past year or so to using QR codes and just labels instead of insert cards. And part of that is also, it’s just to streamline our packaging a little bit more. But with the QR codes, you’re able to dynamically change the link. And it’s just easier. Everyone’s so used to just being able to scan the QR code now just with Covid and, you know, going into restaurants and scanning menus. So we are doing that. We’re trying a variety of different things. We’re trying to provide, you know, educational content as well as different offers. Obviously the educational content doesn’t resonate or not, doesn’t resonate as well, but doesn’t perform as well as offering a big discount or, or free product. So, you know, we’re continually testing, but the good news is that we do have the resources on the backend to kind of swap those offers out. And since we own all of our unfulfillment you know, we can make changes on the fly anytime.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you’ve sold tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of units, I’m sure with QR codes and things. Have you ever had anyone flagged by Amazon or gotten slap on the wrist of any kind of insert card or QR code?

Huy:

No, we haven’t. And I think that the main reason why we haven’t is that we’re not doing any of those tricks where yep, we’re asking people for five star reviews. We’re not putting any five star imagery on there. We’re not asking for reviews before somebody claims an offer. And I think that that’s important where, you know, people have a variety of different opinions about insert cards and things like that. It’s just, it’s really like you know, you have to let kind of take a look at it from the customer perspective and Amazon’s perspective. If you make a universal offer, like this is part of your brand and you don’t treat, continue to treat yourself like just an Amazon brand, and I think that you’re gonna be okay and then, you know, just obviously review everything that Amazon’s doing and don’t do the things that they tell you specifically not to do, and then you’ll be okay.

Bradley Sutton:

What would you say is your take rate now on getting, you know, I’m assuming it’s, you’re trying to get the email address or something like for, compared to the, the orders, you know, is it 1%, 5%, you know, 10% of people are scanning and, and opting in?

Huy:

Yeah, I would say, depending on the offer you know, we were, before when we were doing the insert cards we had a, we were getting about a 10% take rate. So, you know, it’s definitely good enough. But one of the things that to consider for my business is different than other people’s business is that you know, a lot of our revenue, probably 40% plus is subscribe and save. So you’re not gonna get people continually coming through. It does vary from time to time, but I think that, you know, obviously 10% is great. We’re happy when we’re getting it, and I think that, you know, that should be something that I hope that’s what other people are getting.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. And then which one is performing? You mentioned you, you, you’ve tried a lot of different things, whether it’s the education or do you do everthing like, I don’t know, you can’t really have a lifetime warranty on supplements or something, but, but what’s, what’s your best copy that gives you the best opt-in rates?

Huy:

I think that, you know, giving a product offer a complimentary gift that’s always performed well. And I think just naturally people want something for free. But we do offer a lifetime warranty on our supplement. So if anybody’s not happy with it at any time, they can always just return it. So it’s, and that’s just another point as well, right? So if somebody’s thinking about this and they may have purchased like a three pack or a six pack or something like that anytime somebody asks for a, a refund or lets us know that they’re not happy, then we’re happy to oblige by that. Yeah. The majority of people do not. So it’s, it’s really something that we don’t find too too much liability in providing that. But yeah, I mean, I think that anytime you can offer a complimentary product a discount it’s gonna depend by category, the educational content, yes, we get a lot of people to come through for that as well, but it clearly doesn’t perform as well as, you know, providing an offer.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright. Back to Andrew. Now you know, you saw Huy there is is giving us some good strategies there. So what’s some unique strategies that you’ve been using? I remember the last episode, you, you were kind of tightlipped about it, but you know, you don’t have to give all your secrets away, but what’s some unique things that you think you’re doing that has been the secret of your, some of the secrets of your success?

Andrew:

I’ve really like, as far as like the Amazon PPCs concerned, like I take full advantage of the sponsored display video ads, all the, you know, brand video, like the video headline ads. I really like it.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s talk about, let’s talk about that a little bit. What’s your strategy like? Like how do you, you know, it’s not just a matter of, oh, lemme just turn this on and boom, I’m gonna be rich. I’m sure you have some kind of specific things.

Andrew:

Well, to a certain extent it is like there’s a lot of people that, there’s a lot of people that don’t use ’em. But I as far as like what some of my strategies are, like for a sponsored display video, you know, maybe I’ll create 10 different ads and some of ’em.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Let people know about what sponsored display video is. Cuz I think, you know, a lot of people know the sponsored brand video sponsored display video was something I believe launched sometime last year. So, you know, people know regular sponsored display ads is just that, you know, some of those ads that came near or show up near the buy box on, on product pages. But what is sponsored display video for those who might not have heard of that?

Andrew:

From what I understand, basically it takes up the same, you know, it takes the same placements as the sponsored display, but it’s, instead of just a, a solid picture, it’s a video and you can put different videos, different headlines you know, little captions and stuff on there. So you can really experiment with different stuff. And if, if I’m targeting one sort of complimentary product, I’ll put a different video and, and a few different headlines in there and test them and see which one’s gonna do best. And then if I’m targeting another type of complimentary product, it’ll be a different video. So just getting really granular in that, in that stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you choose your targets? Like, are you only looking at, you know, ASINs your auto campaign discover, or are you going and like using Black Box or even just looking on Amazon using X-ray or something to find like, you know, targets that you think, oh, like, I think, I think I would do well on this page. What,’s your strategy there?

Andrew:

I do use the, like the black box, like the product targeting for the Frequently Bought Together and things like that. And then Brand Analytics has like the, the market basket or something, or it’s shows the, you know, people who bought this also who bought your product also bought this. There’s one of my products that it’s an industrial product, but I found that people are buying it for like birthday parties too. And so it’s just like really random. So now I’m having, like, I’m creating content that’s like, has that product in it, but it’s like in birthday parties for like birthday parties for kids, you know? So I don’t know. So that’s that’s some of the ways I can.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s the thing that’s important to, that’s important to, to, to, to call out. Like the sometimes your product will, will get relevant for the most random thing. Like, I’m taking over this one account recently that I’m trying to do some case studies on, and one of the main products on there was, I think it’s like an oil diffuser or some or something like that. And if you look in Brand Analytics or search for your performance, and even Cerebro for some reason, there’s just tons of like sexual product related keywords that this thing is not just showing up for, but it’s converting for it. And, and for the life of me, I actually kind of don’t want to know why, you know, I don’t want to think about it too much. Like why in the world are, are, are people buying it for this keyword, but hey, the data’s there, you know, like you would’ve never thought, I would’ve never thought like a oil, you know, essential oil difference. Like what does this have to do with XYZ keyboard that I can’t even mention on air, but it’s like, hey, double down on it. It’s, it’s, people are use products in different ways and you might probably never thought an industrial product would be used in birthday parties, but if you see the data you gotta double down on it. That’s, that’s what,

Andrew:

What kind of a funny story, when I was helping my brother at the very beginning when we were getting him started, he was looking through different products and he is like, I found this rope. And it was like, but he looked at the reviews and it was like, this rope is being used for like, you know, for adult purposes. And it was like, you know, the rope was like pink and purple and, you know, stuff like that. And everyone was saying how soft the rope was and I was like, oh, I see what you’re, what what this is used for <laugh>. So anyway, yeah. Like he ended up not selling that’s not his product, but Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, well what else? Well, we kind of diverted here a little bit from here. Yeah. Your PPC strategy, but, but what else are you doing in, in PPC s unique?

Andrew:

Trying to do, I’m experimenting with different stuff of trying to bring traffic from off Amazon on Amazon. So you know, Google Ads is like Google and Bing ads been playing with that, been playing with like display ads more on Google. I’m finding, you can drive traffic pretty with pretty cheap, you know, click or cost per click and I’m just trying to see if that, you know, if I get rewarded for that or if my rank changes anything like that. So that’s, that’s kind of what I’ve been doing. And then lately I’ve been a one man show for a long time and I have an assistant now who is doing great and I’m looking to just get more of a team set up so I’m not like constantly bearing all the load here cuz I’m, that’s, that’s definitely something I need some help with cuz I have a really hard time like letting go of some of this stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

Delegating.

Andrew:

Yeah, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. I think a lot of us definitely have that issue. We actually have a opportunity in a couple weeks, you know, we have our elite workshop and Huy is gonna be on this new thing that we’re trying to a, a panel where people can, a, you know, I like providing forums where people can just ask each other questions. Cuz sometimes people get shy, whether it’s online or in person. It’s like they have a question, but they’re like, ah, I don’t want to ask. Or, or they, they’re kind of shy to raise their hand or something. So we try and provide those opportunities. So, so we has graciously agreed to be one of our first panel members ask a seller anything panel that we’re gonna have. Yeah. Are you coming out, Andrew, to the Elite Workshop?

