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

#496 - New Keyword Automation Feature: Workshop And Q&A

Are your competitors outranking you on Amazon? Discover how Helium 10's brand-new keyword automation feature is your secret weapon to gaining an edge in the Amazon marketplace. Our host, Bradley Sutton, will be your trustworthy guide to navigate you through the intricacies of this game-changing tool that can monitor your competitors' keyword rankings and advertising, saving you tons of time and exposing potential opportunities for your Amazon brand! 

As we explore the ins and outs of the new feature, together, we'll dive into the comparisons with Cerebro and discuss the customization options that put you in control. Not only that, but I'll also be answering your burning questions, from setting up competitors and product tables on your Helium 10 Insights Dashboard to finding organic report keywords that have led to sales. And because we value your input, we’ll share how you can submit suggestions to Helium 10 to enhance your experience. Here's to bigger, better selling on Amazon!

In episode 496 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 00:00 - Q&A And Keyword Tool Announcement 
• 03:37 - Suggested Keywords And Insights Dashboard 
• 08:56 - Keyword Tracking and Discovery for Products 
• 12:34 - Upgrade To The Diamond Plan For More Features 
• 17:56 - Setting Up Competitors And Ranking Keywords 
• 21:12 - Replace Keyword Tracker With Insight Settings 
• 25:13 - New Tool For Managing Amazon Refunds 
• 29:05 - Submitting Suggestions To Helium 10 

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we're answering all of your questions live with our monthly Ask Manny thing feature, plus debuting a brand new Helium 10 tool that's gonna save you hours of time every month by Automagically telling you what new keywords you or your competitors are ranking for that you didn't even know about. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you afraid of running out of inventory before your next shipment comes in? Or Maybe you're on the other side and you worry about having too much inventory, which could cap you out at the Amazon warehouses or even cost you storage fees? Stay on top of your inventory by using our robust inventory management tool. You can take advantage of our advanced forecasting algorithms, manage your 3PL inventory, create PO's for your suppliers, create replenishment shipments and more all from inside inventory management by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash inventory management. And don't forget you can sign up for a free Helium 10 account from there, or you can get 10% off for life by using our special podcast code, SSP.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly Ask me anything where I go over like a new tool release or a new feature that maybe you guys haven't had a lot of experience using. That's what I'm gonna be doing today. I think it's gonna be a new feature I'm gonna be showing and then we open up the rest of the show to live questions from the audience. That is about Helium 10 or some, something that maybe you need some help with learning how to use, or maybe you want to know a strategy question that relates to Helium 10. We are going to get to all of your questions today, so let me go ahead and show the Helium 10 project X dashboard. Now I want you guys to be on the child view. I mean you can actually be on any of the views parent, child or skew but just to keep everybody on the same page, everybody click on child for me down here on your table, your product table, okay, and let's go to Keywords here on the right hand side. Hit keywords Right and then, once you do that, actually, first of all we got to make sure you guys have enough Competitors here.

Bradley Sutton:

So one of the first things I need you guys to do is Open up and just make sure you have competitors, because if you don't have competitors, this is not even gonna work, all right. So, for example, I open, I hit the triangle. All right, a right under the the little icon in the inside stashboard. You're gonna hit that little upside-down triangle to open up the Expansion. And then you're gonna want to hit competitors. All right, and right here you should show your five main Competitors of who you're competing with. And if you see something here and you're not the one who did it, that means Helium 10 is the one who, kind of like, assign your competitors. But you guys know your competitors the best. You can change this if you want. So, like, for example, somebody else on the who's in this account put this bat shelf as my competitor. You know what? I don't think that's my competitor. So I'm gonna hit edit competitors and I'm gonna get rid of that bat shelf and let's add another, coffin shelf, which I know is a better competitor. We'll add this one Right there. Okay, add selected competitors. There we go. All right, so I've got five competitors. So does everybody have competitors? Five competitors once you do.

Bradley Sutton:

I want you now to hit this new thing that you guys probably didn't even see. It's kind of funny. We don't even have a new, a new little tag on here. I want you to hit suggested keywords, all right. So so Casey asks when are we at in Helium 10? This is your regular dashboard, all right, so this should be on your dashboard, all right. So now, again, just just to show Casey where we're at. I'm on the main dashboard, I scroll down to the my products table and I'm in child view and I am now on keywords, and then now I'm going to hit this button, suggested keywords, all right. So hit suggested keywords, and this is something you need to have a diamond account for to fully get the full access, the competitors you might be able to to actually set up. But, yeah, you need a diamond account to be able to to run this. All right now, take a look here. Now. These are keywords that I believe I'm not tracking yet and what it's doing. This is what's cool, guys. This is what I've always been kind of like. Teasing is going to be coming to. Insights Dashboard is now automatically. We are kind of like running Cerebro in the back end for you, like on a daily and weekly basis, comparing you versus those five competitors that you added, and we are now letting you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe there's a keyword that your competitor is ranking for newly that you're not. Maybe there's a keyword that they're going to advertise for that you're not, or that we show. Maybe you're not even indexed for. So this is just the start. So the first thing that you have to do hopefully you've done that a long time ago, because I'll show you some other insights that come from having Competitors. But now, once you have the competitors, you've got this suggested Keywords here, all right, and then take a look. This is going to tell you what, where these keywords are coming from. So look at this Gothic wall decor. There's three competitors who are ranking for it, all right, and here's the search volume and then the competitor performance score. This is kind of like a score based on how many competitors are ranking for this keyword and how high they are ranking for it. So, let's say, out of five competitors, all five of them were ranked in the top five. This competitor performance score would be like a 10 out of 10.

Bradley Sutton:

This is this is nothing new. This is literally directly from a Cerebro. All right, this is directly from Cerebro. What's going on in there? So this is not a new metric or anything right. It's just new that we're automating it for you. Now everybody has their own preference as far as, maybe, what keywords you want automated, like, like, or what keywords you want to have suggested. So what I want everybody to do with me right now is go ahead and go into customized settings. I want everybody to hit customize settings and this is what is going to be the basis of your keyword harvesting, or automation on what you want Helium 10 to inform you about. So you can, for example, put it's gonna check once a week. You could say you want the search volume to be at least 500, or maybe you want to, for whatever reason, put a Mac search volume Like. I don't know why somebody would want to do that, but hey, there might be somebody out there who wants to do that and if you are, if you can, you will go ahead and put a Macs when there the position rank.

Bradley Sutton:

This is. There's something wrong here. We're gonna change that. This is supposed to be the competitor feature here, so this is gonna be where their rank. All right, so this position rank means your rank. Forget that. This really means the rank of at least one of your competitors. So we'll change the language on this in a little bit, so it's a little bit clearer. Advanced rank filter. These are directly from Cerebro. We're gonna change the language here so it's more easy for you guys to understand. Basically, this means where at least how many of your competitors is ranking for. Remember, you put five competitors there, hopefully, and so you can put a minimum of one and a maximum of five here, right? So maybe you want to see keywords where at least two competitors are ranking high for right this advanced rank filter two or two again, we're gonna change the wording on here so it's a little bit clear. Maybe by the time you're listening to this podcast it'll be ready to go those of you listening to the replay and basically you're putting the rank range.

Bradley Sutton:

So if I put right here two, advanced rank filter number one, I put a minimum of two and then advanced rank filter two, I put between one and let's just say 25. That means I am telling Helium 10 for automation. I want you to let me know if there is a competitor. At least two out of my five competitors are ranking between one and 25 on page one for the rank. Now I think if you do this position rank, this might be yours, where maybe you're like, hey, maybe I am not. We're gonna change the wording. I know this is very confusing here, because we're just taking the raw data from Cerebro Position rank. I believe this is probably gonna be we're gonna have it here where it's my own rank. Like, hey, maybe I want to know the keywords where I'm not on page one, right, but my competitor is right, it's gonna be very, very customizable what you're gonna be able to do here, and later you're gonna even have the sponsored ranks right here. Okay, like hey, show me where I am sponsored. I am not advertising for this X keyword, but my competitor all of a sudden is at top of search. All right, will automatically get those keywords for you.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, these keywords are also based on my products. Like you know, you might not have certain keywords that you're tracking, that you are actually ranking for and you didn't even realize it. Like that always happens to me, like when I run Cerebro on my own listing, and you guys probably do too. You're like, wait a minute, sometime this month I was ranked five for this keyword that I didn't even know was relevant to my listing, right? Oh, let me start tracking that. Well, if you wanna start doing that, we're gonna automatically harvest those keywords for you as well and let you know right here.

Bradley Sutton:

So again, keyword suggestions based on my products. What you wanna put here is your kind of like qualifications here for what keyword. That is going to be All right. Your search volume, where your organic rank is in a certain range, and if you want the word count, you're like, hey, you only wanna see keywords that have at least one word, or at least two words, or three words, or four words. You will be able to do that and then, now, going forward, you're gonna get these suggestions automatically without you having to run Cerebro anymore. And just remember, guys this is something that I hope is already part of your process the manual version of this you should be running Cerebro on your product, like once every two weeks, to find new keywords that you're ranking for. That you didn't realize. You should be running your Cerebro, you versus your top competitors, to see where they are ranking, that you're not or that you need to improve on right. But now, instead of you having to manually run Cerebro and compare reports from last week to this week, et cetera, et cetera, we are automatically doing that for you. And then you are eventually again, if you have the Diamond Plan, you're not only gonna see that down here in the suggestions. You are going to get insights when those triggers happen.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, let's say you wanted to delete some keywords from this list. You're like, no, I don't need to see this anymore. That's gonna come here under deleted suggestions, ones that you delete. We're gonna definitely kind of like play with this a little bit, based on the feedback, on do you want this just to be snoozed, maybe, or do you want it permanently deleted? We can definitely work, work on that with you guys, but you know we need more of you into this tool, now that it's brand new, and working on it to let us know what kind of view you can get. So this is like something that's super cool.

Bradley Sutton:

I've been kind of teasing this for a long time that we're going to have this level of of automation where we're doing the heavy lifting for you. And then this is just the beginning, guys. I mean anything that you are doing in Cerebro and magnet and and you know, black box, just imagine those things us doing the work for you and just delivering the results. It's like you, you know, using Helium 10 almost as your virtual assistant, where we just deliver the results to you and you don't have to do the manual labor yourself anymore. So I want everybody listening to this podcast or listening to this live feed to go in number one.

Bradley Sutton:

Those of you with a diamond plan, and I hope you can see this If you have a platinum plan, you need to upgrade already yesterday to diamond to be able to get some of these features, like the historical Cerebro and now this, where we're even doing the Cerebro for you. But, by the way, I should probably throw a coupon If you guys are interested to try out the diamond plan. I'm not sure if this coupon code is going to work, but the one that for sure works is SSP10. So SSP10 gives you 10% off the diamond plan If you want 20% off for six months. I almost don't want to give this coupon code out because I don't think it's a good deal. But you can do SSP20 and save 20% off for six months. The reason why I don't think is a good deal is because after that now you can't use a coupon for like a year, and so it's going to end up being more expensive anyway. So I suggest just using the SSP10 and then try out the diamond plan so you can give this a try.

Bradley Sutton:

But I want you guys all working on this and hopefully you can see the value Now. You're going to know, hey, where's your competitors getting sales from on keywords that maybe you didn't even have on your radar, where are your competitors focusing their PPC spend that you didn't even realize, and you're going to see which ones your index for. Like, I don't think the index checker is working yet. This is something that's completely in beta, but, as you can see, there's going to be a column here where maybe you're like, wait a minute, gothic wall decor, I am not index for this keyword, so it might give you an indication that, hey, I need to probably get my, you know, get my indexing fixed on this keyword in the in the first place. Alright, alright.

Bradley Sutton:

So now for the rest of the show. This is going to be your show, guys, where you can ask me any questions, and let me go ahead and go back up and see what kind of questions we have. Remember, it could be questions about this. It could be questions about any tool in Helium 10 or how to do something. That's why I'm here to help. Like once a month, we actually make this open to everybody, but this is something we do actually every week in our Serious Sellers Club group of the six, seven and eight figure sellers. But once a month we go ahead and open this up to everybody and put this on the podcast so you guys can all benefit.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, let's see. I saw an older video where you mentioned that subject matter would post in Seller Central. Even if you can post it, can't post it manually on the listing. Is that still the case? For very few categories now Amazon has taken it out of a lot of character. I actually announced and I was mistaken, I thought Amazon took it, took it out of every category, just because of all my listings, like in in the home and kitchen, had it taken away. But I was just on a call, like three days ago, with somebody who's selling in the jewelry category I believe jewelry or accessories, clothing and accessories category and they had subject matter right there and they were able to definitely update it with Helium 10 listing builders. So there might be some, some categories where you still have access to the subject matter, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Another question here from Rashid Dear Bradley, do you know how to find organic report words that made sales? Alright, so in Helium 10, what we have is that's exactly kind of like what this is for. Alright, what I would, I just demonstrate because you know in Cerebro. You know, first of all, you don't know the exact organic sales that come from keywords outside of about 30 to 40 percent that show up in search query performance. Okay, so the ones that show in search query performance, you usually about 30 percent of your search sales. That's because it's those sales that happen within 24 hours. So you can kind of see there and that's going to come to Helium 10 eventually once Amazon opens that up in the API.

Bradley Sutton:

But the more holistic way you can get it done right now I've seen more keywords is just looking at the keywords for somebody's like in the top 10 positions and the search volume is like more than five or six hundred, because it's usually you're. You didn't get to that position unless you had some, some sales that were coming from organic search, right, and so that's just one of the ways that you can find out which keywords are bringing sales to a competitor is by looking at their organic rank for the higher search volume Keywords, which is what you've historically been able to do in Cerebro and now you can do on the inside dashboard. All right, tomer says. Tomer says what does it mean based on my product? Does it mean that the keyword improved in ranking? No, so, for example, you're already tracking keywords, probably in keyword tracker, and if one of your keywords goes up or down, you know we'll let you know based on that insight, like like you've already had that. We've had that for like three months where if a keyword goes up by a certain percentage that you specify or goes down, we'll give you a message. But there's other keywords that you might not be tracking already in keyword tracker because you didn't realize they're important. And so what you do is you specify the insight to let you know when you are ranking highly for a keyword that you were not tracking already, and then you specify exactly what you wanna see, or when you wanna see that happen, like if it's a minimum X number of search volume, if it's within a certain rank range or it's just ranking at all, you wanna get a notification on. You set that and then we'll send that as an insight and then you can choose to either track it or ignore it in your keyword tracker.

Bradley Sutton:

Dennis says how do you set up competitors for your products? All right, let me just show that to you one more time here On your Insights Dashboard. You go down to your products page, Dennis, all right, and then you hit competitors okay, and then you either have to do edit competitors if there is none here, or add competitors if there's none, or edit competitors here and then you choose which ones you want to use right here and that'll give you the competitors. Dennis, all right. It says I have a listing that shows I am ranked on many keywords in the top five. By the way, everybody, whatever you're watching this on, help the algorithm out. Give it a like, give it a thumbs up or a like or a super like or something on Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn, whatever you're watching this, just to help the algorithms out. Anyways, Facebook user says I have a listing that shows I am ranked on many keywords in the top five.

Bradley Sutton:

When I click the arrow to show the search through Amazon, none of my listings really show up. Suggestions on why? Well, you've got to make sure that you are, first of all, like. If you're outside of the country, make sure that you have a zip code that is inside of the marketplace you are looking at Like. So, if you're tracking Amazon Germany, you've got to make sure that your regular Amazon, you know, shows Germany, just to make sure that you're indexed, all right, and also to make sure that you are looking at the right search results and, at the end of the day, what you see in Keyword Tracker, if you see it fluctuating a lot, you need to turn on boost, because boost checks different browsing scenarios.

Bradley Sutton:

It checks different addresses, it checks, you know, like if you're logged in, logged off. It checks a whole bunch of different browsing scenarios, cause, remember, you could be showing up differently based on where the person is searching, what kind of browser they're using, et cetera. So to turn on boost, we're checking 24 times a day all those different browsing scenarios and if on your computer it's showing that you're not ranked, I guarantee what you'll see on boost is some of those checks. It'll be a blank, meaning that, yeah, sometimes you're just not showing up in the search results. All right, we're gonna bring somebody up from the green room here with a question How's it going, Josh?

Josh:

had mentioned about being able to see how competitors are targeting it using PPC. Is there anything PPC specific in the tool that I missed when you were walking through it, or how can we?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, it's not that part is coming, so the first phase one is we're showing you the organic rank. Phase two, which will be coming soon, probably next week or the week after, is the same exact thing that I showed you guys on the organic rank. There will be a separate settings where you're gonna be like show me in the sponsored rank where I'm ranking or not ranking per se on this keyword in sponsored, but my competitor or X number of my competitors are all ranking for it.

Josh:

Because I was gonna say that being able to see sponsored next to organic is helpful for our own, but to be able to see that for other teams, yes, yeah, so it's gonna be yeah, we start with the organic and then we'll be doing the sponsored next.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool thanks.

Josh:

Thanks, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, no problem. Edison from YouTube says will this function replace the keyword tracker tool? It doesn't necessarily replace it, but it kind of does the work for you. So instead of having to go I didn't show this function today because it's already been there, remember you know what I'll just go ahead and show it right now. So, Edison, what you can do for the keywords here. This is actually showing my keywords that I'm tracking in keyword tracker. All right, so it's actually right here on the dashboard, like I technically don't have to go into keyword tracker. So in that sense, I guess you can kind of consider it replaces a little bit, but I still like going into keyword tracker.

Bradley Sutton:

But the beauty about this is you set up the insights, all right, so that instead of having whether it's on keyword tracker or whether it's here in the Insights Dashboard, instead of having to go every day and check this, you set your insight to trigger when. Let me show you where that settings is here. Hold on insight settings. Let me show it here keyword types. All right, you're gonna hit insight settings, you're gonna hit keywords and then you're gonna hit the three insight types and then, when the organic keyword drops or your sponsored rank drops or your keyword suggestions based on competitors, and you can actually customize that by hitting the settings here for your competitors. All right, so you can actually get the information. And it looks like it's not customizable. Yeah, I thought it was. I'm pretty sure there's a way to customize it of when you get an insight that your organic keyword drops or raises, that's gonna be the new one that's gonna come up to when your organic rank increases, like maybe you were on page two, you wanna know when you get on page one, et cetera okay.

Bradley Sutton:

Hope the answer is your question, Edison, all right. Colby says will Helium 10 ever be accessible via API? Could be, again, pretty much, I think for some of our larger customers they have API access for, like enterprise customers. If it's something that will be available on the backend for just any platinum or diamond or elite member, that's to be determined if that's gonna be available. But just like I told people who are asking for the KSA marketplace, you gotta let your voice be heard. So make sure to submit a suggestion in Helium 10's dashboard of say, hey, we would love to have API access. All right, let's keep going here.

Bradley Sutton:

Miko Lodge says will Helium 10 have listing builder for UAE? I sell in the USA and UAE would make it awesome to be able to redo my UAE listings in the listing builder. Yes, that is coming. I actually have that available in my Helium 10, but I don't think it's available to everybody yet. So that's coming imminently where it's not gonna be too much. I mean you can technically do that, miko Lodge. Now, all right, listing builder Like build your listing for UAE because it's English. It's still English and you would just put your UAE keywords in there. But the real benefit is gonna be once we have it open for Japan, for example, like you maybe ran Cerebro for Japanese keywords, right, but you don't have the slightest sense on how to create a Japanese listing, even though you have the keywords, because you don't speak Japanese. Well, now, soon you'll be able to push a button and create a Spanish listing for Amazon Mexico, create a Japanese listing for Amazon Japan, et cetera. So that's definitely coming for you, and I would assume that would include UAE as well. But if, for some reason, uae is not showing up on the listing builder dropdown, just send that to customer support and maybe they haven't released it yet and just ask them when that's gonna be released.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let's say Rasha is asking a question about Amazon refunds. We'll have to check on that. We're gonna keep this to like the Helium 10 related questions here. Now we have a new refunds tool that actually is gonna go out and look Like if somebody is asking for a refund outside of the window I personally don't know what that window is, I thought it was 30 days that Amazon customers can do a refund and then, if Amazon refunds them outside of the 30 days, I believe we've got the new refunds tool that will go out and make a case. So if you guys are interested to get in on that service, let me show you. I don't have the exact link right here, but let me just show you guys how to find that. On our website you just go to the Helium 10 dashboard, go to tools and go to operations, and then you're gonna wanna hit managed refund service. All right, so that's different than refund genie, where you have to file everything. Go to manage refund service and get a free demo of it, and with this tool you're going to be able you're going to be able to stuff that has to do with Amazon logistics and all kinds of different scenarios where Amazon might owe you money, including what you were talking about, where Amazon might have refunded a customer when they weren't supposed to. We'll be able to go ahead and show that for you. All right, let's keep going here, all right. Facebook user another person who did not click the link so I can't see their name.

Bradley Sutton:

So, since we're talking keywords, one of my competitors is Amazon's Choice for 16 keywords with a total search volume of about 72,000. That seems like excessive favoritism. Will they ever level the playing field? Well, I mean, first of all, like Amazon's Choice is always changing. Like they're doing tests now where instead of Amazon's Choice it'll say overall pick. Like maybe you guys have seen that sometimes. I don't think it's favoritism at all. Like they, amazon definitely has a formula. How that formula works nobody can tell you because sometimes it makes zero sense, right. Like I've seen an Amazon's Choice in the coffin shelf be one that I know is not even getting sales for coffin shelf. Literally it's not getting sales for coffin shelf. Even the Amazon data will say it and somehow it gets Amazon's Choice. So I don't think anybody knows what the formula is, but they do have a formula and I don't think it's favoritism necessarily. That's actually why Amazon has been doing some of those changes they've been doing because they're trying to not show favoritism. They've been trying to show the reviews in a different way so that maybe some of the older sellers who have tens of thousands of reviews they don't have as much advantage. The older sellers, they hate that new way that reviews are showing sometimes because it takes away their advantage, right. So Amazon's trying different things but I don't think Amazon's showing favoritism per se.

Bradley Sutton:

Ryan says Helium 10 Sell and Scale was epic. Any plans for another? Oh, yeah, for sure. We wanna do something with Sell-In Scale. We couldn't do one this year or around this time because, as you saw, amazon did Amazon Accelerate this month and they've got Unboxed right after that and like there was like a million events around this time, which is when we had done Sell-In Scale last year massively successful, and we definitely wanna do something for Sell-In Scale soon, potentially maybe some different continent We'll have to see about that, you know might take the Sell-In Scale show on the road, as it were.

Bradley Sutton:

Another user says "'How can you submit suggestions to Helium 10?” Great question. Let me show you exactly how to do that. Go to the top, and where is it". I think it's right. Oh yeah, right up here. This button here. Okay, first of all, guys, this is something that you might not have seen before. This is powered by AI. Instead of always looking at the, instead of always opening up a chat down here, hit this button and you can ask questions like like, watch this. I don't even know if this is gonna work, because this is brand new. I'm gonna say how can I check what keywords my competitors are ranking for? Let's see if that even works. All right, and if I do that, what's gonna come up? Let's see. Watch this fail on me just because AI doesn't like me, cause I always bad mouth AI. Oh no, there, it is right there. Look at that. To check what keywords your competitors are ranking for.

Bradley Sutton:

Use Helium 10 Cerebro. Here are the steps. So, guys, yeah, this is pretty cool, but anyways, right here at the top, before you hit AI or before you ask AI a question, this comes up and one of the options says I have an idea I want to share with Healing10. That's what you guys click. And then, hey, I want to have the KSA marketplace. Hey, I want to have API, like you guys said. Hey, I wanna have sponsored ads faster and in Insights Dashboard, whatever you guys want, hit that button. So again, just to show you where it was, on the very top of your screen, right to the right of what's new, there is this like kind of like a magnifying glass, or I don't know. This is not a magnifying glass, it's kind of like it has stars on it, mixed with a magnifying glass.

Bradley Sutton:

Just hit that and then that's how you can find that button. All right, question from YouTube. I don't know why this is turning into an Amazon or a Helium 10 suggestion. It's not me. You guys should be doing this to you. You should be submitting it over there, but we'll discuss it here. Modar says I'm tracking competitors on X or in a daily basis for changes and reviews BSR active sellers and I have a dream that, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, Modar, you can do this. Modar says again let me read the question for the people listening to this and who can't see it I'm tracking competitors on a daily basis for changes and reviews BSR active sellers and I have a dream that one day, Helium 10 can do this for me. I'm gonna bring Josh back up to this stage. I'm gonna give him a quick quiz here. All right, Josh, you're a power of Helium 10 user. Did you or did you not know that Modar can actually do this already?

Josh:

You can do it using markets.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, Market Tracker is definitely one, but there's a easier way. Even Do you know about that one? But yeah, you mentioned something I didn't. I wasn't even thinking about it Like Modar, you should definitely do that. On Market Tracker, you add your competitors to your market. You can definitely see their BSR changes and things of that. Josh is thinking all right, all right, josh and Modar are gonna learn something right now. Here we go, guys. All right, let's go to the Insights Dashboard Once you're tracking your competitors, which is what I showed you, guys, how to do today. It's not just for the keywords. All right, guys, we are going to show you what is all of these things. If something changes, not only if their BSR changes, but if their monthly sales, like, drastically change, get this. If all of a sudden, they add a coupon like some of us like to check our competitors like oh man, my competitor added a 10% coupon, I better go ahead and add a 10% coupon too. We're gonna let you know. So if you are tracking competitors in your Insights Dashboard, Modar, all you have to do is set up your insight and you will know if any of those things have changed and you no longer have to track that next, right, like you're saying every day.

Bradley Sutton:

And then Jake here mentioned another tool. So Josh Menzin, Market Tracker. Jake mentioned Listing Analyzer. Yes, listening analyzer too. You can track that, but still you have to like click stuff right With Insights Dashboard. You just set it up. That's the beauty about Insights Dashboard. It's about automation right, instead of you having to click stuff and you do the heavy work. We live in 2023. So heavy work is considered three clicks of a mouse. That's heavy work for a lot of people. I understand. Time is money, but instead of you having to do that heavy work, we're doing that work for you. And look at this Modar says can you believe that I used to do this tracking for over 40 ASINs? This is a lifesaver. All right, I'm gonna bring back Josh for one more quiz or one more question. All right, Josh, instead of saying wow, can you believe that, I would say how cool is that? And then you would say

Josh:

I don't know where you went, but pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

There we go. Josh got that. I know he's a podcast listener. All right, so, Modar, instead of saying wow, can you believe that? The phrase goes how cool? Is that? Pretty cool, I think. All right, cool. Any last questions for the day, guys, again, just to recap, we went over adding competitors to your Insights Dashboard and setting up the setting so that you can get insights which are coming next week on the key actions that are happening on your keywords, so that you no longer have to run Cerebro once every week or once every two weeks. You no longer have to check Cerebro on your own product to see if you're ranking for new keywords that you didn't realize. We're doing all of that work for you, unparalleled in this industry where you have that kind of automation. So really great that the team added that and I hope you guys get a lot of benefit from that and all right. Well, guys, thank you so much for joining us.

Bradley Sutton:

Again, if you are a Serious Sellers Club member, look out for your email. You get invited every week. Or if you're an elite member, elite members and Serious Sellers Club members get access to this. If you're wondering how you become a Serious Sellers Club member, you are automatically a Serious Sellers Club member if you have had over $500,000 worth of sales in the last year and you are on a Helium 10 account that's connected to your Amazon account. If you're not getting these emails, make sure to reach out to support and they'll hook you up with the private Facebook group that we have for it and then get you in there right away. We do this every single week, usually on Mondays, and then once a month, like this time, we do an extra one that goes out on the podcast. So thank everybody for tuning in and we will see you, Serious Sellers Club members, next week and the rest of you guys at the end of October. Have a great rest of your week. Bye-bye now.

Helium 10 Buzz 9/28/23: Amazon Replies to FTC | Walmart Google Ads | Amazon AI Investment

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.

Five takeaways from America’s landmark lawsuit against Amazon
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/28/tech/amazon-ftc-lawsuit-takeaways/index.html

The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon would lead to higher prices and slower deliveries for consumers—and hurt businesses
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ftc-antitrust-lawsuit-full-response

Walmart Marketplace Increases Third-Party Seller Activity
https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterloeb/2023/09/27/walmart-marketplace-increases-third-party-seller-activity/

Indonesia bans e-commerce transactions on social media in major blow to TikTok
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/27/tech/indonesia-tiktok-ecommerce-ban-hnk-intl/index.html

Amazon to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/amazon-to-invest-up-to-4-billion-in-ai-startup-anthropic/

Walmart Deals Holiday Kickoff sales event will coincide with Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days
https://www.wvtm13.com/article/walmart-deals-holiday-kickoff-october/45318835#

An update on Prime Video
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/prime-video-update-announces-limited-ads

Up to tenth of Amazon shoppers in Great Britain ‘bribed’ by sellers to offer good review, poll finds
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/28/up-to-tenth-of-amazon-shoppers-in-great-britain-bribed-by-sellers-to-offer-good-review-poll-finds

Amazon’s biggest competitor gets bad grade from the BBB
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/amazons-biggest-competitor-gets-bad-grade-bbb/QAGKNI77WZDWTOXMEHSNEDGVUQ/

Shopify invests in wholesale platform Faire
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/shopify-invests-wholesale-platform-faire-2023-09-27/

Eligible Walmart Marketplace sellers can use Walmart’s Self-Serve Marketing portal in Seller Center to invest in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and promote their products in Google search results through Shopping Ads.
https://sellerhelp.walmart.com/s/guide?language=en_US&article=000011195

We aren't stopping at that! Don't miss our spotlight discussion on how you can unlock more profits with Helium 10’s Managed Refund Service. This new service aims to recover funds for sellers from Amazon errors by identifying and submitting recovery claims on behalf of the sellers.

Lastly, Carrie Miller gives us the training tip of the week about how to see which ASINs are the most clicked and bought from Amazon Brand Analytics data but inside Helium 10. It's a packed episode, so buckle up!

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

• 00:51 - Amazon FTC Lawsuit
• 03:25 - Walmart Marketplace Increases
• 03:51 - Amazon Holiday Inventory
• 04:18 - Seller Fulfilled Prime
• 05:21 - TikTok Shop Trouble
• 06:20 - Manage Experiments Update
• 06:55 - Amazon AI Move
• 07:45 - Walmart Holiday Deals
• 08:27 - Prime Video Ads
• 09:45 - Incentivized Reviews Rampant
• 11:06 - Temu Trouble
• 11:45 - Shopify Wholesale
• 12:57 - Walmart Google Ads
• 14:15 - Try Helium 10's New Managed Refund Service
• 15:30 - ProTraining Tip: How To See Brand Analytics Data Inside Helium 10

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Amazon replies to the FTC lawsuit. Walmart marketplaces on the rise. Tiktok shop is having trouble in Southeast Asia, manager experiments gets an update. Walmart holiday deals coming. Incentivize reviews are going crazy in the UK. These stories and much more on today's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, bradley Sutton, and this is a show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz, where we give you a rundown on all the news stories that are going on in the Amazon, walmart, e-commerce world and we also give you training tips of the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing. All right, tons of articles out today, so let's go ahead and hop right into it. The first article here is actually from CNN Business and it was a five entitled five takeaways from Amazon's landmark lawsuit, or America's landmark lawsuit against Amazon, and you know, they weren't too far off in this article.

Bradley Sutton:

I remember last week I talked about how ridiculous some of these articles were, like just people not understanding even what was going on in the Amazon. And basically it's you know. They're kind of summarizing and saying that, hey, this landmark case targets Amazon's retail platform, alleging that it's harm shoppers and sellers alike at a massive scale. All right Quote. It has a self-reinforcing cycle of dominance and harm. The plaintiffs claim oh, my goodness gracious, and it has. Amazon is running an illegal monopoly in ways that are paying off for Amazon, but at a great cost to tens of millions of Americans of households and hundreds of thousands of sellers. All right now Amazon, you know, check out the CNN article. It talks about the you know five takeaways you know from it. But Amazon replied in another article that we also have linked in the comments and entitled the FTC's lawsuit against Amazon would lead to higher prices, slower deliveries for consumers and hurt businesses. Hmm, if we only didn't say that, like weeks ago, like anybody who actually knows anything could have told you this that there's nothing good that's gonna come out of this for Amazon sellers nor Amazon buyers. And this article that Amazon releases, kind of like in reply to this FTC lawsuit kind of, you know, talks about that how, yeah, if this goes through, it's gonna make Prime more expensive, it's gonna have more shipping fees or more fees for sellers, et cetera. And it's kind of funny, like some of the things that you know I talked about was how Amazon kind of like I guess you can say, punishes sellers for having lower prices on other marketplaces. Some sellers don't like I mean to me, like it is what it is, you know, like we should be having, you know, same, similar prices, you know across the board. But even, let's say, an Amazon seller thought that was a bad thing. You know, if this FTC lawsuit is for the public, like Amazon is making sure that people, you know, don't gouge customers on the platform. You know, like sellers like like no, hey, if it's cheaper outs outside there, you should have a cheap price on Amazon. But how is that harming the consumers? You know, maybe, maybe could be considered harming the sellers, but you know the millions and millions of prime members now get the benefit of having low prices. So it's like Amazon, or the FTC, is like talking out of like two sides of its, of its mouth there. So it's kind of interesting.

