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

#503 - Maximizing Holiday Sales: Amazon PPC Strategies and AMA with Mina Elias

Get set to sail through the bustling holiday season sales with ease and finesse as we bring you this month’s TACoS Tuesday PPC expert, Mina Elias, Founder of Trivium Group. Ready to divulge his invaluable strategies tailored for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the entire holiday season, Mina introduces us to the art of optimizing ads. Listen closely as Mina recounts his own experiences and shares the lessons learned from past mistakes to ensure you make the most of your holiday sales.

Whether your product is a Black Friday hit or not, we've got the perfect strategies to maximize your sales and click-through rates. Discover the clever technique of adjusting your bids to your benefit and the smart way to maintain your spending within limits. We reveal some hidden gems on best utilizing the holiday season with budget recommendations and crafting holiday-specific ad campaigns. 

Finally, we get into the world of Amazon DSP, providing insights on increasing conversion rates. Uncover the secrets of the optimal spend and timeframe for DSP, learn about bidding strategies for supplements, and also evaluate the effectiveness of Google ads. As we wrap up, we share some valuable tips on targeting long-tail keywords, setting and increasing bids, and making the tough choice between what ad types are top priorities. Tune in for these expert insights and make the most of your holiday season Amazon sales!

 

In episode 503 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and Mina discuss:

• 00:00 - Black Friday, Cyber Monday, & Holiday Amazon PPC Strategies
• 00:13 - Amazon Prime Day Feedback
• 04:01 - Sales And Advertising Strategies for Seasonal Products
• 04:52 - Bidding Strategy for Holiday Shopping Events
• 10:53 - Split Testing for Main Images
• 13:57 - Holiday PPC Budget and Sponsored Campaigns
• 15:14 - Adjusting PPC Budget for Holiday Season
• 23:07 - Custom Images in Sponsored Brand Ads
• 26:53 - Running Amazon DSP
• 31:42 - Amazon Rank and Bidding Strategy
• 34:08 - PPC Strategy for TACoS and Keywords
• 35:09 - PPC Strategy for Improving Conversion Rates

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Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Today we're talking with Mina Elias from the Trivium Group and he's going to give PPC strategies for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday season in general. This and so much more on today's episode.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Not sure on what main image you should choose from, or maybe you don't know whether buyers would be interested in your product at a certain price point. Perhaps you want feedback on your new brand or company logo. Get instant and detailed market feedback from actual Amazon Prime members by using Helium 10 Audience Just entering your poll or questions and, within a short period of time, 50 to 100 or even more Amazon buyers will give you detailed feedback on what resonates with them the most. For more information, go to h10.me forward. Slash audience.

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of this Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Carrie Miller, and this is our TACoS Tuesday, where we answer all of your PPC questions. We have an expert guest who's going to help answer all of your burning questions, especially for the holidays. Today on our show, we have Mina Elias, and I'm so excited to have him on. He's an expert in PPC and so I'm going to go ahead and bring him on.

Mina:

What's up? What's up, guys.

Carrie Miller:

Thanks again for coming on live with me. I'm so excited you're here.

Mina:

I know. Thank you for having me. It's been a minute since I've done a TACoS Tuesday.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, do you want to just introduce yourself a little bit, so everyone knows who you are, and a little bit about you and your agency.

Mina:

Yeah, my name is Mina Elias. I'm the founder of Trivium Group, which is an Amazon agency, amazon marketing agency. We handle pretty much everything on Amazon for brands. I started as a supplement brand in 2018, using Helium 10 religiously, of course. I grew and scaled that brand to over a million dollars. It's called MMA Nutrition In 2021, there was a very large demand for people coming to me saying please run my PPC and stuff like that. I ended up starting an Amazon ads agency. Initially it was just Amazon PPC. Now we do PPC, DSP, SEO, creatives, helping brands launch on Amazon all that kind of stuff. I actually worked with Helium 10 on their PPC course. If you are a member of Helium 10, if you haven't checked it out yet, you should definitely check it out. It is a full, thorough course. Me and Vince Montero did it together. It's like beginner all the way to advanced. It's everything that I do in our business for managing ads. I love sharing everything that we are doing and learning. We have about 150 brands under management, 80 people on the team. We're learning a lot every day and Amazon is changing. I know that it's hard. When I started out, it was very hard for me to know what's good and what's not good. I'm here to share my experience and then hopefully it benefits everyone.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. Well, thanks so much. I have some questions prepared here for Meena that are more holiday oriented. This should be a really good episode. Here's the first question what is your Black Friday, Cyber Monday strategy?

Mina:

Cool. I love talking about this because on prime days and Black Friday, cyber Monday, I mean one wrong move and you could end up losing all of your profits. The reason I say this is because that happened to me multiple years in a row, at least two years in a row, where I was following the strategy of spend a lot of money on ads, do deep discounts and then you're going to sell four times more on Black Friday, cyber Monday or Prime Day. I did sell four times more, but I also spend way more and it resulted in me losing money or not making profits those days. There's two categories in which products fall. One category is they do very well in Black Friday, cyber Monday and Prime Day. I'm talking like expensive products, giftable products. You should know your product. If you don't, I suggest that you go into Helium 10 and you can see the performance historically of product sales over time, and I think Bradley did a video on this. It's on my YouTube channel, just Meena Elias. You'll find a video of me and Bradley and he uses X-ray and cerebro to show you historically how has this product sold and if you notice that certain products or you don't know if your product is going to sell a lot and you notice that there's a spike, then you're like, okay, my product might fall into that category of it's going to do really well Black Friday, cyber Monday. So if you're in that category, I'm going to give you the strategy which is leading up to Black Friday, cyber Monday or any Prime Day. You basically want to increase your bids. You know that you're going to do a deal, so you want to increase your bids and get as much rank as you can, because during Black Friday, cyber Monday, you're probably going to have to decrease it a little bit because you might not be able to handle the volume of the spend that's going to happen from all of the additional people coming in onto the platform. So you're initially increASINg your bids 30 days before you know you have a deal coming. The day of, you know the day before, I would say, and then the day of and then day after, you're going to lower your bids a little bit, probably I would say by 10%, nothing crazy and you want to check frequently that you're you know how much your spend is and you want to make sure that it's not out of control. There's also guardrails. I wouldn't do account level budgets, but if you have a software, you know you could do some sort of automation where it's like if you hit a certain spend in that day, then you know, lower your bids or your budgets by certain amounts so you're not overspending Again.

Mina:

The thing that I learned the hard way was, you know, I would, on average, sell $2,000 a day. The Prime Day came, black Friday, the 7th of Monday came, I sold $4,000, but instead of spending an average of, like you know, 400 to 500, I spent 1,500. And that extra 1,000 or whatever in profit that I was going to make because of the sales, it all went to ads and I ended up not making as much money or losing money. And you know why would I do that? When I'm just like selling more units and now I have to order, you know, more units faster. Now, if you're not in that category, what I would do is you need to have a very focused strategy on organic only. So 30 days prior to Black Friday, cyber Monday, you're going to increase your bids again, but the day before like, or maybe even two days before leading up to the day after those days, I cut my bids by 30%, and we do this across all the brands, so it's a significant cut, which essentially means you know if someone is clicking on your ads, you know they're probably like deep, they're not like window shopping or anything like that. They're probably on page three or something like that. And it's cool because you know people are going to, who are scrolling that much, might be interested in buying. And what I've noticed is, even by cutting our ads by 30%, they will probably our PBC spend will probably be more, like 10% more than what it usually is, but as a result we do get an increased amount of sales. It's not the same as if our bids were high. So we'll maybe sell 50%, 70%, 100% more than what we usually would sell in a day, but you know we'll have our ads spend the same and so all of that difference is net profit.

Mina:

And so you know, if your strategy is, if you're not the seasonal product, black Friday, cyber Monday type of product, you want to cut down by 30%. But if you are, then you're going to have a deal and you're going to probably only cut by 10%. Those perform exceptionally well for products like that. So we've had giftable products that were 45 and we brought them down to $35. We've had coffee makers that were $300 and we brought them down to like 260 or something like that, to 59. And that coffee maker, I think, did $70,000 in one day, wow, yeah, we had a card brand, a card holder, that did like a million dollars between both prime days. So when you have a giftable product, when you have an expensive product, something that people wait for deals to buy, you can make a lot of money and definitely utilize the deals that you know prime day deals or Black Friday, cyber Monday deals.And then one more thing that I didn't mention for both of those is if you do plan on like showing that you have a lower price 30 to 45 days before Black Friday, cyber Monday or Prime Day, increase your cost, your sale price and let's say you're a $30 product, bring it up to 35 and then, right before you can drop your price back to 30 and it will show that you have had the lowest price in the last 30 days. So, on top of like a deal, it'll show that you have the lowest price, or, if you don't have a deal, it'll show that you have the lowest price, which some people might think that it's a deal. That's essentially what we've been doing. And then another thing to consider is what are the things that you can do to improve your click-through rate during those periods which are going to be your sale price, your main image and your reviews? Those are the top three things that can influence your click-through rate. The higher the click-through rate, the more you're taking advantage of all that traffic that's coming in.

Mina:

And so, main image, the time to split test this probably now, because you have about a month until Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You know, with price testing, see how far you can go up right now before actually having a significant impact, because then when you go down you can have a deal and you don't have to go down as much. If you raise your price by 20% now and you notice that your sales and your profits are pretty much the same, when you do a 20% off in Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you're going to get all that much more profit because you're having more sales at the same price. And then, if you're at a 4.2 stars, do whatever it takes between now and Black Friday, cyber Monday to hit a 4.3, because once you hit the 4.3 and you have 4.5 stars, I've seen click-through rates go way up and traffic you know, paid and organic significantly improve. And just a note for everyone, higher click-through rates means lower cost per click, that's. I mean, I don't know why that's the case. My theory is that Amazon views higher click-through rates as better experience for shoppers and, as a result, they want to reward you and allow you to spend more money. So if you're looking for one way to get more free sales through organic traffic or more sales at a lower cost, through a lower cost per click, work on click-through rate.

Carrie Miller:

So would you say, to do the manage my experiments, to do split testing for those main images, or how do you usually split test?

Mina:

You know, manage my experiments has not been that reliable recently and I updated my main image and I did manage my experiments and I noticed that for one variation it said that the old one is better and then for one variation said the new one is better. So I said you know what? I'm just going to test putting the new one up and I know what my click-through rate has been the last month. Let's see what's going to happen the next two weeks. So I added the new image and click-through rate went up by a lot. Oh wow, yeah, I mean, and it was against kind of what manage my experiments said. So I think the ultimate way to split test is just, you know, use something like you guys have a poll feature right, yeah, yeah, audiences. So use Helium 10 audiences, get some preliminary data and then you know, if you feel a little bit more confident and you're like, okay, cool, like this image is definitely better than my old image, then go ahead and just like test it. Worst case your click-through rate goes down for a couple of weeks. No big deal, you can catch it pretty quick. I would not make any decisions until at least seven days because you need like one full week cycle so you can look at the average of the click-through rates before, average of the click-through rates after and then say, okay, you know, after it's definitely worse, because for me, Monday the click-through rate could be 0.4. Tuesday could be 0.28. Wednesday could be 0.43. You know what I mean. So that's how it just fluctuates. No one knows why. It's human behavior, you know. None of us you know behave in a predictable way Like you know, at least that predictable. So it's okay, like just let a full week cycle go by.

Carrie Miller:

Do you have some tips Like are there certain things like maybe if you have multiples in a package should you show all of them, or what are some kind of tips you have for those main images that you've seen, kind of better performance on the click-through?

Mina:

Yeah, great, great question. So for me, I think what I've seen is the sale, the selling points, like the, the USB, the selling point being visible and you showing that you're better than everyone else just from the main image. And so when I, when I put a bunch of you know like products next to each other, my competitors versus me, like I know that I'm looking for a product, not a lot of people take advantage of the text on their, on their boxes or on their products. So, for example, let's say you know you're selling like flip flops, the cloud flip flops, so you can have the flip flops and, and you know, in an angle whatever. Or you can have the flip flops put on top of a box, a fake box, and on that box you have two sides where you can write text and it says, like you know, the softest material on the market or whatever a hundred percent recyclable stuff like that, right, because you can have that text on the box that you couldn't have actually have on your package, and that box probably doesn't exist. You know you're probably shipping it in a, in a clear bag, but no one is going to pay attention to that detail and and you know, at the end of the day, they're going to get your your slippers. They're going to look this, you know they're going to look like slippers.

Mina:

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

Carrie Miller:

Wow, that's amazing.

Mina:

Yeah, they're just心 restoring, etc. You have to get creative in that one, and so just think about what your product is and what are some elements that you can add around the product to make it pop. And then you utilize packaging with text to make your main image an infographic instead of a main. You know, like if you could make your main image an infographic? That's what I'm getting at.

Carrie Miller:

Very interesting. Okay, thank you for sharing that. That's a really good info. Okay, let's go on to the next question here. Let's see, I think you kind of asked well, this is for holiday season, so how should I adjust my PPC budget for the holiday season? So, in general, like you know Q4, there's more spend. What budget recommendations do you have?

Mina:

Yeah. So again like if, if, if you don't know historically how much your budget goes up by, what I would do is I would go, I would go into helium 10 and I find the increase in sales you know from my competitors and I would probably budget 50 to 100% like growth in my ad spend based on what I'm seeing. So let's say my competitor goes from selling 100 units a day to 200 units a day during during that season. Then I'm going to take, you know I'm spending $1,000 a day on ads. I'm going to go to 1500 or max 2000. That's kind of my range of of increase in ad spend and I'm obviously going to do it slowly and make sure that my revenue is growing, you know more, so that I'm left with net profits. So that's another point is to make sure that you are tracking your net profits. So net profits is your sale price minus your Amazon fees, minus your cost of goods sold, minus your advertising you know advertising spend and then obviously refunds and reimbursements take that into account and that's your net profit. You know, on Amazon, excluding, like your own, like cost, you know VA's, whatever, that kind of stuff. So make sure that you're measuring that because that's the, the like, the true number of, like how much you're taking home. And as that number, you know, is increASINg, you can increase your, your ad spend. And you know, hopefully, because at the end of the day, like I don't care about selling three times more in Q4. And then you know, my net profits the same.

Mina:

I'd rather sell four times less and have the same net profit because it's easier on my cash flow. So that's how I would. I would adjust my budgets Now. If you have historic data and you understand how your sales perform, then you can do it based off of your, your sales growth. Again, if, if you're like, not your spend growth but your sales growth, so if your sales have historically gone up by 80%, then I'm I'm, you know, going up by 40 to 80% on my ad spend. I'll start by going up 40% and then notice how much my sales went up, cause if I start going up by 80% and my sales are on the by 60, I'll scale it back down to 40. Because, again, I want to keep that gap big enough so that I'm making more profit, taking more money home.

Carrie Miller:

That's a really good point. Yeah, profitability is the most important thing at the end of the day. Yeah, another holiday specific one. What are some strategies for creating holiday specific ad campaigns and promotions?

Mina:

Yeah, so this is. I mean people are not going to like this answer, but every single time I've tried to create anything that's holiday specific has not turned out well. So sponsor products ads work amazing. Every time I start, I try doing a holiday sponsored brand, which is you know the Christmas tree with the products surrounded and you know that kind of stuff like Christmas vibes, I don't know what it is. My theory is that people on Amazon see that as an ad and they're like I don't want to click on an ad but they see sponsor products as like a very like organic thing and they're like oh, I didn't even know that it was an ad so. And then I've tried it with DSP too, and that one was painful because we have to come up with like 16 different sizes for each creator.

Carrie Miller:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Mina:

And so we tried a lot of it and it did not outperform regular you know our regular standard ads so I wouldn't worry too much about you know. Creatives for holidays, okay.

Carrie Miller:

I've. We've got a lot of questions in here, so I'm going to start pulling up some of these questions from the audience. Um, rick, I hope you said your name right. What is, or what are your rules to stop sponsored campaigns when a keyword does not perform as desired?

Mina:

Okay, so usually, if I'm, if I'm trying to be aggressive and grow, it is about the same price as my product and no sales. So if I have a $30 product, if I spend $30 in no sales, if it's an auto broad phrase or expanded ASIN, I'm adding it as a negative. If it's an exact, I'm lowering the bids and I'm going to lower the bids consistently until they either stop spending money or they're profitable. But more than likely, you know, they're just going to stop spending money. But I'm just giving it a chance to be on page four and if someone finds it and clicks on it, they're likely to convert. So that's, that's my strategy. If I'm going aggressive, if I'm trying to be conservative, it'll be 30 to 50% of my sale price. So if I have a $30 product, anywhere between 10 to $15 and spend and no sales, then I'm going to add it as a negative or positive. Now, if you notice that there's a lot of those and if you notice that you you know you went in and you're like, okay, cool, $15 and spend in no sales, I'm going to add it as a negative or lower the bids and you do that and you're left with very little and you feel like you know, like it's not your sales, your sales are not there. You probably have a conversion rate problem. So your problem is more yes, kill the bleeding. So $15 and spend no sales added as negative. Stop spending money on it.

Mina:

You know you can't help it, but focus on your. You know, with your current ads being the same, that your TACoS like gets cut in half by you doubling your conversion rate, because then from there you can start removing some of the negatives and retesting them, or just taking the negatives and relaunching them in newer campaigns and seeing if they're going to be able to get it, and then you're going to perform Cause. A lot of times it's like a balance between conversion rate and ad spend. So here at this ad spend, you know, and this conversion rate, I'm fine. Now, like you know, this conversion rate, now I'm not profitable. So when my conversion rate goes up, I can spend a little bit more. Conversion rate goes up, I can spend a little bit more. It's like a balancing app.

Carrie Miller:

That's a really good point. You know that. You know you got to look at your listing too. Is it the most optimized, or your images the best they could be? I mean even just your main image, the way you were talking about. You know adding those different things on the packaging, that's um. You know little touches that make a huge difference. So that is really good. You know not all. You know you can negative the keywords, but then you know they might not be bad forever. So it's really good. Mr techie says, PPC strategy help required. Selling a product in Indian market and then I launched it in the US Market. Have 60 plus feedbacks. My ACoS is 150%. I was running exact match, but conversion rate is negative 7%.

Mina:

So not sure what the question is, but yeah, yeah, can you, can you clarify the question? And then I mean, if your conversion rate is 7%, I mean ACoS really doesn't matter to me Tell me what your TACoS is. That's like maybe gonna be a little bit more indicative. Tell me what your, you know your margin is and what your TACoS is and what your conversion rate is like overall on the listing and I can maybe help you a little bit better. But I mean, if you're, if you just launched, it's more than likely your conversion rate is low. Having 60 plus Feedbacks or reviews, I'm assuming, is not enough. Also, running exact match alone isn't great. You can run broad phrase and exact and auto and expanded ASIN and whatever is working. You know you can keep that and whatever is not working you can pause it or add it as a negative.

Mina:

And the goal is to you know, across all the different Add types that you have match types and all that kind of stuff, to find just a bunch of winning keywords. You start off, let's say, with a hundred dollars a day in budget and you know you launch a hundred dollars a day worth of ads and maybe ten dollars of those ads are profitable. So the other 90 you're gonna kill and then launch a new 90, and out of that 90 there's 10, and so now you have 20, that's working, 80. That's not working, you know. Kill that 80, launch another new 80, now you have maybe 30, and you know, and so on, and so you're just trying to stack up like More keywords that are profitable and they're working, and then kill the ones that you tested but didn't work out, and again, all of them will work better if your conversion rate is higher.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, that's a good point. I think he said something else a little bit. I've already spent over 3,000. My sales are around 1800 through profitability, though Profitability is very low. So I think you kind of gave some good advice there. So so let's see. Bradley has a question. He says are you 100% of the time doing custom images for sponsored brand ads and if so, what kind of images are working well?

Mina:

Okay. So the one, the one image that I've seen perform really well and yes, I am doing custom images for sponsored brand 100% of the time the one image that I'm seeing work really, really well is Like something like social proof. So people that are on Shark Tank, people that you know, were like featured on, like there was a creative one where it was like the product and then like put on the cover of Forbes, you know, like with a magazine of Forbes, like next to it. We've seen like stuff done with an influencer, like really big influencers Hillary, dove, Halle Berry, you know who are like celebrities. So social proof is what I've seen Works incredibly well and you have to do it in a way where, like it's, there's no like text, so you can't just do like a bunch of like logos and stuff like that. I don't think they're gonna allow that, but that is what I've seen works best. Everything else has worked kind of Okay, you know, like similar sponsor brands in general and you know I hate to say this, but sponsor brands in general, they seem to not perform that well. They seem to just spend more money and not generate sales. So I'm a hundred percent an advocate for sponsor brands for your own branded search terms. But the second that I start going into like sponsor brand for other keywords. What I notice is it's like the people are clicking on sponsor brand and sponsor products, spending money and not and it's not generating any more sales. And we've tried it where our organic and sponsored is low. So there's. You know there's no chance they're coming into our listing and we try and run a sponsored brand and They've. They've done Okay, they haven't done great.

Carrie Miller:

That's interesting. Okay, the next question how you mentioned in one of your videos that you use same keyword in multiple campaigns, does not, does that not cannibalize the keyword?

Mina:

Yeah, so the only time I'm using the same keyword in multiple campaigns if they're if the match types are different and it does not cannibalize, and I'll explain why. So when you have a keyword in broad, that keyword triggers 50 different searches, 50 different search terms, right, if it's in phrase, it triggers 20 and if it's an exact it triggers one, and then these are, just, like you know, rough numbers. So it let's say that you know you have the same keyword in broad phrase and exact, this keyword in broad is gonna show one of 50 times. Now, if you have a hundred dollars a day budget in that campaign and a one dollar cost per click, that that means that it's gonna show across those 50 keywords twice per keyword. You know you're gonna. It's gonna, you know, be two times per keyword in 24 hours. And then you know for for the, the like phrase, it's gonna be five times per keyword and then for the exact, it's gonna be whatever, however many times, you know a hundred times for that keyword. That's, if you reach a hundred dollars, they and spend, and so you add that up, right, two times, five times. You know, and let's say, 20 times in 24 hours. They're not gonna compete with each other like there's there's so much time in the day. An ad could be showing up, you know, every minute. So it's like there is. They're usually in different match types, not gonna compete, and if they do happen to show in different times, from my understanding the the one that has the highest bid is the one that's gonna show up. So it's not a big deal. I don't think they compete. I just think like, statistically, you have something that shows up twice in 24 hours, five times in 24 hours, 20 times in 24 hours. What is the chance of them running into each other?

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, that's true. Okay, so Jeffrey asked what's the minimum amount of Spend needed and the minimum time frame you recommend for running DSP? That's a really good question. I've had this question a lot recently.

Mina:

Yeah. So I would say 2000 a month is would be the bare minimum and that's just kind of enough to cover like some loyalty or retargeting campaigns. And the minimum like in the first 30 days, that's when you're still getting data, and then in the second 30 days, that's when you're starting to optimize. So within 60 days you should start seeing like the true results. So I would say the minimum at spend would be 2000 and then the minimum you know amount of time should be 60 days, and then 60 days that's if you're like running it with someone, that's like experienced and they know what they're doing. If you're doing it yourself, it's probably it's gonna be longer. You know more, like 120 days because there's a lot of things that you have to tweak to get it Right. But yeah, I mean it doesn't have to be a lot of ad spend. I think you can get retargeting down with 2000. You just have to figure out which Placements work the best. So for me it's been usually Amazoncom, desktop, mobile web and mobile app. Creatives has been responsive, e-commerce has performed the best, and then audiences are Like sometimes 30 days is enough, 30 days retargeting. Sometimes you have to go with like 60 days retargeting. So it just depends on how many people are coming into your listing. For an audience to be created on DSP, you need at least a thousand Unique visitors a month to create an audience awesome.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, the next one is how are you using the bidding strategy for supplements and are you getting good results?

Mina:

First for supplements, the way that, like I work, from long to long, tail up, like from from long, like long term, like um, low, low search volume, all the way up because lower search volume are easier to win. And so my strategy is, you know, going to helium 10, I put in my, or I go into, like you know, the search results on on Amazon type in my main keyword, open up X-ray. I pull up the top 10 competitors, launch them in cerebro. Then I set up some settings, so I would say like a minimum of 500 searches a month, minimum ranking competitors seven or eight out of the 10. Um, and then maximum position, 60. Um, and so now it's showing me keywords that are relevant to most of these competitors with decent search volume and they're not ranked a super low. And then from there I have my core list and I take that core list and I start launching.

Mina:

I launched the big ones initially just to get relevancy and to get a lot of indexing for for a lot of different keywords. I'll watch this broad phrase and exact, but I start with the lower search volume keywords and I put them five in a campaign, one in broad, one in phrase, one in exact, and I'm gradually launching them and I start with a bid that's lower or around the suggested bid. Sometimes the suggested bid is $5. So I'll just start at you know, a dollar or $2. Anyways, and then I can always inch my way up, and so from there I wait and I, you know, I spend and I see what's going on. And then I start inching data up based on like, what's getting um, impressions, um, and obviously, if there's anything that's performing well, I'm spending a little bit more money on it. And I'm basically trying to start like I'm casting a net at the bottom and then coming up, up, up, up, up, until it starts like catching some people and instead of like spending up here, and then I'm like, damn, like this, spending too much money, it's not profitable, and lowering the bids.

Mina:

I started the bottom and work my way up and then, as I stack the, the long tail ones, it's easier to launch the bigger ones Because they're going to be more costly, but they'll balance out because they they will drive a lot of traffic, but you should have like a decent amount of sales that are profitable coming in first and then then it will work a lot better than if you just start with the broad keywords Um and yeah, and that gets me pretty good results. We're like looking for negative keywords very frequently, making sure that any keyword that spends a certain amount of money with no sales, is added as negative, like if it's an auto broad phrase or expanded ASIN, um, and then all any keyword that's like underperforming bids are lowered. And we're constantly launching new keywords and testing new keywords out. So, going through the search term report, um, you know, twice a week identifying any search term that converted profitably that we're not currently running. I'm not negating it or anything, I'm just taking it out, putting it in its own campaign in different match types to try and double down on those keywords.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome, all right. Next question Are Google ads still effective?

Mina:

Yeah, I would say Google ads are still effective. Definitely. I think you're trying to drive cold Google ads to Amazon because you have a lack of attribution. It's very hard to optimize. I wouldn't necessarily put my money there before maximizing uh, PPC and DSP.

Carrie Miller:

Can you elaborate a little bit more on this strategy for a rank? Do you have to put in specific keywords on your Google ads in order to rank on Amazon for those, or does it just sending Google traffic allow all your keywords to increase an organic rank, Like what? What is the strategy for that?

Mina:

The strategy is individual keywords. So it's like we'll set up a keyword, uh, in its own campaign and we'll drive traffic to Amazon and we're noticing that the rank of that keyword for us organically goes up and we're tracking it in the search query performance report, um, in terms of like all of everything ranking higher. That works well when we're using influencers. So we've done a strategy where we've hit up a bunch of influencers, like I'm actually going to do this for my new product that I'm launching, um on Amazon. It's like a new, it's like a packets version of my electrolytes, but basically I'm giving it away to a hundred different influencers and what we've seen is like brands that have done that that they've given it away to influencers on Tik Tok and they've like posted about it and made good content. And then people are like looking up the brand name and looking at it on Amazon, like that's really helped improve organic rank across the board.

Carrie Miller:

That's amazing, thank you, okay, so what's the best way to choose initial bids?

Mina:

Yeah, so start with suggested bid, you know, and if the suggested bits too high, just start lower and then work your way up. There's like no science behind this. Um, you're never going to nail it. You're just going to start somewhere and then you're going to have to optimize it. You're going to have to optimize over time until you hit the you know, the sweet spot. But I would rather you start lower and work your way up, because if you start higher you're just spending a lot more money faster.

Carrie Miller:

All right. Next one should broad and phrase match be used in campaigns throughout the product lifetime? I think is what that is.

Mina:

Product. Okay, so should broad and phrase match type? Yeah, broad and phrase match types should be used forever. They're like different types of keywords. So you have one keyword and you have different match types and those different match types perform differently. So you know, it's like. That's just how it is. Like you can have a electrolyte powder broad, electrolyte powder exact and electrolyte powder broad could do amazing, because inside of electrolyte powder broad there's 40 keywords. You've negative 10 of them that are not doing well, and then there's 30 of them that are doing good, you know. And then electrolyte powder exact is just that one keyword and you know you've optimized the bid as much as you can and it's doing okay, but you know it's spending too much money and not an ecosystem is high, etc. Etc. So you should always use phrase and broad. Yeah.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. Okay, and we have some continuation from the one earlier who had 150% ACoS negative 7% conversion rate. He said TACoS are 125%. Current sales two orders a day. Category gift bags. I need PPC strategy for the current situation in helium 10. I see my rank is poor for major keywords. I am tracking.

Mina:

Yeah, I mean this is. It looks like to me it's more likely a conversion rate problem. When I see TACoS that high, I mean it's not going to be your, because if your TACoS is that high, then great like, pause all your keywords and only keep the ones that are profitable. And if there's like, if the ones that are profitable aren't even making you two sales a day, then yeah, I mean you have a conversion problem. So it because if you fix your conversion rate, then your 125 TACoS could become 50% TACoS and then you'll have more opportunity to get you know, launch more keywords and some of them be more profitable, which will drop your TACoS even further. But it seems, as of right now you're, it's probably a conversion rate problem.

Carrie Miller:

Yeah.

Mina:

Sorry, let me just say okay, while you fix your conversion rate, what should you do for PPC? I would say go after a bunch of long tail keywords, start with a very low bid and work your way up slowly and try and catch some profitable keywords. That's, that's all you can do. There's not much else that you can do, right? It's because then, the day you're launching different keywords, you're testing different keywords, some of them need to convert and it's, you know, it's up to your conversion rate.

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. I think that's actually the last of the questions here, so and we're about, you know, almost at 40 minutes, so we've definitely had a pretty good episode here. So thank you so much for joining us on this live. We really appreciate you coming and giving all this expert advice. I think you just dropped so much information here, so many good tactics that people can start taking into, especially these holiday season times, to help, you know, maybe not overspend and to be more profitable. So thank you so much again for joining and we'll see you again, hopefully another time on TACoS Tuesday, and we'll see you again.

Mina:

See you later, see you soon, thanks guys.

Carrie Miller:

Bye everyone.

#502 - $6 Million Amazon FBA Business with 0 Employees?!