Andrew:

I don’t think I’m gonna be at the Elite one. I’m going to the Billion Dollar Seller Summit though, so I’ll be okay a little bit after that.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. That’ll be our second one, right?

Andrew:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. First one was awesome. I’m really excited for the Puerto Rico one.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, yes. I’ll be, I’ll be there. I’ll be there too. So if anybody wants to get more information than a Billion Dollar Seller Summit, h10.me/bdss, I, I believe is the link. We, any last tips and strategies? You know, like something like a 30 or 60-second tip that you can, you can give the audience.

Huy:

So a lot of people have been talking about ChatGPT and all these different AI tools that, you know, there’s hundreds of different tools coming out every single day, probably more. And I think that there’s a lot of noise out there and people are trying to figure out how to use it. They’re trying to figure out how to use it for themselves and how to possibly replace jobs that they’re doing or their team’s already doing. I think that probably the biggest tip that I can provide is allow and encourage every single person on your team to actually use it. Because, you know, if you’re using it from the top level as a business owner, you may see different things than somebody who’s using it in their everyday life as, you know, working you know, on your business. And we’ve done that as well.

Huy:

So anybody from customer service to operations to marketing, everybody’s been using it and improving processes kind of like the own process that we’re working on. And then those processes are adopted across our entire business so everybody becomes more productive as opposed to just kind of one person. And, you know, thinking about all of the processes within your business. The other thing is you know, along those lines is that don’t always trust information that you get from ChatGPT I find that more oftentimes it’s actually more inaccurate than it is accurate when, when providing information. I know that pre it doesn’t have access to the internet currently unless you have ChatGPT Plus you are able to use different extensions to go in there to give it access to the internet. But just be very careful with the content that you’re putting out there. Or, you know, do your research, play around and figure out how to incorporate into your business for yourself.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep, I like that. I like it. Andrew, what about you? Couple tips.

Andrew:

Yeah just touching on that ChatGPT like AI thing, I’ve kind of noticed the same thing. I’ve, I’ve caught, you know, chat G B T just making stuff up or like lying and I kind of looked into it, they call it hallucinations that, you know, it’s like, oh chat b t makes up these hallucinations. And I’m like, what? So be careful with that. One thing I’ve been trying to do, I’ve been watching exit ticket on helium 10 and just trying to learn more like financially, cuz I, I do think at the end of this year I wanna sell one of my brands. I do have kind of a credit card hack on American Express. They have a credit card called the Plum Card and I never really gave it the time of day in the past, but it allows you to basically have, instead of, you know, you have to pay 30 days after your statement, you can wait up to 60 days after your statement.

Andrew:

So it gives you like more cash flow, it gives you like an extra month to pay. So that’s just kind of something people can go check out. All you have to do is make the minimum payment by the first, by 30 days after the statement and then you can pay the rest off, you know, another 30 days after that. So I put like shipments on it and stuff where I can get, you know, basically just an extra 30 days of, of like credit and the only, the only downside is if you wait the full, the full like 60 days, you don’t get any credit card points, which I love getting credit card points, that kind of stinks. But you do get, if you pay it off, normally you get like 1.5% cash back, which is pretty like standard. But yeah, if you want an extra 30 days to pay stuff off the Plum card from American Express.

Huy:

Yeah, that’s a good tip

Bradley Sutton:

Right, cool. I haven’t heard of that one.

Huy:

I’ll just add onto that as well in addition to the Plum card cuz I was also looking into that there’s a card Parker, so Parker gives you net 60 as well and then you can combine, so you can combine that like you know, this is for people that need funding for operations inventory or whatever it is, giving you that extra 30 days. There’s also the other hack that probably a lot of people have talked about before is that, you know, if you need to pay a supplier with a credit card but they only allow you to use a check, then you can use something like plastic to do that. They do charge a small fee on that, but I think that in combination with just net 60 days on the credit card, you know, allows you a little bit of breathing room.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I’ve used that a lot of times could

Huy:

Could also be dangerous if you put yourself in a yeah,

Andrew:

Make sure you’re keeping track, you know, always you get hit with a huge bill.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah. Good for you. Yeah, I do that a little bit because of just, you know, funds and also, you know, some travel hacking so I can, if I got a bonus for points on a certain month or something, then that’s why I go every 50 episodes of the Maldives on my credit card points and stuff. So yeah, plastic is definitely something that I think is great. All right guys, well Andrew, I’ll be seeing you in a few weeks at Billion Dollar Seller Summit. We, I’ll be seeing you in a couple weeks here at our headquarters. If anybody else is interested to go, just reach out to customer service. Even if you’re not a Heating 10 Elite member, you can actually pay to go, but it’s, it’s, it’s pretty expensive. I think we charge like six or $700 or something to attend but Elite members can go for free. And then the night before so guys, the night before the Elite Workshop, we are doing a social event, like a little party at Dave and Buster’s. Did you ever go Huy to any of our Dave and Buster events that we did way back in the day?

Huy:

I did. I went to probably the inaugural one where we used to be called like FBA high Rollers or something like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep.

Huy:

I do remember we had that big room and all those gold balloons with Manny and Gui, it was a good time actually. And that’s you know, those events actually, I met a lot of people from those events that I continued to talk with and just dm. There’s a lot of conversations that don’t happen in the Helium 10 Elite group like Ankit and I didn’t meet ’em at that event, but I’m just saying that like, you know, there are a lot of conversations that happen you know, once you build a relationship with somebody and that’s a great place because, you know, there’s so many people that have different backgrounds, different stories, and just great place to have conversations.

Bradley Sutton:

All right guys. Yeah, so May 24th, save the date for that. If if you want to go to that one that’s not just for elite members, you know, anybody can go to that one. So reach out to customer service if you don’t know of the if you don’t have the link or actually I’ll make a link right now. Just go to h10.me/irvine, h10.me/irvine. That’s, that’s where it’s gonna be at. And, and be some nostalgic times there because yeah, that was my first ever Helium 10 party too, was at the Dave and Busters there in the Irvine Spectrum. So we’re trying to bring it back to the old school. So I’ll be seeing you there at those events. Huy and Andrew again in Puerto Rico. So thank you guys so much for joining us. It’s great to to hear about both the wins and the losses, you know, that you have had and, and that you guys are definitely both successful Amazon sellers. And I know your inspiration to a lot of people listening out there. So thanks a lot and we’ll look forward to having you both on at some time next year as well.

Helium 10 Buzz 05/10/23: Amazon Anywhere Launch | EU Expansion | Helium 10 Social

In this episode, Bradley talks about an Amazon Anywhere Launch, Amazon Europe expansion, and more!

#451 – Amazon PPC Ask Me Anything

In episode #451 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we bring you another of our TaCOS Tuesday episodes, which is our monthly PPC AMA. This time, we invite Tom Waghorn from Clear Ads for the first time. In this episode, he answered tons of questions the audience threw at him including his Variation listing PPC strategy, defense ad tactics, best practices for advertising during launch, how to use day parting and ChatGPT, and much more!

In episode 451 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Shivali and Tom discuss:

• 02:01 – Tom’s Journey from 3D Animation to PPC
• 03:30 – Why are my Competitors Crushing me During Launch?
• 08:51 – Which Child ASINS Should I Target in PPC?
• 11:09 – Which Metrics Will Help me Audit my PPC?
• 13:56 – How do I Keep Competitors from Stealing my Sales?
• 16:00 – Should I Target All Variations During Launch?
• 18:10 – If I Remake New Campaigns, Will I Lose Momentum?
• 20:15 – Should we Use Auto Campaigns During Launch?
• 21:20 – How Should I Divide Targets In Campaigns?
• 22:10 – When Should We Implement Day Parting?
• 24:21 – How Should I Allocate Budget To Campaigns During Launch?
• 28:12 – When do you Start Negative Matching?
• 30:53 – How Should I Raise Budgets?
• 33:02 – Can You Use ChatGPT with Amazon PPC?
• 35:15 – Tom’s 60-Second Tip

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast
► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension
► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life)
► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft
► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a guest expert who’s gonna answer all of your PPC questions, everything from Sponsored Brand Campaigns, to using ChatGPT with advertising, how to do variation, listing targeting, and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think

Bradley Sutton:

Helium 10’s got over 40 tools for e-commerce entrepreneurs. I know how overwhelming it might seem to try and figure out how you’re gonna learn how to use everything or maybe even to know which ones you wanna get started with. So for a completely free course that’s gonna guide you through learning everything you need in order to become a Helium 10 expert, visit the Helium 10 Academy. That is h10.me/academy. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday program TACoS meaning Total ACoS. This is our PPC-centric episode where we bring on a guest each month and we answer questions that you guys, the audience are giving in live to our show. So in this case we have Shivali who interviewed Tom from Clear Ads and he’s gonna go over a wide variety of topics and he’s got some great information for you. So hope you like this episode.