Bradley Sutton:

So the next article actually switching to Walmart is from Forbes and says Walmart marketplace in increases third-party Seller activity. Not many stats and figures from here, just the writer here is talking about how there's a lot more investment in advertising in this Q4. He expects sellers to have a lot more sales on Walmart Compared to the past, as Walmart's really been expanding their focus on third-party marketplace. Next article here this is from seller central dashboard, just as a reminder to send in FBA and MCF inventory by October 26 before a holiday deal events. So there's less than five weeks left. So like, if you're trying to to have something you know, go for black Friday, cyber Monday deals you actually need to have your inventory in by October 26th. So that's. That's actually not that that far away, so well in advance.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is a reminder that seller fulfilled prime is coming back. All right, so seller fulfilled prime, it's gonna be without that 2% fee that we talked about earlier before. We're gonna have a blog later today or tomorrow You'll see at Helium 10 comm forward slash blog that talks about how to enroll in seller fulfilled prime. Me I'm not gonna roll it like I have. You know I don't ship too much stuff. So like there's no way. I'm not gonna use Amazon FBA you know like for to try and get the prime back. Remember to do prime badge for seller fulfilled prime. You've got to have a way to ship to like same day, next day or two-day delivery, including weekend delivery. Obviously, I can't. You know most of us can't, can't do that, but some of you bigger sellers out there who have, you know really good, you know shipping agreements with companies. You might want to take advantage of this and then for your fulfill by merchant you can actually get a prime badge now. So just look out for that announcement or that blog and it's actually gonna be officially announced by Amazon In a couple of days. You'll see some big comms coming out of Amazon about seller fulfilled prime, but you'll be able to get that blog before the Amazon announcement on our blog later today or tomorrow.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article today we're gonna talk about is actually coming out of Indonesia, all right, and it says Indonesia bans e-commerce transactions on social media in a major blow to tick tock. So Indonesia is actually the biggest you know platform for tick tock in Southeast Asia. I believe. It has something like a hundred and twenty, a hundred and twenty five million monthly active Users and tick tock shop has, you know, released worldwide. But now the government is saying no, you can't have e-commerce and social media together. So you're gonna have to, you know, within the next week or so I forgot when the deadline is you're gonna have to, like, take tick tock shop out and make it a separate app. So this will be interesting to follow, like if something like this happens in other marketplaces and that's gonna be obviously a big blow to tick tock shop. I don't foresee that happening here in in America, but you know kind of is gonna hurt tick tock shop for those who are trying to sell Products in Indonesia.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article here was also from seller central. It says expand single asin AB test to multiple stores. So now, with manage your experiments, you're gonna be able to run separate AB tests on your asins across multiple stores, all right. So, like to different marketplaces in different regions, you can kind of see how how imagery works, you know, between you know, like Amazon Canada, amazon USA, etc. And you can add, like, for example, it says a brand logo to your a plus content to see performs performs differently in different countries, to pay on how well Established your brand is.

Bradley Sutton:

A next article here is from tech crunch entitled Amazon to invest up to four billion in AI start startup and Anthropic all right, so this you know a anthropic is this startup who's kind of making waves in the industry. You know that I've heard about them a while back, but you know the interesting thing here. You know we've been talking for a long time that that it's gonna AI Generative AI is gonna definitely change the the shopping experience and that's gonna affect sellers. Andy Jassy, amazon's CEO, says Amazon believes this deal can improve many customers experiences short and long term through our deeper Collaboration with Anthropic. So, again, improve many customer experiences All right. So again, ais. That's gonna change the way people shop eventually on Amazon and that means it's eventually gonna change the way that you know we sell or sell on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is just from a local TV station, but we talked about this before. It's kind of funny that you know every time Amazon does something, you know Walmart might reply and do something similar or vice versa. You know we're in a competitive matchup here, so this article is entitled Walmart Deals Holiday Kickoff Sales Event Will Coincide with Amazon's Bing Prime Day deals All right. So it's not you know big or Amazon's big deal days, All right. It's Walmart deals holiday, all right. So this is actually happening a little bit earlier than big, big deal days. It's coming on the end from the ninth to the 12th and it's available even to non-Walmart Plus sellers or what non-Walmart Plus buyers? It'll be available to.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article from Amazon, an update on Prime Video. So you know, prime Video has a lot of like you know, tv shows and and and movies and different things, and so they they talked about some of their, their. You know what they've achieved lately with Amazon Prime Video. But the key is that in early 2024, amazon Prime Video shows and movies will include limited advertisements. All right, and there's going to be a people are going to have to pay $2.99 a month if they don't want to see these ads. But again, you know, anytime we talk about you know advertisements coming on Amazon. You know properties, whether it's in store or other ways. It's eventually another way to get your products in front of of buyers. All right, it's new ways.

Bradley Sutton:

You know a lot of people are watching Amazon Prime Video. What was that? It's like a, not Game of Thrones, but it's like a Lord of the Rings prequel or something like that. I think was on Prime Video. But you know millions of people watch that. Imagine, you know, somehow for the people who aren't paying that $2.99, you know they're seeing an ad for a coffin shelf on there. I don't think you know we are big enough to advertise on Game of Thrones or or Lord of the Rings or anything like that, but just shows you an example of what could be possible in the future. You know, if you are a big enough seller you could start having your ads potentially on some of these big TV shows from Amazon Prime Video.

Bradley Sutton:

Now an interesting article from the Guardian in the UK. It says up to a 10th you know, 10% of Amazon shoppers in Great Britain were found to have been bribed by sellers to offer a good review. So they pulled 1500 adults who had bought from Amazon in the UK in the past 12 months and they all got like like gift card offers or free products or refunds in order to cheat the system. This article said all right. So you know Amazon obviously does not want anybody having, you know, any kind of incentivized reviews you know happening. So there's a lot of sellers who are breaking the rules. They're probably going to get caught. You know a lot of them. Some of them. Don't get caught. But don't don't try this, guys, all right. So it also said that 4% of those polls said that they were offered a reward for changing a negative review to a positive one. All right. So, like, how did they even get a hold of that that customer? It's kind of a interesting All right. So you know UK government is looking into how to tackle this a little bit more, but it'd be curious to see what you know how this is in the US. You know, I just ordered a ring light or something and I got like a little gift card saying, hey, you know, try to or not a gift card, but a little card, insert card offering a gift card to to like, have a positive review. So this kind of stuff still happens. But, guys, don't do it. Don't do it, not worth it, not worth it.

Bradley Sutton:

Our next article here is from Kiro7. It was just about a Temu, all right. So it says Amazon's biggest competitor gets bad grade from the BBB. Temu is not Amazon's biggest competitor, first of all, but not a thousand. You know it's the number one app on on Google and Apple, yeah, okay. So in that sense, maybe it's it's an Amazon competitor, but you know, Temu sales are very low compared to Amazon, but according to the Better Business Bureau, they've received a thousand recent you know complaints about the service. But you know, like what do you expect when you're getting like a $2 address or something like that? But it's probably one of the many reasons why nobody you know Amazon sellers. Amazon itself isn't really concerned with Temu being too much of a threat.

Bradley Sutton:

Switching platforms. Now Shopify invested this week into a wholesale platform called Fair. You know, a lot of people knew about Fair, a place where people can get wholesale products but now Shopify is investing there and it wants to see this startup adopt Shopify technology for its clients. All right, so. Fair was founded in 2017. It's valued at $12 billion. That's a pretty big company. It's now going to become the recommended wholesale marketplace for Shopify merchants. All right, so this is going to make it easy for Shopify merchants to find wholesale buyers and also enable retailers to source from Fair's network of brands. It's kind of interesting because, for example, fair said the most popular search filter on its platform is not on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

All right so you know hey if they're going to find some stuff for Shopify that's only on Shopify and not on Amazon. You know this. This kind of like a match seems to be made in heaven. It'll be interesting to see if you know how this changes, how Shopify sellers sell. You know, let me know in the comments below if you are selling on Shopify and you know this is good, if you're going to start, you know, perhaps maybe selling your products on the Fair platform. A last news article was from Walmart seller help. It's actually interesting. They have a. They're launching self-service search engine marketing. Say that three times fast. All right Now, basically, eligible Walmart marketplace sellers can use this portal in Seller Center to invest in search engine marketing.

Bradley Sutton:

So you're going to be able to do Google shopping ads. Now, I don't know too much about this stuff, but I could be wrong. But I believe that this is like. These are like those. You know, when you search a keyword in Amazon or in Google, at the very top right there would be those ads where you can like, click directly into the results and it'll go directly to the storefront you can buy the product. I don't believe Amazon is available for this. So this is another potential advantage you can have of, of doing Google ads, where it can go directly to your store, right there in the shop, the shopping ad section of Google. So you know, if you're a Walmart seller, go into a Seller Central, you can create campaigns right now. You can even bulk create it and then we have the article here linked in the comments below if you want to get more information on this.

Bradley Sutton:

So, whoo, a lot of articles today, a lot going on in the ecommerce world. Quick, quick note. You know, if you missed it, last week Helium 10 launched a reimbursement service. So a lot of you guys are ready to use refund genie where you can, you know, download reports for your loss and damage things from Amazon, things that Amazon might owe you money on, and you're able to go ahead and, and you know, file your own claims and get your money back. But now we have a service that is designed to where we're going to do the work for you, you know, for a percentage of it, and we'll also find other money that you know, refund genie, you know it's not looking for. So if you want to find out more information about this, the service is actually free, you know, to use. We only can get money if we get money for you, and some sellers are getting thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars back by using it. So if you'd like a free demo of it or to get more information, go to h10.me/mrs h10.me/mrs to be able to sign up for a free demo. Alright, now let's go into a quick training tip of the week from Kerry, talking about how you can see who's getting the most clicks and the most purchases from brand analytics. But right inside of Helium 10 Cerebeo, Carrie, take it away.

Carrie Miller:

Did you know that you can see click share and conversion share within Cerebro? That's right. If you have your Helium 10 account connected to seller central and you have a diamond and above, you can actually see this click share. So it's a really great tool when you're doing your keyword research. So the first thing you want to do is you want to log into Cerebro. So I've done a multi search here. It doesn't matter really the position for this particular strategy, but usually I always like to make sure my own, mason, is first, so I can compare it to all others. But if you scroll down here, you can actually see that we have a whole entire column for ABA, total click share and then conversion share. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually drill into this a little bit more and if you go to let's see here a wooden egg holder, we can click on this graph and get a little bit more details. Now I will say not all of these keywords have information. It really just depends on what is provided in brand analytics, and if it's in brand analytics, we can pull it in here. So it has to have, you know, a good amount of search volume in order to get this information. So let's take a look at wooden egg holder. So if we click on this, we can actually see the last few months or six months or so of click share and conversion share, and you can actually, you know see this this most recent month we're in September right now. We can actually go back to see August and you can click along on this graph and hover along this graph and you can actually see at the bottom there which were the top three Clicked and converted on. So when we take a look at this, you can actually see, okay, this one has an 18% click share and a 19% conversion share. So that's, they're doing something right. That means you know a lot of people are actually purchasing when they do actually click on their listing. This one is, you know, 8% and a conversion share of 6.5 you know they're doing pretty well as well and then 7% and 9.1. So now, if you see, you know a really large click share and pretty much no conversion share, that probably means people are clicking on it, thinking it's something, but they're not seeing what they actually want to buy. So one really cool thing that you can actually do if you want to, you know, see what maybe one of these competitors are doing that has the most click share and conversion share. You can see what they're actually doing by running listing analyzer. Now you can actually go ahead and see it in here and when you click on run listing analyzer or you can go straight to listing analyzer and add things in yourself.

Carrie Miller:

I'm just going to click on run listing analyzer. Let's see what we have here. Are these the top ones? Yes, these are the ones I want to look at. So I'm going to click on run listing analyzer and I'm going to be able to see all of the information for all three of these listings and includes price. It'll include the images and everything that we really need to know, kind of stacked on top of each other. All right, so all of this data is is now uploaded into listing analyzer from that click share, conversion share, so we can see, maybe, the difference. Okay, so this top one was the topped clicked and we can look at the price. Now it has a pretty good price. It's not the lowest price. This one is actually the lowest price, but you know, between these two especially that does have a lower price, so $20 might be the best. And then another thing you can do is you can take a look at the images and see if there's something that this Particular listing has done that this one didn't. Maybe they did. You know better close-up images here. These one, these have a little bit better lifestyle images.

Carrie Miller:

So it's kind of a mystery there as to why the first one would get the the most clicks. But usually what you can do is kind of drill down a little bit more into the details and you can see, you know, what people are looking for. Potentially it has to do with the actual structure of the product. This one has a little bit more sturdy look. This one looks a little bit more Shaky and it has a lot more eggs on it. So this one probably fits better into your, into your refrigerator. So there's a lot of different components that can go into that. But you can kind of see it a little bit better when you take a look at the media all stacked on top of each other and then also the pricing. So that is just basics click share and conversion share and ways you can kind of analyze that to see if there are ways that you can improve your listing to get some more click share and conversion share. So check it out and let us know what you think.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, thank you very much, Carrie, for that training tip. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. We'll see you guys next week to see what's buzzing.

#495 - Getting Started on Amazon FBA with Limited Funds

Get ready to unlock the secrets of Amazon-selling success as we welcome back, Stephen Diaz of the Rainmaker Family. Together with his wife, they have woven a thriving community of dedicated e-commerce sellers. Today's deep-dive episode is crammed with innovative strategies, specially designed for those venturing into Amazon's realm for the first time. Prepare to learn how to rake in thousands of dollars per month by creating videos for other people's products, and finding good products to promote with the help of tools such as the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer. We also walk you through the Amazon influencer program and how you can be a part of it without having to be the 'face' of video content.

Buckle up as we guide you through the entire process of recording, uploading, and creating eye-catching thumbnails for your videos. Be ready to learn how to craft compelling titles and get a handful of tips to produce successful video reviews. We also brainstorm creative ideas for video reviews that go beyond the confines of your home. Stephen sheds light on his experiences and the advantages of participating in high-ticket mastermind events, highlighting how investing in yourself can dramatically influence your success in the e-commerce world.

In our journey through this episode, Stephen imparts priceless insights into the keys to entrepreneurial success. We touch on the importance of focus, mindset, and budgeting in e-commerce. In the end, we delve into the strategies that work best for family-oriented businesses on Amazon, like how to utilize Amazon Associates and affiliate links to connect to other products in your shop. Whether you're a novice or a seasoned seller, this episode promises you strategies and insights to skyrocket your business to new heights. Tune in, and get ready to get some creative ideas on how you can build capital for Amazon FBA selling.

In episode 495 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Stephen discuss:

• 01:57 - The Maldives Honeymoon Strategy Helped The Rainmaker Community
• 03:51 - How To Build Capital For An Amazon FBA Business
• 07:14 - Making 6-Figures As An Amazon Affiliate
• 08:43 - Difference Between Amazon Associates And Affiliates
• 11:17  - Different Kinds Of Videos You Can Make
• 17:15 - Why Joining Masterminds Are Important
• 21:18 - Inspiring Stories From Stephen’s Community
• 31:18 - What Does It Take To Succeed In This Business?
• 36:49 - How To Get More Information Of Stephen’s Community
• 40:20 - Stephen’s 60-Second Tip

► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast

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

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

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

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

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we've got somebody back on the show who's got one of the most successful communities out there in the Amazon world and he's going to talk about what's been working for them, including how some can make thousands of dollars a month on doing videos for other people's products. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you browsing a Shopify Walmart, Etsy, alibaba or Pintu? Are you browsing a Shopify Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba or Pinterest page and maybe you see a cool product that you want to get some more data on? Well, while you're on those pages, you can actually use the Helium 10 Chrome extension Demand Analyzer to get instant data about what's happening on Amazon for those keywords on these other websites. Or maybe you want to then follow up and get an actual supplier quote from a company on Alibaba.com in order to see if you can get this product produced. You can do that also with the Helium 10 Demand Analyzer. Both of these are part of the Helium 10 Chrome extension, which you can download for free at h10.me forward slash extension.

 

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 we're bringing back somebody who, along with his wife, has helped more serious sellers than almost anybody else out there. Stephen, how's it going, man? Welcome back.

 

Stephen:

What's up, Bradley man? Anytime I get to hang out with you is awesome. I know Chelsea's usually sitting right by my side, but today she's 100% mom. So she's being 100% mom, today I'm being 100% podcaster Love it. And that's how we do it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And in your honor, you know, I'm actually wearing the shirt that you guys gave me the Maldives shirt. I believe this came from Merch by Amazon, like what? Two, three years ago. I think, you guys, it might have been either during the pandemic or before the pandemic. That's how long.

 

Stephen:

I've had this shirt. Well, the Maldives strategy impacted our community so much that I was like we got to give back and I didn't know Bradley's T-shirt size, so I think I sent you like six Amazon merch shirts.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It was great. I gave one to each of my family who were all those sizes, and then I took the biggest one for myself.

 

Stephen:

Perfect man, that's good. Well, that's that that technique is still making ripples, man Like it's. It's very cool. And title density, all that stuff we love it in Rainmaker. So yeah, I'm excited.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of which, it is now two 10pm on Wednesday, in 28 hours I'm hopping on the plane to go to Maldives. To record episode 500. So the latest iteration of it.

 

Stephen:

There we go. Dang man, I need to get out to the Maldives now. Like I was every time they're out there. Yeah, they got a great kids club, you know so so you know, do you go to the same place every time?

 

Bradley Sutton:

I either go to the Waldorf Astoria or the Conrad. They're both Hillson properties, so I can use my points for it for either one, but I don't know if you're a Hilton or a Marriott person, but they got good Marriott properties out there too, okay, Anyways, let's get into some strategy. Let's just start. You know like we usually say this at the end, but we'll, we'll go and do some strategies at the end, but every time you've been on the show you've always, you know, come with some like kind of unique, uh, unique stuff. So like back in. By the way, guys, if you want to get their full backstory uh, I wrote down here or I didn't write down, I don't do much of work here. Mel, my assistant, is one who does the work here. He put in a episode of 198 guys. So episode all the way back in 198, we're about to film 500. That just shows you where, how far we've come. But 198 was their first time you can get their their backstory there. And then they came back in episode 318. So way back in episode 198, they were talking about uh doing sales on Facebook, uh market places, and then they gave some updates on that in episode uh 318 and talking about Facebook groups. And so I think the latest thing that you guys have been doing you know, especially for those who at the beginning might not be able to have enough money to to, to, to start private label, to invest, uh talk about what is one of the ways that people can can build some capital or what, what, what your community has been doing, yeah, I mean we see all different levels, you know, and and, and we really do specialize, you know, in the Rainmaker family, helping moms, and so a lot of moms like they are just like, uh, honestly, they've tried a lot of other stuff, you know, and so they're hesitant to go go big on Amazon at the first.

 

Stephen:

So so helping them create the money to do the thing is definitely something that's in our specialty. So I would say, lately, there's a handful of strategies. Right now we definitely have a subset of our community doing the influencer strategy on Amazon. Um, and when you hear that word, I think people think, like you know, I don't know, taking pictures of your coffee at the coffee shop and like having your face all over social media, um, but the Amazon influencer program, anyone can do and you can actually do it without putting your face in the videos, which is kind of nice. And so, honestly, like, uh, this opportunity was brought to me by a guy, john, he was doing it and he kind of came to our community. I was like, hey, I'll do this for you guys. Like he was just looking for more products to review. But if any of your listeners are unfamiliar with it, basically how it works is when you go to the Amazon listing right, you see the photos. There's always like these, like videos related to the item or sometimes there. If you have a video, it'll be like the second video that plays after your video, and those are like these Amazon influencer videos and if someone watches that video and then buys the product, that influencer will get a commission on the sale, which is really crazy. So, um, you know, you've probably heard of the Amazon associate program or affiliate program where I signed up for that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Just, I was trying to let you just check if I can get some, um, you know, see some different data points. I was curious if, like Amazon, affiliates have different data points. So I signed up and I was just like I already shoot me or my family is going to get some of them. I might as well just make a link and and get some. You know, get some stuff. But yeah, I signed up for that one, but not the influencer. So what's the difference between the two?

 

Stephen:

So, yeah, you have to sign up as a Amazon associate or affiliate first, and then you can apply for the influencer program. So it is an application only, uh, to get into it. But, um, uh, it's fairly easy to get in. You just need to have an audience somewhere of some sort, and then you can use TikTok, instagram, facebook. I mean, we have people even just use a Facebook page and they'll they'll run ads to the page for a little bit to just gain some audience. Uh and then they'll apply right. And so the the Amazon influencer program. Once you're in, they basically allow you to like, upload videos of of products you're reviewing, but the catch is you don't have to have bought the product on Amazon, so, like it doesn't have to be your past purchases, it can be literally any product that's on Amazon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So if they get approved for this, like, are they seeing something different on product pages or something that's like an extra button of of how they can upload or how they different?

 

Stephen:

just like seller central is its own thing, the influencer or the associate program has his own dashboard you can log into. Kind of KDP, like Amazon, keeps all these things separate, you think they just link them all. Yeah, um, it's like you log into your associates dashboard. You kind of click over to the influencer page and influencers. You may see people do this on Instagram where they actually have like a storefront where it's like my favorite Amazon things and it'll be like my house hacks my favorite clothes and those are like that's one way to do it. But this kind of video side of the Amazon influencer program is really the lucrative one. And the guy I heard it from, john, he was doing six figures with this. Like that was his full time business. He did have a YouTube channel. He was reviewing tech gear and things like that, but he would just like get reached out from brands at this point. He's kind of got a name for himself and I think he was doing like over 200,000 and just Amazon money.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Is it all on commission? Or also he'll get like a flat fee from some of the store owners to create videos.

 

Stephen:

Sometimes they are getting like a, like a bounty, like that, but a lot of it is just commission. Yeah, he's getting commissions through affiliates so he's doing super high volume. That's like I don't know a ton of people doing those types of numbers. Yeah, but that got us interested. You know, chelsea signed up for it and she was around the house shooting stuff. So basically, what you do is just go around your house and you just review every item in your house and like it doesn't have like again, you didn't have to buy it on Amazon, it just has to be on Amazon. Yeah, so you just be like you know, uh, hey, this, I have a Apple mouse on my desk. You're like, let me tell you about this Apple mouse and you just do a review of it. But the types of reviews that work really well are just authentic reviews. If you're super polished and like, let me tell you, it looks like too professional, people don't trust it, right. So you want to just like do it like a casual, like honestly, a lot of our reviews are cell phone, they're vertical and we're shooting away from us and just like pointing and like it's like voiceover, just like like you would like your unboxing something. Yeah, show your friend and so, yeah, you just go around your house and like review everything right and you have to submit the videos. They do have to get approved by Amazon, but once they're approved, they live on that page. You know of the Amazon listing and a percentage of people will click on them, watch them and you'll get commissions and sometimes they actually go up in the carousel too.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I think you know Norm Ferrari was showing you this.

 

Stephen:

Videos will go up in the carousel.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah.

 

Stephen:

Huh, it's crazy. So and then if?

 

Bradley Sutton:

they click it in the carousel and buy it, they still get credit then. Yep, of course.

 

Stephen:

Yeah, you get a commission. Yeah, yeah, all right, I'm a how I do that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm going to have to look into that. I always like it's fun, man, it's fun.

 

Stephen:

It's fun thinking about like, okay, what's the most expensive thing in my house, because again, you're making such a small percentage, right? Yeah, you either want super high volume or you want expensive and helium 10 super helpful because you can go. Okay, how much volume is this product doing? Right, so if you have, like I remember we were reviewing stash your bags. They're like those ziploc bag alternatives, like they're like made of silicone oh, reusable ziploc bags basically. But there's like a thousand stash your bag listings, right, because it's like a wholesale product that'll up your wholesale. So I use helium 10 to figure out which one has the most sales because, like you can't tell which blue stash your bag I bought it could be on any of these listings, right? Yeah, I use helium 10 to figure out which listing has the highest volume, right, but also has the least amount of influencers hopping on there and making videos. So that increases the chances and that that one video would make it's like 10 to $15 a day. You know it's not like crazy, but imagine you have a hundred videos, a thousand videos, you know, that are that are doing those types of numbers Like it's. It's incredible.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, yeah, and so you record it with your phone and then what you? You upload it with the or you send it to your computer and then you upload it in that.

 

Stephen:

Yeah you can upload it. Yeah, I always send to my computer, upload it. You can do a thumbnail. So if you're, you know you know anything about internet, you know you gotta have a catchy thumbnail sometimes. But I was super lazy about it because Chelsea would reshoot them and I would upload them. So I'd do the catchy title and the thumbnail. Oh, that was my specialty. So the key thing with the titles, you don't really want to tell people if you like the product or not. You want to be like five things. I wish I knew before I bought this. Right, there's like no idea.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You have no idea if, like, do you have any that that you could like tell me you'll look at right now, and then I could like show people how it looks, or just an example of one.

 

Stephen:

I'll shout out a friend's brand, kingsloo. Yeah, he sells a slim fit wallet and we did a video on that one and yeah, it's just a super simple video.

 

Bradley Sutton:

$109 for a wallet.

 

Stephen:

Good grief, I know Gucci. Yeah, he sells mostly off Amazon. He's more of a DTC but we've helped him get on Amazon and oh five videos here. I bet a bunch of our Rainmakers have done it now, and then I think you click on that like five videos underneath there and you should see like Heather's on there and Chelsea's on there. Yeah, there you go.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Wait, well, that's, that's their video. Yeah.

 

Stephen:

So click on, here we go, honest, awesome.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So so when you said the, the, the thumbnail like this is the thumbnail that they chose. They just chose a random part of it. Oh, I did that. So like oh, you did this.

 

Stephen:

Honestly like I was super lazy. So I would just screenshot and make an arrow, like I put an arrow and like it kind of like makes you think I'm talking about some specific thing, but it's just a catchy way to kind of. And then you just make it vertical, just like this. Wait, here's I didn't know it wasn't.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Oh yeah, hear your voice in this thing. There, there we go. Okay, wow, I think. Yeah, this is one of those. I was one of the good ones.

 

Stephen:

Heather did this one.

 

Bradley Sutton:

She's in our community.

 

Stephen:

She's really helped us pioneer this kind of influencer thing. She created a mini course on it. Yeah, super casual, right, like it's not like really polished. Of course, if you're doing like a DSLR camera or like the new iPhone, people want like the Marcus Brown. You know they want the Polish video, right, but we're just all the stuff around your house you can just pick, hey, you know, you can just go and get a bunch of stuff, all the stuff around your house, you can just pick. Hey, this is my honest opinion on this thing.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And you just don't know what account could be multiple people Like. Could I have my kids do videos on my account and stuff too?

 

Stephen:

Yeah, I'm just not like the kids, so like if you're going to have a kid, you got to have you in it as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

like a minor or they have to be 18. My kids are over 18.

 

Stephen:

So yeah okay, then they could do it. Yeah, I mean one of the best side hustles, I feel like for a college kid like so so easy to do. You just need a cell phone, you just need time Maybe. I mean, we would batch like four or five videos a day and Chelsea would do some, I would do some, and we named our account like like family. So it was kind of like both of us, um and man, you can stack. I mean we, we did. Well, our goal was like to do 30, 30 videos. You know, just to get it started, I would say if someone's listening to this, they want to do this. I would commit to doing like 30 or a hundred videos to really see the effect of it. And then you can chill out and kind of just let that passive income come in and then just grow it as you want. And uh, I mentioned this before the call. But eventually you will run out of stuff to review right In your house and that's a good problem to have. Yeah, then you can start going to friends houses. You can start. You know, I mean you could even book an Airbnb and review everything in that house. I mean I've even this is really funny, but like I even reviewed something at a park one time, like that's someone else had like a stroller Cause like strollers are expensive and so like I just took a video of a stroller from far away. If someone else is trying, I wasn't showing their kids or anything like that, but I was like zooming in on my phone and I did a voiceover over it later, just talking through some of the benefits and things I was just reading on the listing, you know. So again it can get really creative with it. Um, of course we're not trying to manipulate sales or anything like that. Uh, like not trying to say something, that's not true. But I always go to the listing and I look at the reviews. Use helium 10 and you can analyze all the reviews and figure out what are the big questions people have. What are making what's, what are they loving about the product, what are they wanting to buy or what is what's drawing them to buying this product, that type of thing, and you can hit some of those things. Um, you can even throw all that into chat GPT and be like hey, write me a 30 second video review script and just literally read it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm going to. I'm going to try this, but but not not to throw water on the fire here. But this is something that later on, I predict Amazon is going to change, because, just knowing the way Amazon operates because, yeah, somebody's going to do a lawsuit or something, because theoretically, nobody's going to do a video, that's going to talk bad about it because that.

 

Stephen:

You know, like the whole purpose.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know, if you're an Amazon influence, you're trying to make money. You know, unless Amazon puts something in there where if you do a negative video but that's still real that somehow you still get some kickbacks, somebody's, somebody somewhere is going to do some kind of lawsuit just because this is such a country.

 

Stephen:

I do in a million videos or something like that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, but either way, guys, that's why you got to get on this now. Yeah, what they are doing, which is nice, now you can include two products in the video.

 

Stephen:

I wouldn't recommend it when your first game started, but you can do comparison videos, which I do like where you're like. Hey, are you thinking about buying this?

 

Bradley Sutton:

or this.

 

Stephen:

That's good. Let me tell you about the pros and cons.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And in the video. Does the video show up on both listing? It shows up on both, yeah.

 

Stephen:

You can tag two products in the video. But if you do it right at the beginning, amazon typically won't approve it and they are getting stricter on who gets approved into the program and you have to submit three videos when you first start and they approve or deny those and so if they deny them you can try again, like I think it's three times. If you deny it three times, then it's kind of like you got to try open up a new account or something.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Basically, yeah, Now, are you also? Is this the only thing you're doing under your influencers account? Or are you also maintaining, like a YouTube or Instagram where you're sending deals to? We actually are doing that.

 

Stephen:

You know, like we've had an Amazon Associated Account for I mean since probably 20, probably before I was even an Amazon seller. So we, you know I'm always recommending stuff, even when we are back when we were wedding photographers. People are always like what camera are you using? So we have an Associated Account. And then Chelsea has, she uses the influencer page for her Instagram. So she has like her favorite things on there. You know, here's the kids toys we love, and you know that type of thing. So you definitely like Amazon wants you to be legit, like they don't want you just like do it just for the influence of videos. So and that's a better long-term strategy to is like, have a YouTube channel, have a Instagram, make a tick tock that's like you know Favorite mom finds or something like that and just like, post your videos cross, post them when you're I mean you already recorded, I'm right, yeah, post them on Facebook, post them on tick tock as well, and that's gonna not only drive more traffic to Amazon but it's gonna make you look more legit, you know. So, yeah, you could really make this a business model again. Amazon could change things. Sure, it is a new wear program, but you could definitely ride this thing for the next year or two, I bet, and it makes some good cash from it.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Nice, all right, let's switch gears a little bit, come something completely different. Um sure, I noticed that sometimes you go to like these, you know, like masterminds for, like entrepreneurs, and, and you know you met like Saddam and and come off from a yeah, that's right, he went up there and stuff yeah and and I, I I haven't been to one, but but a lot of these you know, if I'm not mistaken, you know Some of them cost thousands, some of them tens of thousands of dollars to go to. And then so somebody you know, like me, on the outside Looking in might be like, you know, like hey, we all know about, hey, invest in yourself and this and that, but what is it about events that that has people coming out of these things and say you know what? It was worth $1000, like, like. Are you really getting that kind of value out of like these, these, these mastermind kind of events that you go to?

 

Stephen:

Yeah, I mean, I'll use that example. You know, amz, one step. I met those guys through mastermind and I mean for us, like I would say, you want to get in a mastermind of people? Like there's different masterminds for different reasons, right? So oftentimes that mastermind was going to was probably less for the Amazon business and more for the coaching business, right? Yeah, so we teach people how to do Amazon and so meeting people at those masterminds, like those guys, that was awesome, because I was like, hey, we got a big launch coming up like what do you want to throw in, you know? And so they threw in like an awesome bonus for our people that, like people can only get through our work, like for being in Our world, and if that helps.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I use them, by the way, too, for a lot of my photography, and oh man.

 

Stephen:

Yeah, so like if that helps a handful more people come in our program, like that, that so the networking itself.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Like like that you know they weren't the organizers of the event. But the people you meet can give you invaluable thing.

 

Stephen:

Okay, yeah yeah, like we met another guy who does like LLC creation and all like the legal entity stuff which, like our people need all the time, you know. So not one relationship basically paid for the match.

 

Bradley Sutton:

And that's a good point, because now it's like you know, it's not like you couldn't Google to find companies that do this kind of stuff, but but you know, you don't know if how legit they are, but you know somebody who is Gonna invest in themselves and pay a huge money to actually be at that place. It's almost like pre vetting them. Yeah, yeah, a little bit in itself.

 

Stephen:

I'm gonna do a lot of conferences, right, and like conferences you get a lot of gold out of, but it's like usually a lot of time frame, right, like are there three, four days, and then there might be like one or two. Like man, that nugget Added six figures, added a million dollars on the business, like that. One thing I found in these higher ticket masterminds like we're in, we're in a 50k mastermind or 60k mastermind, like it's just like it's so much more compressed because of who's in the room and like who's paying to be in the room, that like you're in the lunch line, you know, like to get your like potato salad and someone drops an idea on you. That's like, oh my god, that's like that was a million dollar idea, you know. So, and I think it's the connections of like everyone who's paying there like to be in the room. They have a lot of awesome connections to you know. So that network effect. I think like, yeah, like sometimes masterminds are more teaching and training and like you know, but, but the best ones I've been in are more relational and it's just like how can we build partnerships? How can we leverage each other's resources? How can we work together? How to serve our people at a higher level. So that's where I found the value. And just there's something about getting in person with people. You know you do it all the time, you know. It's just like it's different than zoom, right yeah.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah for sure, all right guys. So that's something you know. Regardless of what field you're in, you know there's always different masterminds that that can help you, you know, grow as a person, as a you know there's inspirational stuff and or or as a business, if you're entrepreneur, I mean even a helium tent as a mastermind. So so you know the helium 10 elite program. You know people can meet. You know can meet other high-level sellers. So if you think that some of you guys want to look into, look at h10.me forward slash elite. But on the other hand, I think there's a couple masterminds like non-amazon masterminds I was thinking of mainly for me might want to. You know, look into, maybe I can see if helium 10 can help me out with the With the bill because some of these are pretty expensive, but that's interesting. Always bet on yourself, always improve yourself and sometimes it takes takes money to do that. Going back to the your community now, any cool stories. You know, every year there's always cool stories coming out your community. I remember the one Person who I was doing some demo a couple years ago about it's right football product or something, and then I was just like making a joke, like man, if I this would probably be totally something that I would, I would sell and then she ended up selling it made you know thousands of dollars on it. But any other cool like rags to riches stories or just just something inspiring that you could share with audience man it's.