In episode 502 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Swapneel discuss:

• 00:00 - Selling on Amazon And Scaling Rapidly
• 14:18 - Product Launch Strategies and International Market Approaches
• 12:47 - Scaling a Multimillion-Dollar Business Solo
• 17:52 - Product Research and Potential Products
• 20:39 - Issues With Suppliers and Product Lifespan
• 23:42 - Product Launch and Maintenance Strategies
• 34:40 - What's Next For Swapneel?
• 38:52 - Swapneel's 60-Second Tip

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got a very unique seller. He sold over $10 million over the last couple of years, has 60 products in over 10 marketplaces and launches a new product every month. Guess how many employees he has? Zero. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Black Box by Helium 10 houses 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 want to get into with your first or next product to sell on Amazon. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash black box. 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 series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world and from the other side of the world. We've got a serious seller here that is joining us for the first time in the show. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself, since it's your first time on the show.

Swapneel:

Hi, my name is Swapneel and I'm from India. Been selling on Amazon from the year 2014 and, as a full term, from last four years.

Bradley Sutton:

So yeah, were you born and raised in India?

Swapneel:

Yeah. What part Rajasthan, Jodhpur.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. And have you lived all your life there or have you moved around at all?

Swapneel:

Yeah, so when I was like 19 years old I went to New Delhi like for my university for five years and then right now I'm like kind of digital nominate, so I don't really live here anymore, but just maybe like two, three months a year just to visit my family, because my family still live here.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Well, what did you go to a university for?

Swapneel:

I did law so.

Bradley Sutton:

I wanted to be a lawyer.

Swapneel:

Yeah, so I did law for five years and I specialized in intellectual property rights.

Bradley Sutton:

How does one go from five years studying law and then all of a sudden, e-commerce? Not a natural transition there?

Swapneel:

No, I was doing part time, like other than focusing at university. I was working as well All my university years. Any commerce yes, I was selling on Amazon from 2014. And yeah, so, and I did. Well, how did that?

Bradley Sutton:

happen, though, because that's still not typical. It's not like okay, yeah, during the day I'm going to study law, during the night I'm going to sell on Amazon. I mean like especially in 2014, when hardly anybody was doing it, so how did Amazon even get on your radar?

Swapneel:

So, even before Amazon, I was doing a lot of other platforms like eBay, and there are some other local marketplaces like traders shop clothes, so, and you know, in 2013, amazon entered in India, but in 2014, they opened for everyone, and I knew that Amazon is a really big e-commerce company and I should be there and yeah. So, but, like, even before I went to university, I was making, you know, some money like some, doing some other stuff like flipping goods from online to offline.

Bradley Sutton:

So, like you've always been like kind of like I had an entrepreneurial mindset in one of those early age. You trying to make some action, okay, now it's making a little bit more, a little bit more sense, okay. And then things started getting bigger so that when you graduated from university, did you just go full time into into e-commerce then yeah.

Swapneel:

So that that time, like for me the money was pretty big motivation thing. So in my first year of the university I wasn't sure how much I would be making as a lawyer. But on the second and third year I got to know from my seniors like what is the actual situation and I realized that man like I need to put like at least 10 years in law if I really want to make some serious money in this field.

Bradley Sutton:

Now back in 2014,. I'm assuming you were selling an Amazon USA.

Swapneel:

No, I just did in India. That's where Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

India was active in 2014. Yes, yes, I didn't even know that. Okay.

Swapneel:

Interesting, yeah, but it was very new. It was really new they didn't do reselling or private label. Yeah, so I was just doing reselling. I used to buy a lot of stuff from USA, mainly from Amazon.com, and then selling in Amazon India. Yeah, Interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, yeah, at what year did you first hit the seven figures?

Swapneel:

The 2021, yes.

Bradley Sutton:

2021  okay, and at that point were you one hundred percent private label or were you still doing like some reselling and things?

Swapneel:

I was doing both and like I feel like so, in 2020 I launched a lot of private label products. During all the, like you know, doing the first lockdown, I was just focusing on all the products launches I will be making, doing product research and my first product has really contributed a lot for my private label journey, like I started with one product and then just my.

Bradley Sutton:

You're still selling that product now.

Swapneel:

Not anymore, because the demand is okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Can you tell us?

Swapneel:

what it is, then, yeah, sure.

Bradley Sutton:

I can show. Go ahead and send me the link over in the chat and let me pull it up on my screen. Let's see here. Okay, I see what this is, so let's pull it up here so everybody else can see. There we go, all right. So this is like a, like a USB capture card I'm looking at here. And how did you find this Like? How did you even decide that this was going to be your product? You just got it randomly, or?

Swapneel:

what. So for me, like one of the criteria to search the product is checking the new launches of my competitor or and see like if I can have that same product in a very less turn around and can enjoy the party. So that's what's my like, I mainly do. And during that time I saw like a lot of people were seeing selling this product but they were doing MFF, like they were not doing full fill by Amazon and like, even though the product demand was there, but they were, I don't know why they didn't did FPA. And I knew one thing like as soon as I will do this FPA, the product doesn't have any. Like you know, any of my computer doesn't have a lot of reviews and if I will do full fill by Amazon, then I can, you know, sell a lot of goods as well. So how many?

Bradley Sutton:

how many at the peak? Like? How many units of this were you selling a month or a day?

Swapneel:

I was selling like I was selling like a month I was selling more than 1500 units in India.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, wow In Amazon India. And yeah, okay. All right so then you're like, okay, wow, yeah, this is definitely better than reselling, or I have to get a little bit and stuff you could just Well. Did you manufi, did you get it from China, or did you get it from there in India?

Swapneel:

Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, I got through some of the suppliers in China. Yeah, but the best thing about this product is not just selling, but the margin I had. So I was buying this product like for $5 and was selling for like this product for around $40.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow, very nice. Yeah especially in India you're still living in India that the money goes even farther.

Swapneel:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

How long until you bought your parents a house?

Swapneel:

So I bought the like. You know, as soon as my business started picking up in doing COVID, my family was already super excited. So they already finalized, you know, like don't worry about being a lawyer anymore.

Bradley Sutton:

No, forget that you know like, hey, this Amazon is good, huh, okay.

Swapneel:

Yeah, but that you know definitely I was in a bit of stress situation. It's a really big thing, you know so, but that stress really motivated me to push myself further and focusing every small details of my finance, my product. So, yeah, I was a stress, but at the same time I was able to, you know, do better in those situations.

Bradley Sutton:

So 2021 hit that $1 million mark. How much did you sell last year in 2022?

Swapneel:

I did $5.4 million.

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, getting to $1 million is impressive enough. How did you go from $1 million to $5 million just in one year? We're just launching tons of products, or you had some products go viral Were you launching to other marketplaces. How did you increase so fast?

Swapneel:

So, like I was doing some international markets before in and out, like you know, kind of drop shipping back in 2018 in UK and some EU market also in USA but it was not, like you know, full time or doing throughout the year. Sometimes my accounts were also suspended because of drop shipping. But back in 2021, I started again focusing on the international markets, but still was not doing like a full-fledged business. And back in like 2022, I expanded my business in a very serious manner, like in whole of EU UK, Canada, USA. I know everything how to do an average because I had a lot of experience. And also in 2020, I did my business in Austria as well. So that has really helped me a lot. You know, like provided me enough money to expand in those other markets. Yeah, so that was one of the things like really helped me. And like I was just using my suppliers, which I'm already using in India, and I know that, whatever I would be selling the same product in USA, I would be doing 10X more at least. So that has changed a lot. And also my negotiation skills really helped me because a lot of my suppliers started giving me credit and I utilized those that credit in a very efficient manner like, yeah, you get loan and if you just spend on yourself, then it's not a good idea, but if you utilize pretty well in the business, then definitely it helps. So that's what helped me in 2022. Okay, All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Now it's coming up. We're now here in Q4 in 2023. Are you going to do better than last year? Same Worse. What do you think you're going to end up with this year?

Swapneel:

So this year it would be exactly the same what I did last year, because the situation has changed a lot this year. Firstly, I'm traveling whole of this year and it's just maybe like 40-50 days. That was in India. Other than that, I was traveling full time. I was just came, like three, four days ago, from like a four month of trip. I was in North and South America. So this year I was like pretty relaxed and also a lot of things happened at Amazon as well. So Amazon is, I think, are really not smooth at Amazon, so trying to fix those things as well, all right, so now you've got this five months, you've got this five, six million dollar business.

Bradley Sutton:

You're traveling, enjoying yourself, not working like 100 hours a week, so you must have 20 employees supporting you, huh.

Swapneel:

Oh, not at all.

Bradley Sutton:

How many total employees have you had the last few years?

Swapneel:

So in India I just had one accountant and one person who manages, and then there is one guy from at Veros. That's it in India. But I never had any employee anywhere else, even though my Indian business is not even like 7%. If I compare to my last year's sales revenue, my Indian business was just 7%, but for the rest 93% revenue, I never had any employee. So for your Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

USA business and in Europe you have zero employees, just you.

Swapneel:

Yes, yes.

Bradley Sutton:

Well. So I mean, people listening to this might ask a question well, like, maybe that makes sense. You know, like if you're working like 90 hours a week and have no life and just stay in your basement and work all day, but how in the world do you scale a business so much? And you're the one who has to answer the customer service, you're the one who has to find a line of their products, you're the one who has to do the keyword research, you're the one who has to make the listing, you're the one who has to fight with Amazon if customer support, if something happens, how in the world can you run a five, six million dollar business just by yourself and not even working really full time?

Swapneel:

So the one of the best thing with Amazon is their FPModels. So a lot of customers, don't you know, reach out to you if they have any issues with the delivery and all the stuff, and that is one of the reasons why customers, you know, contact to the seller at first place, other than the warranty and all the stuff. And also I was doing a lot of reselling as well in US market, so the brand has to take care of those stuff. So a lot of time was saved for sure, yeah, so, and I had really good partners, for example, with the Logistic thing. I have a really nice shipping agent and that really, like you know, eases my work a lot, just sending the details of the labels and everything and just telling you where to ship which market. They take care of everything. So for me, the main goal was just to, like you know what I can do to improve my revenue, and also sometimes I used to use some freelancers if I was not really good with something. So, yeah, that's it.

Bradley Sutton:

So how many marketplaces now are you in? So right now I'm in USA, Canada, UK, whole of the EU, UAE, Japan, Australia, India, but more than 10 marketplaces, probably, and are you selling the same products across the board, or, like, some products are only sold in EU, or some products only in USA?

Swapneel:

Each market is different. For example, in India I can sell mostly a lot of products, but not very high end products and which are technical. Each country the situation is really different. Sometimes there is a really low like maybe a local company who is doing really good and have a lot of reviews, and maybe you don't have any kind of competitive advantage, even though I will try or push, try to push. So for me it's more like market specific strategies, because not all markets are same and every market is completely different.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now what's your, what's your process? Like, how many products are you launching or actually until now active? Approximately how many skews, different skews, you know, like if you're selling the same one product in USA and Canada and Europe, just count that as one. But just roughly, like you know, 20 skews in all marketplaces, 100, 300, like roughly. What do you think?

Swapneel:

So, like beginning of this year, I was also doing a lot of reselling, but now I'm not doing business with one of the company I used to do and that has definitely contributed a lot to my last year's venue. But things have changed.

Bradley Sutton:

So private label. Then how, yeah, how many skews are you doing?

Swapneel:

So currently I'm launching like every month at least one new product in private label and so and some I also take off the old you know, which are not really performing really nice and not what my efforts or the you know margin is shrinking a lot, so I just cut off, you know, those products. So right now maybe like 60, 70 products 60 or 70 products.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, walk me through. Have in mind your last product you launched. Like, when was the last product you launched this month? Last month? So have one product in mind. You have it in mind? Mm? Hmm, you got it in mind. Ready, yeah, yeah.

Swapneel:

Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, Now was it July that you launched it.

Swapneel:

Yeah, oh.

Bradley Sutton:

I guess that one product you have in mind. What month did you discover it, or what month are you like? All right, this is what I'm going to plan to launch. You know we talking January last year. You know what was it? Spring when was it?

Swapneel:

So in April and May I was in China and I was looking around some products and then I found some product which is doing good in the US market and I contacted some suppliers. When I was in China I visited the factory. So it was in May, in the month of May.

Bradley Sutton:

But which came first. You found the product, or, like you found the idea in China, or you had done some research when you were still in the USA and then went to China. Which one was first?

Swapneel:

Sometimes, you know, because of some advertisement or anything if I find I just keep on. Like you know, at least every day when I'm doing product research I spend at least one hour on Amazon just browsing and doing really nothing, checking what's going on and if I can add something value on that product. So then I just found one product and I was doing more and more research and then seeing like I do check, like you know, if any product is launched recently and the rank is going crazy, it means this product could be a potential. So this is one of the reasons. And then to validate, I check the data how much volume it says in a month and other than that.

Bradley Sutton:

What are you looking for? Like are you checking how many do you have, like a limit? Like oh no, there's already 30 people selling this, so it's too late. Or like what's your what are some criteria? Is that you're looking for when you're doing your validation?

Swapneel:

So I check if this product is a really advanced, then how the product you know like before generation did, for example, like which was not that innovative enough. It was a basic product, but how much that product was doing, how much is the reviews for that product. Is a really really established and do I have chances of getting success or not? So I do check all these things and I also do the search result how much is a search volume for this particular product? And to check whether this product is seasonal or not.

Bradley Sutton:

So okay, so, so then you did all that with this product, and then your next step was you actually went to China to like check some suppliers for it, or what was the next step after you're like you know what, this looks really good, it passes my test. What was the next step for you?

Swapneel:

So I was already in China during those time in April and May and I felt like visiting the factories and you know it's a really good idea rather than just chatting them. I visited factory and I did all the customization with them and, yeah, so ordered like I can also negotiate better. For example, they gave me a price for 10,000 units but I said, hey, it's a new launch and you know, then I try to get the same price for like maybe four, five thousand units and at the same time I make sure that if this product is not really doing good or it's very new in already UK or the U market, then I make sure that I launch the same product in all across the market places all at once.

Bradley Sutton:

So this one product that you launched in July, the one that you have in mind was that only for USA, or was that one that you had launched in other places?

Swapneel:

Yeah, at the same time I was launching UK and U for that product it was Enslafrom.

Bradley Sutton:

On the subject of suppliers, have you ever had issue with your suppliers where they sell your product to other people?

Swapneel:

Oh, A lot of suppliers do that a lot of if not that, then how do you handle that?

That is one of the reason, like why a lot of my products don't have a long life long life in case. Like you know, like people do a lot of drop shipping like tick tock products and Instagram, really, you may see so most of my products are also related to that as well. Not all, but at least 30% of the product. So I sell it. The trend is going on and, yes, then eventually the trend dies, or so it's not like I can sell the same product for another 10 years as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Yeah, so you. So you don't get really emotionally attached to the product because you know that. You know, like now are all these products you're launching similar brands, or or you always starting just different, random brands.

Swapneel:

So I have some products, specific brands, and some brands are just used for any miscellaneous products.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. So then, this product. You were there in April and May. You happen to be in China. You were browsing Amazon. You found it. You found a new supplier for it, got it ready, 4,000, 5,000 units, shipped to Europe and to US. What's your, what's your launch strategy? Like, like, like, how do you, how do you what some techniques use? Like, how are you getting to page one? Are you just using, you know, ppc? You have any special techniques that you can share? I?

Swapneel:

Use very basic first of all. Obviously, your product should have really nice photos, should classify why your product is better than any other product in the market.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you get nice photos? Do you have like a studio?

Swapneel:

You do business with or what. So I first will try to work directly with the supplier so that I don't have to spend a lot of money upfront For these photos, even because I'm not sure whether how the product will gonna do. And then, if I cannot get anything, then I try to look at fiber to find some people who can do for me, and Then also do the nice a plus content, make sure the bullet points are really good, everything this is a really basic thing to start with, and then, since I launch a lot of products and a lot of market, I Utilize one of the best tool of Amazon, that is, amazon wine, because that really help you. And If you will launch a product in a lot of market, then you get a lot of reviews as well, for example, in the US.

Bradley Sutton:

My view just oh and all the reviews are stacked together, then you be Like you get 20 vine reviews in USA, 20 vine reviews in UK in the same ascent. Now you've got 40 reviews instead of I mean, I'm sure many people do that, but you know, it's just kind of just dawned on me like that's a good, that's a good strategy to have and another reason why you should launch on the the same ascent, okay. And then you find the keywords from helium 10, like you use Cerebro or what tool are using.

Swapneel:

So for me, because some of the products are really new in the market, there are no competitors as well, so it's really difficult to focus. You know which would be the keyword. So I just use Amazon automatic ads to check all the keywords which are performing and by or but. Maybe every week I try to optimize and seeing if some of the keywords are element, trying to put in the negative list, so, and trying to make sure that those keywords are on the product title bullet points. Yeah, yeah, to improve, to improve, so like just very basic, to like no things I use. And Once, like initially, you always get very good reviews because of the wine, because normally people don't put a lot of negative reviews, they leave mostly positive reviews. So you already got initial pull, you know, for your product. Yeah and Then it is totally depends upon the actual customers reviews. If the actual customers are Giving me good reviews, then I can be sure that this product is really doing good and Then I can have that as a long-term product as long as there is a sale for this product. And then I started improving more of my ASIN by putting videos, doing, you know, whatever things I can improve for this product, then putting some Warranty-related things, making sure the customer is always happy. Yeah, I feel like if you sit on Amazon, you should always align your values with what the values of Amazon are. Yeah, so I just make sure that and I take every detail of the customer to further improve the product as well, like checking voice, you know, a voice of customers.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so now you know, thinking back then, from April, your product research phase to Negotiating, negotiating with suppliers, you know, getting samples and doing your customization, like you said, sending it to the marketplaces, creating the listing in the different marketplaces, managing those PPC campaigns in the first few weeks to launch that product that you launch in July, up until, let's just say, august. You know, so one month into the launch Approximately, how many hours do you think that you spent doing all those things?

Swapneel:

Oh, one of the so one of the most interesting time for me when I launch the product is the first sale. I look at the velocity of then another cell, how fast I can. I'm getting another cell. Then you know, checking the performance each day and whether it's improving or not. And, yeah, I closely check every detail during those time and for me, whenever it's my first launch, my goal is not to make profit at all and I will focus on that. Yeah, for me, the main focus is just to see how good is the product and how is the demand actually, because if your product reviews are good and you are early, more Than you can make money for years for sure for this just one product.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay so, but then how? Same question like the how long do you think you spent up until you know, after those first few weeks of spending a lot of time checking the sales? You know like, do you think it took you 50 hours from April to July or to August for that product? Was it 10 only, or or approximately? How long did, uh, did you actually put actual work into that product? I must say like maybe, yeah, for 30 hours at least okay, so about 30 hours of work for the one product, and then now, like, let's say, a product gets mature. You know, now you are making profit. Now it's kind of taking care of itself. Like how much time in a month do you spend on that product, would you say you know because I'm you know, you're probably having to do your ppc and, and you know, check reviews, customer service. Is it like one hour a month because you almost have nothing to do? Is it five hours a month for that one product? What would you say?

Swapneel:

so if the product is really doing good, then the first important thing is to make sure that I have stock for this product, sure? So I negotiate with the supplier and, you know, try to to make sure that I have stock, and then I'll look at the competitors if there is something innovating they are trying to do and if I can implement the same as well, you know, as soon as possible, maybe one of my suppliers putting some new product as a free or, you know, trying to value add, then I also make sure that I do some value addition as well, because, just because of this stuff, I don't want my product rank to go down yeah, so how long does it take?

Bradley Sutton:

you know, like, what is your maintenance phase for a product? For that, for that? We're talking about that same product, you know. Now you know it's October, that product you launch in July. Thank you, how much time are you spending on that product?

Swapneel:

so right now I felt that this product reviews are not really doing great and I'm not motivated enough right now to do further, even though even without advertisement right now I'm getting sales for those products. But if I'm trying, this is a low value product. So if I'm trying to invest a lot in the advertisement it's not really giving me a lot of fruitful results. So right now I'm like, okay, once this product is sold I will not start again, but then, but, but still.

Bradley Sutton:

How much time is it are you spending on so?

Swapneel:

every day. I always wait for the helium, then emailed about my performance, and it gives me all the units I sold in each of the market and that really give me a lot of idea. If something is going interesting, then I try to figure out why it's going like that. And, for example, yesterday I definitely checked on that product and I was saying like, okay, I'm getting sales, not doing anything. And then I checked the reviews are there any improvement in the reviews or is there a possibility of me I take that as a possibility if I can, you know, sell this product for a long time. But yeah, I see that I still have some stock left and the other variation is that really go good, I didn't have that, but I'm still wait and watch. Right now I'm not trying to buy something. You know more from us at first yeah, let's see.

Bradley Sutton:

So you think maybe less than one hour a month you spend on it now yeah, maybe two hours yeah, so so now we can, we're getting a little bit clearer picture of how you, you know scaled up and still can be by yourself. Is, you know, like, hey, maybe to find and and vet the product and and all the work to launch it only took you 30 or 40 hours, and now that it's in maintenance mode maybe you're only spending one or two hours, you know, per per product a month but, I remember you telling me you know that you're leaving money on the table, probably because you're not using, like, all of the tools, or you're not doing all of that, the analytics, since you're by yourself. But still, even with not doing everything that you could be doing, you're, you're, you're doing millions of dollars. And then what? What is your like profit margin, would you say, after your expenses for for your business? At least 15, 15, 20 percent so always want to make 15, 20 percent. If it dips lower then then you go ahead and cancel that product.

Swapneel:

If it goes less than 8%, then definitely not worth it at all.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So what's the future hold for you? Are you just going to keep doing what you're doing, like this, and just do stuff by yourself, launch a product once a month and things like that and then put on maintenance mode, or are you going to like you know what? It's time that I need to start delegating some of my tasks and maybe take some employees on? What are you going to do next year, in 2024?

Swapneel:

So ever since I was at our BDSS event, that has completely transformed how I see things and how better I can do, and from that time on was obviously I was struggling, so not focusing a lot during all those months, but right now I'm just thinking like every day. Once in a while I have thought about the delegation and what all things I expect from someone, and I'm right now in phase of hiring people, because I know one thing that I can do a lot better what I'm doing right now If I have people. For example, I have a lot of products in Australia. They do really good for me, but I feel I'm so stupid that I'm not sending the inventory on time there. A lot of my products are mostly on outdoor stock and if some market is doing really good, then I don't focus a lot on the market which don't perform well. For example, my USA and UK and EU market do such so better especially Germany, UK and USA that I don't put a lot of efforts in Canada, Australia, Japan, India and also I feel it's really bad because I have all the resources, all the infrastructure. All I need to make sure is ordering the right quantity and making sure that I have stock for those products. That's it. Yeah, so I'm losing just that.

Bradley Sutton:

That's the first thing that you're probably going to want to hire for is like, hey, I need somebody just 100% managing my supply chain, making sure that I'm not running out of stock anywhere. Okay, All right. So what would you say is your I mean, I'm assuming USA is your number one marketplace what would you say is your number two, three and four marketplaces out of all those that are going on UK?

Swapneel:

UK, I feel, can do a lot better as well. I really I'm very happy with UK market, a lot better than US market, because I feel the competition is less, the margin is a lot better than US, but overall sales it's number two.

Bradley Sutton:

You're saying next to USA.

Swapneel:

Yeah, yeah, right, okay, so far. Yes, so UK would do better than US maybe for me.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh really, wow, that's pretty impressive. Okay, interesting, all right. So, yeah, you got inspired by going to Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You can see all the strategies that people are using, and these are strategies probably your competitors are using and you're not you know. So, yeah, it's like when you go to events like this, it can open your mind as far as as you know, seeing what, what is possible out there. Okay, so, other than hiring, finally, some help. What are some other goals for you for next year?

Swapneel:

Focusing on external traffic, because this is a huge thing, really really huge thing, because I see a lot of products on Amazon having 30, 40 reviews and then there's a competitor having 20,000 reviews and they are on the top five products. Why? Because they're getting external traffic. So external traffic is a really huge thing and I think I should have some strategies to work on that thing. Maybe TikTok release, Instagram release, and I'm really like focusing a lot to get some people on board related to marketing, because that's where I feel I'm really not good at all. So, trying to work on that and, yeah, I think that can be really big thing for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. Well, I wish you all the best of success. You know I've seen you already at a couple events this past year and hope to see you again at some other local events. And yes, please definitely start hiring people and get some help that you need, and then you'll be able to travel even more, you'll have some more time on your hand and you can enjoy what's your favorite place that you or craziest thing that you have done living as a digital nomad the last couple of years.

Swapneel:

So I'm kind of and really in juggy right now. So I do skydiving, mostly a lot of sports, mostly a lot of sports related to air, you know. So when I was in like just a few weeks ago, I was in north of Washington and I did some being walking on a plane, like almost eight years old plane. I was walking on that plane and that was one of the craziest thing.

Bradley Sutton:

Like on the wings and stuff.

Swapneel:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was really a show.

Bradley Sutton:

No, thank you, thank you.

Swapneel:

For me, like selling on Amazon is just giving me freedom to do what I love the most. I just need financial freedom. That's it, Because that's it Like it. And such a beautiful thing like selling on Amazon you can work and travel at the same time.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah

Swapneel:

Whenever I'm traveling still not many people very rarely meet someone who is selling on Amazon, to be honest, especially of my age group and they're traveling because either they quit the job or they just got two weeks off from office.

Bradley Sutton:

That's yeah, yeah. And they have to go back to work but not you yeah.

Swapneel:

So, yeah, this is a really like, really nice life, you know as a digital moment. But only bad thing is that when I'm traveling, I cannot focus a lot on my work. So I feel like, from going forward, maybe next few months or years, I would like to live at one place a lot more so that my work doesn't hinder. And obviously, if you will, if I want to approach eight or nine figure in coming years, then I cannot do by just one or two hours a day. I need to put more efforts and really need to be very cease at work, because big money comes with big responsibilities as well, I guess.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, all right. So why don't you leave us with a 30 second tip or 60 second tip? It could be either like an Amazon strategy, or maybe it's a strategy for traveling, for how to live as a digital nomad, a strategy for Amazon India. It could be about anything, so go ahead and give us your strategy.

Swapneel:

So I feel like there would be always a stress when you are selling on Amazon and you always need to have a patience, because Amazon will not fix your stuff in five minutes, even if your listing is gone, your account is gone or whatever. So the most important thing you can focus is on your mental health and you should prioritize that thing, because in life you may make a lot of money you can on the other day, if your account is suspended, you are bringing your nothing. So, but one thing can always help you is your mental health, and I think exercising is one of the best things, because that has changed completely me. I still remember how I was doing the first lockdown and how the journey from last three was not at all smooth at all, but not at all, like you know, not very smooth at all, but going workout and not stressing that helped me to not to stress. So I think, yeah, everyone should do this if you are especially selling on Amazon, because you don't have a lot of social life as well when you're selling on Amazon, except traveling, Okay, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, that's good for everybody to follow. I wouldn't follow the having zero employees for $6 million business, but everything else is kind of you know, something that I think a lot of people can do Well. Again, thank you so much for joining us and I hope to see you in person sometime next year.

Swapneel:

Absolutely Can't wait to see you again. Thank you so much, Bradley.

Helium 10 Buzz 10/19/23: New Amazon Marketplace | Transparency & Returns Updates | Big Deal Days Recap

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

Amazon announces the launch of Amazon.co.za in South Africa in 2024
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-south-africa-store-launch

Amazon makes it easier for brands to join Amazon Transparency through new interoperability features
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/policy-news-views/amazon-makes-it-easier-for-brands-to-join-amazon-transparency-through-new-interoperability-features

The internet is littered with fake reviews. Amazon, Glassdoor and others are trying to fight back
https://apnews.com/article/fake-reviews-amazon-glassdoor-expedia-trustpilot-43a478ac0b27d6bb773a3bbdba1858b1

Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days Was the Company’s Largest Two-Day October Holiday Kick-off Event Ever
https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/10/amazons-prime-big-deal-days-was-the-companys-largest-two-day-october-holiday-kick-off-event-ever

We'll also introduce you to the game-changing tool, Market Tracker 360 - your trustworthy guide in navigating a rapidly changing market. Get a demo of the MT360 tool here. Lastly, maximize your holiday profits with Helium 10's Q4 Strategy Guide – a step-by-step roadmap to unlocking the full potential of Amazon’s peak sales season. h10.me/q4guide

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

• 00:47 - New Amazon Marketplace
• 01:52 - Amazon Transparency Update
• 04:30 - Fake Reviews
• 06:26 - Prime Big Deal Days
• 07:39 - Walmart Listing Update
• 09:18- Return Policy Change
• 10:16 - ProTraining Tip: Market Tracker 360 Demo
• 16:30 - Download The Q4 Strategy Guide

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Amazon is opening up a brand new marketplace. The Walmart marketplace has created a brand new program to help sellers save on their referral fees, and Amazon is making it easier for brands to join Amazon transparency this and so much more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Welcome back to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. My name is Keri Miller and I will be your host, and this is our weekly buzz episode, where we bring you the latest and greatest news related to Amazon, Walmart and the e-commerce space. We'll also give you a tip or strategy for serious sellers at any level. Let's go ahead and see what's buzzing. Okay, so let's start off with one of the most exciting stories of the day today, and that is that Amazon is opening up a brand new marketplace. This marketplace is going to be in South Africa. So if you are a seller in South Africa, this marketplace is going to be opening in 2024 and it's open to currently local South Africans. So they basically announced that you can start applying for this marketplace now at seller.amazon.com/southafrica and that's going to be where you're going to apply, and it's already set up and ready to go for you to do that. It's a very, very exciting opportunity for anyone who lives in South Africa, because a lot of sellers are in that area and you're selling in Europe and you're selling in the U? S and other parts of the world, but now you can sell locally to your neighbors, and so it's a very, very cool time to be able to bring your brand to Amazon with that fast shipping in South Africa. So let us know below if you're a South African seller and you are planning on applying and selling in this marketplace.

Carrie Miller:

All right, next up, we have another amazing announcement by Amazon, and that is that they are making Amazon transparency a lot easier for brands to join. Before, they had a basically a 2D data matrix barcode that they would put on products and you had to label your products physically with this with your packaging. So this meant that if you wanted to join the Amazon transparency, it would take quite a bit of time to get that all set up and going, because you have to wait till the next run of your packaging and get it on your packaging, or you would basically have to repackage all of your products if you wanted it on your current inventory, which would be very expensive. What's really exciting about this is that they are making it easier for brands through new interoperability features. So, again, you know they had it available to a lot of brands, but they had to do their packaging with that special barcode on it and as of 2020, I believe they said as of 2020, there were more than 10,000 brands that did Amazon transparency, and now 33,000 brands are actually enrolled. So I think that that number is going to jump up dramatically and this is really good for sellers and for consumers because of the fact that you know, when you have that assurance that you're not going to get counterfeit products, it makes the whole process better for sellers, for their account, health and for consumers. They're getting the product that they paid for.