Shivali:

With that, I am going to tell you a little bit about who we’re having on of course. And that is Tom Waghorn. He is from Clear Ads and we are so excited to have them because he is so knowledgeable on all things Amazon advertising. Tom, how are you?

Tom:

I’m very well Shali. Thank you very much for inviting me to TACoS Tuesday. It’s my first time.

Shivali:

Well, I know about Clear Ads through conferences. That’s where I first met you guys. And I might know a little bit about Clear Ads, but I know our viewership might not. So could you share a little bit about, first of all, your experience with PPC as well as a little bit about Clear Ads?

Tom:

Absolutely. So I got into PPC six years ago now when I joined Clear Ads originally people might not know it, but Clear Ads actually started as a Google Ads agency and then we very quickly caught onto the scene of Amazon advertising and how lucrative that was and how easy it was for a seller to set up on Amazon and start getting their products appearing through PPC. So a lot of our business ended up going that way cuz it was a lot more attractive to a lot of the clients that were, were searching for an agency. So I helped spearhead that department with George, our CEO through Clear Ads here. So yeah, I’d love every minute of that journey, which is why I’m still here six years later in the PPC game. It’s definitely not where I started my educational journey. I actually started in 3D animation, but yeah, everyone changed their career path and I ended up doing PPC instead of cartoons. But I’m loving it.

Shivali:

I think that’s incredible. That’s incredible. I mean, before we started this, I was telling you how PPC was such a foreign thing for me, even when I was getting started as an Amazon seller, it was the one thing that caused so many nerves and I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. So I’m really looking forward to picking your brain about PPC today and hopefully providing a lot of value, not just for myself, but for all of our viewers. I’m, I have full faith that’ll happen. So I guess we’ll go ahead and get started. We have Raef hopefully I’m pronouncing that right, he says, I launched my first product two months ago and I’m not getting the sales velocity to rank competitors started after me get to under 20,000 BSR even with a worse listing and price. What should I do? He also continues PPC is costing too much and getting only a few sales even after optimizing the ACoS, which is over a hundred percent. If I negate the keywords that got sales and over a hundred ACoS, I can’t find more keywords. So what would you recommend in this situation, Tom?

Tom:

So first of all, I would take a step back and review your product and review the marketplace. How water down is that market? How convoluted, how busy is that? Do you have a unique enough product that you can actually set yourself apart from that competition that’s taken a big global step back in terms of when you launched your products two months ago? Did you also launch with PPC at the same time or did you wait a period before launching your product with PPC? I asked that because as soon as you launch your products on Amazon, you’ve got something known as the honeymoon period. And that actually lasts around a month and every day through the honeymoon period it’s deprecating and you start off with some sort of invisible rank. Amazon very quickly pushes you off the rank and that’s the benefit of the Honeymoon period.

Tom:

But every day you need to start getting your own sales and improving your rank and improving your sales velocity because the honeymoon period is ending every single day. So what I would do is reevaluate if you actually launched your product during that period, if you missed out on that, ranking boost that Amazon does give you when you launch, you could potentially revisit launching your ASIN again. I know that sounds like a lot of hard work going back to almost square one, but if you can launch your product with PPC, that should help you get that ranking boost. And you’ve also talked about having an ACoS higher than a hundred percent. During the launch stage, I would encourage you not to be too focused on ACoS. Try not to be too scared about even having high ACoS of above hundred or even 200%.

Tom:

Consider what you’re actually paying for in those early stages. Are you trying to launch with profitable sales from the get-go? If so, you’re probably gonna struggle coming into that sales velocity and that rank that you’re after. So I would review what you’re actually spending your PPC money on. Cons consider that that spend should go towards increasing that sales velocity, increasing that rank, increasing that exposure. You are paying for the benefit of having that new exposure and even reviews coming through. Once you’ve got that foundation set up, then you can start to optimize your account and start to see that ACoS come down to 90% to 80% to 70% all the way down to whatever your target ACoS is. Don’t try and achieve and tick every box from the word go cuz it’s impossible to pull every lever and tick each of those targets that you’ve set for yourself and your business and your account in one go.

Tom:

So it seems like the sales velocity and the rank is what you want to go for first. So yeah, try and change your mindset on what you’re actually spending your PPC on. And then your next point was that PPC is actually costing you too much and only getting you a few sales. That’s another reason why you need to reevaluate what you’re trying to achieve with your PPC. No, it’s not always the same. Some people can successfully launch with a sustainable ACoS out of the gate. It depends how water down that marketplace. It’s but yeah, you’ve also mentioned if you negate your keywords that got sales at a hundred percent ACoS, then yeah you struggle to find more keywords. That’s probably because those keywords were the ones that were relevant. You’ve carefully done that keyword research, whether that’s through a tool like Helium 10 or even through other tools or your own search term reports.

Tom:

Are you running automatic campaigns? I know it seems like it’s lazy advertising, just letting Amazon do the work for you, but having those run alongside your manual campaigns is a very good way to constantly discover new keywords and harvest more. Also, it’s worth taking those keywords that you have identified that have got you sales regardless of what the ACoS is and running those through a long tail keyword at tool. So your seed keyword might only be one or two words long. Even putting that into the Amazon search bar using the Helium 10 extension, it will actually auto-complete a lot of those words for you. Try running ads on some of those keywords. Yes, they’re gonna have a lower sales volume lower search volume I should say because they are longer tail keywords, but they should be cheaper and easier to rank for cause they’re likely to be a lot less competitive. Because of the nature of the length of the phrase in that keyword. Once you start ranking well for that, it’s also ranking for the individual keywords and shorter phrases that are in that long tail keyword. So then you can start to introduce those broader keywords that might be carrying higher ACoS for you. And you should see improved results on that. So sometimes it can be slower, steady ways to get there.

Shivali:

We also have Rozina who says, if I have three size variations, bigger being more price, which variation should I advertise on my sponsored product exact campaign? The cheapest or all three.

Tom:

Depends on your strategy. So if you know that you’ve got a far better margin on the bigger product with the far bigger price, which I assume would be the case, then that will be the one I would want to advertise because the keywords are gonna cost the same, but your margins are not better. So you have a $1 per click keyword is gonna give you far better profits if you’ve got a higher ticket price item. But also I would suggest trying to advertise all three potentially in separate campaigns and actually see which gets more engagement. Which of those size variations has a higher click-through rate and which of those has a higher conversion rate? And then I’ll just advertise that one. Cause if that’s how people are responding to your products in the search results and from the listings when they get to that listing, they can then choose if they want smaller variation, a medium variation, or the large variation.

Tom:

Most shoppers are intuitive to know that there are different sizes. They don’t just assume when they search for a product that it only comes in one size and one color. So I would, I would do that. That’s something we are doing for a new client that’s signed up with us to advertise in the UK. They have for some of their ASINs 15 variations. They already had some data with their previous agency and we knew where the sales velocity was coming through, so we just prioritized which of these variations generates more sales. So that’s the one that we advertised. But yeah, generally speaking, the bigger the price, the better your margins are, but it’s just the case of how people are gonna respond. I guess another example is if you are selling, let’s say a cleaning product, I think most households are gonna go for a simple handheld spray. But you could also be selling something that comes in like a big gallon ju I think the general public are more likely to respond better to something that they could actually use in their house rather than the industrial size. So it depends on the need and the niche of your product and how many people are likely to adopt those different sizes. So evaluate that as well, Rozina.

Shivali:

Thank you for answering that question. Now as far as, let’s say somebody already has their set PPC strategy, right? Like maybe they’re doing the variations or they have a catalog of products that they already are very set in their campaigns. How do you recommend somebody audits their campaigns? So I know there’s a lot of different metrics you could take a look at, but what’s sort of that fine balance of maybe understanding that you’re spending too much or when to kind of start fine-tuning it, how to fine-tune it, that sort of thing?

Tom:

Yeah, there’s, there’s a wide variety of things. I guess going to the title of this show checky TACoS. Are your TACoS low enough? Set yourself a target. I think most people go somewhere between 10% and 15%. You can easily find your TACoS by cross-referencing your spend against your overall sales. So that’s not just your ad-attributed sales, that’s all of the sales. And seeing what that percentage is. If it’s too high, then you’re likely cannibalizing some of your organic sales. So if this is a legacy account where you’re in maintenance mode and you’ve got all your keywords sorted, then potentially start dialing back on some of those bids in some of those budgets. I wouldn’t recommend doing that across the board. Test that with one product or even just one campaign or, or a few keywords and see what effect that has.