 

Stephen:

I love our community because we've really like Encourages, community of celebration. I think like it's really easy and like even the Amazon space or really any entrepreneur space, to get in a Competitive mode where it's like, oh, other people winning means like I'm not right and kind of like you think about yourself and you. You either try to like one up somebody you know or you try to like kind of Downgrade their success or like I don't know makes it. People can like oftentimes in the early days of their entrepreneurship journey, go to kind of like almost like I'm not enough, thinking Like I was, like oh, like dang, like it's like you can get in just lack mindset. So we've really tried to overcome that because really when we're helping people in our program, we're helping bring them out of poverty mindset right Into abundant thinking, and not just financially but in all the areas. So when they do have the money, when they are making the money, they don't just let those old mindsets hold them back still, you know. And so we found the way you celebrate other people really shows a lot about that mindset you developed. And so we just like kind of our community is just a thing, like when someone is winning big or small, they post it in the group and like everyone just goes crazy over it. You know, and it's just a really cool like contagious momentum and we had one the other day that I just I loved because she said, like she was posting, I think she had done like her first like $3,000 day on Amazon. She had, you know, was doing about $10,000 weeks at that point in her business. But she said, like you know, when she started the program she was in product research for like so long. You know, like you kind of get stuck in that analysis, paralysis, and she was just getting discouraged and she said she'd always come to the group and just look at the wins every night and she would just like when she was feeling discouraged she'd go look at everyone else's wins and she just be like this is gonna be me, this is gonna be me, this is gonna be me. So it's so cool to see her, like it was probably a year after she started posting the screenshot and being like now I get to be the person you know that like encourages you and like if you're in the dumps, right now and you're feeling discouraged, like here.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It is, you know, and like, which I think is the reason why, yeah, you should be part of a community. You know, sometimes like if that person was trying on their own, I would say odds are they might have just given up because they weren't getting that inspiration. You know from other people. You know nine out of 10 times that person who's stuck in the analysis paralysis they just go ahead and give up. You know perhaps, but being part of a community you could see, you know other people succeed and it inspires you to move on. So I think that's important.

 

Stephen:

Yeah, it's incredible man and I. That's what gets me fired up. I mean, yes, it's cool when we have a student make $40,000 in a day on it. Like we've had these crazy like people like crush huge numbers. Again, it's not the normal, sure. But what gets me more excited is the people that, like you know, we got flowers in the mail from someone who said, like I was depressed, I was suicidal, like I was, I had no hope in life, and then I found this, you know, and this community, plus the training, plus the mindset, like it gave me hope again. Like that, yeah, that's like beyond the money. So we kind of sometimes joke, we're kind of like you know, amazon's kind of the front, you know it's like, yes, we're teaching Amazon, but like entrepreneurship in general, I think is one of the biggest transformational, like vehicles that you can ever like go on. It's like it's like a roller coaster ride that like changes your life right, yeah, and I love it for that. That it's like who it makes you in the process. It's so powerful. So we love celebrating those. We call those the bubble over benefits. Like it's cool when people hit the numbers and make the money, but the bubble over benefits of like I retired my husband or you know, I was able to quit this job. That was soul sucking. Or I got hope again Like that is so crazy, so Right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now you know we can talk Amazon strategy all day long and stuff. But you know somebody like you who's dealt with so many sellers. You know and you help people, not just on the Amazon strategy but like you know mindset and you already handle a lot of that with a community and helping people. When we talked about the benefits of community, but what? are some other things that you see is is like the difference between those who succeed, and again, success doesn't mean a certain revenue figure. You know success is very subjective, but from those who succeed to those who you know end up, you know failing and giving up, because all the people in your community. They're given the same resources. You know they all have helium 10, you know they all, they all have you guys, they all have the same. You know training and stuff, but you know not. The fact of the matter is no program or no, anybody has a hundred percent success rate. So what are some of the things that that success or that not success? What are some of the things that differentiate the successes from the failures?

 

Stephen:

Totally. Yeah, we try to reverse engineer this because we basically have this thing called the 10K payday guarantee, and so to claim the 10K payday guarantee, which basically the short statement is, if you don't make $10,000, we'll pay you $10,000. But there's a ton of terms and conditions. So it's an action-based guarantee and we basically took our most successful students and we reverse engineer what they did and we put it in the guarantee. So, if you want to qualify for the guarantee, do this, this, this, this, and it's just like a checklist of all the stuff you got to do. And so I'd say the biggest thing is focus. Focus is a big one, especially for mom, especially for parents. Like you only have so many, so much time, right, and so we call this nutrients. Like you only have so much nutrients to put into your garden. If you're trying to do Amazon, you're also trying to day trade. You're also trying to, like, do this other Airbnb side, hustle over here. You're putting in just a tiny bit of nutrients. You're gonna grow like a lot of tiny pumpkins, right. But if you cut off a lot of pumpkins and you put all the nutrients into one, you're gonna grow like the award-winning pumpkin, right? There's a book called, I think, the Pumpkin, the Pumpkin I don't know something about pumpkins, where that came from and it's written by the guy who wrote profit first. But he talks about just like you just focus, right, and so that's a big one. We see, just I mean, they're like you know, bradley, like there's a thousand ways to make money on the internet, right, and so we really train people on like put blinders on for like nine months, like a year, like just give this thing your all for that amount of time. And whatever Facebook ad you see, don't click it. You know, just like do this thing. So I think that's a big one. We see people try to do too much and then they just go slower because of that or they get derailed into something else. The second thing I'd see we see a lot is really and we had a PhD neuropsychologist come into our group and really start training on this because she was talking about she works with like six and seven figure entrepreneurs on mindset and just the science behind like training your mind to go beyond where you're comfortable. And you know our body I'm gonna like not say this as sciencey as she would, but like you know, our body is like running a thousand automations at once, like I'm moving my hands, I'm breathing, I'm talking, I'm looking at you, I'm blinking. Like our body is designed, our brain is designed to automate those things because, like, if we had to think about all that, it would like destroy us, right? And so anytime you're doing something, really frequently your brain goes into really an automation and it's to keep you, come to us, keep you safe, just keep you. You know all these things. So when we stretch people into entrepreneurship or like hey, go spend $5,000 on inventory, right, like it's something that is like way beyond their current thinking sometimes. And so the brain will go whoa, chill, stop, slow down. Like hold on, I'm stuck. Like I'm stuck, I'm overwhelmed. These are actually, like we reframe them, as green flags that you're actually on the right track, cause we see people posting the group. I'm overwhelmed, I'm stuck. Right, we're like, oh, this is awesome. This means that we're stretching you this way, right, cause your brain is trying to keep you here, but that same thinking will keep you there. If you want to go here and have this amazing business, you gotta stretch and take this step here, you know. So we've kind of helped reframe the mindset thing. So when people are getting stuck. They know that it's a green flag and then they also know to reach out, cause we have a lot of different ways to support people. So that's the thing we see is people get stuck and then they don't reach out. They ghost us, you know, like we can't show up at their house and do that type of thing, yeah, and then I would say, so I said, focus getting stuck and not reaching out. And then I would say, like I would say PBC definitely has gotten way harder in this last season. And so I think, not having not going after, like I would say, either going after two low search volume products because they are on a kind of tight budget so they're going to have to really low search volume products, or going for, like way too high search volume products and not anticipating how much budget it takes to really rank and maintain rank on those search terms, you know. So it's like finding that middle ground, and so we've started to more train on that like kind of even budget training, of like hey, if you have this much devoted for your business, like spend this much on inventory, right, and leave this much for buffer room and leave this much for something you don't even know about yet, you know, because what we find is sometimes people stretch their budget on the first product so far, like you got 10,000, they spend all of it on inventory and then they have no buffer room to like keep it going, and then they got it, and then, if it is going, they got a reorder and then they're stuck right. So, training on that buffer. So just for people listening, if you're like I'm doing Amazon, I got this type of budget going in. I think, padding that budget right After you're not going all in on your inventory, you have budget room. I mean, you did this with that project. You launched a ton of products for like was it $5,000?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, so I don't know. 12 products for 5,000 project 5K. Do you have any?

 

Stephen:

budgeting rules. I'm just curious, selfishly, because we've been kind of developing it, but like even for that, did you have any budgeting rules, like how much of that budget you'd spend on one product?

 

Bradley Sutton:

No, like I just wanted to see how many. My budget was 5K total, like including, you know, launching and stuff. I was like, all right, what in the world can I do with? This was my challenge. And then I was like all right, a lot of them were like straws and then I launched a brand around that like stuff that had to even do with like straws and parties and stuff.

 

Stephen:

Is there just low cost to?

 

Bradley Sutton:

make. Was that what it was? Yeah, just low cost to make. It kind of sucks that now that there's no Amazon, small and light. So actually I started losing some money on those products in the last few weeks that Amazon took away that program, but I mean, my goodness, like I discontinued some of them. They weren't all home runs, you can't be 12 out of 12. But still, like there are some products. I think I started that thing like four, three, four, five years, no, four years ago, and I'm still selling, you know, some. Like you know, I'm even bringing back one I'm going to do a little case study on it that it was really popular around Christmas time and I haven't sold it in, like you know, two years and so it's been dead. And I just ordered, you know, some new ones to see if I can get some traction. But yeah, the budget is. It was definitely critical. But you know, I tell people like, just because, like you can do it, this is not advisable because you know nobody can make a living off of products that are retailing for like $7, $8, which is what you have to do when you're trying to get products that your cost is less than a dollar, which it was for unit, yeah, so, yeah, yeah.

 

Stephen:

So we're encouraging people, like we kind of we kind of ask them what their budget is and then we kind of encourage them to stretch it a little bit and whether you're leveraging financing or, honestly, like we've seen a handful of people do partnerships, where you just are getting an inventory investor and that sounds fancy, but I mean that means like a friend or a family member who has heard about Amazon but doesn't really want to do the work, and so we found a lot of people doing that and, honestly, I would, I would. One of the easiest things to do is go to go to someone who has an audience too, like, if you can go to someone like you know, you're listening to the show, you have that one friend who has like an Instagram following. Go to her and go hey, I'm learning about e-commerce, I'm launching this product. Would you ever have interest in launching a product for your audience, you know, and then like, develop it with them, and then, basically, you do all the work, you do all the sourcing and then you get a percentage of the sales you know and that that's a no risk way to get into it. Or someone else is fronting the money for the inventory. They already have the audience, not only the Amazon data of the traffic there, but they already are going to promote it and that audience loves them. Buy anything they shall, you know, talk about. So that's another way we've seen people do it, where they are basically making it rain for someone else and then they're making a percentage of that and that's making their own pot and now they have their own money. Actually, that that that wallet brand Kingsloo, one of our Rainmakers, went through our challenge and she got hired by that company, oh wow, and she built their Amazon brand. I mean, they were, they were doing about eight figures like 10 to 12 million on just Shopify with that product. You know, just Facebook had to Shopify and they weren't even on Amazon. But when we looked at the helium 10 data, it was like people searching their brand on Amazon right, yeah, you'll see the Facebook guy and come over, and so she built it out and like, built a I mean they did a million dollars on just like the Amazon channel. And then we recently worked with them because I'm a good good friends with Josh and we re-did his listing cause he was just ranked on his brand keywords, like you know, but he wasn't on slim wallet for men or any of these like big keywords, and so we reworked it. Maldives launched it again and it like basically I don't know exactly but it it almost doubled or tripled his Amazon sales Like he was doing. He was doing. I remember him saying me screenshots of like right after the launch and it was like he's doing. He was doing I think 8,000 or something like that a day and he went up to like 25,000, 30,000. And this was like Q4 last year. So I don't know what his numbers are now, but it's crazy Like there's so many Shopify owners should just like they're cranking on Shopify but they have no idea about Amazon or they have false beliefs about Amazon. That's a whole nother market. If you're trying to get into Amazon, be an Amazon account manager for people on Shopify. When you have those Shopify ads for, like those DTC products, go look on Amazon. If they're not on Amazon or they're on Amazon and their listing is terrible, like there's an opportunity there and it's hard to like work that type of deal sometimes, but if you can like, that's incredible.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah. So your program, you know, before we get to the last couple of strategies you might have, I was just looking at your website. It says you've had over 12,000 moms go through the program there. So if somebody is interested in it, is that like a prerequisite? They need to be a stay at home or working mom or what kind of a requirements do they have?

 

Stephen:

You know you just need to be motherly. No, that can be anybody. When we started, like you know, this is definitely a strategy for Amazon too. Like you want to have a niche, you know you want to, like, really focus on one person. So we, when we looked at our top case studies with our training, it was moms, and so we really made the program for moms when we first started. And when we first started was a lot of stay at home moms. Now it's a lot of working moms, a lot of corporate moms and it's a lot of non moms as well. So really we're just family first and so we're not going to tell you to just hustle your life away or going to tell you like, hey, build this business, but do in a way that protects your family, protects your marriage and all those things. So if you have a family mindset, you can definitely check us out. Yeah, and how can they do that? I'd say go to the. Go to rainmakerfamily.com. Rainmakerfamilycom that's like our, our branded website. You can find our social media there. We have a challenge, seven day challenge. You can get to there. That's what I was talking about. Like we've had people go through that and even just that launch, launch products, and you'll see, you'll see Bradley in there on a bonus day.

 

Bradley Sutton:

If you make it like this is one of the few. Actually no, this is the only community that almost every other week I do a, I do a call with them because you know your community is one of the best out there and so I wanted to make sure that you know I give back because you guys are doing some great stuff and really great community. Like I was just set the Amazon. Accelerate in Seattle and met some Rainmakers that came up took some pictures so that was. that was cool too, so all right so yeah, rainmakerfamily.com. Guys, if you want to, you know, check out the program Now. What's a couple of you know could be Amazon, anything else, e-commerce or some strategies you can leave us with today.

 

Stephen:

Man, I feel like I'm trying to remember the ones I said last time, you know. So, like, I think the one we've been geeking out on again we're still testing this but really is, how can we increase the average cart value on Amazon? Right On Shopify? Like you can have upsells, downsells, cross-sells, like you, you know you can have that funnel, but on Amazon it's just harder to do that. And I feel like I saw Amazon testing this for a season, like they had like a way you could like, oh, add this other thing on there, but I haven't seen it recently. And so what we've been doing is using inserts, basically upsell because, like again, not everyone's going to take an upsell on that, but if you make it really attractive and in alignment with your product, a percentage of people will click through on that thing and a percentage of those people will buy. And so the best way to do this with Amazon, honestly, is like doing a high ticket upsell of some sort. So imagine you're selling, like I don't know, a dog whistle for training, right? Like having an insert that says, like you know, get our free guide on blah, blah, blah, and that free guide leads to a dog training course that's $297. So, like I love pairing information products with physical products because you've already kind of like, spent money to acquire that customer, so to say, right, you pay the PVC, you got them, you know you, you sold them a $15 whistle. If you could Not even make money there, but then a percentage of people buy the $297 course right on the back end, then it increases your margins like crazy and you can spend more than anyone else on that product because you don't need to make money on the product. Actually, you know money in the back end from a percentage of the people that come through. So the tricky part is figuring out, like what's really in alignment with that product, that's that solves problems that that person is buying the product for, right. So yeah, every product Usually solves some sort of problem, right? It's like I, my kid is biting the rail on the crib. We, I, so like he, buy the crib rail bumper, right, like that was one of our, am our Rainmaker products. So like, what other problems does that parent? Half right as it with a two-year-old? So you just start thinking like how could I serve that person at the highest level? How could I? How could I give more value than anyone else in this industry? Right, and yet you could do other physical products, but those take time and and the best thing I would honestly do is give them something for free that you're gonna get, sir, contact information, and then you can ask more question about it, and then you can develop something for them that serves them at a high level, or you can develop future products for them, you know. So I know a lot of people take people from an insert to like a free download or something like that. But I'm kind of thinking through, like, how can we take them to Something that is actually an offer? Right, it's like it may be a free thing at first, it has to be catch it, don't? You can't just say, like, buy my thousand dollar course yeah, no, I mean her and have people click it. Like it has to be like something that truly is like oh wow, I'm gonna scan this QR code or click this link or whatever. And so, yeah, we, we another thing, our Rainmakers doing just like if you know, we're talking about Amazon Associates, as they will link to their other Products in their shop using affiliate links on the insert. So like, and they will even do this for other people's products in our community. So this is really cool. Like, oh, Rainmakers, if, like, they have a baby product, they'll go post in our group who else has baby products? And they'll find like three or four other products and they'll say basically, like, check out, check out our you know, check out our friends, and it's like three other products, but they're using affiliate links. So even if you're just making a couple dollars on that, it's increasing. I mean, you might spend a couple dollars to get the customer on PPC. So it's just this idea of like how could we steward those sales more? Um, Alex Hermosi said like if you could get one more sale ever and it had to lead to like every other sale in your business, like how would you change the customer experience you know, and like what, what does that delivery look like? Right, if you start thinking that way, like how could this one sale lead to every sale, it starts making you think a little differently of like how can you Serve someone out of Super High Level and invite them into kind of a deeper relationship with your business?

 

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, you know so yeah, interesting, all right, well, that's, that's a. That's a good one. I'm I know my memories bad, but I'm almost 99% sure we did not talk about that before, so that's new stuff, all right, well, steven, thank you so much for joining us again. Again, congratulations on all the success and and look forward to you know, always, you know being around there for your, your community, more and and hopefully we get to a link up. It's been a while since we've seen each other in person, so hopefully we get to link up at one of these events coming up. You know you need to make your own like, like big, like kind of like get away or event.

 

Stephen:

We're gonna go to Cancun. You want to come? I'm down, I'm down. Yeah, I'll send you down. I'll send you to work.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Put me to work, I'll, I'll serve, I'll serve, I'll serve the meals there. I'll do whatever you want, I just want to hang out with your communities.

 

Stephen:

I love that. Thanks, thanks a lot.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Please get give my regards to the family, and we'll be seeing you soon, all right.

#494 - Amazon PPC Optimization, Launches, And Budget Strategies

On this episode, we're excited to have Liran Hirschkorn from Incrementum Digital sharing his expertise on Amazon advertising. He helps us unpack the complex Amazon Marketing Cloud and how it anonymizes data for privacy reasons while still offering a comprehensive understanding of the customer's journey to conversion. We further examine how the platform aids brands in measuring incrementality, particularly those utilizing Amazon DSP ads. Don't miss out as we delve into the Amazon PPC techniques for reaching new customers through upper funnel-type marketing and showing ads to lifestyle markets and demographics.

We continue the conversation by discussing strategies to optimize Amazon ads campaigns. This includes the merits of creating separate campaigns for each target and employing auto campaigns for discovery. We also weigh the pros and cons of negating keywords in both auto and manual campaigns. Pay attention as we explain the potential benefits of lowering bids to secure better placements and possibly more conversions. 

As we wrap up the episode, we shift our focus to optimizing sales and advertising on Amazon. Here, we discuss tactics such as increasing prices to slow sales and avoid running out of stock to boost keyword ranks. We look into managing auto campaigns differently and using modifiers to safeguard against broad and exact match keywords. Listen in as we discuss the importance of making incremental changes and evaluating clicks and actual spend data, instead of just impressions, when optimizing campaigns. Liran also offers valuable insights into sponsored display campaigns and other strategies to ensure high conversion rates for keyword ranking. Don't miss this vital conversation and Q&A on Amazon PPC and Marketing Cloud!

In episode 494 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Liran discuss:

• 00:50 - Catch Liran At The Helium 10 Elite Workshop In New York
• 01:49 - What Is The Amazon Marketing Cloud?
• 09:08 - An Advice If You’re Using Amazon DSP
• 11:29 - Auto Campaign Optimization
• 12:12 - ACoS Targets And Examples
• 15:03 - Optimizing For Target ACoS
• 23:53 - Keywords and Budget Per Campaign 
• 25:22 - PPC Strategy When Running Out Of Stock
• 26:35 - Using Modifiers For Amazon PPC
• 27:23 - Best Time To Start Optimizing Campaigns
• 33:41 - Amazon Launch PPC Strategy
• 36:28 - More Effective PPC Strategies From Liran
• 41:43 - How To Reach Liran Hirschkorn And Incrementum Digital

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today is TACoS Tuesday, so we're bringing on another advertising expert to answer all of your Amazon PPC questions, including the latest on product launches and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Want to keep up to date with trending topics in the e-commerce world? Make sure to subscribe to our blog. We regularly release articles that talk about things such as shipping and logistics, e-commerce and other countries, the latest changes to Amazon Seller Central, how to get set up on new platforms like New Egg, how to write and publish a book on Amazon KDP and much, much more. Check these articles out at h10.me forward slash blog.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly TACoS Tuesday program, where we bring a special guest every single month and we talk about anything and everything Amazon and Walmart PPC related. And so you guys hopefully you've been getting some of your questions ready. I've been getting some questions ready that I'm going to be giving to our guest, and let's get them all answered. So, without any further ado, let's go ahead and bring on our guest, loran Hirschkorn from Incrementum Digital. Liran in the house. How's it going, man?

Liran:

It's going great. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm excited to be here Awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome, now you're still in New York. Is that where you're based on? I'm in New York, yes, okay, I was just there a few weeks ago, took the family out there, be going one or two times again in October, and one of the times is I'm going to be seeing you. You're going to be our guest speaker at our Helium 10 Elite workshop. Do you know yet what you're going to be talking about there? Can we give anybody a sneak peek?

Liran:

all Possibly Amazon Marketing Cloud is what's been on my mind, but we'll see, I guess, if that stays the topic or maybe we want to get some feedback from the audience. There's a lot of very interesting things happening with the Amazon Marketing Cloud. We could talk a little bit about that here as well, let's just start with that real quick.

Bradley Sutton:

I think there's a lot of people in our audience who don't even know what Amazon Marketing Cloud is. Can you explain that a little bit?

Liran:

Yes, so the Amazon Marketing Cloud is essentially what's called a clean data room. Essentially, it's just a think about it as a place that hosts a lot of data and through AWS, and what it allows brands to accomplish now that you couldn't do before is understand the. I would say two main things One, understand the full customer path to conversion and to create audiences that you couldn't before. Let's tackle each one of those. When we say understand the full customer path to conversion, today we think we understand how a customer buys your product, but you don't really understand it Meaning if a customer searches your brand, clicks on a sponsored brand ad, then comes back, clicks on a sponsored product ad and they buy, the only thing, the only area where you're going to see the attribution of the sale is to sponsored product, because that was the last click and advertising works on the last click attribution. What the Amazon Marketing Cloud does is it stores all that information and it anonymizes the data for privacy reasons. So you don't have the specific customer information, but what the Amazon Marketing Cloud will show you is that you had this month, for this particular product, you had 100 customers that their path to conversion was branded search click sponsored product ad click sponsored display buy or see a DSP ad awareness ad search to brand name click sponsored product purchase. Because of this, what's happened historically is especially for those people that have done DSP in trying to understand whether or not DSP has incremental benefit on the sales Incremental. I see what you did there. Yeah, somebody told me that it was a very smart name to create a few years ago because really that is kind of what's being measured here. Incrementality is being measured with the Amazon Marketing Cloud because in the past if you did a DSP ad and you would be hard to understand if you actually drove more sales as a result of DSP, this will help that a little bit because it will show you how many customers you had this month that purchased when they just saw both, let's say, dsp and sponsored products together and how many customers you had that only saw sponsored products, for example. So you'll get a better understanding.

Liran:

Even though the way attribution works is it only goes to the last click, I always thought Amazon should have an assist kind of metric where if you had an ad that assisted as part of the process, it should kind of get something. But that's just not how ads work and Amazon Marketing Cloud aims to solve that. And the more you do DSP, especially with upper funnel type marketing, the less you see the attribution there. So when I say upper funnel type marketing, that means upper funnel means not somebody that is immediately looking to buy. So bottom funnel. We have people that are searching for a keyword. They're ready to buy. People that you are retargeting, who have visited your listing they're at the bottom, they're ready to buy. As we move up the funnel you have people that have viewed competitors but not your product. And then you have what's called awareness. We can, as brands grow and they want to scale and they've already sort of maxed out based on, like, the amount of sales they can have, just based on people who are searching for a keyword. They want to look towards brand awareness.

Liran:

But now you're running ads to audiences on Amazon or lifestyle. You have different markets and demographics that you can show ads to. What happens is when you run an awareness ad, that person is not going to immediately see that ad and go by. They might need to see your ad over three, four months and then, when they are actually in the market for that product, they now remember your name and when they go search on Amazon, they see that sponsored product ad. They're going to click on it and buy it because they recognize the brand name and they've seen the ad before. The problem is that again, it'll usually end up being something else sponsored products or retargeting that is the last view they have. Or click before the sale. And you have been running these awareness ads but you don't know if they're being impactful. Well, now, with Amazon Marketing Cloud, you'll see that that person actually started out with the Amazon Marketing Cloud.

Liran:

And I would urge people if you're running DSP, have whoever's running DSP free, whether that's Amazon, whether that's an agency ask them to create an AMC instance for you. And the reason is because, whether or not you're going to use AMC now or not, once you create that instance, you can go back a year. You have a year's worth of data since you started creating it. So that means if in six months from now or nine months from now, you want to go back and you want to see the path to conversion, et cetera, you will have already created that instance. And then the other area where AMC is very helpful is you can now create audiences that you cannot create before because you are tracking this data. So in DSP, historically before we couldn't target people who we couldn't differentiate between people who have visited your listing or added your product to cart. Now you'll be able to retarget people who have added your product to cart. You'll be able to retarget people who have added your product to wishlist, who have searched your brand name. So lots of different audiences.

Liran:

There's something with AMC that is called Paid Insights, where you actually pay Amazon for additional information. With that you can see on average how many buys it takes somebody to become a subscribe and save customer. So you can learn that on average it's three purchases before somebody signs up. Because typically on our first purchase we don't typically sign up for subscribe and save unless we know we like the product. And sometimes it could take your second or third purchase where, like, why am I not just saving and just adding this to subscribe and save? So now you'll be able to understand that and you'll be able to actually create a custom creative and show and add to people after two purchases that says subscribe and save right, because you know that's the typical time where people do that and you're able to create those creatives. So there's a lot that you could do with this.

Liran:

It's very powerful, but I would say it's still early and people understanding it. I would say a year from now, like today, you're an early adopter If you use it. A year from now you won't be an early adopter if you use it. And also a year from now, I think it will apply more whether you're doing DSP or not doing DSP. More software tools will incorporate some data from it and you'll find that there is sort of this freemium model that if you're using software, certain tools will give you the certain templates of different audiences and different path to conversion. That is included with the software and certain tools will say okay, now if you wanna get crazy and customized because you can customize almost anything within this data you'll have fees around extracting that data. But I'm sure companies probably like Pacvue et cetera the Pacvue is, I'm sure, already incorporated AMC and are working on incorporating more and more of it and you'll see those tools continue to add those things and if you're using those software tools, you'll be able to access that data and it will become more prominent.

Liran:

So it is very exciting. Today it applies more so if you're using DSP, but I think that's going to change down the line. So it's. I think it's important that brands understand this and it will kind of change the way we look at our metrics from being focused just on ROAS   to being more to having an understanding of also customer journey as well as ROAS  , because again you're gonna have that sponsored brand ad that's not gonna show the ROAS   attribution but you'll say, hey, I know, when I do this sponsored brand ad together with this sponsored product ad, the purchase rate is higher, and so now you're gonna be looking at these combinations and customer journey more so than just ROAS  , and those that do will have an advantage because they'll be able to understand that sometimes that spending more without seeing the RoAS   still equals ROAS   actually on your ad spend. So it's pretty cool and I think you'll hear more and more about it over the next year or so.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. So we're gonna be talking about that, perhaps at our elite workshops, so elite members can go to that one. We'll have tickets for non-elite members, if anybody's gonna be there in town. The reason why we're having it in New York is it's Amazon Unbox, which is a cool conference. I haven't been to it. This could be my first one. It was my first Amazon Accelerate last week, so that was super cool. All right. Now, switching back to advertising, I wanna ask my questions first here. So I got a list of stuff I've been waiting for to ask Leeran. But one that I've been getting a lot in I thought it was a good thing to bring out is auto campaign optimization. So you know, with auto campaigns, obviously this, almost more than any other you know, can get super out of control if Amazon is showing you for a bunch of random stuff. But I'm wondering, how do you, how do you optimize for ACoS on Campaigns?

Bradley Sutton:

Because you can get to a point where I mean I mean obviously the no-brainer thing is alright. Hey, if you should have rules in place where they're using atomic or whatever software, using is, you know, if you get, like you know, 15, 20 clicks or whatever magic number you guys pick without a sale, you know, might start negative matching. That that's that. That goes without saying, right. But the other thing you know that people can do is maybe they see some of their, their targets Not performing well, like the loose match, the close match, and they could start, you know, adjusting on an individual basis those targets.

Bradley Sutton:

Right, but if you, even if you're doing that, I've seen sometimes you can get to the point where now you're almost all the way down to like a 10 cent. You know target and just, and now you know the quality of keywords at 10 cents. You're just not doing well, but you almost got to that point because, right, so so I, what, what do you do at that point? Should you just you know what I'm gonna go back from 10 cents to a dollar just so I can get some new keywords? But like, where do you draw that balance?

Liran:

Right. So the first thing is you can also create four separate campaigns where you literally turn off Three and keep one on, so you have a set budget. So your budget is not mixed together within those, within each of those areas, because, because you might have, you know, similar products that do very well, but you might have a loose match that doesn't do well, right. So that's something you could do is separate out those four, turn one off on each campaign and then you have a dedicated budget for each one and if something is working well, you can increase the budget. If something's not working well, you can also decrease the budget. And, yes, the first thing, first thing also to recognize, is that auto, mainly, should be there for discovery, discovery tool. So, number one, you may want to allow your auto campaigns to go add a little bit of a higher ACoS, what you want overall, because you want it to be there as a discovery tool. And, yes, you want to Ultimately add negative keywords and you also want to harvest. So that means the Search terms that are converting, the aces that are converting, whatever your rule is whether it's to converge one conversion to conversion, three conversions. You want to move them over into the manual campaign. Now you can also choose to another, like personal decision, if you're going to negate that keyword in the auto campaign or not.

Liran:

Negate their pros and cons to both. If you negate it in the auto, you have full control in the manual. What if in the manual it doesn't get as much traction as it did in the auto? Right, and you're already. Now you negated in the auto and it doesn't get traction in the manual. That would be a reason not to negate in the auto campaign, but still you would ultimately have a higher bid and a more targeted bid in your manual campaign, where it should be getting traction there and not so much in the auto. Anymore, I would say the point is, don't let auto be too much a percentage of your overall spent and Maybe allow it to be somewhat of a higher ACoS because you recognize that it's a broad discovery type of tool.

Bradley Sutton:

Another situation. Let's say I've got a target, ACoS for a campaign just you know Doesn't have to be auto but my target ACoS is 40%. So you know I want my targets For also, you know, at the target level to be 40%. But on one target let's go ahead and say it's a broad, it's a broad match target. I'm at 77% now my cost per click on it is. Or my target that I had, you know the current bid was 291. Let's just say $2.91. Let's just say close call, $3. I'm looking at an exact example now. Let's say it's $3. If my cost per click is 250, right. So I'm obviously not maxing out my target. If my target is $3, right. But at this this to at this 250, I'm still at 70%. I mean right, why my target was at $3 in the first place. Let's just forget about that. I don't know what I was doing there right, but, obviously I have to go down a lot, you know you have to go down to 250 to make a difference.

Bradley:

Yeah, definitely below, below 250. But but is there, like you know, if 250 already is 77%, you know, should I already try and get or put the target at whatever, whatever 40% is gonna be, or is there value in just going down incrementally, like if I just go 250, technically it still couldn't now I was already getting 250. Right, right, I'm still gonna be at 70% or 77% ACoS. Should I just go down more and say, hey, I'm gonna go down to $2 because that's gonna get me closer to 40%, or do I start? Is there any value in? All, right, I'm gonna go to 250 and then let me go to 240 and 230. What is your thoughts there?

Liran:

There can be value in going to 230, let's say and I'll tell you what the value is the value is that the placement that you get may be better than the placement that you get at $2 and that placement can influence the conversion. So, for example, at 230, you may be at the bottom of page one at $1.70, you may be only on product pages, for example, and your conversion rate may be much less on those product pages. So there is a benefit in going incrementally and not going too fast. I would say it depends on how much it's spending and how important it is for you to cut ACoS. I would also say it's important to understand the relevancy of the keyword. If it's not such a relevant keyword and my feeling is well, it may not work. Or it's not highly relevant, it may not work. My feeling is it's not gonna work so well, probably at 240 either. Then I may just bring it down further.

Liran:

But if it's an important keyword, if I'm maintaining ranking, I would try to understand what's happening. Is it ACoS per click issue or is it a conversion issue? It could be ACoS per click issue. It could be that, yeah, three bucks 250 is expensive and it's a $12 product and my conversion rate is good. It's just ACoS per click issue. If so, I would try to bring it down more incrementally and to see what I'm comfortable with. Maybe I'm okay allowing that keyword to be at 50% ACoS ultimately. So I think it depends on the keyword, the importance of the keyword and how much I'm focused around like TACoS versus growth in sales. But the benefit you have in the incrementality is the placement is that your conversion rate may be better at a. You may just end up being on like product pages at a certain point and if you are, your visibility or clicks your conversions are gonna be a lot less, maybe based on the product than in the search results.