Carrie Miller:

So you know, I can imagine that it's going to be very, very easy, and so what's going to, what's going to happen is you can take codes that are already on your packaging and they can use those codes to verify whether or not your product is not a counterfeit. So, if we take a look, there's an example down here and Logitech actually has done this. So Logitech started out with this kind of using their own codes and what they did is they used the serial numbers that were used for warranty purposes, so those were the codes that they were able to use for this transparency and able to validate these. And so what they do when they, when Amazon's shipping is out, they scan these codes before shipping it out to verify that this particular product is the original and not a counterfeit, and then they can send it out. If it's not, if it's not anywhere to scan, or they're you know something is wrong, then they'll put it to the site because it's counterfeit, and that saves you a lot of hassle. Now this is going to be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US, so that's pretty exciting that they're really trying to roll this out worldwide. I think it's going to be an amazing thing to be able to roll this out quickly. I know I'm very interested in getting this going on my, you know, on my brand as well, because I don't have to go back and repackage everything. Are you going to start enrolling in brand transparency and do you think this is a good thing, or do you think it's going to be a hassle? Let us know. Whatever it is that you think below. Okay, going into our next article.

Carrie Miller:

The next thing is about reviews. Now, this goes to you know kind of with the theme of counterfeit and whether or not they're real, and, as you can see here that you know, this article is saying that the internet is littered with fake reviews, and we do know that this is true on Amazon, on Glassdoor, on TripAdvisor. I know for myself, I went and looked at reviews for a restaurant that I just opened and it had so many great reviews and I was like, oh my gosh, this place is going to be so amazing. And I went there and it was absolutely terrible. And what I realized, it was a lot of friends and family that were making, you know, these reviews go, you know, to five stars and they were putting these glowing reviews for it. And it was literally not the customers, because later on the actual reviews started rolling in and I could see that it wasn't the truth. So there is a lot of that that's going on, and so I think that this could be potentially a really good thing.

Carrie Miller:

It says in this article that they are, these big companies are actually teaming up now. So we've got Glassdoor, trustpilot, expedia, bookingcom and TripAdvisor. They're saying they're all launching a coalition to protect, you know, the consumer reviews, and so what they're going to do is they said that they are going to be sharing methods on how to detect fake reviews. This, I think, is going to be great, you know, for all of us to make sure that you know, when we're buying something, that we're seeing the actual reviews of actual customers, and then also just for those brands, because it's going to help consumers to know exactly what they're getting. So I think this is going to be good on all friends, for everyone. They're probably going to come up with some really great technology to really, you know, detect those fake reviews. So those competitors that you have that you know that are putting up those fake reviews. We're going to hopefully stop that, and so we'll see what happens with that. And let us know if you've had any issues with reviews. I know I've had some issues with fake reviews from competitors on my own listing. I'm curious to know if you've had any issues with fake reviews, so let us know in the comments below.

Carrie Miller:

All right, this next article is actually something that I was a little bit surprised by, and the reason for that is it's talking about Amazon Prime Day, big deal days, and I you know the economy is kind of struggling right now and I didn't feel as much momentum going into this day as I think a lot of other people probably did. And so it shows, because Amazon's big Prime Day deal day was the company's largest two day October holiday kickoff event ever. So that definitely tells me that I was wrong in my thinking. I thought it was kind of, you know, not that much excitement going on, but there clearly was. They had a billion dollars across in savings across all the Prime members. They also had 25 million items that were delivered either same day or next day delivery, which is incredible. They were busy delivering packages. Let me tell you, one package was even delivered within 54 minutes. So really, really interesting that this is, you know, kicking off so strong, especially with the economy the way that is. I think that this is a really good indication that we're going to have a really big Q4. I'm very excited for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and just the whole holiday season. This is always my biggest time of year. So really, really great exciting news to see that it's still going strong in sales on Amazon.

Carrie Miller:

All right, the next piece of news is from Walmart. So if you're a Walmart seller, I wanna see if you are seeing the same thing that I see in my dashboard. So I basically kind of logged in today and saw this in my dashboard it's the pro listing savings. Now it looks like what happened. Is I qualified for a pro listing savings? I think you'll have to be a pro seller in order to be eligible for this, but what I'm gathering is they choose listings that are doing very, very well, selling quite a bit, and you actually get refunds on your referral fees. So I have, as of today, this just starting about $3.12 in savings. So that's pretty cool. I know it says over the last 90 days, but I know this just started, so it's definitely not over the last 90 days. I think this is gonna be bigger and bigger as time goes on, and it's very, very cool to see this kind of thing because Walmart's really incentivizing sellers to join the Walmart marketplace and I think this is another incentive. As fees go up on other marketplaces, Walmart’s giving discounts and you can see on the next screen here this is.

Carrie Miller:

I kind of looked more into it and it's based on competitive pricing and fast and free shipping. So I use WFS and I also have, you know, the same pricing that I do on Amazon. So I think that's what helps me with that, and so you get 10% commission savings. That's pretty amazing. So I'm curious to know if any of you have seen this in your dashboard. Let me know in the comments. Let me know if you have any other additional things to add about that. I think it's a very, very exciting thing for Walmart sellers to just save money. You can put that money either towards more ads or just it'll add up over time. So we'll see how long they keep this going for, and I wanna make sure I can get all of my products eligible for it.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, last piece of news, but not the least for sure, this is just an announcement about the return timeframe, and this happens every single year on Amazon.

This is really nothing new, and so they're basically extending the holiday returns policy for consumers that purchase items between November 1st and December 31st, so they're returnable all the way through January 31st of 2024, except for Apple branded products, which are returnable only through January 15th. Now this policy applies to seller fulfilled FBM, fba and Amazon retail orders, and basically this happens every year. So it's something that I know a lot of us are very used to, and it's just another kind of added benefit for people to buy products during the holiday season on Amazon, and I think it does help us all in the long run. So just so that you're aware that's what's going on with returns. If you get some returns from November all the way into January, you'll know exactly why. Okay, so up next we have an amazing demo by Shevali. She's gonna be talking about Market Tracker 360 and how it can benefit you. So take a look at this demo.

Shivali Patel:

The tool I'm about to share with you is a great way for you to gain insights into niches, regardless of if you are a scaling seller, large brand or business that has been in the industry for years. When it comes to dominating sales, monitoring, tracking and staying on top of any rapidly changing market is important, and so, yes, you could go into Amazon and try to keep up with all the new competitors flowing in and out of your market, but wouldn't it be easier if you just had a tool that allows you to market create, curate and understand dynamic markets in one place? Well, that, my friends, is exactly what I'm about to share with you. Let's jump into market tracker 360. So, with market tracker 360, we do have logic in place. If it's your first time inside of this tool, you will be taken directly to market creation. However, once you've created markets, you'll be funneled directly to market list, which is this page right here. But what exactly is market create? Well, let's talk about it. When you click create market in the top right hand corner, you have access to four choices. We'll talk about these three in this video. For the custom market that is based on products, the system will pull in products that are adjacent to the ASINs you select. You can add in products from your list that you build inside of helium 10, type or paste them in directly into the search field box. Or, if you are a token connected user and your account is connected to your seller central, just click select my products to add and checkmark any of the ones that you want before clicking add. The only thing to note for ASIN markets is there is no filtering step. Let's click back and going back. As you can see, you can also define your market based on up to 15 keywords, either from your curated keywords list inside of helium 10, just by typing them in, or using our integrated Cerebro and magnet tools for relevant keywords without having to leave the tool. So if I were to type in matcha kit, I could click this auto complete, which, by the way, is simply what people are typing in on Cerebro, magnet and black box inside of helium 10. Click analyze keywords to receive this output of additional keywords. Use the information given to figure out which keywords you want as part of your market. You can also use this option to create hybrid markets of keywords and ASINs, though you don't see any ASIN additions.

Shivali Patel:

On the second stage of this process. You will see it in the third where it says optional set custom rules. Let's go ahead and jump into the next example for a full walkthrough. Now, if you do have your token connected, we are also offering what we're calling the auto magic creation, which simply means we will create your market. For you to do this, you just need to select up to five of your product lists based on their category, and we will find associated keywords to base your market on, though you can still enhance the market with keywords of your own choosing after the fact. You'll notice in the first step of this particular choice, our product pool is already grouped based on the lowest shared subcategory node, so we want to create one based on, let's say, coffin shelves. I'm going to select these two product pools. Select next to receive a prompt that asks if we want to set any custom rules for our market or simply go ahead and review and create our market. I'm going to click yes. Take me to custom rules.

Shivali Patel:

The third step we're looking at is the filtering step I mentioned before. You'll see this step on three of the four choices of market creation, with the exception being ASIN only creations. Now, if you wish to have a very granular view of your product markets. Setting custom rules is a good idea, as it allows you to generate a default viewing criteria. This is a feature for every market creation option, except for product only or ASIN only markets, as I mentioned, and just think of it as a top level filter. So when we do automatic market updates, only the selections that apply to these filter sets will show. You will always have the capability to add individual ASINs to your market at this level. So if there are any specific ASINs you want in your market view, go ahead and add them here, be it from your list or from your own products, we'll click next. That brings us to review and create, which is the fourth step in this process. Give your market a name. I'm going to call this auto magic coffin shelf market. We can set a default date range. Perhaps I'm only interested in seeing the last 12 months. Give it a default currency. I'm going to select USD. Choose your method of market updates. If you want products to be directly injected into the market without needing any approval, then you could select automatic how we relay the keywords to the products after.

Shivali Patel:

Market creation is typically modeled based on a fusion of the best seller rank, sales volume and search volume Controlled is similar to our original market tracker. It will give you the opportunity to refine by showing you new products under the suggested products tab to add or remove from your market, and the disabled option is just a static market, which would direct all the products that we receive to the removed products and suggestions section within market settings. From here, you can then review all the information that we just discussed, be it adjusting your product list, fine tuning your category, subcategory information or your additional filters. I'm going to click create market. That's going to take us back into our market view. We'll see the new market reflected on our market list page in about 10 to 15 minutes. Hopefully now you know how to create markets inside of market tracker 360 using keywords, keywords and asins, asins only, or even auto creating that market, as long as you have that token connected. Of course, you can gain a lot of insights and analytics with market tracker 360, but it all starts with this first step, so make sure you go and do that first step.

Carrie Miller:

Thank you so much, Shivali. That was amazing. I know that this is such an incredible tool, especially for larger sellers, to really help view the market overall. So check it out. If you haven't already, we'll put a link below to where you can schedule a demo in the market tracker 360 arena so you can get more information about it if you're really interested in it. And the final thing I want to leave you with is we've actually made a queue for checklists for sellers to get ready and prepare their listings and their business for hopefully the biggest queue for ever.

Carrie Miller:

And I basically put this together along with a bunch of resources that we have and it's things that you can use. You know Helium 10 for, and then also just tools on Amazon that are going to help boost your business during the holidays. So it's, it's in a checklist. There are videos to go with a lot of these particular items to show you how to do them, and I think it's a very, very beneficial thing for you to. You know, implement a lot of these strategies. It's still not too late to implement them.

Carrie Miller:

So take a look at the checklist. You can download it, you can print it out, look at some of those videos and I promise you, if you implement some of those, you'll see some positive results from this checklist. I think it'll be a great, great resource for you that you can use this year and in the years to come. So we'll put the link below and so that you can check that out too. Thanks again for joining me this week on the weekly buzz. I think Bradley will be back again next week, but thank you for letting me kind of step in for him this week. I hope you all enjoyed the news articles that we have. I think we have some great exciting stuff going on in e-commerce, and so we'll see you again next week to see what's buzzing. Bye everyone.

#501 - Walmart Seller Coupons, Brand Stores, & Ask Me Anything

Listen in as we tackle all your burning questions about selling on the Walmart marketplace, from gaining access to coupons and utilizing brand stores to handling comp errors and deactivations. Discover why it's critical to get your inventory to Walmart as soon as possible before the end of October and learn the ropes on what metrics you need to focus on when aiming for the Pro Seller badge. We also tackle your questions straight from our Winning with Walmart Facebook group, so tune in for those insights.

Interested in the Walmart Influencer Program? We've got you covered! This episode also explores the ins and outs of the Walmart Influencer Program and provides key updates on when brand stores and video ads will be available to sellers. Listen in as we discuss the approval process for pesticide products on Walmart, the steps to register your trademarks on the platform to get the Walmart brand registry, and whether there is a request a review button in Walmart.

Did you know that Helium 10 has tools for the Walmart marketplace? We explore the nitty-gritty of product listings, coupon availability, and how to compete against first-party brands on Walmart. Plus, how to join the Helium 10 Winning with Walmart Facebook Group. Don't miss out on this Serious Sellers Podcast episode to make the most out of your Walmart selling experience!

In episode 501 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie talks about:

• 02:13 - Access to Coupons for Walmart Sellers
• 06:24 - Walmart's Review Programs and Opportunities
• 09:48 - Prohibited Items Approval
• 12:58 - Walmart Image Guidelines and External Traffic
• 17:39 - Solving Comp Errors on Walmart.com
• 19:27 - Seller Badge and Rich Media Guide

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Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Today, we're going to be answering all of your burning Walmart questions. In this Ask Me Anything episode. We're going to be answering things such as when are coupons going to be available for everyone? When can I start utilizing brand stores, how can I deal with comp errors and deactivations? This and so much more.

Bradley Sutton:

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

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of this Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Carrie Miller, and this is our Winning with Walmart Wednesday episode, where we answer all of your Walmart questions and we give you all of the latest and greatest information about selling on a Walmart. In this episode I'm going to answer quite a few questions that we've had in the Facebook groups. I asked quite a while ago if you had any burning Walmart questions, so I'm going to go over those questions for everyone today and give you some great answers. In addition to that, I wanted to remind everyone that we are in Q4 already, which is kind of crazy that we're already in the last quarter of the year. But start sending in your inventory now to Walmart, because WFS is already starting to take kind of a longer time to check in products and it's going to just get worse and worse as the holidays keep coming closer. So, just like Amazon, try to get your inventory in by the end of this October and just kind of do more than you're used to sending in. I know last year I actually ran out during the peak season of inventory to forever to get checked in and so I missed like three weeks of December, so it was kind of a bummer. So if you haven't done that, make sure to send in that inventory.

Carrie Miller:

I want to start answering some of these Walmart questions that everyone had and I think they're really good questions. I think they're going to be very helpful for just looking at these answers for all of you. So the first one is that I had on my list is that someone in the groups asked because they really wanted to know this from Walmart, and these are not official Walmart answers. By the way, this is just some research that I've done. It's no way connected to Walmart, but I did do the best that I could to find answers for all of you that had really important questions for Walmart. So the first question was Amazon allows access to all deals and coupons to every seller, regardless of their sales volume.

Carrie Miller:

When will Walmart give equal access to things like flash picks to Walmart sellers, equivalent to best deals seven days, and what they said is that deal parity right now does not exist on the Walmart marketplace. However, if you do have an account manager, then they actually can submit those coupons for you. So for those of you who are lucky enough to have an account manager and usually you have to have a certain number, a volume of sales per month in order to get one of these account managers. They actually can help you and they'll be able to submit based on the fact that if you have a you know good seller response rate, if you have good WFS metrics and you know a low number of refunds kind of use it basically in the pro seller range they'll be able to help you with coupons if you're not a one piece seller. So that is something to kind of keep a thought in the back of your mind If you, you know, do have an account manager, ask them about coupons, if you can get into those flash picks and they potentially could help you with that. So sorry, I don't have a better answer, unfortunately, but I think that is a good way, you know, at least for some of you, to get access to some of those coupons. All right, so I'll go to the next question.

Carrie Miller:

Let's see here when can you tell us more about the Walmart influencer program? So the Walmart influencer program is called the Walmart creator program and they are actually trying to do similar to what Amazon has done and they're recruiting a lot of influencers and I don't know if you've seen this, but I know I've seen this on Instagram because I follow a lot of the fashion deals pages, and they are promoting Walmart products in terms of clothing. Right now. There's a lot of cute stuff that you know Amazon sellers are now putting on Walmart, so these influencers are also promoting it on Walmart and they're getting commissions for it. They get a specific commission based on the category, just like Amazon, and so that is something that's really up and coming and something to keep an eye on. If you are in certain categories like home decor, fashion I think those are really good. You know areas to really utilize those influencers because they already have kind of the right audience for you, and so I would highly recommend kind of checking out. Go on to Instagram and search hashtag Walmart influencer or hashtag Walmart partner and you'll see a bunch of videos come up and you'll see you know whose accounts are really Walmart partners so that you can partner with them.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so the next question is I saw that brand stores and video ads are in beta. When will these be available to sellers? Now? This is a question a while ago. Video ads are actually available now to brand registered sellers, which is really, really exciting. So if you have your brand registry all set up in the brand portal on Walmart, you have access, so you should be able to see on Walmart connect the video ads so you can do that. In terms of brand stores, they there isn't an ETA for brand stores, but I do know I've seen some sellers who are in the beta and they are testing it out. So I imagine it's the same as what happened with the videos. The videos were in beta not too long ago and they're going to start rolling out. You know the brand stores probably in a similar way. So that's pretty exciting and I hope it's soon.

Carrie Miller:

But they encouraged everyone in the meantime to take advantage of rich media. Rich media is like A plus content on Amazon and you can go on to the into the help section for rich media and you can actually get free hosting of videos and 360 images currently. So I would check that out. Otherwise, there are a bunch of agencies that do host rich media and you can get different modules that are really I think they're really great modules that you can utilize on Walmart. You just have to pay per skew, so it's a little expensive but worth it if you can see that conversion All right.

Carrie Miller:

The next question was Amazon has a request to review button that allows Amazon sellers to press a button on an order and Amazon sends a review request email to the to the customer on the seller's behalf. Will Walmart do something similar to help us get more reviews? So the answer of this is that there isn't something that's currently available but and there isn't a timeline for it to be able to get it to be available. However, Walmart actually does send a review request automatically after seven days to the customers on Walmart to request a review, so that's kind of an automatic thing that they already do. They wanted to also encourage all of the you know Walmart sellers to utilize the review accelerator program. So the review accelerator program if you have on your product five reviews or less, then you can pay $10 to ask your current customers for review. So it's actually, I think, different than Vine, because what it what it happens is that people are already buying your product and they'll send them an email and say, hey, we'll pay you $3 if you'll send in a review and then we pay. We pay Walmart $10 for this service, so it's actually really worth it. Up to five reviews, you can get verified reviews from your actual customers. So review accelerator it's in the growth opportunities tab, so check it out there If you have less than five reviews. There's also a review syndication where you can get your reviews copied and pasted, basically over from your website. So a lot of really cool opportunities for reviews, but they don't have any kind of timeframe for that request review button like Amazon has. However, I do think it's pretty encouraging that they're already sending those emails for us, so that's something that's that's great to see.

Carrie Miller:

So someone just asked how do you register a trademark on Walmart? So basically, you would take the same trademark that you have as an Amazon seller and you're going to go to the Walmart brand registry portal. It's a whole different website, so you can just Google Walmart brand registry portal and then you're going to apply there. It's very simple. You just put in your information there and you can. You can get accepted pretty quickly. So I would recommend go ahead and Google that and it should be pretty straightforward.

Carrie Miller:

What is the approval process for pesticide products on Walmart? We have 10 bestselling products on Amazon that we are simply not allowed to list on Walmart. The products have all the required government approvals with the EPA, et cetera. So the answer that I found on this is that there's an item report in Seller's Center and it's gonna have the reason code for why an item isn't published and so you can actually open up a partner support case, for all you know, for the web with whatever the reason code is. And then also, if the item status is on says item on hold, then the seller needs to either submit the required documents or provide the missing attributes to complete the submission. So it'll say what attributes are missing or what documents are missing, and you should be able to submit those. I will say I did kind of a case today you can find it on YouTube and we were uploading a hemp product onto Walmart and it has been quite a challenging process and you can actually see part of the process on YouTube. But I'm gonna give an update soon. But the update really is that they really don't want hemp products in WFS right now and I was able to get it approved to sell on Walmart. But it's been quite a challenging process so I'll go more into details about it. But the good news is we can sell seller fulfilled, just not WFS. So there is hope for any of you who are having an issue to get around that and do seller fulfilled if possible.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so the next question is some of my products are not approved to sell via Walmart WFS but they are approved for seller fulfilled. So this is kind of similar to what I was just talking about in regards to the hemp. Is there any special program that I can apply for to get these hazmat products approved for WFS? And it says Amazon has something similar and we are part of the Amazon hazmat program. So the answer was that internally, wfs has recently actually launched an updated prohibited items handling solution across their fulfillment network, which this is actually very new. So, depending on the category, prohibited items are handled in three different teams under the specialty compliance organization hazmat, food safety and non-chemical hazmat. So this is going to hopefully help reduce the time where these products are actually just stuck and unable to be fulfilled with WFS. So definitely inquire about those if you're writing a ticket to kind of be directed to those teams and hopefully we can get some progress on some of those Cause. I know I've seen quite a few questions about this, so I would definitely want to continue to try to get you all more answers about this. So that's the amount of information I have right now. So keep messaging me on Facebook or sending those questions in on the Facebook group winning with Walmart, so that we can help you get those questions answered.

Carrie Miller:

The next one is my account was denied. What can I do to get approved after I was initially denied? So sometimes well, actually most of the time they don't provide a reason, but there's soft denials and then you can do an appeals process and then there's like termination, which is much harder. So you'll have to kind of usually I think sellcord.co. They are an agency. They have helped a lot of people who have been kind of denied. You can reach out to them. That's kind of the best answer I have. Or you can kind of reach out yourself, but I would kind of suggest contacting somebody who's really good at this, and I do believe SellCord does do a good job of helping people get their accounts. You know out of that status. So if you have had that issue, I would say contact sellcord.co. And that also includes you know if your account is suspended or termination is very hard. So you will definitely need you know, inside access. So I would definitely recommend contacting SellCord for that as well.

Carrie Miller:

What is Walmart doing to attract more customers to their online marketplace? And so this is a great question and I can definitely answer that they are doing quite a bit. So they have Walmart Plus, which is kind of like Prime, and if you go into the stores they have it advertised everywhere. They're giving discounts on gas, they're giving discounts on just all a bunch of different things within the Walmart programs, like just in store discounts and also delivery and groceries. You get those for free. So they're really pushing for, you know, just getting more customers into Walmart Plus. Now I also saw when I was looking at applying for an American Express Platinum card, that they have a free opportunity for free Walmart Plus If you have that card. So if any of you have that American Express Platinum card, you get free Walmart Plus. So something else to it's basically like a free Prime membership. So I definitely recommend taking advantage of it. But they're doing things like that to really increase the customer reach. Also, if you notice and I've talked about this in other presentations I've done they are doing a lot of external traffic through Google Shopping and they're also doing Bing Shopping. So you'll see your Walmart products show up in Google Shopping and Bing Shopping without even doing any ads. So they are really doing a lot of work to try to drive traffic that way. So hopefully that answers that question. So this might be college.

Carrie Miller:

This is another question from somebody. This might be common knowledge. But what are the best performing aspect ratios for images on Walmart? Should mean image and secondary images be the same aspect ratios? Is the answer category dependent, and there is definitely some. There are some differences on the different categories. So I would recommend that you go into the Walmart guides and you can look for image guidelines and you're going to be able to find exactly what the image guidelines are for your category. So go ahead and check those out.

Carrie Miller:

The next question I would like to know why the payment schedule for reporting is every two weeks and then why it sometimes I have to wait a third or fourth week. Now I've seen this question quite a bit in the groups and I don't know exactly what's happening, but it's just a common thread, like I've seen it quite a bit. So if you, if you've had this, you can put it in the in the chat or the comments, because I'd love to know. But basically, the payment should be every two weeks, but something if you're not getting it every two weeks, it should. It's probably an error and I think you should open up a support ticket to see what's going on with that, because that shouldn't be happening. So make sure you kind of figure out what the problem is so that it doesn't continue on. So that's what I would recommend. I don't think that that's part of the process. So it is supposed to be every two weeks. I have confirmed that. So take a look at that. And, yeah, just go into the support and ask what's going on with your particular account. And personally, I did see this actually happen, so it did get fixed. Additionally, when see when removing, when doing removal orders, when it shows on the payment summary, can we get a detail of what the removal order consisted of? So if you want to understand what the removal order maybe consisted of, you can go to the WFS dashboard and that will give you a breakdown and it's going to highlight what was in the removal order.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so next one is it possible to allow for multiple SKUs to the same UPC code? Amazon allows this, albeit in one UPC code to one ASIN. So no, this is definitely no. Walmart uses UPCs as their unique identifiers for products. So you cannot have multiple SKUs associated with the same UPC, otherwise you're going to get a lot of errors. So this is really important to make sure you have you own your UPCs and then also that you have an individual UPC for each product. I know back in the day in Amazon you were buying second. You know basically barcodes from other you know third parties because they were more expensive but you can buy individual barcodes from GS1. And I highly recommend doing that to show that you own the UPC codes. Because if you do have somebody hijacking your listing or taking over the content, you can prove with owning UPC code as well as your trademark, that you own that product and the listing so you can get it back. I had a problem with this because one of our products for our Project X did not have a UPC code that was GS1 registered. It was kind of a bot as a third party thing a long time ago and I was unable to get that content back. So it was really kind of frustrating. So I know this from firsthand experience my own business.

Carrie Miller:

I've always had UPCs for each product because you want to kind of think when you're starting out with these products with the end in mind and growing your brand and business. Each product should have a UPC. We've always been wanting to know if Walmart has a honeymoon period similar to Amazon. Now I haven't had an answer to this. I do not think that it's as intense as it is on Amazon. So what I would recommend is to do your best to optimize start ads. Do whatever you do for Amazon on Walmart and I think that you will be successful.

Carrie Miller:

The thing about all of this is I noticed people. What they do is they'll open up and start a listing on Walmart and literally just copy and paste what they have on Amazon and they're not doing Walmart PPC or anything like that to help promote their product and they're like why am I not making any sales? Well, you would never launch on Amazon without doing PPC or optimizing for Amazon. Walmart has different guidelines to optimize their listings. So you know, make sure to follow those guidelines and I think that you'll be pleasantly surprised. The next one is what advice do you have to third party sellers to help them compete against first party brands on Walmart? So the answer to this is Walmart really isn't viewing the two as competitive against each other, but they recommend that you find kind of holes where first party sellers are not really, you know, filling in the gap and finding opportunities on Walmart where you can provide products that are not available via 1P.

Carrie Miller:

When I've gotten a comp error, it feels impossible to get help for this. What is the best way to solve issues dealing with comp errors and how can we find out what the error is so that we can fix it? So then the comp errors are very difficult, I will say, and sometimes what they're saying is that you can actually go into the item report and check the columns. When you upload via flat file or anything like that, you can check the columns, the life cycle status, and then it's going to say published, unpublished or system error, and then on the adjacent column for the, it's going to have an error code and it's going to say things like enhanced vetting, IP infringement, shipping or etc. And you can open up a ticket to get help with this. But in my experience I've noticed that it's usually a pesticide word like antibacterial, antimicrobial. So if you make sure that you don't use any of those illegal words that are, you know, banned on Amazon, then you should be fine, and usually if you kind of delete your listing and rewrite it again. Without those words it'll come up within 15 minutes. So that's been my experience with that.

Carrie Miller:

So another question here is when some someone first starts selling on Walmart, what can they do to get their products ranked? Is it all based on clicks and sales or is there a lot more weight given to the listing quality score? So they did. You know Walmart doesn't really give me a lot of information about ranking, but I do know, for example, if you get a high listing quality score, that does help with your ranking. So make sure you fill in all those attributes in the back end. You know you enroll in WFS, you have reviews to start out with, get your listing quality score 90% or above, and I think that that will definitely help you. You also want to start running pay-per-click advertising to get some sales and I think you'll start to see yourself ranking as that goes. But in terms of like you know state, you know something that they actually say. It's really quite challenging to really say.

Carrie Miller:

And then the pro seller was another question. How can a seller become a pro seller and get the pro seller tag on their listing? So you want to make sure that your products are delivered on time. So I recommend using WFS because it takes care of most of the categories that are required for a pro seller. The thing about pro seller badges is you can actually filter on Walmart for pro seller so customers can say I want to only buy from a pro seller. And I noticed when I got the pro seller badge that I was starting to get more and more sales.

Carrie Miller:

So I will say it isn't an important thing. So you've got. You know, at least you've got an on time delivery rate of 95% or above in the last 90 days. You have less than 1.5% cancellation in the last 90 days. You have a really good seller response rate, higher than 95% in the last 30 days. And then basically it's, you know, fast delivery. And you also have to have over 250 orders in the last 90 days and you have to have at least been active for 90 days. So when you launch your products, you know, do your best to get those 250 orders and get those fast delivery times in and you can get the pro seller badge within 90 days. I think it's really, you know, worth it.

Carrie Miller:

So I would say WFS is probably the most important thing to make sure that you get that and yeah, so, and then the next thing is what? Will rich media eventually be free to Walmart sellers, like it is on Amazon? So there are some modules that are free, and that is the video and also the 360 image views. You can go into the help center and click on rich media. You can find it there. So otherwise, if you wanted to pay for some in the meantime, you can contact an agency and they can help you with that.

Carrie Miller:

So let's see if I have any questions. All right, Nelson, hello. Nelson says I'm a new to Walmart, in the process of onboarding and we already established our stores at Amazon. Is the procedures from Amazon to Walmart going to be similar when it comes to brand name products? If we are able to get wholesalers offline in our city to sell as branded products so we can sell online, are we still allowed to sell them? Yes, you are allowed to sell wholesale products on Walmart and I actually met at the Walmart conference quite a few sellers who have done very well selling wholesale products on Walmart. I think it's a lot less competitive right now in Walmart. So I highly recommend you get in there and start going for those, those products and, you know, make sure that you get in the game now? Great question. All right, let's see.

Carrie Miller:

It looks like I think someone was asking about tools for Walmart. Helium 10 has some incredible tools and I would recommend that you check those out. We have cerebral, which is our keyword research tool for Walmart. Another tool for Walmart called magnet it's another keyword research tool. We have x ray, which shows you sales volumes for Walmart it's our Chrome extension. We also have profits for one, one to help you, Walmart, to help you manage your profits. And we have our ranked tracker. And for pay per click advertising, we have add atomic for Walmart to help you manage your pay per click advertising. So we have all those great tools to help you and support you on your way to selling on Walmart.

Carrie Miller:

Also, if you're a helium 10 member, we have freedom to get Walmart where we should. We walk you through a to z on how to sell on Walmart, so that's available to you free if you are a helium 10 member. So check it out. If you haven't yet checked it out, alright, so it looks like I don't have any more questions, so hopefully, if that was very helpful, thank you to everyone who submitted their questions.