Tom:

If you still see the same level of overall sales, then pulling back was the right thing to do. If you start pulling back but then your overall sales start declining, then yeah, you still need to keep pushing and trying to get that ranking up before you can see those TACoS come down. Another thing to look at would be your click-through rate. So it’s very easy to settle on keywords that have the lowest ACoS, but try and find some of those little hidden gems that have a really high click-through rate. They’re the ones that people are responding to. They might just not have had the chance to flourish or be pushed further. So there’s always one or two keywords in the campaign that we kind of just leave there. They tick along, they’re not wasting too much money, they get one sale here or there, but try and look at their click-through rate.

Tom:

And we’ve now got access to the search query report through brand analytics. It’s an incredible tool. I still think it’s un underutilized today. I know we, we see it all over LinkedIn, but we live in a bubble. It’s a small portion of people that are utilizing that and talking about it. That will show you how many impressions you get from that keyword from that search term down to how many clicks down to how many outer cards, down to how many purchases. So work backward through that. And then that also guide you to what your realistic bid is for that keyword as well. But find those high, click through eight keywords and start trying to push those more and you might be surprised.

Shivali:

Yeah. Awesome. So the next question here is, what are some ways to try to stop or slow competitors from advertising on your listing and stealing sales?

Tom:

My quick answer is to advertise on your own listing. Yeah, defend your listing rather than just worrying about them going on the offensive. So we also employ those offensive tactics but try and defend them. So instead of in those sponsor product campaigns or even through sponsor brands and sponsor display, instead of just relying on doing your competitor’s research and targeting those target your own listings, especially if you’ve got variations. Going back I think it was Rozina’s question earlier. She’s got three size variations advertise against those different size variations that way, yes, we know that they can click on those different variations within the listing, but if they’re scrolling down the page and seeing those ads for your own products in different parts of the product display page, it’s pushing away the competition and slowing the competitors. It also acts as cross-sell and gives you another chance to showcase to that shopper that you have other products and size variations to show off.

Tom:

You can also show off your complimentary products. So maybe you are selling coffee, that’s a chance to show off your coffee mugs, your coffee machines, and your coffee paraphernalia. It accesses a cross-sell, but the main job you’re trying to do is to stop someone from advertising or listing. So, so try that. At that point, I would say the important metric to track as well would be impressions don’t be put off if those sales aren’t generating sales. The job they’re trying to do is have those ads appear on your page. If you’ve got high impressions on those campaigns, that campaign’s doing its job, and you know your product is appearing on your page. If you get any sales, that’s the cherry on the top. Depending on how many sales, it might be time to evaluate the product that they’re appearing on. If you’re already seeing a few people jump ship from your product A to product B, then they found a more applicable product to them in the time. But if you see a high volume of people jumping from one to the other, then you might need to evaluate the product they’re jumping from as well too.

Shivali:

I see that there are a couple of questions here, let’s get to both of them. Yitzhak says I launched yesterday new products on clothing for women in niche black colors, six sizes small through three xl. Congratulations, no reviews. I run automated PPC and exact broad and product. Should I target all of the sizes or just one?

Tom:

There are two ways you could approach this. You could go all in on all sizes and see which one just gets the most engagement. Or you could do some market research and I guess see which size you think is likely to get more engagement just from the get-go. Our reaction here at clearance is unless we’ve got any data coming from the client previously is to test everything. You’re not gonna know until you test. You could just try one size and it might work, but if you’d tested another size, that might have actually given you more exposure, more engagement, more clicks, more reviews, and then more click-throughs to your other sizes. So yeah, I know that might sound like the easy boring answer to test everything, but that that’s really what I would do until you tested it, you are not really gonna know. But yeah, that does require a bigger budget because you are diverting that through more sizes. I don’t know how many different sizes you’ve got there s through three xl. So yeah, looks say you’ve got six or seven sizes going there and that would be my answer. I dunno if you’ve got any, anything else to add to that, Shivali?

Shivali:

No, I absolutely agree. I think unless there is something similar on the market and you can figure out using maybe helium, tens chrome extension for figuring out in that review insights section, which variation tends to have the most reviews. Maybe you can begin there and figure out which variation sells the most and then start by using that for targeting first. But again, you really won’t know until if you do have the budget for it, then go ahead and test. I would say

Tom:

You could also just test the keywords just running some searches yourself and see what default size has come up from your competitors. That could be another way to do quick some quick market research. Yeah, absolutely.

Shivali:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Dominik says, I started my listings about a year ago and my PPC campaigns are, let’s just say crap, can I make new campaigns or do I lose some historic data to the algorithms? Thank you in advance.

Tom:

You can absolutely make some new campaigns. There’s, there’s no harm in starting from scratch or PPC. Your algorithmic data is tied to the keyword against the product. I don’t think Amazon truly cares. So it’s from that campaign or not? So if you do have some gold within those campaigns from search term reports and lifetime data, just start with those. For anything that’s paused, like even reviewing that data, you might find some keywords that worked for you in the past, try and revisit those. You might have even negated some keywords. Try and revisit those as well. But rather than un negating them within that campaign, leave them negated where they are but introduce them as keywords within a new campaign. That way you’re not disrupting something. I know you’re saying your campaigns are crap so you’re not gonna be disrupting anything but dare I say is working well. But yeah, always try and test it in a new campaign. There’s no harm in trying to do that. So yeah, good luck with that Dominik.

Shivali:

Yeah, good luck. Hopefully, things start looking up for you. We also have Safi asking when we perform an auto campaign for a new launch.

Tom:

Good question. Yeah, that’s quite a hot topic cuz yeah, you’ve got no reviews and you really want to teach Amazon what your product is. Amazon doesn’t know what your product is. It knows what category it’s in, but you need to teach the algorithm that when people are searching for keywords, your product is appearing for those. And so when running an auto campaign, you do run the risk of people coming through with irrelevant searches or maybe they’re close to your product but not quite hitting the nail on the head. So I would still launch them early on, but not necessarily on day one. So come prepared with a number of keywords whether that’s just five or six that truly sum up your product, but you know that if this is the product you want, they’re the keywords that you would search for.

Tom:

Try and rank for those. Try and put some budget behind those. So when people search for those and your product appears, Amazon is now learning that your product is those five keywords. Once you’ve got some traction behind those, then you can start introducing them. Your other campaigns, your broad, your phrase, your product targeting. But in an ideal world, I would launch with exact batch on a selection of keywords that I knew that sums up the product I wanted to rank for. And if I was looking for that product, that’s what I would search for.

Shivali:

Are there a certain amount of keywords that you would maybe put into a campaign and limit it as, I know that when you have a certain budget, then that budget can run out really fast especially if you’re spreading yourself too thin? So is there a recommendation of what you recommend staying between?

Tom:

Yeah, this has changed a lot over the years and very quickly I’ve gone are the days where you can just fill a campaign with a thousand keywords like every keyword under the sun and it just works. It’s very quickly been reducing and I probably wouldn’t put more than a dozen or 20 keywords in a campaign now, but I would also have a look at the search volume of those keywords, even if I’ve got 20 keywords. But search volume-wise, one keyword’s got like 20,000 and the other keywords have got a couple of hundred. I already know where the budget’s going. It’s going to that high search volume keyword and the others aren’t gonna have a chance. So divide your campaign structure up by search volume, not just by match type and product type, but if you’ve got one keyword that’s carrying 20,000, then everything else is a thousand and lower. I isolate that one already cause it’s already gonna swap off the budget and it’s not gonna be a fair test, it’s not gonna be a fair experiment. So keep those lower search and keywords in a different campaign with its own budget. We know it’s gonna be a fair, fair trial.

Shivali:

And what about something that’s a little bit more advanced? For example, day partying ads? When does that become a good idea or when should somebody consider that?

Tom:

First of all, you’re gonna need a tool for day parting. Unfortunately, that’s not something Amazon allows us to do within the platform. I guess for those that don’t know what day parting is, this is where you can tell the system to pause your ads completely during a certain day or a certain hour of the day. I would never recommend having your ads and your keywords completely paused for those periods, but reducing bids during moonlight hours like no one is really looking to purchase with any intent at one or two in the morning. Chances are they can’t sleep and they’re just window shopping. Still good to reach those customers cuz they’re still showing some sort of interest but have your bids reduced by maybe 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, or even 50%. But when to introduce this would when you really see that you are struggling to combat some wasted spend even with thorough optimization, getting those bids down, getting rid of the wasted spend from irrelevant keywords or high ACoS keywords, that might be a time to, to consider day parting.