Bradley Sutton:

And then when you say, when you end up on product pages, it's like somebody searched that target keyword, they clicked on another product and then now you're showing up on the product page, correct, exactly because placements even when you're targeting keywords, placements are happening on search results and product pages.

Liran:

So I would say, generally speaking, with PPC you're better off making smaller, faster incremental changes and looking at data than making vast, big changes quickly.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Next thing is the flip side. Let's say my target ACoS is 40%. With what I'm getting right now, though, it's only 10%. Would it be 10 out of 10, 100% of the situations? I should always and I'm maxing out my target Should I always increase my bid Because, theoretically, I could be leaving money on the table, depending on where my placement is? Or is there a situation where I would, hey, let's just keep that 10%?

Liran:

You know I wouldn't say no. I mean I wouldn't say all the time, I would just say Because, again, it could be just helping you be more profitable. One report that you could look at is the search term impression report, because that report would give you an idea of how you rank compared to other brands in terms of impressions for that particular keyword. So, for example, you could be getting the most impressions out of any other brand and getting 60 or 70% of all the impressions. Probably not in that case, because you're maxing out the cost per click, but you want to see kind of where you are and how much more room is there to get impressions. Now, generally, I would say yes. For me, most of the time I would want to increase the bid for that particular keyword and I would want to get more market share on that keyword. But if you're very focused on profitability and this is helping your TACoS be at the target then maybe not. But what I would say, though, in that case you may want to consider let's say you don't want to increase your budgets anymore you may want to consider shifting budget. Find the stuff that's not working as well, where you can reduce the bids, and then maybe allocate it to this keyword. Generally speaking, I would say I would be likely to increase the bids on that keyword.

Liran:

If I was under my overall, I would look at it on a kind of a campaign level, not on a particular keyword level. So if my goal for that campaign is a 40% ACOS and because of this keyword on my 30, then I would definitely increase. Now if I'm at 40 still because there's other keywords that are 50 or 60, I would see maybe I need to move budget from those keywords and I should give it to this one. So I'm not increased my budget, but I'm a lot more efficient and I'm getting better sales. I would also see where's my ranking for the keyword. If I'm ranked number one, maybe I don't increase. There's no sense to increase, right. Or if I'm ranked number one, two, three, right, maybe I don't increase because I might just be cannibalizing my organic sales. But again, if I'm number 17, I'm definitely pushing on this keyword and probably what I'm doing is, if it has enough volume, I'm moving into its own campaign. I'm adding a top of search multiplier on that keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

All right Question from Jonathan. Keywords per campaign. You go from one spectrum where there's people who do single keyword campaigns. You go to another spectrum. Some people have like 50 targets. Let's just start with that part of his question first.

Liran:

So I would say we're somewhere in between, meaning your highest search volume keywords, most important keywords, we isolate really into their own campaigns and then from there, based on search volume and performance, we'll group keywords together. I would say probably up to 30 to 50 keywords is max of what I would go per campaign. If you have a lot of long tail lower volume keywords, I think that's okay. But definitely the highest search volume keywords or keywords that have sort of medium volume, I might group into groups of five to 10, for example. As far as budget per campaign, that's very dependent on what is your overall budget? What is the performance like? Right, I'm generally going to be shifting my budgets. I'm not going to just put a budget. I'm going to be shifting my budget to the best performing budget campaigns and I'm going to be maybe taking budget away from my poorest performing campaigns. So I think the budget needs to be dynamic.

Liran:

I think when your question more budget or discovery or scaling, I think in the beginning you're going to probably have more budget on your broad and phrase than on your exact match. As you uncover those best performing search terms, you're going to move more into exact and have probably more budget there. But it's very common that we find phrase match be the best performing keyword type and you'll have most of our budget on that match type. It's sort of in between discovery and very narrow targeted. But I think over time you're going to put more budget on your scaling campaigns. In the beginning you're going to put more budget on your discovery campaigns Because your scaling really should be your best performing keywords. So that's where you're going to allocate more budget to and less so on discovery, because you've already discovered a lot of what's out there initially.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, Kind of a universal. This question has been around for years. People have different opinions on this. Hey, you're doing great on sales, about to run out of stock. Do you slow sales by raising price and turning off ads and then that hurts your potentially keyword ranks before? Or do you just go hard and heavy, run out of stock and then just get back in and hopefully you still have your keyword ranks when you come back in the stock in a couple of weeks?

Liran:

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

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of auto campaigns, exact campaigns, it's in my opinion I don't know if Amazon announced anything, but just in my opinion I've seen other people say the same thing where what used to be broad and what used to be exact is not like three years ago, is not the same now, where now you have an exact campaign and sometimes you're even shown for what you would have thought would have been a phrase match or even broad matching in some situations. Because of this, are you managing things differently at all, like using modifiers or things like that?

Liran:

Yeah, I would say use modifiers. Modifiers will help protected because if you use a modifier then it forces it to be a true exact modifier before each word in your keyword. But even with that, sometimes there are certain synonyms that Amazon considers the same. You just need to manage it with search terms and negative keywords and bids. But yeah, amazon is definitely trying to find ways to increase their advertising revenue. As a result, they're being more generous in what they are considering your keyword and using synonyms. So use of modifiers will help protect against that Used to be. They started doing it just in sponsor brands and then we've seen this year Amazon doing it with sponsored products also.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Another question let's say I'm trying to optimize for my target A-cost and so I make a change, because I'm trying something similar to what we were talking about. Like I'm at 70%, I'm trying to get to 40%, so I lower my bid a little bit. Now how often are you going back to that and seeing all right now I need to further because you talk about doing some incrementality in order to further adjust that. Like, is it time-based because of that attribution window where you can kind of take a look at it, or is it like maybe I just get another? I can see that in one day I got 500 impressions just because this is maybe some super high search volume keyword? Is that enough data where even a day later I'm further making changes, or once you make a change? Basically, my question is what are you looking at as far as when it's time to go ahead and optimize further? Is it impression-based or time-based?

Liran:

It's based on the data and so I would say one it depends on your budget, right? Because the more budget you have, the more data you're going to have that's coming in faster. I still wouldn't make change from one day to the next because you don't have the full attribution coming in. Even if you see, ultimately, that maybe you didn't have any sales at all, like you know right, like you just know that you didn't have orders from it, I still wouldn't make change from one day to the next. I would wait a few days. So, generally speaking, I would say it's good to be in your account two or three max times, probably a couple times a week to optimize. I think is good, because the one thing you don't want to do is make changes too often where you're just messing yourself up, and this is something we see also with sellers. They're impatient, right, because you don't want to spend money you don't need to spend, and I think everyone gets emotional when it comes to your money. But I would say two days a week is good to go in and make those optimizations. So if you did it on a Tuesday, go back in on a Saturday, or find two days a week that you go in and you're making those changes Now. Again, if you have a ton of data, a lot of spend, maybe make those two days a little closer, like Monday and Friday, or a little closer to each other. But you want to give it enough time also to get the attribution, because there will be people that and impressions. I would look at clicks and actual data of spend, not just the impressions. But people do come back and buy also, right? So if somebody you could have gotten 10 clicks today and if one or two of those become sales, maybe the costs will be fine and you have people that come back three days later. So you do really want to give some time and the attribution window to be in place. I would say most products on Amazon people do buy the same day. They're not very high-priced products, but it does also happen.

Liran:

So give yourself a few days in between changes and even if you're using software that even has rule-based things, then you can give the software days like look on Monday, look on Saturday, look on Friday and also when we do give software rules, you want to make sure when you're decreasing bids one of the things you want to make sure that you're doing just like an example that you said. The rules that we give it is lower OK, if keyword is above target ACoS, lower cost per click by 5%, let's say right, because if you lower bid you may not be reaching the cost per click like you said. So you want to make sure that if you're using a rule-based tool, that you're looking at the cost per click when you're lowering and that you give it, because a lot of times softwares will have both the ability to lower your bid or your cost per click that you lower your cost per click and yeah, we like to do it incrementally. I wouldn't want to go in and say lower by 20%, just lower the bid too much, lower 5% below, then let's see. And then the software will be doing this twice a week.

Liran:

So over a couple of weeks you are going to be significantly lowering your bid where it should be enough of a change. But I would say it's better to go a little slower than make drastic changes. Usually drastic changes are emotional and in business you want to separate yourself from some of that, which is why rule-based is good. But even if you're not using rule-based software, set up rules for yourself on how you're going to manage this based on the different circumstances. It's not a bad idea to write down for yourself what are the rules that I'm going to use to manage, if I'm managing manually as if I'm software, and what days am I going in. How much am I lowering and maybe take some of the emotion out of the management.

Bradley Sutton:

Another question, now that you know, obviously for a couple of years now, you know things like two step URLs search, find by are explicitly against Amazon terms of service. Me personally, 100% of my launch strategy is, you know, ppc. You know, and it's almost I'm almost giving it the same thing as when it was searched fine by. It's still kind of search fine by right. It's just not. You're not. You're not just trying to tell people to randomly search and stuff, which is what Amazon frowns on. But you know, I lower my price by a lot in the beginning. You know big sale price or big coupon, and then I try and do a super high top of search and then it's basically I'm trying to get people to search fine, to buy it. You know, even though I have no reviews where they're like, hey, this is a this price. You know, like, just, you know, I can't you know I can't let this go. So that's my 100% launch strategy. Now, other people I hear you know sometimes they couple it with, maybe like press releases or or perhaps even Google advertising. Right, you know as well. What about you, for you and your clients, for launch, when you're trying to launch on a certain keyword, right, are you strictly doing Amazon PPC? Are you using other techniques? If so, what?

Liran:

we're strictly doing Amazon, and we do it exactly the way you do it, meaning, first of all, the keywords that were focused on ranking. We will give them their own campaign, we will utilize top of search placement, we will recommend to our client to come with an aggressive price coupon, and we do it exactly that. The one thing we really watch for is the conversion rate. Okay, because if the conversion rate is poor, we're not going to get the ranking, and so what we focus on, once we start getting the data in, is the keywords that we're not getting that conversion rate. If it's across the board, then something on the listing side, the price or you know, we need some more reviews to come in. But if we see some keywords performing very well with a conversion rate and some not, we will pull back on those, on those that are not getting the conversion rate, and that really should be. That should very much be your focus when you're launching with those keywords are you converting? If you're converting, then you should you know you should start seeing the rankings coming in. We had a call with a client today and he said, hey, I'm not seeing the ranking. And I said to him that's because we're, that's because your conversion rates are too low and he actually just lowered the price on a product today and we're going to see if that makes an improvement. But you should be very focused on conversion rate and we've seen the ability to be able to rank, especially when you have a new product and you have this honeymoon period, just with PBC. I don't. I don't think you you have to do Google or outside traffic or anything crazy. Amazon will reward you if you are getting sales velocity plus conversion rates on those keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now for the last, you know five minutes or something. Just you know some some quick hitting strategies either on Walmart advertising, Amazon advertising, some things that that you know people you think should be definitely doing out there.

Liran:

So I would say I would say a few things. Talk about two things. Number one one thing I see that is a problem we do a lot of audits is sponsored display, vcpm campaigns. I would encourage you to relook at how much money you're spending on those campaigns. Sometimes Amazon will encourage you to have more of those campaigns. So on account recently that you had, like I don't know, 30 or 40% of their sales coming from VCPM campaigns, and I could tell you without a doubt that probably the majority of that was cannibalized organic sales that are coming from those campaigns, I would say, if you're unsure, don't run those campaigns.

Liran:

The sponsored display campaigns that I like to run are cost per click campaigns and product targeting. You can run retargeting with sponsored display on ACoS per click basis. So that's what I would do. I would not run impression based and just the explanation is the reason is impression based campaigns. Somebody can just scroll by, view it, go back to the listing and buy from a retargeting ad and it gets attributed to the retargeting ad when we don't know, since they just pass by it. We don't know if that influenced them to buy or not, since they didn't click. So I would focus on your sponsored display campaigns with cost per click.

Liran:

The other thing I would say is to the more granular you can go, the better. Separate out your branded and unbranded campaigns, separate out your exact phrase broad campaigns. Take your high volume keywords and put them in their own campaigns. The more granular you go, the more control you have. And that's, I think, one of the keys. And I do think it's important today to also use software, because more and more things will be coming out with software. You see, like the Amazon marketing stream. So if you don't have that, you should be using software that has the Amazon marketing stream, because you can see hourly data on how you are getting sales. One thing we've seen with that is generally, if you're again, if you're unsure, if you have limited budget, I would encourage you to day part and stop targeting from 12 Pacific to 5am. That's usually when everyone's budgets reset and you're going to have a higher cost per click and not any better conversion rates usually worse conversion rates at night. So that's another strategy to help you save.

Liran:

And I would say, at the end of the day, if you're managing it and you pay close attention, it's not rocket science managing ads, it's taking a look at your search term reports, taking a look at your conversion rates, managing bids, adding negative keywords. It's complex because you need to give it time and you need to pull the right reports and data, and also that sometimes people think their product, their problem, is an advertising problem. When it's not an advertising problem, it's a product problem, and that's also something we see very often. I spoke to somebody today. They sell, like a shopping cart, one of those laundry things you carry around, and they said, hey, how come it's not selling as well? Their product has about 100 something reviews. It's selling okay, but there's competitors right next to you at same or lower price with 5,000 reviews, and so, again, it's not an advertising problem, it's going to be a product problem.

Liran:

How can you differentiate your listing more from the competitors? They do actually have a great listing and I think it's actually one of the reasons why I think they're selling. They are selling fairly well with a lower review count. But also, their problem is not an advertising problem, it's a product slash, competitor review problem, and that's why the ability to reverse engineer your competitors with tools like Helium can really help you understand where your competitors are getting sales from. Also, whenever people look at their competitors. They're assuming their competitors are, even though you may not be. The competitors are profitable and selling at great margin, and that's also not always the case. People are looking to get market shares. So I think just go very granular and give ads attention. If not, maybe consider outsourcing it. But if you give it the attention and the optimization, you learn to understand it. It's very much a data driven game.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. If people want to reach out to you to get some more help with PPC or to ask you some follow up questions, how can they find you on the interwebs out there?

Liran:

Sure, thank you. You can go to incrementumdigital.com. You can also sign up for a newsletter there. You'll get our weekly newsletter. We're sharing updates, we do webinars, so you can also just sign up for the email list there just to stay up to date. And obviously you can contact us through the website. You can also follow me and Incementum Digital and myself on social media LinkedIn, Facebook and you can DM me if you have any questions.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Well, Liran, thank you so much for joining us. It'll be nice to see you again in your home stomping grounds there in New York soon and wish you all the best of success with you and your team. Please say hi to Mansour. He's been on this show before.

Liran:

Yes, thank you and the rest of your team. Thank you so much.

Helium 10 Buzz 9/21/23: New Amazon Sales Tool | Prime Big Deal Days | TikTok Shop Black Friday

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 Sales Trends / Sales Estimates New Feature
https://www.helium10.com/blog/amazon-sales-trends-sales-estimates/

TikTok Shop to rival Amazon with early Black Friday deals
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/tiktok-shop-to-rival-amazon-with-early-black-friday-deals-2302091/

Amazon brings generative AI to Alexa
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/20/amazon-brings-generative-ai-to-alexa/

Amazon is hiring 250,000 employees for the holidays, and making its largest ever annual investment in U.S. hourly wages
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-hiring-seasonal-holiday-employees

Amazon drops planned merchant fee as FTC lawsuit looms
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-drops-planned-merchant-fee-202022592.html

Lastly, Carrie Miller shares the training tip of the week on how you can use the BlackBox Product Targeting tab to get new keywords and PPC. Listen in as we share these crucial news, updates, and training that will surely impact your Amazon-selling and E-commerce journey.

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

• 00:50 - Amazon Sales Trends Tool
• 02:48 - Prime Big Deal Days
• 03:48 - TikTok Shop Black Friday
• 04:32 - Alexa Generative AI
• 05:51 - Amazon Hiring 250K
• 07:00 - 2% Fee Cancelled
• 08:48 - Listing Attributes
• 09:30 - Helium 10 On Twitch And Twitter
• 10:10 - Pro Training Tip: BlackBox Product Targeting Tab
• 12:27 - Catch Bradley On These Conferences

► 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:

New Amazon tool for sales estimates makes Helium 10 Chrome extension unnecessary. Prime big deal days is coming. Tiktok shop is starting Black Friday early. A 2% fee going away at Amazon. These new stories and much more on this edition of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the series sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. We give you a rundown of the new stories that are going on the Amazon, wall art and e-commerce world and we give you training tips the week that will give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. All right, we got a lot of new stories. Let's go ahead and hop right into it.

Bradley Sutton:

To the first one here that is actually from seller central. You might have seen it in your seller central news section and it's entitled. Customers will now see sales trend For your eligible listings, as product listings for certain categories, including health and personal care, home and sports, will display a sales trend and Basically it's kind of like in the format of 10k plus bought in the last month. In case you guys haven't seen it. You know it's been. They've been doing tests on this a lot. You'll see right here It'll say like 50 plus bought in the past month or a hundred plus. You know the bigger listings will say 10,000 plus and there's been different tests going on Amazon where you might have seen it was weekly. Sometimes it'll show views. But this is now official. This is no longer a test. Amazon is rolling this out. Does that make the helium-tent chrome extension unnecessary for sales estimates? No, it's interesting to note that this is not even a sales estimate. What it is the number of customers that have purchased this product in the last 30 days. So that's just interesting itself.

Bradley Sutton:

If you want a, if you're a mathematical person or you just want to dive a little bit more into All of the frequently asked questions like is it at a child level? Is it at a variation level? Is it the last 30 days? Is it the last calendar month? You know what does this mean for customers? How come my listing doesn't see it? I do a super deep dive. That's like six in the morning right now when I'm recording this.

Bradley Sutton:

I stayed up the whole night actually doing this blog. I haven't even slept yet, but if you guys please reward me for my hard work. The data science team did a good job. You know getting me some data and I put together this blog. Go to helium10.com/blog and it should be probably at the top of the search results there, helium10.com/blog. Click on the one about the search or sales trend data and You'll get everything you needed to know and a whole bunch of stuff. You didn't even want to know about this new thing, but it's actually very interesting. I think it could be cool for customers, could be cool for sellers as well.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, the next news article today is you know, we talked about this a little bit earlier this week, uh, on our Tuesday podcast. By the way, guys make sure to check out that Tuesday podcast. It was a breakdown of the entirety of Amazon Accelerate. Uh, you can catch that episode at h10.me forward slash 493, uh, where we talk about Amazon Accelerate. But anyways, in that podcast I said, hey, prime big deal days is coming. It's going to be October 10th to 11th. It's kind of like you know different kind of prime day. Amazon, you know, says here in the news that you know the, the, the FBA inventory date for prime big deal days has passed. So if you try and get some inventory and now it might not make it, but you can still participate in prime exclusive discounts, uh, coupons. Obviously you know sponsored ads. So I'm just curious what? What are you guys going to be doing for, uh, prime big deal days? Uh, are you doing any lightning deals? You just doing some coupons, heavy PPC. You know it's kind of something newish. You know it's not the regular prime day, so a little bit of uncharted territories, but probably similar to that second prime day that we had last year. All right, uh.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article up here is from dexterto.com, I don't think I've ever quoted this uh news source before, but their article was entitled tick tock shop to rival Amazon with early black Friday day deals, all right. So this is interesting because they're actually going to be starting a black Friday deals as early as October 27 and they're trying to move $20 billion. Uh, it said this holiday season. You know, the tick tock shop debuted in the U? S earlier this September. We kind of talked about that on this show and, uh, be interesting to see what's going to happen. You know how many, how many of you are selling on tick tock uh shop out there and are you guys doing anything special for Black Friday?

Bradley Sutton:

Another uh, there's a lot of Amazon announcements going on um, at some kind of like release event and, anyways, this news article is from tech crunch and it's entitled Amazon brings generative AI to Alexa. Now, this article has nothing to do with Amazon. You know FBA or prime or anything. So you might be wondering why in the world am I linking to this article? Well, this is something I've been talking about for I don't know maybe a year or so, where my, my theory has been that once. I mean that's not my theory, I mean it was Amazon said they're bringing generative AI to Alexa. The part that was my theory was that, hey, once that starts happening, as it starts developing, the shopping experience is going to become exponentially more robust on Alexa. Like, the shopping experience for me right now in my Lexus is like sucks, like it's impossible to buy stuff, and so I don't think a lot of Amazon sellers are optimizing enough for Alexa. Like you probably should, but if you're not, you're probably okay, all right Cause, not that many sales are coming from Alexa. But now, with generative AI perhaps giving Alexa a boost, I would say that you know, this year we are going to start seeing some, some, some more people shop on Alexa and you're going to have to start thinking about, you know, optimizing your listings a little bit more for the Alexa experience, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article up here is actually from Amazon and it says Amazon is hiring 250,000 employees for the holidays, making it the largest annual investment in US hourly wages. Now it's interesting this is not the most they've hired, right? They say the largest annual investment in hourly wages. That's because minimum wage is ridiculous these days. I think this article talks about how they are actually the average hourly pay for these seasonal workers $20.50. That's crazy. $20 used to be like you've got a really good job and can support your family, like 10 years ago. Now $20 is like the grunt work in a warehouse kind of insane. But anyways, I always like looking at how many employees Amazon hires for the winter because it kind of like shows what their projects and are going to be Like when they don't hire hardly anybody. It's like uh-oh, there might be seen some signals where sales aren't going to be that much during the holiday. $250,000 is a pretty robust, hefty number there, so it'd be a good sign. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next article is from Yahoo Finance and it's like it's kind of like fake news If you can hear in my voice, guys, if you're listening to this on your car or something, if you're watching this, you obviously can see my face. This is ridiculous. This irritates me about news. It says Amazon drops planned merchant fee as FTC lawsuit looms. So right off the bat. The title is like trying to paint this as something like Amazon is running away with their tail between its legs because of this FTC thing. But it has, in my opinion, literally nothing to do with each other. Right, and it's not even that big of a deal, that whole FTC thing. But that's a side topic. We've already talked a lot about that. But in this article listen to this, guys it says effective October 1st, amazon was planning to impose a 2% fee on every sale by third party sellers that ship their products themselves. Guys, that is 100% incorrect. Yahoo, you know you're not some blogger. I mean, get your stuff together. This is not right. This 2% fee was only for those sellers opting into seller fulfilled prime. Seller fulfilled prime is where you get the prime badge on your listing. As long as you're able to deliver to a customer within a few hours or within a day, or within two days and hit the the certain metrics, all right. This was not for all people doing fulfilled by merchant, like this stupid article is saying. And the rest of the article goes in this tie in the FTC thing like it has anything to do with that. So it doesn't. But the bottom line is that if you were planning to enroll in seller fulfilled prime, you don't have to pay the 2% fee, as Amazon had announced. And Amazon did announce that the reason why they're taking away the fee had nothing to do with FTC. But they're like hey, you know, we want this program to succeed, so we want to go ahead and take away that fee to get some more people involved in the program. Our next article is from seller central, or actually the last article of the day, and this is just something simple. We've been talking about this for a couple of months now. How? October 3rd, there's going to be new listing attributes, so this, this go around, has a 213 product types are going to require it. So if you just if you want to check if this is going to affect you, just going to your seller central dashboard, there will be a link to this article in your seller central dashboard and then you'll be able to see which product types you might have to take care of. So that's it for the news today.

Bradley Sutton:

You guys have been asking for us to get on different platforms that we weren't on with some of our videos and lives and content. So one thing just keep in mind, guys we are now on Twitch, all right. So if you guys have Twitch, we're going to stream our first training next week on twitch.tv. But you know, you guys probably use Twitch on some kind of app. I just look for @helium10software on Twitch. @helium10software.

Bradley Sutton:

We're doing a live broadcast next week about a new tool, new features that that helium 10 is coming out with. And also, if you guys are on Twitter we're not doing too much on Twitter, but right now I'm going to start, you know, maybe tweeting a little bit more. Find us at @H10Software all right, @H10Software on Twitter. We're also going to be doing live broadcast from there as well. All right, now for our training tip of the week. If you're wondering how to do product line extensions or perhaps find new ASINs that you can target in your product targeting ads, there's a certain tool that you can use in Helium 10. Carrie's going to show you how to use it in 60 seconds.

Carrie Miller:

Today I want to share with you a little strategy on how to find some good products to target with your pay-per-click advertising. It's actually using our BlackBox tool, which is kind of the last tool that you probably would think about, but I'm going to show you how to do this. The first thing you want to do is you want to log into your Helium 10 account and go to black box and then, under black box, you're going to click on product targeting okay. So once you're in product targeting, then you're going to take whatever ascent it is that you are going to try to, you know, boost your PPC. So this is your product I'm putting in our coffin shelf right here, and what we're going to do is we're going to click on search, okay, and this is going to actually come up with a bunch of similar products, and the idea behind this is that once you find a lot of these similar products, kind of in the same niche, you could potentially advertise on these and they could be kind of compatible products.

Carrie Miller:

So, if we look, we've got, you know, like a web floating shelf, which would be a great way to, you know, advertise on that. We have a bat shelf, we've got some mirrors that you know could potentially be a good target audience. So there's a lot of options in here that you can utilize to test this out and, you know, see which one of these is a really good idea for product targeting. In addition, as you can see, there's a lot of really cool product ideas. So if you did actually want to take your ascent and put it into BlackBox, under Product Targeting you can actually see similar items so that you can actually expand your brand and, you know, reach your the same customers that you have within your own brand. So basically, for our coffin shelf, something like a you know 3D large school ice cubes is definitely the same target market. So it's in a really simple tool, the product targeting, but it's so great for optimizing your pay per click advertising when you're doing the ascent targeting and you can also find some new products that you could potentially start selling on Amazon. So check out product targeting in BlackBox and let us know what you think.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, thank you very much, Carrie, for that tip. How many of you guys out there are using the product targeting tab in black box? I hope you are and if you haven't been, hopefully you start using it today going forward. One last thing I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling. Probably, as this is airing, I'm about to take off to go to Istanbul for Friday. We might do a little mini meetup Friday night. So reply to this If you are in the Istanbul area.

Bradley Sutton:

I'll be in Maldives this weekend recording episode 500 of the podcast. On October 17th and 19th I'll be in Vietnam, both in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, at an Amazon conference. Just go to h10.me/vietnam If you're interested in tickets there, and then directly from there. On the 19th to the 23rd I'll be in Seoul, Korea, Amazon Seller Kingdom Conference. You can find more information on that h10.me/kconference for that one, and then I'm flying directly from there to New York, amazon unbox. It is now officially sold out for in person tickets, but if you just search for Amazon unboxed New York, you'll be able to get virtual tickets to that event. And if you're in the area on the 23rd we will be doing a Helium 10 Elite workshop for Elite members, but if there's not enough Elite members who go, I might open up some scholarship spots for some of you out there. Anyways, guys, that's it for this week. Hope you enjoyed the news. We'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.

#493 - Amazon Accelerate 2023: Breakdown of Everything Announced!

In this episode, we've got all the inside scoop on Amazon Accelerate 2023 that you might have missed! Our host, Bradley Sutton, dives deep into the exciting announcements and their implications for Amazon FBA sellers. From the eagerly awaited dates for the next Prime Deal Days to cutting-edge AI features like Generative AI for building your listings inside Amazon and the AI-backed Seller Messaging Assistant, we've got you covered. Plus, we explore game-changing updates, new tools, and features like the  Amazon Shipping ground package delivery service, Amazon Supply Chain updates with inventory management, customer loyalty analytics dashboard, and sustainability solutions that are set to reshape the Amazon seller landscape. We also talked about the Buy with Prime integration inside Shopify and shared relevant numbers on how D2C E-commerce businesses are crushing it with this new feature. Tune in to discover how these developments could impact your Amazon business and stay ahead of your competitors. It's a must-listen episode for anyone in the world of Amazon selling and don't forget to let us know what you think of these announcements!

Also, don't forget to catch Bradley, Helium 10, and Pacvue in the Amazon unBoxed Event in New York this October 24th to up-level and up-skill your Amazon advertising knowledge. 

In episode 493 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

• 02:05 - Dates For The Next Prime Deal Days Released!
• 02:40 - Featuring A Seller Success Story From A Helium 10 User
• 03:45 - Enterprise Solutions Integrated In Partner Seller App
• 04:09 - Emerald Notifications
• 05:23 - AI-backed Seller Messaging Assistant
• 06:35 - Generative AI For Listing Building
• 07:54 - Bradley’s Feedback On This AI Feature After Tests
• 13:22 - A New Seller Homepage
• 13:40 - One Page Listing Management Page
• 14:23 - Buyer Abuse Protection
• 16:05 - Veeqo Multi-Channel Shipping
• 17:01 - Amazon Shipping Ground Package Delivery Service
• 18:44 - Supply Chain By Amazon (More Than Amazon Global Logistics)
• 20:54 - Automatic Inventory Replenishment with FBA
• 23:48 - Let’s Get Into Day 2 Announcements
• 24:43 - Customer Loyalty Analytics Dashboard
• 26:26 - Fit Insights Tool
• 28:45 - Voice Of The Customer Dashboard
• 30:16 - Two-Tap Ratings
• 31:50 - New Seller Wallets
• 32:10 - Buy with Prime with Shopify
• 33:28 - Interesting Stats From Buy with Prime integration with Shopify
• 35:18 - Potential Sales Lift
• 37:16 - View In Your Room Feature Improvements
• 38:42 - Ships On Product Packaging Program
• 40:46 - Sustainability Solutions Hub
• 41:24 - What Do You Think Of All These Announcements?
• 42:29 - Catch Bradley, Helium 10, and Pacvue In The Amazon Unboxed Event

► 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:

Did you miss Amazon Accelerate? Don't worry. In this episode I'm giving you guys everything that you missed out on all the announcements and how it affects US sellers. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think. We know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash keyword tracker.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am Your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and I'm going to be going over everything that happened at Amazon Accelerate. Well, maybe not everything, but all the key points. There might be a couple things I missed, but there's a lot of interesting things that were announced at Amazon Accelerate. I'm going to keep it real. Like I say, this is BS free. No, there might be a couple things I think is not that exciting. I'm going to keep it real. Let you guys know, it's just my opinions here. So I wanted to give you guys kind of like a rundown of all the like I don't know Like 25 different announcements or 30, or even more than that. As you notice, I'm wearing my old school Helium 10 shirt here and the reason is because back when Helium 10 used to use this logo, you never would have gotten me to say, like in a million years, that Amazon would be announcing the kind of things that they have been at Amazon Accelerate the last couple years. I mean like the things that they're dropping, that I'm going to talk about today, and the things that they talked about last year. It was, you know, I would have bet a million dollars if I was a betting person that no, the Amazon would never give this kind of analytics or Amazon would never do this or that. But, man, you know, hats off to Amazon because they're really trying to come through for the sellers.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So before I get started here, real quick kind of breaking news. If you didn't, you know here last week it's not Amazon Prime Day, but what is it called like? Prime Deal, that Prime Deal days prime something or other? Anyways, the second Prime Day, what a lot of people are calling the second Prime Day. They dropped the dates, for it's actually going to be October 10th and 11th. So mark your calendars. If you guys were preparing for deals or things like that, October 10th and 11th is, I think it's called deal day, something like that. So you know, normally I drop that in the weekly buzz, but I'll give you guys that information a couple days early.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, let's go ahead and hop into Amazon Accelerate. I was there. It was my first time at Amazon Accelerate and it was actually cool. They actually started off with like the whole entire event was started off with a Helium 10 customer. Alright, so Hemlock Park is a customer that you know we've talked about. He's actually been on the podcast Mikey from there and they did this like full profile in front of everybody about how his business is and you know how he makes these candles and you know, really, really cool to see you know Helium 10 customer front and center, like that. But you know, let me know what do you guys think? Like what if Amazon would ask you to, like you know, show your brand, you know, would you be down to do that? You know, so many sellers, I think, are afraid of showing their brand to the whole entire world, literally like now, everybody knows what, what Mikey's products are, right. So just something to think about. You know what? Would you take the publicity that you know coming on full stage from Amazon, or would you be like now, I'm good, amazon, you go pick somebody else, alright?

 

Bradley Sutton:

First, couple of announcements you know wanted to talk about for Accelerate nothing that exciting. One of them is was Enterprise Solutions. They announced that they had 15 more software companies and solutions that are integrated into their seller partner App Store. That the seller partner App Store is like what Helium 10 and other tools like it are connected to you, but now they're connecting with like enterprise level, you know once, like QuickBooks even so, if you use QuickBooks for accounting, that's actually now integrated into the seller partner App Store. Another announcement was Emerald Notifications. Alright, so Emerald is this beta program that are doing, where some of these seller apps like you know Helium 10 can deliver notifications about things that are happening in our software in your seller central dashboard. Some of you guys might have gotten an email about that a little while ago and you guys thought it was spam or something like that. So it's real. You know Helium 10 is part of that program amongst many others.