Carrie Miller:

For me to answer it was really, you know took a little while to get the answers to some of those questions and maybe some of them. I still need to do a little more research and hopefully maybe digging to get some more details on some of those answers, but hopefully that helps you in the meantime, and if you have any questions, join our group. Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. All you have to really do is search in the Facebook groups Helium 10 Winning with Walmart and you can join our Facebook group and ask questions there. You can tag me, you have questions, or other sellers are in there answering questions as well, so love to see you there and we will see you then. Have a great rest of the day.

#500 - Maldives Honeymoon Amazon Launch Strategy + New Amazon Relevancy Strategy

Ever wondered how to make the most of the 'Honeymoon' period when you first start selling on Amazon? Or how to get people to organically search, find, and buy a product without breaking Amazon's terms of service? Tune in to the latest episode of Serious Sellers Podcast, as our host, Bradley Sutton, unveils the intricacies and updates to the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy, along with his prelaunch plan, the Bali Blast Strategy. 

He shares effective ways to use PPC to catapult your product to the top of the search, and how to utilize Helium 10’s Keyword Tracker tool and boost to gauge your bid's success. We'll discuss strategies for attracting customers to a product with no reviews, and you'll discover how to use tools like Helium 10 Audience and the CPR number to monitor and increase your orders.

The episode also sheds light on SEO and its relationship with Amazon listings. You'll find out why a simple listing score formula isn't sufficient to rank on Amazon, and why optimizing your listing for Amazon customers, as well as its algorithm, is pivotal. Let’s dive into the evolution of Amazon's algorithm over the years, and why sprinkling specific keywords a certain number of times isn't as effective as it once was. To top it all off, we'll explore how developing a tool with a potent listing score creator, like a “Surfer SEO for Amazon listings” can guide you in optimizing your listing and the importance of testing your strategies. Buckle up for an episode packed with valuable insights!

 

In episode 500 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 00:00 - Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy and Results
• 03:35 - The Maldives Honeymoon Effect 
• 06:50 - Amazon Keyword Research and Competition Analysis
• 10:53 - Getting Ranked for Keywords With PPC 
• 15:30 - Improve Amazon Ranking With PPC and CPR
• 18:49 - Amazon Algorithm Changes and New Strategies
• 25:20 - The Significance of Amazon Recommended Rank
• 28:23 - Analysis Of The Project X Coffin Bath Tray Keywords
• 34:40 - Relevance of Keywords in Amazon Ranking 
• 42:44 - Listing Optimization and Test Launches

► 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 episode 500 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, and we're doing it live right here from the Maldives, as usual, because we're gonna go into the Maldives Honeymoon Launch Strategy and some of the new twists and turns that have come up because of the test I've been doing. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Two, three, four, music you want to know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for, maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10's Keyword Research tool, Cerebro. Now, that's just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it's the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. H10.me/cerebro. Don't forget to use the Serious Delors podcast discount coupon, SSP10.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That'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, as you guys can see here. I am back here in the Maldives, Waldorf Astoria. The place that started all the way back in episode 200 was when I first started filming out here the Maldives Honeymoon launch strategies, and then every 50 episodes we'd come out here 250, 300, 350, 400. I actually skipped 450, but so this is the first time back in the Maldives since episode 400. But the Maldives Honeymoon strategy is just a strategy. I just made a funny name to it so that we can try and get the most out of what we call the Honeymoon period, when we just get started selling on Amazon for a certain product, and so we're going to dive into it and what's the latest here on this strategy. So make sure to stay to the end, because we've got some new things I'm going to be talking about today. But just some background again.

Bradley Sutton:

Honeymoon period what is it? Well, the Honeymoon period is that's not a term that I came up with. That's a term that relates to the first few weeks, the first couple months sometimes, of a listing where you get more bang for the buck. It basically refers to how, if you have a four or five year old listing and you do a couple PPC sales for a keyword, not much is going to happen, right, but if you have a brand new listing sometimes just changing the title, sometimes just changing a keyword here or there, sometimes just getting one sale on a keyword, sometimes just getting a few sales on a high volume keyword It'll start moving you around on the organic side. Big fluctuations might happen on your PPC on a positive way. And we call this the Honeymoon period. This is not an official Amazon term, but it refers to the fact that when you are selling a new item, especially one that doesn't have much history, what happens sometimes is that Amazon doesn't have enough data to kind of know what you're relevant for, and so any little micro actions where on a more mature listing is not going to have much of an effect because Amazon's got so much data and so many clicks and so many things to kind of measure and understand what it's relevant for. Those micro actions on a newer listing where Amazon's just trying to figure out what is this product going to be good for, it has a lot bigger effect on it. So we call that the Honeymoon period.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now what I started doing, like five, six years ago, is I launched a lot of product. By the way, I've launched over 500 products now, but even more than four years ago I had launched over 400 products and what I found was I always was experimenting. I found, like these, certain micro actions as I just made up that term now for myself I guess, these micro actions that could help me get even more out of the Honeymoon period, that would help me get off on the right foot. You know, just like you know, honeymoon is for a wedding, right? You want to get off on the right foot, and so then I was like, okay, what am I going to call this? I'm like I'm going to call this the Maldives Honeymoon effect, because these actions have a lot bigger impact, even more than just, you know, what we normally would see on the Honeymoon period. And so that's why I just went ahead and named it this thing, and I came here to the Maldives here to record it. So what is the latest with the Maldives Honeymoon method?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, we're going to go into some different strategies here, but let's do a recap. A lot of these methods is actually in prelaunch, and in prelaunch I made a new name for it. You know we call it the Bolly Blast. So I'm not going to go too, too in depth. But if you want to have a Bolly Blast, you know prelaunch these are the steps that leads the Maldives Honeymoon launch. Check out episodes 466 and 467. If I'm not mistaken, it's a part one and part two about all the things you need to do to get your listing ready. So h10.me forward, slash 466 or 467. You can also search that up on YouTube on our Helium 10 channel and in there I think I have like a 47 step process that happens before you even launch the product. Let's just review some of those you know. Again, those are two hours of episodes you need to go back and like listen to to get the full details.

Bradley Sutton:

But in a nutshell, you know it starts at the product research stage, right, picking products that potentially have lower title density. Title density is something that we have exclusively at Helium 10, which measures the number of listings on page one that have a certain keyword in phrase form in the title. So when I say certain keywords, the searched keyword. So, for example, if the keyword is coffin shelf and you see in Helium 10 that the title density is seven, that means that the last time Helium 10 check, there are seven listings on page one that have that keyword in exact phrase match in the title. All right, if you have a listing or a keyword that has title density of 40, that means there's 40 listings that have that exact keyword in the title and that means it's going to be a little bit harder to rank on that page because Amazon algorithm, you know, heavies or favors heavily the title as far as what a listing is relevant for. So it doesn't mean, you know, you can't launch against a keyword that were a title entity it's 40. It just means that, hey, it's going to be a little bit more of an uphill battle where sometimes you have a lower title density and Amazon thinks you're relevant. And, by the way, guys, I'm going to drop some bombs here about how you can know what Amazon is relevant or what's relevant to Amazon. But anyways, if you have a lower title density sometimes it's going to be a lot easier to rank. Sometimes even from day one you can be on page one potentially.

Bradley Sutton:

So that's one of the things we talk about in the Bali Blast method and then other things is about. That has to do with the keyword research, understanding where Amazon puts relevance as far as things that are in your listing, as far as keywords go from the title to the bullet points, and so we talked about getting all of the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, your direct competitors or the keywords that they're ranking highly for. We talk about getting opportunity keywords finding the keywords that maybe only one of your competitors ranking for, and that means you're going to be able to potentially rank for that keyword when you're only competing with one of your competitors, as opposed to five or six of your competitors. There are other keyword research strategies we talked about, such as trying to find complementary products. So these are all. Again, we're talking about pre-launch right now.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you put the right keywords in your listing Complementary products? But basically that means maybe you see your competitors have a frequently bought together type of product. For example, if you're selling a coffin shelf or your competitors are selling a coffin shelf, maybe you see in frequently bought together, which you can find in Helium 10 Blackbox, a history of other coffin shelves being bought with a coffin letterboard Right. Well, part of the Maldives Honeymoon strategy is that you want to get index for some of the main keywords from those coffin letterboards if you have a coffin shelf. So if you see that for these coffin letterboards, these five coffin letterboards. One of the top keywords is coffin letterboard and another one is Halloween display or something like that. So those top keywords from those coffin letterboards, even though they might not be directly relevant to your coffin shelf, you're going to want to get index for those listings and then from day one, you're going to be able to target those in product targeting, ppc, and then also you'll get a little bit more breadth, some width to what you're going to be showing up for, especially in broad campaigns and auto campaigns. So that's another strategy to use too. It's also a strategy to get index for forbidden keywords. Like, maybe you're related to an adult product or a drug related product. You can't put adult related products or keywords in your listing or drug related or other forbidden keywords. Well, if you make yourself relevant to the non-forbidden keywords and you're listening by sticking them in there, you potentially could get index for those forbidden keywords just because Amazon deems you as relevant. So that was another strategy we talked about in the Bali BLAST method.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, originally in the original Maldives Honeymoon strategy, when you're launched, we talked about using search, find by and two step URLs and things of that nature. Now that's no longer something that Amazon really wants you to start doing. And it's actually interesting. I was looking at the terms of service and it doesn't mention anymore the two step URLs. But it does talk about trying to manipulate your keyword search rank in the code of conduct. And that was a different change a couple of years ago where Amazon started specifying that they don't want you trying to do those kind of URLs and things to manipulate what it says the search rank, keyword rank. Before then we always would talk about, hey, doing search find by doing two step URLs, things like that, because in the Amazon terms of service it only talked about manipulating your sales rank, like your BSR. So then Amazon kind of cracked down on the keywords too. So that really changed the Maldives Honeymoon method. We do not suggest anymore getting friends and family or using services that are going to go out and get 40 people to search, find and buy your product with a keyword. That's pretty explicitly against Amazon terms of service. Now it wasn't before. People are trying to say, oh, it's always been against service. No, it hasn't, which is why Amazon changed it to make it against terms of service later.

Bradley Sutton:

So how did we change the Maldives Honeymoon launch strategy then when we couldn't use services like AZ rank or rank bell back in the day. So how can you get ranked for keywords right away? Well, we changed the Maldives Honeymoon method to be strictly PPC, so the whole theory is still the same. You need people to search, find and buy your products after searching for a certain keyword, and the more people that do that, that's what's going to get you ranked on page one. But when you have a brand new listing, how do you get on page one? How do you get people to even see your listing? You know, the old way was just doing search, find, buy, right, you know, getting two-step URLs, having a service send people to an exact keyword and they find you're listing on page six or seven and then they'll go ahead and buy it and then they'll move you up. But you can't do that anymore. So what we talked about, I think starting in like episode 300 or 350, was do the same thing with PPC.

Bradley Sutton:

So how do you get people to organically search, find, buy without breaking Amazon terms of service, you know, without using an outside service, without using friends and family, et cetera? Well, you got to think what is going to make somebody, if they happen to see your product, buy it, no matter what. Well, the first thing is what's going to make somebody see your product if you're not using outside service? The answer is easy it's PPC. So you've got to find the PPC bid that is going to get you to the top of search. You could do a top of search modifier in your PPC or you can just up your bid, you know, and do a fixed bid or down only bid, that's at a high, what you think is going to get you top of search, naturally, and then just make that the bid. Now how you know if you're getting that is you put your keyword to keyword tracker. After you put a bid of like $3, just say $3 on the keyword coffin shelf, I put coffin shelf into my keyword tracker and then what I do is put my keyword tracker on boost. Boost is something that checks it 24 times a day and now within an hour or two, I'm going to see a couple different spots on where I'm showing up randomly in the search results and different browsing scenarios and different locations. And then if I'm like ranked one, two or three, I'm good to go. If I'm ranked like eight or nine or below or something that probably I'm going to need to raise my bid to try and get my rank high. So, anyways, that's step one.

Bradley Sutton:

But if you have a brand new product and has zero reviews, obviously you know how do you get people to buy your product. Right, with the old old days again, search, find, buy you're using these outside services. They were getting incentivized to buy the products like, hey, you get the product for free, basically, all right. Now, now we can't do that anymore. So what is the incentive, I guess you could say, for somebody to buy a product that has no reviews, that they've never maybe heard of the brand? How do you get them to go ahead and purchase your product?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, the answer is by choosing a price point that makes them buy the product you know like no matter what. So that price point is different for every product. For example, if coffin shelves are all costing, or retail price, $25. So what you want to do is think what price point is somebody going to see this with? Like man, this is an incredible deal. You know, here's this other listing that has a thousand reviews, a lot of social proof. But I'm going to go ahead and get this other one. Well, maybe that price is $13, you know, 50% off? Are you going to make money at 50% off? No, you're not. But the whole point is, you know like you used to have to pay to get orders in the beginning to get that momentum and to get that sales velocity and search velocity, so you were paying money anyway. So to me this is a good investment. So you know you choose whatever that price is of where, when your competitors will buy that product.

Bradley Sutton:

And one way that you can, you know, do some product research. If you don't have, like Facebook groups where there's a community that's around coffin shelves and you could like do a quick free poll and they're asking them what price, or something like. Let's say, you don't have access to anything like that, use Helium 10 audience. All right, helium 10 audience it's a pay-per-use service inside of Helium 10, powered by Pikfu, where you can go and choose your target market. Like, let's say, your target demographic is females from the age of 18 to 30, who are prime members. You can actually choose that target market in Helium 10 audience and then just find 50 of them and within like three hours you'll have the answer to questions like hey, at what price point would you go ahead and buy this product even though it had zero reviews, and compared to and you can even have the other products there, even though the other products had a thousand reviews, and you would have pictures of it. So then you're able to see, you know, maybe, what price point somebody would buy that from your target market.

Bradley Sutton:

Or you can just guess. You know, I don't like guessing, you know all the time. So I like to go ahead and, you know, actually get some information. So once you've got that, then you go ahead and launch with that PPC and then in Helium 10, there's something called the CPR number. All right, the CPR number in Helium 10 tells you approximately how many orders over eight days eight to 10 days, I should say where it gives you. If you, if people, if that number of people search, find and buy your product, it gives you the best chance. Doesn't give you a guaranteed chance, but it gives you the best chance to get to page one of a certain keyword. All right, and so that's basically what I've been doing for the last two years. A lot of people have been doing this as well. You know, literally thousands of people are using this technique in order to to get to page one.

Bradley Sutton:

You monitor how many orders you're getting each day with the CPR number. So, like, let's say, the CPR number is 100. I like ramping up my order. So if the CPR is 100, I don't want to just divide that by eight or 10 and say, all right, I need 10 per day or 11 per day. No, what I like to do is I like to make it look organic. I like to start off slow, maybe day one, and get two or three. So the way I know is that, you know, I'm checking my, my PPC reports in real time and if I get two clicks and purchases on a certain keyword, I actually pause that target so that I don't get more. All right, I kind of want to like make it look a little bit more or organic and then the next day I started again and try and get maybe six or seven orders. Next day I try and get 11 or 12 orders until I can, you know, hit that CPR number and then go back and I'm going to check where am I ranking? Did it help my organic ranking?

Bradley Sutton:

Now it's important that again, when I said that you're you're choosing a, a cheaper price point, you don't put your list price or your regular price at this cheap price. No, because the problem is, if you do that, you might end up not being able to raise your price in the future. So when you choose, like, let's say you choose a $15 price point for your $25 coffin shelf, well, I'm going to make that a sale price or I'm going to make it a coupon discount, like, so maybe I'll put the price at $25, but then I'll put a, you know, 40% off coupon in order to hit that, that price point. All right. So again, don't put your regular price at that. And again, back in the Bali blast method, I had other tricks and tips about how to get, like, strike through pricing. So again, 466 and 467, make sure to check those episodes to see how to get you know, special strike through pricing and things like that. But but that's.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, in a nutshell, what the Maldives honeymoon strategy has always been, you know is is launching on five to 10 keywords. One other trick we usually do is hey, in the Maldives honeymoon strategy, don't just choose five or 10 completely different keywords like coffin shelf, gothic decor, spooky bedroom, mysterious oddities and Halloween, scary things Like. Do you notice the difference in those keywords? They're all completely different. They don't share keywords. What you try and do is find the embedded keywords that you can launch in groups, all right. So when you're doing your research in helium 10, you're going to find groups of keywords that have very similar roots. You know, like coffin shelf, gothic coffin shelf, gothic coffin shelf for bedroom. You know there's like six, seven keywords in there. You know coffin shelf for bedroom is also a keyword. So what you do is you try and launch all of those keywords at the same time, so they're all sending those relevancy signals for that root keyword to Amazon. All right. So there's another strategy that we use in choosing the keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Again, that's mentioned in the Bolly Blast Now. Here's the thing here. Now let's talk about some new stuff. All right, that's just kind of like a recap of the OG Maldives honeymoon strategy and Bolly Blast strategy. What is new for 2023, 2024? And I'm going to go out on a limb and I'm going to say something controversial, and that is I almost recommend doing a test listing if you're in any kind of a newer niche. All right, literally doing a test listing first, and you could potentially even do this for more established niche, all right. So that's the end game of what I'm about. That's the controversial thing that I'm launching now with this Maldives Honeymoon Strategy. Let's take a few steps back to explain why I'm suggesting this and what has changed on Amazon in the algorithm. Let's take even three steps back before there.

Bradley Sutton:

Listing optimization is important. All right, how you have the keywords, how many times you have it in your listing, where you have it. It's important, you know, to really send those relevancy signals. However, it is not as important as it was in the older days. Let me just tell you right that right now and it's also not a foolproof way to get ranking All right, do not use some kind of like formula where I'm going to use this keyword this many times and here and here and then, that's equal success. No, all right, if anybody tells you that that is incorrect.

Bradley Sutton:

People like using, like listing scores you know, like people have been, who have been using Helium 10 for years, have done something kind of like rudimentary, where you know they take what we teach them and say, all right, hey, I know I have to have. This keyword is my most important keyword and it needs to be in my title and in one bullet point and in one search terms. And I'm going to give myself three points to have that. And and then I'm going to give myself one point for this. You know, people I kind of do that myself. Like it helps me to kind of like know where my, my keywords are.

Bradley Sutton:

And people have asked, you know, helium 10 for probably like three or four years now to do some kind of like listing score, where we take an algorithm and assign points to it, right, and in the past we've always said nah, like I'm not sure how valuable that will be. But, but recently, you know, I started writing blogs again. Maybe you guys are watching seeing some of my blogs at Helium 10.com forward slash blog. But you know, seo is an important part of a company like Helium 10 and any company like that. So when we write SEO blogs, we're trying to rank for keywords in Google and Bing, right, it's kind of similar to making a listing for Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

It's not just let's randomly put together some words and make some something interesting. It could be the most interesting blog in the world, but if it doesn't have the right keywords in the right places and the right number of times, you're not going to get seen. So we we've been using, you know, for the last like year, this tool called things like surfer SEO or something like that it's called and like it gives you all the important keywords and then it tells you how many times you need to write it and like where, and then it gives you a score based on if you've optimized your listing around those keywords. I'm like, hey, this is kind of like a cool idea. You know, maybe we can do this for Amazon. You know sellers because you know people have kind of like been asking for something similar to this, and so you know this might be a way to help guide people to, to kind of know how strong their listing is as far as best practices. But here's the key Again, even though Helium 10 is working on something like that, once that comes out, don't just think that's all you need, that you know what.

Bradley Sutton:

All you need in order to rank is to know how many which keywords there are, how many times you put it in your listing and in what places, and try and get some high score Is a high score. You know, using this algorithm important to send relevancy signals to Amazon. Of course it's important, otherwise you wouldn't even be working on it. You know it's just a general truth in SEO, but the Amazon algorithm is so advanced these days, it is not enough just to have some kind of mathematical formula. And of course, it goes without saying you have to optimize your listing for an Amazon buyer, all right, which no algorithm can measure, all right. So I'm not even going to talk about the strategies there. But obviously you need to make sure your listing is attractive to a human being, right? All right, so that's a separate conversation about. You know how to do that. We've done podcasts about, about how to do that and really be able to connect on an emotional level to sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

But what about the algorithm? Like, why am I saying that just having a score is not going to be enough? Well, first of all, amazon algorithm does not work on a certain score. It's not like Amazon is scoring your listing as far as all right, it has this keyword four times, it's got to this root word three times and they've got this in the bullet point here in the title, and so it's always going to, you know, have some kind of formula that Amazon scores it and then that's how it deems you as fully relevant for all time. No, that's not the way Amazon works. Back in the old days, in the beginning, amazon did work a little bit more like that, you really could control how you know relevant you were to Amazon. You know, because the Amazon algorithm was not as as developed and I say this not, trust me, guys, I am. I do not have any secret access to the Amazon. I have contacts at Amazon who developed the algorithm and and develop tools like brand analytics and things like that. That does not make me some kind of special. You know, savant as to what the Amazon algorithm, helium 10, no other tool out there, no other guru out there knows what is going on with the Amazon algorithm.

Bradley Sutton:

People speculate, you know. They'll say, oh, I read this scientific paper. You know we've read all the scientific papers. You probably heard a couple episodes ago or you know we went deep into that. But at the end of the day, nobody really knows. Everybody's just speculating, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with speculating.

Bradley Sutton:

I speculate too, but what I like to do is I like to speculate based on tests and that's all I do. That's why I run Amazon accounts. I'm not trying to make money Nowadays. I'm trying to make a little bit more money in my Amazon accounts because that's what I do to to to support my, my kids, who are employees of my, my Amazon company. So now I have to make a little bit more money than I did. But my main point in running Amazon businesses is I use them as like my playgrounds to like test what is and isn't working with the algorithm.

Bradley Sutton:

Because, again, amazon doesn't make its algorithm public. The only way we kind of know how it works is by seeing what happens when we do things on Amazon and then just like measuring the results. But no matter what we do, again get it in your mind, guys there is no exact formula, and anybody who says there's an exact formula to rank on Amazon like an exact keyword the same time, every other time they're full of nonsense. All right, you know, even the helium 10 CPR numbers. Like we've always said, it gives you the best chance, but it doesn't give you a guaranteed chance. You know, every time it's based on a lot of trial and error. You know, I did a one and a half year case study to come up with that CPR number, all right. So what have I found that is working with the Amazon algorithm now and why is it different?

Bradley Sutton:

All right, well, number one is that a kind of important metric in helium 10 that people overlook is now a super important metric. All right, and what metric is that? It is Amazon recommended rank. All right, that is a name that we kind of made up, but it actually comes from an actual data point in Amazon. It's one of the things I'm very proud about. You know, I've made up the Maldives honeymoon strategy and you know I don't invent a lot of things, but this is one of the things that I discovered about five years ago and back then, like five years ago, I was like, oh man, everybody's going to copy us and start showing this. Nobody ever came up with this. I'm sure somebody's going to show it now. You know somebody's going to try and figure out where this data point is and show it to people because it is super, super important. I'm just shocked nobody's copied us in the last five years since we had this.

Bradley Sutton:

But again, Amazon recommended rank is coming from Amazon, where it kind of like says hey for X product and Y keyword. We think Y keyword is kind of very relevant to this product, or not so relevant, or medium relevant, etc. Amazon has a scoring system for every single product and almost every single keyword, where at least the top 1000 keywords if the product has a lot of history, it will go ahead and say, score it as far as how relevant it thinks for advertising. And in the past it was never something I really talked about too much that everybody should have to do because it was mainly about advertising. But it was a great metric to have because it kind of gave you insight into at least how the Amazon advertising algorithm thought that you were relevant for a certain keyword, right, or in relation to a certain product. But now, guys, in the last six months and all the tests I've been doing with launching everything else, it is all of a sudden a super indicative Metric on how just Amazon search algorithm thinks you are relevant. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

So I did a couple of tests with, like this, coffin Bath tray. I use the helium 10 project X account. I use a couple you know friends accounts because I wanted to have like Different accounts and different products, different ASINs, to kind of like test my, my theories right. And so I chose coffin bath tray because this was something that didn't have a lot of history on Amazon. So this is especially geared towards you people who are are getting in these niches where they're not completely saturated, all right. So because of that.

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon doesn't have that much data in order to know from day one what you might be relevant for. You know it's different, like if you're gonna launch some collagen peptides. There is hundred collagen peptides who've been selling millions of dollars a month and you know hundreds of thousands of customers have bought collagen peptides and Amazon has tracked every click and how they interact with the listings. They've got so much data on exactly what is relevant to collagen peptides that from day one of a brand new collagen peptides listening, you're probably going to be able to, you know, to get relevant for the right keywords but in a newer niche is a little bit different. So, sure enough, when I first launched these two coffin bath trays, I did on separate accounts. I did it with separate kinds of listings, one like a more in-depth listing and and I use the best practices again, you know I use that, my own scoring system, even on how to get you know Like I put coffin bath tray, like you know, like four times in the listing and long tail versions of I did all the right things and and get this.

Bradley Sutton:

The key words that I was relevant for from day one Was not coffin bath tray. Alright, if I was looking at the Amazon recommended rank from day one on one of the products. Or again, I launched pretty much the same exact kind of product. It was just different kinds of listings in different accounts at the same time. So I could, you know cross cross, see the number one. There was only one keyword on one of them that it was relevant for. Like Amazon only recommended one keyword. It was bath. Bath tray was kind of crazy, right. One keyword, bath tray. No other keyword had it on Amazon recommended rank. By the way, when you use that in cerebro in helium 10 to get the Amazon recommended rank, you have a listing up for five minutes. We'll already have Amazon recommended rank. This is something we pull from Amazon in Real time.

Bradley Sutton:

And the other product that I launched it was actually relevant for like 40 keywords from day one and the top three was interesting was bathroom decor, wineglass and candle holder. Very interesting. Alright, bathroom decor was super generic Word wine glass, what you might be like. Why does it have wine glass? Well, this, this, this coffin bath tray. I had in the. I think I put in the title and you know I had in the description that it has a slot for a wine glass. Alright. And then I also put that I had a slot for a candle holder but Amazon thought that this was a wine glass in candle holder. So from day one I was not.

Bradley Sutton:

I couldn't really do the Maldives honeymoon launch because for coffin bath tray, I was indexed for it but Amazon didn't think I was relevant. It would not even show me in PPC for coffin bath tray when those was the number one, most important keyword. I was optimized everywhere for it. It had a low title density. There was hardly any competition for coffin bath tray two years ago. I would have been on page one instantly for this, but because Amazon couldn't figure out that this was a coffin bath tray, it would not give me any PPC impressions. Alright, that's crazy.

Bradley Sutton:

So then, what are some of the things I started doing? I started changing up the listing. I had it coffin tray and other keywords. I wasn't even indexing for more times. I had to special features. I was trying doing search terms. Things were not working. I would see little bits of movement, but it was not moving like it would in the old days.

Bradley Sutton:

And this is a listing again. I just barely started. I started it like so definitely in the honeymoon period. So what got me to get coffin bath tray to Amazon recommended rank number two on one and Amazon recommended rank number one. What it was was I did an old-school two-step URL alright, I did an old-school two-step URL. It was the field ASIN URL. Alright, I did a field ASIN two-step URL and then I got somebody to buy it. I think one of them I might have got you know, chevali to buy it, and then the other one. I went to AZ rank and I paid AZ rank to get somebody by it.

Bradley Sutton:

Now I know what you're saying. Wait, bradley, didn't you just talk about how that kind of stuff is is against Amazon terms of service. Now, I think there's gonna be different opinions on this, but I could not care less in this instant about Keyword ranking. I was not trying to increase the keyword rank at all. Alright, I didn't even look at what the keyword rank was. My point was I knew I was not relevant for it to Amazon and so I was trying to send a relevancy signal to Amazon. So it knows that, hey, this is something important and this is something that you can give me impressions for in PBC and I'll gladly pay for clicks. So, in my mind, my interpretation of Amazon terms of service. This is not against the terms of service, because I'm not trying to manipulate or affect Amazon keyword ranks. I'm just trying to get, I'm just trying to pay Amazon some money in PBC and and make sure that they know that I am Relevant for it. So what I did was I just I just did one order, one field ASIN, where somebody added it to the car and they they bought the product for with the keyword coffin bath tray in it and, guys, less than 12 hours later it not only was it not Amazon recommended rank at all, it went to number one. Amazon recommended rank on one of the products and number two on the other product. For the top, amazon recommended rank just with one.

Bradley Sutton:

Feel ASIN now, because Amazon said two-step URLs for ranking is not good anymore. We took those off of our helium 10 gems page. So you guys want to know a trick to do a two-step URL still with a keyword. Right, go to index checker in Helium 10, put your ASIN, put that keyword in there and, whether it says is index or not index, you'll see it has check marks and dashes or whatever. Right click on the dash or the check mark, alright, and then do copy URL. Alright, so that URL is a feel on the field ASIN one there's a, there's a, there's a field ASIN check, copy that URL, replace the keyword and the ASIN with yours. Or if that's exactly the keyword in the ASIN and that's the exact URL you can use in order to get somebody to buy your product with the field ASIN two-step URL, and then that should get you the impressions and it should send that relevancy.

Bradley Sutton:

So again, this might be a controversial thing. You know, I'm definitely. You know I have a good relationship with Amazon. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna suggest something that is blatantly against Amazon terms of service. That's not how I roll, but you know, anything can change. I am like 99% sure this is not against Amazon terms of service Because, again, I am not trying to manipulate sales rank, I'm not trying to manipulate search rank. I'm just trying to let Amazon know that I am relevant for this keyword when on this new product.

Bradley Sutton:

So again, once that happened, once I did that one boom, I got to the very top of the search results in sponsored alright, I'm not talking to, you know, search rank and then I got some organic orders from sponsored and then that brought my organic rank up after just like two or three orders more that I got it got me to like the top of Page one for that keyword, just like the regular Maldives honeymoon strategy. It was very interesting to see because on August 2nd this is months ago this is one of the I do tests constantly, guys. So this one coffin tray you know this is just one. I'm just giving you, guys, one of the examples I've done. I'm looking here at my notes. On August 2nd, you know, the top 10 were keywords like bath tray, tray, decor, very generic keywords. It like he obvious Amazon couldn't figure it out. And then on 8, 4, 2 days later, every single one of the top 10 keywords on one of them was all had coffin in it. So finally I got Amazon, just without one order, to understand that, hey, I am relevant for coffin related keywords and in the other product it didn't show all coffins, that I didn't have coffin as many times. In listening again, listing optimization is still important for the, for the algorithm, but at least the number two keyword was coffin bath tray, and then a lot of the other keywords were were just generic. Now here's the thing, though. Here's a Again, I can do a podcast episode of just about the test. I mean I literally did like 75 tests and tweaks just in this case study alone for these two products.