Tom:

And that might bring us back to our example earlier that Rafi was asking that there are key campaigns and keywords in there with an ACoS above hundred percent that might not be true for every hour of the day. That might just be what the average is. Maybe you’ve got a lot of traffic in on sociable hours that are causing that ACoS to go up. So that will be a time to visit day parting and with the Amazon marketing stream, I know that’s kind of in the beta stages at the moment. It actually gives you a lot more data with day parting. It’s not just you deciding, okay, it’s probably a good time to reduce bids during the hours like 1:00 AM to 4:00 AM the marketing stream actually tell you what level of sales you’re seeing through those hours, what your ACoS is for that campaign or that product or that keyword through those hours. So if you can get access to the marketing stream, that will give you a lot more data and you can introduce that a lot quicker cuz you’ve got a lot more solid data through that.

Shivali:

I see Safi has asked how do we allocate budget PPC budget amongst ad campaigns for a brand-new launch?

Tom:

Good question. I would make sure most of that goes to like what we were just saying, the keyword word campaigns. I would try and launch an exact, because like I mentioned, you want to teach Anderson’s algorithm what your product is and it’s gonna learn that quicker by knowing what keywords people have clicked through and made that purchase from. So I’ll try and allocate more of your budget through to those keywords that you really wanna rank for, you really want to index for and you really want to be relevant to your product. I would have a smaller budget. When you do introduce it for auto campaigns you are always gonna do better keyword research on your own by using tools. The auto campaigns are just gonna kind of fit in those gaps of the nuances, the nest spellings, the yeah, the different nuances within language, whether that’s kind of localized slang words.

Tom:

You are not always gonna find those within your own keyword research. So yeah, I would always try and prioritize the keyword campaigns. I would mostly be launching with keywords and then a selection of competitor targeting. Competitor targeting is gonna give you a better rank increase, but it’s also less likely that you’re gonna get the conversion from a competitor targeting ad most of that is gonna come from you from your keywords, but you’re likely to see a 4X ranking increase from someone jumping from a competitor to your listing and having that conversion directly from a keyword sale, you’re more likely to see keyword sales. So wave that up. And when you introduce sponsor brands and sponsor display, for the most part in my accounts, I’m allocating about 60-70% of my budget to keyword campaigns once, once we’ve got past that launch phase.

Tom:

And then sort of 30-40% across sponsor brands as sponsor display. Hey Zach I see your next comment is women’s clothes niche Walmart marketplace, new product. Which keyword will you run after high search volume or low search? New item, no reviews. I would go with high search volume to start with. That’s what people are searching for. Yes, it’s gonna be more competitive. But it’s ultimately where people are gonna be looking those low search keywords. That’s what I would go after. Once you’ve exhausted your testing on those high search volume, your keywords also it depe it depends on what metric and what KPI you’re trying to track. Are you going after profitability out of the gate or are you just trying to get those reviews that sales velocity that ranking, that exposure. I would absolutely go for the high.

Tom:

If you are more conscious of your margins and your ACoS, then I would look at introducing a lot more of those low search while in keywords but have a lot of them. You can’t just have a few low search while in keywords. Otherwise yeah, they’re low searching for you for a reason. Not many people are gonna discover them that way. So I’d make sure that they’re included. But I’m always introducing low search while in keywords. Like I said, you’ve got your seed keyword, which is the main keyword you’re going for. That might be women’s type or women’s dress site. And then the longer tail version is gonna start to introduce colors sizes, patterns. There’s gonna be a smaller search one for those because you’ve made that keyword more niche, you’re reaching a more niche audience with that, but they’re still valid and it will help you to rank for the individual keywords that are within that longer tail variant. I hope that helps you attack.

Shivali:

Let’s talk about something else. And that is negative matching keywords. Is there a time that you tend to do that? When do you change those keywords over to a negative match?

Tom:

I’m definitely not doing it from day one cuz it’s very easy to respond to a keyword that’s got a very high ACoS and think, okay, this isn’t working for me. I’ll add this as a negative so I don’t waste more money. We’ve talked a lot about launching and ranking today. If you can take a step back and work out what you’re actually trying to pay for, you’re paying for ranking, you’re paying for exposure, you’re paying for the benefit of trying to get more reviews in, it’s not about profitability from the get-go. So I wouldn’t negate from day one. But maybe a few weeks in when you’ve actually got a bit more stability, you know what your ranking is from those first two weeks of the honeymoon period, then you can start negating. Especially if we’re talking about keyword reports at least on a weekly basis.

Tom:

Negate in traffic that is irrelevant. Negate any keywords that talk about a difference in quality. Maybe you’ve got an average household product, but there are key words that would signify maybe a cheaper variant or even a more luxury premium variation. You don’t wanna see that that traffic come through cuz you’re just gonna disappoint the customer regardless of where you are on that spectrum of quality of the product or barrier to your pricing. If you can negate the premium keywords because you’ve got a middle ground product, then do that. You don’t wanna confuse that traffic that is searching for a more expensive variation or even cheaper variation. So start negating those as you see them come up from your search 10 reports. But once you start to hit the maturity, if you do see keywords that are relevant but consistently have a high a cost, maybe it’s because you just can’t be competitive on that bid.

Tom:

Maybe you’ve got a lower ticket price item, let’s say $10 price and some of the keyword clicks are gonna be 2, 3, 4, 5 dollars. Now even with your margins, you can probably only afford a couple of clicks on those before a conversion, before your ACoS is gone on those. So start negating those. Any common themes in keywords that you see that you need to negate, whether it is cheap or premium or luxury? Maybe you’re selling pet food and you’re already selling dog food. Start negating things like cat like straight out of the gate. Add those on phrase because that way you can negate any variation that comes off of that keyword. But when it comes to very specific keywords and phrases that might sing true to your product, add those on exacts negative cuz you know that it’s that variation of your keyword and phrase that doesn’t work and yeah, not those individual keywords overall.

Shivali:

I see we have another question. Mature campaign on Amazon about $2,000 a month spend 25% ACoS. I want to increase the budget. What is recommended on how to match to increase? What are your tactics?

Tom:

First thing I would look at is the budget tab. That’s a very, very new in the last few months tab that we can look at. And it will tell you how often that campaign is in budget and you can set a filter. So set your filter to your target ACoS. I’m guessing it’s somewhere around 25-30% from what you’ve said here that you wanna increase the budget. So I assume that ACoS is sustainable. And first of all, see what percentage it’s in the budget last seven days, last 30 days, year to date. If it’s not hitting a hundred percent, then you’ve definitely got some potential to increase that budget. Now there is an Amazon-suggested budget. Definitely take that with a pinch of salt because they have some wild increases there. I’ve seen campaigns that are in budget 70% of the time and it wants me to increase my budget by a hundred percent, which is crazy.

Tom:

So the same way we increase and optimize our bids, increase your budget methodically and in increments. You don’t wanna double your budget and then see that go from $4,000 a month and then the ACoS shoots up to 50% you’ve just spent to reach no additional audience that is gonna convert for you. So yeah, 2000 is quite a lot. So you probably don’t wanna go with small increments like an extra $10 cuz you’re not gonna get anywhere fast that way. But start experimenting by just increasing that by 10%. See what that does for you. If you see your sales grow and your ACoS isn’t affected too much, then you’ve got a bit more authority to start increasing that by another 200. The higher your budget is, the more authority you’ve got to increase that. But keep an eye on that budget tab cause you’ll very quickly be able to see what opportunities for growth you’ve got there.

Shivali:

Wonderful, thank you so much. Now I see that in our comment section, we have answered all the questions that were asked. So I’ll ask a couple more here. And one of them is ChatGPT I mean there’s been this incredible hype. So do you feel like there’s some sort of incorporation of ChatGPT in PPC?

Tom:

Yeah, I use it. We use it.

Shivali:

Really wait, tell us about it.

Tom:

We use it to help with headline generation for sponsored brands, believe it or not. Yeah, if you run your search down reports and find what keywords or even just look at your targeting reports, find what keywords are working for you and throw that into ChatGPT. Say that you want ChatGPT to give you a headline enter your product title and it has to include your keyword. So include your keyword, include your product title, and if you are having writer’s block that day, it’s a very good way to get those creative juices flowing for new title ideas. I probably can come up with a hundred titles in a week and then I’m just, I hit some all, I just can’t think of any combination for these keywords anymore or this product title. So it can just help Yeah, get those ideas flowing. I don’t think I’ve ever settled on a title that ChatGPT has given me. But it’s definitely given me a platform to jump off of.

Shivali:

You use it as a starting point. Yeah. Sort of for brainstorming, right? Yeah, and I’ve done that for emails. I won’t lie. The emails say a lot. I’m just like, please draft a compelling email for this and then you can always rearrange it afterward and,

Tom:

And the prompt it goes back, you can just get it to reiterate that. So maybe it comes back too formal. You can just say less formal or the same but more exciting or make sure to include the word deal or make sure to include the word soft and it’ll do that and then just put those into a spreadsheet and just split test some of those. Yeah, it’s not very good at calculating character limits. So try and give it a word count. But I’ve also seen people use this for optimizing listings and headlines. So the same sort of thing come up with a new headline including these keywords. My product is a new range of women’s clothing. I’m specifically selling black dresses for different sizes.