 

Bradley Sutton:

That's what they announced at Amazon Accelerate, and basically the way that they described is they said hey, we're trying to make it easier for you to manage and act on key business updates from your third party apps. That was word for word, verbatim from their announcement. Now, if you're wondering how do you activate it in your account, let me just show you how. Go to your seller central account and then you are going to want to go to apps and services and then manage your apps. Alright, once you do that, you're going to get to the other page here and it'll have all your you know software that you're connected with, and you're going to have to find Helium 10 and hit reauthorize alright. So you're going to want to hit reauthorize after doing that or whatever other apps that you have that you can connect to, and then what's going to happen is you'll now start being eligible for those notifications, alright.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The next announcement was an AI back seller messaging assistant, and what this is is for customer service. Basically, you know how customers, if they have a question about their shipping or a question about the product you know those kind of questions go directly to Amazon. That's not anything new. That's always been the case, one of the advantages of Amazon. You don't have to take care of a lot of your customer service, like hey, where's my shipment? Like I don't know, amazon's one who shipped it right, you don't have to worry about those kind of things. But anyways, amazon is integrating AI into there in order to save even more of the questions and so, like now, it's going to be almost instantaneous, like somebody says, hey, where's my shipment? And AI is instantly answering them, saying, hey, here's the shipping and here's where it's going to go, or here's, you know, if you're eligible for a refund, all kinds of generic questions they are. Now have an AI that powers, instead of having to wait for a person you know might take some time to answer the questions and you know, theoretically speaking, this might help because you know, maybe in that time that a buyer is having to wait for the answer. Maybe they just decided to cancel their order or like it right. So hopefully, hopefully, this will, you know, kind of lessen those.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, the first big announcement of the day that got, you know, people kind of excited was about AI and listing billing. It was kind of funny when they first were announcing that they were going to announce that they were bringing it on the stage. And I won't forget, like they had the like the product manager for there. It's like this Amazonian, like his 50s and 60s, and he's like running out there like he's you saying, bolt to the stage. And he was like super excited. Like I was sitting there in the front row, I thought he was going to do like a crowd dive or something he was running so fast, but hey, he was excited. The crowd got excited because they really hyped up this AI tool that you know we talked about on the weekly buzz a while back.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So what does this consist of? This announcement of their AI listing builder tool? Well, they announced a press release also. It says Amazon launches generative AI to help sellers write product descriptions. And so, basically, it's going to, you know, very similar to what, you know, helium 10 has has had for a while in listing builder. Basically, what they're saying is hey, right here, word for word, says to get started, sellers only need to provide a brief description of their product, in a few words or sentences, and then Amazon will generate high quality content for the review. Sellers can refine these if they want to, or they can directly submit the automatically generated content to the Amazon catalog.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now you know, I'm going to raise my Bradley Sutton flag, my BS flag, a little bit here, especially when they say you know, really high quality. I don't think it's there yet. I'm not trying to throw Amazon under the bus. I have very strong faith that it's going to get there. You know, remember, this is not Amazon like creating their own. You know their own. You know magic system here they're probably using. You know AI tools out there, just like you know helium 10 uses. You know chat, gpt.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But they tried to make it seem like, you know, for example, they gave a, an example here where you can just enter mouse pad with gel wrist right and then you'd be able to get like this, full, full listing. No, that's not the case Now. I tested it like we had this custom or this, this kind of case study I'm doing where I've made at least coffin shaped bath tray and I actually just, you know, actually threw in, you know, a description that was not just like five or six words, you know, just about four or five sentences and the output that it gave me. It just copied the input that I said in the description and that was the product description and then it copied it again and that was the bullet point number one and there was only one more bullet point and then there was no more bullet points in the title. Let me see if I could show it to you guys here. In the title it called it 32 inch black plastic coffin bathtub tray. All right, now the cool thing is hey, it adds spooky decor. I actually know that that is one of the main keywords here, spooky decor, but it called it plastic. I didn't say it was plastic. And then, even though that was the title, when you go to the description, the second bullet point or the first bullet point somewhere here it says hey, this is made with wood, so you got it right once. But in the title.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, guys, this is not, do not expect this yet yet to be. You know some all encompassing thing that's going to. You know, allow you to just snap your fingers and create listings. It obviously needs a lot of work If you're interested in using AI. For now I would stick with listing builder. You know that exact same listing of a test for the coffin tray. I actually created it in listing builder and I put that. You know, very similar, prompt. But obviously the difference is, you know, in listing builder I can add all of my keywords that I had found from Cerebro you know that are relevant to that niche, and then you know, listing builders try to incorporate those keywords, which is still very important. You know, for the Amazon algorithm that you, so you can get searchable. So I'm curious, you know, maybe the reason why it made such a terrible listing is because there's not that much data, you know, on coffin bath trays, and so it was kind of struggling. But maybe if I tried to do like collagen peptides, who knows, maybe I could just write collagen powder and it would make this amazing, amazing listing for me. Now, that being said, that tool might not be at its peak yet.

 

Bradley Sutton:

However, they were giving a sneak peek at some pretty exciting announcements. They said coming soon, sellers are going to be able to submit a URL or a photo of a product and then the AI can generate reviews somehow. So you know, in my mind they were kind of saying, without really saying it maybe you have a dot com business and you've got this Shopify listing or maybe even, who knows, maybe a listing on another website like Walmart. You enter that in and then it could create an actual Amazon listing. You know that'd be pretty cool If that happened, even just like an image of a product and it would create a listing. That is pretty cool. And another thing that they said is is it's going to be available for existing listings to edit it. You know, right now it's if you want to test this out. It's only available to be done with a brand new listing if you're going to start it. But they do say that it's going to come in the future.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now this is something that had me a little bit worried. All right, let me read this next announcement that they said. They said hey, we'll also enrich your existing listings to ensure your products have all the details that customers want to help you drive more sales. We'll use AI to automatically generate missing attributes. First of all, that's excellent. I'm not worried about that at all. You know like that would be great for those attributes. You know, sometimes we don't know all the attributes that are needed in the back end and then we have the missing and we could be suppressed and stuff. So if Amazon AI can do that, beautiful, we'd love. We'd love to see that. But here, check this out.

 

Bradley Sutton:

The second part We'll also use AI to automatically generate and improve titles, bullet points and descriptions based on data in Amazon's catalog. You'll be able to review any changes and make edits if desired. Now, that part has me worried because we all know that. You know, sometimes when Amazon kind of changes your title, it's not always great and you got you know like what if, all of a sudden, for my product, amazon use that AI thing that I just showed you guys and it wants to call my coffin bath tray, which is made of wood, a plastic coffin tray? And just terrible listing. So hopefully these things are not going to happen until their AI is a little bit more robust, which I'm sure it is, you know. But the second part is I definitely want to be able to click a button that says no, I do not want to implement those changes because you know all you helium 10 users out there, 99% of you are going to be better at making the listing than any AI. I'll just tell you that right now, ai, as far as if you're talking about optimizing your listing, for you know the algorithm and things like that All right, like, like you know, you've got all the data. You know even more data than the AI is going to have. You know, I know that sounds kind of like a audacious thing to say, but you know, those of you guys who know, know, know what's up. You know, like you guys can, can, you know, look across different categories of different keywords? And I think the technology for AI to do that is still too far off yet. But anyways, hopefully they're not going to be automatically just changing our listings without letting us know. I don't think they're going to do that.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another minor announcement that they did was about the seller homepage. You know most of you guys were opted into that new seller homepage and one of the benefits they said of this new homepage is that you can take away those widgets. You know, sometimes the seller central homepage had all kinds of like little things that you know just cluttered the screen. But now you can, you can hide those. So they talked about that in case you guys didn't know. Another thing that kind of teased it's not ready yet they talked about how you know we have all kinds of different listing dashboards in order to. You know, there's one for fixing inactive listings, there's one for managing listings. There's a dashboard to improve your listing. So what they're working on is a new one page, you know, catch all everything that has to do with your listings in seller central and it's going to have the actions that you need to take and everything's basically beyond that page. And I guess they have the beta program going right now and it said that, you know, with this beta group, sellers are being able to take actions 40% faster than the current way of having to go to all these different listing management pages.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another announcement they made was buyer abuse protections. You know we definitely like that. We know, although we always know that there's there's some bad players out there on the customer side and so they're implementing AI and other things in order to help kind of detect that. They quote seller selling partners can leverage Amazon's machine learning based buyer risk evaluations and specialized abuse risk investigations to protect your business. All right, so that's a bunch of fancy. You know press release kind of words there. But in a nutshell, the way they explained it is this is gonna help protect you against fraudulent orders, fraudulent claims. It says it's gonna potentially save millions of dollars on refunds and actually probably the point that I think got some applause from people, that says they announced that to address the issue of reviews, amazon has worked to automate and sanitize the sanitize I love that word, that's literally their word, that they said on stage to sanitize the process of suppressing reviews for abusive accounts in real time. All right, so we don't know exactly in the past how the Amazon kind of policed reviews, but you could see it happening, like, if you're using the Helium 10 Chrome extension, you ever look at the review history of a product and then you'll notice that all of a sudden 3,000 reviews got lost and then 2,000 reviews got added back. You probably seen that and were thinking that was a Helium 10 mistake or something. No, what was happening was Amazon would just like quarantine thousands of reviews or hundreds of reviews at a time and I guess, like you know, do some kind of audit on it and then just put back the ones that were okay. So if this, if I'm understanding this correctly, that process in the future might be now in kind of like a real time.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another announcement that you know may not affect a lot of you guys there's this Amazon company called I think it's called VCO, v-e-e-q-o and it's like a multi-channel shipping software. So kind of like you know me, I don't use that, I use like Snapscom, but it's very similar to that where it integrates with your seller central and then you could, you know, print shipping labels and things like that. And so they made an announcement that you know they've negotiated the cheapest shipping rates in the business and usually you can only get like the same price, no matter, you know, if I use Snapscom or if I'm using I don't know like ShipStation or something like that. Right, it's almost always the same exact price, like even my Snapscom price is the same as if I buy postage or UPS ground from Amazon. But if you use VCO, you can actually save an additional 5% off by getting credit. So that's like another announcement that they made. So if you use VCO or if you're interested in that, make sure to check that out.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now the next big announcement was a launch of Amazon shipping. All right, so Amazon shipping is basically a new program where they're kind of gonna be be, you know, competing with FedEx and UPS. Now this I found very interesting because you know it's been, it's been rumored to happen for a long time and now it is happening. You know, in some cities there's only like 15 cities and basically this is gonna be just just what you think is a UPS and FedEx. You know like it's a package delivery service to to fulfill not only just your Amazon like fulfilled by merchant orders, but you can technically fulfill anything. You know like you've got a dot com website and you wanna have Amazon actually pick up the shipment and then deliver it in like two to five days, including Saturdays and Sundays, at a low cost and then no extra fees for residential or weekend delivery. You wanna be able to track the packages in real time, get photo on delivery when the order is delivered. This is now coming. You know you're gonna be able to do that. So again, you don't even have to like be a you know Amazon Prime seller, fba seller to take advantage of this.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now a couple of things I'm wondering about is you know how you can't do like drop shipping or shipping from Amazon for Walmart? You know I used to. I used to make oh my goodness, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars drop shipping like Walmart to Amazon and vice versa. I mean it's curious, like would you be able to use Amazon shipping as a shipper and fulfill stuff you're selling Walmart? I would assume. No, I would assume Walmart would not want that. But anyways, you know if you sell on other platforms. You know this could be something that you can use.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another big announcement was Amazon supply chain, or they called it supply chain by Amazon, and automated solution to help so it was quickly and reliably ship products around the world. So this is kind of like they were talked about this as being an end to end system of shipping where it goes all the way from your you know factory you know picking up at the factory, you know getting it out of the country wherever it's gonna be importing through customs, you know all the way to Amazon and it takes it to another level. This is like more. We're talking about more than just through what Amazon global logistics was. Some of the things that they talked about in their press release was that these new prices for this new system are gonna reflect this counts of up to 25% on cross-border transportation that it said. You're also gonna have a streamlined domestic inbound transportation to AWD. All right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Awd is the Amazon warehousing they're through with their partnered carrier program. All right, so you can be able to save 25% on the already lower cost that you might have been having. So you're gonna have an expanded AWD offering with reduced prices. Those of you who are already using it, the AWD rates are gonna be now 80% lower than FBA storage fee, so that AWD is kind of like using Amazon as a 3PL, if I were to try and oversimplify it. But if you're doing AWD, compared to maybe you were just storing things in FBA and getting long-term fees, you're gonna save 80%, which is kind of a pretty impressive right.

 

Bradley Sutton:

They're gonna have new multi-channel distribution capability and what that means is that Amazon selling partners will sell across multiple who sell across multiple sales channels, including online and brick and mortar. Keeping everything in stock is a challenge, so this is going to be able to move your inventory in bulk from AWD Amazon's warehousing to any sales channel so that you can replenish across the board, not just Amazon. So that's gonna be something coming. And something that I found interesting was automatic inventory replenishment with FBA all right. So if you're using this whole supply chain system, they're gonna be like replenishing inventory into the fulfillment centers, like from AWD, without you having to forecast.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So, again, color me skeptical at first, just because I'm like, hey, I've seen some of Amazon's inventory forecasting recommendations and in the past it's been kind of trash in my opinion. Sorry, you know Amazon, but Amazon's definitely improving in that and so. But this would be interesting. Like I'd be curious as to what the algorithm that they're gonna use, how it's gonna work. But imagine a world where you don't even have to like worry about sending your inventory to Amazon Prime. You used to have like, hey, I'm ordering 10,000 units from my factory in China. It's going to Amazon's warehouses and I can just gonna trust Amazon to put them into FBA. You don't fulfill your orders from. You don't fulfill your orders directly from AWD to the customer. It has to go to FBA warehouses first. But imagine a world where you're not going to have to worry about that anymore. So that would be kind of interesting as well.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So there's another you know interesting announcement that happened on day one. I mean, I can't believe we're still on day one here. Couple other things from day one. There was escalate. My case was something that was in beta where you know there's gonna be like a button in seller essential where you can like escalate if you're having trouble with support. That's coming soon and that includes talking to a live support agent. It's something funny.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Seller poll you guys ever see those seller polls in your seller essential dashboard? Well, you know, they ask it. Hey, guys, please keep providing feedback. Now I'll keep it real here. Most of those polls have been pretty, pretty good lately, but sometimes we get a kick out of the ones Like I actually saved one of my all time favorites.

 

Bradley Sutton:

This was, you know, a while back. It says my account is safe from being suspended unexpectedly. Strongly agree, agree, neither agree or disagree. So, like you know, we all made fun of some of these polls like this that people would get back in a day because I don't think any of us thought that we were safe from being suspended. But you know, honestly, if I were to be honest, I have been suspended unexpectedly. That was like a good four or five years ago. I think was the last time that happened. You know, if I were to get my sentiment here, you know I put probably strongly disagree. You know three years ago when I took this screenshot, but maybe now I'd be like I neither agree or disagree, like I still see. You know horror stories out there, but you know I haven't been suspended in a while and now Amazon has new systems in place that actually, where they would call you before they suspend you. So that didn't exist three or four years ago. So you know they're getting better. But anyways, the point being, don't just laugh at these polls. These are important. Most of them are important for you to get some to give Amazon your feedback.

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right now, going to day two, a couple again minor announcements that I'm not sure affect much of you. One was called flexible customer financing, aka FCF program. You're gonna be able to enable your customers to purchase your eligible product's interest fee using installment options. So, like you know, maybe like you got a $200 product or $300 product, you can. It sounds like you're gonna be able to activate this like, hey, buy now, pay later, kind of thing sounds like. But the important part of this is that if customers opt into that, they don't have to pay right away. But guess what? You get the funds right away, if I understand this correctly. So that would be pretty cool, you know, because that would kind of suck if, yeah, let people buy this $1,000 thing and paid off over six months and you're getting, like, payments for it over six months. That would not fly right. So that would be kind of cool if this can help your sales.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another announcement is that there's now a customer loyalty analytics, or there's going to be a customer loyalty analytics dashboard, so it allows you to segment customers based on loyalty and analyze, segment purchase patterns and perform targeted engagement to increase your overall lifetime customer value. So they put out a press release on this and it's pretty interesting because it says, hey, new features will give sellers a comprehensive understanding of the customer sentiment for existing products from reviews and also returns. And it gave an example like hey, there's an outdoor recreation brand, they're trying to design a new tent. They'll easily be able to understand what drives customer complaints and satisfaction with the tents today. Like so it might give you like a niche kind of analysis. And it says upcoming enhancement to the tool will provide the ability to select different time periods, analyze trends over time, benchmark customer sentiment against best sellers in the category. You know that benchmarking thing sounds pretty cool and so this is something to look out for that's going to be available later this year in the US, uk, germany, france, italy and Spain, and then Japan to follow, and, instead of localized insights, will also provide a deeper understanding of customer preferences in the country. So it's not just like looking at, you know a category across all of Amazon, but you're looking at a country basis. So again, something interesting, cool announcement to look forward to.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing that Amazon release is something called fit insights tool. It's going to be backed by AI and this is for those of you who are mainly like in the apparel category, you know, which is historically one of the, you know, the one that has the most returns and issues and with reviews and things like that. But it's going to be analyzing the reviews and the size charts and kind of like how people identify themselves as what size they are and then compare it to like what size you're saying the product is, or, yeah, your shirt or socks or whatever, and then it's going to give you like suggestions, like you know what you know you probably should move your size tier up a little bit, because people who say that they're waist 38, you know they're complaining about your product because they say it's too big. So you might want to, you know, put it, call this a size 36 instead of a 38 or whatever the case may be. So you know I don't sell in the apparel, so this doesn't affect me at all. But what about you? You know you guys who are selling leggings or shirts or pants or things like that. You know, I'm sure you guys have all kinds of crazy horror stories about return. So if AI can help with that process you know it's called again, it's called fit insights. It's going to be available a beginning in October. Look out for more announcement on that. We'll probably have that in the weekly buzz.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another minor announcement that has to do with Amazon warehouses, called computer vision based detection. All right, so they gave this demo where they're showing like vision technology where things are going on the conveyor belts, going to you know orders and stuff, and then this AI is going to like see if there's a problem with, like, an expiration date, somehow, like on the package, or maybe the box is damaged, right, and then it's going to stop it from going to the customer. So I have, you know, face value seems okay. I'm just not fully convinced this is going to make a huge impact. I think the thing that all of us are more concerned about is when products go back to Amazon. You know it's like can we please take a look at these boxes and obviously realize that the customer didn't put the pack back in the box or it's used or things like that. Please don't put it back in inventory. This is a start. This is a start, though, you know, because you know, sometimes maybe like a forklift runs over a package, but it's still somehow it gets on the conveyor belt and then gets to the customer and they get upset because they get a super damaged box and then they return it. So in that situation, this will probably kind of like help, help with that, with that kind of stuff, and then, starting in 2024, you'll actually get a report on all the packages that Amazon kind of like stopped, you know, thanks to this new robotic vision thing that it has.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Voice of the customer dashboard was their next announcement. That's actually something that exists now, but it talked about what is coming to this dashboard. Basically, they said they're going to launch three new, improved features that will give you more insights into what's going on to help you build customer loyalty, and these include key phrases from customer feedback. I'm not sure if that means reviews, because you know customer feedback is something different than reviews, so I'm not completely sure about that. Number two, category benchmarking and trend analysis to give you the tools to compare your performance against similar products. And then, number three, deeper key performance metrics broken down by customer feedback score. Quote unquote was part of their announcement for that. So if you're using that VOC, or voice of the customer dashboard. Look out for those three enhancements soon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Add to cart seller profile pages. That was another announcement. You guys know what the seller profile page is. That's where you click on the storefront, you know from a listing, and then it takes you to the page where the feedback is and the address of the seller and stuff. Well, there's nothing that allow you to necessarily buy the product before, but now, as you can see, they have an add to cart button Now for the product that maybe they were clicking on. So that's something that's already new. And then they talked about potentially, you know, maybe even having some other cross-selling where it has other products right there on this page that somebody could add to cart.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another announcement I really didn't understand. I wish I could have followed up on this, but it was called two tap ratings and in this session or not session, but in this announcement they were talking about how two tap ratings simplifies the seller rating process and customers have indicated that seller ratings are a critical data point in their shopping journey. So two tap ratings eliminates the written feedback requirement, simplifying the end to end review experience. So that's what the announcement was, but I'm like, wait a minute. Hasn't there just been this two tap rating for like a couple of years now, which is why the number of ratings is so much higher than the number of written reviews?

 

Bradley Sutton:

So I'm not exactly sure what this announcement was. Maybe it's about from the actual write a customer review button on orders, like if you were to open up your mobile app right now, your Amazon buyer app, and then you know, hit an order and says write a review, you kind of do there have to leave a written review, I think. So maybe that part is gonna be changed. But I know there's like a page where you can go where Amazon just gives you these messages like hey, rate this product, you don't have to write nothing, you just like click the rating right there and that's it. So I'm not exactly sure what this announcement is, but my speculation is that from the write a review button there, you can just start leaving ratings there, but this might increase the number of ratings you know you get, which is, you know, for some customers or for some of you guys. You guys would love that. Some others were like man, this kind of sucks, I barely get any written reviews now and I really want written reviews. So maybe some of you think that's a negative. Another day.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Two announcement was that a seller wallet where it's this is coming, where you can take your funds you know, your before you get, actually get dispersed and then you can use it to, like you know, make a wire transfer to your, to your vendors or your suppliers, things like that. You know we've had that with a group Alta, helium, 10, alta for a while, but now it's coming to a seller central. Next announcement was a little bit bigger, so it was kind of like there's a little bit of thunder being stolen because they announced it, the, you know, a couple of weeks ago about the Shopify and buy with Prime. But they talked a lot about buy with Prime. The thing that was like shock, shocking was they actually brought out the VP, or a VP of Shopify to the Amazon accelerate stage. So he actually came right on stage and even the, even the Amazonian who introduced him, was like hey, you know, a year ago I wouldn't probably not have imagined bringing this person on stage. And that was because, as we've talked about in the weekly buzz before, they had all kinds of beef. You know, in the old days, you know, shopify wanted all that smoke. They were. They were like saying, hey, if you use buy with prime on Shopify, you're against our terms of service and this and that. So, yeah, that's kind of like nobody would have ever guessed that a VP of Shopify would be on stage at Amazon accelerate, but they were talking about buy with prime. And so, in general, you know, regardless of it was Shopify or not, buy with prime has been out, you know, for a year now. They talked about how some of the stats for buy with prime, you know what kind of stats it's had for for sellers. For example, one brand said that nine out of every 10 buy with prime orders were from customers new to their brand. A newer feature was buy with prime cart is starting to see early success. So before it was kind of like if you had buy with prime, it was just for one product. But now they're rolling this out where you can, like you know, have multiple Amazon or, you know, fba supplied products and then you can actually add them to the cart and then the customer on Shopify or whatever, woocommerce or whatever, can go ahead and check out instead of just having to buy them one by one and the this, this, this feature the merchants who use it say that they increased a 15% increase in buy with prime units per order. Another announcement from the buy with prime is that they introduced you know, or they talked how they introduced reviews from Amazon so that you can display your Amazon reviews on your website at no additional costs, and they said that early results show that merchants who who added the Amazon reviews to their website have 38% increase in shopper conversion. So this is especially probably for those who are newer, have new websites and have zero reviews on there. And then another thing that they announced was buy with prime assist, which gives merchants the option to offer 24, seven cost post order customer service through Amazon at no additional costs, using a real time chat feature. So, yeah, this was definitely interesting to see.

 

Bradley Sutton:

You know, I've never used by with prime and never even had a my own. I mean like not in like 20 years I haven't had my own website as far as my Amazon, my Amazon products go. So what about the rest of you? Has anybody of you guys out there use by with primer ready for, like, maybe WooCommerce or another website? Be curious to see. You know what you guys, you know how that's worked out for you.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another couple announcements, just really quick. Let me just speed through these last few ones here. There's the potential sales lift. You guys ever seen that from the dashboard? It's like where, where Amazon will tell you hey, you know, if you use a plus content, you know you can make a gazillion dollars. You know, I kind of like make light of that. But yeah, I think a lot of us were like this is such nonsense. You know, like I remember one time it was something yeah, put a plus content in your pink coffin shelf and you'll increase sales by $2,000 a month. I'm like, what are you talking about, bro? Like there's, there's not even $2,000 of pink coffin shelves sold in a year. That's like wrong. So that's probably why a lot of us wanted to even hide some of those widgets on the seller central dashboard back in the day, which is what they you know they we talked about earlier today.

 

Bradley Sutton:

But let me tell you guys it's improved. You know I'm not. I'm not again, I'm not trying to throw Amazon on the bus. I just want to show you guys that Amazon actually gets better. I actually haven't looked at those in a long time and I'm looking at it live right now where it says under growth opportunities. Hey, this coffin egg tray says if you increase improved conversion by create, creating a plus content, you could have an $88 sales lift over 90 days. That sounds reasonable. That's like four egg trays. You know, if I put a plus content could I increase sales by four, eight trays. That sounds very reasonable, but then again it's not fully completely working. That coffin bath tray test I said if I put a plus content I'm going to get an $8 and 66 cents sales lift. I'm like this is a $4 product. How am I going to get an $8 sales lift? It's not perfect, but, guys, it is getting better. Don't just overlook it. If you're like me, who are just like, oh, I'm just going to ignore all of those because they're so far off, I think their algorithms that they have working on it is definitely a lot better. So so make sure to check that out. And anyways, the announcement that they had was this potential sales lift is going to be available for a lot other kind of things like manager experiments and 20 other catalog attributes. So 20 other things they're going to be. They're going to give you a little thing that says, hey, if you do this to each of those 20 things, you could get this kind of sales lift.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another cool feature they talked about was view in your room table top. So you guys ever seen the helium 10 coffin shelf or other products like furniture? And then it has a button where it says view in your room, but it puts it on the floor right, like it's mainly for like chairs and tables and stuff, and then you can kind of it's using augmented reality for your product and then you can just kind of like with your mobile app see how that product looks in the room. Well, now they said, hey, this is going to, we're rolling out the room table top feature. So instead of just looking how it would look on the floor, you're like who's going to put a coffin shelf on the floor? You know it's going to be like hey, put it on this countertop or this egg tray, how does it look in your kitchen island, and things like that. So this is coming soon.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So in the past it wasn't something you opted into or or could ask Amazon to give you, like the helium 10 coffin shelf. We didn't do anything special. It just all of a sudden started showing up with that augmented reality. So I have a feeling based on what they were saying at Accelerate that there's now going to be some kind of controllability you're going to have where you can potentially opt into the program or send them like 3D images or something and get into there. So we actually have some follow up meetings with that department to try and see, you know, how maybe helium 10 can can help in this. But that would be pretty cool for those of you who have products that go on table tops or counter tops or things like that, being able to integrate augmented reality for your customers who have the mobile app.

 

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing honestly I was not excited about it all, it's actually kind of scared a little bit was ships in product packaging program. All right, so it's allowing you the opportunity, it says, to ship customer orders in your own custom branded packaging without additional Amazon boxes. All right, now this could go both ways. Already, this happens sometimes and actually, you know, some of us are kind of upset when it might happen, like if you guys have like some super fancy gift box or like some nice, really nice packaging, you don't want Amazon just taking that and then slapping all their logos and and or their logos, but they're they're, you know, slapping their shipping labels and stuff on it and then having that really nice package getting all scuffed up and then it's like all torn up by the time it gets the customer. And so you know like right now I'm actually doing a brand new coffin shelf package where it's like a box, shape like a coffin and it's going to be like a super nice giftable thing. But if Amazon ships in that box, you know that kind of sucks. Now, where this is better is you know Amazon might be charging you extra shipping because it has to use extra packaging.

 

Bradley Sutton:

So this, this article or this announcement where they talk about how, because of the ability now to ship in your own packaging in the future, maybe it's going to save you in the fulfillment costs. But I don't know for me. I most of my products. I don't want that. There's a couple of products I have that that I don't really care about the packaging much, and you know they could go ahead and slap a shipping label on there. I don't care, especially if it's safe. Saves me some money. But I'm I'm curious what you, which boat are you guys in? You know would you say, yes, I want to save, you know, a few cents on packaging and you know it also saves the environment too, you know, because you're not having to to have all this cardboard you know around, or are you like, do you have fancy packaging and you and you want that put into an outside box? Anyways, this new feature is going to have enrollment in January of 2024. So you got a couple of months to think about which which boat you would be in. They also announced the sustainability solutions hub. You can look up there. You know, on seller central, if you want more news I'm running out of time here and the last one that they announced, again that you can check in seller central, was a climate some new climate pledge friendly badges that are coming, and it's interesting. Their data shows that if you have that climate pledge friendly badge, it actually drives 10% more page views than if you didn't have it. So it might be something you might want to get onto your listing, and they're going to have three new ways in order to, you know, to have that. So there you have it, guys.

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm sure I missed a couple of things here, but but that was probably the majority of what they talked about that this year's Amazon Accelerate it was my first time there had a blast. I couldn't even go to all the parties because I was working in the nights. I had a whole bunch of like webinars I was doing in China and things like that. So I got I missed all the parties but I heard it was really great. There was like two, 3000 people, you know, really high quality. They had the DJ from the Beastie Boys was like the DJ for the events and and they had Tracy Ross there as a celebrity, you know speaker. Really really cool event, really well organized. You know what, what you would expect from Amazon. So, guys, next year I'm sure it's going to be back again Highly, highly, highly recommend going there because you know Amazon, there's nothing like it, you know where. I mean, I didn't even do all of it and I probably would drop 30 different news items there that they launched. So it's a one set, once a year event and definitely go.

 

Bradley Sutton:

It's not the only event that Amazon does. Amazon does a little bit higher end kind of more advertising. So it's really the event that's happening in October, october 20, I want to say 25th and 26th or 24th to 26th in New York City. It's called Amazon Unboxed. So you want a similar event but more focused maybe on on advertising and if you're you know bigger sellers, make sure to register for that one. Amazon Unboxed, ilium 10 and Pacview definitely will have teams there, so be great to to meet you guys in person at that one. I hope you enjoyed this recap. If you guys want follow-ups for me to talk about any of these announcements a little bit more in depth, make sure to reach out. Don't forget to follow on Instagram Sirius Sellers podcast. See you guys in the next episode.

#492 - Walmart Seller Event Updates, Common Issues, & PPC Tips

Ready to catapult your Walmart selling journey to a whole new level of success? For today's special Walmart Wednesday episode, buckle up for an exciting chat where our host, Carrie Miller, sheds light on the latest developments that were revealed during the recent Walmart conference. You'll discover how the launch of new international marketplaces like Chile, same-day pickup, brand stores, and more, could potentially revolutionize your E-commerce business in Walmart.com. Additionally, we'll tackle the complexities of COMP errors, and most importantly, how to fix them - a game-changer for every Walmart seller!

Shifting gears, we delve into the art of optimizing pay-per-click advertising on Walmart. Strategies revolve around using Helium 10's Cerebro for Walmart, listing optimization, grouping keywords into campaigns, and using attributes effectively. Can't wrap your head around it? Don't worry, we've got you covered! 

Listen in as we break down these concepts and tips on finding the right keywords, and using Cerebro to save on advertising costs. These concepts are helpful if you're selling on Walmart.com and if you're brand is on Walmart WFS. Now is the time to sell on Walmart.com! Are you ready to take your selling journey to dizzying new heights? Let's get started!

In episode 492 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie talks about:

• 01:14 - Updates From The First-Ever Walmart Conference
• 01:57 - New International Walmart Marketplaces
• 02:08 - Walmart Brand Stores
• 02:42 - Same-Day Pick up
• 04:21 - Add Credit Or Debit Cards For Walmart Ads Payment
• 05:10 - Common Issues On Walmart.com Right Now
• 05:23 - Navigating Through Walmart’s COMP Errors
• 11:19 - Finding Keywords For Your Walmart PPC Campaigns
• 16:20 - PPC Ads In Walmart Is Important

► 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:

Today we're going to be discussing all the updates that were given at the recent Walmart conference. We'll also be talking about a new payment method option that you have on the Walmart marketplace and I'll show you some techniques and strategies for your pay-per-click advertising on Walmart.

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Want to enter in an Amazon keyword and then within seconds get up to thousands of potentially related keywords that you could research? Then you need Magnet by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/magnet. Magnet works in most Amazon marketplaces, including USA, Mexico, Australia, Germany, UK, India and much more.

Carrie Miller:

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I'm going to be your host today. My name is Carrie Miller and this is our Walmart Wednesday, where we talk about all things Walmart. I answer questions we have. Sometimes we have guests, we do demos about how to utilize Walmart and how to sell on Walmart. Let's go ahead and get into it. I'm going to go ahead and get into some interesting information.

Carrie Miller:

Today I actually went to the Walmart conference. I think it was about two weeks ago. There were some interesting updates there and I wanted to share them with you, just in case you weren't there. There were about 1,500 sellers there. It wasn't invite only, but hopefully in the future it'll be open to more sellers, because that would be, I think it's a really great opportunity not only to learn from Walmart, but also to meet other Walmart sellers and get encouraged and see how everyone else is doing.

Carrie Miller:

The first thing that I want to talk about is that they're actually opening another marketplace, which is really exciting, because that means more opportunity for sellers. The first marketplace is obviously the US. We also have Canada, Mexico and now Chile. If you ever had any interest in selling in South America, they are opening a marketplace up in Chile. That's a great opportunity there if you're able to do that. Another thing I wanted to share is that they actually mentioned that they are still rolling out brand stores. If you haven't gotten access to it, don't fret, because they should be giving access to everyone soon. They're slowly rolling it out, just like they did with WFS, and they slowly just added people to those. Just keep an eye on that so that you can start creating your store just like they have on Amazon. You can put all of your products in there and showcase your brand. All they have to do customer has to do is click on your brand name on your actual listings.

Carrie Miller:

The next thing that I have on my agenda here is that they also mentioned that they are going to allow same day pickup. The same day pickup basically means for anyone who is a local store owner, If you have a brick and mortar store, that means that you can actually offer your products for pickup and people can actually come to your store and pick it up. Or if somebody wants same day delivery, then Walmart has a last mile pickup service that you can utilize to get same day delivery. That's pretty cool for anyone who owns a brick and mortar store in any location. It would be mostly for wherever people are local to that brick and mortar, but a really good opportunity for anyone who is local with a brick and mortar.