Bradley Sutton:

Interestingly enough, before I started getting relevant for with the Amazon recommended rank for coffin bath tray, my number one Keyword on one of the products, like I said before, was bathroom decor. All right, very generic keyword, very high search volume, way higher than coffin bath tray. But because Amazon gave me a recommended rank of one which is not really from Amazon, amazon gives a score and then we translate the number one score into Amazon recommended rank one, because for bath bathroom decor, I Could actually target it in PPC and I was already ranking like on page five for this keyword. I didn't even get one sale for one at the cart one, nothing. And I was on page five for the super high volume search term, just because Amazon gave me a high recommended rank.

Bradley Sutton:

Now you might think, well, why didn't you double down on that? You know, Bradley white, you know, to me I couldn't care less about the word bathroom decor. You know, like I don't think that people who purchase or who search bathroom decor we're really going to buy, you know, a coffin shaped bath tray. But that just shows you again how today, in 2023 and 2024, this data point is super important and has wide reaching effects as far as how you or how Amazon thinks that you are relevant. So, at the end of the day, I had this product running for three months now and what I did was after the three months, and you know one.

Bradley Sutton:

My theory I wanted to test was well, is the Amazon algorithm trained All right now that I've been selling this coffin bath tray when nobody else was on these two accounts for three months? You know what, if I launch a new coffin bath tray, is Amazon, from day one, going to go ahead and understand now what this kind of product is? Because it has got this history and the answer is interesting. The answer is still no, not really. So I launched two products on two different accounts today. One of them I just made with the listing builder AI that we have that uses ChatGPT made a great listing, but it was optimized for the keywords that I knew were relevant. And the other one, I use the exact same 100% listing that I've had up for three months, thinking that, hey, now that Amazon recommended rank is very high for these products or for these keywords, well, it should know right away and copy that Amazon recommended rank. So here's what I found out on the very first one, the top three or four keywords that are Amazon recommended rank. On this brand new listing that I had really optimized for coffin bath tray, wine glass, charcuterie board, bathroom tray, wooden tray and bathroom caddy. So a little bit different than when I started off. On the other one, but again no coffin related keywords. So, even though it's you, I did everything right and optimizing my listings to make it somewhat relevant. At the end of the day that ASIN is still going to need me to run a field ASIN two step URL in order to let Amazon know that I am relevant for coffin tray.

Bradley Sutton:

On the other listing that was in Project X, where I copied the 100% same listing that's been up for three months, word for word. I changed like a couple, like just one or two words just to make sure it wasn't the exact same listing, so I should say 99%. Here is the top three keywords from Amazon recommended rank bathroom decor, wine glass and candle holder. Does that sound familiar to you? Exact top three keywords of when I started with that other product, even though now that same product has the number one keyword is coffin bath tray, which it should. So again, it shows listing optimization, guys, is not the end all be all. Having a perfectly optimized listing at times is not enough. It's more. It's probably going to help you more in established categories. But even though I've had this product selling for three months, amazon still needs more, a bigger bump in order to make sure that some of these niche keywords it knows that it's relevant for it. So the Amazon algorithm is not perfect. It was perfect. It would have known from day one that hey, this is a coffin bath tray. This other coffin bath tray has been getting sales from coffin bath tray, coffin bath caddy, you know coffin decor and all these keywords. This product is very similar. We're going to put it number one. All right, that's actually how I noted the Amazon algorithm work back in the day.

Bradley Sutton:

But this is a new year, a new Amazon algorithmic shift. I guess you could say where this is not. You know this strategy is not necessarily working anymore. You've got to send those relevancy signals to Amazon. So for now, you know my way of sending those relevancy signals is, and you shouldn't need this for every single keyword. Guys, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying go, go and every single one of your 10 launch keywords you're going to have to do a field as in two step URL. No, like, I think that Amazon probably wouldn't, you know, like that, because that almost would be considered manipulating sales rank, because you're getting all these sales that are not necessarily real orders. But if you find yourself having trouble getting relevant for a keyword because Amazon recommended a rank is off, try that out, get one or two orders, just try one at first for a field as in two step URL in order to send those relevancy signals and then the next day, wait 24 hours, run it again.

Bradley Sutton:

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

Bradley Sutton:

But if you're like me and you have to do like 40 tests or something to try and figure out, how do I make Amazon think I'm relevant for this important keyword? Well, you don't want to be doing that on a live listing when you're trying to like get you know, make advantage of your honeymoon period. So what the best thing to do might be to spend a few bucks and try a field ASIN, two step URL to see if that helps your Amazon recommended rank, to see if that helps you get those PPC impressions that you're going to need to do the Maldives honeymoon strategy from day one and then, once you figure out what works on this test listing, now you can start over again once your inventory comes in, or you can, you know, maybe your inventory is already there and now you can start off on the right foot so that you know from day one I'm going to send this field two step URL, you know, to go ahead and get this order or to get to get relevant for this keyword or maybe something you maybe have to optimize your listing in a different way. Again, like I said, listing optimization is important. Sometimes it can help. It can definitely help you by by doing things differently. But instead of trying to do all this trial and error on a live listing, when you're trying to you know, get your, you know, get your sales and everything do it like on a test listing first. That's what I did for this coffin tray and that's what I'm going to do for any probably the next few of my launches, or I've been doing it on some of my launches and it's going to be doing what I'm going to be doing, going forward on some of my launches. So, guys, let me know what you think, but this is the Maldives honeymoon strategy, like version four, 4.0, a lot of it's the same, but there's some new things that are different here.

Bradley Sutton:

But the very important that you guys know your Amazon recommended rank and especially if any of you guys have issues ranking for keywords or getting sales or getting impressions in PPC, just run your listing through Cerebro and check what that Amazon recommended rank is All right. So, number one again that means that's the keyword that Amazon thinks you're most relevant for, all right. Number 20, that means Amazon thinks you're 20th relevant, all right. The coffin shelf is a great example. The old coffin shelf seems to be completely locked in at a low Amazon recommended rank. Our Project X coffin shelf is like rank 25. For that you guys can see that yourself. Anybody can run the Helium 10 coffin shelf in Cerebro and you can see what the Amazon recommended rank is Right and it's not high. And that's why we're not ranking high organically. I don't know what happens, you know, like a shadow ban or whatever. I don't want to try and speculate on that, but in even in that case, this Amazon recommended rank is highly indicative of what's happening on the organic side. So, guys, I hope this helps. Let me know how it works when you guys try these strategies out, and especially, even if you have a more mature listening, let me know in the comments below what does it say for your Amazon recommended rank, the one that you've been struggling with? Let me know, and let me know how you fix it.

Bradley Sutton:

I'm not sure when I'm going to come to the Maldives next. You know, 500 was kind of like all right, I'm going to keep going until 500. So maybe if there's going to be a new strategy I need to come up with, I'll have another reason to come out, to come out here. This is my favorite place in the world the Waldorf Astoria. They always take care of me really well. If you guys make sure to you know, if you want to know how I afford this place, it's like $2,500 a night. Check out my travel hacking episode. Just look at up. You know Sirius Sellers podcast, travel Hacking. You'll find that episode and then you can see how I am able to get to this place without having to pay money or ask helium 10 for money for it. But anyways, guys, hope you enjoyed this episode and here's to another 500 episodes. Bye-bye now.

Helium 10 Buzz 10/12/23: Amazon Big Deal Days | Generic Listing Protection | New Buy Again Button

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

Prime Big Deal Days: Everything you need to know about Amazon's 48-hour shopping event
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-prime-big-deal-days-faq

Amazon has reportedly tested a “Buy Again” feature to entice shoppers into repeat purchases. The company has placed the new feature in a tab on the “most prized real estate” on its app home page.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/ecommerce/2023/amazon-wants-to-get-cautious-consumers-to-buy-again/

American consumers are taking their foot off the spending pedal as bargain prices become rarer, former Walmart U.S. CEO says
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/american-consumers-taking-foot-off-102620170.html

In the second part of our episode, we turn our attention to the world of competitor monitoring. Carrie Miller shows us how to stay ahead of the competition with Helium10's Insights Dashboard Competitors Tab feature, which allows you to easily monitor your competitors in seconds.

Get ready to pocket some incredible news stories, strategies, and insights that are going to keep you ahead in the E-commerce game!

 

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

• 00:49 - Big Deal Days
• 02:09 - New CPF Certifications
• 03:32 - A/B Testing
• 04:11 - Controlled Generic Listings
• 04:58 - Buy Again Button
• 05:46 - Bargains Gone Forever?
• 06:50 - Follow Helium 10 In Twitter
• 07:35 - Pro Training Tip: Insights Dashboard Competitor Tab

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

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

Transcript

Shivali Patel:

New certifications for the Climate Pledge-Friendling program, brand protection with generic product listings, a buy again button for your consumers and an incoming shift in consumer habits. This and more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

 

Shivali Patel:

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Shivali Patel, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you all the latest news in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce space and we also provide you with a training tip of the week that will give you insight into serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. The first article that we'll be covering today is from Amazon itself. First, I want to preface this by saying I was just looking at some Prime Day 2022-2023 stats earlier today with some of our Helium 10 team, and we were seeing conversion rates hold study or even increase, resulting in more sales year over year, as well as impressions remaining consistent leading up to Prime Day, but then soaring a whopping 25% year over year on the big day. You can check out our LinkedIn for more details. But, with that said, let's talk about Amazon Prime's Big Deals Day. So what exactly is Amazon Prime's Big Deal Days? Well, it was a 48-hour shopping event that happened in 19 countries and, just like Prime Day, it was a significant sales opportunity for many businesses. I've already seen a lot of buzz on LinkedIn and on our Facebook groups saying that Big Deals Days was going great for them. That is such a tongue twister, guys. I'm not quite saying that five times fast. Our Project X and Project 5K accounts both had more than double the normal average in sales. But I want to hear from you guys how were your sales? Were you up, Were you down? By how much and in what category? Let us know in the comments below.

 

Shivali Patel:

Next up Amazon has added three new certifications that recognize materials innovation to their Climate Pledge Friendly program. This is really helpful for customers in discovering more sustainable products at scale. Oftentimes, as a buyer, when we're scrolling search results pages and we're just on the prowl for a particular item, Badges can be a really great way to have a listing catch our eye, and perhaps that is part of the reason on why sellers have noted slight increases in conversion with these badges. Maybe it's the increased traffic or the feeling of leaning into a morally sound, feel-good purchase for your prospective consumers. But listen, whatever the case may be, if any of your products are eligible for one of these new certifications or the Climate Pledge Friendly badge in general, it may be worth enrolling into this program. To enroll, you must either have an approved third-party certification or be eligible via compact by design or pre-owned certified. Of course, this validation process is really going to vary based off of your product type, and therefore you should do your due diligence. The badge will then appear on product details pages, search results pages and give you access to different things like advertising packages, Amazon business features and much, much more. All right.

 

Shivali Patel:

Another segment of news coming from Seller Central is brands can now run AB tests on supporting images in the Manager Experiments Image Gallery. This is great news for those of you who haven't yet launched your product or you just want to optimize your listing images. After all, as it says here, 62% of customers are more likely to buy a product if they can first view its images and video. Yes, it's still best to do split testing via Helium 10 audiences, but to start split testing your supporting images and potentially hike your conversion rate, you can head over to Manager Experiments dashboard switching gears.

 

Shivali Patel:

Seller Central also recently announced that they've extended product detail page protection to generic product listings. So if you don't know what this means, if you are a seller who does not have brand registry just yet, this could be helpful for you. You can start off listing your product as generic and then Amazon will still protect you by keeping any changes that occur solely under your control. Basically, what Amazon is saying is they won't let other people go in and change out your listing. Even though you're not brand registered, we do still suggest that you get brand registry for most sellers. This is a really nice update, and it does come with a lot of different things, so just bear that in mind. But you do have access to this exclusive control with the generic listing product detail pages now.

 

Shivali Patel:

Then we have a new buy again button. I'm reporting this to you from payments.com. We all have purchase history with Amazon. That's really useful, but sometimes we forget that it's not just those subscription products like supplements and maybe the skincare items that can appeal to people and they'll reorder over and over again. If you can establish brand authority or deliver a really great product or experience, a simple button can be enough to bring back customers and increase your return on investment. Look, I'm a repeat purchaser in general, so I'm the perfect target market for this feature. Have you seen this button on the Amazon app's homepage to entice shoppers into repeat purchases? Let me know in the comment section.

 

Shivali Patel:

Last but certainly not least, the last article I'll be covering today is from Yahoo Finance, and that is Bill Simon. This guy is the former Walmart CEO, and he's raised some concerns about the impact of lingering inflation and various macroeconomic factors on the American consumers, suggesting that the era of big bargains might be coming to an end, you guys. He pointed to the evidence of changing consumer habits, such as shifting towards smaller purchases at the end of the month due to financial constraints, and retailers are feeling the effects of inflation, which could really affect consumer acceptance of prices and buying patterns. I know I've already experienced this inside of my retail stores that when I'm going grocery shopping, the prices are insane, as are gas prices and whatnot. So are you seeing a change in spending habits? Has this been reflected in your own sales? Let us know. We would love to absolutely hear from you. So that does conclude our news pieces for this week.

 

Shivali Patel:

Before I jump to our training tip of the week, I want to quickly encourage you to follow our Twitter account at Helium10 Software, that's @H10Software okay, @H10Software If you don't already follow us. We post announcements, slides, workshops, Q&As and so much more, and it's a really easy way to stay in touch. I don't want you to miss out. Let me go ahead and give you a second. Go ahead and pause this podcast or video, whatever it may be that you're watching this, and go give us a follow Done, All right, awesome. Before I sign off, let me pass it over to Kerry Miller, our brand evangelist here at Helium10. And, as a seller, being able to stay at the forefront of your market can also depend on what your competitors are doing. Perhaps they're adjusting their price points or offering a promotional coupon, and you will want to know when they do that as soon as they do. If you want to know an easy way, just keep watching.

 

Carrie Miller:

Q4 is here and I know a lot of us like to keep close tabs on our competitors, but it's often a lot of tedious work where you have to literally go to their listings to kind of see and try to figure out what they're doing in this Q4 season. A lot of times we want to see did they change their price, are they adding coupons, things like that. So I want to show you a very easy way that you can actually monitor your competitors using Helium10. The first thing that you want to do is you want to log into your Helium10 account. Okay, so this is actually all going to be on this dashboard that you see right here, and we're actually going to scroll down just a little bit and we're going to take a look at this product section where it says my Products, and what we're going to do is we're going to expand this down, and you can see there's a lot of different tabs here. I'm going to actually focus on competitors here. So these competitors, you can actually choose them or sometimes they're already populated for you. So if you don't like the ones that are already populated in here for you, just click on Edit Competitors and you can just add in whatever ASINs you want or you can choose them from this list down here. I usually put my own five that I want and it's the top five competitors that you have. Once you've done that, you can actually see them listed here. You can see if they have a coupon here. You can see if they have done anything in terms of revenue, if they're doing really well, if their price is a little bit different. But this is actually going to get in more detail in this Competitors tab. So on this sidebar here where there's these little swords, you're going to click on the Competitors tab and you're going to be able to see more in detail about your competitors. And so this is not just those five for that one product. This is going to be all of your competitors that you've chosen.

 

Carrie Miller:

So each product on that main dashboard you're going to see five, but this is where they're all going to be put together in one page and you're going to be able to see price changes and all kinds of different things like BSR. And if you wanted to customize and get alerts, you can actually get alerts for your competitors so you can see if their BSR has increased by a certain amount. If it's decreased, you can see if their review count has increased by a certain percentage or if it's decreased, or if their sales have increased or decreased. So that way you can see, hey, their sales are soaring, what are they doing, or maybe they're decreasing, and you can capitalize on that. There's a lot of different ways that you can utilize this and these are the different default or different settings that you can use. Now you can just uncheck it if you don't want to see it, or check it if you do want to see it, and you can add in whatever percentage number that you want to. So that is how you kind of edit these, but it'll show you. You know in general, if you know, there's some changes in price and things like that. But if you go down here to insights as well, we have some more information here. You can add in insights, for you know if their competitor changed the price or a coupon, you can actually get an alert for that. You can also see if they've changed their listing and you can see if they've changed any performance. So, right here, for a coupon, you can say you know if it's a price increase or decrease, or a coupon offered or a coupon no longer offered. You can edit this, however you'd like to get those alerts.

 

Carrie Miller:

If you uncheck it, you won't get any. For listing change you can change, you can check off which ones of these that you want. So do you want to see if they've changed their title, their main image, their category and subcategory? And then, finally, you can see about their BSR and their review count, just like I kind of showed you this a little bit before. So this is where you can really control all of the Competitor Insights. There's a lot more different insights and I'll go over there those in other videos, but this is just focus on competitors. So this makes it very, very easy for you to go into that dashboard every day. That dashboard is going to show you a little an alert button or it'll say insight ready, and it's going to show you those things in the way that you set them up. So if you wanted to see if they've increased, you know, by a certain percentage of sales, you're going to be able to see that in that insights dashboard. You're going to see if they've added a coupon or if you wanted to see if their title changed, you're going to be able to see all of that in the dashboard and it's going to be so easy for you to monitor just in seconds, where all of this stuff would take you hours actually to do, to monitor every day. Where we have it ready for you every single day in the dashboard, easy to see, and you're going to get a great overview of what your competitors are doing so that you can stay competitive and you can capitalize on anything that they are slacking on. So go ahead and check out the insights dashboard competitors section and let us know what you think. Bye.

 

Shivali Patel:

Awesome. Thank you for that, Carrie. I know the ability to monitor competitors with set thresholds was something that I was looking forward to for a while, and it's incredible to finally have it up as part of our tool set. Other than that, that is it for this week. I hope you learned something from this week's Weekly Buzz. We will see you next week to talk about what is buzzing.

#499 - Demystifying the Amazon Algorithm: The Power of AI in E-Commerce

Want to crack the code of Amazon's algorithm? Join us in this riveting episode as we sit down with Kevin Dolan, Principal Engineer of the AI Labs program at Pacvue x Helium 10, a mastermind who has scrutinized over 100 Amazon Science papers and run millions of tests to decode the intricate workings of Amazon's search framework. From semantics to lexical search and all the fine details in between, be prepared to gain invaluable knowledge and insights that will transform how you see Amazon's ecosystem.

Pressing on, we dive deep into the expansive landscape of AI with Kevin. We break down the complexities of Amazon Science's information retrieval papers, shedding light on the motivations, implications, and limitations. With a heavy focus on both the relevancy ranking system and the behavioral indicators, such as previous purchases and time spent on a page, we reveal the intricacies of how this system functions and the challenges faced by new products. You'll gain a comprehensive understanding of the balance between query intent and query volume, as well as the impact of micro-actions on a product's early life.

We wrap up our conversation by evaluating the role of Artificial Intelligence in selling success, discussing how semantic search differs from lexical matching, and lastly, looking at the promising future of the Amazon algorithm's evolution. This episode is a gold mine of knowledge and insights that will guide you in navigating Amazon's complex systems. With the help of Kevin's expertise and insights, you'll be better equipped to harness the power of Amazon's algorithm for your own Amazon FBA business’ success. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to gain insights from an expert who has spent countless hours demystifying the workings of Amazon. Enjoy the episode!

In episode 499 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Kevin discuss:

• 00:00 - Check Keyword Indexing With Helium 10
• 06:21 - Impressive AI Amazon Listing Builder 
• 10:49 - Investigating the Amazon Algorithm 
• 21:10 - How Amazon Search Works in Phases 
• 25:43 - How Amazon Chooses Search Results 
• 31:17 - Analyzing Product Metrics and Rankings 
• 35:05 - Amazon Keyword Relevance and Product Ranking 
• 38:44 - Amazon's Trend in Personalized Search 
• 42:48 - Keyword-Based Search vs. Meaning-Based Search
• 50:53 - Advancements in Semantic Search Techniques

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’re going to talk to somebody who might be the most knowledgeable person in the entire world about how the Amazon algorithm works. He studied over 100 Amazon science papers and runs tests on millions of data points, and he’s going to be educating us on his findings, about what he’s found on things such as semantic search, lexical search and more, including showing a shocking example of proof of how search on Amazon is evolving drastically even now. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Did you know that just because you have a keyword in your listing, that does not mean that you are automatically guaranteed to be searchable or, as we say, indexed for that keyword? Well, how can you know what you are indexed for and not? You can actually use Helium 10’s Index Checker to check any keywords you want. For more information, go to h10.me/indexchecker.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got for the first time, somebody on the show a fellow worker here at Helium 10, but one of the more unique ones. He’s not like we’ve had product managers here, we’ve had, like, some of our executives, like Boyan has been on the show before, Adam has been on the show, but he’s got a very unique and one of the coolest roles here and we’re just going to get to know him and you guys are going to be blown away by some of his insights into how the Amazon algorithm works, because he, probably more than anybody else in the entire industry, has done the most research on the subject. So, before we get into the details, first of all, Kevin, welcome to the show. How’s it going?

Kevin:

That’s going pretty good. That’s a lot to live up to, I got to tell you.

Bradley Sutton:

There we go, no pressure, no pressure.

Kevin:

Where are you located? Yeah, I’m out in Los Angeles so I do live near a lot of the other Helium 10 people, a lot of the back view people. We go sailing from time to time.

Bradley Sutton:

Is this where you’re going to be taking me sailing for my first?

Kevin:

time in a couple weeks. Yeah, we’re taking you sailing next week actually.

Bradley Sutton:

Where did you go to school at?

Kevin:

Cornell.

Bradley Sutton:

Cornell, that’s.

Kevin:

Ivy League. It is technically an Ivy League. We get made friend of a lot for being the worst one, but you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Isn’t that where the guy from the office yeah, he went, or something.

Kevin:

Okay, now I was like wait, how do I know he? Classically.

Bradley Sutton:

Andy for them.

Kevin:

Yeah, he brags about it a lot. That’s the kind of reputation that we try to avoid.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, all right. What did you study there?

Kevin:

I studied computer science Originally physics, but ended up using computers a lot to do physics. Things ended up liking that more, so went down the direction of computer science. My focus was on artificial intelligence, which is why all this new stuff that’s been happening has been so exciting.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so I mean you were into it before. It was actually, you know, hip to be into it Before.

Kevin:

It was cool. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Bradley Sutton:

And so now, what is your position here at Helium 10?

Kevin:

So I’ve actually been with Helium 10 since 2020. I’ve served like a bunch of different roles, jumping in, you know, helping with individual products, with higher level stuff. Right now I’m serving as the principal architect for the AI labs and this is the AI labs between both back view and Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. So AI labs is like a like, almost like a secret organization inside of Helium 10. What is AI labs?

Kevin:

Yeah well, we try not to be a secret. We try to make sure everybody in the organization knows what we’re doing all the time. But basically you know, even if you’re not in technology right now, you’re hearing about AI. You’re hearing about chat, gpt. You’re trying to figure out ways to use it. You’re worried it’s going to take your job. You know, outside of technology, a lot of people don’t become aware of these technological shifts, but sometimes you get these breakout technologies, and AI is one of them.

This whole stream of research really began in 2017 with the release of the first Transformers paper. It started to take off really, really hard in 2020, when some of these new techniques started to get better results than any other techniques. But when last year, openai released chat, gpt, there was this sudden explosion and suddenly we’re seeing AI models that can do things that, say, 10 years ago, people would have never expected computers to be able to do, and so you’re seeing a lot of new products come out, a lot of new features. People are excited, people are scared.

I tend to be more on the conservative side when it comes to AI. There’s, I’m excited about it, it can do a lot of really cool things, but I think it can’t do a lot of the stuff that people say that it can. Right now, the goal of the AI labs is basically to figure out what’s hype and what’s real. We’re trying to figure out what of these AI technologies we can use within Helium 10 and PacView products to make our tools better, to make our sellers have a better life, and we’re also trying to figure out ways that these AI technologies can change the ecosystem. So what’s going on at Amazon right now that might affect the way sellers sell on Amazon, that people buy things on Amazon, and that’s actually the part of the job that’s really really exciting to me, because it forces you to predict the future and that’s just really fun.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, it’s really cool how Helium 10 and PacFu is embracing AI. We have a whole department here dedicated to it. We just hired another executive who was leading up AI at Microsoft of all places. Obviously we have dedication, but somebody might say, wait a minute, like I barely have seen Helium 10 come out with anything AI. This is what I think is cool, because I remember back in the day I obviously have worked here at Helium 10 longer than you but five years ago when we were a tiny team we weren’t number one, we probably weren’t even number two.

It was like Jungle Scout was number one, maybe Viral Launch was number two, and then Helium 10 was kind of a newer kid on the block and because of that we had to be cutting edge like nonstop and try and be the first, and it was like a space wars, like who’s going to launch this reverse ace in first and who’s going to launch an auto responder email, and then sometimes we just rushed to get something out and it wasn’t maybe the best, but in those days, like being the first at something was super important in this growing industry. Now for a few years, since you’ve been here no coincidence there but since you’ve been here we’re number one in the game. So it’s like you know what. We don’t need to be first at anything. Like let’s be. When we launch something, let’s get it right. So we were definitely not the first to launch AI for listing building. But, man, it’s really amazing Like our listing builder tool now can do multiple languages and multiple marketplaces. I threw in words into a Spanish listing but then my inputs were like in English and even through some Portuguese in there, but then the AI knew that this is for Amazon Mexico and then took my keywords and it made a complete Spanish listing. I mean, it’s just like it even blows the Amazon AI listing builder like completely out of the water, let alone anybody else in our space here.

But we had long story short. We’ve got this whole team that’s working hard and making sure that we’re gonna do that. We’re doing the right things. But at the end of the day, you were talking about the. You know how AI is integrated into the search algorithm. We’re definitely gonna go deep into that, but just a preview, guys, like I don’t know.

You can tell me what you think, kevin, but in my opinion, we can read all the scientific documents we want, like you have, but at the end of the day, there is nobody on this earth not even Amazon workers, or not just one Amazon worker who could just tell you the exact formula of exactly how the Amazon search algorithm works, because that’s not the way it works. It’s not something that you can just turn into a mathematical formula. So just guys, you know what we talk about today is gonna be based on, you know, a lot of research and things, but you gotta remember that, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if we’re coming up with something, or somebody else out there who read some scientific documents is coming out with something. It’s speculation, you know, and we can you know. I think what we’re gonna show today is is that Kevin’s speculation probably is better than anybody else’s, since he’s read more. But are you with me there on that kind of like postulation?

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean exactly like you know. I think whenever a new technology like this comes out, people get excited about it. They wanna use it. They wanna release products that you know claim to use AI, even if it’s not really that big of an important component to it. You know, I recently heard from one of my friends who’s in venture capital that he’s, at this point, tired of hearing AI pitches. When somebody comes to him and says, all right, our company is, we’re doing X, but we’re using AI, basically everybody just rolls their eyes and I think the reason is because AI, at the end of the day, is a tool, it’s a technology, it’s not even a feature and it’s definitely not a whole product.

I think when the dust settles, the hype dies down and this becomes integrated into day-to-day life, you’re not gonna hear about it as much. It’s just gonna naturally be a part of so many systems that you don’t think about it. Just the same way that you know, when you’re using Amazon as a buyer or as a seller, you’re not thinking about what databases they use on the backend or what fraud detection techniques they’re using. You don’t have to think about those low-level details because they’re just part of the system we’re about to get to a place, hopefully in the next couple of years, where these things just become more commonplace, and that’s a lot of the approach that I take when I develop technology is that I look at all of these things as tools that can be used to accomplish things, but at the end of the day, we still need to accomplish things that our users want to accomplish.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, now you know we’re about to talk about the extent of your research and how ridiculous, how many hours you’ve spent, you know, investigating the Amazon algorithm and stuff. But you know, just like we said, nobody, not even in Amazon, can, just you know, know instantly what the, how the Amazon algorithm works, how search works. So let me just ask you, like, why did you even do all this work in the first place?

Kevin:

If you knew that there’s.

Bradley Sutton:

you know, the ceiling is not even a full knowledge of what’s going on Like, so why even put all this work into it?

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean, you know we are, at the end of the day, building products that help sellers sell things on Amazon. So the more that we understand about how Amazon search works, the better we’re able to do that. Yes, we’re never gonna be able to understand the whole thing, I would say. Within Amazon, it’s a large functional engineering organization, so the entire system is broken down into subcomponents. Some people are going to be experts on individual subcomponents. Some people are going to be experts on how all of the different subcomponents connect to one another. But, like you said, no one person really knows everything. And even if there are people at Amazon who can really say that they understand all the subcomponents at a deep level, they’re still not going to understand all of the emergent properties that come from the system.

Whenever you have a system that’s so complex that so many different people are using for so many different purposes, a lot of new behaviors start to come about. You get behaviors that come from the fact that people want to list on Amazon so that they rank more highly. You might not be able to predict ahead of time what that’s gonna look like. You might not be able to predict how buyers are going to change what they type into the search box as you change, how different search results come back, and so I think it’s something that, whether you work for Amazon, whether you build tools for Amazon, whether you’re an Amazon seller, or even if you’re an Amazon buyer, I think it’s important for you to understand what kinds of things are happening, because they give you hints to better understand how to interact with the ecosystem.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay now, what did your research entail? To what extent have you done that leads up to you giving us this information that you’re about to in this episode?

Kevin:

A little bit, a little bit. So the first place I went was the blogs, which I think was probably a mistake. They’re written for a different audience. I understand that they’re gonna be non-technical.

Like blogs from Amazon or just like blogs from people in the industry, industry blogs and blogs from Amazon as well, but in general they’re written for non-technical audiences, and so I understand there’s gonna be some loss in translation when you get there. What I was astounded by was just how wrong they absolutely are. A lot of the articles make things up. A lot of the things point to research that isn’t likely to be part of a production system. A lot of them talk about search techniques that were popular 20 years ago and we’ve moved well past those technologies, and so I think it is generally safe to assume that if you’re reading it on a blog, you can take it with a grain of salt. There might still be some useful information there. It might still be relevant when you are writing your listings, but at the end of the day, it’s not canon.

Amazon operates a publication that they call Amazon Science. They have a number of programs internally that lead to this, but this is basically where they release a lot of their public facing academic research, and there’s a section within Amazon Science that’s on the subject of information retrieval. It’s one of the biggest sections. That’s the academic term for search, and I went through and basically looked through the hundreds of papers that they had listed for publication there. I selected about a hundred of them that were gonna be relevant towards giving us hints about how Amazon how many pages does each of these have?

Bradley Sutton:

It depends. It depends these hundred that you read.