Shivali:

So Tom will close off with perhaps a strategy from you. What is your 60-second strategy?

Tom:

I’m gonna keep it on theme with ads cuz we’ve had a lot of engagement in the comments today. So I don’t want talk about my lifestyle. Prepare for any of these upcoming seasonal holidays. No matter, no matter how big or small it is with a decent lead in like with Q4 and the holiday season and Christmas, you probably want to get the jump as soon as you see the other side of Halloween. I know you’ve got Black Friday and Thanksgiving in between. But more and more as we go through the years, people are starting to prepare for these holidays a lot earlier. You don’t have to be aggressive with your bids but just get those keywords out there. Start ranking slowly that way when you get to December, if we’re talking about Q4 and the holiday season, you’ve already done a lot of the work to rank slowly.

Tom:

Yeah, that way you’ve got ahead on your competition when they come in late, you’ve already done the hard work. But the same can be true for those single-day holidays. Like Valentine’s Day work out what the lead time is, don’t start advertising a few days before cuz you’ve missed everyone. Start trying to rank maybe two, or three weeks ahead, not too early because it is a shorter holiday. But yeah, try and come up with a marketing calendar for all of your products based on seasonality and what different holidays you can actually start taking advantage of. Some of them might surprise you. And yeah, Bradley, great point. How can we contact me and Clear Ads? So our entire team is on LinkedIn, so if you search through LinkedIn for Clear Ads Limited, you’ll find most of our team, the people to reach out to. If you want to ask more questions would be someone like myself or Helen or George. If you want an audit and want someone to look at your account or you’re interested in our services, reach out to George Roberts on there. But you can also find us on clearads.co.uk. There’s also clearadsagency.com. So there’s a few websites that you can find us through there. Thank you, Bradley.

Shivali:

Awesome. Thank you so much for being on, Tom. This has been a blast and I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to come and sit down and answer all of these questions for us. All right, we’ll catch you guys next time on TACoS Tuesdays. Bye.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you so much to Tom and Shivali for that great episode and especially thanks to you guys for inputting all of those questions that you had given during the show. Don’t forget, we do this once a month one Tuesday a month. The next one, I don’t have the date yet, but it’ll be in June. I’ll be hosting that one in full. I don’t have the guest yet, but if you guys have some suggestions for guests, make sure to send them my way and I’ll be doing also a Walmart Wednesday episode next month as well. So I hope you guys found some value in this. Don’t forget, hopefully, I’ll see you guys. May 25th at the Helium 10 Social Event that we’re doing, or, actually say May 24th. You can go to h10.me/irvinesocial. You can actually sign up for the event at h10.me/irvinesocial. Hope to see you guys there in person. See you in the next episode.

#450 - No Such Thing As The Amazon A10 Algorithm!

In episode #450 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley invites the “Professor of Amazon” Howard Thai back on the show to discuss all things Amazon Algorithm Related.
 
One misconception that’s cleared up is that there is no such thing as the Amazon “A10” algorithm. We go into where this terminology came from and, more importantly, what are the top things to keep in mind for optimization your listing for the Amazon Algorithm in 2023.

Signalytics has been at the forefront of using AI since before it became “stylish” to do so, and Howard talks about interesting things they have been using it for such as doing heatmaps on listing pages to see what buyers do after getting on a product page.

In episode 450 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Howard discuss:

• 02:56 – Is there a Such Thing as the A10 Amazon Algorithm?
• 04:50 – What are Differences of the Amazon Algorithm in 2023?
• 07:10 – Absorbing Keyword Ranking Juice of Competitors
• 08:40 – The Importance of Adds-To-Cart and Off-Amazon Traffic
• 12:10 – What Parts of Listings are Most Important
• 15:20 – Howard’s Launch Strategy
• 19:20 – How to Get Amazon’s Choice Badges
• 22:00 – How Howard is using A.I.
• 25:10 – More A.I. Use Cases for Amazon Sellers
• 26:00 – What are Black Hat Sellers doing in 2023?
• 28:00 – Can You Protect Against Fake Reviews?
• 28:45 – Howard’s Hobbies and Health Routine
• 30:53– Howard’s Sixty Second Tips

► 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 professor of Amazon back on the show, and he’s gonna drop a lot of knowledge bombs about how the Amazon algorithm is working in 2023 and PPPC Tips, launch tips, and even AI tips. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you have writer’s block with creating or editing your listing? Would you like to get some help from ChatGPT? Well, make sure to use Listing Builder with AI inside of Helium 10. And with a click of a button, have sections or even your entire listing created by AI using the keywords that you say are the most important. If you have Helium 10, you have access to this already. Go to Listen Builder in Helium 10 and give it a try. Or for more information, visit h10.me/listenbuilder. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a serious seller here back on the show for the first time in a while. Howard, how’s it going?

Howard:

I’m good. How are you doing?

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty good. Pretty good. Now this is you don’t know this person, but if my calculations are correct, this is actually a momentous time because this is episode four 50, and this is the first time in two years since episode 200, or actually since episode one 50, when I have not done every 50 episodes in the Maldives. So like, this is very momentous, I’m here in San Diego at my house and, or I was like, you know what? I can’t keep affording to go to the Maldives every six months. So I’m gonna save that for episode 500. But Howard, we picked a special number for you to be on here, so no pressure.

Howard:

Thank you. I try.

Bradley Sutton:

Now part of that, I’m like, all right, well I gotta do something special, so I’m just gonna I keep telling people that I’m trying to get more healthy and things like that. So I’m on my usually don’t do this, but I’m on my treadmill, my standing desk treadmill here, so I’m gonna try and lose some weight while we listen to and learn from Howard. So Howard, actually before the pandemic, didn’t you most of the time live in China?

Howard:

Yeah, before the pandemic. I moved to China in 2009. So I stayed there like until like 2020, 2020, I believe it was February 2020. And then I kind of had to evacuate China so that I can do a mastermind in Kabul San Lucas.

Bradley Sutton:

I wanted to have you on here cuz you know, you’ve always had like special insights into Amazon algorithm and things that go into ranking and things. And one thing that was really upsetting me lately, cuz it hasn’t happened for a few years, but then all of a sudden you would see all of these kinds of posts out there whether it’s LinkedIn or whether it’s blogs and people talking about, oh yeah, Amazon has released the A10 algorithm and it’s changed and, and this is what you need to do. I would think that a lot of people follow, like are putting out wrong information because you tell me, is there such thing as the A10 algorithm?

Howard:

I don’t there’s nothing n no such thing as an A10 algorithm because the algorithm is actually nine characters, so it’s A9, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So talk about how the A9 algorithm, like how that got kind of like-named because it, it’s not like Amazon in their documentation says, oh, there’s such thing as the A9 algorithm, but how did sellers come to call it like the A9 algorithm?

Howard:

I don’t think it’s sellers. It’s actually from Amazon itself. If you go on to a9.com, you’ll see that it should be Let me try it right now again, just I’ll kick myself in the face. But, if you go to a9.com, it should go directly to Amazon itself. And then amazon.com. So that’s what it is. A9.com is actually Amazon.com when it is forwarded.

Bradley Sutton:

Because it was the name of the company that they bought who like made the algorithm, I believe it was called A9 and it actually had its own website before, but now yeah, you’re right, like it forwards to Amazon. Now, now Amazon, throughout the years, of course, just like any software company, of course, updates this algorithm here and there. But have you heard of anything like major in the last, few months at all about the algorithm?

Howard:

Oh well, A9, well, the algorithm, right? For Amazon, it’s always changing here and there left and right because they are maybe testing things or they’re actually putting more weights on special signals we call it here. So there’s a lot of things that they try to kind of adjust to get down to a better customer experience.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Now before I remember, you would speak at different events and you had some special insight into some of the things because I think the most common thing that everybody knows, and it’s just like a no-brainer that has to do with that how Amazon search algorithm works is, hey, if somebody searches for a product and then they buy it that’s gonna help the algorithm. Like because Amazon is in the business of trying to make money, so obviously they want to prioritize in the search results, the products that make the most sales, but it would be erroneous to think that it’s only sales that influence the algorithm. What are some of the things that, you know with your knowledge and your experience and your context, you can tell us that are other factors that go into how Amazon ranks products and search results?