Carrie Miller:

Another thing is that large items are now available to be fulfilled through WFS. Before it was only up to 150 pounds, but now you can actually ship big things like multi-boxes, like maybe a patio set or trampolines or canoes or anything like that. Very exciting, especially because you get a lot more visibility and it helps your ranking when you're utilizing WFS. Now you can use WFS if you have big products. Another thing is that and I actually posted this in our winning with Walmart group Side note, if you're not in our winning with Walmart group by helium 10, go ahead and join that so that you can get access to other sellers and ask questions and we can answer them for you. Video ads are now available if you're a brand registered owner. If you are brand registered on Walmart, go ahead and check it out. You should be able to get access on ads because you have brand registry, but if not, you would probably want to open up a ticket. If you can't find access to that, Then this is one of my favorite updates and I actually got an email about this, I think, two days ago and that is that you can actually put a credit card or a debit card on your ads now, before it.

Carrie Miller:

Just they basically Always take out the amount out of your total sales, but I like using a credit card because I like to use travel points and so. On Amazon, I use you know, you know those travel credit cards to get a bunch of points and by the end of the year I have, you know, tons of points. I know a lot of other sellers like to do that too, but it was such a bummer that you couldn't do it on. On Walmart, too, but now you can actually add a credit card on there or a debit card so you can pay for your ads that way, which is really awesome. So that's something, to you know, look forward to if you are one of those people who likes to take advantage of the opportunity for travel points, All right.

Carrie Miller:

So I'm gonna go and get some into some discussion about just some issues that people have had. I have been looking in the group and I noticed a lot of people talking about so different situations and one of the things is comp errors. So comp errors are Basically kind of like the pesticide errors that you get on that you get on on Amazon. So if you ever get those pesticide notices where you get your product taken down, Comp error is similar but they don't really actually tell you. Usually when you get a comp error it just says comp error and your listing is seen down. You've no idea how to fix it. But usually it's because you use a product, a word that is, you know, forbidden. So what I would recommend is kind of going through those words that you know you can't use on Amazon. If you used any of them, a Walmart, delete them from your listing. A lot of times your listing will literally just come Pop back up within 15 minutes. So I think that's a really good, you know, A good thing to just try if you have the comp errors, and so I mean I've been seeing a lot of these comp errors. So that is something to take a look at and you know kind of refine that if you really have to delete the whole thing and start from scratch, I would recommend doing that too.

Carrie Miller:

Another question that somebody had is that they wanted to know why they weren't, you know, seeing any spend their ads and they had budget in there and they've set it up. And I have a few thoughts about this. Number one is that you're probably not targeting the right keywords and maybe your bids aren't high enough because you need to get those impressions. So I'm gonna actually, towards the end, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about Cerebro and how you can do some exact campaigns for your PPC. But it's really important to make sure that you do keyword research and helium 10. We do have our Cerebro tool, which is literally the best keyword research tool. There's nothing else like it for Walmart and you can find, you know, all the best keywords by using Cerebro. So how they recommend doing that.

Carrie Miller:

And then another question that people have been asking is that if they Add an ace, if they should add an ace in on their product when they're actually uploading a product. So when you upload your product, you know it'll say you know what is your Amazon ace in? I don't recommend putting it there. I don't see why you would want to do it. I know there's one way to upload where you can literally just connect all of your Accounts, like you can just upload to Walmart via Amazon or Target or Etsy or eBay. I really don't recommend that method. My best suggestion for you to get your products and listings up properly is to use the flat file or bulk Uploads. Okay, it's a little bit harder, but once you learn the flat files, you have more control, the update faster, you can add variations in there, you just have a lot more control over your listing in there. So I highly recommend just uploading your listing with the flat file instead of these other ways, and you do not need to add an ace in there. There's really no reason for that. So I would suggest not doing that.

Carrie Miller:

I have a question. You said someone said I have nothing on Amazon. I still have comp errors. Okay, so somebody has saying they've compared. So what I would suggest doing is maybe kind of looking through your listing and seeing if there are any kind of Comp errors type errors maybe something like maybe you use antibacterial. There's lists on some forums about Amazon words. That's kind of what I have looked at is those words that are forbidden on Amazon and just kind of see if you have any of those. Or you could delete your listing completely and see if you can start over and just kind of slowly see if there are some trigger words in there. Another thing is I definitely recommend, you know, opening up a case for that If you still have issues. SellCord they've actually been on our podcast and Jake was on last month, sellcord.co if you contact them they always are able to help with. You know, account deactivations and compares. So if you really can't solve it on your own, I would just contacting them because they can help you expedite that whole scenario.

Carrie Miller:

Okay, and then another thing you know with all of that is it just has Matt in general. So I've kind of run into this issue. I was doing some, you know work on getting up a hemp cream and it was very difficult experience. You need to. You know, for any liquids you always have to submit a safety data sheet if you want to get your product in WFS. So if you're selling like a shampoo or a lotion or something like that, you always need to do that and submit that. When I first uploaded the hemp cream, it was denied, denied, denied, and then I got it approved. So I had, you know, the product up enlisted because there are other hemp products on Wal-Mart. However, apparently it's actually not. You're not really supposed to sell this product, even though there are some on Walmart and it's for sure forbidden from WFS. So some kind of has Matt type products you can sell on Walmart but you have to ship them yourself. So just keep that in mind. If you sell anything like hemp or you know any liquid issue products, you could have these kinds of issues and you might have to ship them yourself. It's kind of a stressful thing, but you know, I think it'll change in the future where you can send these things in, but for now you can still get on there for the most part and do F fulfilled by merchant. So that is what I recommend on that.

Carrie Miller:

So let's go ahead and get into what I wanted to talk about. To show you just I get a lot of PPC questions and so I wanted to share with you some strategies about just PPC in general. So we have a reverse product ID lookup on cerebral for Wal-Mart. So when you go into helium 10, you're going to want to go over to Cerebro and what you'll do is you will put in product ID. So the product ID is actually in the URL. So if you go to a product so I actually looked at men's genes as an example here and let's just go with the George. Okay. So George Sheens, and what you do is you basically find the product ID up in the URL or, if you have the X-ray extension, you actually can pull up the X-ray extension and then oh, I'm having issues there you can actually pull up the product ID there and just copy it straight from the extension. So that is one way to find it. So this is what we have here and we're just doing a reverse product ID and just to see what that product is ranking for.

Carrie Miller:

So this particular product is ranking for quite a few things sponsored and organic. You can sort by sponsored ranks so you can see, when you put these things in, if they are even advertising. It looks like this person isn't or this brand isn't even advertising. But you can also sort by search volume and look through things. So a lot of people like to go for these main keywords, but I recommend kind of looking for the lower search volume as well, and I don't necessarily think you should look at brand names. But you can find a lot of keywords in here. That would be very profitable, but maybe they're only 1,000.

Carrie Miller:

Let's see big and tall. If you have big and tall jeans that's a good one to kind of look for. Men's Baggy jeans is only 94. I have some literal keywords that have only 17, such as a month, and I've made multiple sales on those. The more relevant keywords, the better Work. Jeans for men it's only 200 search volume, but again, if you have really good work jeans, then you can use this and what you can do is find a bunch of these little search volume keywords and they actually add up to a lot. So what I would suggest doing is putting five to 10 keywords in campaign of the lower search volume. If you have higher search volume keywords, you really should put those in their own campaign. I recommend doing exact sponsored product ads because I've really had a hard time making sure that I'm staying profitable.

Carrie Miller:

Maybe some of you are different, but the broadened phrase I've not been able to get control of as much. So what I've been doing is I've been going to Cerebro often and I'm looking for keywords and what I do is I find those keywords and I kind of group them into the lower search volume together, the high search volume. They're gonna be in their own campaign and that's how you're gonna do this. Okay, so that is what I recommend for your PPC and because we have access to these keywords, you actually can sort through, like, if you wanted to find phrases containing genes, you can find anything that has something to do with genes. So all of these keywords are genes related, but they're just kind of iterations of the phrases that you can find all kinds of great potential keywords to target if you're selling something like that. So what I would say is kind of go around bigger keywords as well. Make sure that you're also capitalizing on those smaller keywords.

Carrie Miller:

Another thing is attributes. So in your actual listing there are places where you need to put color and size. Put the color and size into your actual title where they say it Usually, if it says men's jeans, is there a certain color? Are they black denim or regular denim? And put that in the actual title so that people can find you. Put it in the back end on the attributes. Put all the colors, all the sizing, everything that you can possibly do, so that you will show up in these searches. So that's what I would recommend Make sure that you have everything fully optimized and look for a bunch of these keywords to target. Now you can do the video ads. If you're brand registered, you can do the headline ads. So it's really, really a great time to utilize this feature.

Carrie Miller:

If you're not doing pay-per-click advertising, you're definitely leaving money on the table. So pay-per-click advertising is the best thing that you need to do to start on Walmart, other than optimizing your listings. I actually talked to a lot of people that they basically they say I'm not having much success on Walmart and I asked did you optimize your listing? Well, I just copied it over from Amazon. That's no, no, number one. You should definitely not just copy over from Amazon, because Walmart does not like that. They will suppress your listing and not put you in the search. And then also then I'll ask hey, have you started doing advertising? And people will say, no, I have not done any advertising. So if you haven't started advertising, that's really, really important to get some exposure for your products, get some ranking for your products. So if you haven't done that, I mean I don't actually don't know one seller who would say, oh, I launched a new product on Amazon, but I didn't optimize it and I didn't do any ads. It just unheard of.

Carrie Miller:

So think, keep the same energy that you have for Amazon from Walmart, so that you can, you know, just be successful. I talked to a lot of people at the Walmart conference and there were a lot of very successful Walmart sellers. I think the top was, you know they were doing about 700,000 a day in sales a day. So there is a lot of opportunity and a lot of possibility for Walmart. You just have to really push through and figure it out and just put that effort in to you know, making sure you optimize your listing and start the PPC campaigns. If you don't have, you know something to help you manage your campaigns. We do have Adtomic for Walmart. We also have a sister company, Pacvue. That is also has some Walmart advertising tools. So lots of great you know opportunities to find, you know software to help support you in the PPC journey.

Carrie Miller:

So I highly, you know, encourage you to go ahead. Make sure you start advertising. If you haven't started advertising, get your ads going. If you need help, you can always go into the Walmart winning with Walmart group and just get some assistance there. And also make sure you use Cerebro to find the keywords that I you're going to save so much money by finding these exact words. I did some auto campaigns at first and it was just out of control, not even helping me at all. So once I started using Cerebro I started becoming very profitable, so highly recommend doing that and good luck with everything. Let me know if you have any issues with anything and in the Walmart group, and I'd be happy to answer any questions. But hope you all have a great rest of the day and happy selling. Bye.

Helium 10 Buzz 9/14/23: Amazon Accelerate Releases | Walmart Shipping Updates | TikTok Shop Fulfillment

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.

Amazon Accelerate Releases
https://event.amazonaccelerate.com/general-information/?page=marquee-announcements

SmartKargo, a leader in providing technology and logistics solutions to airlines globally, announced it is teaming up with Walmart GoLocal, Walmart’s white-label, delivery-as-a-service platform, to expand next- and two-day delivery offerings for retailers and e-commerce companies.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230913979238/en/SmartKargo-Expands-Next--and-Two-Day-Delivery-Offerings-with-Walmart-GoLocal

Etsy seeks to drive more organic traffic through “Share & Save” program
https://www.modernretail.co/marketing/etsy-seeks-to-drive-more-organic-traffic-through-share-save-program/

Amazon Marketing Stream is expanding to include new Amazon DSP campaign datasets. This includes information on Amazon DSP campaigns, flights, ad groups, and ad group targets.
https://advertising.amazon.com/API/docs/en-us/release-notes/index#original-video-download-is-now-available-on-sponsored-brands-media-api

Around the Clock Convenience: Walmart Now Offers Customers Late-Night Delivery
https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2023/09/12/around-the-clock-convenience-walmart-now-offers-customers-late-night-delivery

Flowspace, the software platform and distribution network powering independent fulfillment, announced today that it has partnered with TikTok to provide fulfillment services for TikTok Shop sellers in the U.S.
https://www.retaildive.com/press-release/20230912-flowspace-powers-us-fulfillment-for-tiktok-shop/

We wrap up with a must-hear insight from our brand evangelist, Carrie Miller, on how to use Helium 10’s Audience tool to gather real data about your product. Join us for this engaging episode with crucial e-commerce updates and strategies.

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

• 00:41 - Amazon Accelerate Releases
• 03:30 - Walmart GoLocal
• 04:08 - Etsy Share & Save
• 05:23 - Stream For Amazon DSP
• 05:50 - Walmart Late Delivery
• 06:55 - TikTok Shop Fulfillment
• 08:11 - Look Out For This Saturday's SSP Episode!
• 08:25 - Follow Bradley And Helium 10 On LinkedIn
• 09:15 - Pro Training Tip: Split Testing Using Helium 10 Audience

► 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

Shivali Patel

Amazon Accelerate announcements, TikTok shop fulfillment, Walmart shipping expansion and Etsy promotions for sellers. This and more on this week's 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 Weekly Buzz, where we give you all the latest news in the Amazon, Walmart and e-commerce space. We also provide you with a training tip of the week where you get insights into serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Let's see what's buzzing this week. So the first article we really have is from Amazon Accelerate. It's hot off the press and it's happening right now. So Bradley on Saturday is going to give you a full rundown of all the announcements that happen, but for now, let's just talk a little bit about what's happening on day one. So we have a little bit about some new enterprise solutions. We have emerald notifications, which makes it easier for you to just act on your business updates. In fact, helium 10 is one of those included notifications, so make sure that you have this on. We also have the AI backed seller messaging assistant, which is just telling you that basically any time a customer messages, you might end up having artificial intelligence responding to them on either that order status or shipping information, returns, refunds, that kind of thing, which is great because artificial intelligence is all the way right now. You also have quick list, and this is referencing the generative AI which can help you simplify your listing creation process. Now, if you are a Helium 10 user, then you know that we already have some of this incorporated into our listing builder. If you have access to a diamond plan, then maybe you're already utilizing a version of this, but now it's there for Amazon directly there as well. Then you have some regulatory compliance information, and we did also have an announcement about the Smarter Seller Central homepage for sellers worldwide. So this is talking about the dashboard itself. There was some announcements on the simplified listing management. And then you have enhanced buyer abuse protections, which actually got some applause at Amazon Accelerate.

Shivali Patel

You have Veeco, which, if you don't know, that's a company for printing shipping labels and they had some announcements for reducing rates. You have Amazon's shipping service. Now this is particularly cool because it's just telling you a little bit about what new changes are coming to the actual logistics side of things. Now, if you don't know about Veeco, Veeco is just a company for printing shipping labels, so they had some announcements. Then you have Amazon shipping services, so you can actually end up shipping non Amazon orders. With Amazon it's sort of a rival to UPS or FedEx you can kind of think of it like that but it's really helpful for the logistics side of things. And then you also have supply chain by Amazon integrated and that's really cool because it offers you the end to end fully automated, basically logistics for supply chain. So picking up your product from your actual manufacturing factories, getting it over through customs all the way to the warehouses. It just helps simplify the process. Of course, with FBA they were already kind of doing that with helping with picking, packing and shipping out that product. But now, when you really have to get out new orders or a new batch of inventory, now they can help you with actually picking up those products and then getting it all the way into the warehouses.

Shivali Patel

Let's jump into the next news article, which is smart cargo expands next and two day delivery offerings with Walmart go local. Now this comes hot from the business wire and as we go down you can end up seeing that this is sort of similar to what Amazon announced actually today. So if this is a coincidence or not, you let us know in the chat. But as you can see here, they're just working with some airlines to enable an alternative delivery network to establish carriers. So, again, you can end up shipping out non Walmart orders with Walmart.

Shivali Patel

Okay, let's jump over to Etsy. So, from modern retail, etsy seeks to drive more organic traffic through their share and save program. So if you are someone who sells on Etsy, then you might have been dealing with about a 6.5% transaction fee, but now you can kind of be your own affiliate and it's going to reward you for that work that you are already doing, ending up to a 4% of the order total off of that bill. So maybe you are one of those sellers who has been trying to hike your prices a little bit to kind of combat with the inflation and make up for any costs that you have, but this can be one of those things that might be something that will add value to your business. Now, something to be mindful of here is Etsy does have some rules, and one of those rules is you are prohibited from directly linking pay-per-click activities to Etsy. So this implies that you might need to actually end up investing and advertising in maybe creating a landing page and then driving those users to your product through that method. But again, if you are selling on Etsy, then this is something that you might want to consider utilizing in your own business.

Shivali Patel

Next up, we have Amazon DSP campaign signals now available on Amazon Marketing Stream. This is directly from advertising with Amazon, so Amazon Marketing Stream is something that helps us have hourly information for PPC, even with Atomic at Helium 10. And now it's expanding to DSP campaign data sets, so this is super cool. If you are somebody who does utilize DSP, then make sure that this is something you look into. Next up, we have around the clock convenience. Now, this is one of the things I'm really excited to share because I find that there's a little bit of a funny component to it, but Walmart does offer customers late night delivery. So, if you are, this is a little bit more on the consumer side of things, the storefront side of things, but I'm sure that this will end up, long-term, be something that can help the three P sellers as well. A couple of weeks ago, Bradley mentioned that you can now end up delivering into the garage for Amazon, while Walmart said let me raise you one, because they now end up having an option right here, but you can have items delivered directly to your fridge, you guys, or your countertop. So if you are someone who you feel like coming home to something from Walmart is gonna make you happy if it's directly on your countertop, you now have that option. So, just so you know, this is now something that Walmart Plus members have the capability of making use of.

Shivali Patel

Then you have FlowSpace. This comes from RetailDive, and FlowSpace is the software platform and distribution network which is actually partnering with TikTok Shop. Now TikTok Shop has had all the hype in recent weeks. A lot of Amazon sellers have expanded into TikTok Shop just to use the external traffic with Amazon attribution links to generate even more revenue. We've had conversations with some Helium 10 elite members as well who end up using fulfillment by TikTok and, though I'm not sure if they're using FlowSpace. Flowspace is something that is directly integrated with TikTok Shop. So if you are a TikTok user, maybe you've been going through and you've noticed that there's some videos coming up with content creators maybe pitching a product, and you'll have a little bit of a shopping cart that you can click on and directly purchase. So not only are they now picking up on trends and popularizing different items, you can also enable those sales directly from the platform itself, which is super, super cool.

Shivali Patel

So, with that, those are our news pieces for this week. If you want more information about any of these announcements, or you're super excited about some of them, make sure you tune into this Saturday's Serious Sellers podcast episode, where Bradley will discuss not only these updates, but also updates from day two of Amazon Accelerate, and, trust me, you don't want to miss out. So, after we've talked about news, what's next? Well, before I get to what's next, make sure that you are following our LinkedIn, because not only is Bradley gonna be sharing those details on our podcast episode, but if you are more of a reader or you are active on LinkedIn, you won't want to miss those updates there as well. So make sure you're following our LinkedIn page. Just go to Helium 10 and you'll be able to click, follow and get all of our updates that we post.

Shivali Patel

Next we have Carrie Miller, our brand evangelist, who is going to talk to you about audiences. Now, audience is great for just pulling real people about your product. So, as opposed to maybe split testing directly on your Amazon listings and having potential headaches of underperforming variance, you can now go directly to audience and get real data on understanding what will work better. But I'm not going to get too deep into it. I'm going to pass it over to Kerry and let her show you Today.

Carrie Miller

I want to talk with you a little bit about split testing. Now, most of the time when you're doing split testing, you're actually split testing things like your title or your images on Amazon. But we actually have a way that you can do some split testing with your target audience before you even listen to anything on Amazon, and there's actually a lot of other capabilities of this tool. So I want to go ahead and show you how to do this. So the first thing you're going to want to do is you want to log into Helium 10 and you're going to go up to the tools menu and you're going to click on this audience tool, and this is where you're going to be able to create a poll of your target audience. So you get feedback on a variety of different things. So the first thing you want to do is click on create poll, okay. So once you click on create poll, it's going to actually ask you what type of poll you want to do, okay, so in this situation, maybe I want to do, you know, a main image, but you can also do like a general idea of listing, title or really anything that you want. A lot of times I use kind of general idea for just kind of like product ideas and things like that, maybe different colors and things like that. So once you choose that I'm going to just choose main image and you go to the next step. You are going to be able to write a question. So you could either choose one of these questions like how does this image make you feel? Which product would you rather buy? Based on the image, which product would you rather buy? I'll probably choose something like that. Then you're going to go to the next step and this is where you're going to actually add your images. So if you have, for example, our coffin shelves, maybe we want to know what is the best coffin shelf main image. You can put upload up to eight options here, but I'm going to skip that just to show you all the rest.

Carrie Miller

Here you can choose a general audience or you can do a custom audience. Now, it is a little bit more of a charge to do one of these polls. It's about $50 because you're going to pull 50 different people. But you can actually choose an age range specifically. If your product is specific age range, you can do a different target audience in general. Are they a prime member? There's a lot of different options in here so you can really personalize this and hone down into your target audience and get the best feedback possible for your product. So highly recommend utilizing these. It's a really good investment to get that really targeted feedback from your exact target audience.

Carrie Miller

Then you're going to choose your audience size and I just I'm going to leave it at the 50 here, and then you can also, you know, know more about who is responding, so you can, you know, find out their personal or all this different information about them. You can check whatever it is that you want and then you can confirm your poll and that is what is going to generate your poll and within you know, 24 hours you should see all of your results. Now, this is what it looks like when you do have results. So you can see.

Carrie Miller

On our poll we were looking for a main image and so we asked you know we have a coffin shaped egg tray. If you saw this in the search results, which picture would you would make you want to click on the most? So the winner here was this B image and if you go down here, you can actually see an explanation of why that person chose this particular image. So it's really, really helpful feedback because it's not just you know a poll, but it's actually you know, qualitative information that really can help you in deciding which image to go with and why. And then it gives you some more insights into your actual audience, that is, you know that you're pulling.

Carrie Miller

You can also see their demographics here, their education level, their gender identity all this great information about who you polled so that you can make a better informed decision about whatever it is that you're testing on Amazon whether it's your main images copy, maybe you're testing a new product all those different options you have there. It is an incredible tool, a really good investment, especially during product research. I love using this to you know, decide colors and also just design in general. Like which design do you like best? If you are having a problem, you know asking your family members. This is actually a better way to do it because you can target your specific audience and get some really great feedback. So if you haven't checked out our audience's tool, go ahead and check it out and you will be happy that you did.

Shivali Patel

All right, thank you so much, Carrie. That was fantastic. So I hope you don't just listen to this. You also implement. So make sure you go check out audience. If you are somebody who needs to split test, who should be split testing, or you want to optimize that listing, then this is great for you. So that is it for this week. I hope you learned something and we'll catch you next time to see what's buzzing.

#491 - Kevin King’s Amazon Hacks & Never-Before-Heard Selling Story

Today, we're privileged to have an enlightening and engaging conversation with the one and only Kevin King. Before Amazon FBA and E-commerce, Kevin takes us back to his early days as a collector of sports cards, which eventually transformed into a lucrative venture during his college years. In a unique twist to the collectibles market, Kevin began featuring pretty girls on baseball cards. A fascinating story that takes us back to that era and Kevin's unique business strategy ties into the Amazon-selling industry today.

Get ready to take notes as Kevin King, opens his treasure trove of Amazon seller hacks and wisdom from his vast experience in the business world. From unveiling the concept of intuitive eating that helped him lose a remarkable 70 pounds without dieting, to sharing insightful hacks, strategies, and resources for Amazon sellers, Kevin covers it all. He even takes us behind the scenes of his recently launched an Amazon newsletter and its intriguing and engaging content. Gear up as we switch gears to advanced Amazon seller strategies and explore the unfair advantages and perks you can get by being a Helium 10 Elite member!

As we dive further into the conversation, you'll hear tales of success from Elite members and how their monthly training and networking calls help them gain insights from some of the top Amazon and Walmart in the space. Rounding off the episode, we anticipate the forthcoming Billion Dollar Seller Summit and the Level Up event. So, whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, an established business owner, or simply someone with a penchant for compelling stories, this episode is guaranteed to leave you inspired and filled with actionable advice. Don't miss out!

In episode 491 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Kevin discuss:

• 00:00 - Kevin King's Amazon Seller Hacks and Journey
• 03:59 - Collectible Baseball Cards and Strip Clubs 
• 10:16 - Kevin’s Weight Loss Journey and Health Tips
• 24:05 - A Different Amazon Newsletter
• 27:40 - Increasing Engagement Through Opt-in System 
• 40:00 - Benefits of Joining the Helium 10 Elite Program 
• 42:52 - Catch The Next Billion Dollar Seller Summit
• 48:30 - 60-Second Tip: Automated Tool for Boosting Amazon Sales 

► 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

Kevin King is back on the podcast and, in addition to some cool seller hacks that he always has for us, he's gonna talk about a whole variety of topics like how he used to be a collectible card Manufacture and how he's lost 70 pounds in the last couple of years without even dieting. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Are you a six, seven or eight figure seller and want to network in a private mastermind group with other experienced sellers? Or Maybe you want to take advantage of monthly advanced training sessions with Kevin King, an expert guest? Do you want to come to our quarterly in-person all-day trainings at Helium 10 headquarters? Or do you want the widest access to the Helium 10 set of tools? For all of these things, the elite program might be for you.

For more information on Helium 10 elite, go to h10.me/elite. 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 we've got the most serious sellers of them all, Kevin King, back on the show. Kevin, how's it going?

Kevin King

It's going. I don't know if I'm serious, though I'm more a I'm a seller, but I'm, yes.

Bradley Sutton

Some people might say you know as like they read my news I would say what is serious, like how serious is this guy? Yeah, yeah, the newsletter. We're gonna talk about that you know. There's definitely been some some things that people are saying that this isn't, this can't be serious, but we'll get it. We'll get into that.

Kevin King

A little bit depends on the total point of view, what you see, what's coming, yeah, oh my goodness, I can't wait, I want to talk right off the bat though, before I forget.

Bradley Sutton

You know, I don't think we've talked about this on the podcast before, or maybe you've alluded to it. I've heard you talk about it, but I've never actually dug deep like right now. Hold on, let me just pull something from my back wall here. I just hit it behind. I was sorting some some baseball cards and I'm actually flying to Japan on my own time personal time off and I'm setting up at a card show over there because my dad's had a business there. But I've heard you mentioned before that that you've dabbled in in the old days, in the, in the like sports cards or comics or what was it exactly in that industry.

Kevin King

Yes, I as a child back in the 80s, 70s and 80s, I collected the basketball cards, back when the I think it was tops they were big, they're like four, four by six size or something like that very Huge, and I collect I don't know. So I don't know when I started second, third grade. So I'm like that and I collected those, collected baseball cards, collected football cards and I was big into them and then I just kind of I grew out of it. I guess maybe I don't know, sophomore year, high school or something, just that was a little kid stuff threw everything in a box or actually put everything in a. I think I was going to throw it away. My mom's like no, no, no, no, don't throw all that stuff away. So she's threw it into about my mom's a hoarder anyway, but she threw it into a box.

And then my senior year of high school, like seven years late, sorry, of college, like seven years later, yeah, I was like I damn, I need some money, man, I need a, I need a little extra cash. I was like what, how can I make some cash? I was like, wait a second. My mom, I think baseball cards now people are actually starting to pay real money for these things. I might actually have, you know, some crazy rookie card for Roger Clemens or something, I don't know. I called her up. You still got that box of stuff I was going to throw away. She's like, yeah, I was like I'm coming up to see you, um, you know, from mother's day or something, I'm gonna grab it from you. So I grabbed it and I went on and I sold to Sold a bunch of those. I had some rare stuff in there, made thousands of dollars just taking them into a hobby shop, you know, a comic book store or whatever, and trading them in. And you got some extra beer, money and cash that I needed when I was, you know, not doing so well, when I was 21, 22 and so that evolved, though into time and, uh, the earth was.

When was this? Like 92, 93, so about three years after college, um, I was doing stuff, mark and I, you know, mark, from billion dollar stars on, we were doing, um, I'd started a magazine, uh, that dealt with strip clubs, actually, and it wasn't. There's no nudity or anything. This is the business side of it. It was, you know the business side of it. And and doing that, these, for some reason baseball cards have become hot to put strippers on. So it was everything from you know the cabaret, royal and Dallas to the dollhouse in Orlando, to playboy magazine was doing it, penthouse, all the anybody you know bikini, hawaiian, tropic bikini girls were doing it. It became a thing to put Put pretty girls on on baseball cards and these were being sold through traditional comic stars. This wasn't like in the adult shops and like the on the other side of the internet. These were like.

Diamond comics was a big distributor back then in capital city comics Too, huge distributors that distributed all the comic book stores. You know they will have big boost at comic con in san diego. Um, they would put these things out and you will put them in packs. It became a huge, freaking business.

Bradley Sutton

We're selling cases of these and that's one of my first so you were the, you were the one who made them, or you were we made. I was one of the.

Kevin King

I was both. I was one of the companies, I was making them. Um, originally we had deals because I knew some of these club owners. So they're like yeah, do go ahead and do ours. You know that's good promotion for us and we'll do it. So I was doing them, I go to them. We would either shoot it or they give us stuff that we would. Actually I would design it. What's the back of the cards have?

you know, in baseball cars I would have the stats and he had had susie, susie smith, stage name, candy, candy dropper, whatever, uh, five, six, 34, 24, 34, um, originally from san diego, likes men with uh, a short hair or whatever, um, you know, it would be something like that and I was like I need a better way to actually sell these. So a lot of people it goes back to what we do today. They're putting insert, insert cards, you know, register your warranty or get on our, join our vip club or something as one of the like the 11th card in a pack of 10, and they were sending it into the company stew physical mail. There's no internet back then and these companies were not doing anything. They're like the, the business cards in a fishbowl at the gym. You know, they just accumulate.

And so I called up all these companies so what are you doing with your, with your, uh, your inserts? And I got there sitting there, said send it to me, I'll get them all typed in. I hired some company in Jamaica that would type these in for Four cents a piece or something, some crazy load number ended up building a mailing list of like 13 000 people off of this that had filled up for like a hundred different companies that were doing this and then as part of the deal I said well, I want to be able to you, I'll send you the list. I knew these guys wouldn't do anything with it most of them and I want to be able to have the right to mail it and I'm going to buy your cards from you wholesale and I'm going to create a catalog, a glossy color catalog that was sent in the mail, and Send these out and sell mine and yours.

That became a huge freaking business that blew up and, um that we were able to ride that wave, uh, for quite some time and we were doing all kinds of really cool. Sometimes I have to show you. If I would know and you're gonna talk about this, I could have showed you some here but we did 24 karat gold signatures, like an ink with 20 raised 24 karat gold. We did and put them in like those, those crystal cases with screws on all sides. I mean this was like Serious, serious stuff.

Bradley Sutton

I mean people ahead of the time, because that, that's like what the industry has moved to is like these, you know, like one of ones, and like, hey, this is a uh, you know there's only 10 that have this signature. And now there's these companies that have them, where they actually come out Like every single one, like national treasures and stuff, where every single you know card in the set it comes in like this case, and it's all encapsulated in these plastic or these, these hard holders, and You're like doing this stuff. Yeah, it's 25 years before we were doing stuff for puzzles.

Kevin King

So at the back of the card we might do a set of, a subset of nine, so maybe this sets a hundred, but nine of them on the back is a puzzle piece. So you had to collect all nine, flip the cards over and put them in the right order to get another picture as a, you know, as a puzzle piece, like like a tic-tac-toe board. But you put them on the right order it makes another picture. Uh, we, yeah, we're doing all kind and but because of the nature of the products we were, basically I was limited in my marketing, and so it's where I cut my teeth, because I had to get super creative and super innovative on marketing. Because you know, you weren't allowed to. You know, if there was a facebook back there wasn't facebook back then, but there was they would not allow you to advertise it. So it caused us to be very creative in the way we did marketing.

Um, we did a huge events. You talking about going to japan at the block blotch Blotch not beloggio, that's vegas, but the Belaj hotel in west hollywood on the sunset strip over there by the viper room and maybe some different name now, but there's a fancy hotel. In 1997 we brought in a bunch of the models Put out a thing and said you know, it's 500 bucks to come, and we had all these guys come like 300 guys, 400 guys, come to get, stand in line, get autographs from the girls on their cards, on 8 by 10s, and we did a party afterwards. It was it was different world.

Bradley Sutton

Interesting. Well, hey guys, you heard it first.

Kevin King

I never talked about it. It's not okay.

Bradley Sutton

I guess, heard, like you know Briefly, you're into collectible cards, you know, and I was like you know what? That's kind of up my alley. Let me ask him about that. So you heard it first here. Now, guys.

Kevin King

We had binders, you know, with the sleeves, and you put special, special binders. You would collect and, yeah, it was like it was full on full on Wow, interesting, interesting stuff.

Bradley Sutton

So, guys, we're doing this podcast a little bit differently. I'm doing everything backwards. You know, Kevin is known for his strategies and and Amazon. You know seller hacks and stuff like that. Well, we'll definitely get to that, but instead of doing at the beginning, we're gonna do that towards the end. If you guys have been listening to this podcast for a while, I've actually, you know, usually at the end of podcast, start asking people about their health regimen and diets and exercise and things like that, because 2023 is my year of health, where I'm asking, talking to guests. But we're gonna, we're gonna flip the script a little bit. Say to the end for the Amazon strategy. Now, Kevin, you yourself, wait, wait, can you look to your left really quick? Look to the side, Kevin. Where'd you go? Kevin? Where, oh? You disappear. You're so skinny now. You just disappeared when you, when you turn to the side there. How much weight have you lost this year?