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean. Some papers will be as short as just a couple of pages, like two or three. Some will be 20 pages long. Some have a lot of appendices, a lot of formulas. When you do academic research, you get really good at skimming papers for the important parts and making sure that you’re not wasting time reading stuff you don’t need to read. But it’s a skill in and into itself for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Now the first time. I haven’t read many and I think you by far have read more than anybody else in the world. These aren’t written by the same people, so probably even county Amazon employees, you’ve read more of these than anybody else. The first time it came on my radar I was looking up. I found a patent that Amazon had filed for something about search, and that was the first time I was diving in. I was like my goodness, this is interesting stuff.

Like a lot of it was way over my head, since I’m not a data scientist and using language, but then it allowed me to understand like even parts of, like what we call the honeymoon period. They call it like cold start and stuff like this. It was just fascinating to read. But then I found out later that Amazon is just publishing left and right all these papers, like you said. But like, first of all, why are they doing this? And then, second of all, correct me if I’m wrong but just because they publish a paper on something, it doesn’t mean, like you said, that they actually have what’s in that paper in production in Amazon or is even imminent to hit production. Yeah, exactly.

Kevin:

Yeah, I would say that there’s a lot of different reasons why companies release academic papers and actually up until about 2020, amazon was very careful about the information relating to their system that they released to the public. They might release a patent, but patents are incredibly vague and the reason you release a patent is specifically to prevent other people from being able to do that or, at the very least, prevent other people from suing you for doing something similar. But when you release academic research, you’ve definitely got a different set of motivations. There. You run the risk of, say, a competitor adopting the same techniques something that’s part of your secret sauce becoming commonplace, and so you do have to weigh that against the benefits. But there are a lot of benefits to doing this. If you look at other companies like Google, google, unlike Amazon, came from academic research. The founders of Google created the PageRank algorithm, which was originally called the Backrub algorithm.

Bradley Sutton:

I bet you there’s a great story behind that there.

Kevin:

So you know, like Google’s approach was academic driven from the beginning and as a result of that, the academic research that goes into web search is probably a decade ahead of what you see in e-commerce search. When you release these papers as part of your company, when you get them out there, at the end of the day, what you’re doing is you’re sparking innovation on the subject. You’re sparking innovation within your own company because you’re able to recruit the best talent. If I’m an engineer or I’m a data scientist or I’m a researcher, I might now want to work at Amazon because I know that there’s a chance that I can release a paper that’s gonna be really important, that’s gonna be really great for my career. I know I’m gonna be working with the state of the art technologies and like that’s really exciting, so you’re able to get better talent that way. It also allows you to work with people who are in academia.

So one of the challenges that e-commerce search has faced in academic research on information retrieval is the availability of data, because Amazon doesn’t want to release to just anybody their search volumes, their search history, what products people are clicking on, and so it’s a lot harder for somebody who works at Cornell University to do research on that subject. Amazon started a program called the Amazon Scholars Program, where somebody who is perhaps a PhD candidate or a university professor can kind of be embedded in a team at Amazon to help them develop something, and in many cases conditions of that would be that they get access to data and they’re able to release important papers, and so at the end of the day you get these papers out there. They help you develop new technologies and new techniques, but it also sort of fosters this broader ecosystem of research. That happens so that just in general in the world there’s better knowledge about how to do things. It’s worked really well for web search. E-commerce search has been a little bit slower to do this kind of thing, but they’re catching up.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, All right. So, guys, first takeaway here is we could have the person who’s read the most scientific documents here in the world. We could have somebody who just reads one scientific document, but what you can’t do is just take one of these and say, okay, because of what I read here, this is proof of what’s going on in Amazon. You know I mean, otherwise we’d be releasing blogs every week with Kevin as a byline talking about what he’s learned from there. So, again, just keep in mind that not any one of us can just take one of these documents and explain what is happening on Amazon. But, that being said, there’s a lot that we can take away, both from what you’ve researched in these documents and what you. Obviously, being at Healing 10, you have access to more data points than almost anybody outside of Amazon, and so you can actually study behaviors and trends and things like that. So let’s just start at a very basic level. How does Amazon search work today?

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean there’s some things that we can tell from the papers that are kind of like canon knowledge. One section of almost every paper is usually like a introduction discussion session where they talk about why this problem exists, what they’re trying to solve and sort of what the context of the problem is. In these it seems to be pretty well accepted that search happens in three high-level phases. The first phase is query understanding. So Amazon is gonna be looking at the query that was searched. They’re possibly gonna be looking at your past queries, your past purchase history, to try and better understand what it is you’re looking for. There’s a matching phase, phase two which is basically looking at Amazon’s catalog of billions of products to try and find a smaller set of products that are likely related to that search. So now we’ve whittled it down from, say, a few billion potential products down to a thousand products. And then the final phase, which is really the most important, is the ranking phase. The ranking phase is where it determines what order to show those thousand matching products in. This is, I think, where Amazon has the best opportunity to use the more advanced technologies to really precisely understand what somebody’s looking for and what somebody’s offering and to match the absolute most likely things that somebody’s gonna buy into the top of the search results. But even as you go further down the list, ranking is still important.

Amazon talks about a lot of situations where the priorities and goals that Amazon has for ranking are actually different than what you might think. You might think that when you’re making a search that you want to show in the number one search result the product that the person’s most likely gonna buy, but that’s not always the case. They use this example a lot in their research engagement rings. So I don’t know about you. I don’t know many people who are buying diamond engagement rings on Amazon. If you’re going to Amazon, you’re typing an engagement ring, you’re most likely gonna be looking for something like cubic zirconium, something a little more affordable, and so you would think that when you search this, the top results should all be affordable diamond rings. The reality is that if people see that, they think something is wrong with Amazon because they expect to see diamond rings at the top, and so in certain cases, amazon has goals that are more related to user expectations than quantitative optimizable goals, and so it’s a really complex system. But ranking is really where a lot of the secret sauce is.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now how does AI play a role like, for example, in misspellings? Or is this just something that has existed, where machine learning is used and it just learns to try and predict buyer intent based on most common misspellings? And then, how does Amazon work in that regard?

Kevin:

I mean misspellings is an interesting case, so that usually falls into the query understanding bucket. So somebody types in a query. There are a lot of existing techniques that you might call AI, you might call machine learning, but they definitely aren’t the same thing that’s being referred to as AI that everybody’s excited about right now to do a spell correction. It’s a pretty well researched area and so when you type a query into Amazon, one of the first things that they’re gonna do is run it through a spell check algorithm to try and figure out if there’s some obviously misspelled word that they can correct. And that’s usually gonna be like one of the first steps in query understanding.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now you know the holy grail or goal of any Amazon seller when they’re launching products or when they’re trying to get sales is hey, I need to get on, quote unquote page one of Amazon search results. You know, this is nothing new, you know, you’re a blogger, you’re an SEO person, you want to get. You know, page one on Google results. You know, but on Amazon, how? In general? You know we’re going to simplify this down before we go deep into the weeds here, but how does Amazon choose what to show? You know, first in search results?

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean this. This is a really complicated question. Like, like we said earlier, amazon is a modular system. You know, there are going to be a lot of different teams working on a lot of different subsystems. These subsystems are going to be interacting in different ways, but in general, there’s a broad category of algorithms that work really well with these types of modular systems, and these are called learning to rank algorithms, and basically the idea is that you set some set of goals that you want.

You know a goal might be I want the product that the user is most likely to buy to be at the top. A goal might be I care about my long term relationship with the user, so I’d make sure not to show them things that they’re going to return. You know I care about my long term relationship with sellers, so I want to give new products a chance, and so the system’s going to have a lot of different goals that it’s able to juggle, and a learning to rank algorithm will take a series of signals and try to put things in the best order so that they can achieve those goals, and this also allows for engineers at Amazon to be modular in how they define those signals, so I might define relevant signals in terms of like okay, you’ve searched for a query with these particular words in it. I know that those words are in the title, so you should probably rank that a little bit higher. However, another signal might be everybody who buys this product seems to return it, so that’s a bad thing, and these different signals can go together to they can be.

These signals can be mixed together to basically come up with a ranking that best accomplishes those goals, and it’s really important to stress that these signals can be defined by, like a lot of different engineers. You might have data scientists who are working in relevance factors as to like whether or not a particular listing means the same thing that somebody is expressing in a query. You might have somebody who’s focused more on behavioral signals. We see that things that people have bought in the past is a really important signal for Amazon. If you search for a common query, something as simple as like pressure cooker, amazon knows which things people have bought when they’ve typed in pressure cooker, so that might actually end up being the dominant signal. But the learning to rank algorithms basically allow you to, instead of sit there and like manually tune all the rules that land at some particular ranking. You get to let the system sort of figure out how to do it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, what about when we’re talking new products? All right, you know that’s just general, general how the search works. But then you know, especially when it, when it comes to to you know a history of interactions. You know, like, what happens on a mature product. You know Amazon can easily know what to prioritize because you know they have how people have clicked, how long people have stayed on a page or how they scroll. I mean, there’s like billions of data points. They have, after listings, been out there for six months. But going back to, you know, like what I saw in that one document about, like, you know what was called cold start. You know problem how does Amazon determine relevancy in things for a brand new listing? You know that doesn’t have this history.

Kevin:

Yeah, so it’s a problem. It’s a very active area of research. Of the hundred papers I read, at least a dozen were about the cold start problem. So I would say this is definitely something that is a focus for Amazon. It’s something that they care about really deeply and want to solve, and it’s also something that they haven’t entirely solved.

The cold start problem basically says that because for common queries, behavioral signals dominate and are so predictive of what somebody is likely to buy, the rankers are typically going to show products with deep history above products with, you know, a shallow history, like a new product. If I’m searching for a pressure cooker, it’s going to show me the pressure cooker that people usually buy. If some company comes and makes a better pressure cooker something that really just you know completely blows this the existing ones out of the water, amazon’s not necessarily going to show that to users because it’s got no behavioral priors. So solving the cold start problem is really important and there’s a bunch of different ways to do that. There’s a bunch of different techniques. Some of the techniques you’ll see in the literature are called bandit optimization, which uses like a gambling game as a sort of analogy for how you learn about you know whether you should continue exploring new options or exploit the options you have, but I would say most of the research and the papers that seem the most important lead to this idea of using details about the listing to predict behavioral priors. The idea is basically that you look at things like the quality of the listing, the seller, the image, the title, and you try to analyze them to a degree to where you can estimate what you think somebody might be likely to click the product.

At that point. You start to use those to intermix new products with the existing products and then you can measure that behavior against them. So you could say all right, I’ve started to rank this new pressure cooker high, even though I don’t have much priors for it, and it seems like people are really excited about this thing. It seems like people are buying this. So now I’m going to update my estimate and say like, okay, your optimistic estimate is really good. If I start to show it to people and nobody wants it, or people buy it and they start to return it, then I’m going to start to rank that item lower.

I think this is what leads to what you and the industry refers to as the honeymoon period. It’s this idea that there is a brief window of time when you launch a new product where Amazon is going to be ranking it more favorably than if it had a long sales history of poor performing sales, and so I think this is something that’s definitely an emergent property of the system. It’s not necessarily something that Amazon sits there and says, okay, the honeymoon period is two weeks, it’s definitely not something like that, but it is something that may emerge from the system as designed.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so, like you know, there’s in the industry. You know people talk about query intent versus query volume. You know, query volume, search query volume. You know don’t always just go for hey kitchen utensil has, you know, 50,000 search volume. And that’s what I need to be focusing on when I launch my product or when I’m making my listing optimization, as opposed to something with only 600 searches. But that’s super hyper relevant, like aluminum spoon for boho decor or something like that, you know.

And so I found that in early listings and I’m going to talk about this more in episode 500 of the podcast, where I talk about the Maldives honeymoon method, about how micro actions mean exponentially more in the, you know, honeymoon period, or whatever you want to call it first few weeks, cold start, whatever of a product, like you can drastically change how Amazon views your product. Now the first part is you guys obviously have to have your listing optimization down. You know, like I can’t have a water bottle, but then the copy of the listing just talks about kitchen utensils. It talks about, you know, I don’t know podcasting equipment and just random stuff, and then Amazon just miraculously is going to figure out that I’m talking about a water bottle. No, you’ve got to be super, make sure your listing has all the potential keywords so that you give Amazon something to start with. And the thing is, you could do all of the right things. I’m talking about this in the next episode, how we’re working on something so that when people are using listening builder, that they have like a scoring system that’s kind of based on best practices, like how many times do you have the right? Do you have all the right keywords, are you indexed for them? How many times do you have it and do you have it in the right parts of your listening? But at the end of the day, you could have a perfect score, if there ever was one, and still Amazon might not 100% know about what the product is, especially if it’s like a newer niche, like if it was water bottle, probably from day one. Amazon has everything ready. As long as you have a great listening, amazon knows exactly what your product is.

I’m gonna talk about how I launched or I did some dual testings on this coffin shaped coffin shaped bath tray, which maybe only one or two people has ever sold this on Amazon and not many units. And when I check in Helium 10, there’s a way to check how Amazon views your, which keywords Amazon views as relevant. It was obviously confused Like coffin is probably one of the most main words because that’s how it’s shaped, and it was like way, way, way down the list as far as what Amazon thought was relevant and it had like these generic terms that had great search volume. It was funny because I could rank easily for it on a keyword that another product probably wishes they could rank for. It was something like bathroom decor or something that had like 200,000 searches.

And just because Amazon rated that as the most important keyword to my listing, I was already ranking in the first six pages, even though there’s 30,000 other products that are indexed for that keyword. I was on page six and, you know, temporarily I was even on page one without doing anything, while other people are getting purchases for this product and they can’t get on page one. But does that really do me any good? No, it doesn’t do me any good, because that’s not necessarily what my product is and nobody’s gonna search that keyword and then buy my product. And so you know, sure enough, you know the keyword dropped down, but it shows you guys that you know you’ve gotta be thinking about the quality of the keyword and how relevant it is, especially in the beginning. So that’s kind of like your training Amazon to understand how to interact with that. Now, how does like advertising, you know, play a role in all of this in your opinion?

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean. Well, I think what you just said is really kind of key across the board when it comes to writing your listings or using advertising. The optimization effort that you put into your listing to basically describe your product accurately, to target keywords that are more intent focused, that people are more likely to use to purchase your product. I think that that’s really good advice. I think that that’s gonna apply across the board. We do know that when somebody performs a search and ultimately buys a product through a sponsored listing, that behavioral signal still counts. It’s a technique that I know a lot of people recommend for how to sort of seed your behavioral signals.

At the end of the day, if people are buying your product, if they’re not returning it, if they’re leaving good reviews, those are all gonna be things that lead to better organic rankings.

We do see some evidence that the paid signals count a little bit less than the organic signals, but they still count, and so I think that advertising is definitely a critical part of any product launch. But I think, just like you were talking about with organic optimization and search engine optimization in general, your focus in the beginning really needs to be on high intent queries rather than high volume queries. If you are showing up on page one for a search query that has a lot of volume and people are not likely to buy your product, that’s actually likely going to damage your organic search rankings way worse than if you had ranked highly for keywords that are very relevant to your product. Because what’s gonna happen is Amazon has now shown your product to people and people have rejected it, which Amazon is gonna be considering a negative signal, and that could start to affect you on other keywords as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay now, a lot of the documents that you read might have been two, two, three years, or some of them might be two, three years old already, but the ones that you’ve read that are maybe published this year. Have you seen any trend that makes it kind of obvious that Amazon might be moving in a certain direction?

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean there’s a lot of stuff on the cold start problem and I think that there seems to be a narrowing focus on this approach of estimating behavioral signals based on the listings and I think you’re seeing some sort of corolling of resources into that direction. There are a few papers on personalized search and it’s kind of always been in the background. I think there’s some evidence that Amazon might be re-ranking products based on individual preferences. If you’re a bargain hunter, I might be showing you different products than if you’re the type of person who likes to buy the more expensive, more luxury products. There’s definitely some query rewriting that might be happening based on recent search history. So if you’re looking for a lot of kitchen utensils versus if you’re looking for a bunch of hunting and camping equipment and then you search for something generic like knife, amazon’s gonna be thinking about what you’ve recently searched for to try and understand what types of products to show you. So there’s definitely some stuff going on there. There are always papers about UX improvements, little things that they can change in the site or big things that they could change in the site and how people search. I don’t think that the general UI of searching for something in a text box and then seeing either a grid or list of listings. I don’t think that goes away anytime soon. I think that’s a great way to look for products. You’ll see a lot of people who are pumped about large language models and AI talk about like conversational search or shopping assistance and things like that. I’m not too excited about those. I don’t think that those are gonna really really change how people do look for products.

But one area where Amazon may start to invest in is result explicability explaining to you why a particular listing might be relevant. They already do this to some degree. Like when you type in a search, they’ll highlight any of the words that are from your search that are in the listings to help you better understand it. With LLMs and other generative models, you can start to explain in more natural English like hey, this one might be really good for you because X, y and Z, so you might see some UX changes there.

There’s a lot of work on neural rankers, so this is sort of a technological detail of how they choose which products to rank higher than others, rather than fundamentally changing the way learning to rank works. So it’s not super relevant but I think probably the most important and most impactful area of research is this space called semantic search. Semantic search is basically looking through the listings and trying to find listings that are most relevant to a particular query, based on the meaning of the words rather than the literal words that are in both the listing and the search.

Bradley Sutton:

So give an example of like the counter to that would be lexical matching. How is semantic matching different?

Kevin:

Yeah, so within, I would say that today Amazon is still probably dominated by lexical matching. Lexical matching is the historical winner for search. It’s become less important in web search but it’s still a major factor there, and e-commerce has sort of fought this battle between lexical and semantic search for the past six years. In a universe of lexical search, you are trying, as a person who is searching, I’m trying to guess which words would likely be in a listing for a product that I’m looking for, and it requires you, as the searcher, to have a skill set for searching. The ideal in infamoration retrieval is that you don’t have to have a skill set in order to find things. You just type in here’s what a situation is, here’s what I want, and the search engine brings you back exactly what you’re looking for. If you really wanna get that, if you really wanna solve that you can’t use a keyword-based approach that as your only solution you need to really start thinking about the meaning of those words you’re typing.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, what are some things that you’ve dive a little bit deeper into to what you’ve found in the documents, as far as if you can kind of say where Amazon might be going with the search, because, like you said, this is something that’s already been kind of existing in the Google and regular search engine world, but it’s a little bit been slower for e-commerce places like Amazon to adopt. But where do you think we’re going with this?

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean I think that it generally seems to be accepted as true that using new advanced AI-based technologies to match products would give people better listings. It would give better rankings to it would produce better rankings in the matching the user’s intent. I think we have really really strong evidence that that’s the case. The problem is that they tend to be slow and expensive, and so a lot of the research today has focused on using AI during ranking. So, instead of processing a advanced AI model across all the billions of products on Amazon, I could process it across just the top 1000 that match your query and then I could find the exact product that you’re most likely looking for.

And I think it’s pretty safe to assume that Amazon is using some type of semantic analysis at the ranking stage. What’s a little bit less clear is what they’re doing at the matching stage. I have some examples to suggest that, most likely a technique that Amazon discussed in a 2019 paper called DSSM. I have some evidence to suggest that they are at least using that for matching. In cases where there aren’t a lot of lexical matches for a particular search, they may be using different techniques, but I have some evidence of this and I think that it’s definitely safe to say that they’re using semantic search at the ranking level to make sure that the top results you see are exactly the thing you’re looking for.

Bradley Sutton:

Now is, that is what that one. Was it you who found that, or was it Adam Shabazz? About the the noodle camera.

Kevin:

Noodle camera, yeah yeah, the noodle camera I think this is. This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence I have for Amazon using semantic search string matching. So I wrote an algorithm that I called a Adversarial search generation. So basically the idea was generate searches that are Are phrases that somebody might use, that kind of like make sense from a language perspective but don’t have a lot of lexical matches. And one of the search terms that the algorithm came back with was noodle camera.

Noodle camera is not a thing. Yeah, I thought perhaps you know it was a thing, but I Googled it. Nobody calls this a noodle camera. Most of the results that come back are endoscopes. Endoscopes are also called snake cameras, and I have two main Explanations for how this result is coming back for noodle camera. The first is a query rewriting explanation. It is possible that somebody who didn’t know the name of an endoscope might call it a noodle camera and they would search for that, not get any results, and then later search for snake camera, later search endoscope and end up buying that. So Amazon might be behind the scenes doing some kind of query rewriting.

Another explanation is semantic. A snake and a noodle are similarly shaped they’re long, cylindrical objects and so, going down that direction. That would seem to suggest that they may be doing some kind of semantic analysis of the words that you’re searching to try and find something that At least Resembles the user’s intent. We tried a couple variations of that that were also interesting. So when I searched for eel camera Figuring eel and snake they’re similar enough it came back with an entirely different set of results. It came back with underwater cameras, and I think that’s really interesting, because underwater cameras and Again, in this case, when you look at the listings, none of them talk about eels, but eels are similar to fish. They do talk about fish, and an underwater camera is exactly the type of camera that you would use To take a picture of an eel. And so I think that, at the very least for cases where a Search doesn’t burn back a lot of lexical matches, there’s a good chance that Amazon is augmenting those matches with some kind of semantic techniques.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, guys, you know I dug into this too and anybody can do this Everybody, you know, if you’re not in your car but if you’re at home, you know, just type in Noodle camera and then you’ll see what he was talking about. Like, like, there’s one brand here that that is kind of like could be a Misspelling of noodle called new e. Like it has a camera, and it’s actually interesting, when I, when I entered that into chat GPT, that was one of the first things that came up. He’s like oh, some people miss misspell noodle camera for this new e brand. It was really weird. And so, you know, amazon picked up on that. But then most of these are these kind of like endoscope cameras and so I took one of these. You know, just alright, I didn’t take just one of them, I took, like most of these endoscope cameras, and then I first threw it into index checker inside of helium 10 and it’s interesting to know the.

You know it says that noodle camera is indexed, and that rightfully so, because it obviously shows up in the search results. But usually when you have a phrase that is indexed, the individual words are indexed as well. But then I broke out the word noodle, and noodle is not indexed while noodle camera is. And then I went to the Ajax page a lot of you guys know what, that Ajax page where I can look at the whole back end of a Listing and then if I type in here, there is no noodle written in the front end, in the back end, in Amazon’s you know features. Nowhere is noodle in this listing or any of these other listings that are on this page. And yet clearly it is indexed. For noodle camera. Amazon is showing it in the not only is it index, is ranking you know for it. And so that you know, I don’t want to like scare people you know, or people you know start to think.

Wait a minute. You know, if Amazon goes full semantic search, you know, then tools like cerebro and helium 10 or listening builder and optimizing your listening are not Important and it’s gonna be out of date. No, there is always gonna be a need to To have to understand the right keywords and to build your listening. Otherwise Amazon won’t even know how to do a semantic you know match to your product if it doesn’t have a baseline. And so you’ve got to be all you know, you’ve got to be traditionally indexed, lexically indexed. That’s a thing you know for the right keywords for this. You know Semantic to take the the next step. But what? What you know? What should sellers do you think keep in mind over the next couple years? You know what is this move towards semantic searching mean for Amazon sellers and how they optimize our listening.

Kevin:

Yeah, the technique that I was just talking about, dssm. It’s a fairly old technique. The paper Amazon released was in 2019, but the technique itself goes back a few years before that. There are newer techniques that are closer to these families of exciting large language models.

In particular, this past May, in May 2023, they released a paper where they created a small Burt model, which is a much more advanced type of semantic search, and the challenge generally would be when running with one of these birds sand for anything and it stands for my names are bi-directional encoder, something transformers, yeah okay, so not just the dude who discovered it is an acronym I can’t remember the, the whole name, but anyways, they use this Burt model to basically Create a set of what they call embeddings to index listings in a semantic way and then perform search over that. This was something that we knew we could do for a long time, but they found a clever way to do it very fast, and this is going to be the difference between whether or not they use these technologies in production, because speed really matters when it comes to searching. You know the difference between Amazon getting you your search results back at a hundred milliseconds and ten seconds would be. You go and shop somewhere else, and so, even if you’re getting better results back, you need to get the results back fast, and so as we start to see new techniques that can do this deep level, deep level of query analysis, deep level of product analysis as we start to see these techniques that can be run more quickly, we’re going to start seeing them more In actual Amazon search results. I think that within three years, you’re probably going to be in a world where semantic based search actually starts to dominate Lexical search results. You know, that’s that’s my personal guess. You know who knows what it really looks like in the future. But I think at the end of the day, it is when things are heading and I think that does change the way people need to write their listings. But I also think that’s a win for pretty much everybody involved.

I think that buyers don’t like keyword stuffing because in order to get to the information they want about a listing, they’ve got to go through a bunch of random words. I don’t think sellers like it because it’s tedious. It’s a lot of work. I’ve talked to a lot of sellers who, you know, describe this as a major pain point in their jobs is trying to make sure their listings contain all the literal keywords that somebody might be searching for, and I don’t think Amazon likes it either because it makes Amazon look sketchy.

You see all throughout the literature how Amazon really tries very hard to make sure it doesn’t look like a flea market. You know they don’t want the search results to look like the results that you get on a site like Alibaba, and so Everybody’s incentivized to get rid of keyword stuffing. But because of the limitations of the way a search is done today, it’s basically an inevitable emergent property, and so I think as we start to see semantic search become more viable. As we start to see it get faster, as we start to see Amazon upgrade the hardware that runs their searches, there’s a good chance that semantic search is going to start dominating over traditional lexical search, and so I think that leads to a world where sellers, instead of trying to play these different keyword games, should just be describing their products as accurately and compellingly as possible, and I think that’s just a win for everybody.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, all right, guys. So you know we’ve. You know if your head doesn’t hurt right now that then you probably weren’t paying attention, but but a lot to take in. You guys might need to Re-listen to this. There’s a lot of exciting things happening on Amazon.

That’s one of the cool things about being in this industry. It’s. It’s not. It’s not something that stale or or something that you know you can master, and then you know you never have to learn another thing ever again because you’re your master at it. No, you got to keep you know studying and and keep you know seeing what’s going on, and that’s that’s what sets you guys apart.

You know the good Amazon sellers from the the ones that might fall off, is you know they just make their listening and then you set it and forget it and then never try and figure out how to, how to optimize or, you know, remain at the top. And so you know, those of you who listen here to the end of this episode, you’re probably one of those ones who’s like, nah, I got to make sure I’m at the top of the game and and continue to develop, because Amazon is is always on the cutting edge of different things. So you know. Thank you, thank you for joining us on here and any last words of wisdom you can share with Everybody out there, or something to you know, like things that we can expect from the cool AI lab, secret, secret Avengers team here at at Helium 10.

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean you’re you’re gonna see a lot of things come out. I mean we’re gonna be releasing features within Helium 10 with impact view, that use AI. These are gonna be things that you know, like I said, become commonplace. I Think the most important thing is that we’re paying attention to what’s happening in the industry. We’re aware of the trends, were aware of the new technologies and we’re gonna make sure that our sellers have the best chance of success.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, awesome, well, kevin, thank you for joining us, and you know I wouldn’t suggest reading in a hundred more scientific Papers that I think that’s too much. Your brain’s gonna explode soon. But we appreciate all the work that that you’ve done so that we don’t, so that we don’t have to go out and read all that stuff, and and we’ll definitely invite you back next year and it’ll be interesting to see you know where we’re at as far as the Amazon algorithm goes. So we’ll see you, yeah.

Kevin:

I mean, at this pace it’s gonna be completely different. So thanks for having me, Bradley.

#498 - TikTok Shop & Amazon Live Insights with Gracey Ryback

A warm welcome back to the Serious Sellers Podcast for our returning guest, the queen of TikTok and Amazon Live, Gracey Ryback of Deal Cheats. With her world-famous influence reaching almost 2 million followers across all platforms, Gracie has been making waves in the world of influencer marketing in social media. Over the past year, she's been a force on Amazon Live and Amazon affiliates, producing more content, and gearing up for Q4. While considering venturing into TikTok Shop – following the footsteps of other creators like Alex Earl, the "it girl" of TikTok, who's been able to leverage their massive following effectively.

The heart of our conversation explores the power influencers have in promoting products on platforms like TikTok - a goldmine for brand visibility. Gracey gives us a peek behind the curtain of her success promoting products on Amazon and shares insights on the higher commission rates offered on TikTok Shop. We also dive into the potential of using TikTok shop to build your Amazon FBA brand, drawing examples from creators who have successfully taken advantage of this feature.

As we round up our chat, Gracey shares a wealth of actionable tips for Amazon and Walmart brands and influencers to increase their visibility and appeal. Bradley also explains some cool Helium 10 strategies for tracking competitor listings and leveraging the Helium 10 Insights Dashboard to find deals, monitor price drops, and keep an eye on coupon codes. Lastly, we take a deep look at Amazon Affiliates - a platform that offers influencers a chance to gain popularity and make an impact, and how TikTok Shop can be a potent platform for boosting your sales. This episode is full of insights for anyone interested in the fast-paced, ever-evolving sphere of influencer marketing, Amazon affiliates, and TikTok Shop.

 

In episode 498 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Gracey discuss:

• 00:00 - Welcome Back Gracie on Podcast
• 08:42 - The Importance of Authenticity in E-Commerce
• 14:32 - TikTok Shop's Impact on Views/Sales
• 22:27 - Expanding Audience With Non-English Videos
• 27:02 - On-Site Videos and Community Growth
• 32:12 - Amazon Insights Dashboard
• 38:05 - Importance of Amazon in Boosting Sales

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we're bringing back the queen of TikTok and Amazon Live, Gracey, who's going to be talking about how she now has almost 2 million followers across all channels, why she thinks everybody should be getting on TikTok Shop and some cool ways to have some side hustle as an Amazon influencer. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. One, two, three, four, I've used this tool. Find out what it can do for you by downloading it for free at h10.me/xray. 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 right now I've got a shirt. I actually have people make fun of me. I have a document that documents what shirt and what hat I wear each episode, just to make sure I'm not doing the same one. I'm wearing a shirt I haven't worn before. It's one of my old school shirts. It's called I'm Huge in Japan. I did that because we're bringing somebody on the show who's pretty much huge in the entire world. All right, Gracey, the world famous Gracey, How's it going? Welcome back.

Gracey

Hi Bradley. What an introduction. That's wild. I'm happy to be back, love this podcast, one of my favorites. Thank you, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It's like it's hard to believe that it's been over, actually over a year since you were on the podcast last. So before we get into, you know, talking shop and stuff shop, Literally. We're going to be talking about TikTok. Shop is what I want to talk about. There's no pun intended there, but let's just talk about what's going on with Gracey the human being. What's been going on with you in the last year?