Howard:

So Amazon does a lot of you know, they look at a lot of different signals on how to rank keywords and well in the very beginning, right? When you have a honeymoon period and they will actually go in and look at your keyword sets and what people are actually buying from that keyword to your listing. That’s one of the basic things. But in reality, like people, they’re also looking at things like if they landed it on, someone searched a keyword, right? Let’s say keto or something like that, and then they land in on your competitor’s listing, right? And from that competitor listing, they actually go in and buy your products under the related stuff or the sponsored stuff there. You’re actually your keywords juice, ranking juice, you actually absorb the keyword ranking juice from that competitor, we call it relevancy, right? From that particular competitor. So it’s like, kind of like you’re, you’re like absorbing their powers, absorbing their keywords into your listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Sounds like something out of like Marvel or DC Universe movie or something. Alright, well, what else is like one thing that I never could understand I would hear it talked about by you and others is like, oh yeah, add to carts is so important. And to me that just seemed ridiculous because I’m like, me, I guess I’m the weird one, but like me as a buyer, when I search for something on Amazon and I add it to my cart, I check out like I buy it. But when Amazon started releasing more data like Search Query Performance and different data points, you could actually see that the majority of people aren’t like me. They like add things to their cart and then maybe they don’t buy it for a few days, or they add like 10 things to their cart and then they choose like one of them that they’re actually gonna buy. And so, like, that’s why I could never understand like why people would focus on add to cart or why Amazon focuses on it. But, but Amazon is looking at that, right? And then that also would go into their algorithm.

Howard:

Yeah. add to cart is very important. They consider it as two things, right? One of ’em is in order to get your Amazon choice batch. The other one is, it’s called an expected conversion. They expect a certain amount of add-to-cart will lead to a certain amount of conversion. So the more add to cart, the more possibility or expected conversion they expect. So they, so with that said, they would have a collection of data points that will tell you, Hey, these people add to cart, let’s go and retarget them through email marketing through when you get those emails, you say, Hey, why is, why am I getting these emails that I was looking at? And it looks like it’s, I haven’t been looking at this. I haven’t been actually buying this, but then they’re actually giving a discount, a 20% discount or whatnot just so that I can come back and buy it. You know, like things like that you could see like it’s kind of how Amazon targets retargets them through that cart.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. And then also what have you found in your experiments and like maybe research just from what you’ve heard about, about offsite traffic as far as for the search algorithm like there, there, there’s been debate out there, like if somebody makes a keyword search in Google, clicks on an Amazon product and the search results, can Amazon actually see what they search for on Google and thus helps their rank juice a little bit for that keyword? Or is it only looking at the canonical URL that somebody has clicked on? But what’s your best advice as far as like, like Google and other search engine traffic, how that can help if it can help your Amazon ranking?

Howard:

So from what we’ve been seeing throughout a lot of data points that we have, Google is the most relevant for the keywords, right? Amazon can actually track those keywords that are coming from Google. Other platforms like TikTok and others, aren’t able to track those keywords as much. So it’s really relevant that if you’re coming from Google, then you would be actually getting more priority on those keyword ranking juices because Amazon wants people to come from Google because they want to make sure that they’re the first choice in product search engines.

Bradley Sutton:

So interesting.

Howard:

So they give you the best customer experience for those people and they wanna make sure that the ones that people who actually come from Google will actually find the products that they really want. It’s just like how like you go on Google and you found, there’s a news right article that just came out as not, not saying something bad, but like there’s some like in Los Angeles, there’s a shooting this and that. So when you type in Los Angeles shooting the things like most currently will be actually coming up on the search warrant results. So if that, if those products that are the most that go from, comes from Google to Amazon and they actually create a purchase, those are like the most relevant relevance for those keywords. So like at Nike had just had a new shoe how would Amazon know which shoe to present is? Yes, it’s new, but this current event kind of thing will, will kind of push over to Amazon based on Google.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but like, I’ve seen like a devaluation of the search terms like back or backend search term back in the day, it’s always title number one was the most important to Amazon algorithm, and then it would be like the backend search terms, and then maybe subject matter is kind of tied. And then after that, maybe bullet points and last would be description. But I’ve noticed in a lot of listings in some categories where not only is it not prioritized what’s in the search terms, but like 30% to 50% of the keywords that you only have in the search terms are not even index anymore. And ever since they made that change from like backend search terms and now they call it generic keywords what kind of things are you seeing as far as what parts of the listing that Amazon is prioritizing as far as the algorithm goes? Or what are you guys focusing on when you do optimize listings for keywords as opposed to what you were just talking about, like the images and things.

Howard:

So we, try to do the following, right? It is very important to have the f the initial keyword sets in there, right? So you don’t actually need to change the listing anymore. That often meaning like putting title, different text in there, different keywords into the title and stuff like that. Cuz it doesn’t really hope a lot. You guys can test it yourself. If you guys been like putting a product up for a while and then just change the title, put the most important keyword in the title in the very beginning, you’ll see that it doesn’t matter if you put whatever you put on the, on the title it’s not gonna help too much anymore because like we said before, it’s all about relevance, right? What actually get purchased and from what keyword plus the what when you search for something and like we talked about like they go to a competitor’s landing page and they eventually buy yours.

Howard:

It’s all about what the AI thinks, meaning what the AI thinks is relevant because like what you, you said we’re superpower, right? Using that particular AB testing and height mapping. How do we make it someone buy our product over someone else’s, if they land on their page, then on a competitor, and then you go in and get purchased at add a cart and purchased, you’re gonna absorb their keyword juice. That’s how they’re actually finding more new keywords. So you don’t have to change your listings that often anymore if you’re doing it correctly.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. How are you how are you launching these days for like your customers products? Like wha are you mainly just using PPC or every launch? Are you trying to incorporate outside traffic or what’s your go-to launch strategy these days?

Howard:

Okay, so first, a normal way to find the keywords we go in and we look at the top competitors. We grab all the keywords that they’re ranking on the top competitors. For the top competitors, there’s just say 10 of ’em. And we would actually find all the keywords and find which one is actually getting the most sales. And then we just put those on the title. A normal way where we do the listing optimization, right? Then we go in and we go do PPC, right? PPC, we do it in two ways, as we talked about, right? One is the normal product sponsored products. We go do exact search keywords with the rest of the, like like using our ai, it goes in and does the keyword to actually rank the product. That’s one.

Howard:

But then we go in and do product targeting. Remember I told you like whoever, whatever we’re landed on and then we actually like the top ASINs or something that we go in and purchase and they purchase our product. We actually get more keyword ranking juice from all their keywords. So when I’m targeting a keyword, first thing I do is I go in and I do the normal, exact, broad phrase, all those and autos and stuff like that to get the particular ranking for those keywords. You know, the, we called it query groups, right? So the query groups are there already. So now then we go to Helium 10 we search on Amazon, right? We search on Amazon and we say, let’s say coffin shelf, right?

Howard:

Coffin shelf, and then you get all these different ASINs in there. So we go into the and get the first two page of ASINs within that keyword, and we stuff it into the product targeting side. When you stuff into the product targeting side, that means when you have a higher chance to get sales related to that keyword, because eventually a lot of people are going to be looking at the first two pages for that keyword. And we’re gonna actually be under their product display page like the, the related, the sponsor, the highly ranked or what, whatever it is all those we will be in there. So the probability of us looking into getting ranked will be higher for that keyword from going from the regular search results or all the way to someone else’s product as a page. Then it comes to us. So we’re trying to be all over the place and absorbing as much of keyword juice coming from those.

Bradley Sutton:

I like that because I never thought about it that way. Like, like I do something similar, but I guess for a different reason. But like, let’s say f you’re targeting all of them, that means if they type in coffin shelf, even if they pick somebody at the bottom of the page, they click on it your ad comes up, but now my ad is gonna follow them around Amazon in the future because I was targeting their ASIN. And so like if I’m only targeting like two or three or four of the top sellers, that means I’m only gonna get, I’m only gonna get to follow that customer around Amazon for if they click on those three. But this gives me a little, a bit of wider reach and sure, maybe they don’t purchase it right away, like just because they saw my ad on the page, but now there’s gonna be more chances for, for them to click on my product because we’re gonna follow them. That’s a cool strategy.

Howard:

Yeah, that also helps with the add-to carts, the clicks, and also the Amazon Choice badge.

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of Amazon’s choice badge what are you, I mean, what else are you doing to, to kind of help with that and or make sure that you, as I say this my device is gonna turn on, but, but, but trying to get Alexa to like make, make sure your products maybe show up in Alexa’s voice searches.

Howard:

Well, for Alexa, voice searches is mainly Amazon’s choice, right? So to get the Amazon choice, you will need to make sure that the customer that buys your product is actually doing a lot of research about this. Remember how you said in the very beginning, like when people are like adding to cart a product after a certain time, they actually go back and buy it, right? They have this intent to buy it, but maybe they go in and add your product to the cart and then they go, Hmm, I need to do more research. I need to find out if this part product is actually what I want and it has the specs that I want. So it goes back and looks at all the competitor’s reviews, all the competitor’s specs, and there’s page nation coming on. There are people clicking on these pages’ reviews that Amazon’s tracking.