Kevin King

I Don't know what the number is this year but in the last couple years about 70, 70, some odd pounds. I still got a ways. Still got a ways to go. But I'm probably another 50 or 60 and I'll be happy, but that'll probably take.

Bradley Sutton

That's impressive. Take me a few more years. Once you, I've noticed, you know, once you hit 40. It's like hard to lose weight, so you hit a number like that. That's pretty impressive. So let's talk about that a little bit. You know I Mean are. What are you doing? You're not, you know, starving yourself. You told me that before. It's not about, it's not about like starving yourself or necessarily counting calories or or working out seven hours a day or anything like that. But but how have you been able to, to steadily get to that when you're at now?

Kevin King

I've been. I've had an issue with my weight all my life. I've been up and down all my life and sometimes it's gotten a lot worse than what it what it is now. You know, right now about 260. I've been as high as like 360 in the past.

In high school I was right around 200 when I most of my weight gain started when I left the house to go to college, to start drinking beer, eating pizza and just kind of kind of put it on and Didn't really care Too much. But then it, you know, as you age and I've been lucky, knock on wood, that I haven't had a lot of issues, not other than a type 2 diabetes, but no high blood pressure, no high cholesterol, none of that kind of stuff that you would expect. I've been pretty good shape, even though been a bigger, bigger guy comparatively, and but I got to a point where it's actually my, my ex-wife, her. She always used to say if you can't take care of yourself, how can you take care of me? Which was a good little slogan and it's true, and so that kind of motivated me a little bit to To kind of in. So I tried every diet in the book. You know, everything from carnivore diet to Atkins diet, to Weight Watchers, to.

Bradley Sutton

Manny, get you on that carnivore at one point. Yeah, they're all stupid, he's, I know he's big on that.

Kevin King

Every one of those diets is stupid. I'm sorry if someone's out there's listening and thinks they're great. They're stupid. Every single one they do. They work, yes, they work short term. But how many times have you done the carnivore and you're right back to where you started it. But the key and I kind of learned this from my dad in a way, because he lost a lot of weight and kept it off for like 50 years he's skinny, I mean, he's like 130 pounds or something, but it's mindset, it's psychology.

Eating is psychology. It's the people that you look at, all the people that go when they work out. They go when they work out and work their ass off and what they do after that. They go get a Starbucks and they just undo the entire workout. They just did by getting Starbucks with all the cream and all the whatever in it. I'm not coffee drinkers, I don't know all the terminology, but and they just completely undo it. But they feel good about themselves. I worked out and I had a supposedly a good coffee. It you've got to be conscious of what's in your mouth.

So my, my ex-wife had found this woman. She's from Venezuela originally. She was listening to these, this podcast in Spanish, and she was a guest and she's talking about something called intuitive eating. You can look at, you can Google it. Google it intuitive eating. And she was talking about how this works. And so my wife At the time was like, let me, I want to do this. And so she called her up, started doing like launch. This woman lives in Miami doing long-distance consultations. And Then she said, Kevin, I think you'll really like her, she's really really good, you should try it. So, and to during COVID 20, was it? I'm into 2020 on Christmas time, 2020. I had my first call with her and started really in January 2021 and what she does is she doesn't believe in diets and she's like the head of the gastric that people of Miami I don't know what the damn thing is called, but something Uh, but she's like the top person of it, gmm. She's skinny, she's a Attractive you know, vince, a willing girl, but she's headed.

This whole thing and her whole thing is, is intuitive eating. It's the psychology of eating. It's not about, you know, weight losses is about 80% what you put in your mouth and 20% everything else, and being conscious of what you eat, and so it. She's like Kevin promised me, you'll never go on another diet in your life. It's like done check mark. She's like if and if you get bad. If you get bad, if you go off rails on something Like you know, you go out and you you eat a gallon of ice cream one night because you're depressed or something. Don't think, well, shoot, I just ruined everything. I'm working at Might as well, eat another one the next day and I'll start a diet on Monday. Everybody always starts a diet on Monday or the first of the month. Okay on, on September, on August 1st, I'm gonna start. She said that's absolutely the wrong way to do it. She's like eat what you want. If you want a freaking Pizza, eat the pizza, but it needs to be. You want the pizza needs not be a five or six out of habit, but like a nine or a ten and go get the pizza, but be conscious of what you're eating. Maybe get a small instead of a large or whatever.

And I had a habit. I had a bad habit like every night to relax, I would watch TV Just to, you know, unwind my brain and everything and spin an hour just watching mindless TV. You know, america's Got Talent or some stupid reality show or just whatever, just to kind of just wind down. And I would eat a box of milk guts. You know one of those, can those? I love milk guys because you could put three or four of them in your mouth, suck on them. You know, you put three or four in your mouth, they kind of meld together because they're caramel and so you're just sucking on it like you would a you know a butterscotch or something, and then, as it gets lower, you put a couple more in your mouth and they meld together so you can make a box last like an hour and a half. But that's 600 calories on a lot of sugar. I just I was in this habit of doing it every single night. She broke me of that. Now I have that maybe once a month.

But she got me the thinking about things and she finds substitutes. Why do you like those milk duds? Is it the texture? Is it the carmel? Is it the way it taste on your tongue? There's something about it. Why do you drink so much soda? Is because you like the carbonation, that is, a specific carbonation. How about switching to this drink, not a period, not this, but this specific one, and it works. So you're, you're tricking your mind psychologically to still, because you have those cravings in those desires or those habits, and as you break in those you swap it.

So she's told me, like Most dieticians would say, if you're drinking a coke, zero, you need to cut that out. You need to go to water. You know, hundred twenty eight gallons a day, or ounces a day I mean I got too much, that's a whale size. But a hundred twenty eight ounces a day, and and and, quit, cut, cut those out immediately. She's like no, if you're drinking six a day, just swap one of them out for a water In this, you know, and then have five and let's see where that goes.

And but over time you start consciously eating things differently. You start looking at stuff. Am I eating because I'm hungry or am I eating because it's a habit? And now I'm at the point now where I have a private chef that comes once a week and cooks for me, and he used to make my lunches and my dinners. Now I'm just telling me one meal a day because that's all I want.

So, and I'm not, I'm not eating half of it anyway. I eat, you know, a little bit of breakfast, protein shake, maybe a little cereal or piece of bread or something. But if I want a candy I buy. If I want an ice cream I get it, but I used to eat a lot of ice cream. Bluebell is my favorite to Texas company and you get across the south it's not everywhere but it's my favorite so I would have those little pints. I buy those little half gallon things or whatever they are last a couple days. I've had one right now in my fridge for two months and I haven't even opened it. It's a change in psychology or what I've done is like, okay, if I want that taste, I want that ice cream taste. I love that taste. It gets the hormones In me, it gets the things that satisfaction, those triggers that are in your body. I'll buy those small size cups. They're like for birthday parties for kids. You know there are 160 calories and I'll eat one of those and she's like, do you go back for a second, go back for a third? Like, no, I just, I just eat one. So it's it's some of its discipline, some of its mind over matter, just being conscious of everything that you eat. And that's the biggest thing in.

The second is sleep is so important in in health and a lot of people especially. I mean you're a perfect example. You're working your ass off and sleeping wherever you could grab a nap here or there's a couple hours at night at one point. I know you're better about it now, but but most people dismiss how important sleep is for your overall health. And what woke me up to it is is a few years ago I was going to get life insurance and I didn't have life insurance before. But I got Marius, I better get some life insurance. And talking to the agent, they're like OK, there's, there's a what's your sleep apnea score? And I'm like. I just did a test and it was like 19, I had 19. Mild things or whatever it was, in a, in a period of whatever the measuring period is, that's OK, that's mild and what? What this insurance company told me is that you're at 19 times, maybe it's 19 times per hour. You sub, get subconscious, you don't realize it, but if it messes with your body and they said, if you're you get to 20, you're uninsurable on life insurance. I'm like what? And so I went immediately.

I had my wife used to say I would snore. I would snore like a sound, like a Mack truck Coming down the street. So I went. I had a. There's a guy here in Austin that does a balloon, sonia plastic, so they go into your. I had a 70% blockage. I didn't know what, I just get used to it as you're living, you only realize it. But I had trouble in my nose. So you know, man, he just did it. I did a Marcus done a bunch of people done it. He has this technology is like these. One is doogie how's your guys that became an MD when he was 14 or something. So you know this technique. So it doesn't require the major surgery that and still get knocked out for like 15 minutes because and uses balloon and blows it up and opens all that up. That made a huge difference on my story.

In my sleep Plus, I started using a sleep mask and I changed. You know, sometimes in your bed If it's hot or cold, temperatures are right, you're tossing and turning, you're not getting as much sleep, you wake up in this little bit of sweats or whatever. But there's something called the eight sleep mattress. Is the number eight sleep. That's freaking amazing. It's a mattress topper and you it's about two grand.

It's not cheap, but you put it on top of your bed and then it you can set settings are you cold sleep or warm sleep? And you can do splits, so if your wife and you on one side, your partner new Can be off different. And then it measures you throughout the night and it ring and fit, that fits and stuff. Do this, but give you like your pulse rate and use some measurements during the night. But this like measures your whole body and like how often do you wake up, how, what kind of quality of sleep did you get? What was your heart rate, your hrv through the night, all this stuff and it Adjust after a week of testing. It figures out where what temperature is optimal for you. It's a way to just you can manually write it but adjust up and down either cold or hot, the temperature of the mattress.

And this thing is so thin, it's super thin. It goes on top of the bed, has a little pump that you hide behind your bed with a little bit of water in it and it's brilliant. I mean I have a. I have a sleep number bed that has Like seven thousand dollars sleep number bed that has something similar built in that sucks compared to this Eight sleep. It's awesome. So things like that plus you got. You got to watch as a man. You got to watch your testosterone. So, as men, the number one thing is sleep, sleep apnea or sleep To stop, strong level in your diabetes level. Those three things play more in your health Then anything else. If you get on top of those, your chances of Of Having a long fruitful life and being there for your kids and your wife and when To enjoy your retirement or much, much higher intriguing stuff.

Bradley Sutton

Alright, so let's let's give somebody a quick tease. We're gonna talk about your newsletter you just started, why you started it and some of the stuff, but what's one of the either one that's come out already or something that's coming one of the strategies that you can share with our listeners who maybe haven't gotten a chance to read the newsletter? What's something you brought out in one of your newsletters that can write off the bad help sellers listening.

Kevin King

Yeah, I mean I just started April, august 14th. It's twice a week, it's Mondays and Thursdays. When I say newsletter, a lot of people roll their eyes but and cause I'm like, oh yeah, I get a newsletter from Helium Town, I get a newsletter from this software, and every time I get my email I get the company newsletter. Those are not newsletters, those are promotional emails for the most part. Go read our blog, go read this. A newsletter to me is more like a. What I'm doing is more like a magazine in a newsletter format. So it's action packed. Yes, there's a couple of ads and stuff in there from people that are paying for those, but it's action packed, actionable stuff. It's totally free. So, like, we just did a big one that's really resilient. The one that came out on August 28th talked about the A9 algorithm and so you know, Danny McMillan over at Seller Sessions did a big, big like document on it and we analyzed that and like, while that's good, that's not really there's more to it than that. So we took a look at Amazon Science, a big paper that came out and a couple of other things analyzed that and we talked about that and I've gotten so many people saying this is like the most amazing. It was written in a way that we can understand it. Sometimes this stuff gets too technical, plus some of the tips and tools that we put in there. We had a really cool resource for like getting.

Sometimes, when you're trying to create your A plus content, your brand story, your brand pages, you're like what should I do? How should I tell my designer, a graphics person, to do and maybe you saw a couple here their ideas, or you give them some basic idea. But there's guys who listen. There's a guy in George. That's a similar library of 25,000 A plus pages and you can filter by it. I'm in the pet space, I'm in the space, I'm in the. It's got it all keyworded so you can search and get like, wow, that's a cool one, that's a cool one. I want my designer to do something like that or combine these two together. So I wish there were resources like that.

I have something called the Dream 100. As you know, there's a lot of BS not Bradley Sutton's, but BS in this industry that with fake gurus and stuff. So I have every Thursday I come up, I put someone in the Dream 100, and I announced this is a legit person, you should follow them, trust what they say. So that'll get up to 100 people. It's only three right now, but that'll get up to 100 people over time. We do.

I add a little bit of humor to it, so there's like I'll either call somebody out you know that's basically a fake guru or we'll put some crazy listing like hey, can you believe that this product is selling 100 grand a month on X-ray on Amazon? You look at it like holy cow. That's the craziest thing I ever saw. We do some of that, so it's a mix. And then I tell a personal story and each one's called a six second story. So when someone opens the news there, you gotta hook them right away and you gotta get them reading and engaged. And so I do. I personalize it and then I tie it to whatever we're talking about that day.

Bradley Sutton

So I'll personalize and reason. One kind of causes stir about some naked people, some balconies.

Kevin King

Yeah, but I do that. I want to. You know, I always say if you're not pissing someone off, you're not doing a good job. If you try to please everybody, you please nobody, and so I'm feeding my audience and so if that bothers you and it's gonna bother some people that might be religious or you know, depending that's okay. You can go find your information somewhere else. I'm fine with that.

But the overwhelming response to that has been like holy cow, this is the best thing ever. This is don't stop. Can you do this every day? I can't believe it. One guy who sent me a message today is like this is so good I can't even take it all in.

I just got three of my team members start reading this and we're dividing up sections of what to do, and so that's.

There's so much out there. You know we do the helium-10 elite every month and we've been doing that since 2017 at helium-10, which is advanced level stuff, and in that I do seven ninja hacks every month and share those with the audience, and then, once those have become a little bit older, sometimes I share those other places, but the helium-10 elite people always get them first. Right now, I write everything on the current newsletter, but it's going to get to. I'll hire a staff, but I need to get to set the tone, figure out what works, what people like, what they don't like, and then I can feed everything I've written. For if I do this for three months, let's say, I can feed that all into an AI and then say have the AI write in the style of Kevin of the newsletters they don't know the exact style, the exact everything. So these are not AI newsletters, these are. We use AI as a tool, but AI is not writing these.

Bradley Sutton

So if somebody wants to go ahead and sign up, it's free right now. How can they do that?

Kevin King

Well, it's always going to be free. It's billiondollarsellers.com with an S, billiondollarsellers.com with an S. It's growing pretty quickly. So I think hopefully by this time next year there'll be maybe 50 to 100,000 people getting that twice a week and actually reading it that one. So my email list from all the stuff I do is big not as big as helium-10s or something, but so I could just blast this out to everybody.

But I don't want to do that. I want people to actually want it and I have people now already saying I didn't get it, I didn't see it in my spam or what happened to it, and they're getting upset that they didn't get it. That's what I want. Is it to become habit-forming and become something people look forward to? When they see that Kevin King, BDSS, they're like, oh, this is something I got to read. If I can't read it right now, I'll save it until tonight or the plane ride tomorrow or whatever. That's where I want it to be.

So it doesn't have to be. It's not a blast on my whole email list. You've got to double opt in. You can't just sign up and get it. You actually sign up and you got to click something else to say you really want to sign up and then you're in and that's on purpose and it keeps the open rates high, the engagement high, it's good for the advertisers that come into it, that support it with a little bit of advertising, and it's just good for everybody. It's people that want it.

Bradley Sutton

All right. So guys, make sure to sign up. It's one of the. I personally don't even read newsletters. This is like the first one. I actually just sit there and read and, just like Kevin said, sometimes he starts with a funny story, but it works. It like hooks you up and like laughing, sitting there, laughing like all right, I want to read more. I'm hooked in and from start to finish. It's long, it's like you're doing a lot of scrolling. Sometimes people say, oh, when you write an email, you don't want them to scroll, and they're like I got no problem scrolling, but it's written short.

Kevin King

It's written in a format so that you can skim it, but you'll see that it's using every trick in the book. There's no paragraphs more than two or three sentences. There's no. It's not long, and usually when I write it I have to go back and cut half of what I've written wrote out and it's straight into the point and we use a sense of humor. It's not just that opening story, but it's like we did something about in a recent one. So there's no such thing as the A10 algorithm. It's always the A9. There is no such thing, and the A9 of all is just like you did during puberty, but it's still named the A9. So we'll do stuff like that. It's not necessarily business-like or corporate-like, but screw that, put a personality to it and people love that and then as a reading they have a little smile or like I get it, or that's relatable. It doesn't sound like corporate speak or boring stuff. That's all on purpose.

Bradley Sutton

All right. Now you referenced Elite and how you saved the best hacks for there. Do you have any? Just for a sample, you can give some of the cool one or two of the cool hacks that you've given out on your seven ninja hacks that you do monthly in the Elite group.

 Kevin King

Yeah, sure, what's a good reason? We do this every single month. We talk about some of its tools, like CASPA AI, which is a really cool tool where you can shoot your product on your iPhone, just basic picture, upload it and then put it into any scene you want. So you're like, hey, I want my water bottle to be held by an Asian guy standing in the gym with some barbells behind him and he's holding it facing the logo out. It'll make a cool picture instantly using AI with that which you could use in your Amazon post or you could use in your maybe in your listing. You could use a lot of places. So we'll do cool tools like that. Or Melio payments, where you can use credit cards to actually finance your purchase, orders and stuff. We do things like.

A recent one was about how to Get that there's a newer version of this item available. You know we covered that there's a new version of this item available. Like people like see that, how do I get my? You know if I you got a calendar or you got you just updated your product, how can you Link that to the old inventory so that people see there's a newer version available? We showed people how to do that. We showed people how to do the back-end stuff before anybody knew how to do the back-end and get a complete dump of your competitors Listings like all their attributes and everything before. That was really public information. Well, I was like a couple years before yeah, main stream.

Yeah, we stuff like how to use a Hexa. Hexa, it's a beta program most people don't know about to create 360 degree pictures for Amazon listing. They'll do it for you for free and I think that's really really, really, really cool. We've done stuff like how to make money fall from the sky on your landing pages. You know you, someone hits on one your landing pages or one of your blog sites and they don't let's say they don't sign up. But you want to know who they are. There's tools out there that will actually Use IP and geo location to actually figure out, in about 50 to 60% of cases, who these people are, based on public data In the United States, Europe, you might have a few more issues with privacy, but yes, we don't care about privacy.

So, unless it's medical, and so we, we can figure out that. I just went to Bradley's blog talking about the honeymoon and he's a no, I went there. You know, as he got a hit or his metrics, that there's a visitor session, but he doesn't know who they are. If he puts this little bit of code, then we can we put, we can figure out that. Oh, this was Kevin King because he was using this IP address of this computer and there's reverse matching. That knows that, oh, Kevin King went to this gaming side or went to somewhere else in the past 10 years From that same place. It must be Kevin King. Let's match it up again to this other database. So his, his email address is blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Puts that into a database. Then you can either email those people which I don't always recommend if you're gonna do that, you should use something like zero bounce to make sure the emails are valid or you can put them into custom audiences if you're running Facebook ads or any kinds things like that and you can retarget these people.

You ever wonder how sometimes you went to a site and You're all of a sudden now I'm seeing this stuff all over my feed. Some of that's retargeting pixels, which is more private. But if you're wondering, how do they get me onto an email list? Or how did they get me from this this not a meta property into an X or Twitter property? Those two aren't the same company not sharing the same pixel. How do they do that? And this is some of the ways they're doing it. We also talked about you know, Howard. You've had Howard on the how tie on the on the podcast and he's got a little group called elites I'll forget the name of elites seller society or something like that and he's had every Thursday he has someone come on and talk about stuff and one of the things that just recently he had David, who's spoken at the billion dollar sauce on. You remember David from a, the ghost story.

Bradley Sutton

Back in 2019 he came on and he did some translating for him. One year at the billion dollars.

Kevin King

He came on and talked about you know what, what? How are things changing with the Chinese sellers? You know, Howard, he's like you know, ai is level the playing field as far as creating listings and stuff now for everybody. And If you someone's like a word that, how are they ranking? How are they getting reviews? What are they doing? He's like the number one way that Chinese sellers are getting Ranking. Right now they're using postcards, postcards through the mail and he's like, thanks to Kevin King, I'm like what he's like? Oh yeah, I did talk about that in 2019 when I did me and Brandon young went over there and spoke to a huge group in Shenzhen. Well, they took that and now he said that's the number one way that they're getting Review, ranking products and getting reviews. And and so I was like you know what? I think I actually did that In the US too. It wasn't. I just didn't give that to the Chinese sellers.

And so I look back and I share that to the helium-ten elite. First way back, and I don't remember exact time, in 2018, some point, I did a presentation on postcards and it was cutting edge. Virtually nobody did it, everybody, you know. They looked at like, yeah, Kevin, that's like I I never heard of. I don't even check my mailbox. I don't know. I'm a millennial Nah who reads the mail like dude, you're missing it. And so nobody in the hardly anybody in the US did it, but the Chinese like, oh, this, this looks good. They did it and look what it's doing for him four years later. So that's the kind of stuff we do in helium-ten elite.

If you freakin pay attention and implement Not only what I'm teaching but what we bring on Really good guests. You know I look for diversity, from PPC people to shipping people to you name it. You know sometimes you get a speaker. That's yeah, okay, but we get some really good people as three speakers, plus myself, on Every single one of the helium-ten elite, that's. You know, there's a lot of groups out there that that have trainings, but I think this might be the longest last, the oldest one period. It's continuous. There's others that have started and come and gone, but that and but I think since we started February at 2017, when it's called Illuminati, changed the name in 2019 to helium-ten elite, but it's been continuous, never missed a month since February 2017. So that's six and a half years. I don't know if there's any other Group. That has lasted that long at this point and guys.

Bradley Sutton

You know I told people this before. This is One of the secrets not the main secret to my success is Before I ever sold on Amazon, you know, before I even became a consultant. You know people thought I was crazy because it's mulling. I mean, like seven, eight, nine figure sellers going and paying 400 bucks to get in this Illuminati mastermind. I, I could see the value in it. I saw a webinar for something first of you and Manny, you know, way before I worked at helium-ten Year, more than a year probably before and and I actually joined Illuminati Just as a regular person who wasn't even selling yet and within like three, four months I had enough knowledge just from the Illuminati stuff and you know a couple other. You know courses I was taking, but mainly from the Illuminati, where I became like a pretty top-level consultant and and was, you know, launched my Amazon consulting career. You know which was my career before helium-ten, without even selling on Amazon, just because I was able to ramp up my knowledge super fast by being part of that Illuminati mastermind.

Kevin King

So and it's not just the guys exactly training- that's what we had, but more recently Helium 10’s added a weekly call with all the people that want to participate. So I do one a month. I jump on once a month and then the other three weeks Bradley and Carrie and Shivali host them and we'll have anywhere from 20 to 40 50 people in there that are members of helium-10 elite. There's a lot more members in that, but you know some people are busy and for a couple hours Typically an hour or two hours everybody's on there on a zoom call, all on the screen. There's no agenda, no presentations Like what do you got a problem with?

Oh, you know Amazon's blocking me from shipping this and anybody else ever dealt with this. And usually there's someone else like, oh, yeah, I've a. You know, maybe we me or Bradley or somebody knows the answer begin help them. But usually there's somebody else like, oh, have you ever tried this? Or this happened to me two years ago and I did this and you have this interactive conversation that you're not gonna get in a Facebook group. You're not gonna get anywhere else other than maybe an in-person event, which there's four of those a year to for helium-10 elite. Did you get to come to for free? That are that value right there. Sometimes I learned stuff in there, you know, I didn't know from somebody else that right there, connecting with other high-level sellers and being able to share is as valuable as the presentations, if not even more valuable in some cases, and I'm so. There's things like that, that that you're not gonna get anywhere else.

Bradley Sutton

Just last week I don't know if it was on your call or on one of the regular weekly one that you're not on there, it was before you. Either way was before you came on the call there was Elizabeth, who's an elite, elite member, and she was talking about how she's done like something like a two million dollars on TikTok shop Some crazy, some crazy number like that and so she was just like people were dazzled with what she was saying Just ran, you know, just like just randomly got on there. She was just one of their participants and was talking about that. Now we're actually gonna do a train. She's gonna do a training in October in the elite in-person workshop in New York where she's gonna show people I'll kind of like reverse engineer how she was able to get to this level of success that she's had on on TikTok shop, which is definitely a hot topic.

Kevin King

So that's hot, that's. That's big right now. That's big. If you're not paying attention to that, that's big. You know I had Perry Belcher.

This will be coming out on the AM PM podcast in October. So be sure, but Perry Belcher if you don't know who he is, he's one of the top marketers in the space right now. He started digital marketer. Yeah, the big expo with 7,000 people I mean sorry, traffic and conversion is. He was one of the founders of that. He started digital marketer. He's really big in the marketing space and old-school marketing guy.

One of the things he actually said on that podcast, among a bunch of other cool stuff, is that he's like if you're going from Amazon to Shopify, it's a mistake. You should not be doing anything on Shopify. He said we're finding far better success by setting up funnels with click funnels or high level or one of the other, and doing single product drives it. The conversions are way higher, the Sales are way higher than driving someone to a Shopify site where it's there's too many confusing things that can distract them and he's like that's where these Amazon sellers because I asked him for one of the mistakes people are making said that's one of the mistakes a lot of sellers. Amazon sellers are making right now, as they should be focused more on driving stuff to single products with upsells Rather than driving to a Shopify store.

Bradley Sutton

Here's all my 20 things my, my company sells, but yeah, yeah, I mean the tick-tock shop that there's, just whatever is cutting edge. You know we talk about an elite, so so it's actually the longest in history and that you know. Kevin just said it started in in 2017. So it's we're talking over six years, almost seven years. It's been closed for the longest time in history. I think the last time it was open was in March of this year I'm not sure by the time you guys are listening to this episode of its open, but sometime in in September, October, we're gonna open it up for a couple weeks or so. So this is the time to sign up. Guys write this down h10.me forward slash elite. H10.me forward slash elite. And even if it's not open right now, there's a button on there where you can join the waiting list so you can make sure that when it does open for the short window that it does, that, you guys can get in.

But but you know the benefits are this is like the only way to really talk to Kevin. You know people Want to ask kept. You know want to hire Kevin as a consultant all the time. Kevin doesn't have the the bandwidth do that, but once a month he'll go on there and just live, you know, just in a regular zoom call. You can ask him anything you want. You can ask other people anything you want in the Facebook group.

Or we have two weekly zoom calls now one at In the afternoon on Friday us time and then one that I actually hop on at midnight because it's 8 am UK time Every Friday and and we hit the, we hit the Europe. You know, all the European sellers and people in Asia, you know, can hop on a call and network with each other. We have four quarterly workshops. The next one's coming up in October, the fourth one of the year. We had one in, you know, during Amazon accelerate, September 11th, and now October, right during unboxed, we're gonna have one where we're gonna be talking about, like I said, tick tock shop, and also we're gonna have a PPC Expert and there's a whole bunch of other Advances of being on the elite program. So if you guys are interested to add this to your helium tenant count again, go to h10.me forward slash elite and Either sign up right there if it's open, take advantage or if it's closed, just just join the waiting list so you can hook up with Kevin that way.

Kevin King

There's some software tools to that. They get extra tools or extra capacity or something right.

Bradley Sutton

Yeah, elite members usually get access to tools like way before, like we just launched Some historical Cerebro. Elite members have had that for like a year and a half, you know, but now barely diamond members are getting it. Like a year and a half Later there's some tools like our elite analytics so that Kevin actually developed himself he gave the the kind of blueprint for it. That's still only elite members can can access that diamond members don't have access. Then that's been around for like two years. So lots of advantages, including networking and training that elite has.

You know, back in the day, like I said, when I was an elite Illuminati member, it was only the. You know there's a I think there was a Facebook group Maybe at that time or something, but it was mainly just one of those training calls a month and that was enough value For me and now it's just like all you know tons, tons of other value. So guys, make sure to check it out. Another thing you know I'm wearing my my OG Billion Dollar Seller Summit shirt today from the very first one, from the very first one and the next one time and place In 2024 for the next billion dollars.

Kevin King

There's actually two. Come with the next Billion Dollar Seller Summit, May 18th to the 23rd in Kauai, Hawaii, which is gonna be amazing, and then right after that one from the 23rd to the 26th, I have a second event called level up, where we're? So the first, the billion dollar seller summits, mostly for Amazon sellers and all the traditional things that you're You're used to like you are Bradley from a billionaire, saw something, the level up, or switching resorts, take it, everybody that's staying, that chooses to stay, and they're going to the Waimea Canyon, which is the Grand Canyon of Hawaii. It's like a little Grand Canyon that you in Hawaii that then we're taking them on the Nepali Coast on a dinner cruise. The pop for the poly coast is where these mountains, these beautiful mountains, come right up to the edge of the water. It's just stunning Dolphins jumping everywhere, and so that's gonna be cool. And then we're switching to Hanalei Bay, to the one the chain, the ones 300 million dollar resort that just had a overhaul and it's like 14, $1500 a night to stay there, but we got a rate that's like way less than half of that For people coming to the event. And then we're doing it's called level up, so it's six speakers, only ones Amazon, the other five, or you know, like Perry Belcher just said, he's probably gonna speak at it, jason Flatlin is someone that's maybe speak at us, a couple other Molly Mahoney, it's probably gonna speak at it, and some some other, and then we're mixing that in with Some mind and body stuff, like we talked about earlier, because that's important for our engineers. So there's gonna be cryo therapy, there's gonna be a sound therapy lab where you listen to the bowls and it helps reset your mind. We're doing hot yoga, a bonfire on the beach, and so it's. It's gonna be pretty cool.

We're doing a race. You know we did that race here in Austin. You were in that's that scavenger hunt we did a couple years ago here in Austin. People love that. So Probably problem one of the problems when you go to an event you don't get to see the place. You're like you see the hotel and maybe you see a bar or something with a restaurant. So we're doing we've got 25 Avis rental cars thing or 30 Avis rental cars all lined up and you're gonna broken the teams of four and you're gonna do an amazing race across the islands one day. So you're gonna see, then you're gonna be able to see the entire islands and experience the island. Quiet is a place where you're not gonna want to be sleeping aping in the back. You know you're gonna be like looking out the window after every turn going Holy Callis is beautiful. I've never seen something so beautiful my life. It's a drastic Park Island and so you're gonna, but you're gonna be able to see some cool stuff all in some back places that you wouldn't know they're not on the tours map. We're gonna take you to this one cool beach as part of the race. You're like, holy cow, I'm coming back here because nobody's here, nobody knows about this place. It's like a secret little beach. So that's. That's gonna be cool too.

If it's your third or more trip, you're gonna get like a drastic park experience in a helicopter ride Over the island and stuff. So, like Bradley, if you're out there, you get. You get that for free, as, since you're a regular, since you've been to three, this is your third or more we're gonna take a helicopter around the island as a tour is amazing fly up to the inside. This 10,000 foot waterfall and a helicopter in land and this, this drastic park kind of vehicles gonna pick you up and take you through this Amazing like plantation kind of thing and to a VIP dinner that night. It's gonna be really, really cool. So, yeah, that's a billion dollar seller summit calm.

If you want information on that, then in October I'm doing the billion dollar exit summit so the billion dollar exit summer, doing this with Scott Deets so somebody may know he's got the, the exit ticket or whatever it's called him and he them to Probably the top guy and helping people exit. He helped manning Guillermo exit Helium 10 help who's involved in that Done over a half a billion dollars worth of exits for Amazon sellers. So and you may be like, yeah, but right now I'm not thinking about exiting, but you, you might be in a year or two years and now's the time to actually start working on it now To maximize and add a couple extra million dollars to your exit. By working now, rather than waking up one day and say I want to exit, I want to be out of here in three months, you're gonna be shooting yourself in the foot. So we're doing a.

It's very small 25 to 30 people in Austin, October 10th to the 13th called the Billion Dollar Exit Summit and it's hands-on. So he's bringing his whole team, so it's want some a lot of one-on-one stuff. It's not a bunch of presentations from all these random people. You're gonna walk out there with a plan like, okay, this is what I need to do specific to your business. So that's, that's happening in October.

Bradley Sutton

Awesome, awesome, alright. So, guys, billiondollarsellersummit.com to get more information on it. Alright, like always, let's go ahead and close this out with your 30 or 60 second tip that you can leave for the sellers out there, do you haven't checked out Levonta.

Kevin King

That would be a really good tip. I leave a NTA, I think calm, I think is the is the URL. But especially for the fourth quarter coming up. You know, offside Amazon traffic is huge for ranking. You know you get the 10% referral bonus if you're brand registered and it just helps you in your rank Even if they don't buy. If you're sending traffic from outside social media or outside media, blogs, whatever, even if they don't buy, it helps you on your rank.

But these guys you know that's, but it's kind of a pain in the ass to go set all that stuff up. You got to find people on TikTok or you got to find blogs or you got to find these affiliates and like coordinate everything one-on-one, one by one, by one. These guys have got over a thousand of the top affiliates, from TikTok people to people who are in the affiliate business. That's what they do to blogs like USA Today. USA Today will do a holiday gift guide for pet products this year. If you have a pet product, you want to be in that gift guide in USA Today with two million people reading it online. You, these guys, can facilitate that in the way. It's seamless, the way it works is you just connect your Amazon account to their system and it automatically imports all your products.

Once your products are in there, you can go in and cherry pick them like I only want to promote these three. I'm willing to give a 20% commission for you know this dog bowl and then that goes into their database, these thousand affiliates. When they're writing their stories and looking for things they can search that database. Oh, I want, I want to promote this dog. Well, he's given 20% Off. They just automatically pick up the code, the, everything. It's all done for them. They put it into their blog or their, their post or whatever, and it's all automated or you can go in there.