Gracey

Good question. So I mean, right now, no news is good news to me. So, still working on everything I've been working on, I'm still creating content still, but doing Amazon live, still doing my social media thing and still growing there and it's going really, really well. I'm excited for you know, q4 to come around. That's been a huge topic. I just spoke at a virtual summit about that and we're talking about TikTok shop now. That's what actually what I talked about there, but upcoming projects and, like my human being, life is hopefully getting on YouTube soon as a attempt to dwell into more like a long form content instead of just doing everything so short form. That's something I'm working on.

Bradley Sutton:

Wait, wait. You didn't have a YouTube channel before, Never. You were only Instagram and TikTok.

Gracey

Facebook and Twitter and everything else except YouTube pretty much.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, my goodness, I didn't realize that. Okay, what across all your platforms? Now, how many followers are you up to combined?

Gracey

Probably close to 1.4 million, majority of them being on TikTok. But yeah about 150K on Facebook now, which is my second leading one.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, okay, interesting. Is it a Facebook page group or what so?

Gracey

I have both about 50K in the page, 150k in the group. Yeah, yeah, both I guess.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, Cool, Cool. Now just taking a step back for anybody who maybe is new to the podcast. You know, people know how I usually try and get people's complete backstory, like where they were born and stuff. We're not doing that here because Gracey, as I said, has been on the podcast before. So if you guys want to get her backstory, go to h10.me forward slash 360. So she was on episode 360 of the podcast and you can find out her story, which I forgot most of it since I have. What was that movie? Is it 51st date? What's the movie where Adam Seller forgets his memory or not? Adam Seller? Drew Barrymore forgets her. It might have been. Is it 51st?

Gracey

date I don't know, but that movie sounds about right where.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, one of them, yeah. She forgets, she resets her memory like every few days, but that's pretty much me. Anyways, let's talk. You know you said most of your followers are on TikTok. So before I even get into, you know TikTok shop for other people. Is that ever something you would consider doing, or are you just happy doing the promotional side of it?

Gracey

Do you mean you like selling on TikTok shop?

Bradley Sutton:

Like actually selling on TikTok shop, Since you've got the followers like you know, like would you ever, you know, start your own store it has crossed my mind.

Gracey

Have I done it yet? No, but I think it would be a really great opportunity for other creators to like start dishing out their own product and start, you know, creating something in that world, because I think there is a shift. I have seen it just in the past couple of weeks that creators are like hey, I came out with my own clothing line, here it is, I'm making content about it, people are buying it, creators are making commission and, of course, the sellers making their, their earnings as well. So it's kind of like a win-win. And then I actually saw a guy he he created like a journal and it was totally based off his content, his contents like motivational, how to create the life you want. And he made a journal and I guess I was pretty cheap of him to do not cheap of him to do, but like cheap to create. And and then he actually talked about how Alex Earl who do you know who that is?

Bradley Sutton:

I do not.

Gracey

She's like the it girl of TikTok. She's like blonde and really pretty but also relatable, and whatever she talks about sells out. She has like millions of followers and like all the brands are going after her because she's like the TikTok it girl, so like everything she talks about is I thought you were the TikTok girl.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.

Gracey

But she ended up promoting his journal just like organically and he was like I didn't pay her a dime and brands are paying her many dimes for her to promote their product. So it's just really cool how, like creators are just picking stuff up organically from TikTok shop because they have the incentive to do so, you know so and like.

Bradley Sutton:

Now is live selling happening on TikTok at all, either through the shop or just naturally, cause I know you know that's always been a topic. It's going on three years now is why you know people can't figure out why live shopping is not taking off in America, when it is everywhere, or at least in Asia. Yeah, we'll talk about Amazon a little bit, but is live selling a thing on TikTok?

Gracey

Absolutely. So, like we can talk about the official thing and we can talk about the cultural thing. So the official thing is absolutely TikTok shop. There's three ways to shop it. There is the live shopping, where you can link products to a live stream. You have the way you can link products directly in a TikTok video like a normal TikTok. And then there's the storefronts that are on people's profiles where you can like have products linked. So those are the three ways. So officially, absolutely live selling is a thing for TikTok shop. Shall we talk about the cultural aspect.

Bradley Sutton:

Let's talk about it.

Gracey

So this is really interesting and I think it's something I've seen a lot of platforms get into recently. It's like YouTube has a new affiliate monetization platform not platform, but like program for creators to directly link products into their YouTube videos. That's like a new thing they're rolling out. Pinterest is doing it. All these different social media platforms are trying to keep people on their own platform with their interest in buying a product. That's the new thing. So you can see this huge integration of shopping and social media. But not everyone is happy about it, because TikTok is normally an entertainment app. People wanna go there to escape the corporate grind, escape the rat race, like they wanna go there to like forget about work and forget about money and all that. So there have been a couple of videos I've seen that's like how to block TikTok shop videos from your free youth feed, cause I'm sick of it. I'm sick of TikTok now and TikTok shop. I see it every other video.

Bradley Sutton:

I think I did the weekly like have you ever seen my weekly buddy show? I do right, so what was I do Like? So when I do that once a week where I just like scour the internet for new stories and one of my keywords that I follow is TikTok shop, and boom, like I swear, there was 10 articles last night about what you just said, where people are like the four you feed is like ruined. Like I got all this TikTok shop stuff, so continue, but I definitely don't wanna talk about it.

Gracey

Like people are like sharing hacks on how to basically like not have that, like those TikTok shop videos in their feed, and I just think that, regardless that that is where the future of social media is going. It's like integrating shopping and integrating e-commerce into it. However, I wanted to just say that the importance of being authentic, the importance of being like real, like people wanna see a real review but they don't wanna be sold to, and I think that's also why you mentioned before that how like live shopping isn't taking off as it is in China or in other countries, it's because people don't like being sold to here, they don't like products pushed in their face. But if they see a product, they're like, okay, that's cool, I discovered it. And they wanna feel like, okay, like, I want the product organically. They don't wanna be like, oh, someone's trying to sell me something. So that just like highlights the importance of authenticity and being real when you're talking about a product and integrating it organically instead of like coming off like an ad.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting, interesting. Okay, now you mentioned Alex. Well, I can't believe I remember her name. Alex, you just randomly mentioned this guy's journal, right, but that was an organic thing. But as far as TikTok shop goes, what are influencers like yourself or others doing on a non-organic way? Cause, like the traditional way of promoting on TikTok is all right. Here's a link. Amazon affiliate link or hit the link in my bio or whatever the case is. But now if somebody has TikTok shop, are there like affiliate links that go directly to there that an influencer can get?

Gracey

Yeah, so basically the way that people shop is there's a little tag product in the lower left corner and it says eligible for commission on the bottom and then if I was interested in the product I could click that and it would take me to basically the shops page on the back end where I could check out and all that good stuff. Something I've noticed is that the shipping times are a bit longer. Like, I wanted to purchase something yesterday and I got influenced and I think it was like gonna deliver like mid-October, so that's like close to a month away. So there's that.

Bradley Sutton:

But in terms of like, that person had to have been out of the country then I would imagine, because unless they can sell stuff out of stock, because if you're shipping for America, why would it?

Gracey

take you Right, and it wasn't out of stock because if it was out of stock the little button of tagged product would disappear, so I wouldn't be able to click on it.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah so. Okay interesting.

Gracey

Yeah, I see there's that. And then there's also, of course, the marketplace, for both creators and shoppers. Like, you can search products, you can sort by category. There's different products and there's so many joining each and every day, like when I remember when it first came out earlier this year, it was like very few. There was like maybe 10, 20 brands up there, and now I'm starting to see a lot more mainstream products come along and like now, if I'm like, oh, like, I have this product, I wanna make a video about it. More likely than not, I can find it in TikTok shop now, which is great, and I can just kind of have a product I already have in my hands and like talk about it in a video, if I want to.

Bradley Sutton:

So then You've got like this portal, kind of like the Amazon associate or affiliate associates where, by the way, I became an Amazon influencer a couple weeks ago. I haven't done anything yet, but I got the account set up, I sent some links to some friends, but I'm trying to figure out what the next step is, because I want to get I have this channel that has like 30,000 followers On YouTube and I want to like go ahead and use that to to start my Amazon influencer career. Anyway, there's a side note like that, but I noticed, you know, I can just like find a product that's on Amazon in my portal and then it creates the link. So you're seeing, on TikTok you have something similar where it's not like the, the, the owner or the, the brand has to reach out to you and give you special links. You can just see something that you're like oh, I think this might pop off, let me go ahead and create a link, and then you're sending traffic.

Gracey

Yes, so it's not really a link. It basically is like on the page before you post the video there's an option to add a product tag and then you'd like click it, add product. You search product, add a video, blah blah, and that's how it shows up.

Bradley Sutton:

Mm-hmm. How are the percentages on there?

Gracey

commission percentages. Yes really good, really good, like for the better than Amazon, I guess 50%. Not all of them are 50%, not all majority, maybe like 10 wait, wait, wait.

Bradley Sutton:

50% higher than Amazon or 50% commission commission. How was that? Even real life? Yeah, how is that possible?

Gracey

I agree the journal that I'm talking about with Alex on the whole thing. The guy created it. He was like I made it 50% commission to incentivize creators to talk about it. So maybe he's like maybe selling At a very, very, very small margin right now, but the brand awareness like that, that could be something like a big brand one day. That he's just like doing the promotion right now but creating a brand in the long term. So like I'm not saying everything's 50%, that's not sure but upwards of 50%, and I see I think a lot of them are around like 10 to 20, 30% commission, which is pretty good. I mean absolutely More than what most affiliate platforms offer.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, I'm just seeing her Dumbfounded because that's, that's crazy. Like I heard, tick tock is also kind of incentivizing both the sellers and and influencers and trying to like subsidize a little bit. So I, man, that this is pretty interesting stuff, have you? Do you have? Have you had any success yourself, like where something went off, or you know, you know, I know, back in the day, you know you've talked about how you've given some sellers like six figure weekends, you know, like over a year ago. But what if that was on Amazon? What about on tick tock shop? Any, any cool stories?

Gracey

I've Humbly sold out a couple products so far, but, admittedly, I'm still focusing on Amazon a lot. I I still I haven't, like you know, sold my soul to leaving that yet, or like I still doing Amazon mostly. However, I am delving more into tick tock shop without trying to be annoying and filling my feet with it, but yeah yeah, there was a bodysuit that I did a video of and it was so silly and and Dumb it was, it was like me try it on. It was like oh, look at my belly before and then like don't even look, okay, anyway. It was like oh, this body like Now I want to find this video. But it was like, oh, here's my stomach now. And then like, oh, here's how slim I look after and it was a really good bodysuit Like I liked it, I feel, as it was good quality. It did slim. You know, it was like kind of like a shape wear bodysuit, so it was really cool. It was like a really quick like before and after it got, I think, over a million, almost two million views, something like that, and it ended up selling out and it was a million views your video.

Yeah, but but here's the thing Ticktock is absolutely pushing videos that have tick tock shop product.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah thanks like the algorithm is favoring towards okay.

Gracey

Yeah. So what I have like organically gotten those views, who knows? But because it was a tick tock shop video, I think that definitely boosted in the algorithm and it boosted the sales and it ended up selling out the product, so that was great. I don't know how long they're gonna keep pushing the videos, but that's why it's like that. It's so time-sensitive right now. It's like joining the platform as a seller is time-sensitive. Making the videos as a crater is time time sensitive. Like don't wait until it's super saturated and everyone's in on, and like they don't do these promotions anymore.

Bradley Sutton:

I know of a somebody who's in this niche From Amazon and I think it's very similar products, I believe, and they've done on tick tock shop.

Gracey

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

I think something like one or two million in four, four months or five months.

Gracey

It's just that that's amazing.

Bradley Sutton:

It's just crazy, I mean.

I mean it's so new and and people are just like you know, just going viral, like like, yes, she had a few videos that you know, like like yours. Yeah, that one viral and that's all it takes. You know, you know like not everyone, and you're like I'm looking at your channel here. It took me a while to find it. The reason I could find it is because it's not like every single one of your videos has one million, so I can just ease your skin. I mean, you're in the 10,000s, 100,000s, but you know, it's just like sometimes, so that you'll get one that gets a. I saw another one you were doing like a treadmill that had like two million. Yes, or something like that amazing product.

Gracey

Yes, that one is great and super popular. I will absolutely make another video about it. It was like a deal for a walking pad, but, yeah, it is definitely, definitely something that People should be hopping on, like on that topic. It's like on the creator side of things, tick tock is also giving creators like product samples. They're giving us coupons like hey, like get this much product and like, as long as you make videos about it, like product samples, like they're so, so, so, pushing it, and I love that because they're very supportive of both sides of like the seller, the Creator, and like they're wanting it to be the best of both worlds, which is what I was all about forever.

Bradley Sutton:

So Now would you suggest to people I mean, obviously there's influencers like yourself and I. There's obviously clear benefit with with hopefully you know somebody like you with a 1.1 million followers, you know About po, you know linking to their product, but at the same time, would you suggest to anybody who does have or is starting with tick tock shop, they should be putting out their own content as well, because who knows, you know, even without the followers, something of theirs could go viral as well. Or do you think that they should just stick to the shop and and just let the professionals do these, these videos?

Gracey

100,000%. And this is a little bit of a contradiction from like what I said before, because before I was, you know, in the Amazon world, it's like what you could do as a seller, like one of those things being live streams. I always said like hey, like, if you don't have all the time in the world to like be doing Amazon live, maybe just like focus on the brand selling part and then like have like a Amazon live Influencer or creator, do the stream for you. But in this scenario, I would absolutely a hundred thousand million percent Recommend that the brand also has, you know, content based on their product. Specifically, there is a brand of Chamoy. You know the sauce, chamoy sauce. There's a brand that is going absolutely viral on tick tock shop right now with their Chamoy and they basically make their Chamoy without any like color and whatever, but the the lady behind it. She makes so much content. She answers questions from the comments she gets. She shows the process of Making the product. She's like we sold out today, like so sorry, like more coming.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you know what that channel is?

Gracey

Yes, it's like their brand is called. I love she's an amazing example of a brand. She made it, she has a story and she's this yes, she's Kelly.

Bradley Sutton:

Don't take. So this is a brand, yes, and then now wait, this is her like this, she's doing her own.

Gracey

It's just like insight, like just like backstory. It's like, oh, like there's a real human behind this brand. This isn't a huge corporation. This isn't like it's just this lady. And she's asking questions, she's being interacted, like that is such an amazing brand example and hopefully not gonna take too much time and effort, like look, you can just make the video. It's like-.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one thing I don't like and now I'm having to do it here is, unless I'm doing something wrong, I can't see TikTok shop on web right Like. I have to see it on my phone Cause like when I was doing something like on somebody else's the other day and I couldn't see their TikTok shop. But then I opened up my phone and it was there. I'm looking here and I can definitely see her store, her shop, on mobile, but for some reason TikTok is not allowing you to see the shop Like. So how much money is being left on the table for the old school people who are on their desktop?

Gracey

They're watching TikToks on their computer.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, interesting, anyways, okay. So, guys, I love Chamois is an example of somebody who is a brand owner and who's doing her own content. Let me go back to your page. Here Is there a video that's a good representation of like hey, here's something simple that almost anybody can do without, you know, having to have fancy equipment and stuff. Do you remember anything that I can just like look for real quick here?

Gracey

Pretty much everything I do is very, very, very low maintenance, like it's nothing studio. It's like me with my phone up with like a ring light. It's like nothing that everyone doesn't have. So let me see if there is one that I have. The bodysuit one was probably the easiest and simplest one that I have ever made for TikTok shop. Here's one. So it's a plumping lip gloss. Can I show a video? That's not mine.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, it's not even, yeah, yeah.

Gracey

Okay, and her pinned video has 20, almost 24 million views.

Bradley Sutton:

That was like 20 seconds long.

Gracey

Yes, and she's in like a dimly lit room.

Bradley Sutton:

On mobile. Is this one actually going to like a TikTok shop or anything?

Gracey

It's been sold out.

Bradley Sutton:

It's been sold out, okay, but it did. It did at one time.

Gracey

Yes, it was a TikTok shop video. It says eligible for commission, but the product is no longer tagged cause it's sold out. There are alternatives because it's now viral and I think she made it viral. So there's other products on TikTok shop that are probably the same or similar, but this specific one been sold out. And like you could do that, I could do that, our dog could do that, like anybody could make a video.

Bradley Sutton:

I've looked at it five times in a row while you're talking and I'm just like in shock. Here that's something like this could go viral. It's not, it's not unique. It's not like you know, mic drop or anything. That's that, just. That should just show yes, so how does that happen then? Is it just?

Gracey

People love a before and after. People love it simple. And here's another really interesting hack tip. Okay, so you know the, the creator named Kobi Lame. Kobi Lame, so his whole thing is that he's amassed such a huge audience because he doesn't speak in his videos, so you're not like constrained to English speaking audience. You could. You could reach any country, anybody. They don't. There's no like necessarily any need to understand English to understand what's happening in the video. Similar to that, the mega viral videos millions and millions of you, not one or two million, like millions.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah.

Gracey

They're very like. They're usually no speak, no, no speak, no talking. So, yeah, that is kind of a hack. It's like if you want to reach more people Mr Beast is the same thing he like translate his videos to like other languages to reach more more people. And like, once you start going viral on TikTok, they start promoting your videos to different countries. So, like if I had a really mega viral video, people start commenting in French and German and Italian. Like people start commenting in different languages. So don't cut yourself off. If you do like a simple like showing the product, no words, or maybe just text on screen, super simple. You're not talking before and after done.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, where? Where can I go or anybody listening to sign up to be? What is it called? Is it called TikTok affiliates or TikTok partners?

Gracey

So yeah, there, if you're a creator, I think there's a requirement of a minimum of 5,000 followers and on TikTok it's not like Instagram, it's like on TikTok you could do that in two, three weeks. If you're like consistent and you try, you could get those followers. So that's the requirement If you are an affiliate or a TikTok shop creator. If you're a seller, I don't think there's any requirement to be able to you know, sell or Link to your own, let your own stuff, because you're not you're not getting like a commission on your own stuff, Okay that makes sense yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, yeah, I just had recently the Rainmaker family on and they were talking about the Amazon influencer program, how it's a great way for people who you know they have this big community of like stay at home moms that's what they focus on and a lot of them don't have a lot of startup capital to just start their own private label business. So one thing they've been doing in their community for those people is that they become Amazon influencers and then they just start making all the you know Videos of everything in their house you know that could be found on Amazon, start uploading it to all those listings and then, you know, some of them make, you know, $500 a month, can make up to $1,000 a month. That's just, you know, a little steady income to build up some capital. So I think that that it almost sounds like the. Probably there's probably a higher ceiling on TikTok for somebody to do that, but the caveat is they need to have the 5,000 Followers first correct, and also for the Amazon influence program.

Gracey

There there is like a small gateway to get into the program, but once you're in the program. I just wanted to add on to what you just said. Yes, people can make $500 a thousand dollars a month. I also know people making Unbelievable amounts of money from just on-site videos.

Bradley Sutton:

So let's go ahead and switch back to Amazon. Now, then. Like, what is taking up your time on Amazon? Like, how much are you spending Amazon lives? Are you doing what I just said, like just doing videos for, for random products you think might go viral, or you just doing collabs with brands? So what's your? What's your day-to-day like on Amazon?

Gracey

Yeah, so I'm still doing Amazon live. I've been doing that consistently since start of 2021. I still do that two to three times a week and that is something I plan to keep doing until the cows come home, I don't know, and yeah. And then a lot of what I do day to day is just social media posting of like promo code deals, helping people find the requests of products that they're looking for Deals on. Like a lot of times I'll ask my community, like what are you guys looking to buy today? And then I'll they'll be like oh, baby, products, treadmill, whatever, whatever long list of items. And I'll just do a lot of research, finding the best deals, promo codes, coupons. That's a lot of where my time goes and then posting them. But I post them knowing that there's somebody looking for that specific product. So I know that there's an audience for that and I can also just like cater to what they're looking for instead of just posting willy-nilly. And then there's also, of course, the video creation of like TikTok, instagram reels, the short form content that you see on my TikTok. There's that, that as well, and the on-site video, which is like another aspect of this whole thing. Now, I haven't focused as much time on on-site videos as I absolutely should have, or have already, and the reason what's on-site video? It's like the shoppable videos that people can post their storefront and the listings and they get okay, okay. When you mentioned. Yeah, so I haven't been focusing on that as much because I've been focusing so much on all the off-site aspect. But the reason for that is because On-site will forever and always be controlled by Amazon, like they have, you know, the ability to Rotate videos out, rotate videos in they they can change the video placements and there's all those different options that are kind of out of our control. So I want to focus more on growing what I can control my own audience, keeping up with that community, and you know, like when you have a community, you got to keep showing up for them. Yep to keep them, and so I think I want to dedicate more time to on-site videos, but I can't do so at the loss of my community, so I just thought I like time, manage it better and Do more on-site videos, of course, because that is super lucrative if you put a lot of time into it. And Amazon, I definitely see, is focusing more on quality over quantity and obviously doing more quality control for their inspire feed as well. You know so there's a million ways to make money in this program. It's almost overwhelming.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you on On Instagram? Are you sending all of your traffic to to Amazon still, or have you started funneling some to tick-tock Shop at all?

Gracey

Um, so I can't really do tick-tock shop Traffic directing on Instagram, so most of my Instagram is still geared towards Amazon, but I try to keep the tape.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you do that, by the way? Probably talk about this before. Are you doing like a Lincoln bio, or or? Okay, okay.

Gracey

Yeah, yeah, so I'll just have the Link under the product and then I'll have that page where in the profile where people can click on it if they want something. Yeah, that's what you can do. And another thing that I've seen a lot of people do is like using chatbots, so that there's like a double edge to benefit to that, actually, because whenever I say like you can see my description of my Instagram posts, it's like comment this keyword for the link and then Whatever people comment on your post, which boosts engagement, then they would get sent the link to the link page, basically Similar to the page in my bio, but they could then get the link to Amazon from there. So I've seen that a lot of people do that and it's going well.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, now, if I, if I'm a brand, you know, be it on tick-tock or be on Amazon, and I'm trying to, like you know, get somebody of your caliber and following to post my product, it's gonna probably cost me a decent amount of coin. But then, like you said, you sometimes just find stuff on your own, you know? Yeah, like that's probably most of what you do. How do I Make myself more Findable by you or become more attractive to you when you're searching the? You know the, you know whatever you're searching? How can we do that to get on your radar?

Gracey

So are you talking like Amazon or tick-tock or kind of just?

Bradley Sutton:

Both, both.

Gracey

Okay. So I Am specifically like a deal person, so I'm always looking for the best deals. If you have a good deal running and it's a good product for my audience, I'm more than likely post it. But I understand that not everyone can have these hefty promo codes and deals that they put on their products. So I Would say, if you have some sort of like buzz going around your product and that could literally just Be a micro influencer posting about it, and then it catches on and it goes viral and that will start a tidal wave of you know a trendy product, and there's that, of course. But it requires a little bit of luck and very dust. I'm trying to think there there is the structure of like increased commission. I've been getting a lot of inquiries about my brands on tick-tock shop. They're like hey, if you create a product with my tick-tock shop link, then I will give you 30, 40, 50 percent commission and that's like a deal that you can do. Instead of like 50 percent commission for everyone on tick-tock shop, it's like just for you working with the brand. So you could offer a very hefty increased commission with the offer of just including my product in your video. You could do that too, and I'm sure if you reached out to the right people they would be down to do it because again, like they're getting paid on performance and they're getting paid a good commission, a commission you probably. It's very hard to get on Amazon 50% unless you're working with yeah affiliate program.

Bradley Sutton:

But yeah, I'm gonna give you something that I probably shouldn't make public, but Okay, like I was gonna do this on my own, it's something new that helium-10 has, but maybe now you know you can get, you can definitely use this new feature of helium-10, but I don't know. I really should keep this myself. It's that, it's. I think it's pretty valuable, but I Like to give, so I'm gonna just so, and then you can tell me if that my concept is even correct. Again, I'm an I'm a newbie when it comes to being an Amazon associate or whatever it's called. So we have this new thing called Insights dashboard. It's been out for most of the year, but the new part is you're going to be able to track competitor listings. Now, how it's worked until now is like if I'm a seller on Amazon, I've got my coffin shelf. Well, I'm gonna track just five of the other coffin shelves and. I wanna know, like when they're running coupons or if they go out of stock or this or that happens. But how it's gonna be soon is you can add products to track that aren't even tied to competitors. So somebody like you is not selling on Amazon. You don't have competitors per se. So what I was planning to do and now everybody can just go ahead and copy this but what I was planning to do is like go in and grab, go to some top BSR list of some trending subcategories be it body suits or whatever that I think I could sell and then just add like the top 100 BSRs, and then I can set notifications like let me know if they lower their price by this percent, or let me know if they start running a coupon, or let me know if this one goes out of stock, because now I know this other one, but it'll just give notifications instead of me having to like refresh pages every day. Like that theoretically should work right, like it'd be cool for an influencer like you know me.

Gracey

Do you read what I think? So like the question. There is like the promo code or the deal would have to be public facing it would be like a price drop or a coupon.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes yes. Because you got me thinking about that too, and when you were talking about how you're looking for deals.

Gracey

I mean, that's the whole name of your and not all of them are public facing, which is like the whole. Like time to search? Yeah, okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, some just go to prime members, some just go to repeat buyers but then, like a lot of times they don't even do a coupon or something because they don't want to have to pay Amazon for every. You know, if they're running an Amazon coupon, they got to pay Amazon, you know, a certain amount. So they might just do a sale price and then we can detect that you know like where they guess. And actually most of the time I do that for my products because the badge that shows up. If you just do a sale price, like if it's the lowest price in 30 days, it's like, just as you know, stick outable yeah, if that's the word it sticks out just as much in the search results as like a coupon. So sometimes I'll do that. But, all right, there you go. Guys, there's a tip of the day If you want to become, or hack of the day, a cheat, a deal cheat of the day if you want to find some deals on Amazon, you know, once that feature comes out in Helium 10, just add a whole bunch of some trending stuff so that you can get a notification as soon as a coupon or a sale price goes on.

Gracey

I definitely think it's helpful because there are, just like in my head, a bunch of best sellers that have done well, regardless of the season, regardless of whatever I'm talking about. So like. I would be able to, you know, add those best seller products and then, whenever the deal happens yeah, I'm just thinking through my head, but absolutely I think it's super helpful.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So I mean, I know we haven't. We've been kind of jumping all over the place because that's the way my brain works, guys, but I hope you guys can see the potential here. I mean, we could probably have a three hour podcast where we just talk about all of the cool videos that we see and what she does, but we're just scratching the surface, guys. So there's two ways to look at this, in my opinion. Number one if you're a brand owner and you don't wanna dance or do anything, totally fine, there's influencers who might pick up your product. Or you can get them in front of influencers like Gracey, who might show your product and, who knows, they might even do it organically. So, but you gotta be on TikTok shop in the first place to even let that happen. And then, or number two you know, if you're a brand owner, you can be like that. I already forgot what it was. What's your-.

Gracey

Chamoy Chamoy.

Bradley Sutton:

I love Chamoy I love Chamoy. Right, I love Chamoy and she is bringing hundreds of thousands, millions of views and visibility. You know what? I'm gonna just check something real quick. I'm gonna do this live and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. I'm on Amazon here. I was looking at your page, by the way, I love Cham. Oh my goodness, look at all of this. Look at this.

Gracey

I love this. This is.

Bradley Sutton:

Helium Tendetta 5,000 search volume for this brand that probably nobody had ever heard of on Amazon, but because of the TikTok All right, I love Chamoy. Sugar free is 3,000 search volume. So this is what happens, guys. You know you have something go viral. Yes, you're gonna start getting some action on TikTok shop, but then there's other people who are old like me and who are trying to look at TikTok on a desktop and couldn't even get to the shop. So if that happens, what am I gonna do? I'm gonna go to Amazon and look up I love Chamoy. Maybe I don't know what this old TikTok shop is, as dang whippersnappers doing this. I'm gonna go to Amazon because I trust Amazon. So, and two days ship or same day shipping. Oh my God, I can't imagine it. I live in the suburbs and I get same day shipping all the time. It just boggles my mind. I'm not even in the big city, but anyways, guys. So this is like this is gonna be the thing in. I mean, it might be the ready to thing right now, but I think in 2024, like TikTok shop might start giving Walmart a run for their money as far as number two next to Amazon. They don't have the distribution at work. Obviously, that's gonna be a big. Like you said, one month shipping time is nobody wants that, but the views are there. This is where people of all generations I'm making fun of my oldness here, but people way older than me are addicted to TikTok. It's not just for young people. But anyways, any last strategies on something that we haven't talked about or something that we have, but you can just say something a little bit different.

Gracey

I just wanna highlight the thing we just found out. It's like, while it might be viral on TikTok shop, those sales always translate to Amazon because their Amazon has the consumer trust, they have the easy checkout process, they have the fast shipping, the customer service. Even sometimes I am like I don't wanna wait even a week for shipping on TikTok shop, but I see it, it's viral, it's available on Amazon, I'll always buy it on Amazon. So it's like those sales, even if it has nothing to do with Amazon, it actually does and you just saw that with Chamoy.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep, I love it. I might buy it right now, as a matter of fact. All right, so people want to find you on the intro. We almost went through all of your socials already, but go ahead and repeat how people can reach out to you or find you out there.

Gracey

It is dealcheats on all platforms D-E-A-L-C-H-E-A-T-S, and my email is contact at dealcheats.com.

Bradley Sutton:

Gracey, thank you so much for bringing your very unique knowledge. I've been talking a lot of people about TikTok. I've been talking to Norm, who I know is your. Are you a Star Wars fan at all? A little bit you suck. But I was about to say Norm is kind of like your Padawan apprentice, you're like the Jedi master, because he was telling me you're training him to be an official Amazon influencer and he seems to be doing a good job. Like I saw I was looking at his channel. But anyways, like everybody knows a little bit about this stuff, but like you're the one, you're the go-to person in the industry. We just kind of cool when I think about it. You came out of nowhere, I did you know. Like all of a sudden I was like who's this person? I see popping up everywhere that's talking about influencers. I just love how Amazon, just like you know, things go viral on Amazon, things go viral in the Amazon influencer world like this. So it's awesome, I think.

Gracey

I'm out of nowhere it does and I love it, and I've discovered so much and learned so much from the brands and sellers as well. So a great team, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, all right, thank you, Gracey. I hope to see you at an upcoming event, if not this year, then maybe sometime next year.

Gracey

Sounds good, thank you.