Howard:

On the competitors where that actually has a good ranking for that particular keyword. They actually, you could see that they’re doing a lot of research. They’re outsourcing, Amazon’s outsourcing the work to these customers to help us, help them find out what is actually a good Amazon choice for this keyword. Because they’re actually going through the page Na page Nation and going through all the keywords within the exact reviews for that particular product. And then they might go hop back out and go look at another product and then look at more reviews and then, and eventually, they say, actually, I think I did a correct choice. The first product that I did put into my cart, it’s actually really important. It is really a good product and I’m gonna buy it. So they calculate this based on a lot of different ASINs or a buyer sessions, and they calculate and they do some and the average of which one is actually a really good fit for the Amazon choice. And then they calculate from there on. So every three days they switch out, they recalculate the Amazon choice, and that’s how you see Amazon Choice comes in and out on things.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so now I read your blog sometimes and I know you’ve got a lot of experts on your staff about AI and that seems to be all the rage. So what are you guys doing with AI? I mean, you, you guys have been working with AI for even longer before became trending, but like for ranking with AI or listing optimization or just business? Talk AI with me for a little bit.

Howard:

A lot of things that we do in the very beginning, ever since we created this company is 2019 or it’s Signalytics AI, right? So we, we actually did AI before AI was cool so what we were working on, which we already have something already is you guys have it too, the AI listing builder, right? From the AI listing Builder, it goes in and creates a listing to and it goes through the process of like heat mapping and, and so on from building it after it builds the listing and looks at it, then it will go in and say, How is AI ranking products compared to before? So we, we found out that you know, like there’s scores on Amazon when you’re like on a product on honeymoon, you can kind of tell that it’s very sensitive on ranking, right?

Howard:

So if your product is going in and you can and you’re ranking, if for some reason you get attacked right? By negative reviews so when you get attacked by negative reviews, you can see automatically at that particular couple hours, you’ll see that your ranking drops like crazy. It might not be because of your ranking your score or whatnot. It’s because Amazon has a positive and negative signal to it. If you know that they, they see that, hey I’m giving you all this trust, I’m giving you all these impressions, but all of a sudden you’re giving me, you’re telling me that your product is not good because you’re getting, start starting getting a lot of negative reviews, you know? And then of course it looks at the percentage of negative reviews with your ratings and ranking and review ranking rating.

Howard:

But then all of a sudden, the most recent ones is always going to be the one that’s gonna decrease your rank or your ERPs on organic. So that’s what we see negative, a lot of negative effects. And they give you scores. They have like scores, like on the first page, how many reviews that you actually have on there, that’s not, not so good. You know, like threes, twos, ones, and then they kind of calculate a score and that’s how they kind of help using AI to de-rank you. And that’s why you’re getting attacked all the time on refuse.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Okay. What else? How else are you guys using AI or how do you think sellers should be using AI? Oh

Howard:

Well, we use AI to actually look at what Amazon’s looking at in their AI, it’s like an AI against ai, right? We feed ’em the dataset and then we see what results come out of it. Like, so regarding another thing is like deals like you, you, you can see that from all the data sets that deals is actually really important for the algorithm to learn to see if you’re actually a good fit for these keywords. So the more deals you have, the more impressions you will get, and the more of course chances that you are showing Amazon that your product disaster is doing well. Yeah. So that’s something that we use.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now you mentioned like just all of a sudden getting attacked with bad reviews. You know, Amazon in the last two, or three years I’d say has definitely cracked down more than in previous years on Black Hattery. You know, like they shut down so many accounts what was it, like a year or two ago, and cracking down on review groups and making it harder for people to potentially sabotage listings and hijack and different things. But here in 2023, what are some of the common things that you’re still seeing that sellers need to be on the lookout for as far as what Black Hat sellers are doing to attack their competition?

Howard:

It’s still the same thing. It’s all about the reviews there are people still out there doing reviews that are going to be hurting the, the com the sellers, right? So yes, maybe before it was a hundred percent of the people who are doing reviews, let’s say 2019 let’s say, or 18 whatever, there’s no like checking on the algorithm what actually is working or not. They’re not suppressing any reviews or anything like that, but the more you’re getting closer and closer, the review rate is getting less and less based on like, maybe bots leaving reviews or sock puppets leaving reviews. So it’s getting less. Right now it’s probably like 20-30% of the people out there that are trying to leave your review is actually sticking, there’s still a percentage of that. But getting it off is another thing. So getting off, we have in the back end, what we have for our clients is we actually can detect which reviews are fake and which one is real with an algorithm that we have. So then we can actually help submit tickets to see which ones are actually fake to Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. All right. So, but, and so there’s no real way to protect yourself against that? You just gotta kind of be on the lookout. Or what would you suggest to sellers to maybe mitigate some of the effects of that kind of stuff?

Howard:

I talk to Amazon often and they say that it’s hard for them to co-relate which one’s real and which one’s fake unless you have some kind of proof. If you have some kind of proof, submit it and they’ll see what they can do with it. But this is the hardest part of doing Amazon is getting those fake reviews.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. All right. We’re gonna ask you in a little bit what’s your 60-second strategy or 60-second tip of the day, but before we get to there like me, I’m right here on my treadmill and you know, as you know, I love traveling. So like I’ve always tried to ask guests in 2023, Hey, what are you doing for hobbies? For me is traveling. What are you doing to keep your mental, physical health good as an entrepreneur? Me, I try and get on my standing desk, treadmill, play basketball outside, and stuff. What about you? What are some of your hobbies and what are you doing to stay mentally and physically healthy in 2023?

Howard:

Me trying to stay mentally healthy is trying to learn new things. Like I’ve already probably done, since 2009, right? So that’s why like 13, 14 years now on Amazon, I’m trying to learn new things. Cause everything on Amazon is pretty much the same. There’s not much to learn. So I’m trying to learn new things like internet marketing affiliate marketing and other things to help our company to boost it up to another level. So I think learning is, is what’s kind of keeping me sane because, or else I would’ve been like doing something else already. Like everyone else right now, all you can see like all the top sellers are probably doing other things like Airbnb and other things like that. So I think learning is what I could say. It’s what causes me to still be sane.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. You still gotta do some stuff, though. That’s not work-related though. I think you gotta have some hobbies or fishing or golf or something.

Howard:

Well, I do. I love fishing. I love it, okay, there we go. I love fishing, I love eating, I love watching movies and traveling because there’s, there’s a lot of food and stuff involved in traveling. So that’s what I like to do. And I, I don’t, I like, I like working too. Actually. I work like maybe I would say like 14 to 16 hours a day. Just, just so that I’m out of the house sometimes.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go to our 60-second tip of the day or 30-second tip, whichever you want. What’s a strategy that you think sellers can utilize right now that will definitely help them?

Howard:

Well, I would really, really look into protecting your listing page. Like from what I just said before regarding your listing that people can actually absorb your keyword ranking juice. You wanna protect it as much as possible, right? So we call it CRO on your product listing page, conversion rate optimization on it. It’s making sure that you have all three or four tags you have, like the save tag, the green or the orange, and the red tags as well as try to make sure that you have the save or what do you call it? The strike-through price. It kind of helps, right? It is not just that one thing, but a combination of a lot of things to do it right. Also, I mean, you could get Amazon choices even better, the more Amazon choice you got, that you are actually the Amazon choice for that category, right?

Howard:

And also maybe like, have some kind of accessories bundles or optional items that you can have on the side. But you do need to get an account manager, but account manager, you can get it for free now. But if you guys need someone, contact me. But if you want and then all the bundles and all the things, so people and the new models, the new models are important because when people scroll, they’re gonna can’t find any of your competitors until they scroll two very, very on the bottom right. If you have any variations if you have other similar products, make sure that you include it on your product display page and make sure your EBC is good if you, oh, I’m sorry, A+, but premium A+ actually guys, premium A+, as long as you change it a certain amount of time.

Howard:

You don’t need to have that much A+ content out there. You just, as long as you modify it, edit it, and modify it and edit it within this how many times do you need? I think it was 15. I forget how many times do you need to edit. Do you get it? And then you automatically get the A+ premium. So you don’t need to do 15 ASINs, just the same listing. Edit it, update it, edit it, update it, and then you get your A+ premium.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, I love that. That’s a good tip I didn’t even know about. All right. Well Howard it was great to have you on here. I’ve burned 300 calories and, and walked 1.5 miles on this treadmill during this. And, and I know you’re going back to China soon to visit. I’m gonna see if I’m not sure if I can make it, but this time I’ll take you to my treat in Macau. And for the rest of you guys, if you wanna reach out to Howard just go ahead and go to Signalytics.ai.