I think they let you do 50 a day. You can reach out to people and they're growing really, really fast and they just had people on prime day the last, the July prime day. Do over a million dollars just off of outside traffic, off of this program on prime day, and just imagine what that does to your listing on Amazon and the internal Amazon stuff, how that's gonna get that file flywheel going. So that's that would probably be a tip of there under the radar. And you know a mission is here. They don't give me a kickback or anything for this, but that's a tool that I think any Amazon serious Amazon seller is a fool to not use. I'm an absolute fool to not actually take a look at that, especially for this fourth quarter, and get a strong competitive edge Over your competition get more like that.

Bradley Sutton

Guys in Helium 10 Elite. h10.me/elite. Kevin, thank you so much for joining us. I know you're traveling a lot more than you were in the previous years. I'll probably hopefully see you at one of these upcoming events and then, for sure, at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit next year. So Keep on. By the time I see you next time, you know I might not even recognize you're losing so much. Wait, hopefully you won't recognize me, because I need to. I need to get on the path.

Kevin King

Yeah, it's slow but by. Yeah. If we go along in a period of time, you know I've lost a bunch.

Bradley Sutton

I'm not trying to do it quick. All right, we'll see it. We'll see you next time you.

#490 - Steps To Resurrect A Dying Amazon Product - Project X

Ever wondered what it takes to breathe new life into a product whose sales have hit rock bottom? Well, we're about to pull back the curtain on the process. Kickstarting the journey to redemption, we delve into the realm of listing optimization, cross-examining ASINs, and pinpointing top keywords for single or group listings. In this highly practical session, we use our Project X egg rack product as a case study to illustrate the steps to revitalizing sales, from initial setup to shifts in market trends.

Then, we navigate the rough seas of competition research, undertaking a meticulous analysis of competitors' pricing, product dimensions, FBA fees, and reviews. We reveal how powerful tools like Helium 10’s Market Tracker can unlock a comprehensive understanding of the market share held by various competitors. Wrapping up this segment, we ponder the implications of our competitors' profitability on our pricing strategies, equipping you with the knowledge to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the curve.

Lastly, we dissect sales and keyword performance, shedding light on the art of effectively monitoring them. Discover how Helium 10's Keyword Tracker, Cerebro, and Adtomic can unravel the mystery behind your listing losing rank and sales. We also discuss how subtle tweaks in prices and keyword targeting can help reclaim your competitive edge. Rounding up, we explore the process of competitor analysis on Amazon, offering a wealth of insights on identifying keywords your competitors are ranking for, and assessing your own keyword performance. This is a must-listen for anyone keen to understand when to pull the plug on an unprofitable product and how to give it a fighting chance at survival. Tune in to gain a wealth of knowledge and strategies that could just save your product from the brink of extinction.

In episode 490 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 01:13 - Project X Is Back?!
• 03:42 - Revitalizing Amazon Sales With Project X
• 06:31 - Analyzing Competitor Pricing and Profitability
• 07:29 - How To Leverage Helium 10’s Market Tracker Tool
• 16:01 - Amazon’s Test On Hiding The Bullet Points
• 16:08 - Results After Emma Helped Improve Our Listings
• 18:13 - Analyzing Sales and Keyword Performance
• 24:27 - Analyzing Keyword Rankings and Sales
• 26:54 - The Power Of The Cerebro “Time Machine”
• 30:48 - Competitor Analysis Process in Amazon
• 39:22 - Revitalizing Old Products & Introducing New Projects

Bradley Sutton:

Today's episode marks the return of one of our most popular series ever Project X. We're going to talk about the steps that any Amazon seller should take If they have a product that has tanked in sales. Can we revitalize it? How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. Do you want to see how your listing or maybe competitor's listing rates as to best practices for listing optimization? Or maybe you want to compare a group of ASINs or Amazon products to see how they compare to each other? Maybe you want to see within seconds the top keywords for a single listing or a group of listings? You can do that and more with the Helium 10 tool Listing Analyzer. For more information, go to h10.me/listinganalyzer. 

 

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. In this episode we are bringing back Project X. Maybe once a month or every other month I'm going to start doing some Project X follow-up episodes. There's a lot coming. We actually started recording season two last year and we got some great footage and some products are actually coming into stock. That was from those recordings. We're going to follow up on some of the original Project X products, if you'd like. What in the world is this Project X that Bradley's talking about here? 

 

Bradley Sutton:

A few years ago, we did this case study. It was mainly on YouTube and you can go back and watch it, but it was all about trying to take some products from zero to hero. We did this reality TV show, vibe program, where we showed you every step of the way how we were able to find products, get them launched, optimize them and then scale them up in the feature. Ever since that show maybe three years ago, four years ago now we did that We've been maintaining those products, not doing that great of a job because we're not full-time Amazon sellers here. I try and run this in my spare time. That's part of what we're going to be talking about today is I've been neglecting some of these products and sales have gone way down. That's what we're going to be talking about today is do you have a product that maybe you've neglected, maybe you haven't been neglecting it, but sales are way down? It's a product that's one or two years old and you're just not doing as well as you did in the past. What are the steps that you can try to take in order to revitalize it or in order to try and get those sales back up and see if you can salvage all the time and effort that you put in a product? Now, what we're going to do today, guys, I'm doing 100% live. I'm not going to prepare this or try to pre-do some research here. I'm going to air this episode right after I film it, a few days after I film it. We're not even going to have time to see the effects. It's going to take maybe a month or two to see, or I did the things that we do actually have an effect. I started noticing this product going down a few months ago. We've already done a little bit of work. We've actually talked about it on this show, where we had Emma from Marketing by Emma come in and revitalize a little bit some of the images and also some of the copy. Now it's like, hey, let's see how that did and what more needs to be done. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let me give you some background first on this product. This product wasn't one of the original Project X products. This is something we were doing when we expanded the brand, we made this brand called Gui’s Chicken Coop and then it was an original in Egg tray. We still have that product. But then we're like, hey, along those same lines, we found that there were these stackable egg racks that were trending on Etsy and Pinterest. The same way, we found the original Project X products. We're like, hey, let's be the first person to make these. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

On Amazon, which we were and we were just dominating, we had some really, really great sales. Let's actually go in and take a look at some of the sales here I am on our Insights dashboard and I knew that even I put here last year and it was one of the top five products. You could see that towards the end of last year we were doing well. We were doing, I mean, for Project X. It was doing about $5,000, $6,000 a month. Profit was decent. Let's take a look at what the profit was towards last year Over $6,000 worth of profit. So it was decent. It actually overtook some of the original Project X in sales. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

But let me show you what happened since the end of last year. We started off with a bang, but then some competitors started coming to the marketplace. We were the first ones and they're like hey look, how good these Project X guys are doing, we're going to try and undercut them a little bit. Let me show you what happened to our sales because of that. All right, I'm going to go ahead and show you this year's worth of sales. You can see, at the beginning of the year we were still doing about $6,500 a month, but then sales just took a nosedive. It halved in March down to $3,000. April it was only $1,000, and then it's been hovering between like $1,000 and $2,000. First of all, you got to understand what happened. Now. Unfortunately, I wasn't running Market Tracker on this the whole time. Otherwise I could show you guys exactly when people started getting into the market. Maybe you're like me and you weren't running Market Tracker the way you should have. I am now and I'm going to show you guys what I can see in the last couple of months on Market Tracker. But let's go ahead and go to Amazon and take a look at what the competition has been doing. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and enter a stackable egg rack here on Amazon. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's just take a look at a couple of these big players. Some of them have been around for a while, but this guy here, this Kinlin, has been just crushing. Now, first of all, take a look at this price point $20.95. Let me tell you I was actually selling this product for $38. We were the only ones and we couldn't even keep them on the shelves Right off the bat. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

You can see an issue here $20.95. Well, let's just take a look at the Helium 10 BSR chart here to see has he been doing this price the whole time? First of all, let's take a look at when he started getting serious. You guys notice anything here. It was right exactly in March of this year. You can totally tell that by looking at this BSR chart, where it looks like he maybe was experimenting with some units here and there, but he really wasn't selling that consistently. Then all of a sudden, come March of this year, he just starts going bonkers. His price point has actually always been looks like $20.95. He stayed pretty consistent on his price, but literally almost half the price of our product. That's one of the issues right there. His sales are like you know maybe five, six, x what our sales are. So it wasn't just him, though there's other people who have jumped in the market. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let me actually show you I actually set up market tracker a couple of months ago. This is not market tracker 360 that you have to pay a lot of money for, that's for like huge, like five, $10 million brands and agencies, but the regular market tracker that all you helium 10 users have. I created the market to kind of like track who are the players, who are my direct competitors for the stackable egg rack market? And, as you can see here, I picked about 17. Now, keep in mind, for almost a year we were the only sellers of this product. Like like nobody had anything that was like ours, where you can just buy these extra levels of this egg rack and then stack them up. Now there's 17 players that have come in and take a look at a lot of their price points $20, $30, $22. Here's one for 38, but it has four racks, all right, mine only has two, um $27. Uh, here's another one that's like $15, $28. So everybody's coming in at this cheap price point. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Uh, you can take a look at my market share. My market share used to be a hundred percent, right, my market share used to be a hundred percent. Now it is 11.2%. That product that came in in March, is crushing it. They have 50% of the market right now, and so that's obviously a problem, right Like that's why my sales have gone down. So the question is what can I do about it? Can I just lower my price? And can you guys lower your price almost by half and still be profitable? Probably not. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

I actually did some research and that was one of the first things. I look at my dude like like I might have to discontinue this product. Let me look at what the numbers are. So actually, let me take you through what I did. Uh, I went and checked my product price. I forgot I think I was paying too much for this, but you know I was the only seller. I was making a ridiculous profit. It was like probably like more than 30, 35% or so, and so I didn't. I didn't care really what price I was paying. So I was just curious. I was like how in the world can this product sell so cheap? 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So I first looked at their at their page. I was like, okay, are, are, is their dimensions a little bit different? Let me actually go ahead and open up my product in another window here. Okay, here we go. I've got my product open. So now you guys are going to kind of see the comparison. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So the first thing I was just wondering was what's going on with, like, their FBA fee? Now, look at this. Their FBA fee is only $8.83. I'm like what in the world? Like how is that possible? All right. So I look at the size of their package and it's 14 by six and a half by two. All right, now compare that to mine. I've got $12.43 FBA fee, okay, and my product size is 15, seven by four. So, right off the bat, it's like how in the world can they do this product in half of the width of my product? Because I'm like, wait a minute, you know it's the same exact product, right? So I actually ordered one of theirs. You can actually see it here in my Amazon window when I go to their page and says, hey, you purchased this, you know, back in July and it's interesting. Their product first of all. They make it like almost like an IKEA package. You actually have to put this together. It's in pieces Now to me. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

I would have thought they would got some bad reviews for this because they don't say that in the listing. You know my product. It already comes all assembled. You're good to go. Go ahead and put your Huebles in there, your eggs, right? But no, they don't have any bad reviews. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

But, like me, if I bought that, I literally would have left a bad review even if they weren't my competitor because I'm like I think I'm not time for this. I buy from Amazon for convenience and now all of a sudden I have this two layer egg rack that literally comes in one, two, three, four, five, six pieces and I got to like screw it together and do like Lego and stuff and try and figure out how it works. I'm like, no, I didn't get time for this. So, just, it was just shocking to me. How can people not complain? I guess maybe because the price is so low or something. But I was like, okay, well, there's one thing I'm not going to do, right, so if they're saving a couple or four bucks on their, on their FBA fee, so I'm like there's an advantage that they have right off the bat. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

But even besides that, what I did was I was like, well, what kind of profitability might they be having? So I actually ran the profitability calculator and then if they, if this is their price, and let's say they're doing, you know, they're doing some um PPC, that maybe they have 10% tacos on there. So if they're doing 20% profit even with this lower uh you know shipping price that Amazon is charging them, that means that their product manufacturing costs is got to be like around $4. And mine is like seven or eight or something. Uh, something like that was what mine was. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

And so then I went into, you know to, to my listing. I'm like, well, this, this kind of sucks, how can I, how can I compete? Now, remember before I was like at 38, 97, and I think my manufacturing cost was like, let's just say it's $8, right? And then if I had 10% tacos, all right, uh, in order, you know I was doing. Third, like I said, I was doing like about 30% profit here. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

But then I'm like okay, what if I were to have to lower my price like $21? Well, what's going to happen? Look at this my profit is negative, 2.85. So you know I wouldn't have lowered the. You know I don't like race to the bottom anyways, but rather about my. Okay, obviously I'm not going to lower my price. But what if I lower my price to like $30, or let's just say 33. If I'm at $33, what kind of profit? Can I make 20%? Maybe it's okay, you know. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So I actually did that. I lowered the price temporarily just a little bit ago to $33. But knowing that, hey, I've got to go to my factory because $30 is $33 probably isn't going to cut it. I need to get a discount. So if I can go to my factory and lower my manufacturing costs from like, let's just say, $8 to $30, let's go with $6, for example, now, all of a sudden, if I lower my price to like $28 or $29, right, I can still maintain that 20% margin. So I might even try and get a little bit more aggressive on this and actually get a little bit aggressive on the box size to see what's going on. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So here's the first part. You know, without even worrying about, you know, conversion rate or how's my listing, optimization or what keywords I'm on, I'm looking at just like the kind of logistics of everything, right, so here's their. I bought their product, here's their box. Now I see what they're doing. You know, let me see what I can do. Now I'm considering a little bit, like, is there a way to still do this kind of stackable thing that they're doing without screws and without so many pieces. You know I'm still considering it, but at least I know that if I want to lower my price to under $30, it's still doable. But I've got to, you know, take down my costs by a couple of dollars. But in the meantime, I just started doing experiments. I was like, let me just lower the price and so you can see. If you look at this product right now on Amazon, I put it down to $33.97 and because it's the lowest price in 30 days I had this nice big red sticker that comes up in the search results and it actually comes up right here on the page. So I'm like, who knows, maybe that will, maybe that will help me out. You know, just a little bit. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so, as I said, I, ready a couple of months ago, started trying to say, hey, we need to get Emma in here, and let's do some some of the images a little bit different and let's see how it, how it performs. So she came in, she, she gave like you know new title. She had Chevali do some new images here. So Shivali actually took a lot of these images by herself and so we kind of revamped what we were doing here with these images. I actually told Shivali, hey, I need you to change this image. But she didn't do it. I'm gonna have to remind her. Now I'm looking at this. I didn't like this last image because it needs to not get multiple sets to have all the storage like it needs to be. Hey, get more top racks in order to get all the storage you want. So I got to get what Shivali to change that. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

But anyways, Emma went in and did a lot of updating. By the way, I hate this test that amazon is doing right now where they Hide the bullet points. All right, because, like, for example, when I saw that that competitor had Um, you had to like assemble it in order to Make it. I made that my first bullet point. I said no assembly was required, unlike the others. You see out there, this comes ready to use out of the box no screws, no multiple pieces. But of course, after I did that, amazon is like doing this experiment for the last month or so where they're hiding the bullet points, so annoying. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways, as you can see here, Emma put in some A plus content. We never had a plus content, uh, in the past, and so first thing I wanted to see was wait. First of all, when did I change this Um, and then how were the results? As far as like conversion rate at the very least? So I had forgot when I changed it. So, um, what? 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go ahead and take a look here on my insights dashboard. When you do things to your listing It'll you'll get an alert, but then also I can put my own notes. So I'm pretty sure it was May. Let me just put my mouse over here. All right, view all, and sure enough, all right. Here we go. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Um, I put an updated Listing and a plus content looks like May 16th. So I put a note here, I uploaded the listing and and did a plus content at that time. All right, all right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to check what the Conversion rate was like, kind of like the few weeks, or actually a couple months leading up to that. A plus content and listing content change and let's just see how it was after. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So let's go ahead and hop back into the insights dashboard. As you can see here, I've got for one April 1 to May 15, and of course, you can do this in your Seller central as well, but obviously just easier, do it here in your insights dashboard. You don't have to go into Seller Central or try and Find where it's at. Uh, here's the egg rack, and then I'm here under listing so I can see here All right, we've got a conversion rate of 3%. Okay, unit session percentage of 4%, right. So let's go ahead and take a look at what it was After the change. Let's go ahead and go from like may 18th To the end of june and we're going to look at the same number, looking for the conversion rate for Egg rack, and look at this Wow, 8% almost, and 6% conversion rate. All right, so definite increase. So you, you could see like, hey, maybe the sales would have even been worse if we didn't make that change. We were able to to not quite double, but you know pretty, pretty nicely increase our unit session percentage and conversion rate. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So now, what else can we do? Because it's probably Not just about the price. Price is probably the big thing. What you want to do, guys, if you have a listing that has lost a lot of sales, is you want to see like, have you lost, you know, keyword rank? So let me first let's go outside of helium 10 and let's hop in a search query performance and see if we can go ahead and do some Diagnostics there. All right, so I just started search query performance here. I'm going to look at ASIN view. All right, let me go ahead and look at my double rack. Here it is. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

And let's go ahead and look at one of the months where we were just kind of crushing it, like like we were doing really well In January of this year, right? So let's take a look at some of the top keywords here and then let's go ahead and open up in another tab this same report and let's take a look, let's see if there's any information for August. You know, August we had probably like only One-third the number of sales. So let's go ahead and compare. Looks like they don't have information for August yet. Uh, here in search query performance. So let's go ahead and look at july. All right, let's compare. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So in January, uh, the number one keyword for us was egg holder countertop. We got eight sales from it. You know, 48 cart ads. Wow, 48 cart ads. So there's probably even more sales. That happened after there for the egg holder countertop. All right, let's go switch over here to july. An egg holder countertop brought us Zero sales, wow, okay. So where, where in the funnel, did we leave? So this is the beauty of search query performance in In January there was 25,000 searches and we had 13,000 impressions. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

All right, all right, let's go ahead and take a look. All right, July 13,000 search volume, so a lot less search volume, first of all, all right, 25,000 versus 13,000, okay, so search volume, you know, just overall, might be down, but then the impressions was 3,000, all right. So you guys remember we had a Search Query Performance team on this call. What does that mean? If there was 13,000 searches and I only had 3,000 impressions? It means that my organic and sponsored rank most of the time was in the top of the page. So at this point, at this point, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to Helium 10 and this time I'm gonna open up Keyword Tracker and let's just see what's going on with my keyword ranks for Egg Holder Countertop. All right, so let's go ahead and do that together. All right, so I got Keyword Tracker open. I was tracking all items and the variation here is the Egg Holder Countertop. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go ahead and look at the history of Egg Holder Countertop for the organic rank and specifically, I wanna take a look at what was going on in most of January, all right. So you could see here in January I was towards the top of the page a lot of time, like in the top 15 results. Look at that Top 15 results almost across the board for organic. Let's take a look at what my sponsor was. Was I even advertising for this keyword at that time? Okay, now I'm looking at sponsored and what. This is kind of weird. So it looks like I've never advertised for this keyword. So that's kind of strange. So, like I definitely wanna check my Adtomic. But that's interesting. That means most of my. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's go ahead and look back at Search Query Performance. Okay, it makes sense. My search volume was 25,000. I only had 13,000 impressions. That was 100% organic. So that right there is like a miss. I don't know what was going on or why I wasn't advertising against my number one keyword. So there's potential right there, where I have a history of converting for this keyword. Maybe I need to start go ahead and put that in my sponsor as a matter of fact. I'm gonna go ahead and do that right now. All right, so here I am in Adtomic. Let's go ahead and open up one of my performance campaigns. That means that's what I put my exact manual. I'm just gonna go ahead and add this as a target. Here we go, let's go ahead and add target and let's enter a new keyword, exact match, and we'll call this egg holder counter top. And there we go. All right, there we go. So we just made one potential move. Again, now it's from search crew performance. So the rest of what I would need to do is I need to go through and take a look at these other keywords that I was getting sales from, like. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Here's the second one, just an egg holder. I was able to get three orders from back in January. Here I got six orders. From what keyword is this? Wooden egg holder, all right, wooden egg holder got me six purchases and I actually had 184 clicks on 4,000 impressions. So that's pretty impressive. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now Wooden egg holder is still my number one keyword. Only 2,000 impressions, 29 clicks. Wow, guys, that is pretty crazy. My click share is only 3%. So I had 29 clicks out of 2,000 search volume or impressions. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

But before egg holder countertop or a wooden egg holder, I had 184 clicks with only double. So that just shows me that's gotta be price, guys. All right, that's the price effect right there, if nobody even clicks it. You know, and I have a similar image that means people are like why am I gonna click on this 33 or $38 product when we've got these $20, $22 ones, all right. So in this case, you know what I already lowered the price of 33. I wanna do a test on if I can go further and I wanna get that. Since I have that lowest price in 30 days, let me double up on the badging and let me go ahead and throw a coupon in there at the same time. So I got that red lowest price in 30 days badge and I've got one of those green coupons, so I'm just gonna go ahead and hop in and throw one of those coupons, all right. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So for those who haven't done coupons before, you just go to Seller Central. You go to advertising and then hit coupons, all right. And then let's go ahead and create a new coupon, all right. Next step is you're gonna hit, search your catalog and let's go ahead and put the ace in in here. Here's the product. Let's go ahead and select it and hit continue. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Next step you're gonna do is set the start and conclusion date. Let's go ahead and start this like on September and let's have it run all the way to the end of September. Let's make it a percentage off. I'm just gonna go. Let's go with 10% off, a double-digit number there, limit redemption to one per customer and let me make a just a budget of a hundred bucks on this. Let's just test it out. Next thing you gotta do is you gotta fill out this coupon title and targeting. I'll do that off-camera. Okay, so I got my coupon set up. That's gonna go active in a few days. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

We're gonna come back in October and then take a look at all right, how much did that increase? You know, click-through rate, because I'm never even gonna get to the add to cart, I'm not even gonna get to the purchase If I can't even get them to click the listing in the search results. I might even have to go to a deeper price based on what these competitors are doing. So we just covered search, create performance and how I can go dive in there and look at all the keywords that were working for me before, and then look at all the ones in search, create a performance at least, and then look at all the ones that is happening now. Now, remember I was selling crazy units a day like five 10 units a day. Back in January, if you look at a search create performance report, it only showed like about 15, 20 sales for the entire month. And remember that's because Search Query Performance doesn't cover a lot of the other scenarios of how people purchase. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So looking at where I was ranking as a whole is important, and let me show you how I can do that. I can look at a holistic look at where I was ranking organically and sponsored and then do that comparison. It's gonna give me a lot more keywords to look at. Let me show you how. So what I wanna do is I wanna go back into my listening. I'm just gonna run Cerebro on my own listening, so I just have to go ahead and hit this keywords button. If I'm in the listening, I scroll down to the Healing 10 Chrome extension here, just hit the keywords button, or I can just enter my ACE into Cerebro and get it All right. Here's all the keywords I'm ranking for now. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, same thing that I was doing in  Search Query Performance. I'm actually gonna keep another tab open here and I wanna run another instance of Cerebro, and the reason is is because I'm going to compare what's going on right now to what was going on in January, which was like the most recent killer month that I was having. So how I can do that is when I'm in Cerebro I'm gonna hit this show historical trend button and I'm gonna go ahead and check what was going on in January. You can see I was organically ranking for a decent amount of keywords. Let's go ahead and apply the filters and now let's see what I was ranking Like, let's say, organically, in the top 10. So what I'm looking at now, guys, I'm like taking a time machine. That's why it's called historical trends, but I call this Cerebro time machine because I'm just literally taking a time machine back to January of this year and I'm running Cerebro as if it was still January and let me see where I was ranking on average for that month. So to see what you know decent search form keywords I'm gonna go ahead and enter a minimum of 500 search volume and let's go one to 10 on the organic rank and let's take a look at some of these keywords. And, sure enough, I'm definitely gonna expand it out to more than just one to 10, because I get sales from other parts of the page too. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

But take a look, there are those keywords that were right from search through performance. That's why you know I could have just skipped that search through performance and got the data here as well. But here we got wooden egg holder, egg holder tower top and there are a few other keywords. Now let's actually switch to right now. Let's take a look at where I'm ranking for on some of these keywords. So what I wanna do is I actually wanna check on these top 10 keywords. Where am I ranking now? 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So let me take this a wooden egg holder, for example, keyword and then let's look at Cerebro. What is going on right now for this keyword? All right, so here I just did a filter for a wooden egg holder in July, and look at this my organic rank is 25. So there's there's definite drop in sales. I went from organic rank two, to sponsored rank one, and then now it is sponsored rank five, organic rank 25. So there's a big fail. I need to kind of, you know, improve on what was the highest search volume keyword at the time Egg holder countertop. We already looked at that one. Another one here is a chicken egg holder, all right. So let's look at chicken egg holder and then go ahead and look up where I was ranking in last month for this chicken egg holder organic rank 53, sponsored rank nothing. In other words I wasn't sponsored at all. But back in January, I was organic rank seven, and sponsored rank five. So there's another kind of plus there, guys, where for whatever reason I let some keywords fall off and I'm not even advertising for them anymore. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now the interesting thing here is is back in January I was not really getting play for very specific keywords to my product. And when I say very specific, that would mean, like this is a specifically a stackable egg holder or a stackable egg tray or a multi-tier wooden egg tray. You know, those are very specific to what this functionality was. It's interesting because since my product was kind of like the first to this niche, people weren't really searching for those keywords because they didn't even know it existed. But now I bet, if we would look at it, you know, there's some other sellers probably getting some play for those keywords. That that I'm probably not right now, because we almost, like, created a niche. That's why there's so many different coffin shelves and things like that. We were the first to really, you know, go hard with that kind of product and now there's just a million coffin shelves. But anyways, as you can see there, even just comparing myself to myself, I took my foot off the gas off of some keywords for whatever reason, and that definitely, regardless of price, is probably playing a role in my drop in sales. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's now take a look. You know, instead of comparing myself to myself, which is what we're doing in search, career performance, and cerebral, let's compare what's happening now myself, my product, compared to some of those competitors who have overtaken me in sales. Are they getting sales from keywords that maybe I don't even have in my listing? Let's hop in and let me show you how to find that. All right, so I'm here in the search results for stackable egg rack, and now what I want to do is or what you guys want to do, you know, I hope, if you're following along, do this in your own product. What you need to do is go to Amazon and go to the search results of, like your main keyword or main page. You can also do this inside of Helium 10. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

If you're, if you're tracking your competitors, I like doing it from Xray, just because it's a nice visual experience and the first product that you click on in Xray. Now again, I know this is kind of harder for you guys who are driving around or running around or riding a bicycle and trying to picture what I'm doing. Make sure to go to YouTube to watch the version of this episode to really get the full feel. But hopefully, I'm describing this, you know, decent enough for you. All right, so the first thing you want to do, since you're comparing your product versus your competitors, you go into Xray and you choose your product first. So I'm looking for Ghee's Chicken Coop here. It is right here. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

And then now you pick like four or five of who are the best sellers right now. And you know, sometimes I sort it by sales. This category sometimes trips out and, and you know people switch categories. So I'm actually going to sort it by BSR and let me pick the closest ones to my product that have the lowest BSR, the ones that have a better BSR than me, meaning that at least for the last few hours or today, they were selling better. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

And here's that number one product, kinglin. Here they're the ones I want A hot look at. This Kinglin product has sales of 666. You see, I knew there was something. There was something weird going on with this product why he could sell so much. You know, deal with the devil. I see how it goes, okay? 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways, seriously speaking, though, let's go ahead and select him. We definitely want to know what keywords he's doing, and I'm only choosing the products that are very similar in function to my products, like here's a quail pigeon egg holder. You know, mine is not for quail pigeons, so I'm not going to pick that one. All right, there we go. I was able to pick a few products, and now we're just going to go ahead and run Cerebro. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, the first thing that you want to do is you want to see if are there keywords that they're getting sales from that I am not even ranking for, let alone not on page one. For all right, let me show you how to do that. I have their products compared to mine. I'm going to say position rank that's my, my product zero, minimum, zero, maximum. All right, I'm going to go ahead and put a minimum search volume of 300. And then the next thing I'm going to do is I am going to do advanced rank filter minimum one. All right. Advanced rank filter number one, minimum one. That means I'm looking for a keyword that at least one of the these other competitors is ranking in the top 10 that I am not ranking for at all. And to do that, I go to advanced rank filter, number two, and I put minimum one, maximum 10. All right, there you go. I mean, as a goal, you want no keywords to come up here, and sure enough, there are no keywords that came up for mine, thank goodness, all right. So that means that hope you guys understood what I just did. I was checking are there any keywords that I am not ranked for at all but at least one of my competitors is in the top 10? The answer to that is no. You guys want that to be no as well for yourselves, all right. Step two All right, I know there's not one that I'm not ranking on, but what? Are there any keywords where I'm ranking like between like 15 and 306, but at least one of my competitors is ranked in the top 10.? And I would assume that there's a number of them. And sure enough, look at all these keywords here. All right, so wooden egg holder is one. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Let's take a look at what's going on here. Wow, look at this. There are a couple competitors ranked for and ranked five, and yet my position is 25. So there's a keyword that potentially I can try and increase on my sponsored rank to get some, you know, to start competing with those other two products. Here's another keyword here. Look at this, this counter egg storage. You've got one competitor at position seven, another one in the first 20, but or two more in the top 20 organic positions. And me, where am I ranked? 91. There are a total of 50, 17, sorry, 17 keywords on this list or at least one of my competitors is most likely getting sales from because they're in the top 10 positions in the organic results. And yet I'm like anywhere from 25, and here's one keyword that's, I'm all the way at 220. So there still is some low-hanging fruit. So there's a lot more stuff I'm going to go into. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm going to go look at my Adtomic. If you guys don't use Adtomic, you're not going to be able to do what I do, because I'm going to be able to go in and look at my history on what keywords I was crushing it on back in January and February and see what's going on with those keywords Now, like, did I accidentally pause it? Or did one of the healing 10 employees who keeps screwing with my account because they're trying to run test, accidentally archive something. The reason I say if you don't have Adtomic, you can't do that is the only way you would be able to look at that is if you were downloading your search term reports from Amazon during that time because Amazon only lets you see I think it's like two or three months worth of data, and that was January February. With Adtomic I can go back like two years, so I have no problem. So that's my next step. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm going to do I already did, you know some listing optimization, but I'm also going to do some next level list optimization. Once I take a look at all these keywords and look at the keywords I'm not doing great in, I'm going to check in Listening Builder. Do I have them in phrase form? Or maybe that's why I'm not doing so great for it is because I'm just indexed for it, but I don't have the full phrase in there and that will help. That could help my relevancy. So I'm definitely going to optimize that. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

I told you I'm going to go into those images and I need to kind of like make people understand that they can buy extra racks, to kind of like stack it up. That's another thing I'm going to do. Another thing I'm probably going to do is I'm probably going to go to azrank.com and do some customer testing, like have some customers search for some of these keywords and then let them give me a report on what they think of my listing versus these other ones and which ones, like, would they pick first, second and third, and which one last and then, and then I might get some insights there from, like, real customers on. Is it really just the price that people are kind of tripping on? I'm going to go ahead and hop in and use Helium 10 Audience, which is powered by pick food. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

I'm going to run some split tests. You know, like I just told you that we changed the images right, but was that the right move? I'm going to? I think that the A plus content definitely was the right move because you know it helped our conversion rate, but that main image we actually didn't change. So I'm going to check. Did they take any more pictures that maybe I could split test on? I might not want to split test this on a live listing because you know it could hurt my conversion rate, but let me go ahead and run a Helium 10 audience so that I can, you know, pull 50 Amazon buyers and then see, see what they think. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

And then, like I said, for my next order, I got to get a price that's at least like 20% cheaper, if I can, from my factory, and I might even look into changing a little bit of the dimensions. Actually, matter of fact, you know what this is important. So let's go ahead and hop in here and see what we can do. Let me show you something cool, alright, so let's just go hop into my listing and let me show you how I can kind of like play around with the pricing here. Let's go ahead and run the profitability calculator once it comes up and let's see if I can like maybe shave a couple of inches off of this. What might happen? Let's take a look. Alright, so if I can get my manufacturing cost down to like $6, and still with a 10% ACoS, and if my price I want to put this at like $28 more or less, what would happen if I can shave just maybe an inch off of the length? 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So let's go 14.12. It was at 17% profit. That brings me to 18% profit, so not much. What about this width? Let's bring this down to seven. Wait a minute. Wow, did you guys just see that? I just took the other width or the height, from 7.28 inches. I just took off a quarter of an inch and it increased my margin by over 4%. That's kind of crazy. Let's try that again 7.28. Yeah, it was 18%, large standard size, but then I take it down to seven and it drops me under three pounds outbound shipping weight. So that might be an easier win to just shave off a quarter of an inch from the height and I get 4 percentage points back on my profit margins. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

Now, that is definitely doable. You see, you see guys, like, like how you just got to like, dive in there and start playing with this. You never know what might happen. I think it's because I was right on the cusp of that dimensional weight for three pounds and it put me at 2.99 pounds just by changing 0.28 of an inch. On one side of the product, I say 4 percentage points. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

So these are the kind of things that you guys need to do and at the end of the day, let's just say I do all of this stuff and I start losing money on PPC because I have to spend so much and I just can't, I can't compete, I can't stay profitable. Yeah, you got to be able to pull the plug. You shouldn't have complete emotional connections to your products, guys. You got to be able to pull the plug sometimes. But, anyways, these are the steps I want you guys to take. 

 

Bradley Sutton:

If you have a product that's been out for a couple of years and you're like man, can it be revitalized? Don't just give up without even trying these things. There are things that you can do to maybe get some traction back. So again, this is one of the Project X products. We're going to have some more Project X episodes coming out on some of the products you know and some of the launches of some brand-new projects. These are brand new products that we've been doing in our Project X that you guys haven't even heard about yet. So look forward to that in the next episode. I'll see you guys there.