Helium 10 Buzz 10/5/23: Amazon / Walmart AI Search | FTC Case Update | Keyword Tracking Training

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

Amazon planning major AI revamp that will change the search experience
https://searchengineland.com/amazon-revamp-change-search-experience-432913

Walmart experiments with generative AI tools that can help you plan a party or decorate
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/04/walmart-experiments-with-new-generative-ai-tools-that-can-help-you-plan-a-party-or-decorate-a-space/

TikTok halts e-commerce service in Indonesia following ban
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/04/tiktok-halts-e-commerce-service-in-indonesia-following-ban.html

Report: Amazon made $1B with secret algorithm for spiking prices Internet-wide
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/10/report-amazon-made-1b-with-secret-algorithm-for-spiking-prices-internet-wide/

Serious Sellers Podcast #497 – Amazon Vine 101 + Changes to the Vine Program!
https://www.helium10.com/podcast/amazon-vine-101-changes-to-the-vine-program/

Etsy "experiments” lead to loss of income for many Sellers. Sellers noticed a significant decrease in sales without knowing why. After the issue began to be addressed in Etsy Forums, sellers did not know whether it was a technical problem or an "experiment".
https://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/letters/blog.pl?/pl/2023/10/1696187388.html

Shopify CEO discouraging staff from side hustles that divert attention from company
https://torontosun.com/business/money-news/shopify-ceo-discouraging-staff-from-side-hustles-that-divert-attention-from-company

Lastly, we delve into the ins and outs of Helium 10’s Keyword Tracker and it’s boost button which allows you to track your keywords 24 hours a day in various browsing scenarios, a tactic endorsed by none other than Manny Coats, the founder of Helium 10. We discover the direct impact of inventory levels, keyword ranks, and inventory heat maps on your page views and impressions. To top it all off, we'll teach you how to prepare for the unexpected by setting up alerts for sudden drops in keyword ranks and understanding how your inventory location might affect shipping times. This episode is packed full of insights, strategies, and revelations that every serious seller must know - so get ready and join us for the ride!

 

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

• 01:12 - Amazon AI Search
• 04:02 - Walmart AI Search
• 07:11 - TikTok Shop Closes
• 07:45 - Secret Amazon Algorithm?
• 12:42 - Amazon Vine New Prices
• 13:34 - Etsy Testing Troubles
• 14:55 - Shopify Side Hustle
• 16:15 - Catch Helium 10 In Rumble
• 16:30 - ProTraining Tip: Boosted Keyword Tracking in Browsing Scenarios
• 28:52 - Keyword Fluctuation & Inventory Impact on Amazon Rankings

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

 

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon and Walmart are all in on generative AI search. TikTok shop in a certain country closes. Is there a secret Amazon algorithm that costs consumers a billion dollars, plus a special in-depth pro training on why you should be tracking keywords at different browsing scenarios. All of this and more on today's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the news stories that's going on in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce world and we give you training tips of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. We've got a lot of news articles that we're going to go over today. And make sure to stay to the end, because I'm going to go in-depth on a topic that I think might change the way you track your keywords. Nothing new, but it's something that you guys need to be doing, and I'm going to demonstrate exactly why it's important. So let's go ahead and hop into the news right now. The first article that we're going to go over is actually from searchengineland.com and it's entitled Amazon Planning Major AI Revamp that will change the search experience. This article says All right, now, this was a document that they're calling this project Nile or something like that, but basically they're talking about Amazon creating AI-powered conversational shopping agents. Now, I saw a lot of the documents that this was on and there's some like maybe some contradictory information. Like they did talk about how, like when, non-personalized search results actually perform better, but then, at the same time, they're talking about okay, this new initiative is going to really put an emphasis on personalized search results. So a little bit of contradiction. I'm not sure which side of the coin I'm on, but at this meeting that Amazon had, they said hey, before you commerce, the sales person in the store was your search engine and that individual knew everything about the products. They would look at you and know what you might want, because customers like you have been to that store before. So this is something that has been talked about for a while, about how Amazon is investing heavily in AI, and then the question is going to, of course, end up being well, how is that going to change the seller experience? We don't know.

Bradley Sutton:

They say this is going to come out sometime in 2024. I find it very, very hard to believe. It's just going to be like some chat GPT prompt. It's going to take over the search bar. I mean the search as it is now. It's hard to beat that. You test, type in two words like coffin shelf, and boom, you get pictures and prices of exactly what you're looking for. How do you beat that? Anything more is going to cost the customer more work. So I don't think this is going to be something that takes over all search, but some niche searches. Maybe somebody might want to go a little bit deeper and say I'm looking for a coffin shaped shelf that customers feel can be used for displaying shot glasses and has multiple color options. Now could there be somebody who might want to search like that? Sure, I'm not one of them. I'm not going to be sitting there typing all those words with my fingers on a phone, but hey, there's definitely going to be people out there who might want that level of detail, and so it's going to be interesting to see how you can do that, how Amazon's going to integrate this. Is this going to change the way Helium 10 works, or the necessity to optimize, or listening for the right keywords and looking at what has search problem? Of course, not, not at all. It might add stuff later on that you might have to optimize for, but the core functionality you guys have been doing probably is going to stay the same, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article here is from TechCrunch and also about search and AI, this time about Walmart. This article is entitled Walmart experiments with generative AI tools that can help you plan a party or decorate. It's so funny, like these days, like Amazon news comes out with something, Walmart comes out with something similar. Like the next day, Walmart comes out with something and Amazon comes out with something. I love the arms race here. This is good stuff. It's good for sellers, good for consumers, that these giants are kind of like racing to integrate different tools and experiences. Now, Walmart didn't say in this article which AI models it's going to use to develop these features, but they're experimenting with generative AI and it's going to include a shopping assistant, you know, kind of similar to what Amazon was talking about, and it says here that it's going to allow customers to have a more interactive and conversational experience, as it can answer specific questions, provide personalized product suggestions and share detailed information, all right. So this is going to be something interesting, you know, like it gives an example. It says, for example, if a customer wants to plan for a unicorn themed birthday, the AI displays a wide array of products such as balloons, paper napkins, streamers and so on, instead of having to type in numerous separate searches. Walmart's new AI search tools designed to save customers time that wouldn't save me time, like when I'm about to buy something. I know what I want, you know. So, again, this is going to be something that some people are going to love. Some people are like nope, just give me the old search. You know I'm talking about. When I say some people, I mean consumers, you know. So it's going to be interesting how this goes on.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, if you're, if you guys are, new to AI and have never you know, have never really worked with it, you know, just real quick segue here inside of helium 10, if you want an experience about how this kind of works, it's not shopping, obviously. But inside of helium 10, guys, on the very top right, okay, on the top right of your screen, right next to like, there's a what's new tab. Hit the button that said that that looks like a magnifying glass. All right, looks like a magnifying glass. And if you do that, it actually opens up a chat window. All right. Now this is using, I believe, chat GPT, and you could say things like how do I track keyword ranks daily? I'm just going to give an example here and I enter it in and what this AI is doing is it's looking through, like our videos and our knowledge base and things like that, and then right here it gives an answer to track keyword ranks daily. You can use the keyword tracker feature in helium 10, simply enter the keyword, blah, blah, blah. So so, guys, I'm not sure how many of y'all know that. Let me know in the comments below how many of you guys knew that there's a full chat GPT AI assistant inside of helium-10 that can, like, answer questions on how to use the tools and stuff. So make sure to use that. And then now think about how that's going to look now inside of Amazon, something similar like that. You know something to think about?

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, let's switch from Amazon and Walmart and let's go to the next article. This is from CNBC and it's entitled TikTok halts E-commerce Service in Indonesia following ban. Alright, this is not new news. We talked about this last week, how in the Indonesian government gave TikTok an ultimatum of one week, say, hey, if you don't remove TikTok shop and make it separate, we're shutting your whole platform down. So what did TikTok do? Like, fine, we're gonna go ahead and and take away, you know, TikTok shop. So that's a huge blow to TikTok because Indonesia is a the largest market for them in that, in that region. So RIP TikTok shop in Indonesia.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from arstechnia.com and it's entitled Report Amazon made one billion dollars with secret algorithm for spiking prices internet-wide. Now this, this is one of those, those articles that kind of made my blood boil. First I'm like, okay, this is interesting, like what this is? You know, this is new stuff that hasn't been talked about and and if this is true, you know, obviously that's an issue, you know. Finally, I was thinking, wow, finally is there a legitimate thing that Amazon is being investigated on by the FTC. But this thing was called they say, codename Project Nessie, and it says it allegedly works by manipulating rivals, weaker pricing algorithms and locking competitors into higher prices. The controversial algorithm was allegedly used for years, all right, and helped Amazon improve their profits. Now, first of all, it even says here that they stopped using it in 2019. So, first of all, guys, this has nothing to do with any of you sellers right now, because even the FTC, it seems like, admits that this was stopped in 2019, or somebody said it was stopped in 2019. But the weird thing is here is the FTC alleges says Amazon has successfully taught its rivals that lower prices are unlikely to result in increased sales. The opposite of what could happen in a well-functioned market. Like this doesn't make sense.

Bradley Sutton:

You know the Amazon price matching. Price matching, like, always helps everybody, you know, except a seller. Sometimes you guys remember how I mean those of you who you know. Four or five years ago even, you know you would shop at Best Buy and then you could like price match Amazon and vice versa. Where you could price, you know, if somebody else had a cheaper, amazon would give you, you know, like, a little rebate. Vice versa, if Target had a cheaper Walmart, you know it would make up the difference and things like that. Like that actually helps consumers, because when somebody's running a coupon, that means, like all the other major players would have to, you know, like, run a coupon or run a discount to try and match it. So like I'm not sure exactly what is the problem for for sellers.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you know, amazon right away responded and then they said hey, you know, this was a project. Yeah, there was a such thing as Project Nessie. Who named it? You know, they didn't say, but it says they were trying to stop price matching from resulting in an unusual outcomes where prices became so low that they were unsustainable. Okay, it's kind of kind of reasonable. You know, I'm not a little bit of a not sure what's going on there, but hey, that sounds reasonable, right, they didn't work as intended. They said, so we scrapped it several years ago and they kept saying, hey, this is not how competition works. The FTC has it backwards and if they were successful in this lawsuit, the result would be anti competitive, anti consumer, and that's what I've been saying to you. It's like the things that Amazon, that the FTC was complaining about I don't know about this Nessie thing, but was like hey, amazon is like making sellers match low prices on other websites I mean, that's like for the consumer. It's so weird how the FTC is talking out of both sides. Now, this is just what made my blood kind of boil here.

Bradley Sutton:

Later on they did a press release the FTC and get a load of this. All right. They said Amazon's far reaching schemes impact hundreds of billions of dollars retail sales over here. First of all, yes, I mean like now, you know, best buy Walmart, everybody's got a price match Amazon, you know. And if Amazon, you know, has these, you know that's why Amazon is doing big deal days. The entirety of Walmart now has a big deal day, or I don't know what they call it, holiday big day or something like that. You know, yes, amazon is is affecting a lot of sales, but in a bad way? I don't think so. It's in a good way. It's in a good way because now everybody has to try and keep up with Amazon. And then take a look at this. They say they touch hundreds of thousands of products sold by businesses, big and small, and affect over a hundred million shoppers. The FTC's press release said sell them.

Bradley Sutton:

In the history of US antitrust law, has one case had the potential to do so much good for so many people Said this dude from the FTC like bro, come on, are you serious around? Like, like we Amazon sellers are, are very scared of this even ever happen? I don't. I personally don't think this is gonna go through, just because it's so, so ridiculous, some of these, these things. But but I mean, you're not helping anybody now who knows? A lot of the FTC thing is still redacted. So who knows? There might be stuff in there that are legitimate complaints, because we know Amazon sellers have a million complaints About Amazon, right, you know there's a lot of things that we don't like. You know, I was just dealing with something today where a removal order was taking like 90 days or something. It's just a pain in the neck sometimes. But the weird thing is the stuff that has been released in this FTC thing, none of it is the stuff that Amazon sellers are mainly complaining about. Yet they're just coming up with this random, random stuff here. Anyways, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too much.

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go ahead and go to more positive news here, and the. The next one's coming from seller central, and it is about a new pricing tiers for Amazon Vine. So now, instead of having to pay $200 from one up to 30 reviews, you can get two reviews in Vine for free. All right, you or you can say hey, no, you know what, I only want to get up to 10 reviews and then that's only gonna be $75 or the existing tier up to 30 for $200. So if you guys want more information on this, we actually interviewed one of the leads At Amazon for the Amazon Vine program. Ah me, she was great. It's her first podcast. She did awesome, so make sure to check that out. Episode 497 you could get that episode h10.me forward slash 497 tons more information in that document or in that podcast about the new Vine program.

Bradley Sutton:

Switching marketplaces we're going to Etsy. This was from e-commerce bites. It says s e-test lead to lost income from sellers. So we think we got problems on Amazon. Etsy just like on their own, just start deciding to do some tests with the titles. Actually, amazon was doing that too for a while, but Etsy gave no notice for these changes. And then they were. They were just like taking random words out of the title and taking punctuation out of title and making it look like the sellers Can't even speak English because the titles didn't even make any sense. And so at you know Etsy sellers. It says they were trying to go back in and fix the listings and stuff. But it's kind of crazy. You know, like Etsy does so many things, like Etsy remove like a few of my products, saying it violates and, and, and you guys think that Amazon seller support is bad. Etsy is a billion times worse. Let me just say that right now, like there is no support, like like they completely suspend the listing and they say there is no way that you can, you know, follow up on this. It's a final you know, don't even ask us about it. Basically, they sent me a message. I'm like what in the world this is like. This is very you know, this is a legitimate Etsy product. So, guys, you know, like, where there's no marketplace out there, that's gonna be perfect, right? Amazon has mistakes, Esty has mistakes, Walmart has issues. We just got to, you know, figure out a deal with it and move on.

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of different Marketplaces, Shopify CEO, is this next article from Toronto Sun? Says he's discouraging staff from side hustles that divert attention From the company. Now, this is just something that doesn't necessarily have to do with e-commerce, but I wanted to get your guys opinion on this because, basically, here he said hey, he doesn't want staff to take on side gigs that divert their attention away from the company, says I'm not talking about, like, yoga classes on the side and coaching a, a soccer team or something. You know my kid soccer team but he didn't want people like doing their own Shopify stores and then having it like go big. He's saying, hey, no, if you're a Shopify employee and you actually do, you know, do a Shopify store and it gets bigger, you know, higher staff, or give it away or something. That's kind of interesting. So the reason I brought this article up was I'm just curious about about you guys. If you have Employees in your Amazon business, are you okay with them having like side hustles on the side, you know, like having their own Amazon business on the side, or do you want them a hundred percent focus on your business? All right, that's it for the news today. We had tons of be interesting to see what happens with some of these things that are that are ongoing.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, before we move on to our really important pro training Wanted to, you know, let you guys know, we're launching new platforms every week. You know, last week we launched on Twitter where we're doing a live video, so make sure to follow us on on Twitter, on twitch as well, and then one platform that a lot of customers want us to get on was rumble. You know it's. I didn't even know what rumble was. It's kind of like YouTube, and then I started watching rumble because on YouTube my sumo wrestling that I always watch Got canceled on YouTube, you know, for some, whatever reason. Now they're on rumble. So I'm like, okay, now I know rumble for sumo wrestling, but now instead of just sumo wrestling, you can know it for helium 10. So, guys, go to h10.me Forward slash rumble, make your own account if you don't have one h10.me forward slash rumble, and then hit follow here and then you'll be able to see we're uploading like old helium 10 podcast Episodes and training videos and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys, let's talk about keyword tracking. You know a lot of customers ask me what is that boost feature and why is it important. You know, like why? It's kind of annoying, I don't want to have to click it every 10 days, so I'm just gonna forget about it unless you tell me why it's important, all right. So for those who don't know, boost is the feature where, inside of keyword tracker, you hit this rocket ship Over here and then what it does is it starts checking keywords 24 hours a day, 24 times a day in different browsing scenarios. All right, so that's the key there, and so I'm gonna show you why helium pen has been doing this. Oh, I mean and this is, this is nothing new like 2017, when keyword tracker first came out 2018 as well, it had boost, all right, so so this is something that Manny coats, the founder of helium 10, is very important to him. But why is the question?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, why do we need to check different browsing scenarios? First of all, what is different browsing scenarios mean? Different browsing scenario is an edge browser, a chrome browser, edge in private mode, chrome incognito mode, safari browser, a mobile browser, a zip code in Minnesota, an address in Miami Florida. So it's like geo location, you know, like different addresses. It's also different browsing scenarios logged in, logged out. Basically, what happens is is Usually for like that. You know, the biggest selling products, a lot of their keyword ranks, stay kind of steady. You know, regardless of the browsing scenario, you know a lot of the keywords will stay pretty steady, but on the flip side, there might be just as many products and just as many keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

We're based on these browsing scenarios. You know whether I'm using a chrome browser, whether I'm signed in, whether I'm signed out, whether I'm using Safari, whether I'm in in Brooklyn, new York, whether I'm in San Diego, California, you might see different search results, right, and that's always been the case, like where people say, hey, how come you know my, my keyword tracker, my cerebral, looks different than what I'm looking at on Amazon? That's cause we're not using your Chrome browsers to actually go search for keyword ranks. You know, whatever your scene in keyword tracker is not necessarily the same as what the rank that we put, you know what browsing scenario that we chose. So I want to go in now and kind of like really illustrate just how much of an impact this potentially can have and why you should be using boosted, why you should care about different browsing scenarios. All right, let's hop right into it. Right now I am in an edge browser, right, Microsoft Edge. Like can't believe anybody uses that, huh. And I am here in the San Marcos zip code. All right, san Marcos is very near to me here in San Diego and I searched coffin shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, now you take a look at the first line of search results. You see, you know three competitors. There's a makeup coffin shelf and then here's at one of our products. You know, one of our coffin bookshelf products is page one position for you know the second line of results, there's a bat shelf, three coffin shelves and a couple other coffin shelves and a makeup shelf. Now let's just compare. I am in the same exact browser, which is edge. All right, here I put a different address. I put my old address in Brooklyn, new York, one one, two, one Brooklyn Heights, right there. All right, this is the same search done at the same time. Now, if we look at the search results, the very first line, it looks like it's the same. But look at page one, position three, this is actually a completely different makeup shelf. That is here. All right, the other three products are actually the same. Like I said, you know a lot of times it is the same, but here this, this epic gifts coffin shelf, is completely different.

Bradley Sutton:

What has page one, position three from San Marcos, california, compared to Brooklyn, new York? As I scroll down to the next line of search results, it's even more different. You know, like like, this bat shelf is nowhere to be found. Here is that one. That's page one, position three, in one address, and now it's like page one, position 10 in another one. All right, so this is basically what we mean by, first of all, like the geo location or different address, different city. You know that you're putting in to Amazon. You could have different results in the same exact browser based on that and that, I think, kind of you know, makes sense to most people.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one interesting thing it's not necessarily about the shipping time, all right. So, for example, remember that that that listing we said was different. The page one, position three, the coffin makeup shelf. Here, as you can see, for New York, it says it would be delivered on October 10th or October six is the fastest delivery. All right. Now that same exact product in San Diego. It's page one, like position 10,. You know it's way down the page. But look at the shipping time. It's either October 10th or October six, exactly the same. So the keyword rank here it wasn't that, oh, it can ship faster to New York. That's why it's going to be higher up there. Now, sometimes that might be the case, but it's. You can't always think that, oh, okay, this 100% ranking has to do with how fast Amazon can ship, because that's not the way that Amazon, uh, works across the board. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Now next thing let's, this was edge signed in. Let's now go to edge in private, all right, so this is now like edge in Cognito mode, I guess, if you were, I did the same exact addresses. All right, again, San Marcos, California, and then I did Brooklyn, New York. Now this is like literally the same address. So the difference is one is an edge browser and one is edge in private mode. All right, take a look at the first line. There's like two here for San Marcos. There are two coffin make, those two coffin makeup shelves that were at different places. On the other, uh, listening, or the other, uh, browsing scenario. These are all in the top row. Now let's again compare it to the same exact city. Right here, this is San Marcos. Right, look at the top line of search results Completely different. Where's our, our product? Our double coffin shelf is nowhere to be found on on the same exact one.

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go ahead and scroll down. It's not in the second line of products, it's not in the third line of products. It's all the way in the fourth line of products. All right. And again, was this necessarily about shipping? No, look, look at our product. It says delivery on the 12th or seventh. All right, in the same scenario delivery on the 12th or seventh. But one is ranked page one position for and just because of the different browser we're using, the other one was ranked halfway down, uh, page one, all right. Now take a look at this. If I scroll down page one in the in private, I see this crazy ugly looking grotesque, grotesque here, uh, like knife holder. That's a skull, right, it's gross. Looking Now in Brooklyn on the in private, let's see if I see that. Yep, there, it is right, there, it's all the way down the page.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, guys, this was not anywhere on page one, one in the same exact address, just a different browser, that that product was nowhere to be found. So you guys see, this is what we mean by different browsing scenarios. It's not just about address, it's not just about shipping time. You could have different search results. All right Doesn't mean one is right, one is wrong, just different results. It is what, it is, all right. What are some other examples? Let's go ahead and switch to a Google Chrome. All right, now I'm in Google Chrome. Now here's the thing Some people, you know, might think that, oh well, is the different locations? Is it only about, like, different states, or maybe it's different cities, or no, it's not cities, it's zip code. No answer is none of the above Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Sometimes, even within the same zip code, will have different rankings in the same exact browser. All right, watch this. This is Google Chrome, right here? Right, I put in look at this 92078 up here as a address and then in this other window 92078, I actually put a specific, a different, specific address that the other one. All right, so two different addresses, same exact zip code, same exact browser. Let's take a look at the search results. All right, line one, it goes uh, the, the Amazon's choice, and two coffin makeup shelves and then one other coffin shelf. Let's take a look at the other address Only one coffin makeup shelf and then another product that wasn't even in the top of the page. Okay, this is the same exact zip code, guys. Just two different addresses, same exact browser and we are getting different results. If I go further on this page, I found another listing that was on one on page one. It wasn't even on page one on the other one.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, the other reason why you know it's not just about the address is, like you know, there's fulfilled by merchant. All right, so take a look over here. I just actually activate. This was a test product. I was doing some keyword testing on for episode 500 that's coming up on the podcast and it's a coffin bath tray, right, and I just threw it on here here I put Brooklyn, New York, all right, Brooklyn, New York address. And this is fulfilled by merchant. And I'm obviously in California. Amazon knows I'm in California, they know where I'm shipping from, I've got my shipping tiers and it's saying this is page one, position five, looks like five or six, right here, all right, and this is a fulfilled by merchant. Now, if I actually change this zip code, let me go ahead and change this zip code to let's go ahead and change it to something in San Marcos, really close to me, right, so that Amazon knows I, you know I'm shipping it, it's probably gonna deliver the next day, you know, because I'm shipping it right from here.

Bradley Sutton:

Let's take a look at the search results. You would think that it would go all the way up to page one, position like two or three. Let's take a look, nope, nope, it's in the exact same position and this time, page one, position six, Like. So again, if Amazon was like just strictly going on shipping time, you would see a little bit more consistency with the fluctuations. Now, that being said, the whole reason why we check different addresses and different browsing. Scenario again is that there is fluctuation, sometimes based on an address, sometimes based on a browser. And why is this important? All right, like why. Why should you care about this? Let me show you a great example of this.

Bradley Sutton:

Going back to that coffin shelf product all right, here is my keyword tracker that I had on boost sometime this summer, in May. All right Now, as you can see those of you watching on this look here like in the beginning of May, I had like pretty consistent rank. I had boost on and you could see it was only fluctuating my rank between like five and 10,. Right Now, look at what my impressions were for that day. Like the way you can see your impressions and page views is right on your insights dashboard of helium 10, your dashboard. You just set the dates. I set it right here to May six through May 13th and I scroll down here. I can see this at the parent level. I just wanna see all the impressions at the parent level and let's see what it was 1310 page views, 603 sessions. All right, it was doing pretty good here at the beginning of May.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, going back to that keyword, look what happened the second week of May. You guys see what's happening. All of a sudden now you start to see fluctuation in the different browsing scenarios. So you can see, instead of just going between five and 10, it's going back and forth between like five and like 15 and 16. Did this have an effect on the number of page views and impressions we were getting? Let's go to helium 10 insights dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

Let's enter the next week 514 to 521, and take a look at the impressions it went from let me see, 1310 down to 881,. All right, it went down by a pretty big number here. All right, because of that keyword fluctuation. Let's go more on this keyword tracker graph. Take a look here the very following week. Look at some of this fluctuation at in one hour, in one browsing scenario it's position six, and the next hour it's position 25,. Even position what is this? 45, probably falling off of page one, all right. So what happened there? Let's go to the page views for that week 427, all right. So remember, just compare it. That first week where we were doing pretty good, it was pretty steady, your keyword ranks, right, you had 1310 page views. But because of this fluctuation on rank that probably was happening on multiple keywords it went down to 427.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, what is the reasons? Could it be inventory? Absolutely it could be inventory. Let's take a look. You guys probably didn't know this, but in helium 10, there's a tool called inventory levels inside of profits, and I can actually go to a certain date range. I'm gonna pick April to May here and see, hey, every day what was my inventory. And sure enough, here at the end of April I had some inbound inventory, all right, and at the beginning of May I had some pretty good numbers. So the number actually, you know, went up between the end of April and the beginning of May. And actually if you look I actually show the page impressions all the way back from the end of April. It was actually pretty bad when my inventory was low. And then as soon as my inventory got in stock, my impressions went up and my keyword ranking, you know, potentially got a little bit better. So absolutely your inventory levels plays a role. That's why we have this here.

Bradley Sutton:

But, as you recall, as May progressed, even though my inventory was not going down much at all, I was still at the mercy of Amazon. You know we call that like the search shuffle, where Amazon was not consistently keeping me at the top of page one. So now another thing that people ask about is inventory heat maps. All right, so you know, helium 10 has inventory heat maps and that allows you to kind of see where your inventory is stored at across the country. And like, for some strange reason, here in inventory heat maps I can see where Amazon is storing my products and it's only in two warehouses. All right, it's only in Kansas and Ohio. So right off the bat, that tells me like probably I need to send more inventory in.

Bradley Sutton:

But that being said, it doesn't always mean that your keyword ranks across the board are completely affected. Don't you remember that even when I was in the Brooklyn zip code and I was in San Diego, like, I was still ranking at the top of page one about? So what I did? I was just out of curiosity. I'm like if Amazon only awarded keyword rank based on where my you know product is being stored, well, let me go ahead and pick an address very close to this place where they has most of my inventory. So let's take a look at Kansas, all right. So here I picked a zip code and the address right here in Kansas, and if you look, I mean you would think, hey, my coffin shelf should be at the top of page one. It's not in the first line, not here at the sec, or it is here at the second line, all right. So here it's, page one, position five, all right. So not too bad.

Bradley Sutton:

But look at the shipping time, guys. It says Tuesday October 10th, friday October 6th. Does that sound familiar? Do you remember how it was when I was in San Diego, california fastest delivery October 10th or, I'm sorry, regular delivery October 10th, fastest delivery October 6th, the same exact shipping time, even though it has to go cross country just to get to me, all right. What about the other address which was Ohio, remember? So I put a Cleveland zip code in here. All right, not in the first line, not here in the second line, not in the? Oh, it is in the third line. But here, even though the inventory is stored right, like literally next door to this address that I picked, it is actually showing a later shipping time. It's saying the fastest delivery is Monday, october 9th for this. And it also has this, you know, a little bit toward down, towards the page.

Bradley Sutton:

So you know, again, part of the moral of the story is nobody, we, none of us know. Amazon probably doesn't even know the ins and outs of the Amazon algorithm. It's obviously, first of all, not consistent. All right, it's not based on one thing, you know. It's not just all hey, on this browser, you're always going to see these results. If you're signed in, you're always going to see this results. If you're in this address, you're always going to see these results. If you have inventory close by to a warehouse, you're always going to have this. That's not the way, unfortunately, as of now that Amazon works.

Bradley Sutton:

But at the same time, there's a reason why helium 10 made all these tools I just went in keyword tracker with boost, inventory levels, history, inventory heat maps is because you need visibility into what's going on, so you're not scratching your head wondering what you can do or why your your page views are gone, have gone down, or why your page views have gone up. You know, conversely. So again, the takeaways here, guys, is number one turn boost on on your main keywords, keep it on, all right. Go into your dashboard and set up the insights where you'll get an alert if, if your keyword, uh, if your keyword drops in in keyword rank, you know, uh, more than four times in a row. All right, uh, set up an alert for if your page impressions go down. You like that that actually we have. This product is underperforming insight on insights dashboard. It'll let you know. Hey, your page views are down by 30% or whatever. All right, and that should trigger you to like.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let me go check my keyword ranks. Which keyword is resulting in this? Is Amazon like all of a sudden shuffling me around? Uh, take a look at your inventory levels. Do you need to send more inventory in? Is Amazon distributing your inventory? Like to me? They're not distributing my inventory across the board, but it doesn't look like it's affecting me too much. On keyword ranks, my keyword ranks are pretty uh stable at the top of page one across the board. So even though you don't have too much control over what's going to go on, as far as the search shuffle goes, it's important you understand what is happening out there so that you know you can take action uh in your account. So I hope this uh special training deep dive here uh was able to help you and, uh, you know, let me know in the comments below if you guys have any questions and we'll see you guys in the next episode.

#497 - Amazon Vine 101 + Changes to the Vine Program!

Get ready to learn more about Amazon's Vine program with our special guest Ami Pandya, Sr Manager of Product Development at Amazon and a leader from the heart of the program itself. We caught up with her at Amazon Accelerate to bring you an inside look at this game-changer for brands on the Amazon marketplace. From the importance of reviews and the program’s unique approach to maintaining authentic and balanced reviews to the timeline to generate a first review after enrolling an ASIN, Ami offers a comprehensive understanding of the Vine program plus new big updates that can impact your Amazon businesses.

But it doesn't stop there! Ami lets us into the global reach of the Vine program, touching base in the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan. She also shares invaluable strategies for brands to maximize the benefits of the Amazon Vine program, demonstrating how to pick the perfect sample size for your units, timing your enrollment just right, and ensuring your product appeals to a mass audience. This candid conversation with Ami is a golden opportunity for any brand aiming to crush it on the Amazon marketplace, and a fascinating insight into the inner workings of the Vine program for all the curious minds out there. Buckle up and enjoy the enlightening ride!

In episode 497 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Ami discuss:

• 00:00 - Amazon Vine Program Q&A at Accelerate
• 06:02 - Amazon Vine Sellers Eligibility and Changes 
• 09:53 - Authenticity of Balanced Vine Reviews 
• 17:09 - Quality Reviews in the Vine Program
• 20:03 - Automatic ASIN Enrollment in Vine Explained 

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